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Travel Notes: Fragments from SmyrnaAuthor(s): Eric LarsenSource: The North American Review, Vol. 260, No. 3 (Fall, 1975), pp. 52-53Published by: University of Northern IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25099283 .

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ERIC LARSEN lives in New York City and is no stranger to the NAR.

A STORY BY ERIC LARSEN

Travel Notes:

Fragments from Smyrna

11 e had been told about the earthquakes and warned about

them, but he had not felt one. Then before dawn one morning there was a tremor. It was minor, nothing important, but still it

was frightening. Above all it seemed unreal.

Thomas thought someone was moving his bed, bouncing the mattress up and down the way you might do to wake

someone up. He did wake up and there was no one there,

but the bouncing didn't stop. It was like a car rolling

quickly over smooth corduroys in pavement buckled by heat. He sat up and swung his feet to the floor, and the floor

was doing it too. The entire room was doing it, the hotel, all

of Izmir.

Carrie was saying something in her sleep, rolling her

head on the pillow. Thomas touched her bare shoulder to

wake her up. It's an earthquake, he whispered, but just then

it stopped, vanished abruptly into stillness, and she didn't

believe him. She gazed at him with a kind of distrust. Why didn't you wake me up? she said. She had been having a

dream. The two of them were inside an airliner that was

going to crash. They were high up, she said, in the thin

freezing air above the clouds, in the sparkling sunlight, yet

for some reason Thomas could imagine only a grainy image in black and white of an old-fashioned DC-3 falling past

distant towers of clouds, its wings turning slowly around.

Thin light was gathering at the window, and Thomas

went over to look out. He pulled back the curtain with his

hand.

An old rusted freighter moved slowly shoreward across

the wide bay, barely leaving a wake on the placid water. In

great letters on the side of the flaking hull stood the words

LYNES LINES. After a moment, Thomas opened the door to

the small terrace and went out. There were the fresh smells

of early spring in the air, and with them the dank salt scent

of the bay. He looked at the battered ship again; it said LYKES LINES and not LYNES LINES. He had seen a mis

spelled sign on a fence once in New York that said DON'T

SUPPORT DECIET, and he thought of it now, absently, as

he looked out over the mysteriously placid water.

Mist hung far out over the bay, suspended in thin gray

layers over the smooth surface like last night's smoke. Ev

erything was utterly, absolutely silent. It was like a photo

graph that stretched from edge to edge of his sight. Nothing moved except the deserted ship and the handful of gulls flying as if in slow motion around its stern. It seemed to

Thomas that if he were to scream there would be no sound.

After a time he went back in. Carrie was sitting up in

bed, smoking a cigarette. The sheet was pushed down

"The broken wall, the burning roof and tower. . ."

around her hips, and her heavy breasts hung naked, the

dark nipples puckered and erect, as with a chill.

A hey spent the days waiting for mail that never arrived.

They walked through the narrow streets of the old city and

looked in the covered ships. From inside the shabby tea

houses unshaven Turks peered out from the darkness, stared

at them blinking in the sunshine. In one of the shops Thomas bought Carrie a medallion with the ancient sun-face

of a woman, and she wore it around her neck so the heavy medallion hung between her breasts.

In the streets men in ragged clothes pushed old wooden

carts with tiny bells suspended on strings above them. They sold bread-rings and roasted almonds, dyed pistachios and

Turkish pastries lying in pans of honey. The air was sweet

and pungent everywhere with incense and perfumes and

spices and the dung of horses, and the muezzin sang out in

eerie tones from crackling loudspeakers set awkwardly atop the cracked domes of the shabby, beaten mosques.

At the APO there was no mail, and they walked back to

the hotel through narrow dusty streets and over broken

sidewalks where ragged men were sleeping with their backs

against the walls and their feet protruding so you had to step

carefully over them. In front of the hotel it was different

because it looked like the Cote d'azur with the green palm trees and the blue bay and the wide tile sidewalks. There

was a young boy whose face and throat were covered with

thick reddish scabs and who had no nose except two slits as

if someone had made them with the tip of a knife. He sluiced the tile walks with buckets of water and then swept them with a stiff broom so there was no dust and it was

always sweet and cool and fresh as if there had just been a

rain.

In the hotel room Carrie lay on the bed in her underwear

and read Simone de Beauvoir, and Thomas wrote in his

journal, but pointlessly, because he could never find any

shape in what he wrote. He read The Unquiet Grave. He took

off his clothes and lay down on the bed, but Carrie turned

over and pulled the sheet over her and fell asleep. The night

before, she had waked up crying but couldn't remember

why. Thomas tried to sleep, but gazed instead at the shapes of her body. He reached over and pressed his hand against her belly above the tangle of black hair. She stirred but

didn't waken. In the street below, men cried out in ancient,

52 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW/FALL 1975

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Fragments from Smyrna

tired voices, selling wares from their wooden carts. The

palm fronds outside the window moved gently in the after

noon breeze, and brightly painted fishing boats, blue and

yellow and red, crossed and re-crossed the sparkling bay under

the sun.

\Jn Easter morning a Russian liner sailed into the bay. Thomas watched it from the terrace?sleek and lovely, pure

and white as a seabird, moving smoothly in the dazzling

sunlight over the bright blue water of the bay. In the dining room at breakfast there was restrained, self-conscious laugh ter among the young officers and their nervous wives, and at

the service club there was thin greasy coffee and a colored

map of the United States pinned to the wall and a sign that

said This is your service club we invite you to enjoy it but

please keep the facilities clean, and the girl behind the

counter where they kept the billiard balls said she was sorry

but, no, there wasn't a scheduled bus after all.

Carrie was wearing a denim skirt and a blue scarf from

Venice over her dark hair, and Thomas wanted to tell her

how lovely she was, but she touched his hand for a moment

and squeezed it and then turned away. They met five British

students who sang songs and did dirty gag routines for the

officers' clubs and together they rented a dolmus and rode

out through the squalid outskirts of the city and onto the

open road in the sunlight over pale green hills scattered with

broken rock and distant groves of olive trees like the pic tures in Sunday school books of the Holy Land. The driver

turned on the radio to the station that played Western songs,

and everyone sang along with the music, then everyone

shared cigarettes with everyone else, and the driver smiled

and nodded to show them how pleased he was.

He took them first to the statue of Artemis with the mys

terious clusters of egg-shaped breasts hanging down like

tiers of dugs in front of her. It was cool inside the thick

stone walls, and the moist air was silent and still.

Afterwards they walked outdoors, among the ruins of the

goddess's temple, where the Americans from the military base stood clustered like uneasy tourists for their Easter ser

vice in the open air. A wind came up from among the shat

tered fragments of fallen columns and billowed the

preacher's skirts; it scattered his papers upward like flutter

ing, released birds, and his black-sleeved arm shot up

against the sky too late to stop them. A woman shrieked.

Tall grass stood moving in the breeze among the broken

marble.

At the house of the Virgin, Thomas and Carrie went

down to the spring where the water came out of a rock, and

Carrie bent down and drank from her cupped hands, then

stood up again and looked at Thomas with a questioning, hesitant smile in her dark eyes. The breeze touched her hair

and her lips were wet in the warmth of the sun. A nameless

fear rose up and tightened in Thomas's throat, then slowly

passed, but left him frightened. That night in the hotel he had a dream that he was standing on a hill and saw the sky itself freeze over suddenly like frosted glass and then shatter

completely and it was the end of everything, utterly, and

nothing remained but screaming and silence. Then the

morning after that they went down on the quay in Smyrna and sailed for Istanbul.

JUDITH PYNCHON

BUILDING THE GOAT-PEN

It wasn't meant to be metaphysical;

it was meant to be

work: lifting,

hammering, sawing

work. Oh, there was

some measuring,

but that was mechanical.

Then, as we lolled

around the kitchen table,

stupid, limp, idle?

Tinkle, Tinkle. The goat was at the door.

Just to joke we said:

"Who is the goat?"

A local witch's familiar?

A relative of Pan?

The balloon man?

Someone serious said:

"Has anyone looked

at a hoof?"

Then, Tinkle, Tinkle. The goat was at the door.

Deterioration set in fast.

We hammered, but only halfway;

we sawed, but too short;

we gave up lining boards up.

We said, and this

was the fatal

mistake, "Let's think

about what we're doing."

Maybe we should be

penning the goat on paper,

and so at night

we'd write,

in the manner of the Shelleys.

We dreamed elegant

goat-fantasies,

elaborate shaggy goat-jokes,

weird goat-masques, goat-tales.

Then the whole thing fell apart.

THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW/FALL 7975 53

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