You Are Always Safe With Me Read Online Free Page A

do it.” Then, carrying his microphone down to the main floor, he walked among the tables, and invited specific women, eight of them, to come up on stage and “try it, give your fellow-travelers a little thrill.” Lilly noted that he passed her right by and chose to invite only young and very pretty women, all of whom ran giggling up to the stage.
    In five minutes, he had them all wiggling their hips lasciviously, inviting applause from the audience for each woman, more applause the more wildly she shook her body (he had the women turn their backs to the crowd so the audience could assess the movement of their behinds.) He awarded a prize to the woman who shook the hardest—a souvenir belly dance doll.
    “Lilly,” her mother said to her, leaning across the table. “Didn’t you once take belly dance lessons? It seems to me you could do as well as any of those women, don’t you think?”
    *
    They were picked up in the morning by yet another tour company van and delivered to one of the great international hotels on the Bosphorus where they were to be met by their specific tour group for the day. From the lobby of this great hotel which looked out on the water, Lilly and her mother could see the majestic Queen Elizabeth Two waiting in the harbor. The glass and chrome of this hotel was ten times more luxurious than theirs, carpeted with thick Persian rugs and decorated with the most elegant of antiques. (“Foreign money,” Harriet whispered to Lilly. “The Turks don’t run hotels like this.”)
    Their names were called and they were directed to a small van with four other tourists already seated in it—a couple from Australia and a mother and her grown son from India. They briefly introduced themselves, but without much enthusiasm. Apparently having to meet a schedule, the driver, who spoke no English, pulled into traffic, and the guide began his spiel.
    They sped to the Aya Sophia museum and were marched dutifully through it as their guide, in broken English, pointed out the fame of its enormous dome and how it was supported, how it used to be lit by thousands of candles (also making it a lighthouse), but whose flames eventually destroyed the building as well as burned down most of the city. He pointed out mosaics of Christ, John the Baptist and the Virgin Mary.
    Lilly craned her neck and began to feel the deadness which often set in when too much culture was thrown at her, when image overlaid image and became confused in the kaleidoscope of her brain. She was not disinterested in other cultures and their history, and not averse to learning about art and architecture. But this trip had been thrown upon her, against her will. She’d had no time to study and prepare for what she might see, and, now that she was here, in the midst of it, with facts and details tumbling down on her head like a small avalanche, she wished she were elsewhere.
    She longed to go outside, sit quietly on a step and watch the people pass by, watch their faces, consider their lives. That every human being on earth had a special life, a unique story, a fate through which he or she was moving was what fascinated Lilly. Everyone, just as she did, must act one role and live another private one. This guide, who made his living intoning facts—what did he really think and feel, doing this, day after day? He was now showing them a large marble pillar which had a small hole in it.
    “Legend has it,” he said, “that if you place your thumb in this hole, turn it round and make a wish, it will come true. It was also said that if you put your finger in the hole and rubbed your eye, it would cure eye disease. Or spread it!” he added, laughing the canned laugh of his script.
    Even so, Lilly placed her thumb in the ancient hole to touch souls with the millions of visitors who had done so before her. She made a wish. She was in a fabled land, a place of genies and flying carpets. Why not wish to be transformed?
    *
    They had to surrender their shoes at