Table Of ContentYou Are Always Safe with Me
Merrill Joan Gerber
Poem 1
How could I know melancholia
Would make me so crazy,
Make of my heart a hell,
Of my two eyes raging rivers?
How could I know a torrent would
Snatch me out of nowhere,
Toss me like a ship upon a sea of blood…
Poem 8
With each new breath the sound of love
Surrounds us all from right and left
Now up we go, head heavenward
Who wants to come and see the sights…
—Rumi, Turkish poet, 12th century
CONTENTS
IN THE COVE
DOLMA
HOUSE OF TURKISH DELIGHTS
BIRTHDAY PARTY
LILLY BELLY DANCES
CREPES
PRAYER
CLIFF TOMBS
AT THE HELM
GUNS
THE MAGIC CARPET
WHIRLING DERVISH
PIRATES
THE WORLD IN HIS HANDS
UNDER THE TURKISH MOON
KAYAK MERMAID
YOU ARE ALWAYS SAFE WITH ME
COMING TOGETHER
THE TIE THAT BINDS
ISAAC
IN THE COVE
Each night the boy named Barish took the rope in his mouth and dove into
the sea from the railing of the boat. In the darkness he swam toward the edge of
the cliffs where he clambered upon the rocks in his rubber fins, searching for an
outcropping that could accept the loop of his rope. His shadow, illuminated in
the beam of the powerful searchlight held by Izak, the boat’s captain, loomed
and quivered on the stones. When Barish had found a jagged boulder and tested
its strength, when he knew the knot was secure and would hold the boat steady
in the currents till morning, he turned and gave the captain the signal that the job
was done.
The guests on the Ozymandias observed this ritual each night before the
anchor was dropped in the cove. Some glanced up from their backgammon
games or their post-card writing or their sea-gazing. Lilly’s mother put her
paintbrush down on the railing for a moment and stared toward the cliffs. She
was three months into widowhood and her eyes were hollow, although Lilly had
not seen her cry once since her father had died.
Lilly watched the scene intently as she did at this time each evening, when
the Turkish sun had dropped far below the horizon, when the first night winds
blew over the deck, and when Barish, with his golden skin and beautiful back,
swam back to the boat in the flashlight’s beam and climbed, dripping, onto the
deck.
The boy was beautiful but it was the captain, Izak, whose presence affected
Lilly. She could not take her eyes from him, this dark-skinned captain with his
bare feet planted on the teakwood deck, with the powerful contours of his shaven
head outlined against the blue-black of the darkening Mediterranean Sea. This
was the moment when the heat of the day had relented, when soon the delicious
and mysterious meal would be served, and when Lilly began to look forward to
her night of sleeping on the thick foam pad of the deck under the stars.
Izak always slept on deck, on one of the narrow padded benches beside the
boat’s helm. She could see his form from her pillow, his body wrapped in a light
blanket. Sometimes she felt that only the two of them were awake under the
dome of the dark heavens. Did he ever close his eyes? Lilly sensed that he never
truly slept, but stayed awake to guard the passengers and the boat from harm.
*
The ship’s cook, Morat, was already below in the galley, slicing and dicing
and heating oil on the stove. He was visible from the deck, just a few steps
down, standing shirtless in the steam of the boiling potatoes. He sweated till he
shone, the drops of condensation running into the curly dark hairs that climbed
his breastbone. The men who managed Lilly’s life on this cruise, who fed her
and cared for her, walked around her and leaned over her and steadied her
against the sudden sea swells were always nearly naked. Barish, the boy, was
eighteen. The two older men, Morat and Izak, were perhaps thirty-five and forty.
Having just passed her own fortieth birthday, Lilly did not generally
entertain romantic reveries about men. Her life was orderly and rational; she had
made peace with her single state. Large-boned and sturdy, she had never been
the kind of girl that men rushed to admire. “You have lovely forearms,” her
mother used to tell her and she knew, even in her teens, this was not a good
thing.
Still, there were always men who sought out less attractive women, thinking
they were easier to approach, easier to impress and perhaps easier to take to bed.
She always knew when a man was measuring her vulnerability, her weakness for
attention, her neediness. Though never deceived by their attentions, she was
willing—even eager—to have some experience in the world. Twice, when she
was in her thirties, she had let men court her, listened to their compliments, gone
with them to dinners, to movies, and eventually let them take her to bed. Neither
one had been a villain or a cruel exploiter. In fact, they had been professors, like
herself, bachelors both, men as uncomfortable in the world as she was. But
though she engaged in the events of these courtships under a faint veneer of
hope, she had at heart known these men were only sweet, unlikely experiments,
each one hopeless in his own way and as lacking in passion about their
arrangement as she. The friendships ended—not badly, but necessarily. She had
truly not counted on more.
Lilly lived now in a townhouse near the Florida university where she taught
literature, fifteen miles from the house where she had grown up. Until her
father’s sudden death, she had not been on particularly intimate terms with her
mother. Now (and she hoped temporarily) she was her mother’s constant
companion, guardian, and caretaker.
When her mother had asked her to travel with her, (“This cruise is a once-in-
a-lifetime invitation, Lilly, but you know I can’t go alone…”) just the thought of
it had seemed an impossible interruption in her life—an inconvenient, irrelevant,
compulsory excursion that pulled her from her privacy, her routines, her
carefully orchestrated, highly scheduled life. In this month at sea she was
missing her yoga workshop, her piano lessons, and her Italian language class.
She had two pieces waiting to be fired in the kiln in her art class. Keeping
herself busy was her antidote to despair. She made a point of filling her life with
activities since it had become clear to her that family life, a husband and
children, were not going to be her fate.
She was just beginning her second scholarly book, that academic necessity.
This one was to be about the symbolic uses of jewelry and perfumes in classical
fiction. “Glitter and Scents in 19th Century Sensibilities.” She had brought some
notes and readings for it in her suitcase, but the 19th century and a pedantic
search of its details seemed ridiculously far removed from these Turkish nights
(she felt closer here, among the ruins, to the 10th century), far removed from the
velvety sheen of the ocean, from the swirling night breezes.
“Are you cold, Mother?” she called, as the wind ruffled the pages of her
mother’s painting pad. “Do you want me to go down and get you a sweater?”
“No, I’m fine, darling. Besides, I see there’s a towel here I can just toss over
my shoulders if I need to.” Her mother motioned to the foredeck where an array
of snorkels and masks lay on the foam deck cushions, and where a few brightly
colored towels lay drying across the two green kayaks that were there for the use
of the guests of the cruise.
A cruise! Lilly had never wanted to go on one, to live on a floating city of
2000, to be entertained by cabaret singers and comedians, to play slot machines
at sea, to be herded about into souvenir shops on tropical islands and stuffed to
the gills with midnight buffets.
But this cruise was something else—there were only twelve souls on this
sailing gulet, the nine passengers and the three Turkish crewmen. None of the
passengers had paid for the cruise, they were all the guests of Fiona O’Hara, the
dearest girlhood friend of Lilly’s mother, former actress and torch singer, widow
of a philanthropist, hostess for this floating house party. The once-great beauty
still sparkled under a bejeweled caftan. Lilly’s mother and she had been unlikely
roommates together in a girl’s finishing college and over the years maintained
their friendship via tea room lunches and hand-written letters. Lilly had known
her all her life, this gaudy, rowdy, sparkling, energetic woman who stood in such
contrast to Lilly’s lady-like, polite, low-voiced mother.
When Fiona O’Hara invested money in the building of the new boat, the
Ozymandias, it was as a favor to her son Harrison, a handsome playboy and
ambitious businessman with a love for Turkish ruins and the idea that everyone
else must want to see them. One of the perks that Fiona had arranged for herself
as part owner of the boat was an agreement that entitled her to free sailing, for
herself or for guests whenever there was cabin space available, to be used over
the next five years.
What happened to give her this privilege so quickly was the earthquake that
had struck and ravaged Izmit, a city only a few miles east of Istanbul. Television
broadcasts to the United States showed the streets turned to rubble, tuned in to
cries of those buried under the fallen houses and forecast rampant disease in the
streets from the bodies decaying under the stones. The media reported dozens of
large aftershocks and showed graphic scenes of families weeping at open graves
and cities of plastic tents set up along the open roadsides.
The tourists who had booked passage on the virgin voyage of the
Ozymandias all cancelled their trips, forfeited their deposits, and planned safer
vacations, no doubt relieved to forgo flying to Istanbul, the city that still shook
violently days after the quake.
With an empty boat about to sail from Bodrum, where it was built, with its
hired crew already aboard and the food storage lockers full, Harrison urged his
mother to plan an instant party since he needed, in any case, to take the boat on
its trial run. She must, he urged her, quickly round up a boatful of her friends for
the Ozymandias’s first voyage.
Thus, Lilly found herself a guest on Fiona’s traveling house party with her
odds-and-ends of friends: Fiona’s son Harrison, the boat magnate, and his 24-
year old wife, a bone-thin fashion model named Gerta who wore her blonde hair
in two shining Dutch-girl braids. The other lucky-chosen included Lance, a
widowed amateur astronomer, Marianne, Fiona’s former psychoanalyst (for a
mere two weeks) who was now just a friend (Fiona hadn’t had the patience to sit
still for so long to solve her problems), and Jane and Jack, a glamorous couple
from the Silicon Valley in California who were on their way to vacation in
Greece after this voyage to Turkey.
*
Now, as happened each night, Barish had swum back to the boat and, in the
glittering dark water below, was hanging onto the silver ladder at the side of the
boat, handing up his black fins to Isak, who received them and tossed them into
one of the kayaks. The boy climbed, dripping, to the deck. Water beaded on his
tanned skin. He gave one shiver as the wind passed over him. Lilly was close
enough to see the golden hairs stand up on his back.
