Fair Game

...As he attempts, rather self-consciously, to haggle in the Plaka or in the Grand Bazaar, how can he, the American tourist, avoid being put on the spot...

...Arriving in Turkey, excited by the Western buff's vision of Byzantium and Islam, he may wind up looking out upon the Bosphorus from a hotel designed to keep him from unsettling contacts with the fabled and filthy city...

...She herself had been born on Rhodes and had lived there all her life, except for the War years when her family tried to escape the German occupiers...

...A sign on a wall indicated that I had come upon a synagogue...

...It did not look very old, but the woman told me, in our mutual pigeon French, that it had been built 300 years ago, and now served seven families, some 30 people...

...My reactions began to come together a little...

...Delphi was fantastic.'' "Mycenae was simply fantastic...

...What have the real needs of real workaday people to do with the cravings of the traveler entranced by the ancients and determined to go home with some sort of revelation...

...What sort of pretensions were these that I was lugging through Europe...

...A public relations woman in Istanbul complained about the Right-wing religious tone of the present Turkish regime and maintained that the way to deal with the dispute over oil rights in the Aegean was for Turkish and Greek businessmen to get together and keep the politicians out of it...

...The building was small and simple, of no particular beauty or interest that I could detect...

...Some days afterward in Istanbul, I visited the city's main synagogue, near the Galata Tower, and talked with an English-speaking official of the community center...

...our conversation was brief...

...How were things now...

...lacking in depth and reach, he can scarcely help utter phrases he has read elsewhere?his source not always as estimable as Gibbon—or, worse, overheard in the hotel lobby from people who made the rounds the day before...

...And stunned though he may be at his first encounter with the Acropolis, with Ephesus, with Knossos, with Hagia Sophia, when he tries to express his feelings, the words are likely to be not quite his own...

...But never in other visits to Europe have I felt so out of touch with the life of the countries I was visiting, so distant from both their present and their past...

...Innocence Lost In any case, when an instant of contact came—between me and someone only marginally in the tourism line, between the past I had carried with me and the present as it is being endured—I was no doubt disproportionately gratified...

...I turned into a narrow street named for a martyred Christian and walked along it for a few yards...

...It occurred on Rhodes...

...But the woman was not in her place...

...1976 New Yorker, have to do with the ancients...

...had ruled after being driven out of Jerusalem, imagining that I was getting in touch with the darkness, closeness and stench of a medieval garrison town...

...I could not make connections in my meanderings along boulevards and amid ruins, between what I was seeing and what had existed for so many years in my mind...

...A woman, thin, about my age, was sitting on a stoop...

...If the Greek Customs found them, I'd properly be tossed into jail...

...Was the government causing any difficulties...

...For all I knew, she was running a cottage industry...

...I soon met an American couple who had been taken into the synagogue by a man and given much the same information...

...He confided that he prefers not to use his surname, Shalom, in the bazaar...

...We chatted over tiny glasses of tea for a couple of hours as he sold me a carpet...

...Yes, of course I tried on those few occasions that I met an English-speaking native not altogether in the tourist trade to get onto a subject that had nothing to do with the quality of the food or the eccentricities of cab drivers...

...What he would say, I already knew: Turkey's Jews flocked to Israel when it became a state, leaving only about 35,000 of their brethren in the country, most of them in this city...

...Hadn't he...

...They ended up in a concentration camp—she showed the number on her arm—and most of them were killed...

...Or, if my lady's forbears were not yet there to enjoy the courtesies of knighthood, perhaps they came to Rhodes after being ejected from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella...

...Had I made some sort of connection between a danger-filled past and a delicate present...

...That was it—the Ancient World...

...In Istanbul, too, I had met a witty 72-year-old carpet salesman named Albert, who turned out to be Jewish...

...Still, I remembered reading that the Knights of the Order of St...

...It was evident that she had told her story and had shown the number on her arm many times before, to other Jewish tourists Who drifted by, had their look and left a few drachmas, perhaps destined for the synagogue...

...No complaints...

...John of Jerusalem, who held the island in the 14th and 15th centuries, counted among their religious duties the cleansing of Rhodes of Jews...

...How were things now for the seven remaining families...

...I kept thinking, while I was making my obligatory and rewarding pilgrimage up to the Acropolis, that to contemporary Athenians these symbols of Greece at its apex must be looked upon mainly as bringers of Deut-schemarks and dollars and oversized buses that clog their streets and their air...

...The most striking intimations of Byzantium I found in teeming Istanbul were the replen-dent shoeshine boxes lined up at Taksim...

...she asked...

...In Turkey, I had heard that there was a strong movement toward solidarity with the Arab lands, and I saw graffiti linking the U.S...

...Synagogue...

...So there was nothing all that special about my encounter...

...Mykonos was absolutely fantastic...

...Not uninteresting, such conversations, but not in-close either, rather happenstance and cool...

...The tourist had made contact...

...I had been wandering about the walled city, where the Frankish Knight-brigand...

...and Israel in a way that even an illiterate tourist could tell was unfriendly...

...In places where that sort of gesture is made, it generally comes down to some old folks posing in peculiar costumes...

...Things were all right, I was told...

...Is he to be an exploiter or one of the affluent exploited...

...No problems—but why ask for trouble...

...A shrug: "The Italians, the Germans, the Greeks—it doesn't matter...

...Arrived in Athens overflowing with awe and wonder, he may find himself prowling back streets in search of picturesque, which is to say dismal, alleyways foT the benefit of his camera...

...There was a surprising conversation with a high-priced American-taught doctor in Athens, who confessed that he leaned toward the Greek Communists despite his aversion to their political style because no other party had a program to reduce the outlandish gap between the country's rich and its peasantry...

...What did I expect, after all?sound-and-light-shows about the fall of Rome...

...In Greece, I had heard that Henry Kissinger, widely disliked since the Cyprus blowup, was being denounced as a Jew...

...and handed me a yarmulke...

...Then, too, I am not as adventurous in my efforts to meet people as I may once have been...

...She came back to Rhodes in 1949...

...I saw most of the remarkable things I had come to see and was suitably overwhelmed...

...These sour reflections arise out of your correspondent's recent visit to Greece and Turkey...

...Beware of Greeks wearing togas...

...I returned to the synagogue a few hours later, hoping to learn a bit more about the Jewish remnant on the island...

...I left his shop, determined to believe that it was not just the drachmas that the woman on Rhodes had wanted of me and that Albert had wanted something more than a carpet sale...

...Albert has a sister in Seattle—yet how could he leave his business...

...the gate to the courtyard was shut...

...Now, there is no reason on earth why the people of any city, battling to make a living, should spare a thought for a tourist's daydreams...

...And, anyhow, what did 1. Mr...

...She led me into a courtyard and then into the building where she asked, "You Yooish...

...Partly, I suppose, I owed my sense of being kept out of things simply to language, Greek and Turkish being equally baffling to me...

...The man was busy...

...and, no doubt, I had expected too much of this, my belated first exposure to the Ancient World...