Orient Express Read Online Free

the café table. Behind on a little platform fenced with red baize, musicians keep up a reiterant humming and twanging out of which a theme in minor climbs and skids in an endless arabesque. There is a kind of lute, a zither, a violin and a woman who sings. In the midst is a stool with coffeecups and a bottle of mastic. The zither is played by a grizzled man with a bottlenose and spectacles who occasionally throws his head back and opens his mouth wide and lets out happily a great Gregorian yodel which the other voices follow and lead back with difficulty into the web of sound. At the tables packed under the locusttree where they will get shade in the afternoon sit people with narghiles or cigarettes or German pipes or American cigars drinking mastic and beer and coffee and even vodka. There is a smell of tobacco and charcoal and anis from the mastic and douzico and grilled meat from the skewers of chiche kebab, and a discordance of many hostile languages and a shuffle of feet from the street under the terrace.
    Leaning my chin on my hands and looking down at the strip of cracked and dusty pavement between the bare feet of the boys who sell cakes and pistachio nuts and flyspotted candy along the terrace wall, and the row of autos for hire, of which the drivers, mostly Russians in various patched uniforms, loll and sleep and chat, waiting for a fare through the long afternoon hours.… Across that space shoes, feet, shambling legs, crossed arms, arms swinging vacantly, stoop shoulders, strongly moulded backs under thin cotton, chests brown, sweatbeaded, shawls, black veils of women, yakmaks, faces. All life is sucked into the expressiveness of faces. A boy, skin the color of an earthen pot, eyes and lips of a drunken Bacchus, swaggers by jauntily, on his head a tray of roasted yellow corn. A girl patters along, mouse-like, features droop white as a freesia behind a thin black veil. A whitebearded man in a blue gown, redrimmed eyes as bleared as moonstones, being led by a tiny brown boy. Two hammals, each strong enough to carry a piano alone, with deeplymarked mindless features, and the black beards of Assyrian bowmen. Three Russians, blond, thick-chested of the same height, white canvas tunics pulled down tight under their belts, blue eyes, with a freshwashed look and their hair parted and slicked like children dressed for a party. A stout Greek businessman in a Palm Beach suit. Tommies very pink and stiff. Aggressive thickjawed gobs playing with small maggotlike beggar-children. Pale-faced Levantines with slinking eyes and hooked noses. Armenians with querulous mouths and great gold brown eyes. In the bright sun and the violent shadows faces blur and merge as they pass. Faces are smooth and yellow like melons, steely like axes; faces are like winter squashes, like death’s heads and jack o’lanterns and cocoanuts and sprouting potatoes. They merge slowly in the cruel white sunlight, brown faces under fezzes, yellow faces under straw-hats, pale northern faces under khaki caps—into one face, brows sullen and contracted, eyes black with suffering, skin taut over the cheekbones, hungry lines about the corners of the mouth, lips restless, envious, angry, lustful. The face of a man not quite starved out.
    They are the notes, these faces, twanged on the trembling strings of this skein of frustrate lives that is Pera. So many threads out of the labyrinth. If one could only follow back into the steep dilapidated streets where the black wooden houses overhang, and women with thick ankles look down with kohl-smeared eyes at the porters who stumble under their huge loads up the uneven steps, sweating so that the red out of their fezzes runs in streaks down their knobbed and shaggy cheeks; through the sudden plane-shaded lanes that snatch occasional unbelievable blue distances of sea or umber distances of hills seen through the tilting and delicately-carved tombposts of Turkish cemeteries, and lead out into the pathless