The
owner, a young man in shirt-sleeves, very dirty and unshaven, and with
an old fez on the side of his head, intimated that I might stay if I
liked.
The cafe was a room full of poor Turks. Picture a crowd of ragged men,
some in drab turbans with loose ends hanging down their backs, but
most of them in dingy red fez hats, faces unshaved, mottled, ugly--a
squat people, very talkative, but terribly mirthless; and in shadowy
corners of the low dark cafe solitary persons with hook-nosed,
ruminative faces. All about me was the din of the strange language,
the clatter of dice and dominoes. All night long the doors of the cafe
slammed and customers passed in and out, games were begun and played
away, animated groups formed at certain tables and then broke up
and gave way to new groups, loud discussions broke out over Turkish
newspapers and politics and the war, in the course of which
discussions the newspaper, a wilderness of Arabic, was often torn to
bits--a series of scenes of tremendous animation and noise; but no one
laughed.
In the clamour of tongues sounded again and again the name "Italia."
The Turks were angry over the war, full of a restrained resentment and
a profound need for revenge. It was a relief to me when one of them
came to my table and talked to me in Russian.
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