To the Ends of the Earth

It was the tone of a man who tells you, with a mixture of piety and arrogance, that he has a vocation. But Moto-Guzzi had a wife and children in California. Interesting: he had fled his children and some of the girls in his group had fled their parents.

Another fellow sat on the steps of the coach, dangling his feet in the wind. He was eating an apple. I asked him where he was going. “Maybe try Nepal,” he said. He took a bite of the apple. “Maybe Ceylon, if it’s happening there.” He took another bite. The apple was like the globe he was calmly apportioning to himself, as small, bright, and accessible. He poised his very white teeth and bit again. “Maybe Bali.” He was chewing. “Maybe go to Australia.” He took a last bite and winged the apple into the dust. “What are you, writing a book?”

Sadik

AGAIN I SHOWED THE CONDUCTOR MY TICKET. “FIRST-CLASS ticket,” I said. “You give me first-class couchette.”

“No couchette,” he said. He pointed to my berth in a second-class compartment with three Australians in it.

“No,” I said. I pointed to an empty compartment. “I want this one.”

“No.” He gave me a fanatical grin.

He was grinning at my hand. I held thirty Turkish liras (about two dollars). His hand appeared near mine. I dropped my voice and whispered the word that is known all over the East, “Baksheesh.”

He took the money and pocketed it. He got my bag from the Australian compartment and carried it to another compartment in which there were a battered suitcase and a box of crackers. He slid the bag into the luggage rack and patted the berth. He asked if I wanted sheets and blankets. I said yes. He got them, and a pillow, too. He drew the curtains, shutting out the sun. He bowed and brought me a pitcher of ice water, and he smiled, as if to say, “All this could have been yours yesterday.”

The suitcase and crackers belonged to a large bald Turk named Sadik, who wore baggy woolen trousers and a stretched sweater. He was from one of the wilder parts of Turkey, the Upper Valley of Greater Zap; he had boarded the train in Van; he was going to Australia.

He came in and drew his arm across his sweating face. He said, “Are you in here?”

“Yes.”

“How much did you give him?”

I told him.

He said, “I gave him fifteen rials. He is very dishonest, but now he is on our side. He will not put anyone else in here, so now we have this big room together.”

Sadik smiled; he had crooked teeth. It is not skinny people who look hungry, but rather fat ones, and Sadik looked famished.

“I think it’s only fair to say,” I said, wondering how I was going to finish the sentence, “that I’m not, um, queer. Well, you know, I don’t like boys and—”

“And me, I don’t like,” said Sadik, and with that he lay down and went to sleep. He had the gift of slumber; he needed only to be horizontal and he was sound asleep, and he always slept in the same sweater and trousers. He never took them off; and for the duration of the trip to Teheran he neither shaved nor washed.

He was an unlikely tycoon. He admitted he behaved like a pig, but he had lots of money and his career was a successful record of considerable ingenuity. He had started out exporting Turkish curios to France and he seems to have been in the vanguard of the movement, monopolizing the puzzle ring and copper-pot trade in Europe long before anyone else thought of it. He paid no export duties in Turkey, no import duties in France. He managed this by shipping crates of worthless articles to the French border and warehousing them there. He went to French wholesalers with his samples, took orders, and left the wholesalers the headache of importing the goods. He did this for three years and banked the money in Switzerland.

“When I have enough money,” said Sadik, whose English was not perfect, “I like to start a travel agency. Where you want to go? Budapesht? Prague? Romania? Bulgaria? All nice places, oh boy! Turkish people like to travel. But they are very silly. They don’t speak English. They say to me, ‘Mister Sadik, I want a coffee’—this is in Prague. I say, ‘Ask the waiter.’ They are afraid. They shout their eyes. But they have money in their packets. I say to the waiter, ‘Coffee’—he understand. Everyone understand coffee, but Turkish people don’t speak any language, so all the time I am translator. This, I tell you, drive me crazy. The people they follow me. ‘Mister Sadik, take me to a nightclub’; ‘Mister Sadik, find me a gairl.’ They follow me even to the lavabo and sometime I want to escape, so I am clever and I use the service elevator.