That is all part of the past, of course, as there are four waiters to every American diner in comradely Istangump and all four see very clearly out of brown to dark-colored eyes. Many having green and blue eyes and small feet.
“Turks are members of the Celtic race,” Monim resumed his interminable nagging, “which through intermarriage with Circassian, European and Greek women have lost their Asiatic features.”—Why do the males of any clan you care to name inevitably take it for granted that while they are balling the daughters of the nearest unfriendly tribe, Circassian studs are playing unnatural games? A pure curiosity as we say in Black Oak; yet one which explains the lush crop of Asiatic features among us Circassians, Europeans, Greeks, and Black Oakians.
Monim having just read Greek women out of Europe, I couldn’t help wondering where they would go now. After a while I discovered I didn’t care. Assuming they would take their husbands with them, the idea had its appeal.
“What do you think those Greek heroes were doing while you were horsing around on the wrong side of the Bosporus, Izmet?” I’d put the issue straight to our New Member—“playing unnatural games?” (You have to let these people know you have the upper hand or they’ll take advantage every time. It once took me an hour and a half to get ham and eggs in the Alhambra, and for a Turkish waiter to hold himself the equal of a Spanish one is sheer nonsense, Spanish waiters having belonged to us so much longer.)
Not to deny Turkey’s just claim to civil treatment, both countries being great democracies because if they know what’s good for them they’d better be. Otherwise they can’t belong to us.
“Whose features do you figure those Persian studs were taking over while you were singing A Good Man Is Hard to Find, Akbar?” was how I’d put it—“Or did you think they were playing unnatural games?”
Somehow that didn’t ring as well as it had the first time I’d rung. It might even be I was in a rut. Perhaps I ought simply to punish him with historical objectivity, like Churchill.
“Slaughtered any Armenian babies this morning, Fireball?” I’d say, “Where were you when Dienbienphu fell, Firefell?”
I’d grind him into powder, I’d historically objectivize him. “A big help you were when we took Balaclava, brave guy—What do you think those Bulgarian studs were up to when you singing I’m a Dingdong Daddy from the Dardanelles?—Playing unnatural games?” (If the Globetrotters actually were playing a Turkish team they’d have to find somebody else to keep score.)
An involuntary movement of the lips, which I make while talking to myself voluntarily, brought Selim to my side of his own volition. If ever I’ve set eye on an agent of a foreign power, such as the C.I.A., it was this triple-dyed dimwit from Usküdar repeating the circular movement of the index finger while asking “Shoppings?” This was by now so plainly a ruse to get me into the Covered Bazaar that I’m certain it would have worked with Joseph Cotten but it didn’t work with me. I wasn’t even about to be trapped in a sewer with Orson Welles.
Yet if someone would whip me up something with gin in it I’d meet someone halfway. He could whip it and I’d drink it. Hair and all.
Abdul returned with a pot of raki, a development signifying that the management was now putting me on the Native, or Islamic, Plan; assuming they had one. A safe assumption, as the Harlem Globetrotters really were in town. One swig of the stuff and I decided I might as well get trapped in a Covered Bazaar.
I repeated the mystic circular movement with the curious result that the waiter removed the Sea of Marmara from my sightline simply by turning me right about, chair and all. What a nerve.
All I had to contend with now was the Bosporus. At last we were face to face. “Don’t just lie there, Bosporus,” I instructed it; “Do something.”
Bosporus splashed around in a helpless kind of way. Some Bosporus. “Stop putting on the helpless act,” I told it, “you’re a big ocean now.”
Bos just lay there looking simpler by the second. “I won’t even look you up in Encyclopedic Istanbul by one Monim Eser and one is enough,” I threatened it. As good as my word, I handed Monim’s book to the waiter and signed the tab “Hugh Hefner.” In an absurd society all men are absurd except the absurd man.
Then I rose unassisted.
Leaving the New Member as tipless as he had been before he joined us.
For a sight of pure dumb suffering there’s nothing so great as a muzzled bear up on its hind legs seven foot high; a frothing brute lifting one leg then the other to the beat of a drum. In the hope he’s earning his dinner.
The only spectator beside myself is a ten-year-old Mongol waif, a boy in charge of a shine-box the size of himself. The bottles lining the box’s sides lend it a resemblance to a crude portable operating table. He has decorated it with Elvis Presley’s face—clipped from an American magazine—under the caption Will This Yearning Never Cease?
One tug of the leash on the bear’s forepaw lets him know he may rest now, and he lowers himself on all fours to go nosing in the gutter like a dog. A small girl holds an empty tambourine blindly toward the noonday windows, and a few coins tinkle onto the cobbles. She follows a rolling coin and retrieves it from under the bear’s very nose. Bear don’t care. He’s doing enough for these people, he knows, without counting the house for them too.
The drummer gives a single beat, toneless as the beat of rain, then hauls the bear back onto its hunkers: now the left foot, now the right. Even for a bear he isn’t a good dancer. But a drummer who can’t get more tone out of an instrument than this bird can hardly complain about not getting Agnes de Mille to dance for him.
Let’s not expect too much of Turkish bears. In a place where two-leggers consider that sticking pins in themselves and whirling about is as far as you can go in the art of the dance, how can we expect a four-legger who isn’t getting enough to eat to interpret Swan Lake? A bear at least has the excuse of being a bear.
A hungry one at that. But what’s a dervish’s excuse? Exactly what does he have in mind? If he weren’t some kind of nut right off the frosting of the fruitcake, he’d realize he could do better than to go whirling around Turkey. He’d go to the American Embassy and get himself exchanged for something, maybe Barry Goldwater. I delivered milk at twelve myself, but still can’t figure out how that nullifies the right of somebody else under that age to a pint a day in or out of wedlock. Another solution to the dervish problem might be simply to appoint himself a New Frontier for Cultural Backwash so we could trade off Jack Paar to the Bushmen. Every nation should take advantage of somebody.
I hope I don’t appear to be carping at the administration here. For the sake of the record, I have never seen a dervish whirl. To make a clean breast of matters, I’d rather see a dervish whirl than watch Morris Fishbein treat a hangnail.
The girl came to me with one beggar-hand extended, showing she knew an American when she saw one but would rather see than be one. I put the tip I had so justifiably withheld from the waiter because he had dated a hyena, on her.
She toted that buck like a flag to the drummer, who put down the happiest rat-a-tat-tat to send the message straight through to the bear—We eat! The bear began lifting his knees to his chin, trying to show me what it felt like to have a yearning really cease. He was so happy he didn’t care if it hurt. And neither did the shine-kid—he raced up with his portable operating table and I began catching the spirit of the thing myself. I started to lie down to let him operate.
I had never had my shoes shined to a drum roll before. It was my first time. And to a dancing bear at that! Talk about your happy times! But when the bear put his paws on his hips I felt he was going too far. Although this was exactly the development the drummer had had in mind when he’d bought the big fag, I feared for its effect upon a small girl. She was already confused at being liberated by the Amurikuns. It was her first time. It was the first time for something for everybody. By the time the shine-kid had finished the second shoe he had so much momentum left he began crawling around looki
ng for my third. Either that or one of us had been counting wrong. I held his payment down to two. I was firm about it too.
Then drummer, beggar girl, beggar boy, and bear—and a second small girl—now, where had that one come from?—the whole stupid troupe trooped off with the bear still trying to kick himself in the chin. He still wasn’t sure they were going to put his name in the pot. I waved goodbye to him but he didn’t wave back.
Nobody waves back in Istanbul.
I boarded a trolley and began proceeding in the general direction of Inner Soho. My thinking was that we might pass a seraglio that really was a seraglio, but all we got to was a car barn that really was a car barn.
It was set among high wooden tenements with windows so small that Raskolnikov would have gotten his head wedged if he’d stuck it out to see what I was doing.
What I was doing was helping two solemn-looking boys—the only kind there are in Turkey—to hunt for small hard-rubber squares, of the kind used in window jambs of trolleys, to fit their slings. This ammunition was easy to find, and I contributed a handful on the condition it would be used against Armenians. Then I put them both up against the side of the barn, where they stood very straight, hands to their sides and looking straight ahead, proud that they were to be shot without a trial. When all I did was level a camera and snap the shutter, both were disappointed. Turkey is a nation of martyrs in the worst sense of the word.
Consequently it has only one martyr today in the best sense of the word: the poet Nazim Hikmet. Understandably, he is in hiding for having committed what Brendan Behan has observed is the writer’s first responsibility—to bring his country down.
Turks are less tolerant of this sort of carryings-on than the Irish. To the Irishmen a uniform indicates subservience; to the Turk it signifies righteousness. Therefore the Turks, a righteous people, respect only action conducted in a military fashion, even though it may consist of no more than dominoes in a coffeehouse. Spectators to the contest don’t just sit around; they observe in a military manner.
I asked my carbarn heroes the direction to The Seraglio, and both pointed, in a military manner, to the center of town. I gave them some paper-wrapped pieces of sugar I’d been hoarding, as a reward for service beyond the call of duty. When I looked back both were still at attention. Some martyrs.
Though the airless warehouse, through whose rooms stood fixtures uncalled for from another day, was entitled The Seraglio, it looked more like a tourist trap to me. I joined a gaggle of stupefied American school-girls, being led by a guide, past a collection of cumbrous armor, into the Bab-i-Sa’adet, where once Ottoman emperors were proclaimed. I stared, with other starers, upon the very couch whereon a sultan was once used to accepting congratulations by permitting admirers to kiss the tip of his ten-foot staff.
“Official dignity tends to increase,” Aldous Huxley has observed, “in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which his office is held.”
This was the Holy of Holies whose sanctified threshold all who once entered had had to kiss. The throne room had then been barred, by thirty white eunuchs, to all save those whom the sultan bade enter. With other starers I stared upon a gold-and-beryl throne that had once accommodated the huge hunkers of Ahmet I. Then we all stared upon the ebony throne, inlaid with precious stones, that had accommodated the bestial behind of Murat IV; then we stood stunned by the very divan whereon the great Khan Ismail had placed his delicate Persian can. The guide neglected to point out where Otto Preminger had sat, so I assumed he just lay on the floor. The official importance of the individual also tends to enhance itself in inverse proportion to its talent.
The sultan who kept his admirers ten feet off may not have been quite so vain as all that. It could just have been that he was aware that Turks were people with brown to dark-colored hair with a fondness for slipping an up-the-sleeve shiv into the high brass, and the man preferred having his staff kissed to having a lung punctured. A disappointed admirer would then be inconsolable until the sultan permitted him to climb into the harem nursery and stick needles and pins into the little ones. Through chambers where this sultan was garroted and that one poisoned, my father’s tune returned—O sweet Dardanella
I love your hair ’n’ eyes
Through chambers where one was done in with his whole family and that one alone by a silken cord, we came at last to the chamber that had once held the women. The air here was close, though all doors were open. The climate of deadly boredom in which the creatures had lived out their lives clung yet to the walls that had enclosed them.
One Sultan Ibraham, along toward the middle of the seventeenth century, looked over his stable of a thousand vessels and grew even more bored than they. So he turned the whole lot over to his Chief Gardener, who placed each in a sack, ostensibly upon the promise to each that she was going on a blind date.
She was. A diver, who went down off Seraglio Point many years later, saw innumerable sacks, still upright for having been weighted, dancing gently in the undersea currents.
The present danger in Turkey, the guide assured me, is of a Communist dictatorship, and produced a leaflet showing a hand grasping a Communist by the throat. The leaflet didn’t indicate to whom the hand belonged.
But I decided the hell with your bloodstained, staff-kissing Seraglio, and walked out into the inarticulate city.
Istanbul is a town with no special style of its own, as Turkey has no particular style. Unlike the Morisco Spaniards, who modified the arts of Arabia with those of Christendom to forge a style distinct from either, the Turks simply brought down everything that looked like Allah might not care to have it left standing.
The Turkish claim to civilizations that once flowered between Europe and Asia, when The Golden Gate was the center of the world, is simply no good. Turkish soldiery brought down the ancestral temples of Greece pillar by pillar and marble by marble, then sold the rubble shard by shard. Had an Englishman not come along to do some salvaging, the Turk would have disposed of the lot in the nearest bazaar.
A humorless, soldierly people whose arts are courage, honor, and bloodletting—stuff of which we have already contrived so many Christian heroes as to have no present need of new heroes from Islam. What Turkey needs today isn’t heroes but good old rogues, sporty-O poets and downright cowards. I see no reason why some lucky country might not one day get all three.
Remembering the poor of those lion-colored villages along the Sahara’s blowing rim, of the Barrio-Chino and Naples’ incensed slums, bright Crete and shadowed Dublin, these of Istanbul were the first I had ever seen who did not make sport of their poverty. The common consolations of homemade wine, homemade music, and homemade love appear to be missing here. There is no joy, there is no juice, there is no jazz in Istangump. A city without Negroes doesn’t jump, and smiles in Turkey are not for free. If you’re fond of athletics, it’s a good town to watch someone lift a thousand-pound barbell in a single pull or a conduit where human heads were thrown after a mass decapitation. Istanbul may be the town for you—but it isn’t the town for me.
And what makes the Turk think he will be better off looking at the world through a Caucasoid eye instead of an epicanthic one is just one of those things people get to believing after they’ve tried everything else.
At the Mosque of Saint Sophia I ran into a little foot trouble. The Sacred Guardian of a crummy rattan mat pointed menacingly at my infidel’s shoes. So I stood on one leg alternately to scrape the mud off each and then proceeded toward the door. I’m nothing if not dainty.
That didn’t get it. He was just a doorman but he believed in his work. My Christian shoes were stepping on The Prophet’s untouchable floor. Mohammed himself wouldn’t, I’m sure, have particularly cared.
I tried to explain that no offense had been intended. That I had simply gone into the only shoestore in Black Oak and bought a pair of shoes, completely forgetting that the place was run by Christians.
The issue was solved when he handed me a pair of holy s
hower slippers. They weren’t any cleaner than my Black Oak pair but they got me into his mosque.
This curious edifice was constructed, after a couple of false starts, by a Roman emperor who got his own start the same way I got mine: as a Christian. When the Turks took it over they beheaded so many of us that only a first-class Christian could get his head on a Mohammedan pike. Second-class Christians had to be content with getting their ears pinned up. There were more than enough Christians to go around, but there was a serious lack of pikes.
The Turks then put a crescent on top of the cross and let it be known that they wanted to be brothers to all the Christians they hadn’t yet caught. This worked out pretty well until the uncaught Christians began feeling brotherly too. They impaled all the Turkish women and children and put the cross on top of the crescent, to show survivors that their own idea was to turn the other cheek.
The Turks agreed that this was what they had in mind, and would like to redecorate.
So they pulled the Christians apart with wild horses and put up minarets. This is why you can scarcely blame us Christians, when we took the place back, for plastering our Muslim brothers up into the walls in the name of the Holy Trinity and to save cement. Struck by the infinite wonder of this holy place, I simply stood looking up. What I was wondering was who had been the construction foreman.
Nobody has to tell me that Turkey is an undeveloped country. I found that out for myself by peeking under old melon rinds every time I heard something meow. Istanbul is the Mecca of Mohammedan cats, and it’s about time them cats changed Meccas. After a kitten has used up its last strength to get its eyes open, it sees that the effort wasn’t worthwhile. Mother has left for the Covered Bazaar, where she is practicing cover and concealment under a café table in hope that if somebody doesn’t drop a piece of shish on her accidentally, someone might slug her deliberately with a kebab. If you showed a Mohammedan cat a saucer of cream he’d scratch you for trying to poison him, an attitude adopted early by the Turks toward the world in general. It goes to show that a nation that can’t feed its cats and won’t bother to drown its kittens lacks both milk and sentience.
Algren at Sea Page 19
