Counting in Cappadocia

 by Kimm Brockett Stammen

Bir

Morning-chilled rosewater sky shimmered behind the fairy chimneys of Goreme. The chimneys—plump fingers of rock, at once gnarled and mushroomy, sinuous and craggy—pointed upwards as they had done since long before the existence of Turkey, the Ottoman Empire, the Mongols, or the Christians who fled them. When volcanic eruptions smothered the Anatolian plains, the magma solidified over time into tuff, a vast swath of mostly soft rock swirled through with lumpy veins and whorls of hard basalt. Battered and taunted for millennia by wind and water, the tuff disintegrated, grain by grain, until by the late twentieth century only the veins of basalt remained. Cone-shaped, tall as ten story buildings, frivolous as the sandcastles of a giant toddler, these rock formations now crowded the plains of central Turkey, stretching towards the sky: fanciful, phallic, fantastic. Aptly named, and innumerable.

A small white bus, dusted with fine sand like powdered sugar on lokum, stopped in front of the Goreme Hotel. Sheena swiped her finger through the sand on its side and stuck the finger in her mouth. She was six, the same age as the new century, and newly in love with lokum—the rose flavored, sugar-dusted jelly rectangles that arrived on dainty Ikat-patterned plates of arabesqued ruby and blues—and had thought since the sand looked like sugar, it would be as sweet. She frowned, but kept the finger in her mouth.

Marlie pulled her daughter up the bus steps and settled her in a window seat. She sat next to her, and without looking around, heard the rustle of Max’s new travel clothes as he slipped into the seat across the aisle. She pulled out her pocket copy of Turkish in Ten Minutes. It would be at least that long to the Goreme Open Air Museum.

The bus filled. Suited men, young women in bright silk head scarves, old women wrapped almost completely in black like the stuffed grape leaves, delicious and bitter, at last night’s dinner. A skinny young man lumbered on with a large burlap bag of walnuts. A cluster of florid German tourists in shorts chattered. From somewhere in the back a chicken protested. The book in her hands flopped open to her daughter’s favorite page. Perhaps it would be any child’s favorite, thought Marlie. Didn’t all language begin with numbers?

“One,” she prompted.

Sheena pulled the finger from her mouth and stuck it in the air. The fantastical chimneys outside the window were the same color, a pale blush. She hesitated only a moment; one was easy, it was the drink she wasn’t allowed, that Max ordered in restaurants. She pictured a slender brown bottle on a table.

“Bir!” exclaimed Sheena, but softly, leaning forward so she could look past her mother and across the aisle to the man with the whispery voice and big nose, her strange new father.

İki

Max saw Sheena peeping at him and did a small wave. Just his fingers curling, and what he hoped was a kind smile. Sheena: blonde, shining, so unlike any child he had grown up with in the Jewish neighborhoods of West Philadelphia. He knew little of children, in any case. He dredged in his mind for the Turkish for two. He had tried, on the plane from Chicago to Istanbul, to learn the word for “thank you”, because Marlie had insisted it was only common courtesy to speak some of the language of the place you were going. She was right of course. She loved to travel, and her first husband had been all over the world as a journalist. Even after he died and she was working long hours to support herself and her daughter, she had still managed to see a good bit of the world. Bringing her golden baby along to China and through Bosnia and Peru and likely to other places about which she hadn’t yet told him. But he had traveled little, and the Turkish for thank you was multi-syllabic and strangely percussive, like a drum roll, its sound whipping past, leaving only a rattling in his head: impossible. Numbers were somewhat easier; he ought to be able to remember the word for “two”.

The bus started up. Clusters of chimneys began to file past them. In the window seat next to Max, a bent woman wrapped in black cloth rummaged in a large mesh bag on the floor. Just as he found the word for which he was searching, he heard Sheena’s piping voice.

“Icky!” She stuck two fingers into the air.

The bus bumped over some deep gouges in the road, and the driver tightened his hands on the wheel. Suliman had just overhauled the steering mechanism from wheel to tie rods, but the rutted alleys, sharp gravel, harsh winters and dust which he and the bus had to put up with meant it could not be prevented from jostling passengers, especially those who sat in the back. Built in 1989, its shocks were long gone, its upholstery threadbare and stained, its air conditioning broken, its paint coated with a filigree of scratches. Still, it carried them. For these few minutes all these disparate people had the same destination. Suliman never ceased thinking there was something magical about that. He cursed his vehicle under his breath, but lovingly. Although prematurely aged by its rough work, the bus' engine, when given the chance, still ran like a thief from an angry merchant. He turned onto a main road he hit the gas with a sigh of satisfaction.

Max, however, felt the engine’s vibration rise up through the soles of his feet like a surge of anxiety. He twisted the ring on his finger. Two was a new number for him, in any language.

Uch

This one might be a wrong one, thought Asuman, pulling her voluminous black ferace closer around her and keeping her eyes on the striped canvas shoes of the yabanci in the next seat. But she didn’t shrink away. The long skinny legs that rose out of the clean shoes, the fine dark hair on his shins, were unaccustomed intimacies; only tourists wore shorts. She fingered her evil eye amulet—her nazar—and asked her body why it wasn’t afraid. It told her the next instant. The man—certainly an American, probably Jewish—turned and looked across her out the window, and his eyes widened. He was young. Young, and in a place unfamiliar.

Scrub trees scrabbled past the window, and beyond them the soft rock of the peri bacaları pointed towards the sky, washed in pink and violet. Such a perfect name for them, she thought. Chimneys of fairies. As if smoke from the fires of secret beings would come puffing up out of them at any moment. Behind the peri bacaları flushed the sunrise itself. The young man’s face seemed to come alive in the warming light, the sallowness of his cheek and stubble of jawline receding, his youth appearing more like anticipation than fear. Asuman decided to speak.

Yes, she said in Turkish. He bent to look at her with his wide eyes. Evet. Yes. She nodded. Asuman loved to talk. She began to tell him about what it was like to live here, in Goreme. The bus arced onto the main highway and the engine roared, seizing its power. Shacks, tethered goats, and more rock formations flew by. She pointed to the trees at the side of the road, telling him how she went a few times a week to gather branches there and carry them home in bundles on her back, nattering the whole way with the other grandmothers. How she arranged the sticks in piles next to the clay firepot outside their small house. How she would, in the evenings, light the fire and cook the thin pide dough she had rolled and filled.

Max listened with amazement but growing calm. The way she spoke to him, a stranger on a bus, reminded him of his grandmother, and he let her voice wash over him with dawning interest although he understood nothing. The bus sped along the two-lane highway, swerving left and right around slower cars. Unless they had gotten on the wrong one, it would take them to the Open Air Museum, a UNESCO World Heritage site, where tenth century Christians had carved out dwellings and churches inside the fairy chimneys, and, according to the guidebook photos, left behind tables carved of rock, niches in curved walls still overflowing with wax, and murals of ochre, garnet and azure.

From the corner of his eye, Max saw Sheena stick three fingers halfway up in the air and hesitate, gazing at them. The bus struggled and swished, gravel slushing against the wheels. There was a smell of heat—a new smell for Max, who had never been to a dry climate like Anatolia. His parents had argued over it, but in all his formative years he had never visited Jerusalem, never been anywhere near the Levant, and had not grown up to practice the religion that was his by heritage. Here he felt newly conscious of the history that ran through him in hard whorls of land, genes and blood.

Sheena frowned at her silent fingers. She looked up at her mother. Marlie smiled, and then showed her by puckering her lips. “Eewww…” They spoke slowly at first, eyes on each other’s mouths, as if to set the memory of the strange word onto each other’s tongue: “eewwch…” Sheena said it again, more confidently, and then over and over, simply for fun. “Uch, uch uch.” Max repeated the strange syllable too. Quietly, under his breath, thinking what a primitive sound it was, involuntary as a belch.

Asuman saw that the young man was somewhat in awe of the small blond girl across the aisle, of the way her voice cut through the other sounds of the bus ride without concern or self-consciousness. She also understood that he knew nothing of Turkish, except, apparently, the number three, which he muttered over and over. And yet she talked on through the miles, telling the American that her life was hard, much harder than those on the television—or so she’d been told. But she had six good grandchildren—six! children were a blessing of Allah—and every day food and the sunrise. And the tourists who came more and more often, sometimes even riding on her bus, were not too much of a nuisance, merely strange and different with their clean pressed short pants, their insecurities, the round way vowel sounds came out of their mouths, and their odd masking aroma of chemical, as if dust and sultanas were not the most beautiful scents in the world.

Dort

Sheena lost patience with riding the bus. It was hot and it smelled like feet. The windows were dirty and too high; all she could see was the pink dissipating from the sky like colored sugar in water, and the pointed tips of what her mom had called fairy chimneys. On the other hand, the chicken was interesting. A live one, clucking, somewhere behind them. Not a jellied pale blob like the chickens that slept on chilled shelves at the grocery near her house. She turned around to look, but her view was obscured by adults. No feathers, no fairies.

Her mother nudged her, raising an eyebrow. Sheena lifted another finger in the air. The fourth number was easier because it was approaching her favorite. She said it boldly aloud, pointing her pinky, and felt her palm open as the last finger unfurled.

Besh

Across the aisle, Max listened to the tandem whisperings crescendoing into the small explosion of five. Bir Icki Uch Dort Besh! Sheena giggled, Marlie laughed, Max envied. He would never communicate with the girl half as well as her mother did. He would never communicate with either of them as well as they did with each other. Turkish, or English or any other language, they spoke from somewhere deep inside them that he would never be able even to fathom, much less translate. And no whirlwind romance, no sudden ceremony or travelers’ honeymoon, would change that.

But, calmed by the chattering of the old lady beside him, Max decided that it wasn’t a negative feeling, his envy. It was simply that he loved them. That’s what love was: an ache for something you couldn’t understand or possess. Only if you were very lucky could you visit, be allowed in, as if to an uncouth beautiful place whose secrets you had neither grown up in nor ever imagined, not even in childhood dreams. Max gave himself up to the disorientating sounds and smells of the jostling bus. He was 34, in central Turkey, with a wife (what a strange word!) and a precocious blonde girl for God’s sake. He wondered what word the girl would use, now, to count him.

Al-tuh

Rickety wagons, gnarled sedans, bicycles, quarter tons, semis—so many semis—

hurtled towards the bus, popping suddenly into Suliman’s vision from out of the glare of the rising sun. He gripped the wheel and rode the yellow line like the pull of a zipper. It was where the bus liked to be, in the road’s center, so that his driver’s eye aimed like the cobalt center of a nazar straight down the road’s middle, and like a nazar warding off any evil. From the center he skimmed this way and that, into the oncoming lane or onto the shoulder, as he overtook slower drivers or as other vehicles blasted towards them. Suliman had a deep confidence in the steady roar of his engine, in the solidity of the wheel under his hands and the untapped potential underneath his right boot. He glanced into the rearview mirror. In its lower half he saw his own strong hairline, black hair springing from a cinnamon forehead, his own watchful, determined eyes. 

Suliman drove a Goreme bus now, but he was hoping to get on as a guide, perhaps at the museum to which they were headed. He had grown up with it; he would be a fine guide. His parents still lived in a shack leaning against a fairy chimney, with narrow stairs leading up to a round room of basalt. They used it for storage; he and his cousin Hamid had played there, deposited there their secrets, the small things they had found or stolen or been given by girls. Hamid had been killed in a motorcycle accident, and Suliman hadn’t been in that chimney again, or any other, in years. But he read about them, and he remembered the scent of the rock, the coolness of the rough floor, and when tourists asked questions about them he could always answer. Being a guide would pay better, be better, than driving the bus. The bus, although it ran well, could be irascible, the traffic was chaotic and unpredictable, the passengers rode mostly in silence. All three, the bus, the traffic, the passengers, came and went, went and came again, without seeming to advance or connect. As well as the salary Suliman wanted connection, the way the pedal and the wheel helped his body reach the hidden power of the bus.

The round voice of the American girl started again at number one.  She reached five, then started again, and then again. The numbers came gradually faster, more fluidly, and louder from her small mouth. Suliman glanced in his mirror. Some of the passengers were beginning to smile and look around.

Max listened to the old woman’s voice flow—the language’s consonants and fricatives like wind and weather against rock—and to the way it was punctuated by the five piping words from Sheena. She always stopped after arriving at five, as if the fingers of one hand were all that one needed. The bus swept by a long shed selling pottery: flowery Iznik and other vases, jugs and plates with intricate geometric patterns in oxblood, indigo, amber and celadon. Max reached across the aisle and touched Marlie’s arm.

Marlie glanced over, and her irritation at his unwillingness or disinterest in participating in their counting, or in hearing the information from her guidebook, dissipated like the pink of the sunrise. She smiled. The depth of his eyes, the innocent arch of his eyebrows, something else vital she did not yet understand, had drawn her to him from the instant they met. But she had spent much of the flight to Istanbul trying to teach Sheena and Max basic words. She had spent the last five years—without Sheena’s father but in truth because of him—prepping her daughter for the largeness of the world. Having Max with them was still a strangeness, a surprise, like the taste of Tavuk göğsü, the delicate milk pudding first served to the sultans and made of shredded white chicken breast. She and Max had known each other merely a few months. Now they were married. It was right, like the strange dessert it was even delicious. But was it too sudden? She feared that Sheena’s parents knew as little of each other as they did of Turkish.

“Bir,” she nudged her daughter. The girl counted to five one more time, but in a kind of high singsong, very silly, that she used when she was starting to be tired of sitting. “Itchy, ewch, dort, best!”

“Besh,” Marlie corrected.

She could see the other passengers smiling, the corners of their eyes crinkling. They were all adults with serious faces, the men in khaki pants most likely talking about carpets. The fat tourists in back spoke loudly in German and wore vests with many pockets stuffed with maps and guidebooks. The driver, skimming down the middle of the ribbon of road, glanced up sharply and met Marlie’s eyes in the rearview mirror. His eyes were steely, determined, purposeful. Were they the eyes one wanted the driver of the vehicle that held one’s new family to have?

She was suddenly filled with doubt. About the whole thing: coming to Turkey; marrying someone who would never be Sheena’s father. Even about whether she’d gotten the pronunciation correct. She pawed through the guidebook and read the page on counting again. Her first husband had been the one who was good with languages. He’d loved traveling. He’d died traveling, hit by a car on a street in Amsterdam, researching Catholic places of worship secreted in Reformation residential structures. When it happened she had been home, too pregnant to fly.

The sun began to beat down with a saffron gold heat. Just keep going, Marlie thought. Go on, even into the magical.

“Al-tuh,” she said quietly.

Yeh-dee

Sheena, bored with the strange numbers and annoyed at having to pass the five that were easiest, stuffed her feet underneath her, kneeled on the seat and then raised herself up, trying to see more of the fairy chimneys. The name delighted her, even though she had a thought, like a shadow, that that couldn’t really be what they were called. Her mother sometimes gave things childish, nonsense names to make them seem more fun than they were. But these lumpy towering things were interesting enough on their own. Some of them had square windows in them like gaping eyes or blackened teeth. Some of them curled over at the tops, as if they were wearing sagging peaked hats.

Sheena watched the sky behind the chimneys change from bubblegum mixed with deep carrot to a glinting blonde-yellow, and had one of those moments that she would remember, even years and years later. The moments—she was collecting them in a corner of her mind—when time did that strange slowing down thing, as if it wanted you to put your two small hands under it and cup tightly: her mother next to her playing the game of calling the numbers all different odd words; her new father across the aisle—and there was an odd word, father, because she hadn’t had one before, or at least not one she’d known; the old women, the bus driver, the loud Germans, the two young Turkish women sitting up front near the driver, their jewel-shaded clothes fluttering in the wind from his open window. Sheena captured all these things in her mind, and added the way the driver’s elbow rested on the window frame, the pointy joint sticking out.

Just as she was noticing that the shape and the angle of his elbow was nearly the same, if you tilted it up, as the fairy chimneys whose tips poked the sky, the whole world did tilt up. The rock formations jabbed towards the clouds as they slid down, leaving nothing but a view of blank sky out the window. The bus heaved, Sheena slid sideways on the seat towards her mother, who screamed.

Max had been pointing out the window at some shacks staggering between modern buildings, hoping he could understand from the old woman what it was like to live in the old and the new simultaneously—when the bus slipped off the smooth asphalt and spluttered over the gravel shoulder. He heard Marlie’s scream as the old woman’s response to his question burst from her, coinciding also with a strangeness in his stomach: he was airborne. The shacks slid up out of his vision and a blur of black pavement and gravel hurtled towards him. He was flung, gangly, against the pillow of the old woman, whose fingers, gnarled as twigs, clawed and flailed.

Occasionally, Suliman knew, when the last colored remnant of sky slipped away to be replaced by the shock of raw, unambiguous daylight, the sudden glare could hide deep ruts in the road. Filled with dust and chunks of debris, the ruts, when driven over, had been known to leverage vehicles into the air. Even the best driver might once or twice in his life find his bus tipping up at an angle, skidding down the highway shoulder flinging gravel, balancing solely on will and the steadiness of wheel and steering column as his passengers and cargo tumble, shriek and snort, grasping desperately around them for the things they, in that instant, realize are most precious.

Max felt a tremendous ker-thunk, followed by a little catch underneath them as the engine reengaged. The bus righted itself. Plunked back down onto his seat, his teeth smashed together. Despite the pain, he grabbed the old woman, whose eyes had narrowed into panic for only a moment as she sluiced off her seat, and pulled her back up.  

Asuman, the wind knocked out of her, let the young man’s sinewy fingers pull at her shoulders. She regained the bus seat and was grateful for the warmth of his arm still around her, for his concerned frown. She patted her body all over, asking it for an update. It seemed to have survived, although there would probably be herbs to gather and a poultice to make for the bruising. She nodded to the young man and patted his bare knee.

Max sighed, a breath of relief, and followed the old raisin's finger as she pointed at the bus driver. She said something in Turkish. Max took in the solid back of the driver’s head, the uniformity of his straight black hair, the steadiness of his hands on the wheel. He turned to Marlie and said, “I think it’s all right.”

Marlie made a sound like a small yelp.

“Tell your mom I think it’s all right,” Max said to Sheena.

They both looked at him doubtfully—his wife, his daughter. Max remembered the instant when he was suspended in air, and felt that everything unimportant had been shaken off him. He kissed the side of Marlie’s head, then reached across her and let his hand smooth Sheena’s hair from her cheek.

Sheena smiled at him, and as Max leaned back in his seat her light voice began again. At first in a whisper and then rising as she approached her favorite number—besh, the one she knew best—her voice carried above the murmur of women checking the contents of their burlap shopping bags, tourists grousing at the scuffs on their bright shorts, and the renewed roar of the bus.

“Bir, itchy, ewch, dort, besh!”

Max’s seat companion gestured in the child’s direction and grinned. She was missing most of her teeth, but that she was telling him his daughter was charming, he had no doubt.

“Yes!” he agreed. “Evet!”

Marlie still clutched her guidebook. Five years earlier her life had been turned upside down, tumbled, demolished, by a random driver on an Amsterdam street. And despite her first husband’s love of travel and foreign cultures, despite all the effort she had spent convincing Sheena of the value of the wide world, she still, herself, desperately needed to be re-convinced. Keep going, she thought. She pushed air in and out of her lungs.

“Al-tuh,” she said slowly, nudging Sheena.

The girl looked out the window.

“Al-tuh,” said Marlie again.

“Al-tuh,” said Sheena. Obedient, but not believing in the connection between the word and the meaning. Like 'father', which up until now had been only a sound, an abstract concept, a photograph, a tight feeling.

Daughter looked up at her mother, who looked back at her blankly; they had both forgotten what came next. Marlie pawed through the guidebook.

Suliman looked in his mirror again. The tourist child had stopped, blank-faced, after six. “Yeh-dee!” he called.

Everyone on the bus looked up, reassured by the authority of the bus driver’s voice. Then they looked over at Sheena.

“Yeh-dee!” she called back.

Everyone smiled. Their eyes met, then looked away.

Another silence ensued. Max looked over at his family’s blank faces; they’d forgotten the next number as well. He, of course, had no idea what it was. But there was a tug at his sleeve, and the old woman said something hoarsely in Turkish. Max leaned across the aisle and whispered. “Sheena. Se-kuz!” His tongue felt like it stuck to the roof of his mouth as he spoke, but he savored Marlie’s look of astonishment as his daughter yelled out the Turkish for eight.

The laughter of the young women at the front of the bus fluttered as brightly as their scarves; they spoke English, but it was rare that they heard foreigners trying to speak Turkish. The chicken began clucking excitedly. A middle-aged Turkish man next to them clapped his hands.

Dokuz

The light outside the bus sizzled white now, the fairy chimneys silhouetted against it in mottled dark mauve. Suliman downshifted as they turned off the main road and onto the gravel drive that led to the hidden rock-cut churches, the chimneys whose interiors were frescoed, whose walls and floors had been carved into refectory tables and altars. This is where he knew that the child and her parents—who were oddly shy of each other, as anyone could see, but it was perhaps the way of American families—would buy their ticket and follow a guide through the earth. They would stumble along badly lit corridors with pockmarked floors, climb up and down tenth century ladders, huddle in chill rooms, smooth their fingers over carved troughs for washing, lay down on rock sleeping bunks. They would climb into the towers of the fairy chimneys, their arms tight at their sides, and be astonished as the passageways opened out into wide frescoed caverns, the images nearly as fresh as when believers had painted them. They would enter, sharing for a few moments only, the hidden place of his boyhood.

The middle-aged man began a slow clap. Suliman smiled benignly into his mirror.

“Dokuz,” the front of the bus seemed to whisper to Sheena.

“Dokuz,” she called out.

A whoop came from somewhere in the back. About to yell the next number, Sheena hesitated, faltered, began again. Bir! The man laughed and clapped more loudly, in time with her count. The rest of the bus began to join in. Icki. The driver, the old women. Uch. Dort. The chicken’s owner, her mother, Max. Besh. With each digit the clapping increased, there was more whooping, more people joined in. Al-tuh. Sheena laughed, and after that, it was clear sailing. Yedi! Sekiz! Dokuz…

The bus powered into the parking lot and jerked to a stop.

Sheena, ahead of everyone else, called out, On!

To stay alive in a tumbling bus; to count to ten. Rare and simple, these times of unison reveal ourselves to one another, and strangely, we are always surprised by the new memory that we are always the same. The old black-wrapped women who could barely understand the girl’s pronunciation, the bemused German tourists, the riders on their way to work in the shops and restaurants near the museum, the newlyweds, even Suliman the driver who had already jumped up to inspect the side of his bus—even the bus itself, in its crackling cooling-engine way—erupted into applause.

On

Chunks of tuff, worn off and fallen, littered the Cappadocian ground. Tuff paved the roads, scrabbled against tires, disintegrated into dust that puffed at the sandaled feet of farmers heading to the town market. Dust stroked the wooden wheels of painted carts, coated trucks and taxis and busses. The volcanic sediment swirled around the feet of pedestrians, caught at their rounded and unrounded Turkish vowels. It was breathed in, as it had been since Osman the first Ottoman sultan; since Christians secreted themselves in hand-dug caverns, labyrinths, and chapels; since the Hittites discovered they could survive high up, hidden in caves; since it had fallen in sheets like rotted silk to reveal the grotesque statues of the Fairy Chimneys. Tuff dust made its way into the lungs of Anatolians who would keep it there as they had for centuries, but also into the lungs of tourists and travelers, reformers, traditionalists, militants, fascists, pacifists, monotheists, children and lovers, who would carry it back with them to wherever they came from and on into the next century. The fragments of central Turkey would solidify in their breath the way experience—even fleeting ones, unextraordinary, ten counts, a single breath—hardens over time into character.

Asuman, wiping her face with the end of her headscarf, pulled the huge bag of mending supplies out from under her seat. Several middle-aged men clapped Max on the back as they exited, congratulating him in Turkish on his fine family. Max grinned at Marlie, she grinned back like a fool, and Sheena looked up at them both.  Suliman kicked a tire and swore at his bus, but ran his hand gently over its silted hood. The chicken escaped and tumbled down the front steps, squawking, the skinny boy in pursuit. The Germans strode away in an obdurate cluster. Sheena reached out and took her mother's hand in one of hers, and her father's in the other, and tugged them toward the secrets of the Fairy Chimneys. But like the strange rock formations reaching crookedly to the sky, the moment when everyone on the bus counted together, and knew what counted, remains.

Kimm Brockett Stammen's story collection, In a Country Whose Language I Have Never Mastered, was a finalist for the Iron Horse Book Contest and the 2022 Eludia Award. Her writings have appeared or are forthcoming in Chautauqua, december, CARVE, Pembroke, Prime Number and over thirty other literary magazines, and her work has been nominated for Pushcart, Best Short Fiction, and Best Microfiction anthologies. She holds an MFA from the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Creative and Professional Writing at Spalding University.
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