Algren at Sea (26 page)

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—

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 shower 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.

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.