Orient Express (2 page)

Thum-rum-tum: thum-rum-tum on an enormous tambourine and the conquering whine of a bagpipe. Two tall men with gaudy turbans round their fezzes come out of a lane leading a monkey. The thumping, wheezing tune is the very soul of the monkey's listless irregular walk. Carters stop their carts. Beggars jump up from where they had been crouching by the shady wall. The ragpickers try to straighten their bent backs and shade their eyes against the sun to see. Waiters in dress-suits hang out from the windows of the hotel. Taking advantage of the crowd, two men carrying a phonograph with a white enamelled horn on a sort of a table with handles, set it down and start it playing an amazing tune like a leaky water-faucet. The tall men with the monkey thump their tambourine in derision and swagger away.

Downstairs in the red plush lobby of the Pera Palace there is scuttling and confusion. They are carrying out a man in a frock coat who wears on his head a black astrakhan cap. There's blood in the red plush armchair; there's blood on the mosaic floor. The manager walks back and forth with sweat standing out on his brow; they can mop up the floor but the chair is ruined. French, Greek and Italian gendarmes swagger about talking all together each in his own language. The poor bloke's dead, sir, says the British M.P. to the colonel who doesn't know whether to finish his cocktail or not. Azerbaidjan. Azerbaidjan. He was the envoy from Azerbaidjan. An Armenian, a man with a beard, stood in the doorway and shot him. A man with glasses and a smooth chin, a Bolshevik spy, walked right up to him and shot him. The waiter who brings drinks from the bar is in despair. The drinkers have all left without paying.

2.
Jardin de Taxim

A table under a striped umbrella at the edge of the terrace of the restaurant at Taxim Garden (Entrée 5 piastres, libre aux militaires). Dardenella from a Russian orchestra. On the slope below a fence made of hammered-out Standard Oil tins encloses a mud hut beside which a donkey grazes. Two men squat placidly on the slope at the gate and look out, across some tacky little villas, like villas at Nice, and a gas tank streaked red with fresh paint, at the Bosphorus and the Asian hills. It is nearly dark. The Bosphorus shines about the string of grey battleships at anchor. Between the brown hills in the foreground and the blue hills in the distance curls up a thick pillar of smoke. One thinks of villages burning, but this is too far to the north, and they have a habit at this season in the back country of burning off the hills to smoke out brigands. The orchestra is resting for a moment. From the yellow barracks to the left comes a tune on a hurdygurdy and a quavering voice singing.

Then the rim of an enormous bloodorange moon rolls up out of Asia.

Presently when one has eaten caviar and pilaf and sword-fish from the Black Sea washed down by Nectar beer, made at the edge of town in the brewery of a certain gentleman of immeasurable wealth named Bomonti, the show begins on the stage among the trees. International vaudeville. First a Russian lady waves a green handkerchief in a peasant dance with a certain timid grace one feels sure was learned at some fashionable dancing academy in Moscow. Then two extraordinarily tough English girls in socks and jumpers, perhaps ex of the pony ballet at the Folies Bergères. One of them croons in a curious bored and jerky manner as they go through the steps and kicking that shocked country parsons at the Gaiety when Queen Victoria was a girl. Then come Greek acrobats, a comic Russian lady understood only by her compatriots, a Frenchwoman in black with operatic arms and a conservatoire manner who sings the mad scene from “Lucia” several times to huge applause, a pitiful little woman in pink tulle dancing the Moment Musicale with that peculiar inanity of gesture encouraged by dancing instructresses in American state capitals, and so on endlessly.

Meanwhile people move about the gardens among the locusttrees; jokes are passed, drinks poured. There are flirtations, pairings off. Three girls arm in arm dart into a side path followed by three Italian sailors, brown sinewy youngsters in white suits. A party of Greek officers are very gay. Their army has taken Eski Chehir. The Kemalists are about to leave Ismid. Tino is a great king after all. Opposite them two elderly Turkish gentlemen in frock coats and white vests pull impassively on their narghiles. Further back seven gobs are getting noisily drunk at a round table. Toward the gate stands an Italian gendarme, imported all complete from the buttons on his coattails to his shiny tricorne, and a British M.P. with A.P.C. (standing for Allied Police Commission) in handsome letters on his sleeve.

Why do you want to learn Turkish? a Greek girl asks me, a look of puzzled irritation on her face. You must side with the Greeks; you mustn't learn Turkish.

Flits through my head a memory of the little yellow tables and chairs under the great planetree beside the mosque of Bayazid over in Stamboul, the pigeons, and the old men with beards as white as their white cotton turbans who sat there gravely nodding their heads in endless slow discussions; and how a beggar inconceivably old, yellow like frayed damask, gnarled like a dying plumtree, had asked for a light from my cigarette and then smiling had pointed to the glass of water that stood beside my little coffeecup, and how when I had handed him the water, he had had to crouch low to the ground to drink it, his back was so bent; and the gesture full of sceptered kings with which he had put back the glass and thanked me with a wave of a skinny corded hand. There was something in that wave of the hand of the soaring of minarets and the cry of muezzins and the impassive eyes of the elderly Turkish gentlemen in white vests sitting so quiet beside rejoicing Greeks in the Jardin de Taxim. There are reasons for learning Turkish.

Then when one has seen all one can stand of international vaudeville, of Russian ladies trying to earn a few pennies for the hard bread of exile, of Levantine dancers and beached European singers, one walks home along the Grande Rue de Pera. Along the curbs are more Russian refugees, soldiers in varied worn uniforms that once were Wrangel's army, selling everything imaginable out of little trays slung about their necks—paper flowers and kewpie dolls, shoelaces and jumping jacks and little colored silhouettes under glass of mosques and cypresses, and cakes round and square and lifepreserver-shaped. They are men of all ages and conditions, mostly with dense white northern skins and fair close-cropped hair, all with a drawn hungry look about the cheekbones and a veiled shudder of pain in their eyes. In the restaurants one can see through the open windows pale girls with veils bound tight about their hair. On the arms of two stout Armenians two rouged and densely powdered ladies in twin dresses of flounced pink ride out of an alleyway on the jingling waves that spurt from a mechanical piano.

Further along a onelegged Russian soldier stands against a lamppost, big red hands covering his face, and sobs out loud.

3.
Massacre

The red plush salon of the Pera Palace Hotel. The archbishop, a tall man in flowing black with a beautiful curly chestnut-colored beard and gimlet eyes, is pouring out an impetuous torrent of Greek. Listening to him a Greek lady elaborately dressed in rose satin, an American naval officer, a journalist, some miscellaneous frock-coated people. Clink of ice in highballs being brought to two British majors across the room. The archbishop lifts a slender Byzantine hand and orders coffee. Then he changes to French, lisping a little his long balanced phrases, in which predominate the words
horreur, atrocité, œuvre humanitaire, civilisation mondiale.
The Turks in Samsoun, the Kemalists, who some weeks since deported the men of orthodox faith, have now posted an order to deport the women and children. Three days' notice. Of course that means … Massacre, says someone hastily.

The archbishop's full lips are at the rim of his tiny coffeecup. He drinks quickly and meticulously. In one's mind beyond the red plush a vision of dark crowds crawling inland over sunshrivelled hills. The women were crying and wailing in the streets of Samsoun, says the officer. The news must be sent out, continues the archbishop; the world must know the barbarity of the Turks; America must know. A telegram to the President of the United States must be sent off. Again in one's mind beyond red plush salons, and the polished phrases of official telegrams, the roads at night under the terrible bloodorange moon of Asia, and the wind of the defiles blowing dust among huddled women, stinging the dark attentive eyes of children, and far off on the heat-baked hills a sound of horsemen.

In a big armchair beside the window a Turk with grizzled eyebrows and with eyes as soft and as brown as the archbishop's beard looks unmovedly at nothing. One by one the oval amber beads of a conversation chaplet drop through his inscrutably slow white fingers.

4.
Assassination

Extracts from a letter published under “Tribune Libre” in the
Presse du Soir
that comes out in Pera every evening with two pages of French and four of Russian:

The eighteenth of June my husband, Bekhboud Djevanchir Khan, was murdered.

I the undersigned, his wife, of Russian origin, trust to your kindness for the publication of certain facts which will put an end I hope to the false rumors that are attainting the dead man's good name.

I have never been separated from my husband and God has made me witness of all the horror of these last years.

March 1918. The wreck of the Russian army crawling back from the Turkish front. At Baku the power is in the hands of Armenians who have adopted the Bolshevist platform. By order of no one knows who, according to a prearranged plan, there is organized a massacre of the Muslim population.

Never till my last breath shall I forget those terrible days. They were tracking my husband; his name was on the list of the proscribed. By a miracle he escaped. We fled the town and after unbelievable privations, succeeded in getting to Elisabethpol.

Months passed. Power changed hands, and my husband was called to the post of Minister of the Interior in the first Azerbaidjan cabinet. Turkish detachments draw near to Baku and again, before they reach the town, the bloody happenings of September are unrolled. It was the terrible reply of the Muslims to the March massacres.

My husband hastens to Baku to put an end to these riots, but by the time he arrives the wave of national hatred has subsided. National hate gives way to class hate; the Bolsheviki aspire towards power and the local population, tired of national and religious strife, see in the Reds a neutral force.

In the beginning of 1920, the Bolsheviki have control and start settling their scores with the representatives of the national parties. We are driven out of our house; everything we have is taken from us. My husband is arrested by the extraordinary commission and sentenced to death. But the particular conditions in Baku and his great influence oblige the Soviet powers to free him. In spite of his reiterated solicitations they refuse to let him leave the country, knowing that he is a mining engineer and one of the best specialists on the naphtha industry. Fate itself reserves for him the rôle of “spec.” He is offered a post in the commissariat of foreign affairs which offers possibilities of a foreign mission.

My husband accepts and some time afterwards we leave for Constantinople. Here death awaited him: an assassin's hand ended the life of my husband whose only crime was to love above all things his people and his country, to which he had consecrated his studies, his work and all his life.

Two words more on the subject of the rumors that my husband had betrayed his companions of the “Moussavat” party, and that for this they had condemned him to death. In the eyes of those who have even slightly known the defunct, these rumors are so absurd that they are not worth the trouble of denying. Such gossip will not be able to tarnish, in the hearts of those who intimately knew him, the glorious memory of the defunct.

I am, yours etc.

5.
The Crescent

They sell amber beads and the notaries and scribes have their little tables and stools in the court of the mosque of Bayazid. Charitable people have left foundations for the feeding of the pigeons that circle among the dappled branches of its planes and perch, drinking, beaks tilted up, throats shimmering with each swallow, on the marble verge of its washing fountain. One flaring noon I stood against the cold granite of a column watching a Bedoueen in a stiff bournous of white wool dictate a letter to a scribe with the gestures of an emperor composing an edict to a conquered city, when I noticed that a constant string of people was going in under the high portal of the mosque. Adventuring inquisitively near, I was beckoned in by a young man who dangled a green silk tassel at the end of his string of amber beads. An old man obsequiously pushed big slippers over my shoes, and I stepped over the high threshold. The huge red-carpeted floor under the dome and the dais along the sides were full of men, beggars and porters and artisans in leather aprons and small boys with fezzes too large for their bullet heads and stately gentlemen in frock coats and white vests with festooned watch chains and gravebearded theological students in neatly wound white cotton turbans, all squatting close together with their shoes beside them. A yellowbright beam of sunlight striking across the pearly shimmer of the dome gave full on the bronze face and shining beard of the mollah who was reading the Koran and brought fierce magenta flame into the silk hanging that fell from the front of the pulpit platform. He read in a wooden staccato voice, swaying slightly with the rhythm, and in the pause at the end of each verse a soft Ameen growled through the crowd.

—It is for the fall of Adrianople, this day every year, the young man with the green tassel on his beads whispered in French in my ear—Many of these people come from Adrianople, fled from the Greeks.… Commemoration.

The man who had been reading climbed down clumsily across the magenta silk hanging and a taller man with full lips and dark cheeks flushed under hollow eyes took his place.

—Now he will pray for the army in Anatolia.