I’ve had a lot of unusual housewifely experiences while traveling and being a house guest, and one of the most bizarre ones has been vacuuming the volcanic tuff rock dust off the wall-to-wall lattice of Turkish carpets in my cave.
I actually find very little opportunity or obligation to perform housewifely chores around here, which is not what I would have expected from the gender dynamics of a traditional Muslim town. Whenever I work at the travel agency, the chefs at the family restaurant next door prepare a çok güzel salata for me, gratis.
Ekrem has a devoted worker named Mehmet who hails from Sanilurfa in eastern Turkey near Syria. Mehmet seems to play a role somewhere between Ekrem’s superhero sidekick and indentured servant. He knows very little English and doesn’t read or write. He does everything with a smile, unless he’s wrangling or chastising the animals with ferocity, and his eyes widen with aggression when we are martial arts sparring. Mehmet goes to the horse ranch every day to care for the horses and prepare them for riding. He gets sent on errands and shopping trips in town and comes to the cave to do the animal feeding, gardening, wood chopping, cleaning, dishwashing and food preparation alongside Ekrem, whom Mehmet clearly reveres. When Ekrem and Mehmet are making meals and maintaining the cave, I ask Ekrem if I can do anything to help, and he usually answers something like, “put on some music,” or on rare occasion, “wash these strawberries.” Oh, how I luxuriate in the graceful ease of cave princess life. When I requested a basin to wash my laundry, Ekrem sent to whole load home with Mehmet for his wife to wash so I wouldn’t have to use my hands. When my socks were drying, Ekrem insisted on buying me four new pairs at the pazar.
I find that Ekrem serves me attentively and thoroughly, taking me anywhere and everywhere I want to go, always giving me a ride back home to the cave in the evenings, stocking the place with kilos of the foods I eat, preparing salad for twenty and setting aside a special portion for me every time with no salt and less oil, even insisting on pouring me clear glass tulip tea cups of hot water instead of me serving myself. I stopped attempting to pay for the produce we were buying at the market or covering restaurant bills when I understood that doing so would always be ineffectual and might even been considered offensive to the Turkish male sense of pride and generosity and masculine responsibility. This kind of care and treatment is new and unusual for me in comparison to the laissez-faire way of America boyfriends, with whom I usually found myself in the role of provider and server, doing the majority of the food purchasing and preparation and the stocking of household items, taking care of bills and the cleaning of dishes and things, coordinating trips and outings, doing most or all of the driving around town and on road trips. After a period of anxious adjustment to this new dynamic, I’m allowing myself to happily relax into a place of femininity, to learn and understand what it feels like to be deeply taken care of in a relationship.
The days here in Göreme are full of moments and idiosyncrasies that are amusing to me; some because for their of curious juxtaposition of masculinity and femininity, some that are just plain funny. I once cut a breakfast grapefruit with a meat cleaver that I am sure hadn’t seen the inside of a citrus fruit before.
Analogously, Ekrem was sitting in his former rock church turned cozy ranch house with me and a collection of visiting cowboys. He wanted to cut an apple, so Mehmet searched for a knife and handed him a huge, razor-sharp one fit for cutting through scrub brush or slaying a crocodile, and Ekrem proceeded to gingerly peel the apple with it. That same night, one of the cowboys had the hiccups, so his friends had him stand up, bend over, and sip water from a glass upside down. The process initiated an eruption of laughter, and the antidote worked - his hiccups were cured.
One night at our friend Hassan’s ranch house, we were gathered around a buffet of barbequed meat and a tomato, garlic and green pepper salad. A candle with an overly long wick was burning while sitting on a shelf carved into the rock. Ekrem examined the wick of the candle critically, looked around, picked up a nearby pair of garden sheers and trimmed the wick with the shears while the candle was still aflame.
Ekrem has a cell phone. So, not only is he a traditional Turkish cowboy talking on a cell phone while riding a horse, he is a traditional Turkish cowboy talking on a pink cell phone while riding a horse. When someone teased him about it, Ekrem explained that the store only had pink phones in stock for the model he wanted. He said he should switch to a different color phone, and then we all agreed that the pink one was perfect, actually.
Ekrem wears a red and grey striped shirt with the world “flight” printed on the back. This carries a particular irony because he feels scared of flying in airplanes. He’s only been on one plane trip in his lifetime, to Morocco and back, and he swears he’s never doing it again. I observed, “Most people won’t get anywhere near the horses you ride, and even experienced cowboys won’t ride them the way that you do, without a saddle, rearing into the mountains and out in the winter snow. Most people fly in airplanes all the time. Yet, you are scared of flying.” He said, “Yes, I will ride any kind of horse, it doesn’t matter. If I fall off, I’m only two meters off the ground. Airplanes, how high are they? Eight thousand meters? No way.” His reasoning makes perfect sense.
Ekrem wears a black jacket with the word “puzzle” printed on the back. He is a puzzling creature, a living paradox. He possesses the innocent curiosity and dynamic enthusiasm of a child. He is also his grandfather’s legacy, a wise and weathered man planting grape vines, prescribing folk medicines, complaining about litter on the roads and horses eating his fruit trees and hot air balloons landing on the gardens. He talks and tells tales, mostly about horses, in a stream of nonstop Turkish with his friends, who orbit around him like satellites around a star. When he is alone or with Mehmet, they sometimes sit together silently, like tranquil monks in a cave drinking tea. Then, one of the horses will give a whinnying kick or create a commotion, and they’ll hop up and yell toward the corral with fierce commands to settle down.
Ekrem’s friends tell him that he is an exceptional and special being and so am I. They observe with wonderment, “You are a Cappadocia cowboy. She is a wild American girl from China and Italy. How did you two find each other?” Well, we didn’t exactly find each other. I found him. I came here to Göreme in the middle of nowhere, Turkey by following my intuition and tuning into the synchronous signs along my path of worldly wandering. We wouldn’t have met any other way. Though Ekrem intends to travel overland to Egypt and India, he’s not likely flying to America or flying anywhere. He was born and raised in Göreme, and he loves this place eternally. His friends warn me not to take him away, insisting that they need him here. “Don’t worry, he’s not going anywhere,” I assure them. This town revolves around him, and as I am with him, this town revolves around me now. Ekrem’s horse ranch and cave serve as frequented social hubs where a current of visitors come to gather, share tea and meals. Ekrem’s store sits in the center of the village, across the street from the most frequented bar, and it’s the only one open past midnight. He knows just about everyone here, and they admire and respect him like he’s the town sheriff. His friends are the owners of the most prestigious and beautiful hotels, restaurants, bars, carpet and jewelry shops, travel agencies and the hamam, and they teach me Turkish and offer me jobs left and right and adore having me and my dancing free spirit around.
I often find myself the only woman amongst a gaggle of born and bred Turkish men, smoking, drinking and carousing together. “Why is that?” I ask them. “Where are all of your girlfriends and wives all of this time? Where are all the women here? What’s with this place?” One of them answered, “The women stay in the home for the most part, and I do go out with my wife and my family sometimes. We go to restaurants together or out on walks. This place, though,” he said, referring to the Cave Chalet, “is our place. It’s special, just for men.” So it seems, not only have I been invited into the boys club, I have been invited to live in the boys club and to be served like a queen. Amazing.
Some of our friends call the cave house “the Museum,” since it is carved near the heart of the Göreme Open Air Museum, the most visited spot in town, a collection of thirty-three rock churches dating from the stone age with layers of medieval mosaics and red ochre paintings. I notice this synchronicity of informal place names, as I refer to my parents’ house in Houston as “the Museum” or “the Chi Museum,” because it houses a priceless collection of my artwork and has the hands-off austerity of a museum environment. When I first came to the cave, Ekrem said to me, “This is your home. Treat it as you would your parents’ house, like a place to come back to always.” I have two museums to call home now: one in Houston, Texas one in Cappadocia, Göreme.
I love living and sleeping in a cave. I sleep on cushions and blankets within the heated radius of a coal and wood burning stove. My dreams are lucid and clear. I awake with the dawn and feast on grapes and channel inspired words, writing in a continuous stream. The cave is protected from outside electromagnetic radiation, so cell phones don’t work, although there is a fine stereo and satellite TV for watching bizarre Turkish comedies and critical soccer matches. Being in a cave carved into tuff rock is kind of like hanging out in a geode, like sitting in the palm of magnetized earth energy, a powerfully healing habitat. I intend to create a space in the back cove for massage and Reiki, a perfect shelter for renewal and release, enveloped in the moist womb of mother earth. I wonder, if grapes from the garden that would normally wilt in six days stay preserved for six months in these caves, then what kind of effect do they have on human bodies and longevity? How long will I live if I stay here? Could I possibly get any younger? I’m already nineteen for the tenth time.
Cave life is very nice. We host giddy dinner parties nearly every night, serving organic salad with greens from the garden, parsley, dill and mint leaves, and homemade tomato aubergine güveç cooked over an open fire under the stars. After dinner, we gather in a circle for folk dancing to rhythms played on drums and spoons, thumping and clacking, turning and snapping late into the night. Once a pack of sixty Spaniards came to drink and dance, play music and sing, alternating between boisterous Spanish ballads and step dances and Turkish folk songs. If one culture could match the level of enthusiasm the Turks have for dancing, music making and revelry, it’s the Spaniards. Our Spanish guests delighted in the cave party scene and praised my belly dancing and spoon castanets. I found myself in the strange situation of dusting off the coating of Italian from my Spanish skills to translate flirtations between my Turkish men friends and the Spanish women, insisting to the most beautiful of them that they stay past midnight, dance more and go out with us to a local bar for all night carousing.
Some things about me are absolute anomalies here. I am the only person in this town and maybe this whole region who has an Apple computer. I’ve had several people request to buy my MacBook from me outright or to have me bring them one from the US. I sense a potential business venture. Also, when I moved into the cave, I increased the amount of books here by three hundred percent, bringing in The Rough Guide to Turkey borrowed from an American student named Rainbow studying in Istanbul, an English translation of the Koran gifted by my local friend Hasan after I told him I went to pray at the mosque, and my signed and dedicated copy of La Chiave Segreta dell’ Amore, a book on sacred sexuality written by Nautilo Miglio at Damanhur. The only book Ekrem had in the cave before was a three hundred year old military manual with diagrams on shooting with precision, written in Arabic and handed down to him by his great-grandfather. Ekrem has a family house in town where he stays most of the time and all winter long, and perhaps he has a few more books over there. However, nowhere in my circle of connections could I imagine walking into a home and finding just one archaic and incomprehensible book instead of piles and full bookshelves. Such is the culture here in this cowboy town carved into caves, where the locals largely disregard literature, writing and book reading in favor of oral traditions, talking and storytelling. Horse riding is a language. Histories are woven into the colors of carpets and sagas are shaped into clay pottery. Gardens are libraries; fruit trees are magazines. Pool playing and backgammon are acts from theatre scripts. Drinking tea is poetry.
