I went to Turkey because a New York art dealer had cabled me to fly to Istanbul to look over a Rose Period Picasso that had just come into the market. I was to buy it if it were really a Picasso, which didn't seem likely at the price.
We flew with the kbamseen, that hot, smothering Egyptian wind, but when we passed over the tight mouth of the Dardanelles and ran up the Sea of Marmora, the inbat, the summer breeze of Turkey, cooled us. and after hunting the Bosporus in a hot mist, the airfield came up to meet us. We bumped to a landing, and two passport officers went through us quickly but skillfully.
A trim little man with a high, balding brow and a long cigarette holder came toward me.
“Hajji H. Khalfah at your service.” he said, holding out a yellow-gloved hand to me.
I always shake hands with art dealers. “Pleased.”
He spoke a mediocre French, and I tried out a halting German. We just about made contact. Sometimes we changed over and made about the same progress.
“About the painting …” I began.
“Later, later. How do you like Turkey?”
“I've been here several times before,” I said. “It's always changing.”
“Wallabi, by God. you are right.”
We took a taxi over a fairish road that ltd to the city. The fez and the face veil were long gone, of course, and even the muezzins, who called the hour of prayer, had to wear business suits in public.
I looked at the Byzantine-Ottoman face of Hajji H. KhaIfah, and he could have been an art dealer on Fifty-Seventh Street, one of the better ones.
“Fine city now.”
I agreed. We were passing the busy Galata district with its banks and business houses, and very fancy it looked with the newsboys selling The Daily Yurt on street corners and businessmen walking around with brief cases as if a merger had just gone off in their hand. The Khalfah Gallery was small, neat, and modem and had two windows. One held two small Guys drawings, and the other a fair copy of the combined schools of Paris, signed Saadeddin.
Inside was a fairy glow of polite, expensive darkness and some soft yellow seats. No pictures.
Hajji said, “I haven't got the Picasso. It's privately owned. But we shall see it after lunch. I am sure it's a genuine Rose Period.”
“It's priced pretty low.”
“The owner needs cash in a hurry.”
“Who owns it?”
“I cannot say just yet. Let us go to lunch. My wife would be very happy to meet you. She saw your play, High Button Slippers, in Sweden.”
I hadn't seen it myself there, and maybe they had changed shoes to slippers. I know little about Sweden.
We got into a small English sports car which Hajji drove as if he were living his last ten minutes. He lived in the fashionable Pera district with its new apartment houses, and I missed the garden of valonia oak and ilex and the carob trees and fountains. Only the spires of St. Sophia and its dome seemed like old times.
Mrs. Khalfah was Circassian and named Aliye Hanun and was once, I was told in a proud whisper by her husband, a dancer. It must have been a long time ago. She was anax-faced old dame with a sour mouth, tired eyes, and a game way of putting on her lipstick. She didn't give a kurusb—a penny—for old-fashioned ways and looked like the lead in a third-rate road company of Rain. Hut she bad very beautiful hands,
“Lunch is just about ready. We shall have American cockballs.”
Her husband said softly. “Tails, dear. Tails.”
Turkish gin isn't bad, but it shouldn't be used for cockballs. The table was set with green ceramics, very old, and two old servants with wisps of palm leaves and peacock tails stood over us to brush off the summer flies. There were no screens or air-conditioning. But the latter was coming, said Hajji. They had a radio already. “And soon we shall connect it.”
Turkish food is not new to me. My mother took me to Turkey when I was five, and I have been back several times. I have written elsewhere, in a book called The Sitters Liked Them Handsome, of Mama and myself in Turkey in the days just before World War I. One thing Mama did do for me—salaam to her soul—was to instill respect for the food of the country. “It can't be any worse than at home, Stevie,” she used to say, “and mostly it's better.” Mama was deeply sad at the time, a student of Schopenhauer and of the more handsome males of the international set.
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