Rehearsals went on for several weeks, and while it would be pushing it to say that excitement reached fever pitch, by opening night most of us expats had certainly worked up quite a head of enthusiastic steam at the thought of a rare injection of high culture to the village. Such was the excitement, in fact, that some people decided to get together for a picnic beforehand. Call it sixth sense, call it good luck, but for some reason I opted out of this plan, instead dining alone at home. The play was scheduled to start at eight o’clock, which theoretically left the picnickers plenty of time to eat. In England a typical picnic consists of a few soggy sandwiches and a flask of tepid tea, but my friends were going for the grander Turkish version which always includes something hot. Accordingly Karen from Avanos had prepared a stew, which she carried over to Göreme in a sizeable cooking pot. Unfortunately the time to eat it somehow managed to slip by without so much as a spoon being raised.
At nine o’clock we were handed candles and instructed to walk in silence to where a stage had been set up amid the fairy chimneys. While I congratulated myself on having eaten a hearty supper, poor Karen was forced to walk the whole way there with her arms wrapped round her cooking pot.
In silence we took our seats, waiting with bated breath. Then the lights came on and the action began. The play was being performed in English, which should have put me, as one of the few native English- speakers in the audience, at a considerable advantage. However the actors might as well have been talking Mandarin for all I could understand.
In lieu of being able to follow the plot, I gazed around at the fairy chimneys, which looked especially romantic in the moonlight. But then the action on the stage took a turn it needed no words to understand. There, in the valleys, a couple was simulating activity which normally takes place between sheets in the privacy of one’s own home (they were fully clothed, I hasten to add). No sooner had I absorbed this shockingly inappropriate fact than I glanced up and caught my neighbor’s husband’s eye. Had it not been for the merciful shadows, he would have seen me blush a red to match the tomatoes in Karen’s uneaten stew. Beside me a German friend started to laugh. It was a nervous laugh, in which I detected incipient, hungry hysteria.
Shortly afterwards the curtain metaphorically fell and we started the slow walk home again. “What was that all about? I didn’t understand anything,” I complained bitterly.
“It was about a man with seven souls,” replied the German friend with rather unsettling confidence. Beside us Karen plodded on in silence. She was still clutching the cooking pot, its contents by now stone cold.
Pat Yale lives in a converted cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
