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you’re a translator, Cassandra,” said Eva. “What languages do you speak?”
    “The Romance languages.” I smiled at her.
    Jack agreed. “Romance is her specialty.”
    “Spanish, French, Italian,” I said. “A smattering of Icelandic, Arabic and Tagalog. Serviceable German, some Mandarin, and Russian.”
    “We all had to learn Russian at school,” said Eva. “I can’t bear to speak it now. German I don’t mind—we look forward to working with more German clients. But I would never speak it for pleasure.”
    “In that case, I suggest we stick to English.” I looked inquiringly at Jack. “Unless you’d rather go on with your Hungarian, my dear?”
    The Polski Fiat took us across the Danube from Pest to Buda. The two cities weren’t connected by bridges across the river until the last century. Buda was much older, a medieval fortress on a hill that during the Turkish occupation had turned into a city of minarets and domes. Although that skyline was gone, the Hotel Gellért and its adjoining baths, nestled at the foot of Gellért Hill, echoed the Turkish past. The buildings were constructed in the early part of the century in an art nouveau Ottoman style that reminded me of glorious silent science fiction films. Mad scientists and space voyagers could have easily been at home in the mosque-like, round-roofed towers of the baths, which looked as if they would slide open at any moment to launch a homemade rocket to another planet.
    The main entrance to the baths led to more Mozarabic elegance: a vaulted ceiling with skylights, a tiled floor, marble pilasters and patterned mosaic walls, potted palms and white marble copies of Greco-Roman statues, all women in uplifted poses. We bought our tickets to the thermal baths and swimming pool and went into the women’s dressing room, where we were each given a cubicle, a white muslin wrap and a plastic cap.
    The air here had a secret mineral smell, like dirt, like metal. After disrobing, Jack, Eva and I met up in a mosaic and marble room with two sunken thermal pools. The arched ceiling had a skylight of amber glass, the tiled walls were aqua blue. Naked, we dropped into the warm, buoyant water that came bubbling up from the interior of the earth.
    The Romans were the first to tap into the waters of Gellért Hill, but it was the Turks with their languorous notions of the hammam who brought the bath to its steamy perfection. I could never be in an establishment like this without thinking of Ingres’s The Turkish Bath, which I had first seen, printed in black on a clear-plastic shower curtain, at the apartment of my high-school Spanish teacher, Dede Paulsen, the first woman I was ever in love with. Such was my cultural background that I never realized the image was taken from a famous painting (when I saw it years later in the Louvre I had to stop myself from exclaiming, “Dede’s shower curtain!”). But such are also the wonderful powers of the adolescent erotic imagination that from this bathroom artifact I constructed an entire fantasy of gorgeously plump nude women lounging around a tiled sunken bath in various attitudes of sloe-eyed indolence. Ignorant of Ingres’s orientalizing male voyeurism I could happily conjure up a Turkish bath cum harem where naked women soaped and steamed in close proximity.
    All bathhouses had a homoerotic element; for men it was overtly sexualized, for women subtly. In the Turkish harems the odalisques spent hours soaking and scrubbing, being massaged and pumiced. They hennaed the hair on their heads and removed every strand of it elsewhere with harsh depilatories. The enforced interiority of their lives, the sumptuous idleness bred sensuous addictions to opium, to rich food and to each other. The women in the harems were slaves and concubines; they fought for position, they intrigued, they poisoned, smothered and drowned each other.
    Of course I had to admit, as I looked at the women in and out of the two thermal pools, I wasn’t