Middlesex

Smyrna endures today in a few rebetika songs and a stanza from The Waste Land:

Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant Unshaven, with a pocketful of currants C.i.f. London: documents at sight, Asked me in demotic French To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.

Everything you need to know about Smyrna is contained in that. The merchant is rich, and so was Smyrna. His proposal was seductive, and so was Smyrna, the most cosmopolitan city in the Near East. Among its reputed founders were, first, the Amazons (which goes nicely with my theme), and second, Tantalus himself. Homer was born there, and Aristotle Onassis. In Smyrna, East and West, opera and politakia, violin and zourna, piano and daouli blended as tastefully as did the rose petals and honey in the local pastries.

Lefty started walking again and soon came to the Smyrna Casin. Potted palms flanked a grand entrance, but the doors stood wide open. He stepped inside. No one stopped him. There was no one around. He followed a red carpet to the second floor and into the gaming room. The craps table was unoccupied. Nobody was at the roulette wheel. In the far corner, however, a group of men were playing cards. They glanced up at Lefty but then returned to their game, ignoring his dirty clothes. That was when he realized that the gamblers weren’t regular club members; they were refugees like him. Each had wandered through the open door in hopes of winning money to buy passage out of Smyrna. Lefty approached the table. A card player asked, “You in?”

“I’m in.”

He didn’t understand the rules. He’d never played poker before, only backgammon, and for the first half hour he lost again and again. Eventually, though, Lefty began to understand the difference between five-card draw and seven-card stud, and gradually the balance of payments around the table began to shift. “Three of these,” Lefty said, showing three aces, and the men started to grumble. They watched his dealing more closely, mistaking his clumsiness for a cardsharp’s sleight of hand. Lefty began to enjoy himself, and after winning a big pot cried, “Ouzo all around!” But when nothing happened, he looked up and saw again how truly deserted the Casin was, and the sight brought home to him the high stakes they were playing for. Life. They were playing for their lives, and now, as he examined his fellow gamblers, and saw perspiration beading their brows and smelled their sour breath, Lefty Stephanides, showing far more restraint than he would four decades later when he played the Detroit numbers, stood up and said, “I’m folding.”

They nearly killed him. Lefty’s pockets bulged with winnings, and the men insisted he couldn’t leave without giving them a chance to win some of it back. He bent over to scratch his leg, insisting, “I can go out any time I want.” One of the men grabbed him by his soiled lapels, and Lefty added, “And I don’t want to yet.” He sat down, scratching his other leg, and thereafter started losing again and again. When all his money was gone, Lefty got up and said with disgusted anger, “Can I leave now?” The men said sure, leave, laughing as they dealt the next hand. Lefty walked stiffly, dejectedly, out of the Casin. In the entrance, between the potted palms, he bent down to collect the money he’d stashed in his ripe-smelling socks.

Back at the quay, he sought out Desdemona. “Look what I found,” he said, flashing his money. “Somebody must have dropped it. Now we can get a ship.”

Desdemona screamed and hugged him. She kissed him right on the lips. Then she pulled back, blushing, and turned to the water. “Listen,” she said, “those British are playing music again.”

She was referring to the service band on the Iron Duke. Every night, as officers dined, the band began playing on the ship’s deck. Strains of Vivaldi and Brahms floated out over the water. Over brandy, Major Arthur Maxwell of His Majesty’s Marines and his subordinates passed around binoculars to observe the situation ashore.

“Jolly crowded, what?”

“Looks like Victoria Station on Christmas Eve, sir.”

“Look at those poor wretches. Left to fend for themselves. When word gets out about the Greek commissioner’s leaving, it’s going to be pandemonium.”

“Will we be evacuating refugees, sir?”

“Our orders are to protect British property and citizens.”

“But, surely, sir, if the Turks arrive and there’s a massacre …”

“There’s nothing we can do about it, Phillips. I’ve spent years in the Near East. The one lesson I’ve learned is that there is nothing you can do with these people. Nothing at all! The Turks are the best of the lot. The Armenian I liken to the Jew. Deficient moral and intellectual character. As for the Greeks, well, look at them. They’ve burned down the whole country and now they swarm in here crying for help. Nice cigar, what?”

“Awfully good, sir.”

“Smyrna tobacco. Finest in the world. Brings a tear to my eyes, Phillips, the thought of all that tobacco lying in those warehouses out there.”

“Perhaps we could send a detail to save the tobacco, sir.”

“Do I detect a note of sarcasm, Phillips?”

“Faintly, sir, faintly.”

“Good Lord, Phillips, I’m not heartless. I wish we could help these people. But we can’t. It’s not our war.”

“Are you certain of that, sir?”

“What do you mean?”

“We might have supported the Greek forces. Seeing as we sent them in.”

“They were dying to be sent in! Venizelos and his bunch. I don’t think you fathom the complexity of the situation. We have interests here in Turkey. We must proceed with the utmost care. We cannot let ourselves get caught up in these Byzantine struggles.”

“I see, sir. More cognac, sir?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“It’s a beautiful city, though, isn’t it?”

“Quite. You are aware of what Strabo said of Smyrna, are you not? He called Smyrna the finest city in Asia. That was back in the time of Augustus. It’s lasted that long. Take a good look, Phillips. Take a good long look.”

By September 7, 1922, every Greek in Smyrna, including Lefty Stephanides, is wearing a fez in order to pass as a Turk. The last Greek soldiers are being evacuated at Chesme. The Turkish Army is only thirty miles away—and no ships arrive from Athens to evacuate the refugees.

Lefty, newly moneyed and befezzed, makes his way through the maroon-capped crowd at the quay. He crosses tram tracks and heads uphill. He finds a steamship office. Inside, a clerk is bending over passenger lists. Lefty takes out his winnings and says, “Two seats to Athens!”

The head remains down. “Deck or cabin?”

“Deck.”

“Fifteen hundred drachmas.”

“No, not cabin,” Lefty says, “deck will be fine.”

“That is deck.”

“Fifteen hundred? I don’t have fifteen hundred. It was five hundred yesterday.”

“That was yesterday.”

On September 8, 1922, General Hajienestis, in his cabin, sits up in bed, rubs first his right leg and then his left, raps his knuckles against them, and stands up. He goes above deck, walking with great dignity, much as he will later proceed to his death in Athens when he is executed for losing the war.

On the quay, the Greek civil governor, Aristedes Sterghiades, boards a launch to take him out of the city. The crowd hoots and jeers, shaking fists. General Hajienestis takes the scene in calmly. The crowd obscures the waterfront, his favorite cafe. All he can see is the marquee of the movie theater at which, ten days earlier, he’d been to see Le Tango de la Mort. Briefly—and possibly this is another hallucination—he smells the fresh jasmine of Bournabat. He breathes this in. The launch reaches the ship and Sterghiades, ashen-faced, climbs aboard.

And then General Hajienestis gives his only military order of the past few weeks: “Up anchors. Reverse engines. Full steam ahead.”

On shore, Lefty and Desdemona watched the Greek fleet leaving. The crowd surged toward the water, raised its four hundred thousand hands, and shouted. And then it fell silent. Not one mouth uttered a sound as the realization came home that their own country had deserted them, that Smyrna now had no government, that there was nothing between them and the advancing Turks.

(And did I mention how in summer the streets of Smyrna were lined with baskets of rose petals? And how everyone in the city could speak French, Italian, Greek, Turkish, English, and Dutch? And did I tell you about the famous figs, brought in by camel caravan and dumped onto the ground, huge piles of pulpy fruit lying in the dirt, with dirty women steeping them in salt water and children squatting to defecate behind the clusters? Did I mention how the reek of the fig women mixed with pleasanter smells of almond trees, mimosa, laurel, and peach, and how everybody wore masks on Mardi Gras and had elaborate dinners on the decks of frigates? I want to mention these things because they all happened in that city that was no place exactly, that was part of no country because it was all countries, and because now if you go there you’ll see modern high-rises, amnesiac boulevards, teeming sweatshops, a NATO headquarters, and a sign that says Izmir …)

Five cars, bedecked with olive branches, burst the city gates. Cavalry gallop fender to fender. The cars roar past the covered bazaar, through cheering throngs in the Turkish Quarter where every streetlamp, door, and window streams red cloth. By Ottoman law, Turks must occupy a city’s highest ground, so the convoy is high above the city now, heading down. Soon the five cars pass through the deserted sections where houses have been abandoned or where families hide. Anita Philobosian peeks out to see the beautiful, leaf-covered vehicles approaching, the sight so arresting she starts to unfasten the shutters before her mother pulls her away … and there are other faces pressed to slats, Armenian, Bulgarian, and Greek eyes peeking out of hideaways and attics to get a look at the conqueror and divine his intentions; but the cars move too fast, and the sun on the cavalry’s raised sabers blinds the eyes, and then the cars are gone, reaching the quay, where horses charge into the crowd and refugees scream and scatter.

In the backseat of the last car sits Mustafa Kemal. He is lean from battle. His blue eyes flash. He hasn’t had a drink in over two weeks. (The “diverticulitis” Dr. Philobosian had treated the pasha for was just a cover-up. Kemal, champion of Westernization and the secular Turkish state, would remain true to those principles to the end, dying at fifty-seven of cirrhosis of the liver.)

And as he passes he turns and looks into the crowd, as a young woman stands up from a suitcase. Blue eyes pierce brown. Two seconds. Not even two. Then Kemal looks away; the convoy is gone.

And now it is all a matter of wind. 1 a.m., Wednesday, September 13, 1922. Lefty and Desdemona have been in the city seven nights now. The smell of jasmine has turned to kerosene. Around the Armenian Quarter barricades have been erected. Turkish troops block the exits from the quay. But the wind remains blowing in the wrong direction. Around midnight, however, it shifts. It begins blowing southwesterly, that is, away from the Turkish heights and toward the harbor.

In the blackness, torches gather. Three Turkish soldiers stand in a tailor shop. Their torches illuminate bolts of cloth and suits on hangers. Then, as the light grows, the tailor himself becomes visible. He is sitting at his sewing machine, right shoe still on the foot treadle. The light grows brighter still to reveal his face, the gaping eye sockets, the beard torn out in bloody patches.