aquamarine
Adjective. A greenish blue likened to the ocean.
I wonder, at this moment—and yes, beyond the swish of the broomstick wind I can hear now the waves—just how many times I can describe the sea, or will there come a point at which I have exhausted my store of adjectives, analogies, improbably antiquated words for blue? Watchet. That means blue, you know. And sapphire and turquoise (what is it with gems?) and cerulean(good crayon) and how fitting, aquamarine… Probably one can trace in much of human storytelling a desire to portray water as never before, to plumb the poetics of vastness and unfathomability at twenty-thousand fathoms
And the drive is time elongated to latitudes and longitudes, round and round the globe where all seas are linked and one and the same, and we don’t even mind the slow drive.
billow
Verb. To puff or swell.
Which is what clouds are especially fond of doing, but the clouds over the Aegean Sea seem especially gifted with it, as David and I first observe walking among the legions of stunted palms lining a campground beach. Above the generously warm waters and the waves break their own hearts and spines in just the perfect way for flinging oneself into the foam, the clouds are artwork begging for somebody with a brush made of water and the ability to paint faster than wind—they surge into pictures of anything one wants to imagine from the seas below, like when you are a kid: there’s a lovestruck heart and then your favorite cartoon’s face, then it’s suddenly a toadstool and then a dove and then milk in a blue bowl and then a white somersault like the one you unexpectedly turn in the next roguish wave.
deceleration
Noun. The act of slowing.
As in a car pulling into a weedy lot of defunct, dragongutted engines—just like—
there there there there there! David pulls the bus to a stop even before the crest of the hill. Did you see that? Five VW Beetles all in a row, and a bus!
I think my love has Busdar, or some sort of paranormal eleventh sense which enables him to catch a whiff of air-cooled engines even in the mountain air of crushed brambles and heavy animal matter. A bus! and we are swiftly turning down a dirt road to what turns out to be the American Auto Show, a scrubby field of cars disorganized as any good inventor’s shop. It’s guarded only by a Turkish kid with wide eyes and shy, slight nods as he opens the chainlink gate; I hand him a chocolate as I follow David in his ardent stride.
With the little boy following us, silent and sweetly canine, loyal, we plunged into the aisle of cars, David making the proverbial line-of-the-bee for the VW bus. 1970, he informs me, examining the derelict engine in the auto’s rump, cameo blue. And there’s another! this one a desert’s beige, adorned with leafy stickers and the image of a seductress with the open rose of a teasing smile hidden behind her veil.
There’s me, though, wandering this museum with its chambers of rust, admiring the monstrous Buicks, a taxicab whose timer counts a particularly expensive ride through thirty years, a truck with black entrails exposed to sky and a Mustang with only chickens tripping in and out in panic from the hood.
Oh, baby! I gasp. Look at this. This one’s cherry—
a pink Cadillac, pink Cadillac... Somebody, I know—my great-grandfather? A racy uncle I never knew? somebody in my bloodlines once owned something like this, I think, I think I recall my mother telling me, and the restored, gleaming, valentine glamour is itself the lyric to a rock ‘n roll romance. I can’t help it; the automobiles of decades ago are sensuous beings.
But look at this! There’s a clock in the bus! David leans towards me confidentially.
The VW clock, he explains, is a rarity, like hens’ teeth. Or like those sorts of cats with a head at each end, or shoes built specifically for handstands. These things go for two hundred dollars at auctions—and he knows how to remove it.
It’s quite handy and culturally heartwarming, I suppose, that one can wheel and deal and haggle in any language, and with David’s habitual skills of pantomime (he can narrate the Mahabaratausing on hand and a pair of scissors, I swear) and a little help from our faithful, following friend, he’s found the owner of the lot sipping tea outside the renovation shop where cars wait like tarnished beauty queens for makeovers and carnations and ribbons bearing their names, and he’s bent over the dashboard of that blue bus. Haphazard and anonymous bands of film negatives lie aflutter upon the floor, by the still pedals waiting for speed: the vague images of people in lawn chairs who must have voyaged across a subcontinent, towards seashore and forgetfulness.
And now we have their clock!
It doesn’t tick yet—a melted gear, I think, and if anybody can repair it, David… But it’s analog and how we both love the mechanisms of the obsolete, we agree. it doesn’t know that at this very moment it is 3:53 in the windburnt afternoon, let alone that David first held it in his hands around 10:10 AM, but it’s said that of all minutes this auspicious instant looks the most like a smile upon the face of time.
discern
Verb. To understand, perceive, or realize. Like I did….
I should imagine, in the thousands of verdant and thirsty and lustful years since the sunrise of human agriculture, farmers have cultivated a great many things—from wheat with its whispers to barley already fermenting and boozing up the cattle, to maize emitting the tunes of flutes and rice in its mirrored paddies and those lost civilizations which sowed shoes in May and reaped October hats. But driving lackadaisically past one field of southern Turkey, just where the road bends like the pin in your barmiest aunt’s hair, David and I glimpse a garden where coffins are grown among the parched seedlings of unknown crops. One farmer treads calmly over the red furrows, between a scattering of pallid stone sarcophagi standing solemn in the dirt, under the absent eyes of a hilltop tomb.
Tavam? we ask. Can we see? And indulgent or impassive, the farmer nods.
Perhaps we are invaders, or perhaps worshippers of all things decomposed (after all, both David and I agree we prefer a villa on the verge of collapse to any manor with topiaries pruned), or perhaps we are the vandals of the past, desecrating monuments with our incessant gaze and compulsive words—or other roles, maybe, of which I have not thought—but we are there, clambering over mammoth stones and peering into the tomb; now a cavern stained holy by campfire, empty of corpse, and the sepulchers across the fields stand nameless as one’s first memory of a stranger. But wow, we repeat. And they’re just here, we say, here and unmarked. Below us a well, from which somebody must once have drawn the water as mercy in a Mediterranean noon.
Oh, but who were they, these people left motionless, mysterious, forgetting how to walk and how to speak in the long amnesia of decay?
Here, look… Beneath my fingerprints, unlike anybody else’s and bound to one day disappear, the graven writing feels like ideas before realization, like something ready to disappear if touched too much. It doesn’t look familiar, I say. It’s like Greek, but it isn’t…
And I figure it out! On the metaphysical scoreboards (these exist, arcane records of all the awesome or mediocre deeds a person does) I gain ten points!
It’s Lycian, I discern, and much gratitude to historical data in its forever mounting fight against amnesia. This was their land, their garden, the bed of gods and final rest of chieftains. This is a fact, and it is a fact too that the Lycian people had their own linguistic world and system of writing; that is, before they were erased from relevance by empires with bigger swords and more elaborate words for permanence.
dysfunctional
Adjective. Not working, or operating in a poor or undesired manner.
As in the performance of a certain remote-controlled toy helicopter which David purchased upon a whim in a gas station, which after multiple power charges and exuberantly frustrated cries oflook! look at it! Proved incapable of a sustained flight beyond hovering lazily for some six majestic seconds, and also colliding into a juvenile apricot tree (in what proved a rather ad hoccampsite in the yard alongside a barren hotel; its crashes had but a touch of the humanity attributed to the descent of the Hindenberg, sans tremendous flames. After its much-cursed abandonment in the weeds of an ambiguous construction site next door, we did fall asleep to the happy cries of two Turkish boys discovering their new, gratis toy, though these too fell silent, either because at last some tiny plastic pilot awakened to cruise off to Istanbul, or because the children too discovered the thing didn’t work for beans.
fairy
Noun. A being of myth, usually winged and gifted with powers of magic.
Which rhymes with ferry, which is what David and I (and Cyril, of course) take across the strait of the Dardanelles (not quite as fun to say as Bosporus, but still good); the birds, on the other hand, do imitate some of the flight of the fairies across saltwater, graceful as glitter in wind and dipping into the sea as if they desire something of which we on the surface do not know.
forsaken
Adjective. Abandoned or alone.
When David and I come to the town of Kayaköy, we come in search of ambiance, the way one steps closer to a billow of lilacs simply to inhale the scent of violet rarefied. But when Sophia comes to the lost village she looks for other things. In Kayaköy, David and I walk just-the-two-of-us up a narrow avenue of weatherworn stone, between the houses declining into rubble, an architecture of disordered stone and a populace of weeds; Sophia comes alone, with the absolute solitude given to a crone. She sees the abandoned town through her hundred years’ worth of cataracts like dreams in the upper atmosphere, and through the memory of a spinning wheel’s cyclic song.
David is seeking photographic instants, the perfect angle of morning cast on sorrowful wall—and I am seeking the tiny matchflame of enlightenment, to know precisely what new form of decay lies beyond this crumbling corner, past this well from which nobody drinks, behind the brambles growing with all the paradoxical freedom of utter destitution. But beyond—only more emptiness, so many homes with windows of pure absence left ajar for the magpies and the hillside winds.
That was the house of Nicolas, Sophia must say to herself, with the pebbled mumble of an ancient throat. He who once stole my shoes. And on that step I scraped my knee. There my father left the cart of apples and a mule stole the ripest ones, and there, Sophia thinks, there my aunt Agatha was wed to man from the town on the opposite hill, and blessed by the saints who guard doves. David and I walk into the resonant waste of the chapel and look up at birdstains on the plaster—there are still frescoes there, do you see the leaves?
There’s nothing to see here, really, just a promenade down deserted paths; in 1923, I read, the Greek carpenters and farmers and farmwives and daughters and sons all had to gather their satchels and depart Kayaköy in a forced population exchange to the nations of who-knows-where. By now, when a person can exchange one subcontinent for another with a numbered ticket, and a city is a place obsessed with forcing tomorrow to glint more than the day before, the children of the village have aged almost a century, and maybe grown older in dreams.
But that nook of ivy and thorn and the last flakes of sapphire paint, there, must have held the mussed bed of a little girl with pockets full of snail shells and berries in her mouth, and Sophia might wobble into that forsaken chamber and curl up like the crescent moon, because it has always been and will remain so purely good just to lie down in your own bed and gaze up at the exposed, lonely sky.
headless
Adjective. Lacking a head.
As in the arbitrary and charming statue of what must have been a cheery farmer, before the beheading, standing staunch in a bush outside the ticket office at the ruins of Troy. Seepalimpsest, below.
impish
Adjective. Playful, sly, or ill-mannered. As in that one time…
The clerk grins, the expression of friendliness over a linguistic gap, and gestures to a cigarette lighter sold in the novelty form of a miniature pistol, just the right size for the world’s smallest mobster. I should touch it? I say, stupidly charmed, and he nods.
Ow! I laugh indignantly, because how was I supposed to know that the thing would give me a minute electric shock? No fair, I groan, no fair!
He smiles again in his minor triumph, ringing up the gasoline our dear Cyril so desires and the Coke I’d very much enjoy.
Çok tesşekur ederim, I thank him, rubbing my forefinger.
If the clerk beams with any more friendliness I believe he shall break a physical law, but he hands me a bit of candy I will later discover to be marzipan, and a tiny, delicate glass charm, Allah’s extralunary blue eye of protection against evil, though, it would seem, not of mischief.
palimpsest
Noun. A document, originally of pulped papyrus, upon which is written not merely a single text but stratum upon stratum of words.
This proves an apt metaphor for Troy, upon whose dry earth is inscribed not only the mythcrossed Homeric battle, but five thousand years of settlement. O sing of it, of Helen, her beauty so intense the fishes of reflective pools went blind at the mere sight of her jawbone in a mirror, who inspired odes and war—sing of the battle in which a hundred thousand men shed their hearts on a hundred thousand swords—sing of the absurd ruse of the Horse.
But sing also of the first villages, whose foundations David and I see in rotting traces, and above that is written the poem of the Myceneans’ homes, crumbled into single lines of brick, and above written the ashen dirges of multiple fires and the violent lyric of the earthquakes. Atop that, the Greek amphitheatre unearthed as a drama of marble steps and columns shattered, and then the arrogant autobiography of Alexander the Great overpowering the deep remains of the enormous wall, then elegy of the massive temple to Athena which remains only as a single hill dedicated to wisdom and war—and over that the city’s abandonment unto dust, which is always unrhymed and meant to be forgotten. Troy is a layered literature, millennia of stories with an archaeologist translating history out of earth; now it is a lyric of weedflower and violet blooms and dung beetles fighting the mad red ants, and the cursing speech of a Japanese woman with a parasol stumbling on a path, and the diary of David and I, wondering what sort of character falls for a huge wooden horse.
scratch
Verb. To rub or chafe.
What I do to the bee’s sting on my leg, which I sustained three days ago in a grove of eucalyptus and a rainfall of infinitesimal seeds. Ow! dammit. I know I’m not supposed to scratch the sting, but it really, really itches.
scrumptious
Adjective. Delicious, or good to eat or savor.
As in unleavened dough with the consistency of silk, as in mulberries plummeting in rings around the rugs, as in the woman with her headscarf kneading, as in her son crafting a castle of cushions and as in the man with the spatula like a sword
as in the domed iron woodstove and the butter, the three minutes cooking time, and as in sikma, yet another superlative Turkish bread. Scrumptious:
Say it aloud!
system
Noun. An organizational scheme, or categorizing structure.
As in the Dewey decimal system—written in Roman numerals, as ‘twould have been the case in the library of Ephesus with the majestic gleam of its long-hollowed library. See number 453.65: Ptolemy’s most erroneous and most shimmering astronomic treatises. See 986.99: The Oddytie(epic detailing adventures of Odysseus in Brazil). And also tales of woe, a bucolic poem about people turning into pigeons, a guide to rhetoric so rational one can negate the existence of the audience—
What tomes were contained in the library at Ephesus? Now, only the façade remains, blazing intellect across the sunvarnished stones of the ancient road, ornate as if no empires had turned a somersault and still guarded by muses with smiles that know more than marble can say. We’ve seen so many ruins thus far, I know, and as civilization has quite the talent for construction and demolition I know we shall see so many more, but I only wanted to see the library. What papyrus of owls’ odes, what comedies, what scrolls of scientifically accurate myth might I once have read?
767.34: the capers of Plato in his philosophers’ nightgown, alongside tragedies concerning snakebites, guides to mathematics as would be valid in an upside-down oceanic world… the bibliophile’s perpetual lament—there’s simply not enough time for it all.
yia sas
Oh. Wait. This isn’t English, and thusly does my paltry pseudolexicon tumble sloppily into multilingualism. But one might excuse this, or at least I do, as yia sas is hello! in Greek, and David and I have been repeating it daily since Greece is where-we-are.
I can’t say I’ve seen enough of the nation to give a comprehensive definition; crossing the Turkish border—oh, Allah işmarladik, Turkey!—we drive into an agrarian undulation of toasted fields and the traceries of hedges between, with pillars of unexpected rain propping gracefully grim storms above and handily washing Cyril of some sixty days’ worth of grime (hey! that mud was a souvenir!). But at the coast, sleeping at a municipal campground (next to the inexplicableAngels in Heaven beach) in the town of Alexandroupolis, the Aegean clouds perform their daily drama, the sun a bit confused and hazy while we resolutely swim to tap (and thus conquer forever) a yellow buoy. Now I type (aha! live and in person) from Kevala; it’s one of those towns that prompts a what a charming place, with all its crisscrossed cobblestones and the harbor of painted boats fit for bottles, the old men circled around espressos in shaded cafés. And overlooking the fishermen’s calm cove a citadel upon a hill, a sequence of domes—apparently these mark a school established in the 18th century by one Mehmet Ali, born here among the red rooftops and the empires of pigeons to become the pasha of Egypt, and founder of its last dynasty. One wonders what memories he might have held, drawing nostalgic maps upon glassy sand, or waxing reminiscent with an audience of noble cats; Kevala was a charming place, he tells one kitten, and the waters warm.
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