Nine at night and the city outside has gone quiet in the way old cities do, not silent, just lower. Inside the hamam it is louder somehow. Water dripping from a marble basin, a bucket scraping stone, someone's low laugh bouncing off a dome built four hundred years ago for exactly this.
The attendant wraps me in a peshtemal, red and white, thin as a bedsheet and somehow warmer than any towel I own. The central stone, the göbek taşı, holds heat like it has a memory of every body that ever laid on it. Mine included, now.
I left the camera in the locker. Steam and film do not agree, and some rooms do not need to be photographed to be remembered. The dome above has small star-shaped holes cut into it, and through them the last of the light comes in pale and blue, dust moving in it like it has somewhere to be. It does not.
An older woman scrubs my back without asking, which is the custom, and I let her. There is a kind of trust in that, handing your skin over to a stranger in a room built for exactly this exchange. My mother would have opinions about how long I let the soap sit. She usually does.
Somewhere past the marble and the steam, Istanbul keeps doing what it does at night, ferries and calls to prayer and the smell of roasting chestnuts drifting up from a cart two streets over. In here, none of that matters. Just heat, stone, and the particular quiet of a body finally slowing down after weeks of trains and early flights.
I stay longer than planned. I always do.
