In the Ladies’ Pool

Time was replaced by water.

JULY 11, 2023

At the entrance of The Good Place, you stopped to fill up your tubs from a drinking fountain with two spouts – a cold one and a warm one. What is it good for? I asked a Gypsy man with a face pummeled with hardship. What do I know, he chuckled. Everything, they say, so I fill up and hope.

The luxurious water embraced your insides. The summer was late, life was caught in a sticky web. Something emanated from the mountain. It felt like predestination. Destiny, destination, destino. Destino, purpose, goal.

Being brimmed like an overfull cup. Being with places, with plants and with people. It was enough. Nothing more was needed.

I walked by Good River eating a peach and when I stopped to throw the stone in the undergrowth, there was a dry peach kernel by my feet. An odd impression passed over me: that the person who stood in this spot eating a peach was just another me that popped up somewhere along the timeline. I’d never been here before, yet I was retracing my own steps. And it didn’t matter who I was. I was someone and no one.

I was like the electron, outside linear time.

These quantum flashes accompanied me daily here. Previously, I’d have described them as ‘surreal’. But the surreal is simply the real out of context, discontinuous. The surreal is quantum reality. It had something to do with the pandemic – everything had fallen out of context. And all the water. It was like Oppenheimer’s description of the electron:

‘If we ask, for instance, whether the position of the electron remains the same, we must say no; if we ask whether the electron’s position changes with time, we must say no; if we ask whether the electron is at rest, we must say no; if we ask whether it is in motion, we must say no.’

I was like the electron, outside linear time. This whole place was. But where were we, then? We were near water. There is a river. If you couldn’t hear it or see it, its ions vibrated in the air and you inhaled water, day and night. If you walked downstream and left the village, there was a spring of colloidal water. It gushed out of a spout with some force, warm, abundant. You wanted to plunge your head in and forget your troubles. A sign said:

SILVER MINERAL WATER
EYE DISEASES

I waded in the small rock pool, where the water collected before it ran into the river, and let my feet drink from it, then splashed my eyes. The springs of The Good Place had always been about the eyes.

A man came down the steps to the silver spring with tubs to fill, thought he recognized me from somewhere I’d never been and gave me two ripe peaches from his garden. And splashed his eyes.

Further downstream, I found The Little Roman Bath – a round stone basin with carved seats inside. It overflowed with warm water. I was tempted to sit in it but felt disquiet. It was an isolated spot. Wherever there is clean running water in an isolated spot, there is a presence. I plunged my hands in and sensed the undines, the creatures of water according to our friend Paracelsus who came up with the four elemental spirits. Undines carry information from the primordial ocean to our cells, from the highland spring to the vessel of the crone that holds our fate. Our fate is in our cells. Our fate is water. I remembered an acquaintance’s mother, last year. She gave me a repertoire of self-healing spells. They featured three things: a mantra, a gesture, a plant. The fourth, ‘magical’, ingredient was intent – ‘say it like you mean it,’ she said, ‘or it won’t work.’ A great spell is like a great poem: it brings change. Here is her water mantra for distress.

Pick a plant you like and go to running water. Wet the plant, pass it across your eyes left to right and say:

Bismillah Rahmani Rahim.
The king’s court is on fire.
No one’s home to put it out.
Sister water, you will put it out.

Do it again:

The king’s court is on fire.
No one’s home to put it out.
Sister water, you will put it out. Amen.

And one more time:

The king’s court is on fire.
No one’s home to put it out.
Sister water, you will put it out. Amen.

Then throw the plant away and leave.

Back on the road, a skinny old man pulled up in a battered Lada car and leaned out of his window:

‘Want to buy edelweiss?’

On the homemade card he proffered was written:

EDELWEISS.
TRIP TO THE GODLESS AND BACK

I got into the sagging passenger seat and went to see his edelweiss garden.

He’d worked for many years in the uranium mine, then he’d been a truck driver, then a pensioner on 150 euros a month and now he peddled his cultivated edelweiss and drove visitors to Godless, a local mountain peak. And back.

What kinds of visitors?

‘All kinds, rich and poor, but especially those afraid of heights that can’t take the chairlift. I take them up, then bring them down.’

What was it like, in that uranium mine?

‘Days like nights underground,’ he said. ‘Thirty, fifty meters down, soaking in the radiation and watching your friends die in accidents. And then from cancer. I don’t know why I’m still alive. It was the wife but should’ve been me.’

On his gate was a black-edged notice for his wife’s death anniversary. His edelweiss plants were arranged in potted rows in the large garden which he neglected because he was obsessed with the one plant. He cultivated it from seed, slow-dried it and sold it glued to souvenir cards. They had to be in pots because they got eaten by worms and snails otherwise. Snails gobble up the leaves of edelweiss like steak, he said. He showed me where he dried them – in the pages of old books. He turned the flowers between pages, to stop them getting screwed by mold or extreme sunshine, ‘cos these days it’s one or the other, no middle way anymore,’ he said. ‘This year it’s been very damp. Don’t touch them for God’s sake.’

Like many high-altitude plants, like mursala, edelweiss is unearthly – white, velvety, star-shaped. Like a visitor from another planet that took root on top of the earth.

As a young man building the chalet at Godless, he’d seen wild edelweiss.

‘Like seeing the god of the mountain,’ he said. ‘But now there’s hardly any left and only in the rockiest crags where people can’t go. Cos they destroyed it. They pulled it out by the roots. Now, I’ll give you one that’ll last you a hundred years.’

He brought out pressed edelweiss cards at different prices.

‘These ones are medium. And these are ideal. Which do you want, the medium or the ideal?’

The ideal of course, though they looked the same to me – they looked sublime even dry-pressed. Like many high-altitude plants, like mursala, edelweiss is unearthly – white, velvety, star-shaped. Like a visitor from another planet that took root on top of the earth.

‘Here’s an ideal one. Don’t put it in direct sunlight or you’ll fuck it up.’

He was in an ongoing argument with another gardener who said that edelweiss didn’t need moisture because it was an arid flower.

‘Arid, but what do you see on the ground at dawn, at 2,500 meters? Dew. Edelweiss holds moisture in its leaves.’

It was all about watering them at the right intervals, moving them into the shade and back into the sunlight, and hoping he didn’t lose too many to climate extremes and ‘jealous neighbors.’

The herbarized specimen were cut and you couldn’t see the roots which are really something, Edelweiss Man said, all tangled together like snakes when they make love.

Edelweiss Man was a believer in karma. He had done some very bad things in his youth and didn’t expect to go anywhere nice when he carked it, he said. That’s why he liked to visit the ‘miraculous’ icon in a monastery, brought in the Middle Ages from Athos by a monk whose destination was Rila Monastery to the north, but he got lost in a storm and ended up here, taking shelter in a small, abandoned forest monastery. Years later, locals saw colored lights in the woods. And there, inside the building, were the remains of the monk and next to him – the icon, giving out unearthly light. We drove there. It was a high, dangerous forest road that climbed into the mountain, a hermit’s road, a road where you won’t be found for years, unless you hug an icon that shines. The icon was indeed shiny – Mary and her son were wholly made of wrought silver, only their faces were painted and nestled within the armor. The monastery was named after Panteleimon, a lucreless healer from Asia Minor who healed the blind with prayer. And mineral water. The monastery had been cared for by a brave lone nun called Domenika. She came as a young woman in the early years of Communism and must have lived a peaceful life in the forest with her hens and goats. The numerics of her lifespan bookended the twentieth century with inscrutable symmetry.

9.9.1919 and 9.9.1999

A drunk woman with a moustache was the caretaker of the monastery now, so we didn’t linger.

On the way down, Edelweiss Man told me about his friend who, during the Communist regime’s campaign against the Pomaks, a minority group, had been ordered to bulldoze their graves. He didn’t want to do it, but they bullied him.

‘I wanted to bring him to the icon but he wouldn’t come. Two years later he died.’

‘Maybe it was the mine,’ I said.

‘It was the graves. Not the mine. A cause-and-effect thing.’ Edelweiss Man didn’t meet my eye and I wondered if he too had bulldozed graves.

‘Make sure you go to the old baths,’ Edelweiss Man said when he dropped me off. ‘Before they turn them into another hotel for the rich in this land of the poor. My back is fucked from the uranium mine and the only time the pain stops is when I sit in the men’s pool.’

I’d been avoiding them because of their neglect, but now I went into the old baths.

You gave 70 cents to a woman in a white overcoat and you could spend the whole morning inside. Though staying in the pool for more than thirty minutes was not recommended. You could get a headache or pass out – which I nearly did after spending two hours inside on my first day.

The voices of water came from all sides. All was vapors, drips and rumblings and at first it was hard to see who was inside. Someone was inside. Even when empty, a presence was here: water.

There was no clock inside, because time was replaced by water. Everything in the echoey building spoke of the past – of the 1930s when it was built with high glass cupolas in the main men’s and ladies’ pools and inlaid with those handmade mosaics that you don’t see anymore, and the decades of Communism when things fell apart, and of the last decades when that which had fallen apart was not fixed. Taps dripped. The voices of water came from all sides. All was vapors, drips and rumblings and at first it was hard to see who was inside. Someone was inside. Even when empty, a presence was here: water.

You entered naked and climbed into the pool down the tiled steps in an involuntary prayer that felt as old as humanity. You climbed into the warm mouth of the earth and paid your respects.

There was just one woman in the pool, my age, with a handsome face and hard eyes. She was from here but had spent decades working in the city because there was no work here, except in hotels. Her belly bore the marks of long-ago childbirths.

‘Every weekend, I come home,’ she said. ‘Because I’m in my place here.’

Conversation in the ladies’ pool is brief. There is a code. You come naked, no towels, you don’t ask questions, you don’t stare, you don’t take up more space than you have to and if you are asked to rub another woman’s back with her hand mitt, you do it. Being asked is a show of trust.

Women descend into the pool, slow, naked. Or sit by the individual basins with milky-blue glaze that has been stripped away. They sit, plug and fill the basin with warm water – the taps are broken and water drips anyway – and pour it over their backs and heads with measured movements, using the small bowls provided. The old women bring shampoo and wash their hair, a nod to their childhood when houses didn’t have baths and this was it. Soapy water runs down the blue tiles.

Throughout the day, women of different ages arrive and enter the steam. Their bodies disappear. Bodies that have given birth, endured surgeries, sat at sewing machines for decades, planted and uprooted vegetable gardens, emigrated, returned, aged, been pounded then abandoned by children and men, lain exhausted on narrow beds. Under the dirty glass dome with the drip-dripping, these rumbling memories rippled through us all, as if it was a single body in the ladies’ pool.

Drip-drip. All of us are young and old.

Everybody takes a turn under the lion-headed brass spout. It is the sweet spot. A large Roma woman placed the top of her head underneath it – for headaches. A bird-like old woman held her broken hand under the spout. I bent my head and let the warm stream hit my crunchy neck. Too much reading, too much looking down, instead of up at the stars.

You can’t play a role in the ladies’ pool. You just bend your head under the lion spout and have your spikes become softened by the warm water. And you accept things as they are. Dripping taps, decay and all.

The hard-eyed woman handed me a towel-mitt and asked me to rub her back. When someone bares their back to you, they are defenseless. Few things are so vulnerable-making as exposing your naked back to a stranger. The mitt felt like a gauntlet, the task was intimate and responsible because of the red streaks it leaves, no matter how gently you do it. Her back was long and thin, and I realized that I’d never seen a woman’s back close up. Then she sits next to her overflowing basin and pours water over her head, her face motionless, her eyes closed, a sphynx. One bowl after another.

I look at the other women and I’m struck with awe at the female back. Later, I rub the back of the bird-like old woman with the broken hand whose face is crisscrossed with lines and whose teeth are gone. Yet her back is astonishingly smooth, untouched by the many burdens she has shouldered. It’s a young woman’s back. It is the same with the other women – their backs are decades younger than their fronts.

Silence. The bird-like woman thanks me, barely making eye contact. When the large Roma woman offers to scrub my back, I feel timid and decline. She smiles – she sees I am a virgin of the ladies’ pool.

We sit by our chipped basins, and pour water over our heads and backs. A shard of light hits the glass dome. I pour the noble water over my head and the essence of water hits me: everything flows, everything runs away. We are the water running down heads and backs, and we are the women that never change even as we age. Our backs are like water. Our long hair, our short hair, our raven hair, our white hair, our thinning hair through which the scalp shows – our heads are vulnerable and soft under the water, yet indestructible. We have broken Berlin walls with our heads and we’re not done yet.

Bowl after bowl, I pour water over my head and I cry. There’s something about pouring warm mineral water on your head that dissolves you.

It’s involuntary. I cry not for anything in particular. I cry because I am bewitched by these singing mountains, this talking land blighted by greed that still rises to hum a perfect note. Orpheus’s head sang after being torn from his body. For these backs, these heads, these hard lives, these tributaries that crisscross the mountains like the lines on the bird-woman’s face, for the builders, the gatherers, the planters, the healers, the mushroom pickers, the small-scale farmers, the laborers, the cleaners, the caretakers, the emigrants who return and those who don’t.

I cry because time runs away, yet it pools in my basin long enough to see my reflection.

I cry because nothing is ours except our own backs, yet we give weight to things that are worth nothing. We carry loads that we can put down. We come to the warm mouth of the lion spout and bend our head, and we are equal.

This is how women pour water over their heads.

A fortified settlement was here in the sixth century BC above the present one. The Good Place still had a dozen old churches in place of pagan temples. And seventeen springs.

The first religion was clean water. The last will be, too.

They too sat here and poured water over their heads. Their backs were smooth and young even when old. And they cried, then laughed again. They gathered herbs and gave them to their men and horses to eat, drink and rub on to make them strong when they rode into battle, to make them faithful, to kill them. Prostate trouble was forever the bane of riders. And when the men were away picking cotton in the Aegean south or fighting someone else’s war, the women turned into men. They guarded the flocks in the giant forest, they made tar from pine in vats to sell in goatskin bags, they tilled the sloping furrows, they gave birth and buried children, they washed their linens and their wounds in springs that never changed.

What happens in the ladies’ pool happens in the men’s pool. The men sit by the dripping basins and pour water over their aching heads, their herniated stomachs, their lonely genitals, their sore backs, and their coughs echo in the chamber when they clear their emphysema lungs.

I cry because good things are dwindling. Snow, edelweiss, mursala, clean water, and I am meeting creatures shortly before they become extinct.

✺ Published in “Issue 6: Rivers” of The Dial