Tag Archives: Shadow puppet dancing troupe

A Karagözi intervention after multitasking with meatballs

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A terrifying image - the puppets tell me I am going down this road - thanks to this website for the image: http://www.motifake.com/the-modern-woman-bad-drivers-crankyhead-demotivational-posters-113611.html

Today was not my finest driving day.  Let me start by saying that despite being constantly exhausted and ready for a 2 hour nap just about any time of day, somehow, I am starting to get things done.  While the horrid on and off fevers and deep, phlegmy cough and dizziness have subsided somewhat, I am still totally tired, and literally surviving my commute and teaching moments via excessive amounts of caffeine and the eventual burst of adrenaline that comes when you have to talk to a group of students for 3 hours at a time.  The Karagöz puppet troupe is ever-present in my psyche through this time of strange health.  I think they are quite worried and don’t really get what is going on.  Sometimes they talk to me in a soupy, drawn out, slowed-down-recording voice and I realize it is because my brain is tired, slow and not functioning optimally.  Karagöz himself is pretty funny looking when he jumps up and down and twists – in slow motion.

The chain of tea delivery was in slow-motion as well, this morning, but it helped to get me up and out.  I even drove M. to work.  The little puppets were notso hot on this idea, but I was feeling the strength of morning and we managed to get there despite a lot of screeching along the way (“Watch the bicycle, how do men wear these pornographic outfits in this century?” the little ladies commented upon seeing a spandex-clad muscle man, shocked but fascinated in their Ottoman era temperaments).  Karagöz just tries to get my goat by calling me a “typical lady driver.” I ask him where he gets this term -as there are no cars in Ottoman times – and he says “watch, learn and listen, m’lady, my intellect will glisten and the television provides many revisions!”  Nonsense speak such as his takes time to decode.

Today, at one particularly chaotic moment, everything seemed to slow down as all of my efforts focused on forgetting my meatball sandwich and instead not hitting the parked car I was heading for.  I woke up early, ready to meet a colleague before 2 student meetings, a doctor’s appointment and another student meeting after that – all in different locations in my trafficky New England town.  Sleepy even after a super venti latte, I downed a Red Bull energy drink.  The puppets were up to their usual tricks to keep me awake – pinching body parts, opening the window wide for fresh air shock treatment and screaming punk rock lyrics at the top of his lungs, Karagöz was at the center of it all.  As I was chugging the cough-syrupy but enticing and powerful stuff, I remembered a conversation with a student from the previous day…she had caught sight of me downing a Red Bull and said -”Really, Dr. Professor, you are REALLY drinking a Red Bull? I thought only rave kids drank that.”  Yup, that’s me, the caffeine addict of the moment, I thought, before I realized I was about to hit a parked car.  Narrowly averted, I gripped the wheel, and soothed the terrified puppets splayed all over the car after being thrown off of their perch on top of the back seat.  Many were cursing and shaking their fists at me for a bit, but they soon resumed their efforts to shepherd and guide me through my life despite their very different values.  The little chorus of dancing ladies, well, they just cannot seem to understand how it is that ladies go out and work – they are doing their best to accept this reality – while secretly scheming for other ways of life to enter in.

Juicy, soft, home-made köfte from Kenne Teyze, the wax paper puppet from the Ottoman empire era who is one of many who inhabit my head

I made it to the next stop on my busy agenda without incident.  Dragging myself out of there, having promised my nurse practitioner to at least eat a good lunch, full of protein, I stopped in an Italian deli and ordered a meatball submarine sandwich. “Totally un-ladylike, madam, not even good looking köfte, these are.”  Kenne’s patience with me was wearing thin.  She thought another week of bed rest would be a better option.  I ignored her, slumped to the side of the 1980s-decorated vinyl-sided wall, and closed my eyes for a bit, dreaming of her delicious thyme and red pepper-infused lamb meatballs.  Once the submarine sandwich was in hand, I dashed to the car to eat my lunch on the way to my next meeting.  I do this all the time, but rarely do I dump the whole damned sandwich in between my seat and the gear shift.  It happened in slow motion and I – along with the entire puppet troupe – screamed “Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!” as it played out perfectly – sauce everywhere.

So, it all got cleaned up.  I was a little late to see my student.  I didn’t have another accident, but tonight when I got home, the puppets staged an intervention.  They have determined, they tell me, that I have to be happy, healthy and safe in life, and something has to change.  They are engaging in a morning tea boycott until I can make some healthy choices in my life to get through this Lyme’s recurrence or walking pneumonia or whatever it is…at least until then, if not more, they are adding.  They hopped onto my laptop and jumped around on the keys (a great string of them, each on the other’s shoulders, so their wax paper selves would have enough weight to press the keys).  They are the ones who found the “modern woman” demotivational poster pictured above.  “You don’t want to be that woman!” they tell me, with grave, gravely voices and stern furrowed brows.  They are threatening to whisper to M. at night about the benefits of keeping me in a New England-style one-woman harem from now on…it’s getting into serious territory with these tiny wax paper figures in my brain.  Something’s gotta give, I guess it’s gotta be the meatball submarine sandwiches while driving…and the public consumption of red bull…and probably a lot more than that.   Let’s see what happens.

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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Finally, a kindred spirit amidst the swim parade

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Although the moon shone with sprightly sparkles on the sea, I did not wake up and worry about the next day. My invisible burqini was bringing me some well-needed peace. After throwing my burqini street theatre idea under the proverbial bad-yet-sexy-while-it-lasted-idea-take-the-high-road bus after receiving the magic, invisible burqini from Kenne, Khadijah and the little ladies, I descended to cement beach the next day with renewed resolve and a slightly improved body image self-rating. Kenne took the left shoulder, holding on to my ear as if she were the figurehead of a ship in the 1800s – with Khadijah her mirror image on my right shoulder. Karagöz and Hacivad were nowhere to be seen. Even the chorus of dancing ladies had taken it upon themselves to emerge from my purse for the occasion, draped on the straps of my purse like seagulls on the rope netting of a clipper ship. All the ladies stood proud, tall and lovely, with nary a word between them. They were just focused on drinking up the sun. It was, after all, our last day on cement beach.

M. and I planned to leave the next day in order to wend our way up the coast to Bozcaada, where we would visit M.’s aunt, the reigning matriarch of the family. We had already spent the majority of the morning finalizing our travel plans, with our next stops in Selcuk and Şirince, Ayvalık, and Assos/Behramkale along the way. We had discovered the first edition of what was then a new thing – the guide to small hotels in Turkey – the Kuçuk Oteler Kitabi. Happy with the idea of breaking free from the machine-gun-toting guards, Cuban cigar smoking generals, judges and businessmen and, of course, the ladies of the swim parade on cement beach, I plopped myself down on the usual tanning chair. As usual, I placed myself next to M.’s sister-in-law, and commenced polite chit-chat for as appropriately long as possible before moving to my textbook on Turkish politics. I was relishing the notion of my invisible burqini, of not caring about all the feminine gaze around me and most importantly about the idea of being able to act like myself again, not double-thinking everything, or worrying about how I looked. I wouldn’t miss M.’s sister in law’s checks of my labels (“Oh, not a designer, I see, and a size large?”). I also wouldn’t miss having a sore tummy from holding in my stomach muscles quite so constantly in the waking hours.

I had just tucked into a particularly good section of my book, when a lady plopped herself down on the tanning bed to my right. Greeting M.’s sister-in-law with respect and an open-hearted friendliness that did not seem at all akin to the gold-dripping wrists, honey-tanned bodies and perfectly coiffed hair of the skinny bitches around us, this lady stood apart. She was gorgeous, don’t get me wrong. Petite, tan and raven-haired with red highlights, she exuded a natural beauty – but what was most noticeable about her was her slight plumpness – just like me. “Hello, nice to meet you, çok memnum oldum,” she said, extending her hand warmly, “I hear you are visiting from America? How do you like Türkiye? What intrigues you about our country?” Curious about this new person so different from the other non-interested lady friends of M.’s sister-in-law, I hesitantly responded with a range of rather banal observations, but soon felt myself drawn out in conversation with a potentially kindred spirit.

Knowing that it would be prudent to ask about her children, as I had picked up on this as the vital bit of information to discuss with all women I met in Turkey since they asked ME the question, I planted the question out in the ether between us. Immediately, I regretted this. As a trained therapist and childless person myself, I realized that the infinitesimally quick grey cloud that shadowed her eyes was a dead give-away. “Oh,” she said, quietly, “um, I am not able to have children, but we are talking about adopting a child – and I have so many nieces and nephews.” Realizing that we were in the same boat, so to speak, the women, no-children-first boat, that is, I had to let her know that she was in “safe” territory. “Oh,” I said, putting on my hopefully-kindest smile and reaching out a hand to hers, “me too. I can’t have kids either, I know how it is.” Her smile spread across her face like a giant, spherical golden-hued firework across the deep, dark night sky. “Really,” she said, “I have not met someone else like this. Why can’t you have kids?” Needless to say, we launched into a drawn-out discussion of endometriosis and infertility challenges, and I even broached the topic of M.’s zero population growth political stance that had led to a vasectomy. “Surely,” she said, “this does not rule out adoption, though?” “No, it doesn’t, but as older people, we may feel we are too old to consider adoption – he is 10 years older than and I am also going to have to take care of my younger sister, who has a major disability.”

We moved from our discussion about children to sharing our histories of treatment with the same hormones (her for infertility and endometriosis, me for the control of endometriosis), we decried our collective weight gain from those hormone treatments, the inability to “lose” the tummy fat and the horrible mood swings we had endured on those awful medicines. Laughing hysterically at a range of stories about the latter, including the time that normally police-shy me got in a massive fight with a ticketing policeman, M.’s sister-in-law tried to join in the fun at first, but soon lost interest. Later, my new friend and I walked the swim parade forgetting that it was the swim parade, locked deep in laughter and connection. In the water, we compared our keloid-rich belly scars from numerous surgeries. It felt a little bit like junior high school again, finding a friend you could “click” with like this. Meanwhile, her husband and my boyfriend sat in the cigar smoking section with M.’s brother, wrapped up in discussions of the politics and economics of the day. Yes, it did feel a bit gendered.

As my new friend finished packing her bag to leave cement beach for lunch and a flight back to Istanbul, she embraced me deeply. “I am so glad to meet you, I am so glad,” she said “to not be alone.” No sooner had she said this, than M.’s sister-in-law approached, threading her arm around my new friend’s back “it’s such a shame, you see,” she tried to join in, “that Z. has not been able to have children, it is indeed a woman’s right. As it is your right, and would that M. hadn’t had that vasectomy! It is so selfish.” The bubble was slightly burst, the reality of our environment was back, but it didn’t seem to matter quite as much, we had made a connection. I never saw her again, but she reminded me that the domination of the skinny bitch morphed with the child-bearing/rearing factory that is Turkish womanhood does not reign totally supreme.

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