Ruth ended up speaking the most that first time. With her hands, I mean (later she would speak to me with her mouth, oh me oh my). I lay on my back, she on her side, right next to me, her legs tucked against my bum under my legs. Her fingers roamed, eventually drifting to the gravitational centre of my desire.
When I came, I squeezed my legs together and pressed my hands onto her hand, to keep her there, on me, in me. It was amazing and perfectly ineffable. That floaty feeling.
I felt giddy with life, overflowing with it. If I had taken hold of a light-bulb at that moment, it would have lit.
"Good?" said Ruth.
I broke out laughing. For once I didn't try to put things into words. I turned and kissed her and kissed her breasts and glided my hand down. She was so wet, so so wet. As I rested my head on her chest, and her hand, whose fingers smelled of me, distractedly played with my hair, I titillated that wetness. As her breathing grew more urgent, I held onto her more tightly. When her body tensed and she burst with inner pleasure, I closed my eyes. In the dark I could see fish darting about.
I remember that first time with Ruth, in that liquidly dark white stage of a room in Greece, as a moment of perfect felicity.
After Methoni, Koroni. After Koroni, Kalamata. After Kalamata, Mistra and Sparta ("Is this it? Is this really it?" said Ruth in disbelief, looking at a stump of rock nearly overgrown with grass, typical of the few remains of great, ancient, masculine Sparta. "Yes, but don't worry," I replied. "You'll like Mistra. The Byzantines were wonderful"). Then down the Mani. Then over to Monemvasia. At every step Ruth enjoyed further pushing the openness of her airplane ticket. I don't recall any discussions as to whether we should proceed, only as to where. Ruth called Philadelphia regularly to touch base with Tuesday, Sandra and Danny (Graham was staying with his father, in Baton Rouge). The three kids would share the phones in the house. Tuesday, the woman in charge, home for the summer from Simon Fraser, told her mom that Danny repeated word for word what she told him to whoever cared to listen; so that when Ruth said, "We're in, uh, Rhodes, like the Colossus, and we're leaving tomorrow, uh, by boat for a place called Marmalade, or something like that, in, uh, Turkey. Oh! It's called Marmaris," Danny would tell everyone, "Mom's in, uh, Rhodes, like the Colossus, and she's leaving tomorrow, uh, by boat for a place called Marmalade, or something like that, in, uh, Turkey. Oh! It's called Marmaris." He repeated the words aloud even when he was alone, Tuesday said, "like a mantra," until she called again and gave him a new one. "He doesn't even know where Turkey is or what the Colossus of Rhodes was," she added. There was a little spite in her voice, Ruth said. I guess they were right in wondering what their mom was up to, whose two-week-or-so trip was into its second month, with no end in sight. All hell broke loose at the mention of Turkey!, which they always pronounced as if it were written with an exclamation point, land of would-be Pope-killers and the Midnight Express ("But I'm neither the Pope nor a drug dealer and the Turks are actually very nice, nicer than the Greeks, in fact, and I just got you a beautiful carpet," said Ruth; "but Mom's neither the Pope nor a drug dealer and the Turks are actually very nice, nicer than the Greeks, in fact, and she just got Tuesday a beautiful carpet," said Danny said Tuesday said Ruth to me). Still, she, we, travelled. The phone calls to Philadelphia got longer the longer we were in Turkey, and Ruth carried around a carefully wrapped kernel of maternal guilt about Danny, but still we travelled.
We heard that the Greek islands were overrun that summer with tourists, mainly British, so we decided to step around them and go to Crete. We backtracked from Monemvasia to the ramshackle port city of Gytheion -- where, in a tiny open-air cinema, projected against a bed sheet to the loud clatter of the projector, we watched what must be the worst American B-movie in history, a piece of such outrageous but deadly serious badness, The Sudsy Massacre, starring blonde nobodies, that it stayed with me for years, exactly like great art -- and from Gytheion we caught a ferry to Crete.
We walked through towns, we rented mopeds and sputtered into remote mountain villages (one during its annual festival), we caught vistas that were vast, rich and green, we lay on deserted beaches (one so inaccessible that we stripped and swam naked), we hiked through the Samaria Gorge, we visited museums and archaeological sites, we caught noisy, crowded buses, we had Ruth's camera fixed in Heracleon, and every night, every day, we made love and slept together in cheap hotels.
Everyone assumed that Ruth was my mother, and we let it go since it made things easier. But it became a running joke between us that each time this happened Ruth muttered under her breath, "I-am-not-your-mother."
We landed upon Crete's left end. When we reached its right end, we needed a new destination.
It was I who suggested Turkey!, so close and so enormous, and surely with fewer tourists. We hesitated -- the country did have a bad reputation at the time -- but we decided to go for it. After a night in Rhodes, we embarked on a nutshell of a boat for Marmaris, reassuring ourselves that if things got bad, Ruth's credit card would be our magic carpet out of the place.
We were nervous at customs -- we'd both seen that movie -- but it was the Turkish passengers who had all their luggage opened and thoroughly searched, while we were waved through with big smiles. Our passports received such thunderous stamps as to cripple them for life. Mister Hairy-Armed Official was so gleeful in delivering the blows that I thought he was one who should have been checked for drugs.
We crossed a threshold and advanced a few steps. The sunshine was warm against my face. I noticed a young man who was trying to catch my eye.
Which I let be caught.
"Are you looking for room?" he asked, with a smile that was neither menace nor malice, just friendly.
"Yes," I said, my first word in Turkey.
Ah, what a country! Strange how a place so big, such a maelstrom of history, can yet fit into my heart.
The room we were shown was clean and rustic, with bright bed-covers and carpets, in a four-hundred-year-old family home with a doorframe only five feet high, and very cheap.
When we were alone we sat on one of the beds. "This is nice," said Ruth.
"Yes," I said, again.
We had an unpleasant encounter a few days after arriving. We were on a quiet, deserted beach when some American soldiers appeared. When they realized that we spoke English, and one of us was American to boot, they came over to talk to us. Friendliness is a good quality, but it should be accompanied by other qualities. Otherwise it is like gift-wrapping an empty box. These boys -- I say boys though they were all older than I -- were posted at a NATO base in Turkey and were "R'n'Ring" for a few days. They hated Turkey. Nothin' to do, nothin' to see, miss my girl, miss my wife, miss my football games -- they had thick necks, and brains that wouldn't have overflowed a thimble. One in particular stuck in my craw. Perhaps he thought I was feeling left out. To reassure me that I was no orphan, that really I too was part of the Great American Family, he told me that there was no difference between Americans and Canadians. He was from Michigan, was his evidence. Same language, same TV, same culture, same everything. He wore mirror aviator glasses so I couldn't see his eyes, he imposed his scrawny white chest on me as if it were a work of Michelangelo, his tone of voice made it clear that he was speaking the plain universal truth and -- as if that weren't enough to whip my internal rage to a froth -- I could think of little to refute his border-erasing arguments. I pointed out that both Australians and New Zealanders spoke English, yet they were from different countries. Yeah, but New Zee, as he called it, could have been a part of Australia if it had wanted to, like Tasmania. Or like Hawaii with the U.S. They just used the ocean as an excuse to have their own country. Or look at Austria and Germany, he persisted, a bulldozer of reassurance. I was posted in the south of Germany, was his evidence. There's no real difference between the two. Or no more than there is between the north and south of Germany. Austria could perfectly well be a part of Deutschland. Really. Same language, same culture, same country, that's what I
say, he said.
I was at a loss for words. I searched among the icons of the Canadian Gestalt -- maple syrup, beavers, niceness, the Queen, no guns -- for an essential difference, an originality, something to War-of-1812 about. But the only irrefutable difference I could come up with was that I wanted to be different. I looked at my hegemonic comforter and I thought,
Je ne veux pas etre comme
toi, je ne veux pas etre comme toi,
je ne veux pas etre comme toi,
je ne veux pas etre comme toi,
je ne veux pas etre comme toi,
je ne veux pas etre comme toi. I don't want to be like you, I don't want to be like you, I don't want to be like you, I don't want to be like you, I don't want to be like you, I don't want to be like you.
I deflected things by asking him what he did in the army.
The air force, he corrected me. He was a mechanic for military jets.
They eventually left. With their Frisbees, footballs, ghetto-blasters and beers, which they offered but no thank you.
"They're not very nervous about being in Turkey, are they?" said Ruth.
"No."
She patted my thigh. "I could tell you were upset by that mechanic."
"I'm not American."
"Of course you're not. Nor am I your mother. Canadians are very different from Americans in lots of small, important ways. I'd never mistake, you for an American."
I grinned. "You liar! You thought I was American when we met."
"Oh. Right."
We laughed.
A pause. A search for fundamental differences.
"Do you think we can take our tops off?" she asked.
"I don't know," I replied, looking around. "I don't think we should."
"I guess you're right." She looked out at the water. "Let's go back to our room," she said brightly, with that twinkle in her eye.
"Okay."
As we walked back she said, "And of course you're different. You can't be American, you don't have an American passport. And you speak French in Quebec." Which, for as long as I knew her, she pronounced Kweebec.
They were the only Americans we met in Turkey.
We stayed in all kinds of cheap hotels and pensions during our stay in Turkey: some that were unique, like the troglodyte lodgings of Cappadocia; some rustic; some functional and forgettable; and some that were filthy, with dirty sheets and heavy smells. In this last category, I'll never forget one that had a wall so mildewed and rotten that I could put my hand on it and push it in several inches, presumably startling our neighbours, if we had any. When I let go, the wall slowly sprang back. Would that Buster Keaton had been in the next room, we would've had a merry time. Ruth was the arbiter of hotel rooms, since I was game for anything. I was very much a student of the the-more-I-rough-it-the-more-I-am-alive school of travel. If a hotel room didn't kill me, it made me better. Ruth walked out of many a room saying, "This one kills me." But the woman was surprising and resilient, and she developed a tolerance for grunge that came to equal mine. By the end of our trip we would peek into rooms that were dungeons of degradation, sties that would have made swine blanch, and Ruth would emit a flat, unironic "Great" and drop her pack on the bed. It helped that we were running low on money. Necessity is the mother of tolerance.
We bought double sheets in Kusadasi. I carried one and Ruth the other. Every night we brought them together. This, and a shower with only a few degrees Celsius of warm water, made us happy.
We became minor experts in Turkish carpets, and damn good bargainers, able to ingest gallons of sweet tea and resist all kinds of smiles and ploys to make us buy what we didn't want. One carpet that Ruth bought had an impossibly intricate gold and green pattern. When I saw it in Philadelphia, a tide rippled through my mind, a watery carpet of fleeting images and wordless feelings. I bought a kilim, the sole decoration in my bare student rooms, a magic carpet in the way it spoke to me of Ruth.
"The seeds of all things have a moist nature," I said to Ruth, in Miletus.
She looked up from her bag and squinted. "What's that?" she said. She was sitting on a great lion, at one time surely proud and menacing, but now old, worn and half-buried in sand.
"Greek philosophy started here. A guy named Thales. He said the source of everything was water."
She looked around. "Well, he's right."
Miletus, once a port of such prosperity that it could afford philosophy, is now a desert, the river Meander having silted up and pushed back the sea. It's a dry, dry place. Ruth brought out a Coke. She was incorrigibly American.
"He also said, 'All things are full of gods.' " Just as I said this, Ruth pulled the tab on the can. There was an explosion of spray. "You see. Excess, compressed gods."
She laughed. "Want some?"
As usual, I looked offended and then drank half of it.
We were alone; Ruth slipped her hand into mine. We walked about, pulling each other this way and that for no reason except the pleasure of knowing that the other was there. We kissed against a column. The seeds of all things.... I wished we'd been back in our room.
After Ephesus, on the Aegean coast, we made the decision to head east. We rested in Pamukkale's white travertines, basins that thousands of years of flowing mineral water had created, all pure white in colour and overflowing with hot, calcium-rich water. Ruth piled mud onto her head.
The land pulled us along. Pamukkale wasn't far from Cappadocia, wonder of wonders, refuge of the early Christians, who dug habitations into the friable rock, a lunar landscape like nowhere else on earth. And there was Konya in between, city of the whirling dervishes. And beyond, just beyond, was Nemrut Dagi, a sanctuary atop a mountain, with huge stone heads. From there it was an obvious step to Dogubayazit, site of the Kurdish castle of Ishak Pasa (and Little and Big Ararat besides).
In Dogubayazit we took a taxi to the border. We peeped into the Islamic Republic of Iran. I would have gone if the border hadn't been closed because of the Iran-Iraq war. Ruth looked at me. "Right," she said. "Sure. We'll go tomorrow. Just hop back into town to exchange our bikinis for one-pieces, and we'll be all set to do Iran," which she pronounced "I ran", first person singular. In Dogubayazit at the same time as us, filling up the best hotel in town with his team, was James Irwin, an American astronaut who had walked on the moon (and presumably found it full of God) and was now unsuccessfully looking for Noah's ark on Mount Ararat. "Let's find the crackpot," said Ruth. But Mr. Irwin was hard at work on the mountain.
We returned westward along the Black Sea coast until Samsun, where we headed inland towards Ankara. I regretted that we had not seen Urfa and Harran, in ancient Mesopotamia, near the Syrian border, and that we would miss the entire Mediterranean coast, but it's always like that with the two vectors that rule our lives: space is truly infinite, we have ample proof of that, but it flies in the face of all experience to say the same of time.
The only story I wrote in Turkey came to me in Ankara. Ankara is partly a planned city; Ataturk plucked it out of provincial obscurity in 1923 so that the capital of his European nation would be firmly in Asia. It is a modern, bustling city. But it does have its own memory, its own history. After visiting the ninth-century citadel, Ruth and I went walking in the old city, along the narrow, twisting, hilly streets with their low, sometimes vividly coloured houses. It had rained earlier, but the sun was out now. There was a refreshing coolness to the air. Puddles were mirrors. We walked with no destination in mind, for the simple pleasure of the activity, a voluntary lostness. We turned left or right beckoned by a potted plant or a shade of blue wall. Children played in the streets. Some who weren't too frenzied over their fun stopped and looked at us in silence. Others, between the catch and throw of a ball, called at us in their shrill voices. "Hello to you too," one of us would reply, which as often as not triggered a cacophonous chorus of shouting and giggling in return, one voice more high-pitched than the next, a sound that is internationally familiar to the human species. One little girl, no more than t
hree years old, got so caught up in the commotion that our appearance caused that she went gaga. She trembled, she stared, she dripped saliva -- she looked as if she were about to explode. Instead, she arched back, closed her eyes and put out a shriek that was so loud and piercing it would have shattered crystal. "Aren't you a little screamer?" said Ruth, bending down and making her eyes big. Momentarily I saw her in a different light. She knew children intimately, intimately three times over. I so rarely saw her in that way, even when she was talking of her Philadelphia brood. The screamer's mother came out and swept the little diva into her arms. She and Ruth exchanged looks and smiles, women of different languages but mothers in common.
Others watched us too, but silently. Old, ill-shaven men who followed us with their eyes, perhaps nodding if theirs caught ours.
The street was too narrow for traffic. We came upon a woman sitting on a carpet beneath the open window of what was clearly her own dwelling. Beside her lay a sleeping baby. She was sewing. She took no more notice of us than a glance's worth.
We walked past her.
At a turn we beheld the same thing, only double. Two old women on carpets opposite each other, one with a baby quietly prattling and playing with a piece of cloth. Old they were, these women, with bright, multilayered clothes and few teeth. They were in animated conversation. At the sight of us they waved and smiled and spoke to us. I smiled back and pointed ahead, meaning that we were on a walk and ahead was where we were heading. At exactly the same time they both fell silent and looked where I was pointing, as if I were indicating something amiss, a cement truck coming their way, perhaps. They looked back at us, and both repeated my hand gesture, probably not knowing what they meant by it, only that it might please the foreigners. One held up an empty glass. An offer of tea. We sat down and had tea and another of those conversations we'd had with women throughout Turkey, where many words are spoken, none is understood and much is communicated. Ruth pointed at the baby and said, "Is this your grandson?" and instantly the baby was propelled onto her lap and then mine. "Doctor Livingstone, I presume?" I said to the gurgling child.