Algren at Sea (27 page)

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.

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.

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: