Amazing Mrs. Pollifax

by Dorothy Gilman

  She looked up and waved at Colin who had wandered out of the inn. He said dreamily, “Just think, these same walls were standing when Tamerlane came through this part of the country.” He patted his camera. “I think I got a wonderful shot of that frieze, and the old walls inside; I’m absolutely certain I didn’t muff it. No Sandor yet?”

  “Here he comes,” said Magda.

  Mrs. Pollifax looked up to see him loping through the gateway and she had to control her gladness at seeing this disreputable, grinning, filthy man. She thought that even if he shaved and bathed she would recognize him because he would still exude the same boundless joy in living and in outwitting whatever forces resisted him. He had obviously been busy for his arms were full of bundles.

  “I am back,” he cried. “I have found Bengziz Madrali and he will help—there is much work to do, we go to meet him now but first—good Turkish peasant clothes so you will become incognito.”

  “Become what?” said Mrs. Pollifax, staring with distaste at what appeared to be a week’s laundry that he held out to her.

  Obviously he was conferring a great honor upon her. “For you ladies the baggy pants,” he said. “Also the skirt, the shirt and the shawl that begins over your heads and goes everywhere—I show you its workings.” He stuffed them into her arms without sympathy. “And for you,” he cried happily to Colin, “the moustachio—a good sweep of one—and a cap and trousers with holes in them. You will look like me, eh? Could anything be better?”

  “Oh nothing,” Colin said dryly.

  “Then wotthehell, change now in the truck and we go. Is better Madrali never see you in your own clothes, he has a feel for intrigue, that man, and the roadblocks are up.”

  Mrs. Pollifax had been halfway across the courtyard with her new clothes in her arms when he said this. She stopped. “Roadblocks?”

  He nodded pleasantly. “Twenty minutes ago. Pfut—suddenly they are there. Police stopping everyone. Madrali hears everything, you understand? He says officially it is the new government study of traffic flow but he hears they look for specific peoples.” Sandor beamed at them. “You do not wish to be specific peoples, do you? Incognito please—at once!”

  Mrs. Pollifax thought the room looked exactly like a thieves’ den, and she discovered with some surprise that she felt delightfully at ease in such an atmosphere. Shadows leaped up the walls and across the ceiling from candles burning in their sockets and from the charcoal brazier on which their dinner of tel kadayif and pilaf had been cooked. On one whitewashed wall hung a picture of Ataturk in an unusually convivial, smiling pose. On the other side of the brazier, seated cross-legged on the floor with a tray on his lap, Bengziz Madrali squinted over the three cards of identity he was forging for them. Occasionally he grunted expressively as he examined his work through a jeweler’s glass, and occasionally he flashed Mrs. Pollifax a smile laden with warm reassurance and admiration.

  “Your name is now Yurgadil Aziz,” commented Sandor, eating noisily with his fingers from a platter and looking over Madrali’s shoulder. “The other lady is Nimet Aziz, and he”—pointing a dripping finger at Colin—“is Nazmi Aziz.”

  Lost: one Emily Pollifax, she thought, and glanced ruefully at the black baggy pants engulfing her legs.

  From the corner Magda gave an amused laugh. Her hair had been dyed brown from a bottle that Madrali had purchased in the bazaar; and then it had been washed and set in fat steel curlers that bristled gruesomely all over her head. She sat and smoked a Turkish cigarette with elegant fastidiousness, her hands moving gracefully but without any sign of being attached to her body, which had become lost somewhere inside her voluminous Turkish disguise. Near her sat Colin, loading his still camera with film for the passport photograph he was going to take of Magda when the curlers were removed and her hair combed. Catching Mrs. Pollifax’s glance he said irritably, “Soon? You know I’ve got to develop the picture and then it’s got to dry!”

  In appearance she thought he outdid them all. He wore shabby pinstripe trousers tied with a belt of rope, a vest too tight across his chest, a purple shirt and a pink bowtie. His sweeping moustache left him almost mouthless and because he wasn’t accustomed to it he kept trying to look down at it, which caused his eyes to cross. He also complained that it itched. Yet in spite of all this he had acquired a definite air of distinction. In some indescribable manner his new identity brought out the fierceness in him that Mrs. Pollifax had noticed when she first met him but which she had assumed was a defense against failure, and against taller and more successful men. But freed of any possible competitiveness, and wearing the most absurdly shabby clothes, Colin was fierce. There was no mistaking it: there was a look about him of a mountain brigand.

  There is more of his family in him than he knows, thought Mrs. Pollifax with amusement. She stood up and walked over to Magda and felt her head. It was dry. Removing the curlers she said, “Mr. Madrali, you have the suntan make-up? You have the white backdrop for the passport picture?”

  “Evet, evet,” he said, nodding. “Over there, pliss.”

  Colin shook his head. “I still can’t imagine how you expect to get her out of the country when we can’t even get out of Ankara.”

  “I go look into that now and make more questions,” Sandor said, reluctantly putting aside his plate of food. “The new ideas they come and go. Now I go.”

  “Good. The white blouse, please,” said Mrs. Pollifax, helping Magda out of her Turkish clothes and into her own navy blue suit.

  Sandor stopped and looked down at Magda. “Wotthehell she can’t leave a country without a passport.”

  “She has a passport,” Mrs. Pollifax said calmly as she began applying tan make-up to Magda’s white face.

  “Wotthehell, you forge those too?”

  “It’s a very respectable passport,” she told him, “and very legal. There,” she said, applying lipstick to Magda. “I think she looks rather like a poetess or an undernourished actress, don’t you, Colin?”

  Sandor went out, looking mystified. Colin said, “You’re quite right, I wouldn’t have believed it possible.”

  Flashbulbs illuminated the room several times before its native dimness returned, and then Magda lay down and promptly went to sleep. Colin at once became tiresomely cross and nervous about developing the film, and since Mr. Madrali’s English was severely limited and he was still engrossed in his forgeries, Mrs. Pollifax opened the door and walked out.

  The tiny house in which Mr. Madrali lived—or hid, as the case might be—leaned against the walls of the Citadel, even belonged to the wall of the Citadel, like something washed up against the sides of an old ship. Mounting the tamped down earthern path behind his house Mrs. Pollifax put back her head and looked up at the wall that had withstood a thousand years of earthquakes, pillage and armies, and then she looked down at the crooked, meandering alleys below, with their rows of primitive hovels dropping to the base of the hill. The sun was just disappearing behind the distant mountains leaving a blaze of glorious color in the sky but on the plains surrounding Ankara twilight had already fallen, and lights were beginning to glitter along Ankara’s streets and avenues.

  As she stood transfixed the last notes of a muezzin’s chant reached her ears from below, sounding phantom in the high clear air, and Mrs. Pollifax thought, I must remember this moment, and then, I shall have to come back and really see this country. Yet she knew that if she did come back it would be entirely different. It was the unexpected that brought to these moments this tender, unnameable rush of understanding, this joy in being alive. It was safety following danger, it was food after hours of hunger, rest following exhaustion, it was the astonishing strangers who had become her friends. It was this and more, until the richness of living caught at her throat, and all the well-meant security with which people surrounded themselves was exposed for what it truly was: a wall to keep out life, a conceit, a mad delusion.

  She was still standing there when Sandor walked up the steep path. It had becom
e quite dark; she realized with a start that she had been standing there for a long time. “Is that you?” he said, peering at her. Little squares and stripes of light lay behind him on the path, formed by the shuttered and open windows of the surrounding houses.

  “Yes,” she said. “Where have you been?”

  He said buoyantly, “I have biggest good luck! The twice-a-week bus for Yozgat leaves at dawn. It will be hot, cheap, very crowded. I went to Taksim Square to be sure—already the families sleep there waiting.”

  “Bus?” said Mrs. Pollifax wonderingly. “But won’t the police be stopping the busses too?”

  “When you see the busses you understand,” he said cryptically. “Only Turks take them—tourists never!—and they buy tickets distantly ahead. But wotthehell, for big price I get four tickets to Yozgat.”

  He said modestly, “For a little extra I come too. You need me for the translations.”

  She turned and looked at him gratefully. “Oh yes, we do need you, Sandor, but I scarcely dared hope—Aren’t you wanted by the police too, Sandor? Who are you really?”

  “A scoundrel,” he said with a grin. “Who are you, really?”

  She laughed. “Obviously I ask too many questions.”

  “That you do, yes.” He shrugged. “Be comfortable, don’t itch. It is like a story of Nasr-ed-Din Hodja who went through the East many hundreds of years ago. His stories live everywhere. One of them is that Nasr-ed-Din was walking a road one dark night when he saw three men coming toward him. ‘Oho,’ he thinks, ‘they may be robbers’ so he jumps over a wall and hides behind a rock. The three men see this and are curious and they too jump over the rock and go to him. ‘What is wrong?’ they ask. ‘What are you doing here?’ And Nasr-ed-Din sees the truth of it—that they are not robbers—and he says, ‘Oh gentlemen, I will tell you why we are all here. I am here because of you, and you are here because of me.’ ”

  Mrs. Pollifax smiled. “A most philosophical parable. Are there more of them?”

  “Evet. Another story is that Nasr-ed-Din said he could see in the dark. Someone said to him, ‘That may be so, Nasr-ed-Din but if this is true why then do you always carry a candle at night?’ Nasr-ed-Din said, ‘Why, to prevent other people from bumping into me!’ ”

  Mrs. Pollifax laughed delightedly.

  Sandor took her arm. “More I tell you another time. Please, go inside now before we are heard speaking English. Tomorrow at dawn we go to Yozgat.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Having been officially hired as their guide, Sandor took them over with stern authority. He allowed them to sleep until three o’clock in the morning and then he prodded them awake. “For you to be real peasants you get up now. You will do rest of the sleeping in Taksim Square, please. Like others.”

  The three of them arose stiffly from their floormats. They would have to wash on their way down the hill, at the public well, Sandor told them; Madrali was bringing them tea and fruit for their breakfast. They would also be carrying their lunch on the bus with them—it was already packed in a basket: two jugs of water and the remains of their evening meal. He produced a small cardboard suitcase that looked as if it had been possessed by a dozen other people first. Into this Mrs. Pollifax packed her suit for Magda to wear, and Colin added a number of spare reels of film. His cameras he insisted upon carrying in a string bag. Mrs. Pollifax again checked her pantaloons for the wads of money and Magda’s passport, all secured with large safety pins. Her flowered hat was presented to Mr. Madrali with instructions to dispose of it, as well as her useless, emptied purse.

  They started out in the pale light of dawn, and at the base of the hill wrung Mr. Madrali’s hands, thanked him and were once again on their own, a little more secure in their new identities but a little less secure at being on the street.

  “I think I could get to like these baggy pants,” said Mrs. Pollifax, lengthening her stride. “Is my headgear properly wrapped? Are you sure we’re all right, with everything where it should be?”

  “Good, very good,” Sandor said gravely. “Except slower—please! You act like American. Dressed as you are dressed you come from a small village—do not walk so fast, so happy, and please—stay behind us men!” He shrugged apologetically. “Not for myself, you understand, who know precisely who you are but for the role, the act. Anatolian women, they work hard, say nothing. And to wear the shawl pulled so across the mouth you must be very shy, very small village. You understand?”

  “All right.”

  Sandor added, “You do not look so Turkish as the other lady, you see.”

  “Oh—sorry,” she said contritely, falling still another pace behind him and Colin.

  “And stop talking English,” contributed Colin, delivering the final snub.

  Magda’s eyes were gleaming over her veil with amusement. “It worked,” she said.

  “What did?”

  “You look properly cowed and snubbed now. Your shoulders droop, you look shamed and subservient.”

  Mrs. Pollifax said in a peevish undertone—she really had been feeling expansive—“It’s all very well for you—he said you look the part.”

  “Touché,” said Magda with a throaty little laugh that reminded Mrs. Pollifax she would be delightful company under more relaxed circumstances. They turned down a broad, tree-rimmed boulevard lined with buildings so modern that Mrs. Pollifax might have forgotten she was in the Near East but for the sight of goats being herded down a side street, and a flock of turkeys being driven screeching, wings flapping, across an intersection.

  When they reached the square they learned what Sandor had meant about bus transportation to Yozgat. A bulging and ancient wooden vehicle stood beside the curb—“It’s early,” explained Sandor—and around it squatted dozens of families who looked as if they had been waiting all night long. Sandor reminded them they must not speak to anyone, not even to one another, but smile and keep smiling agreeably. They silently sat beside the others. After about an hour the driver of the bus came whistling across the boulevard, unlocked the bus and began shouting orders to the passengers to bring their suitcases to him for storage on top of the bus. A policeman wandered over and watched, then alarmed Mrs. Pollifax by asking to see the cards of identity and the bus tickets of everyone waiting to leave.

  “Do not panic,” whispered Sandor. “Steady does it.”

  When the policeman reached Mrs. Pollifax she concentrated on looking as small and submissive as possible. “Yurgadil Aziz,” he said musingly, as he examined her identity card. “Bilet?” he added, holding out his hand.

  Sandor arose, spoke easily in Turkish and produced four bus tickets from his pocket. Mrs. Pollifax gathered that she had been asked for her ticket, and because the tickets had all been sold days earlier the possession of one precluded any of them being newly arrived Americans wanted by the police. The tickets were handed back, the policeman moved on, the bus driver shouted, passengers shouted, and like lemmings rushing to the sea they swarmed onto the bus. A child vomited. A pig squealed. Those without seats sat on the floor. Men and women laughed and congratulated themselves upon being there, and the trip to Yozgat was begun.

  Seven hours and one hundred and thirty-eight miles later the bus jolted into Yozgat following innumerable stops to cool and refill an aging radiator, exercise children, revive fainting women and change a tire. After seven hours in such cramped quarters any disguises had become academic: everyone aboard knew that three of the passengers did not speak Turkish but no one appeared to even question the fact or to care. They were foreigners and therefore guests. Whether they were Yugoslavs or Rumanians or Bulgars—apparently no one even conceived of their being Americans—they were treated charmingly: smiled at, handed grapes, peaches and sweets and offered seats on the aisle several inches farther from the dust that billowed in through the open windows. Nevertheless the seven hours seemed endless and Mrs. Pollifax could feel only compassion for the majority of the passengers who were bound for Sivas. “When will they get there?” she
asked Sandor.

  He shrugged. “Six o’clock, eight o’clock, midnight, who knows? Only Allah. But do not worry, they are having the time of their lives.”

  “Magda isn’t. She’s looking horrible again.”

  “I will help her. Then I make discreet questions about the gypsies you seek,” said Sandor. “There are always men in the square, and in a town like this everyone knows everybody else’s business. I have thought further. In Yozgat there will not be many cars, and few gasolines. It will be less prominent to rent a horse and wagon. Wotthehell, okay?”

  “What the hell okay,” said Mrs. Pollifax with a smile, and as the bus halted in Yozgat square, honking its horn dramatically, she stood up and looked for Colin, who had become trapped in the aisle in back of her and could only wave and shrug.

  Magda was helped from her seat by Sandor, and the three of them made their way to the front of the bus. Sandor jumped down first, followed by Magda, who almost fell into his arms, and Mrs. Pollifax stepped down behind them, lifted her head to look around her at Yozgat, and abruptly stiffened.

  A man had separated himself from the cluster of people on the pavement, and had stepped forward to scrutinize each passenger as they dismounted. Now he was staring attentively into Mrs. Pollifax’s half-concealed face; his glance moved to include Sandor and then fell upon Magda who swayed on Sandor’s arm.

  The man was easy to recognize because of his small pointed white goatee. She had in fact already exchanged glances with him once, across a crowded Istanbul livingroom. It was Dr. Guillaume Belleaux.