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“Three thousand. Two mosques. Several fountains, an enormous number of places where you can have the best Turkish food. But I have some religious statuary you won’t find anywhere else.”
Jacques thanked him, said he’d be back soon—the merchant knew it was a lie and briefly redoubled his efforts but soon saw it was useless and wished them all a good day.
“Did you know Mark Twain was here?” asked Mirthe, who at this point was covered in sweat and somewhat frightened by what she was seeing. What if there was a fire, how would they get out? Where was the door, the tiny little door they’d used to come in? How would they keep the group together when everyone wanted to see something different?
“And what did Mark Twain have to say?”
“He said it was impossible to describe what he saw, but that it had been a much more powerful, more important experience than his visit to the city. He spoke of the colors, the immense variety of visual tones, the rugs, people conversing, the apparent chaos that nonetheless seemed to follow an order he was unable to explain. ‘If I want to buy shoes,’ he wrote, ‘I don’t need to go from store to store along the street, comparing prices and models, but simply find the aisle of shoemakers, lined up one after another, without there being any sort of competition or annoyance between them; it all depends on who is the better salesman.”
Mirthe didn’t care to mention that the bazaar had already been through four fires and an earthquake—it wasn’t known how many had died because the hotel brochure said only this and glossed over any talk of body counts.
Karla noticed that Marie’s eyes were glued to the ceiling, its curved beams and its arches, and she’d begun to smile as if she could say nothing beyond “incredible, absolutely incredible.”
They walked at about a mile per hour. When one person stopped, the rest did, too. Karla needed some privacy.
“At this rate, we won’t even make it to the corner of the next aisle. Why don’t we split up and meet back at the hotel? Unfortunately—I repeat, unfortunately—we’ll be leaving this place tomorrow, so we have to make the most of this last day.”
The idea was greeted with enthusiasm, and Jacques turned to his daughter to take her with him, but Karla stopped him.
“I can’t stay here on my own. Let the two of us discover this universe of wonders together.”
Jacques noticed that his daughter didn’t so much as glance at him, she merely repeated “incredible!” as she stared at the ceiling. Had someone offered her hashish when they entered the bazaar? Had she accepted? She was old enough to take care of herself—he left her with Karla, that girl who was always ahead of her time and always trying to show how much smarter and more sophisticated she was than all the rest, though she’d toned it down a bit—only a bit—during the last two days in Istanbul.
He went his way and disappeared amid the multitude. Karla grabbed Marie by the arm.
“Let’s get out of here right now.”
“But everything is so beautiful. Look at the colors: absolutely incredible!”
Karla wasn’t asking, she was giving orders, and began to gently tug Marie toward the exit.
The exit?
Where was the exit? “Incredible!” Marie was growing increasingly intoxicated with what she saw, and completely inert, while Karla asked several people the best way out and received several different answers. She started to get nervous; that itself was as disorienting as an LSD trip, and she wasn’t sure where the combination of the two would leave Marie.
Her more aggressive, more dominating manner returned; she walked first in one direction then another, but she could not find the door through which they’d entered. It didn’t matter if they returned the way they’d come, but each second now was precious—the air had grown heavy, people were full of sweat, no one paid attention to anything except what they were buying, selling, or bargaining over.
Finally, an idea came to her. Instead of looking for the exit, she ought to walk in a straight line, in a single direction, and sooner or later she’d find the wall that separated the largest temple to consumerism she’d ever seen from the outside world. She charted a straight path, begging God (God?) that it also be the shortest. As they walked in the direction they’d chosen, she was interrupted a thousand times by people trying to sell their wares. She pushed past them without so much as an “excuse me” and without considering they could well push back.
Along the way she came upon a young boy, his mustache just coming in, who must have been entering the bazaar. He seemed to be looking for something. She decided to use all her charm, her seduction, her persuasiveness, and asked him to take her to the exit because her sister was suffering an attack of delirium.
The boy looked at her sister and saw that, in fact, she
wasn’t really there but off in some distant place. He tried making conversation, telling her that an uncle of his who worked nearby could help, but Karla begged him, saying she knew the symptoms, that all her sister needed now was a bit of fresh air, nothing more.
Rather against his will, and regretting that he was about to lose sight forever of these two interesting girls, he took them to one of the exits—less than sixty feet from where they’d been standing.
* * *
—
At the moment she stepped outside the bazaar, Marie came to the solemn decision to abandon her revolutionary dreams. She would never again say she was a Communist fighting to free oppressed workers from their bosses.
Yes, she’d started dressing like a hippie because now and then it was good to be in style. Yes, she’d understood her father had become a bit worried about this and had begun to furiously research what all of it might mean. Yes, they were going to Nepal, but not to meditate in caves or visit temples; their goal was to meet up with the Maoists who were preparing a large-scale rebellion against what they judged to be an outdated and tyrannical monarchy under the rule of a king indifferent to his people’s suffering.
She’d been able to make contact through a self-exiled Maoist at her university who’d traveled to France to call attention to the few dozen guerrilla soldiers being massacred there.
None of that was important anymore. She walked with her Dutch companion along an absolutely unremarkable street and everything seemed to have a greater meaning that went beyond the peeling walls and people walking with heads lowered, barely glancing up.
