This café chantant is in a garden. In the center, where orchestra seats should be, are small tables, with chairs in semi-circle facing the stage. It is a regular theater stage and on both sides of the garden, boxes have been built. It is crowded. Every one seems to be intoxicated and the weird music of a regular jazz band composed of genuine American negroes fires the blood of the rollicking crowd to demonstrations unknown even to the Bowery in its most flourishing days before the Volstead Act. Much bejewelled and rouged “noble” waitresses sit, drink and smoke at the tables of their own clients. The proprietor of the place, an American coloured man who was established in Russia before the Bolshevik revolution and who—it seems—protected and helped most efficiently some British and American officers and relief workers at the time of the Revolution, is watching the crowd in a rather aloof manner. Frankly he seems to me more human than his clients; at least he is sober and acts with consideration and politeness, which is not the case with most of the people who are here. Not one real Turk is in sight. Many foreigners, but mostly Greeks, Armenians and Levantines—with dissipated puffed-up faces, greedy of pleasure and materialism. We have a liqueur. The show is a vaudeville which is not very interesting. Every minute that passes makes the crowd more and more demonstrative. Carayanni is enjoying it immensely, but I realize that our presence puts a damper on his good time and although he defends himself in the most exquisite manner when I tease him about it and accuse him of being evidently an “habitué” of the place, the glances that he exchanges surreptitiously with one of the waitresses—a real Russian beauty with pale skin, fire-red lips and languid black eyes—confirm my suspicions. My wife does not enjoy herself, and she is tired: our life in Stamboul has evidently made her lose her taste for late hours. Besides she has never seen this kind of night life anywhere and the atmosphere is getting decidedly too tense for us. A “parti carrée” enters a box—and immediately pulls the curtain, thus cutting itself entirely from the view of the public. My wife looks at me in surprise. We really must go.
It is too early for Carayanni, the night has just started for him and for the other regular Perotes. So we insist that he should not spoil his evening and we apologise for our departure. He is heartbroken to see us go but asks permission to remain, protesting that he has some very important business matters to talk over with a friend of his whom he has just seen in the crowd. We understand perfectly well and take our leave.
We step out of the gay garden. At the curb a long line of automobiles is waiting. We take one as it will get us home quicker than a carriage. Besides, the streets of Pera, and especially of Galata, are not very safe at this late hour, and the quicker one rushes through them the better.
Pera is tossing in her sleep, nervous and restless. A few night-owls of both sexes who evidently have not yet been able to find a branch to their liking are still wandering on the sidewalks. The porches and doorways of nearly every house are crowded with groups of children and refugees, half-naked, sleeping cuddled up together to keep warm. In restaurants and amusement places the merry-makers are continuing their revels.
Galata again, her narrow streets still lit up and still resounding with sinister noises. Now the bridge, almost deserted, and then at last Stamboul, our Stamboul, the beautiful Turkish city, sleeping in the night the sleep of the just; poor Stamboul, ruined by fires and by wars, sad in her misery, but decent and noble; a dethroned queen dreaming of her past splendour and trusting in her future.
X
CONSTANTINOPLE, 1922
THE night life in Pera sketched in the past chapter constitutes, naturally, only one aspect of the present-day so-called social life of Constantinople. In full justice to the inhabitants of the city I must say that it is only the “Perotes,” that is, only those who inhabit Pera—be they foreigners, Greeks, Armenians or Levantines—who find pleasure in this kind of distraction. The people of Stamboul lead the quiet life which I have already described and in between these two extremes there are, of course, quite a large number of foreigners, of Turks and of non-Turks who do not participate in this kind of life but who nevertheless seek distraction in the society of each other in a more rational and decent way than the Perotes—if not quite as sedate as their friends of Stamboul.
Pera is the theatrical and the red light district of the city. Stamboul is the residential district of the more conservative Turks, that is to say, the Turks who are modern enough to set aside all the antiquated customs of their ancestors who—by preventing their women from participating in the every-day life, had handicapped the social progress of the race—but who are not and do not care to be modern to the point of adopting indiscriminately all the social customs, good and bad, of the Occident. Fortunately for Turkey, the Turks who belong to this group constitute the greatest majority. They are serious-minded people, progressive without exaggeration, desirous of adapting to their own temperament and customs only those foreign customs which are desirable. They do not seek to imitate blindly western nations. They do not care to be over-westernized. These Turks realize that with all its superiority over the Oriental structure, the social structure of the West is far from being perfect, and they do not propose to introduce and adopt customs which either might be incompatible with their temperaments and traditions or which have been and are strongly criticized by well-thinking people even in western countries.