Fanis took a better look at the man through the open door: bump in the back, skinny legs, flaccid dead-chicken skin, disgusting body hair. Did Polyvios have a bump in his back? Fanis thought back to his school days. He remembered Polyvios hunching over his desk and Miss Evyenidou coaxing him to sit up straight. Good God. Fanis’s heart was now beating dangerously fast. Would Polyvios attack him? And would Fanis, unable to endure the stress, have the ischemic stroke now, in the hammam, all because of his past sins with Sophia Papadopoulou?
“Go attend to those fellows,” Fanis said to Isa. “I’d like to have a good sweat in the hot room. Alone, if you can manage it.”
“Sure thing, Captain.”
Fanis covered his head with a towel, tiptoed through the warm room to the cubicle-like hot room, and lay down on the marble bench. Sweat poured from his forehead, armpits, chest, thighs, and groin. He began to feel dangerously drowsy, but he knew that Isa would fetch him if he stayed too long. He drifted into sleep and felt Sophia Papadopoulou’s long black hair, which she hadn’t cut after she married. It tickled his face and shoulders. Before their affair began, he had fantasized about how her hair would cover him when they made love. Once things got going, however, Sophia’s tresses made Fanis uncomfortably hot. While making love he often had to shout, as he did then in his dream, “Tie it up!”
He swatted at her hair with such energy that he emerged through the layers of sleep and realized that Isa was telling him that it was time for his scrubbing.
“Are they gone?” Fanis asked.
“Taking cold showers before they come in here,” Isa replied.
Fanis sat up. “Let’s go quickly, then.”
“A husband?”
“Probably. What’s his name?”
“Poly-something.”
“Definitely a husband.” They passed into the warm room. “Keep my face covered while you work, will you, Isa? I don’t need a thrashing today.”
“As you wish, Captain.”
Fanis stretched out on the heated platform in the center of the room. He listened to the splashing and running of water, the metal clank of dishes on basins, and the music of the foreign languages spoken by the tourist bathers. He reveled in the boar-bristle-mitt scrubbing of his thighs and back, but when Isa arrived at the right shoulder blade, Fanis squealed.
“Sorry,” said Isa. “That side was always numb.”
“Things change,” said Fanis.
After the scrub down, Isa wrapped Fanis’s waist in a dry woven towel, draped a fluffy white towel over his shoulders, and wrapped another around his head.
“Where are they now?” Fanis asked.
“Still in the hot room. Fat Mehmet will take care of them. Let’s go have our tea.”
Fanis and Isa returned to the cold room. Isa turned two chairs inward toward the fountain.
“Still in the same place?” Fanis asked, easing himself into the chair.
“No. Can’t afford Pera anymore. Now I’m living further up, but who knows? They’re building there, too. Soon I may have to go somewhere else.”
“You’re as restless as the Rums. We were driven out of Anatolia. We left the Old City. Soon we’ll disappear from the earth altogether. Tell me, Isa, after your wife passed, may she rest in brightness—”
“Amen.”
“—did you find another woman?”
“To sleep with, yes. To marry, no. You?”
“The same, but now I want to marry. I’m sick of being alone.”
“Got one in mind?”
“That’s just the thing.” Fanis and Isa took their teas from the attendant’s tray and stirred in their sugar cubes. “I’m pursuing a stunning Rum woman who has just come back to the City from America. Pretty, intelligent. A good soul. There’s another fellow after her, nice enough, but hardly competition for an old pro like me. My suit is going swimmingly, but a complication has presented itself.”
“A complication?”
“A feisty violinist. The problem is that she’s not Rum, and please don’t misunderstand me, but I was set on finding one of my own. Yesterday, however, she gave me her phone number.”
“Good-looking, I assume?”
“Fetching.”
“Nice quinces?”
“An entire balcony.”
“Age?”
“Forties. Older than I’d like, but—”
“Maybe that’s why the feeling’s returning to your back. Love healed you.”
“No,” said Fanis. “That’s something else. If I tell you, you’ll think I’ve gone mad or, worse yet, senile. And I’ve already broken my vow never to discuss women, which shows that I’m not as sharp as I used to be.”
“I’ve always thought you were crazy, so it won’t make much of a difference. Tell me.”
Fanis reached his hand into the fountain’s trickling water and whispered, “It’s the god Hermes. He’s told her that she must send me on my way.”
“Who?”
“The nymph Kalypso. I saw it in a dream.”
“You’re lucky I’m more pagan than Muslim,” said Isa.
“And I’m discovering, as the years pass, that I’m just as pagan as I am Christian, but don’t tell anyone: I want to be buried properly, with all the blessings of the Orthodox Church.”
“Of course. But can I ask you a question? Why do you care if the violinist is Rum or not?”
“Because I want to feel home again.”
Isa took a sip of tea. “Listen. We’re lucky to feel anything at our age, so if the violinist does it for you, you ought to go for it. As far as I’m concerned, if a pullet with nice quinces gives me her phone number, I don’t care if she’s a Turk or a Martian.”
“Yes, you have a point. But women aren’t interchangeable, Isa. You have to decide which one you can really love, which one will really love you.”
Isa patted Fanis on the shoulder. “Good luck with that,” he said. “Now get going before your nemesis is ready for his tea, and get your ass back in here before I retire.”
Fanis dressed, gave Isa a handsome tip, and exited into the back alleys of Galatasaray. Having retraced his steps down Turnacıbaşı Street, he turned the corner into Ağa Hamamı Street and found Ali the barber, in his habitual white jacket, leaning against the doorjamb of his shop
