Algren at Sea (25 page)

Greek coffee is the best in the world, but there was no Greek coffee. There was no coffee, period. But Romanos broke a loaf of bread with his hands, handed me half, and apologized—“Greek bread knife.”

When he whistled to a man on the other end of the boat, he added, “Greek telephone.”

I don't know what would happen to Ionnis' mind if he ever sat down to
bifteck poivre
and a bottle of Beaujolais. It would snap, that's all.

A dusty South Italian light was beginning to fall aslant the walls of the Venetian fortress that guards old Herakleion. Behind us the sun came up Egyptian gold.

Romanos strung a dozen herring together and tied on the squid who didn't care for me. It was money out of the pockets of the men, yet nobody grumbled. It was a gift. I took it.

“Send me postcard, Eiffel Tower,” Ionnis Romanos asked me. Behind the desk at the hotel the clerk was still sleeping. I tied the line of fish to his chair and laid the squid on his desk.

Maybe it would like the clerk better than me was my thinking.

The singular plan the management of the Conrad-Istangump had devised for non-Muslims consisted of placing a non-Muslim sporting a bow tie, namely myself, upon a veranda overlooking the Sea of Marmara. Here I was forced to strain my eyes to make out the small print of my guidebook because the batteries of the tie had gone dead that same morning.

Encyclopedic Istanbul, Including a Dictionary of Prominent Persons
was by one Monim Eser, and one was enough.

“Turks are members of the White Race,” Monim lost no time in cheering me up, for that's how I got my own start and I'm not going to turn on society now by asking Under What Circumstances Did You Leave Your Last Employer, Kemal? If someone wants to wait till the last possible minute to join a losing organization, that's nobody's business but some other Turk's. The moment for a fresh extension of the White Western world had come and, speaking personally, I was pleased to look upon these simple folk with new eyes; this being the color that bears closest watching.

Whether my waiter or the Sea of Marmara would be the first to make a funny move was 6-5, and take your pick. Sure enough, it turned out to be our new member. He put something down on me that tasted like a cross between English grog and the hair of a hyena that has been out all night. One glance at the sneak who'd served me this deathly potion and my worst suspicions about hyenas were confirmed. They'll date
anybody.

He stopped beaming idiotically long enough to make a circular movement with his dial finger while inquiring, “You wish to do shoppings?”

For reply I pitched the contents of his hyenafied grog over the veranda rail—not so much out of disgust with the stuff as in hope of hitting somebody below.

Should my mood appear foul, bear in mind that it was one imposed upon me, like all that sea water, by a management that had promptly disclaimed its responsibility.

And also considering that the most cheerful note of my childhood was my father's Saturday-night pealing of my mood was about as light as anyone has a right to expect.

Pa's lifelong confusion about Turkish women was only an extension of his confusion about all women. When Black Oak, Indiana, lost him to Chicago in 1893, my own difficulties began. He came to see the World's Columbian Exposition, but all he recalled of it later was Little Egypt. His reminiscing eventually led me to haunt the burlesque houses of South State Street in search of some Little Egypt of my own.

The closest I came was my discovery, in 1929, of Miss June St. Clair. Had it not been for her I might well have completed a four-year high-school course in four and a half years. Because of Miss St. Clair, it took me only five.

So in expecting someone either to take me off the veranda or to remove the Sea of Marmara, I was hardly asking more than I richly deserved.

I resolved, nonetheless, that any personal disappointment I felt in the Near East would not be taken out upon this innocent countryman unless an opportunity presented itself.

“Turks are fine-looking people, something like North Italians of medium size,” Monim filled me in, “with light-blond or dark-colored hair and brown to dark-colored eyes, many having green and blue eyes and small feet.” I glanced at my waiter's shoes and saw he had been obtained in a cultural exchange with the Harlem Globetrotters. Who they'd be playing in Turkey is an issue that still gives me wakeful nights.

“U.S. tourists know to tip,” Monim had to concede, “but for their information there is no limit to generosity. Tip an additional 5 to 10 per cent at restaurants, bellboy, maid, porter and suitable sum to doorman and elevator but never involve friendship with sightseeing.”

Not only have I never been involved in friendly fashion with a sightseer but I haven't yet tipped a waiter and don't plan to begin. Not after once
having suffered entrapment at the hands of one in The Oak Room. Had he cleared that table instead of nattering away with the chef, the half-dollar under the saucer would never have come to the attention of my hand just as the sneak padfooted up.

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 looking 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.