“Fanis,” said the high-pitched voice. “Fanis, is that you? It’s me, Gavriela. I’ve been trying to reach you all morning. Are you all right?”
“Fine, fine. I was just out running errands.”
“Get a mobile phone, will you? Listen, the whole gang’s going to Antigone tomorrow. Aliki invited us to her cottage for lunch. We’d like you to come, but I suppose you have to cantor?”
“I can have somebody fill in for me.”
“Perfect. Be at the quay, outside the ticket office, at a quarter past eleven.”
After uttering the usual string of salutations—“Ciao-ciao-yeia-yeia-bye-bye”—Fanis hung up and threw himself directly into the shower, but he couldn’t wash off the haze caused by longing, sour-cherry liqueur, and the sleeping pill. His transformation back into the mature gentleman known throughout Pera for his dapper appearance would require more than just a shower.
Although Fanis hadn’t visited his neighborhood hammam since it raised its prices to the tourist levels of the Old City, he knew that its attendants were some of the only people who could improve his desperate situation. So, he readied a kit of towels, flip-flops, and a boar-bristle exfoliation mitt and left the apartment.
As soon as he was out in the street, he spotted the sixty-something matron who owned the top three apartments of the blue mansion opposite his building. “Good morning, Madame Duygu,” he said. “You seem rather busy.”
She looked up from the dossier she had been perusing. “Mr. Fanis, what a lovely surprise!”
“You are the lovely surprise. Did I see that you rented the garret?”
“Yes, finally. An ‘artist’ took it, but who cares what they call themselves as long as they pay the rent and don’t disturb anyone? Moving in today. That’s why I’m here.”
Fanis wanted to ask further questions, but it would probably take the fun out of the evening’s window-watching, so he plodded up the road to the Galatasaray Hamam, a monument built in 1481, just twenty-eight years after the fall of the City to Mehmet the Conqueror. Fanis paid in the wainscoted entryway and asked the pot-bellied male receptionist if he could have Hüseyin as his attendant.
“Hüseyin?” said the receptionist. “He retired a decade ago and moved to Ankara to live with his daughter.”
Fanis grumbled. Now that he had already paid the fee listed in euros, which was exorbitant, despite the significant “local” discount for which he had haggled, he wouldn’t even have his old tellak to scrub him down. “What about Isa?”
“Today’s your lucky day, Uncle. Isa only works on Saturdays.”
“Nothing’s like it used to be,” said Fanis. Then he shocked himself by uttering a vulgar expression: “Everything’s gone to shit.”
Fanis left his shoes in the vestibule with instructions that they should be polished to a shine while he bathed. He put on his flip-flops with the receptionist’s help and took a key to one of the ground-floor cubicles, where he removed his clothing and wrapped his lower half in a woven towel. Then he caught his reflection in the mirror: he looked like one of the swarthy, bulging, wrinkly Rum gnomes who had filled the baths half a century before. It had been at least twenty years since Fanis had been to the hammam. He wondered what he had been thinking when he decided to return. Sleeping pills: they impaired one’s judgment.
Fanis took his toiletries in hand, stepped into the cold room, and seated himself on one of the high-backed chairs arranged around the central fountain. Presently a man with an even bigger belly than the receptionist’s entered through the heavy wooden bath door. His triangular breasts were as large as a woman’s, and his double chin sagged in folds like the rest of him. His chest was covered with gorilla-like hair, but Fanis could see, when he raised his hand to salute, that his underarms were shaved.
“Isa?” said Fanis. “Is that you?”
“Unfortunately so,” said a gruff voice that Fanis would have recognized anywhere.
The two men cheek-kissed and laughed at each other’s bodies. Fanis patted Isa’s belly. Isa rubbed Fanis’s balding head.
“I can’t believe it,” said Isa. “Fanis Paleologos, the comfort of every woman in Pera with an absentee husband. Still getting some?”
“You know I never talk about women. And you?”
“Not for a long, long time, Captain. Sad, isn’t it?” Isa offered his arm and led Fanis into the white marble antechamber. “Did you want to do the first rinse-down yourself?”
“No, Isa. I’m not taking any risks with slipping. I have a new—never mind. I’d appreciate it if you’d do it.”
“A new pistachio?”
“Please. You know I would never insult a woman by referring to her as a pistachio.”
Isa filled the bronze dish and repeatedly doused Fanis as if he were a small child. Fanis surrendered to the warm water and to the carroty scent of the hammam’s soap. Sometimes his young acquaintances wondered why anyone would go to a bathhouse. They couldn’t understand the pleasure of having one’s back, hair, and even the insides of one’s ears washed by another human being. Neither could they appreciate the relaxation brought by the maternal care of another, even if that other was a fat and hairy man.
“Well, whatever kind of nut she is,” said Isa, “at least you’ve got her.”
“Not yet. That’s partly why I’m here. I need to freshen up. The other reason is that I’m confused.”
Just then a familiar-looking old man passed through the antechamber on his way to the warm room, followed by two younger men quacking away like ducks. They had to be Americans. The older man greeted Isa in Turkish. That voice, thought Fanis. That wobbly gait, so familiar . . . could he possibly be. . . the husband of Sophia Papadopoulou, the nursery-school teacher who, forty-three years prior, had proven the truth of the Turkish saying “gündüz öğretmen, gece fahişe,” teacher by day, whore by night? People said that Polyvios Papadopoulos, Fanis’s former classmate, had flown into a violent rage when he found out about his wife’s affair. Luckily for Fanis, the disclosure had
