Traveling with Pomegranates (14 page)

A particular memory has come to me twice since we boarded the ship. I am a new mother for the first time, barely twenty-four years old, and it is the day my own mother returns to her home, leaving me alone with my six-pound newborn son. I look over his crib and a paroxysm of fear grips me.
Maybe I will be terrible at this; I will do something horribly wrong—sleep through his hungry crying until he grows emaciated or overfeed him until he spits up and aspirates
. There are a thousand ways to screw it up, and I feel ripe for all of them. Alone, terrified, swimming in postpartum, hormonal soup, I sink straight down onto the floor and cry.

Sometimes memory has the purposefulness of dreams. The second time I recollect that long-ago day, I realize it’s because I’ve arrived at the moment again—the scared new mother, not of a newborn, but of a grown, floundering daughter—feeling alone, afraid, the hormonal soup turned menopausal. There are a thousand ways to screw it up.

Inside the coils of the bazaar, we wander into a small shop where sitar music whines from a tape player on the counter. I stare at a wall of shelves lined with identical ceramic statues of Artemis, as if she has been cheaply cloned at the goddess factory. I pick one up. Once Artemis flourished here. Her temple, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, is just up the road in Ephesus. Her symbol, I notice, is a bee. It is engraved all over her dress.

I slide my hand to the hollow of my neck and feel the sterling silver bee charm on my necklace, resting beside the glass pomegranate. I bought the bee six or seven months ago for no reason except that I felt drawn to it. Maybe the pull I felt was simple nostalgia. When I was growing up, bees lived inside a wall of our house, making honey that sometimes leaked out onto the floor. The wall would hum. Sometimes the house would hum. After I told Mary in the myrtle tree that I wanted to be a novelist, I went home and wrote a first chapter about a girl whose bedroom wall is full of bees that slip through the cracks and fly around at night. I even took it off to a writer’s conference, where the teacher pronounced it “interesting”—the despised, dreaded word—suggesting its potential as a novel was “small.”
Small.
At times, I still hear his voice in my head, saying the word.

On his advice, I turned the chapter into a short story, but for a long while now I’ve felt nudged to go back and write the novel after all. Despite my nudges and prayers, though, I don’t much believe in myself as a novelist. I tell myself I’m wearing the bee charm because it expresses something about the fertilizing power of women moving into their fifties, but I don’t know.

“How much for the statue?” I ask the young man who has materialized at my elbow.

“Twenty dollars,” he says.

“Five,” I tell him.

He throws up his arms as if halting oncoming traffic. “Lady!” he cries. “Do you have a gun in your purse?”

I blink at him, while Ann tugs on the back of my dress and takes a step toward the door.

He grins. “You must have a gun, lady, because you’re
killing
me!” he says, and to prove it, he staggers backward a few steps, his hand flying to his chest, feigning a mortal wound.

Ah, the drama of bargaining!

“All right,” I tell him. “Ten dollars.”

He bows—the Thespian Merchant of Kuşadasi—and takes the money.

South of Ephesus our tour van begins a spiraling ascent up Nightingale Mountain to
Panaya Kapulu
—Mary’s House. Until we boarded the ship and saw the list of tour outings, I was not aware the Virgin Mary had a house anywhere, much less in the woods on the summit of a mountain in Turkey. Supposedly she lived out her days there as an old woman. I found this fairly stunning in itself, but the fact that I would stumble upon a chance to visit the house after what transpired between Mary and me in the cathedral in Athens—well, it seemed uncanny. I felt like I was
supposed
to go.

Not that I believe it’s
really
her house. I’m guessing the whole thing is another lovable “fictoid” of the Catholic Church. As we jostle along on the seat of the bus, it doesn’t matter that much to me whether the ruins of the house belonged to Mary or not. In some way, I am going to the house of Mary as an old woman.

As the van crawls around the steep curves, the plain of Ephesus slips in and out of sight. On the seat in front of us, an American woman hums “the wheels on the bus go round and round.” Ann writes in her journal while I gaze through the window. For a moment, I consider asking if she’s okay, wondering if this is the right time to coax her into a conversation about the sadness I sense in her.

“Round and round . . . round and round.”

Laying down her pen, Ann cuts her eyes at me and whispers: “I’m going to ask her if she has a gun in her purse, because . . . she’s killing me!”

I smile. For the rest of the trip, we speculate on whether this person or that has a gun in their purse, depending on their ability to irritate us. There’s something unbecoming about it, but it makes us laugh, and any thoughts I have about delving right now into Ann’s hidden distress dissipate.

Rifling through the tour material in my expandable bag, I find the little booklet on Mary’s House I bought in the market in Kuşadasi. It was on a table marked GUIDE BOOKS in English, but I discover it’s not so much a guidebook as a story.

It begins with a mystical, bedridden German nun named Anne Catherine Emmerich. In 1822, the forty-eight-year-old nun began to have vivid and highly detailed visions that described the house in which Mary died, along with its precise location near Ephesus. The accounts were transcribed verbatim by Clemens Brentano, the German poet, and published around 1874, fifty years after the nun’s death. They sparked a series of scholarly expeditions and excavations that led to the remains of an ancient house identical to the details in Anne Catherine Emmerich’s visions. It was
Panaya Kapulu
.

The story leaves me spellbound. I start to wonder if maybe the house is for real. One writer pointed out that if the ancient city of Troy vanished for three thousand years until Schliemann rediscovered it by following clues in the
Iliad
, then why not believe that a two-thousand-year-old house could disappear and be recovered by following clues in the visions of a saintly nun?

Yes, why not?

Actually, there are two equally probable theories about where Mary lived out her life: in either Jerusalem or Ephesus. While on the cross, Jesus entrusted Mary into the care of his disciple John, an event recorded in the Scriptures. A strong and enduring tradition holds that later, when the persecutions in Jerusalem began around AD 37, John fled to Ephesus, taking Mary with him. A number of historical and ecclesiastical documents support the possibility. For sure, Ephesus came to be a thriving center of Christianity by the second century, and at the epicenter of it was the spiritual presence of John and Mary.

I lower the booklet, drawn back to the van window, squinting into the shadowed green valley. The ruins of the ancient city of Ephesus are spread below, glinting and ivory, diminutive as Lincoln Logs, but still discernible. Using an aerial map in the back of a guidebook, I pinpoint places we visited earlier in the day: the Great Theatre; the Odeon; the Library of Celsus; columns lining Harbour Street like rows of jagged teeth. Somewhere down there amid all of that rubble and lost glory, Mary was declared
Theotokos
, the Mother of God.

I did not remember this strange piece of history until last night. I sat awake in the dark berth of our cabin, staring at the moon, at the bowl of the night lit up like a stadium and the sea swishing past, lunar and shining black, and it suddenly came to me—Mary became the Mother of God
in Ephesus
.

I got up and searched the guidebook by flashlight, finding a passing reference:
In 431 AD the church officially proclaimed Mary
Theotokos,
“God-bearer,” more commonly referred to as “Mother of God,” at the Third Ecumenical Council in Ephesus
.

What happened to Mary at Ephesus seemed deeply related to how my own experience with her was unfolding. In one spiritual and theological swoop, Mary went from human Jewish mother to a divine Mother Goddess. Or—as scholar Charlene Spretnak describes it—from biblical to biblical
plus.
She became “big Mary.”

How did something like that happen—a young woman from Galilee ending up enthroned and gloried in the art and cathedrals of Europe? How did she land at the center of icons, rose windows, liturgies, music, miracles, healings, processions, offerings, shrines, and feast days? How did “little Mary” come to be worshipped as a full-blown Goddess in everything but name? And frankly, she’d come pretty close with the names, too. They roll through my head like lavish floats in the Rose Parade: Queen of Heaven, Mother of All Living, Star of the Sea, Merciful Intercessor, Mystical Rose, Mistress of the Angels . . .

I could not go back to sleep. I’d been thinking about Mary since those moments in the Athens cathedral. My encounter with her there had set off a backlash of feeling. If I pursued her, it would mean a whole compass-change in my spiritual life. There were people who would think it was fatuous, if not theologically egregious. I suppose some part of me thought so, too.

Part of the problem was that the larger-than-human Mary had fallen on hard times. Not only had she been expelled from the Protestant world, but a strong “progressive” movement to downsize her had been under way in the Catholic Church since Vatican II. Feminists had taken up the cause of getting Mary off her pedestal. I had been right there among them, at least ideologically, insisting we take Mary’s humanity back.

So why did this astounding magnification of Mary’s at Ephesus excite me? How much of Mary’s humanity did we have to take back before we could handle the grand, cosmological Mary? Was it crazy to think I could reclaim that part of her, too? I stared at the lacquered surface of the water, torn with doubt.

Eighteen months ago, when I ended seven years of Jungian analysis, my analyst’s farewell gift to me was a picture of a woman making her way through a forest. Surrounded by an entourage of wild animals, she follows a dove, which flies just above her head.

Nervous about leaving the relationship, I tried to make a joke. “Are you telling me it’s a jungle out there?”

“I’m telling you that you’ll be fine if you follow your spirit and travel with your instincts.”

Her words became a distillation of wisdom squeezed from those fruitful seven years. I framed the picture and hung it in my study.

Now, sitting on the bus to Ephesus, my head lolls against the warm, vibrating window. As my eyes sink closed, the picture of the woman in the forest floats against the thin membrane of my lids.