Scrambled omelet, or David and the Turkish Bath

At most Sunday brunches in fancy hotels or restaurants, you can find the omelet chief. He (or she, though I've never seen a woman omelet chief). He will make an omelet to your specific order and you watch and wait. He cooks with real elegance, but not because his motions are particularly graceful or showy, but because they are so precise, efficient, fast. He flashes some butter in the pan, in quick pecks grabs or pinches the onions, mushrooms, ham, whatever you have request, in exact quantity. Eggs are quickly cracked, whipped, and poured into the pan only when the other ingredients are at the right point. He stirs, flips, folds, and finally pours the omelet into your plate.

That's how I was handled at the Turkish bath.

When I have time to revise this, I'll put in here the name of the Turkish bath (I forget in now and don't have my guide book), but I can tell you it's about 500 years old and was designed by the architect of Suleiman the Magnificent, Sinan (whose masterworks, btw, are Mosques that rival the great European cathedrals in their artistic splendor and the way they feel you with a sense of the sublime). Anyway, the bath is really logically designed, but I didn't know it at the time. There is a foyer area where you pay the fee, and on the second and third level of the foyer area are changing rooms. The entrance and exit to the bath itself is the same, which makes sense if you think about it, but I hadn't. Now, this particular bath is in the midst of the tourist areas, so the employees are used to befuddled idiots like me and have developed a series of grunts, nods, grimaces and shrugs to communicate with us. I was shrugged upstairs. A man there grunted at a door. I entered my room. Except for the glass of the door and window, it was completely private--I could take off my clothes and my nudity not be seen by the people on the first level of the foyer if I squatted low. Wrapped in a towel, I stood looking stupidly at the man who'd grunted me into the changing room until he finally shrugged downward.

I bumbled down to the steam room. About four men in towels and nothing else milled around the entrance to some door. How could I know they were the employees. One betoweled man nodded me over to another betoweled man who scowled at me to follow him. This Turk grunted me in, a man, probably my age but looking like how 55 looked in my parents' time. He was about 5'6", round bellied, hair cropped short and the trim moustache that a lot of Turkish men wear.

We entered the main room of the bath, a domed chamber filled with steam and a great, marble slab in the center and alcoves along the side where men sat steaming. I followed my guide around the slab until he finally grunted at me. He nodded on the slab. I sat on the slab. He grunted a no. I stood. He grunted. I sat, he grunted, I stood. He nodded toward the center of the slab and I understood I was supposed to lie on it. I lay feet towards center. He grunted impatiently. I lay feet toward from. A yet more impatient grunt. Finally I lay head to center, and he was content, and then ignored me to work on another client.

It feels very, very pleasant, that slab, warm and damp. The slab was about the same diameter as the dome and right under it. The dome was shot with about 100 round glass covered holes arranged in an ever expanding circular pattern, letting in light. And opening your eyes, it's like looking at the star-lit sky.

After I'd lain on the slab for those five minutes, my guide shook my foot and pointed for me to lie on the edge of the slab. I lay. He grunted impatiently. I lay in the other direction. He grunted with deep exasperation. Not knowing what else to do, having lain in every direction I could thing of, I oonched to the edge of the slab. He sighed relief.

All his actions were like that omelet chief: neat, precise, efficient, unemotional. First he scrubbed me down with a rough scouring pad, the kind used to exfoliate skin, rough just on the verge of being painful. I flip and he does the same to the front. He did a few chiropractic-type things to my back, which nearly broke, and then lathered me all over--well, not what's under the towel. After I was well lathered, he took a bucket of cold water and more or less and without a hint of ceremony dumped it on me. I'm next grunted into another room and motioned to sit on a low slab. He washed my hair, my face, my neck.

He grunts at me. I am done with that phase. He nods towards a door in front of which are five men. I open the door and am yells at in a thick Australian accent that there are no cuts and to get into the bloody cue. I cue.

When my turn comes, my wet towel is exchanged for a dry one--the only moments when I'm completely naked--and the young masseuse has me lie face down on a thin, platformed mat with a half circle for my face. He uses oil, applied light so it's not at all slippery. His procedure otherwise is a lot like those used by a Chinese masseuse who works for in an acupuncture shot back home. Were the Turks were influenced by Chinese medicine (the Ottoman empire stretch from Hungary to the reaches of China, and the Ottomans traded with China, so it seems possible there could have been this trade of information)? The Turks borrowed the baths from the Romans, and I wondered if these massage techniques developed in the west or were imported from China.

It was, in short, marvelous.

The next step was to shower and try to soap off the oil from the massage, which, of course, was not possible.

But now what? Was I done? Where was the exist. No one was grunted at me; I didn't know what to do. I went back to the room with the slab, but no one grunted at me there, either. I went back to out again. I went through another door, and there was was, sopping wet in a skin clinging towel, in the middle of the foyer where the wives were waiting for their husbands. Someone grunted, at me I thought, so I followed him back into the slab room. But then he disappeared. I went back out and into a foyer. A thin Pakistani in a dry towel nodded at me. I nodded at him. I followed him, he followed me, back into the room with the slab. Then, he sat on the slab as if I was supposed to wash him! Oh no, he was a customer who mistook me for a Turkish masseuse. He retreated. I went back out the door I'd come through, and there, a heavy set Turk grunted out, "You finished? Good.' He exchanged my towel for a fresh one (you removed the wet one, toss it in a basket, and they wrap the dry one around you, during this process holding the dry towel near to you to afford some modesty). He threw a towel on my shoulder at patted me down rough, and then threw a third towel on my head and gave it a good rub. Then he grunted me out the door and back to my dressing room.

I wonder how long it took the Pakistani to get his bath.