Gorgeous East

by null

  7.

  The tea peddler and the letter writer stood waiting on the sidewalk when Smith, blinking, dazzled by the outdoor light, came down the steps from the Galatasary station. Smith, dressed again in his own clothes, now indelibly stained with Vatran’s blood, his boots and watch returned, smelled like an animal after a week in the cell without washing, but this didn’t seem to bother the waiting Turks. The tea peddler stepped up first and embraced him warmly, tears in his eyes.

  “Benim maalesef çocuk!” the tea peddler lamented, wiping tears from his face. “Benim çocuk!”

  The letter writer stood back gravely, like a concerned uncle, then reached out and took hold of Smith’s hand.

  “Hakim and I have been concerned,” the letter writer said. “We have much found your photograph in the newspapers.”

  Smith had never been happier to see anyone in his life than these two relative strangers.

  “Geez, guys!” he managed, temporarily reverting to his original Midwestern self. “Oh, geez! Thanks so much for coming!”

  “Did they beat you?” the letter writer asked, lowering his voice. “Did they beat you here”—he gestured to the blown-out wingtip he wore—“bottom of your feet?”

  “No.” Smith shook his head.

  “Because there exist laws against such practice.” The letter writer wagged his head adamantly. “Very strict laws against use of the falaka, which is a small but very terrible stick to beat the bottom of the feet. We are a civilized nation, we Turks. We have been civilized for many years and such practices are no longer allowed.”

  “Really, I’m O.K.,” Smith said. “Tamam, tamam.” It was the one Turkish word he had adopted into his personal vocabulary. So neat and expressive: Tamam. It’s fine.

  “Very good,” the letter writer said. “We go.”

  The Turks each took one of Smith’s arms and walked him over to the tram station at Tünel. The tram came; the letter writer dropped a handful of coins into the till, enough for all three of them, and they clambered up and clanked slowly along Istiklal on this antique conveyance. Smith stared out the window dazed, nearly terrified by the crazy swirl of pedestrians and cars, but he couldn’t take his eyes away. Over the course of the week in the fluorescent cell, he had come to know every crack in its gray-green walls, every subtle gradation of color; his ears attuned to faint scraping sounds far away in the silence. All the noise and movement on the street now suggested the immediate aftermath of an explosion: He was glad for the watery hush of the Abdulhak Hamit Hamam—a dilapidated, old-fashioned steam bath—when they got there twenty minutes later.

  Once again, Smith surrendered his clothes and was this time given a pair of wooden clogs and a striped towel to cover his lower half. He left the tea peddler and the letter writer in the antechamber, the peeling wood-paneled camekan, and followed the bath attendant into the steam room. Here he sat for a contemplative hour, sweating profusely, the foul stench of incarceration running out of his pores. At last, the attendant returned and led him to the marble gobektasi and laid him out facedown and went to work, slapping and kneading and twisting Smith’s limbs, his joints cracking, his skin pinkening beneath the blows. When he could take no more of this beating, he was lathered, rinsed, and released, wobbly and weak in the knees, into one of the outer rooms. Here, on a wooden bench, the tea peddler and the letter writer sat waiting for him. They had in the meantime gone to the Stamboul Palace and retrieved Smith’s duffel and the remainder of his clothes.

  “Thank you, my friends,” Smith said, once again moved by their concern for his welfare.

  He sat on the bench between them and tea was brought—strong and sweet, with mint leaves crushed at the bottom like a mojito.

  “Pek parlak degil,” commented the tea peddler, by way of professional assessment, making a face, but he drank the stuff anyway and the three of them sipped for a while in companionable silence. Then, the tea peddler set down his cup and spoke at length. When he stopped speaking, he smiled sadly and patted Smith’s arm in a consoling manner. This gesture was the only thing that didn’t need translating:

  “Hakim says many thing,” the letter writer began, after a moment. “But first he says to know you are a gentle person who is like his son to him, and he is sad such terrible events happen to you.”

  “Thanks, Hakim.” Smith nodded. “Thank you so much.”

  “Also he says about how he see your picture published in Akit where they write that you do terrible, un-Turkish, and anti-Islamic things. That you cause the killing of a good Turk, that you spit, so to speak, on the beard of the prophet, peace be upon him. Understand, following your arrest there was very many people shouting outside the Galatasary police station, they”—he hesitated, a flush coming to his cheeks—“wanted to take you, to beat you, they want to cut your”—he indicated Smith’s crotch—“your manhood away. They try to smash the door down so the police must come out with plastic shields, with helmets and clubs—but before this, Hakim comes. Hakim stands up and says how you are only such a sensitive boy brought low by the woman in the window. He tells what he has seen, the golden-haired woman almost naked there beneath a big piece of glass, but no one will believe him. They shout, they throw rocks. Finally there is a terrible fight and the police beat many people with clubs and the crowd goes away finally, some to prison, some to hospital.”

  “My God!” Smith said, horrified. “I had no idea. How awful!” He’d caused a riot, he’d almost caused the lynching of his good friend the tea peddler!

  “Very terrible,” the letter writer agreed. “So we come back four days ago to have you out of jail, because of course you have done nothing wrong, but Inspektor Biryak tells us they must keep you locked up until passions are forgot by the people, but not to worry because the people is so easy to forget—” He paused to take a sip of his tea. “The inspektor was indeed correct. Today, they shout and scream about another things, a few foolish cartoons of the prophet in a newspaper in Finland, and now you are here safe with us.”

  “Oh, geez,” Smith began, but he couldn’t say more, again moved to tears by what these two men had done for him: The tea peddler had confronted a lynch mob on his behalf; both of them had sought his release from imprisonment in a country where such an action might have been construed as sedition and landed them behind bars with no tradition of habeas corpus to get them out again.

  “How can I ever repay you—” Smith began, but the letter writer interrupted gently.

  “Good men must help other good men,” he said. “In America, in Istanbul, doesn’t matter. Else the bad sleep well.” He made a gesture.

  “Yes, you’re right,” Smith said, touched by the nobility of this sentiment—though he couldn’t think of himself at that moment as a very good man.

  “Nerede gidis?” the tea peddler asked, and the letter writer translated.

  “I don’t know.” Smith shrugged. “Back to Paris for now. Then, New York. Or somewhere to toughen up, emotionally, I mean. I definitely need to get my shit together. Maybe I’ll join the Marines,” he joked. “That’s what Jessica said . . .”

  When the tea was done, Smith dressed quickly in clean clothes from the duffel, and the men took him on the tram to Tünel, where they transferred to the funicular down to Karakoy. From here, they walked arm in arm through the crowds across the Galata Bridge, the tower on Galata Hill receding behind. A stiff breeze lifted off the Golden Horn, whipping the blue-green water beneath the pilings into whitecaps. The wind and the water brought Smith’s spirits up a notch—I have never had such good friends, he thought—and they got back on the tram at Eminonu and rode it down one stop to the Sirkeci Station.

  On trains departing from the echoing interior of this tile and plaster terminus, it was possible to reach Paris via Edirne, Sofia, Bucharest, Vienna, Brussels, and points in-between, an expensive trip even at its cheapest, with four or five transfers that would take several days and consume nearly all of Smith’s remaining funds. He didn’t have a plane ticket back to
the States, hadn’t planned that far ahead. But he couldn’t allow himself to think further along than Paris—a city he knew well, where he had once lived for eight months during an AID-Amicale Etats-Unis-sponsored production of Oklahoma! (not a great gig); he’d only been in the chorus.

  Maybe in Paris it would be possible to get a temporary job, save a little money for the trip home.

  8.

  The tea peddler and the letter writer waited with Smith for two hours for the Thessaloníki local, which was an hour and a half late. Sirkeci Station, empty in the early part of the day, filled with commuters on their way back to the outer suburbs, to Cankurtaran and Yenikapi, to Yesilkoy, its un-kept rose gardens and tiny, cigarette-strewn beach of black sand now overshadowed with storm clouds blowing down from the Black Sea. The Thessaloníki train pulled in at last, disgorging women in headscarves and seedy-looking Balkan types wearing dingy pin-striped suits and carrying heavy briefcases full of who knows what.

  “I better get a seat,” Smith said, standing up. He embraced both of them manfully. Then the tea peddler spoke.

  “He would like to have something,” the letter writer translated.

  “Of course,” Smith said, slightly disappointed in this last-minute mercenary turn. “I don’t have much money left, but he can have it all.” He reached for his wallet.

  “Hayir, hayir.” The tea peddler patted the air between them, offended.

  “He means a small personal item,” the letter writer explained. “A souvenir to remember you. A scarf, perhaps?”

  “Oh. Yeah, sure . . .” Smith searched through his duffel and pulled out a faded blue sweatshirt, nicely worn, with the motto I TOOK A SWIG AT NIGS!—WISCONSIN DELLS 1997 printed across the front in circus-style lettering.

  It was from Smith’s favorite bar in the world, a little hole-in-the-wall place in Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin. As he handed over this precious garment, he saw in the eye of his memory the falls glittering beyond the dusty fan-shaped window over the bar, the fat tourists from Milwaukee and Cedar Rapids filling up the stools, the putt-putt golf courses and go-kart ovals out on Route 12. He’d gone down to the Dells, to Story Book Land and the roller coasters and the water parks, every summer when he was a kid with his parents and sister before her unexpected demise and all the complications that followed. And later, during college, he went back to smoke pot along the hiking trails and drink at Nigs and the other dives along Main Street and ride the amphibious Ducks drunk and high through the limestone gorges. He’d lost his virginity there on the morning of his nineteenth birthday in room three of the Hotel Hiawatha with a pale, pink-nippled, redheaded sorority girl from Madison. Afterwards, they’d gone skinny-dipping in the river at a secret place she knew about, the cold water as red as her hair from iron ore deposits in the soil. All this he folded into the faded blue sweatshirt as he folded it neatly and handed it over to the Turk.

  “Take this, my friend,” he said.

  The tea peddler nodded his thanks, eyes downcast.

  Smith then took out a scrap of envelope and scrawled out the address of a friend in New York who might hold mail for him and gave it over to the letter writer. “I don’t really have an address right now. But you can try this. Send me a postcard, tell me how you’re doing.”

  Then he shook their hands one last time, took up his duffel, and mounted the steep metal steps into the second-class car and lost himself in the onion-smelling interior. The best good-byes are the swiftest. He hunkered down in an empty seat and watched through the scratched window as the tea peddler and the letter writer walked across the marble platform and disappeared into the forward rush of commuters. They didn’t look back. Smith didn’t bother to knock on the window or wave. He knew he would never see them again, would never return to Istanbul, and was filled with an unaccountable sadness at the thought, even though such terrible things had happened and he hadn’t been happy there, not for a single moment.

  A few minutes later, with no preliminaries, no whistles or bells, the train lurched forward and began to move slowly along the tracks through Eminonu, beneath the aqueduct built by Valens nearly two thousand years ago, past the Hippodrome and the Great Bazaar, which once brimmed with the spoils of the gorgeous East. It began to rain. Light at first, then heavy; a downpour darkening the elegant fluted columns of the Blue Mosque, the wide green domes of the Hagia Sophia, washing cigarette butts and discarded lottery tickets and orange rinds and other urban rubbish into the deep, stagnant cisterns beneath the city.

  5

  THE END OF SMITH

  1.

  In Paris, Smith looked for work and stayed two nights in the cheapest hostel he could find—a dingy flea trap in an anonymous quartier near Cité Universitaire, just beyond the Périphérique—but soon realized he was both too old and too American for such low-class digs. On the second night, the six belligerent Australian backpackers with whom he shared his dormitory-style room stumbled in piss-drunk at 1:00 A.M. They had acquired an illegal passkey from the desk clerk, a fellow Australian, thus circumventing the hostel’s 10:30 curfew. And though the rules also forbade the consumption of l’alcool on the premises, the Australians carried a case and a half of Pelican Brun between them and continued to drink heavily for the next couple of hours, talking at full volume, lurching drunkenly between the painted metal bunks, vomiting in the sink.

  Smith, outraged, protested twice. The first time the Australians ignored him. The second time they threatened to beat him senseless if he didn’t shut his mouth. Still rattled from the ordeal in Istanbul, Smith was in no shape for a fight, especially not with six drunken Australians; so he shut his mouth, crawled deeper into his bunk, and jammed a musty-smelling pillow over his head. He managed to catch a half hour’s tortured sleep sometime after the Australians passed out around 5:00 A.M.

  First light showed pink and pale blue and exhausted in the sky above the black monolith of the Tour de Montparnasse. The Australians snored, an alcoholic cacophony every bit as loud and odiferous as a diesel-powered generator going full blast. Smith, despairing of further sleep, rose and dressed. Then he gathered up several half-empty bottles of Pelican lying around the room and quietly dumped the remaining contents into open Australian backpacks. This stealthy act of revenge accomplished, he slipped out of the hostel by a side door.

  Traffic was just picking up along the boulevard Jourdan. Smith felt the rumble of the métro at Cité Universitaire as a small earthquake beneath the pavement beneath his feet. He bought a bottle of mineral water and a fresh-baked baguette, still warm, at a boulangerie near the busy intersection of avenue Reille and avenue René Coty, and found a bench in the Parc de Montsouris. Swans slept on the muddy banks of the small island in the middle of the lake, slate-colored in this early light, heads tucked beneath their wings. Munching grimly on the baguette, Smith counted out his remaining funds. The total amount came to less than he had expected—115 U.S. dollars in traveler’s checks, 63 euros in cash, and a handful of useless Turkish lirasi, maybe 8 dollars’ worth. Not enough for a plane ticket to New York at current rates, even on an underbooked Air India charter flight with babies screaming and nonstop Bollywood movies playing on the drop-downs.

  He saved the second half of the baguette for lunch and, to economize on métro fare, walked an hour across the city, from the Fourteenth to the Fourth Arrondissement—which is to say from Observatoire to the Quai des Célestins—to the American Cultural Center in the basement of the American Methodist Church overlooking the green-brown waters of the Seine. Here the Methodists maintain what they call the Official Paris English-Language Job and Housing Bank. This grandiose moniker conceals a somewhat paltry reality: five or six tattered binders with the good listings already ripped out; two computer terminals upon which, for a euro a minute, the applicant might consult craigslist France; and one overladen bulletin board covered with rarely culled three-by-five cards and myriad scraps of paper listing both employment opportunities and apartments to share. From the Job Bank’s quirky porthole wind
ows it was just possible to glimpse the tall white facades of the Isle St. Louis, anchored like the fantasy of a luxury liner in the middle of the river.

  Smith spent the morning down there, sorting through the outdated listings (English Language Tutor Wanted—French required; Companion for Elderly Man—French required; English-Speaking Tour Leader—French required; Child Care Provider—French required), wasting precious resources on watery cups of coffee from an American-style vending machine, on fleeting chunks of Internet time and phone calls to numbers that had been disconnected, to jobs that had been filled six months ago.

  At about two in the afternoon, as he stood dumbly studying the bulletin board for the last time, a young woman came down the short flight of steps from the Quai des Célestins and through the foyer and the glass doors into the Job Bank and stepped up and pinned a yellow scrap of paper to the board with all the other scraps. She was in her early twenties, short and a little overweight, with brown hair and a shiny-greasy complexion unadulterated by makeup. Her brown eyes held a slightly crazed, glittery look. She wore a pair of Ole Miss sweatpants and a bulky beige cable-knit sweater; the knockoff Hermès scarf knotted around her neck seemed a pointless concession to French fashion sense.

  “Y’all looking for a job, or a place to stay?” the young woman said brightly to Smith, her voice drawly and Southern.

  Smith turned to look at her. “Both, I guess,” he said. Something about her eyes made him want to look away.

  “Well, my goddamned co-loc bagged on me last week, ran off with some dude to, like, the Czech Republic. Here Czech it out”—she waved to the pinned-up yellow scrap—“get it, Czech it out? Hey, that was a joke, y’all.”

  “Funny,” Smith said, not meaning it. But he leaned forward and squinted at the spidery, nearly illegible handwriting on the scrap: Quartier Ménilmontant-Père-Lachaise, he deciphered, on a street he’d never heard of. One bedroom; sleeping couch in living area. The rent at 250 euros per month was crazy-cheap for Paris, even for a closet or a bit of floor space in a corner.