Beyond Belief (36 page)

The first weekend, we took the Blue Train to Istanbul where I hired a guide to show us Tokapi Palace. The gentleman wore a long double-breasted coat and horn-rimmed glasses. Even though it was I who handed him the lira, he had kept his eyes on Thom. “Secretary?” he asked and nodded toward me. He smiled broadly.

“Friend,” Thom said.

“Yes, secretary,” the man said and winked. “Not wife.”

I walked ahead. I had questions to ask the sexist guide and I intended to ask them. I knew what I was worth in his eyes: forty-one million lira, or about twenty-five bucks for a half-hour tour of a sultan’s palace. I walked through the harem quarters and saw the golden cage where concubines were once enclosed high above the rest of the room. I knew what that was like, the feeling of being a captive, the angst of knowing life continued below. We drank fresh-squeezed orange juice at a sidewalk café. When I finished I asked for another, and Thom laughed at my greediness.

A few days later, we were on the bus to Cappadocia and beginning to pass strange rock formations, conical rocks stretched twenty feet into the air. Some of the cones and towers had carved windows and doorways, hobbit houses. It could have been created in Hollywood, a strange valley of volcanic deposits with the occasional fairy chimney, a cap of hard rock on top of a rock cone.

Thom said, “There’s historical evidence that Saint Paul visited here. Actually some biblical reference to this area—surely you know it?”

“No,” I said. “I know about Ephesus. That’s in Turkey, too, I think.”

“It is. A pity we won’t be going there. But the chapels I want you to see are a bit later—they’ve dated the frescos from the ninth and tenth centuries. They built monasteries in the face of a cliff.
Looks like a wasp nest cut of stone. And then you’ll see over thirty of these rock chapels or cave churches, rustic but magnificent.”

The bus pulled into a village and parked and became the only noticeable marker of the modern century. Hay and muck littered the pathways, no sidewalks to speak of, no yards, no fences. Chickens wandered in and out of living areas. A goat munched on the grass roof of a house. I smiled at the women who wove cloth in their front yards and at the children who rode burros. The men in the village gathered around outdoor tables drinking cups of chai. One young woman jumped up with a scarf of muslin she had beaded with tiny drops of amber and draped it over my hair. The beads glistened in the Hittite sun as we faced each other, only our eyes and lips showing. “Beautiful,” she said.

I bought the scarf, digging out wads of lira and pressing them into her hand. I joined Thom, who was studying some bit of a Roman ruin.

“Pretty,” he said. “How much?”

“Twenty million,” I said.

“You got robbed.”

“I like it,” I said. I folded it and carefully put it in the bottom of my backpack. I pulled out the brochure the guide on the bus had passed out. It was a map of the valley with the churches labeled. Kokar Kilise, the church of the sweet smell. Sumbullu Kilise, the hyacinth church. Agacalti Kilise, the church under the tree.

The Melindiz Suyu ran through the valley, gray-blue, crystal clear. As we began walking, the cliff faces stretched on both sides with doorways and windows carved at all heights. Tall, thin poplars, silent forests with fluttering silver and green leaves. The guide picked small golden berries and handed them to us. We ate the
cherrylike fruit and tongued the pits into our palms as we walked deep into the valley.

The first cave was covered with frescos, the paintings remarkably preserved, especially on the ceilings and upper walls where tourists weren’t able to rub or chip. Angels brandishing crosses. Saints lined up like judges looked down at the scruffy tourists, who stared back with wide eyes and flashing cameras. Christ was everywhere and as primitive as I had ever seen Him. No gentle Jesus meek and mild here; this angular Byzantine
glared.

The colors were amazing, centuries old but vibrant gold and azure and red. The artists must have worked on these for years—the detail, the flowers, rosettes, checkerboard patterns, everything layered and ornate, on stone, in a cave with windows chiseled for light. The Garden of Eden. The Red Sea. Daniel in the lions’ den. Everywhere I looked was another story and another truth and I had believed them all. God made a way in the wilderness if you were his true daughter. But impostors were struck with boils and lightning and turned to salt. I felt dizzy. Centuries ago my forefathers had lived and worshipped here and were now buried beneath me. The very air condemned me. I was breathing their bones. These dead saints had persevered, unlike me. I suddenly remembered the winter mornings my sisters and I would meet before light in the morning. We’d leave our warm beds to start reluctant cars and wade through drifts of snow for prayer before our husbands and children woke for the day. Our faces were bare, still creased with sleep, as we held each other’s cold hands and sought the face of God. I was willing to sacrifice sleep, time, comfort, anything that would keep me from being in His presence.

“Are you all right?” Thom asked.

“No,” I said after a pause and suddenly I wanted to go back to the bus. “May I have some of your water?”

I took a long swallow from his bottle and handed it back to him. I led the way out of the cave and stood, uncertain, at the door.

“Can we go sit by the river?” I asked.

Thom tried to subdue his impatience with me. “We’ve only started,” he said. “Later, we’ll take a break, okay?” He was intent, knowledge his aphrodisiac; I knew that. His gray eyes deepened. “Come on. The next cave is fucking fantastic—Yilanli Kilise.”

We entered the arched doorway and stepped into the domed room. The frescos were even more intact. An enormous spotted snake writhed over the walls, a woman caught in its grip here and there. Saints gasped in horror as this snake attacked. It was primitive and ridiculous, such an obvious threat I wanted to laugh, but I was afraid if I did, I’d cry instead. Thom launched into lecture mode.

“Some say this is the dragon that Saint Michael wrestled, but it could be a snake sent to punish sinners. Or is it the devil, straight from the Garden of Eden?”

“It’s rather misogynistic, wouldn’t you say? Why is it the women who are being punished?”

“Eve, of course,” Thom said. “It was all her doing, the fall from grace. Poor Adam, minding his own business, and next thing you know, he’s naked.”

I focused on one of the women in the painting. She stood still as the snake approached her. She wasn’t screaming or running like the others. It was as though she knew this moment would come. God would not be mocked. I took Thom’s hand to pull him away. He squeezed my hand.

“Stop it,” I hissed.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“You crushed my hand,” I said, and couldn’t stop myself from crying. My defenses were down, and I was suddenly aware of how
much I had lost, all that confidence in an ordered universe, an approaching day of reckoning, a settling of accounts, and justice for all. I couldn’t make myself believe in any of it any longer.

“Ah, this is too much for you. I’m sorry,” he said and put his arms around me. I let him hold me.

“Would you mind if I waited for the guide? I have to hear more about this,” he said as he wiped the tears off my face with the back of his hand and kissed the top of my head. “A fucking anaconda in a church, good God.” He looked up at the snake with obvious admiration.

I told him it was fine if he wanted to stay and that I’d find him later. I made my way back down the hill and sat by the river with my back to the cave churches. A woman knee-deep in the Melindiz Suyu carried a log on her back. Though it wasn’t large it looked heavy. It made my own shoulders ache in sympathy. How many years had she been gathering wood in this river? I wondered if she resented this task or if it had become automatic and not worth thinking about anymore.

I threw little stones into the river and imagined floating down the Melindiz, away from these small rooms carved from rock, past the minarets with their loudspeakers insisting on prayer, past the whirling dervishes lost in ecstasy, past the glimmer of stained glass, the whiff of incense, until I arrived somewhere I could breathe again.

A light step nearby made me turn around. A little girl, probably about seven, brown hair and eyes, stood nearby. She was dressed in a plain brown tunic and wide cotton pants. She pointed to her lips and then to my purse.

“Lipstick?” I asked, miming the tube across my lips. She nodded, happy. A first-rate germophobe who had only reluctantly shared a lipstick in the past, I unzipped my purse, fumbled for the
tube, and rolled it out. I held her chin and carefully applied Dusky Mauve to her solemn mouth. Then I watched her climb toward the chapels on the hill, her tiny feet picking through the roots and rocks and scrambling for balance.

What could she be looking for up there? I wondered. I hoped it was lira and lipstick, a handful of berries, something she could taste or touch, anything she could see. You couldn’t go far wrong in loving things like that. But I had stopped doing exactly that when I was eighteen years old, when I’d wrapped myself in a cocoon of scripture and sermons and tattered hymnals.

I had spent a lifetime bending knee to that which I could not see, and I wasn’t ready to say that was a waste or a tragedy or anything of the sort, but now I wanted to praise the threescore and ten, the running water and poplar trees, that singular ride from the airport through Istanbul leaning into the side of a man I loved, his lips on my hair, the apple tea we sipped as we cruised the Bosporus, the canvas bags of spice that filled the market. I took a deep breath. It wasn’t too late for me, after all, and it certainly wasn’t too late for her. I dug through my purse for an extra tube of lipstick, and then I went hunting for the girl.

The Imperceptible Head Shake

Julia Scheeres

I
was thirteen the first time I doubted Christianity.

My family had just finished eating dinner, and, as usual, Dad was reading to us from the Bible. He would read a chapter at a time, usually from the New Testament, as he sipped his sugared coffee and my brothers and I silently urged him to finish already so we could get back to our kid business.

His scriptures-reading voice was a soporific drone; he may as well have been reading the list of ingredients off a box of cornflakes. While he spoke, I’d usually zone out until he bent his head to pray, the cue that we were about to be released from our familial obligation. But for whatever reason, on that particular day, this passage caught in my ear:

I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. But women will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love, and holiness with propriety.

That’s 1 Timothy 2:12–15.

I felt slapped. Angry. Disturbed. I don’t know what struck me more—my father’s nonchalance as he read the passage, or the words themselves, which brimmed with injustice. (At thirteen I wasn’t familiar with the term
sexism
.)

I do, however, remember my reaction. I looked down at the plastic white tablecloth and shook my head in disagreement. Mind you, this headshake was imperceptible to anyone but me. My father was a violent patriarch who brooked no disagreement, especially with his beloved scriptures. But it mattered to me, this headshake. I was taking a stand. I wasn’t going to passively sit there and be told I was worth less than my father and brothers because I was born with a vulva instead of a penis.
Why should I be punished for something a woman did six thousand years ago?
I remember thinking.

There was no gendered division of labor at our house, as far as we kids were concerned. I shoveled snow from the driveway and chopped logs for the wood stove beside my brothers; they took turns peeling potatoes at the kitchen sink. I prided myself on my toughness, on swinging an axe as capably as they did. Why didn’t this same equality extend to our roles in church? On that evening, I looked across the table at them with great resentment. I imagined a smugness blooming in their chests as Dad read the Apostle Paul’s sexist screed, but in reality the passage probably didn’t even register with them. They tended to zone out just like I did.