He prayed for five minutes. Then came out, replaced his hat on his head, and rattled the change in his pockets. He climbed back up the sloping streets and, this time (his heart unburdened), stopped at all the places he’d resisted on his way down. He stepped into a kiosk for coffee and a smoke. He went to a cafe for a glass of ouzo. The backgammon players shouted, “Hey, Valentino, how about a game?” He let himself get cajoled into playing, just one, then lost and had to go double or nothing. (The calculations Desdemona found in Lefty’s pants pockets were gambling debts.) The night wore on. The ouzo kept flowing. The musicians arrived and the rebetika began. They played songs about lust, death, prison, and life on the street. “At the hash den on the seashore, where I’d go every day,” Lefty sang along, “Every morning, bright and early, to chase the blues away; I ran into two harem girls sitting on the sand; Quite stoned the poor things were, and they were really looking grand.” Meanwhile, the hookah was being filled. By midnight, Lefty came floating back onto the streets.
An alley descends, turns, dead-ends. A door opens. A face smiles, beckoning. The next thing Lefty knows, he’s sharing a sofa with three Greek soldiers, looking across at seven plump, perfumed women sharing two sofas opposite. (A phonograph plays the hit song that’s playing everywhere: “Ev’ry morning, ev’ry evening …”) And now his recent prayer is forgotten completely because as the madam says, “Anyone you like, sweetheart,” Lefty’s eyes pass over the blond, blue-eyed Circassian, and the Armenian girl suggestively eating a peach, and the Mongolian with the bangs; his eyes keep scanning to fix on a quiet girl at the end of the far couch, a sad-eyed girl with perfect skin and black hair in braids. (“There’s a scabbard for every dagger,” the madam says in Turkish as the whores laugh.) Unconscious of the workings of his attraction, Lefty stands up, smooths his jacket, holds out his hand toward his choice … and only as she leads him up the stairs does a voice in his head point out how this girl comes up to exactly where … and isn’t her profile just like … but now they’ve reached the room with its unclean sheets, its blood-colored oil lamp, its smell of rose water and dirty feet. In the intoxication of his young senses Lefty doesn’t pay attention to the growing similarities the girl’s disrobing reveals. His eyes take in the large breasts, the slim waist, the hair cascading down to the defenseless coccyx; but Lefty doesn’t make connections. The girl fills a hookah for him. Soon he drifts off, no longer hearing the voice in his head. In the soft hashish dream of the ensuing hours, he loses sense of who he is and who he’s with. The limbs of the prostitute become those of another woman. A few times he calls out a name, but by then he is too stoned to notice. Only later, showing him out, does the girl bring him back to reality. “By the way, I’m Irini. We don’t have a Desdemona here.”
The next morning he awoke at the Cocoon Inn, awash in recriminations. He left the city and climbed back up the mountain to Bithynios. His pockets (empty) made no sound. Hung over and feverish, Lefty told himself that his sister was right: it was time for him to get married. He would marry Lucille, or Victoria. He would have children and stop going down to Bursa and little by little he’d change; he’d get older; everything he felt now would fade into memory and then into nothing. He nodded his head; he fixed his hat.
Back in Bithynios, Desdemona was giving those two beginners finishing lessons. While Lefty was still sleeping it off at the Cocoon Inn, she invited Lucille Kafkalis and Victoria Pappas over to the house. The girls were even younger than Desdemona, still living at home with their parents. They looked up to Desdemona as the mistress of her own home. Envious of her beauty, they gazed admiringly at her; flattered by her attentions, they confided in her; and when she began to give them advice on their looks, they listened. She told Lucille to wash more regularly and suggested she use vinegar under her arms as an antiperspirant. She sent Victoria to a Turkish woman who specialized in removing unwanted hair. Over the next week, Desdemona taught the girls everything she’d learned from the only beauty magazine she’d ever seen, a tattered catalogue called
She told Lucille and Victoria to stop by every afternoon. They walked into the house, swaying their hips as instructed, and passed through the grape arbor where Lefty liked to read. They wore a different dress each time. They also changed their hairstyles, walks, jewelry, and mannerisms. Under Desdemona’s direction, the two drab girls multiplied themselves into a small city of women, each with a signature laugh, a personal gemstone, a favorite song she hummed. After two weeks, Desdemona went out to the grape arbor one afternoon and asked her brother, “What are you doing here? Why aren’t you down in Bursa? I thought you’d have found a nice Turkish girl to marry by now. Or do they all have mustaches like Victoria’s?”
“Funny you should mention that,” Lefty said. “Have you noticed? Vicky doesn’t have a mustache anymore. And do you know what else?”—getting up now, smiling—“even Lucille’s starting to smell okay. Every time she comes over, I smell flowers.” (He was lying, of course. Neither girl looked or smelled more appealing to him than before. His enthusiasm was only his way of giving in to the inevitable: an arranged marriage, domesticity, children—the complete disaster.) He came up close to Desdemona. “You were right,” he said. “The most beautiful girls in the world are right here in this village.”
She looked shyly back up into his eyes. “You think so?”
“Sometimes you don’t even notice what’s right under your nose.”
They stood gazing at each other, as Desdemona’s stomach began to feel funny again. And to explain the sensation I have to tell you another story. In his presidential address at the annual convention of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality in 1968 (held that year in Mazatlan among lots of suggestive pinatas), Dr. Luce introduced the concept of “periphescence.” The word itself means nothing; Luce made it up to avoid any etymological associations. The state of periphescence, however, is well known. It denotes the first fever of human pair bonding. It causes giddiness, elation, a tickling on the chest wall, the urge to climb a balcony on the rope of the beloved’s hair. Periphescence denotes the initial drugged and happy bedtime where you sniff your lover like a scented poppy for hours running. (It lasts, Luce explained, up to two years—tops.) The ancients would have explained what Desdemona was feeling as the workings of Eros. Now expert opinion would put it down to brain chemistry and evolution. Still, I have to insist: to Desdemona periphescence felt like a lake of warmth flooding up from her abdomen and across her chest. It spread like the 180-proof, fiery flood of a mint-green Finnish liqueur. With the pumping of two efficient glands in her neck, it heated her face. And then the warmth got other ideas and started spreading into places a girl like Desdemona didn’t allow it to go, and she broke off the stare and turned away. She walked to the window, leaving the periphescence behind, and the breeze from the valley cooled her down. “I will speak to the girls’ parents,” she said, trying to sound like her mother. “Then you must go pay court.”
The next night, the moon, like Turkey’s future flag, was a crescent. Down in Bursa the Greek troops scrounged for food, caroused, and shot up another mosque. In Angora, Mustafa Kemal let it be printed in the newspaper that he would be holding a tea at Chankaya while in actuality he’d left for his headquarters in the field. With his men, he drank the last raki he’d take until the battle was over. Under cover of night, Turkish troops moved not north toward Eskissehir, as everyone expected, but to the heavily fortified city of Afyon in the south. At Eskissehir, Turkish troops lit campfires to exaggerate their strength. A small diversionary force feinted northward toward Bursa. And, amid these deployments, Lefty Stephanides, carrying two corsages, stepped out the front door of his house and began walking to the house where Victoria Pappas lived.
It was an event on the level of a birth or a death. Each of the nearly hundred citizens of Bithynios had heard about Lefty’s upcoming visits, and the old widows, the married women, and the young mothers, as well as the old men, were waiting to see which girl he would choose. Because of the small population, the old courting rituals had nearly ceased. This lack of romantic possibility had created a vicious cycle. No one to love: no love. No love: no babies. No babies: no one to love.
Victoria Pappas stood half in and half out of the light, the shading across her body exactly that of the photograph on page 8 of
