Turkish Delight: Interlude

I left out the most archetypal event of our time in Istanbul on purpose, because it had to stand on its own. On our last night in town we went to a hamam: a Turkish bath. It was every bit as romantic and transportive as I imagined without really believing it could be so. We walked through a large reception area warmly panelled with blonde wood and smelling of essential plant oils and into a changing area with wood benches and friendly matrons handing out towels and swaths of red-and-white-checked fabric (that proved to be multi-functional in the course of the next hour). Autumn and I had parted ways with Eric of course, and as we pushed open the heavy wooden door and beheld the scene before us we couldn’t help but speculate on the spectacle that was confronting our dear companheiro. We stood in a perfectly round room in front of a huge, round, low, slightly convex marble platform, knee-high and about 15 feet in diameter. Five or six women in various states of undress were sprawled across it, lying on or wrapped in their red and white sheets. We laid our own swaths out on the grey stone and rested our tired lower backs against the radiant heat that grew more intense the closer one laid to the center of the obelisk. After a few minutes of silent reverie, a middle-aged woman in red bikini underwear and swinging breasts, her hair piled pell-mell on top of her head, approached me and said “massage?” I handed her my token that entitled me to a half-hour scrub and she set to work. As I lay on my stomach with my cheek pressed against the warm marble, she poured a rich lather over my back and worked me over with a rough touch and a surprisingly coarse loofah glove. She proceeded to exfoliate every inch of skin, periodically smacking me smartly on the rump and ordering, “sit!” when she wanted me to get up and change positions. At the end she led me to one of several marble fountains around the outside edge of the round room and washed my hair in the tepid water. I returned to the marble slab and laid on my back staring at the high plaster ceiling shot through with star-shaped holes, listening to the low murmur of women’s voices in more languages than I could count. I raised my head and looked around at the scene before me: two dozen naked women in un-self-conscious repose, gossiping, combing one another’s hair, being roughly scrubbed by the pendulously-breasted women bearing tin pans full of hot water… I imagined that the scene here in this bath a thousand years ago was probably not so different, and I felt it curious how patriarchy can create this kind of a space, where women are at ease with themselves and one another, whispering secrets with an easy intimacy that we in the west grasp at but never seem to achieve. I stepped onto the street with a wet head that elicited shouts of “You look very clean! You’ve been to Turkish bath?” in heavily accented English, and I thought, I’ve never been cleaner in my life.