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.
I thought of Mama's sad and happy years as we sat down to lunch. How it brought back the past. The trays of anchovies, tuna, mullet in brine, slices of smoked sturgeon, and its roes. Then came the skewered lamb; a fine dolma, vine leaves stuffed with meat; a rice called pilà; and last the eternal sweetmeat, irmik helvasi, made of rose-petal flour. corn meal, butter, honey, and nuts. The honey is very special. It is imfi, or palm syrup.
I ate everything and felt very old and very full of the past. The servants poured rose water over our hands and gave us the damp towel which has helped so much to spread trachoma over the Near East.
Hajji smiled and looked at his Swiss wrist watch. “The owner of the Picasso will be here soon. I hope you will be very pleased.”
“I hope the art dealer will be.”
Mrs. Hajji sighed and took two after-dinner pills, and the art objects on the table rattled. A servant came in, towing, like a wide little tug, the largest woman I had ever seen. She was not only fat, she was huge—big-boned, old, and once very beautiful, I felt sure.
Another servant followed with a picture, wrapped badly in paper. Mrs. Hajji pushed back a flock of tears and said to me, “This is Anna.”
The large woman looked at me. leaned over, and kissed my cheek. “Little Stevie.”
I was puzzled. The large woman shook her head.
“You don't remember Anna any more?”
“I am sorry.”
“You've changed, too. The little boy with the blond hair has become a middle-aged man with gray hair. At least, darling, you have kept it.”
“You're Anna,” I said. “The Anna.”
“I've changed a great deal, too.”
Yes, she had. She and Mama had been the gay girls back in 1913. They had been called the two most beautiful women of their time, and their time was long past. Mama was dead. But there sat Anna cartooned as this tremendous woman, this aging woman looking at me, trying to bring back a past we had once shared. The small boy and the beautiful Anna of the soft, white back and the long arms and the red hair and the gleaming, gold-flecked green eyes. The Anna that Mama had promenaded with “for protection.” How Gramp bad snorted at that line and swung his cane at the flowers. “For protection! It's the men who need protection! Damn world is going to hell in a hack when two women like that are allowed to run in polite society. and their husbands off someplace making a living for ‘em!”
I said, “It's been a long time, Anna.”
“Yes, darling, a very old time. And I've shocked you. When Hajji said they were sending an art expert from Egypt and said his name was the same as the writer's, I knew it was Sari's boy. We both bought this Picasso in Paris. One of those Russian dukes paid for it. We wanted to buy a Renoir, but Leo Stein—remember Leo, Stevie? No. I guess you don't—he talked us into the Picasso. Poor Leo is dead, I hear. What ever happened to that yenta of a sister of his?”
“She started a literary movement. She's dead, too. Some people take her very seriously. She's got a cult now.”
“The cow.” said Anna, unwrapping the painting. “Well, here it is. I need money badly. Things have changed since the old days. I hope you're getting a good cut of the price, darling.”
“No, just the trip. The dealer is a friend of mine.”
“That's bad. Dealers aren't nice people, except the Khalfahs here.”
Hajji purred, “It's a fine example of the Rose Period.”
I looked. It was a bad fraud. The Rose Period isn't hard to copy. But this thing was labored and cluttered. Picasso's Rose Period is a thing of quick drawing, amazing color tones, and flat areas so simple that it almost falls apart and yet doesn't.
“I'll have to study it a little more, Anna.”
She smiled and patted my check. “I've got an advance from Hajji, darling. Tonight we celebrate. They are dancing a fine zabek full of knives, or do you like Circassians?”
“Something less expensive,” I said. “I would like to take you all to dinner. I can charge that to the dealer.”
“No,” said Anna. “I have the money, and for dear Sari's sake I want to do the honors.”
I was trapped. I said, “Of course.”
“You will take the painting back to your hotel?” said Hajji.
I avoided that. “No, let's examine it under the lights in your gallery.”
We drove back to the gallery, and I put the picture under the lights. I turned to Hajji. “Well, what do you think?”
He made an art dealer's face, twisted his fingers, rolled his eyes, and stepped back two paces. “Wonderful.”
I said, “I've painted better Picassos myself.”
Hajji said, “Ah.” He let his hands drop to his sides. He sat down and mopped his brow. “It will not do?”
“No. The canvas is too new. The paint is the wrong kind. There is too much underpainting. The colors are muddy. The thing is still wet on the canvas in parts and is pulling. The wood of the Strecher is Greek pine. Shall I tell you where the nails come from?”
“No. It's too bad. Anna is desperate.”
“I don't see how you expected to get away with it, Hajji.”
“It was only for Americans. I beg your pardon. After all, van Gogh painted only three thousand paintings, eight thousand of which are in the United States.”
I sat down facing him. “What happened to the painting she and Mama bought in Paris in 1913?”
“Anna sold it years ago. I had this copy made for her. But her memory for recent events isn't so good. She's forgotten I sold it for her in 1928.”
“That's not so recent.”
“It is for Anna.”
“How much have you given her as an advance?”
“A thousand dollars. I don't mind. I made a lot of money in the past from her collection. But how long can a thousand dollars last Anna?”
“If she's like she used to be, just tonight.”
It was a very big night. We went to a place called the Golden Horn, which was a French night club with colored jazz and Eurasian girls and men in evening clothes. For dinner we went to a small place with menus printed in gold leaf. Anna, done up like a battleship in red lead and rustproofing and a green gown that split in the wrong places, was queenly and loud. She puffed on a jade holder and drank wine with a quick gulp and never stopped laughing.
“Stevie, darling, there's life in the old gal yet. Lots of life. Sari would be proud of you, taking an old lady around the night spots. This place used to be wonderful. German and British Embassy boys and rich Russians who had mujiks to flog. What fine beasts the Russians were in those days. Wolf collars and black eyebrows and little white teeth, and such vodka and caviar! Not just black caviar, but the big, fat, gray stuff, too. Drink from a lady's slipper, my eye. Those boys used to …”
But the dinner came just then.
Gangar, artichokes in olive oil; slirk pilávi; a kibbi, or baked lamb casserole, to which had been added a stuffing of baked quince; the Armenian delight, sumpoog letzvadz, stuffed whole eggplant: with a side dish of fabsoulia beyih.i waisefab, Lima beans and apple. Wine came and went, and rare fish roes, and we ended with siirk kabvesi, the native coffee, and sarab, a white wine brandy of the country. This led to the raki brandy and more wine. There was no halva. Anna had a water pipe, and so did the Khalfahs. The raki was anise-Gavoicd, and I took so much I had to taper off on boza, a refreshing drink made of water and fermented bread which tastes like a fine sour milk. People have lived to 105 on boza.
After the liqueurs we went to another night club, but I don't remember much except Anna leading a conga line and teaching the samba to a man from the Soviet Embassy. I hope the F.B.I. doesn't hear about this.
The next morning was rather grim. I felt the futility of human endeavor, and there was little top to my head. I put the head under cold water, and with what was left of my mind I worried over Picasso's Rose Period.
I had to be back in Egypt; I had a film unit shooting on the Nile, and the director was going a little daffy in the heal. I decided to bring things to a conclusion. The taxi took me to a shabby row of flats, overlooking a line of decaying trees. Anna had a red door and a small room furnished with darkness and tattered wallpaper; it smelt of spilled raki.
She was sitting in a deep chair looking up at a drawing of Mama as a Gibson Girl. She held a sticky glass of raki and looked at me and smiled.
“Hung over?”
“Like a mountain goat. Anna, I've got bad news for you.”
She grinned and refilled the glass. “The Picasso? You've found out it wasn't real? Well, I remembered we sold the real one years ago. I told Hajji I didn't remember, but I did. It doesn't matter, darling. I'm old and falling apart. I can't last much longer. I'll get by. They can't count the old girl out just yet.” She smiled and looked up at Mama.
“It isn't much of a world any more, Stevie. They've taken the color our of it and made it damn dull. The world has lost more than values and a sense of humor; it's lost its desire to live fully and let the next man alone. We had a motto in the old days—if you don't like it, don't knock it—but now they're prying apart the atom and making over their plows into Hying bombs. I must really feel bad to talk like this.” She stood up and stretched her once-lovely arms.
“Kiss me, Stevie, and go away. It's been good seeing you, and now I can finish off the few dance steps left to me and then go see what Sari is doing someplace else… Pass the bottle, darling.”
I left her there, and I felt old and tired in the sunlight.