Orient Express (3 page)

His body erect, his eyes staring straight into the sunlight, his hands raised level with his beard in the attitude of prayer, the new mollah shouted a prayer full of harsh ringing consonants and brazen upward cadences. His voice was like warhorns and kettledrums. And all through the mosque under the faintly blue dome men looked beyond the palms of their raised hands at the flaming magenta silk and the priest praying in the yellow shaft of sunlight, and the Ameen at every pause rose from a growl to a roar, grew fierce and breathless till the little glass lamps tinkled in the huge flat chandeliers above the turbans and the fezzes, rolled up the stucco walls, shook the great dome as the domes of the churches must have shaken with the shout of the fighting-men of Islam the day Constantine's city was carried by assault and the last Constantine killed in his purple boots.

At the door as they left everyone was presented with a card on which was a cut of the great mosque of Adrianople, and with a small tissuepaper bag of candies.

6.
Douzico

A fragile savor comes from the tiny rounded leaves of the basil in a pot on the edge of the café table. Behind on a little platform fenced with red baize, musicians keep up a reiterant humming and twanging out of which a theme in minor climbs and skids in an endless arabesque. There is a kind of lute, a zither, a violin and a woman who sings. In the midst is a stool with coffeecups and a bottle of mastic. The zither is played by a grizzled man with a bottlenose and spectacles who occasionally throws his head back and opens his mouth wide and lets out happily a great Gregorian yodel which the other voices follow and lead back with difficulty into the web of sound. At the tables packed under the locusttree where they will get shade in the afternoon sit people with narghiles or cigarettes or German pipes or American cigars drinking mastic and beer and coffee and even vodka. There is a smell of tobacco and charcoal and anis from the mastic and douzico and grilled meat from the skewers of chiche kebab, and a discordance of many hostile languages and a shuffle of feet from the street under the terrace.

Leaning my chin on my hands and looking down at the strip of cracked and dusty pavement between the bare feet of the boys who sell cakes and pistachio nuts and flyspotted candy along the terrace wall, and the row of autos for hire, of which the drivers, mostly Russians in various patched uniforms, loll and sleep and chat, waiting for a fare through the long afternoon hours.… Across that space shoes, feet, shambling legs, crossed arms, arms swinging vacantly, stoop shoulders, strongly moulded backs under thin cotton, chests brown, sweatbeaded, shawls, black veils of women, yakmaks, faces. All life is sucked into the expressiveness of faces. A boy, skin the color of an earthen pot, eyes and lips of a drunken Bacchus, swaggers by jauntily, on his head a tray of roasted yellow corn. A girl patters along, mouse-like, features droop white as a freesia behind a thin black veil. A whitebearded man in a blue gown, redrimmed eyes as bleared as moonstones, being led by a tiny brown boy. Two hammals, each strong enough to carry a piano alone, with deeplymarked mindless features, and the black beards of Assyrian bowmen. Three Russians, blond, thick-chested of the same height, white canvas tunics pulled down tight under their belts, blue eyes, with a freshwashed look and their hair parted and slicked like children dressed for a party. A stout Greek businessman in a Palm Beach suit. Tommies very pink and stiff. Aggressive thickjawed gobs playing with small maggotlike beggar-children. Pale-faced Levantines with slinking eyes and hooked noses. Armenians with querulous mouths and great gold brown eyes. In the bright sun and the violent shadows faces blur and merge as they pass. Faces are smooth and yellow like melons, steely like axes; faces are like winter squashes, like death's heads and jack o'lanterns and cocoanuts and sprouting potatoes. They merge slowly in the cruel white sunlight, brown faces under fezzes, yellow faces under straw-hats, pale northern faces under khaki caps—into one face, brows sullen and contracted, eyes black with suffering, skin taut over the cheekbones, hungry lines about the corners of the mouth, lips restless, envious, angry, lustful. The face of a man not quite starved out.

They are the notes, these faces, twanged on the trembling strings of this skein of frustrate lives that is Pera. So many threads out of the labyrinth. If one could only follow back into the steep dilapidated streets where the black wooden houses overhang, and women with thick ankles look down with kohl-smeared eyes at the porters who stumble under their huge loads up the uneven steps, sweating so that the red out of their fezzes runs in streaks down their knobbed and shaggy cheeks; through the sudden plane-shaded lanes that snatch occasional unbelievable blue distances of sea or umber distances of hills seen through the tilting and delicately-carved tombposts of Turkish cemeteries, and lead out into the pathless heaps of masonry of burnt-over places, where gapes an occasional caving dome with beside it a gnawed minaret, where sneakthieves and homeless people live in the remnants of houses or in shattered cisterns; or down through the waterfront streets of Galata with their fruitstands and their Greek women jiggling in doorways and their sailors' cafés full of the jingle of mechanical pianos or the brassy trombone music of an orchestra, where the dancing of ill-assorted closehugged couples has a sway of the sea to it; or through the cool bazaars of Stamboul where in the half darkness under the azure-decorated vault Persian and Greek and Jewish and Armenian merchants spread out print cloths and Manchester goods which an occasional beam of dusty sunlight sets into a flame of colors; or into the ruined palaces along the Bosphorus where refugees from one place or another live in dazed and closepacked squalor; or into the gorgeous tinsel-furnished apartments where Greek millionaires and Syrian war-profiteers give continual parties just off the Grande Rue de Pera; or to the yards and doorways where the Russians sleep huddled like sheep in a snowstorm: somewhere some day one might find the core, the key to decipher this intricate arabesque scrawled carelessly on a ground of sheer pain.

Teheran: The Bath of the Lion

This afternoon I can only sit sipping douzico made opal white with water, ears drowsy with the strangely satisfying monotony of the Turkish orchestra's unending complaint. The cool north wind off the Black Sea has come up and is making dust and papers dance in whirlwinds across Taxim Square.

Along the line of taxis, abolishing them, abolishing the red trolleycars and the victorious puttees of Greek officers, his head in embroidered cap bowed against the wind, his almond eyes closed to black slits against the dust, taking little steps in his black embroidered slippers, the great sleeves of his flowing crimson silk gown flapping in the wind, walks a mandarin of China.

Cathay!

7.
Constantine and the Classics

Little Mr. Moscoupoulos threw up pudgy hands.

—But the Turks have not studied the Greek classics. They are ignorant. They do not know Aristophanes or Homer or Demosthenes, not even the deputies. Et sans connaître les classiques grecs on ne peut être ni politicien, ni orateur, ni diplomate. Turkey does not exist. I assure you, sir, it is a mere question of brigandage. And this city—we peered out of the window of the Pera Palace at a passing Allied staffcar—you know the legend. A Constantine built it, a Constantine lost it, and a Constantine shall regain it.…

Overhead bunches of green grapes hang down from the dense thatch of vineleaves and twined stems. A café outside one of the gates in the great wall of Heraclius. The dusty road dips into a low gateway that seems too small for the heavy dust-raising carts that clatter through it. On either side grey square towers timecrumbled at the top. Endlessly in either direction, grey walls occasionally splotched with the bright green of a figtree, and grey square towers. Towards the east a patch of the luminous aquamarine blue of the Sea of Marmora; westward bare umber-colored hills. In the purplish shadow of the vine arbor little tables and stools of unpainted wood and on each table a pot of rosemary or basil or thyme or a geranium in flower. In a group in one corner old men with grave gestures discuss some problem with quietly modulated voices. Their white turbans are almost motionless; now and then there is a flash of white when a head nods in a patch of sun, or a hand, lean and brown, is lifted to a grey beard. Beside me three young men in fezzes of new bright red are exchanging witticisms. An old gentleman with a puffy red face, dressed in the eternal white vest and broadtailed frock coat, listens, looks across his narghile with eyes sparkling and occasionally throws his head back and roars with laughter. A yellow slender man with green carpet slippers beside him is looking into vacancy with large yellowbrown eyes, in his hand a long amber cigarette-holder that is bright gold when the sun strikes it.

Sans connaître les classiques on ne peut être ni diplomate, ni politicien, ni orateur.… But one can sit in the shade where the cool wind rustles the vineleaves, letting the days slip through the fingers smooth and decorously shaped as the lumps of amber of the conversation beads with which one hand or the other constantly plays.

Out of the gate snorting and grinding in low gear comes a staffcar full of Allied officers, glint of gold braid and a chattering of voices. A cloud of dust hides it as it crawls up the uneven road.

A flock of sheep forms bleating out of the dust, followed by two shepherds who shout and throw stones and beat with their sticks until the sheep begin to flow through the narrow gate like water through the outlet in a trough.

Sans connaître les classiques.… A party of the Inter-Allied policeforce has come up and they stare searchingly in the faces of the Turks in the café. There are two Italian gendarmes with shiny threecornered hats and buttons on their coattails, some British M.P.s with hard red necks, French flics with the whiskers familiar to Paris cartoonists. They are all redfaced and sweaty from their rounds and there is dust on their highly polished shoes. When they have stared their fill at the people in the café they turn and go through the gate into town. Under the vines no one has noticed them. The voices of the old men continue, and the slow movement of a hand stroking a beard. In the upper bowl of the narghiles there is a little red glow at long intervals when the smoker pulls deeply. Above the grey towers and the wall, kites with black curved wings and hawk-beaks circle in the porcelain-blue sky.

8.
Alexanders

Going down to Therapia they pointed out the place where two nights before a French truck with a regimental fanfare in it had gone over the khud. Ah, monsieur, nous avons vécu des journées atroces, said the tall Greek lady beside me with a dangerous roll of her black eyes. At the next curve the car gave a terrible lurch to avoid an old man with a mule—Four of them were killed outright. They say they were dead drunk anyway. They never found the truck or the bodies … le Bosphore, vous comprenez. She smiled coyly with her large lips on which the rouge was restricted to a careful Cupid's bow.

At Therapia we sat on the terrace with the green swift Bosphorus in front of us and watched Englishmen in white flannels play tennis. A hot stagnant afternoon. Locusts whirred madly among the dusty cypresses. People in frock coats sat whispering round the little tables. Mr. Deinos who was starting a steamship line to run from Constantinople to New York, sat in a lavender grey linen suit between the two tall ladies with lurching eyes and Cupid's-bow mouths coyly puckered.… Greece, he began, is going to fulfil her historic mission.…

I slipped away and strayed into the bar. A British major with a face like the harvest moon was shaking up Alexanders. A man in a frock coat was trying to catch in his mouth olives that an American relief worker was tossing in the air. The talk in the bar was English, Oxford drawl, Chicago burr, Yankee twang, English and American as spoken by Greeks, Armenians, Frenchmen, Italians. Only the soberer people in the corners spoke French.

—Intelligence service cleaned up another Bolo plot … yessiree. Collected all the Bolos in town and towed them up into the Black Sea in a leaky scow and left 'em there—Best place for them. Ungrateful beggars, these Russians.… Here we evacuate them from Odessa and Sebastopol and now they go turning red on us. The leader was a woman.… Picked her out of a room at the Tokatlian. When the A.P.C. knocked at the door she took off all her clothes and went to bed. Thought they'd be too gentlemanly to break in. Well they just wrapped her up in a blanket and carried her off the way she was.

—Well, sir, I was the last white man outa Sebastopol.… Agricultural machinery's my line.

—Turkish bandits carried off six Greeks last night from that village opposite.…

—Did you hear the one about young Stafford was walking with a Red Cross nurse out on the road near the Sweet Waters and bandits held them up? They didn't touch the girl but they stripped him down to the skin.… The girl made them give him back his drawers for decency.

—And the General said: There's not enough light, we want a flambeau in each of the windows. People tried to point out that the lace curtains might catch, but the General had had beaucoup champagne and kept calling for his flambeaux; well, they brought his flambeaux and the curtains did catch and now the Sultan has one less palace.… It was a great sight.