Personally, I’d rather be a Mohammedan mouse any day than an Islamic cat, because if anybody put me down for never purring, I’d have a damned good excuse.
The one who gained my attention by meowing, “Take this thing off me, Dad,” from under half a grapefruit, wasn’t even thankful when I obliged her. She was a cat caught in the worldwide struggle between Democracy and Communism, so it was my duty as an American to liberate her because we invented milk. Now we have a surplus we want to donate to undernourished peoples unconditionally in return for airbases and affection. If you don’t love us more than them, you can’t have our nice milk. But this was a Commie cat; she told me Keep Your Goddamned Milk, I’m a cheese-eating left-wing Radical Red and I subsist on blood and yogurt. Even her yowl was curdled.
I asked her where Mother was, and she said that was none of my business; but Father, she was happy to report, had been eaten by wild dogs under the veranda of the Conrad-Istangump. I could verify this, as it was under my window they’d gotten him, and the next day the menu featured koftë. Somebody is going to catch hell from Allah.
If you’re now feeling superior to Asia because you’ve never eaten kitten, don’t take too much for granted. You wouldn’t be the first tourist who’d gone into a French restaurant and had the surprise-du-chef without knowing it. I once saw a Frenchwoman in pursuit of game down the Rue Bûcherie before the horsemeat restaurants had opened, and if that was a horse she was after it was the smallest lead-pony I’ve yet seen—the only one in Paris bearing fur. The point is that if you’re planning to open a restaurant in Paris, you had better make it of the classe premiére, as cat under Sauce Béarnaise can easily be mistaken for rabbit—but you’ll never get away with this in a classe-quatre joint. I’d like to invent a sauce that would make cat taste like horse. In three weeks we’d all be rich.
I found myself walking along a ruined wall, and ducked into one of the gaps to see whatever it was they had built a wall around to keep me from seeing.
I stood among the grass and bones of old Turkey dead and gone, carven fez and fallen headstone, stone turbans cracked by time and a real hard fall. The unkept, unkempt Muslim dead; under cypresses leaning with grief that so many had gone. The Mohammedan dead are buried shallow and return aboveground soon; as though they had left the living yet not found oblivion.
A stonecutter was sitting crosslegged chipping away at a stone while another stonecutter stood watching. When one got tired chipping he would stand up; then the other would sit crosslegged and chip. For the manhours the two were putting in, they could have been chipping out two stones.
On the other hand, they themselves didn’t yet know for whom the stone was being fitted. It was a cinch he wasn’t in a hurry, so why should they be? Isn’t life just chock-full of little surprises? If I wanted to stand around minding their business they didn’t mind, it appeared, so long as I didn’t try to tell them mine.
“I’m from Black Oak, Indiana,” I explained my concern in Mohammedan headstone-hewing; “I’m looking for a girl named Dardanella.”
The one standing up pointed, with his chisel, in the general direction of the Dardanelles.
I had a distinct impression I could leave now anytime without causing any parting pangs. So I left. When I got to the break in the wall I had come through, I turned and waved goodbye.
But nobody waves goodbye in Istangump.
I’m fully as fond of a mad cab driver as the next fare, but I had no more chance of getting a coherent thought out of Osman Israhar than I would had Jack Kerouac been driving, and I’m still not sure it wasn’t. Dizzy Israhar came whipping crosstown in a jalopy with a smashed headlight, one hand on the wheel and the other on a bottle of Pepsi-Cola. Had he been chewing a steak I wouldn’t have thought it was Kerouac.
Dizzy came from Üsküdar, the town that made an Asiatic out of Eartha Kitt, but how he perceived I wasn’t a French aristocrat I haven’t yet figured. When he told me in what small regard he held the French, I knew he didn’t think I was on their side.
His grudge burned so deep I felt it must be because the French have become fond of giving Mohammedans electrified baths; but no—whatever happens to an Arab in a bathtub, he has it coming, was the thinking of Osman Israhar. In fact, the chief trouble in the Arab world wasn’t in Algeria at all. It was the Jews God was really mad at. They really had it coming.
Had God wanted Jews to have a flag, he explained, He would have given them a flag instead of dispersing them. When God disperses somebody, he doesn’t intend they should get an army together. God doesn’t like people to begin things; that is all there is to it. Beginning things is God’s business. He, Osman Israhar, was on God’s side. Had been all his life, and wasn’t going to switch sides now.
“I wonder what He had in mind in letting Jews win a war,” I marveled aloud.
“They win no war,” Osman corrected me, “only a battle. Allah willing, the real war is yet to begin.”
“Well, I be dog,” I explained, “then why not let God begin it?”
For reply Osman pulled up his left trouser to reveal shrapnel scars. A sight upon which, I assume, I was supposed to shriek. I decided to congratulate him instead.
“You got off light,” I assured him. “An Indian in my outfit stepped on a land mine at Château-Regnault and it blew both legs and half his head off.” Actually, that fool Indian lost only two feet and a part of a hand. I threw in the rest purely to make this Asiatic feel he was one of the lucky ones.
There are some people you can’t do anything for. Osman didn’t feel luckier than anybody. A fellow like this could be in a hospital with his back broke and he’d still complain. “Oh,” he assured me, “a wound is nothing. All Turks have wounds. We are a wounded people.”
“If you’d stop hollering ‘Fix Bayonets!’ for a generation, you’d catch up with us more able-bodied groups,” was my merry rejoinder.
Osman didn’t grasp that concept. He didn’t grasp anything, not even the wheel. He was just a wounded Asiatic heading for a general smashup, in which event we would both be wounded people. As nobody in my family has ever yet suffered so much as a black-and-blue mark, I don’t intend to start a trend.
All I wanted was to find a bartender who would begin a Martini which, Allah willing, I would finish without Allah’s help.
Osman’s beef was that, after all, he had fought for France, and won. But the French had not let him go to fight the Jews.
“I’m sure you would have turned the tide,” I assured him.
That almost brought us head on into a mosque with our shoes on. When he straightened us out I told him that if he could find a dance hall for infidels I’d brag about him all over Athens.
All that funny stuff being wasted on a skinny Asiatic, an undeveloped Muslim with his right headlight smashed. Just a shiftless Mohammedan caught in the worldwide struggle between Democracy and a world without a key club.
“How about some Egyptian belly dancers?” I asked as though he had a stable in every watering hole. “How about them Bulgarian chicks? I hear there’s an awful lot of Chinese living out of China now—or is that just another rumor?”
“We keep women inside,” Osman told me.
“I know you keep them inside,” I assured him; “so do we when the weather is bad.” The truth was I not only had the wrong country, I didn’t even have the right century. Strong drink, good music, and women are out of bounds to Turks even if their shoes are size 14. But this was the first time I’d been up against sexual apartheid, and felt I ought to do something about it before the idea spread to Johannesburg and we’d all be in trouble.
“In old days,” grieved Osman Israhar, “was forbidden to look by woman. Then was better.”
I immediately fell into a funk at thought of all the good times I had missed.
“We don’t even let them in The Oak Room,” I agreed happily, thinking to cheer him up. But this cross between a crow and a barbed-wire fence didn’t even catch the reference.
“It’s
the men’s bar of a hotel I happen to own in New York,” I felt obliged to explain. “I used to own The Downstairs at The Upstairs too, but I traded it for St. Nick’s Arena. Then the boxing game went to hell and I bartered my holdings for 50 per cent of Hurricane Jackson. I was ruined.”
They would have laughed in Black Oak. But on this provincial it was pure waste of good material. I had to talk to somebody—but why couldn’t it be Barry Goldwater instead of a ragged Turk driving a jalopy with a spring coming through the seat? Why did it have to be a skinny Asiatic instead of Ramfis Trujillo? Why did it have to be somebody who couldn’t drive better than Jack Kerouac? All I had to sharpen my wits on was an undeveloped Mongol caught between Khrushchev and David Susskind, and if I had a ten-foot strap I’d flog him out of the studio. “Raped any Circassian school kids today, Abdul?” I’d put it to him. “How many Christian ears did you pin up this morning—or were you too busy playing unnatural games?” Honest to God, isn’t it bad enough to have a crowd of Uruguayans tossing tomatoes at James C. Hagerty without my being trapped in Istanbul with a cab driver who can’t find his way to the Bosporus? The more I thought about it, the more certain I felt that the French ought to have let Osman take his own chances. He plainly didn’t know where he was going, and I was spiteful enough not to tell him, purely to see what his own plans might be.
It did cross my mind to have him take me to a Turkish bath. I once went to one in Chicago, and the man at the window gave me two bars of soap and said, “Have fun and come out clean.” Fun? I was there three days, and when I came out I still had both bars! On the other hand, a Turkish bath on Division Street is one thing, but one full of Mohammedans is a different proposition; one I decided to forego lest they get the idea I had come around to gather material instead of taking a bath.
Osman’s plan, as it is that of every cab driver in Istanbul, was to ignore all requests of the infidel in the rear seat and drive straight to the hill where someone named Pierre Loti once lived. Not that interest in this forgotten littérateur is that lively among Turkish cabbies, but merely because it is the longest drive in town.
I have never been moved by the writing of this French maritime officer, but when Osman assured me that where we were going was to Piyer Loti I submitted, thinking that, even if he had not been much of a writer, it might be a good idea to look at the scene where he had such a success that his name still gives a big assist to the tourist racket around the Dardanelles. I’d see how he got his start without bothering with how he finished.
He had gotten his start by dwelling at great length on “the mysterious heart of the Turkish woman.” The question thereafter arising that, if Turkish women were that mysterious, how was it that Piyer was more interested in the mysterious heart of the Turkish boy? A sense of responsibility toward his literary reputation subsequently beguiled him into an affair with three veiled women at once just to save time. When the three turned out to be Frenchwomen who were putting him on, it was about time.
At the foot of the height upon which Piyer’s cottage still stood, I abandoned Osman Israhar without a parting song.
The way up was narrow, steep, and overgrown by weeds. I would not have minded getting out of breath to see how a good writer of the past had gotten his start, but making it uphill to see how this Tümmler had put it over was somewhat discouraging. It was like getting out of breath to see the typewriter of Max Shulman.
Once I’d made it, however, I was glad I had. It offered a view of the Dardanelles truly startling. Who was more startled, myself or the Dardanelles, is a question only posterity will answer. Yet there below me lay The Golden Gate, Galata Bridge, Ataturk Bridge, Ataboy Bay, The Sea of Marmara, The Vale of Tralee, and my old buddy, Bosporus.
I could see Besikatas, Domabahçe Beyoglu, and somebody cooking shish kebab in Kabatas Iskelesi. I could even make out the umlauts in Üsküdar standing up like tiny minarets but I couldn’t see what Eartha Kitt was up to. It was a commanding view but it wasn’t that commanding. I could make out the Florence Nightingale Hospital, the German Hospital, the Belgian Consulate, and five Laotians led by a landing party of C.I.A. marines. A battalion of SS troops was practicing the Marseillaise and a Portuguese bishop was telling Pandit Nehru that he’d give India Angola if Nehru would let the Portuguese keep Goa. It looked like Nehru was shaking his head, No. I could see the Harlem Globetrotters too. But I couldn’t make out who that was they were still playing.
So leave us bid farewell to fashionable Asia where the new contrasts with the old and the old contrasts with the prehistoric and the prehistoric just mills around because it doesn’t have a damn thing to which to contrast itself. A fond adieu to bonny Dundee where kittens live under melon rinds and June St. Clair once captured my schoolboy’s heart. Auf wiedersehen, old Asiatic squatters on cobbles turned rust-red with blood of Scythian and Khan; thanks for turning a color that matched my shoes. À votre santé to all French wenches between Rue Saint-Denis and Ataboy Bridge. Hip-hip-hooray for Osman Israhar who couldn’t find his way to the Bosporus. Thank God for Greek cab drivers who would rather go to Piraeus than the Parthenon because it is farther. May Allah send alms to sellers of water and sellers of weight, beggar and bootblack both alike—and if Allah don’t care then God help you, privates of all Turkish barracks paying for your American fatigues by eating American pork and beans: May your dog tags never return to Beyoglu without you.
And one lingering Continental-type kiss to the Turkish woman whose heart is mysterious so long as she stays indoors. Goodbye and good luck to all small men at desks with English dictionaries writing “Americans know to tip but there is no limit to generosity.”
Farewell to ancestral Byzantium where ancient and modern world meet and both are that much worse for meeting. Goodbye and goodbye, great bear of the noonday street; may you stay out of jail forever. For I loved your hair and eyes. Au revoir to all covered bazaars, may none of you be uncovered. I wish adieu and fresh milk to milkless kittens—better luck next time around.
Goodbye to bear and shine-boy alike and to all who must dance in the noonday street. May your yearnings never cease.
Goodbye for keeps and a single day, forgotten farm boy who came to town in 1893, who came to hear music and see the dancing.
And heard, in all the years that followed, no music save the beat of one toneless drum.
CHICAGO I
THE NIGHT-COLORED RIDER
A winter of a single wind has tattered the El-station ad that once promised lessons in the waltz by the Waltz-King of the Merry Gardens. Its tatters seem less merry now: Waltz-King and waltzers alike are gone.
Gone with the Twelfth Street dandy with cap tipped for love in Garfield Park, who stepped off here beside the Monday-morning salesgirl, her lashes still tinted by Sunday’s mascara. Gone with the Mogen David wino and Virginia Dare drunky, wearing Happy-New-Year snow over their shoulders, who once sought summertime in a bottle below these ties. Rain has stained the gum machine that gave strangers a choice of Spearmint, Doublemint, or Juicy Fruit. It has rusted the rounded guardrail that now has nothing left to guard save a peanut machine; whose peanuts are long vended now.
Up the banked snow to tattery ads in a blood-red glare, shadows race like snow-children tonight; then toboggan down. Two railroad lamps, at either end of the platform, tip and dip when the midnight B-train passes, like flares left burning on a raft abandoned in a rising sea. Till a fog shot with neon shuts out all sound.
All sound save that of some carefree summer’s couldn’t-care-less piano, honkytonking a midnight out of times long gone— a midnight when saloon doors kept swinging all night for the first summer night of the year.
If it wasn’t for powder
‘n for store-bought hair—
For the blue-and-white legend that once named this platform, its ads that once wheedled, its legends that bragged, all have passed in the wash of this last of blue snows. Leaving nothing but lovers’ kisses, given while pigeons made summer strut, in its evening corners.
Then a fog shot with neon closes down
Waltz-King and waltzers alike are gone.
He was a fixer of tools, a mender of machinery in basements and garages. He used electrical tape as a physician uses a tourniquet. He was a geneticist of lathes, for he prolonged the lives of brushes stiff with sclerosis of paint. He was one who had no life except while fixing:
The plaster that had cracked, the rainpipe that had clogged, the hinge that had rusted, the saw that had blunted, the glass that had shattered, the beam that had split.
Other men wished to be forever drunken. He wished to be forever fixing: The step that had rotted, the fence wind had bent, the clock that lost time, the light fixture gone dark.
He ministered to bolts whose threading was worn; he had an understanding with cement. He moved among pistons and vises and cylinders carrying an oilcan and a rag. His ear was less attuned to human speech than to the delicate play of gears: in dreams of ball bearings he sensed that one dream-bearing was less rounded than others.
He was a solderer, a welder, a tool-and-dye maker, a carpenter who could handle electricity.
Algren at Sea Page 20
