Tag Archives: Moldova

Of cigars, ironing and my very own “Sicilian message”

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Image from La Casa del Hubano in Hamburg (click image for link)

We are driving back from the Migros supermarket.  I have my stash of rosehip juice, for better or for worse.  M. has his leblebi and sunflower seeds, for better or for worse.  We are ready to roll in the morning, and X., M’s brother-in-law plans to take us to get the rental car in Bodrum first thing.  I realize that nothing can be done without the OK of the big brother.  It is endearing, I think, this bond of love, this sense of responsibility.  I think that for a few minutes and decide it is not all that – it is also some sort of brotherly sparring, some sort of exertion of control by one who remains in Turkey and one who chooses a different life elsewhere.  I decide that no amount of brotherhood analysis is really going to make any difference, and I let the topic float out of my mind before I think about what life would be like with a heavy-handed but well-intentioned brother-in-law if M. and I chose to live permanently in this country…but this is 2004, and I was hesitant to think about life plans at that point.  M. was just my boyfriend and I was just meeting his family.

As we exit the fortress that is the massive BMW of X., I can smell the starch in the steam from an iron coming from the steps down below.  Kalinka, the Moldovan maid extraordinaire who has been my #2 (after M.) ally in at-times difficult moments here in the gated compound near Bodrum, has washed and ironed all of our clothes to perfection – without us asking. I note that the otherwise super modern house is home to a very old fashioned looking iron.

Feeling a bit unsure about how to address this situation – much less how to don what are now heavily starched underpants in lock-step folded formation – I ask M. if we should pay Kalinka.  After all, I think, she works for X. not for us, this is extra work.  M. agrees and secrets some funds into her hand with a heartfelt thank you and a hug.  She has been a lightness in the sometimes unbearable atmosphere of being on or near cement beach and the swim parade.  I give her a hug and offer up one of my now-few Russian words – friend.  She squeezes me back and slaps my butt before kissing me on both cheeks.  She is a vibrant soul.  What I do not realize at the time is that this payment will cause havoc in the years to come.  But I will get to that.  For now, let’s see what happens.

M. heads to the room to take a nap, and X. calls me into the outdoor terrace – remember the one with the massive futbol flag flapping down two stories in the Aegean breeze?  ensconced in the corner seat on the white canvas couch, M has both arms stretched out, the end of one arm includes a hand with the usual Cohiba cigar.  I note that X. is dressed in the colors of his futbol team.  “Come and sit, let’s talk,” X. says, “you are leaving tomorrow, we should talk.”  I feel grateful for this, for this welcoming, and I don’t notice that both Hacivad and Karagoz are receding down my back as if repelling down a cliff.  They secret themselves away into my purse with all of the ladies, and I know it isn’t any monkey business that they are after, they are clearly escaping.  While I do notice that my most trusted counsel of shadow puppets is for some reasons receding like a quick tide during an earthquake in the ocean, I don’t, for some inexplicable reason, choose to fully notice this.

Plopping myself down onto the couch with a happy smile, happy to share some time alone with M.’s brother who has indeed been very kind to me on this trip and made every effort to assure my comfort as well as my family’s concerns back home through, for example, polite introductory telephone calls filled with assurances I have not asked for, I breathe in the lovely clean air – until the cigar smoke catches me like a fish in a net. “So,” X. says, taking on a most officious tone, “so I am glad that you spend time here with our family.” He shifts himself forward, both hands on his knees now, leaning towards me a bit.  “I am glad to see that my brother is happy with you and you with him.”  Of course, I agree with him, but now I am feeling something brewing.  I hear Karagoz yell out from the depths of my purse across the patio “something wicked this way comes!” before he is pulled under and the button of the purse is summarily snapped shut.  It is the battening of the hatches before a storm going on over there, and I am wondering if I am too exposed to the elements.

“You need to know,” X. says with certainty and a direct look in the eye, “you need to know that M. is a good man and he will never cheat you.  He will take good care of you and he will be stable.  Not the wealthiest, but stable and loving.  And I hope you will never cheat him.”  I sit in silence, not sure what to say as he adds in this hum-dinger.  “You know, he had someone before many years ago, and she cheated him.  Do you know anything about this?”  I can see this is going perilously close to a firestorm and I am tongue-tied.  There is some movement over in my purse, the puppets are moving together, jumping in unison, trying to move the purse out of the room.  I am frozen in my white cushion couch perch. I think I know what he is referring to from M.’s stories, but I decide to play dumb. “No,” I said, hoping I would not blush, “I do not.”

“I don’t know you, I don’t know your family, but you seem like a good person.  I wish only the best for my brother, but you must know, this person that cheated my brother, she makes me very angry.  Very. Angry.”  X. is pointing now, upwards.  He is getting red in the face and his upset is written all over that red face.  “You need to know that if what I hear is true, about this person who has CHEATED my brother and therefore me and my family, you have to know that if it were up to me, (and dear readers, this is a direct quote emblazoned in my memory)  I wish she could be taken to the top of the mountain and raped a thousand times!  She cheated this family!”  Hearing the commotion as she is entering with a tea tray, Kalinka looks in – and quickly turns around and high-tails it out of there.

Time stops.  As the wind, trees and people around me are frozen, I think to myself, “um, did he really just say that, about raping a thousand times? What the heck? What kind of gendered freaky bullshit is this anyway?  This is hyperbole, right? Is this why M. left the country?”  As I watch the cigar smoke frozen in mid-air, the tendrils of gauzy grey winding around a frozen in mid-wag finger of X., I wonder what I have gotten myself into.

I lose myself a bit in the frozen world, having never seen a frozen world before and am therefore surprised when the little ladies come marching out of the purse, now halfway into the kitchen from the porch.  “M’lady,” the leader of the shadow dancing chorus says ignoring my shock at her movement, “you need to understand that tempers flair high, but the words are not serious, and he has not done this thing.  You must soothe the tempers of men, and ignore their foolish words”  I turn my head at an angle as if to take in what she has said.  “Oh, and yes, we puppets move even in frozen time.”

Karagoz jumps out of the purse behind her like some cartoon character prince around to save the day.  “That’s some womanly talk – look at this buffoon – you must protest!  Agent provocateur – I wish that I were!  You need to speak!  Feminist principles do indeed reek!  But you must not be afraid to step on the peak – of this mountain he mentions!”  Although Karagoz is speaking in his usual bizarre poetry-like jumble, I hear the call to protest, to speak truth, to make some gentle feminist observation and bring this guy around to realize that he is making a TOTALLY SCARY AND INAPPROPRIATE comment.  Hacivad, of course,  is the next to appear.  All he says is “take the middle path.”

Time suddenly unfreezes mid-spittle, and I get a bit of the cigar-laced saliva on me.  I take pains to ignore it.  X. speaks for me as he stands up to walk out of the room.  “You, I know you are different, you would never cheat my brother and therefore me.  For this, I am glad.”  Whomever the woman is, I think, I feel badly for her, given the wrath that she has induced.  I can’t conceptualize what has led to this level of wrath.  Something tells me not to tell M. about this conversation.  And I don’t, for about 6 months.  X. turns on his way out and delivers this line: “I know I can count on you.”

I sit, forlorn, here on the white canvas couch that smells like clean sunshine, the potential cheater, feeling unclean from cigar smoke and the awful images ginned up so quickly from the imagination of this fiery potential brother-in-law.  He seems to epitomize every one of the worst stereotypes I have about men in Muslim countries even though I don’t want to admit I have them.  This is the first I have seen of this side of him.  Kalinka brings me a glass of tea and kisses me on the cheek as if she has understood the whole conversation in English.  I stare out at the sky and listen to the flapping of the flag.  The message has been received.

A Sicilian Message

All I can think of is Luca Brasi and the “Sicilian message” in The Godfather, involving the delivery of a dead fish which means something like “you will sleep with the fishes” (once we whack you).

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Of peştemal, patlican and the perfect Turkish junk food (with home-style recipe)

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After saying goodbye to Z. after my first-ever great morning at cement beach, M. and I walked up the hill, now expert at pre-stretching our legs in order to elude shin splints.  Upon entering the house, Kalinka was upon us, unleashing a stream of Turkish over M.’s way – the only word of which I understood was “peştemal.”  A peştemal is a Turkish-style towel, often woven in lovely, simple hues in the Bodrum area.  M.’s sister-in-law referred to it as “Bodrum cloth.” Apparently, M.’s niece was missing her favorite peştemal and a new one needed to be purchased immediately, or all hell would break loose.  M. explained that we needed to drive his sister-in-law over to the village bazaar immediately, although it was already late in the day “for the good stuff.”  It was the last of our days on the Bodrum penninsula – and we hadn’t been to the bazaar yet, so this was welcome news. Kalinka (the Moldovan maid who saves my life every time she smiles) warns us that we had better high-tail it over there, and we hop to it, salty hair from swimming and all.  While we are waiting for sister-in-law, Kalinka hoots and hollars in Turkish before saying to me in Russian, our shared broken language, “more fun than house!”

I am excited to shop for some peştemal.  Now that I am done with my burqini fantasy, it’s all about the cotton beach wrap - peştemal - to feel more modest along cement beach in the gated compound regardless of the machine gun-toting guards, for my last afternoon there, that is!  M. and his sister-in-law are conversing with great hilarity about something else – something called “patlican” (“pahtleejhahn” skinny, Chinese-style eggplant in U.S. parlance or aubergine to the Brits).  I hear kuçuk (small) and buyuk (big) and peals of laughter along with this word.  “What ever are you talking about?” I ask M. wishing that my flair for language would finally make its appearance with respect to Turkish.  Hacivad made his presence known just then, with a simple clearing of the throat “So, you are thinking so far, no luck, in the country 3 weeks and counting, must be patient. Remember, Rumi says “patience is the companion of wisdom.”

“Aubergine, um, eggplant,” M. explained a broad smile still inhabiting his face, “patlican is eggplant – and you can’t get better than the Turkish one, I can’t find it in the States.  We are going to make patlican salatası.”  Let me move from potato salad – to safer territory, roasted garlicky eggplant.  This territory is a bit safer and we had nothing to navigate here, as there was no American equivalent for me to get pissy about vis-a-vis my mayonnaise mania.  :)   By the way, I must admit, I am embarrassed to look back at myself then – so convinced that I was open to new things!  I had so much to learn, and am old enough to know that I have too much more to learn than I can realize.  At least I am more open to that reality now.  Wouldn’t trade middle age for anything.  And yes, it is just potato salad and mayonnaise we are talking about, but sometimes the tough stuff comes out in sheep’s clothing, I suppose.

Old-fashioned hues of three Bodrum peştemal

In any case, back to the bazaar, as we meandered through informal rows underneath the white canvas tent on the bazaar grounds, M. bounded up to me happily, saying that he had found not only the perfect peştemal, but also the perfect patlican seeds.  “This is excellent!” M. said, hands waving akimbo, “finally the seeds – I can never find the right eggplant back in the U.S.!”

“Hmm,” Karagöz noted, “p-items, items beginning with the lovely letter P! P into the sea! P all over me!  P, it’s free!”  Kenne pulled him off of his impromptu stage with a hooked cane, shushing him along the way.  He reeled in giggles despite the cane.  Oblivious to the presence of a very goofy Karagöz and horrified Kenne, M. began to explain his eggplant-cooking process. “We have to cook it on the coals (on the mangal or BBQ) to make it smoky, until it explodes and you mash it with garlic – then you can try my version of Turkish junk food.”  Now there’s a concept, I thought, Turkish junk food other than the Turkish-flavored crisps from Lay’s, for example.  “OK, sounds good to me – but junk food, I don’t know about that characterization.”  Armed with patlican and peştemal galore, we snaked through the streets at breakneck pace, feeling glad to be in the sturdy steel-tank that is a Volvo station wagon.

Our own eggplant-grilling moment

On the way home, M. talked nonstop about his various favorite eggplant dishes.  We became so hungry that we stopped for a snack.  An unassuming place by the roadside, with no other customers.  While this did not bode well to me, M. is blessed with the nose for the best places to eat – anywhere in the world – and I had already in our short months together learned to understand this.  M. knew the ancient-looking owner – who sits at the front table molding köfte (“keufteh” spiced meat balls) by hand in the shade of a white pine tree. Although the place was empty, I had faith that M.’s food judgement was still working.

Sitting there, we tried not only mashed eggplant with garlic, but also what M referred to as “my favorite version of Turkish junk food.” Essentially, it is slices (think potato French fry shape) of eggplant, grilled, along with yeşil biber (“yesheel beebehr” long skinny light green color peppers) that have been grilled until they are wilty. These are then dredged in strained sheep’s milk yogurt (cow’s yogurt would be fine too) that has been blended with fresh garlic (vs. dry) that I find often has a different and more pungent and almost fruitier taste. We spent an hour or so just talking eggplant with the waiters and chefs…with me writing down words as I understood them, once M. was up-to-here with the translating.

That night at dinner, M. referred to this visit to the little lokanta as
“research on Turkish junk food.”  Since then, we have done a lot of “research” all over Turkey on this form of Turkish cuisine – as in “two plates of patlican salatası, please!”

Once at home for the evening with M.’s brother, we prepared the mangal on the terrace at the top of the house, which is situated on a hill.  We savored the
wood smoke that comes from the special charcoal they use here – real wood (that in 2011, is all the Whole Foods rage). Here is the home-style recipe for what we did that night – and many other nights in the years since…

Homestyle Patlican Salatası

Step 1:  Place the eggplants on the grill – as pictured – or directly on the coals if you prefer.  Once they are white with heat, wait for them to explode – sort of like a sausage bursting a seam.

Step 2: After getting them blackened and soft with a split seam, so to speak, extract the soft, oozy interior, mashing the strands of eggplantness with a fork while mixing in extra virgin olive oil, crushed (vs. chopped) raw garlic to taste – we use a whole bulb, but we are garlic fanatics), fresh lemon juice and salt.

Step 3:  Try not to eat the entire deliciousness at one setting with a spoon.

Note:  People often add in roasted peppers, parsley and tomato to this salad as well – but we like it straight up.  Patlican salatası rules! Delicious…and never possible, to date, to re-create quite as well Stateside!

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