Iranian Yankee in Byzantium, a modern fable.

It was a fine day for an excursion. Me on my own and able to take the fine trains that always run on time in Istanbul. We were there for a C=O=N=V=E=N=T=I=O=N of business minded individuals, the New World Order types and all. I wasn’t invited to those thank the Locomotive of the Lord (another poet's words, not mine), thank that! No, I, like all ‘business wives’ was allowed to hook up with one of the other poor sods left behind in hotel rooms, or, I could take some sort of flower arranging lessons in the hotel mezzazine with the older European crowd that usually claim to have lived in Zanzibar. So I decided to Hoboken it down into Istanbul proper. I’d been there before to Istanbul, to all the gala rug shows and tea parties about ten years before when we had that awful crash near the Hittite Hideouts.

What I wanted to do was trot on down to that Topkapi Palace. Ah. One could stay in there for days and not get enough of it. Wonderbar. I took a notebook (so unlike me to do that sort of thing) and make some sketches to remind me of the visuals (like that horse in a painting which had a human face, spooky man!).

Of course, that secret policia fellow was on my trail and met me as I disembarked from the Oriental Express which is filled with more and more hijaby clad women than you can shake a stick at. They can’t attend public universities dressed like that you know so instead they ride trains to the textile factories there. There are RULES if you know what I mean and make sure if you ever go there, DO NOT MENTION KAMAL ATATURK’S RESEMBLANCE TO COUNT DRACULA. If you do, the thugs will follow you all over creation and to kingdom come. And don’t have a car accident or they’ll take you to their secret prisons to cry over the fact that the portrait of KAMAL ATATURK on the wall looks just like COUNT DRACULA. Armenians my butt. They’re all over the place here buddy, Byzantium which is a wide area encompassing some of the best real estate between the Sahara and the Gobi. They usually speak five to seven languages and some of them even live in France! Imagine the horror of that diaspora! But that is what they call, “off topic”.

So anyways, I took my time and meandered through all the tools of ancient warfare, the kitchen utensils of the ancients, the special clocks and family albums until at last I sat down outside the HAREM to make up my mind whether or not I wanted to pay the extra ten bucks it costs to go in and see how the real burqa clad crowd suffered…such exotic excesses there if you know what I mean. Diamond encrusted couches and pillow cases made of something a bit nicer than percale.

This kid was sitting out on the bench near me and I struck up a conversation with him. You know, kids will generally say the darnedest things and I usually prey on them like potato blight. Little spuds. So I asked him where he was from and he started to look really scared all of a sudden. I thought to myself, Aha, I guess the secret policia got hold of you too. He just wouldn’t spill the beans. I was about to get out my rubber hoses and smack him around a little (legal in some policia states nowdays, even if yer a kid) when all of a sudden his family showed up and eyed me real mean like. Like, What are you doin’ to my kid here?

Nice people but terribly nervous. When they told me they were from New York via Iran I said, Oh yeah. I would be too, nervous that is. Yer probably nervous ALL THE DAMN TIME.

So I went on and on as I usually do about how our Hezbollah was doing such a fine job of liberating our people down in the boondocks. You know how it is. Loud mouthed naïve that I tend to be.

They just looked at me and shook their heads. The dad looked me SQUARE in the eye and said, “We’re Jewish.”

Damn if that didn’t make me feel like an ass. But after we got that out of the way, we had a good time for five or ten minutes swapping tales of the Orient. It was a good day all in all. And then I took the train home. What a nice ride.