Interlude: My dear Armin
Salonika, April 1915
Arthur Conan Doyle had visited the Balkans as a child, almost half a century before. Salonika had already been a city then, but a small one, and most of the stevedores and sailors had called it “Thessaloniki.” A few of them still did, but they were far outnumbered by the more recent arrivals, the Jews who had turned Salonika from a small city to a big one and who’d put their stamp on every part of it. Even the Greeks and Turks who worked alongside them now looked and spoke a little like Jews themselves.
Doyle, making his way down the gangplank to the pier, found it vaguely disconcerting. He was a man of the world, of course, and no stranger to Jews; he’d known them in many of the cities he’d lived and visited. But in those places, Jews did their best to blend in with the majority, or else stayed mostly in their own neighborhoods. Here, the Jews were the majority to which their neighbors blended. It wasn’t a
bad thing, necessarily, but it… just wasn’t the way things were supposed to work.
And the Jews! Doyle was past the cranes and warehouses of the docklands now, and into the waterfront plaza. The people there were as motley an assembly as one would find in any port, and most of them looked very little like the Jew of a Scot’s or even a Londoner’s imagination. There were Hasidim in their heavy black coats and fur hats, yes; they looked familiar, but Doyle couldn’t help imagining what such clothing must feel like in this climate. The Moroccans and Tunisians were in more sensible djellabas, but they were olive-skinned and curly-haired, looking far more like Doyle’s idea of an Arab or Greek than otherwise. There were sober Ashkenazim dressed like Germans; sober Sephardim and Romaniotes dressed like rich Turks; Russians; Caucasians dressed like poor Turks; Yemenis who looked like Bedouins; even a few Ethiopians in the patterned cotton robes of their country.
It was enough to make Doyle wonder how anyone could think of Jews as a race.
He stopped in the square for a moment, unabashedly watching the people pass and listening to snatches of their conversations. The cadences of many languages drifted to his ears; he could hear Turkish, Greek, Russian, Yiddish, something that sounded like archaic Spanish, and…
“Hebrew?”
“Yes, it is.” He turned to see an amused, vaguely Balkan-looking man speaking in accented English, and all at once was deeply embarrassed.
“I’m sorry…”
“No need to be. Everyone’s like that when they first get here, me as much as anyone else. And most of us don’t stand much on formality here – maybe up on the hills, but the rest of us ignore them.”
“Oh.” Doyle exhaled in relief, and curiosity got the better of embarrassment. “I didn’t realize that people actually
spoke Hebrew – I thought it was only for prayer, like church Latin.”
“If you ask the Hasidim, it is. But the Am Ehad party…”
“Am Ehad?”
“Sorry, ‘one people.’ They’re the ones who want to turn everything you see here into a single nation, with Hebrew as its common language. You can see they’ve got their work cut out for them.” Doyle’s interlocutor paused for a moment and let his eyes drift to a poster advertising an art exhibition in Turkish and Greek. “I like the sound of Hebrew, though. Maybe it’s that Hebrew’s ours, not something we borrowed from you lot, no offense meant.”
“And none taken,” Doyle answered; he was privately appalled by the other man’s crassness, but it wasn’t as if
he’d made the best of starts here either. “Would you happen to know where the Kerem neighborhood is?”
“Kerem? That’s up north and a little west – I’m headed that way myself. You can follow me.”
“Thank you…”
“Yossi. Yossi Calderon.”
Try and fit that
into your mental geography, Yossi’s eyes taunted, but his smile was welcoming as he led Doyle onward.
They walked past the public buildings and department stores on the plaza into the winding streets of the old city, with its ancient houses converted to tenements.
The natural habitat of the Jew, a fellow naval officer had said once, and maybe this time the stereotypes had some truth to them; Salonika’s population had grown faster than the available housing, and it was a crowded city even by the standards of someone who’d spent years in Singapore and Hong Kong.
The crowding seemed even worse with so many people were down on the streets, and to Doyle’s astonishment, many of them were clustered around tables. The streets were rich with the smell of fresh-baked bread, and the tables were piled high with flat crepes, cakes, lamb, and olives and roasted vegetables arranged in groups of five.
Yossi looked back at him, amusement in his eyes again. “Mimouna,” he said. “It’s a Moroccan holiday, but everyone celebrates now, and rather than inviting people in, they’ve just brought the tables out to the street.” He snagged a crepe from one of the tables, folded it around some lamb and handed it to Doyle; as he did so, a Moroccan Jewish patriarch in a djellaba and silk cap sprinkled both of them with a sprig of mint dipped in milk.
The milk was unexpected, but the lamb was surprisingly good, and Doyle suddenly realized how hungry he was.
“It’s good to see everyone getting along,” Yossi said, moving on.
“Sometimes they don’t?”
“Some idiot a month off the boat started a big fight a few days ago – he saw some Mizrahim eating rice at Passover, and said something he shouldn’t have. It would have ended there, but once the families and friends got involved, it became a matter of honor, and you know how those things are.”
“I suppose I do,” Doyle said, and in truth he’d seen many fights start over even lesser things.
Put people from so many countries this close together, and you’re lucky not to have a civil war…
The neighborhood was changing now; the streets were straighter, the buildings well-constructed and modern, the stores more lavish and even some small parks and trees to break up the urban jungle. The roads were less crowded, although there was plenty of noise from the apartments and restaurants; it seemed that Salonika’s bourgeois preferred to celebrate Mimouna inside.
“Kerem’s in there,” Yossi said, and pointed across a square and past a statue of someone Doyle presumed to be a Jewish hero. “It isn’t that big – just ask someone for your street, and he’ll tell you how to get there.”
It proved a bit more complicated than that; Doyle was just starting to get a feel for the city’s layout, and he had to ask directions three times before he found his way to Gracia Nasi Street. Number 59 was a handsome stone building four stories in height, and as dusk fell, he mounted the stairs to the second floor and rang the right-hand doorbell. A moment later, the door opened, and an elderly man with Central European looks and the air of a nineteenth-century gentleman stood in front of him.
“Monsieur Vámbéry?”
“It’s Armin Bey here. And you, I presume, are Dr. Doyle.”
“You got my letter, then?”
“I did.” The old man stepped aside, ushering Doyle through the door and into a well-kept apartment decorated with curios from the Caucasus and Central Asia. Their arrangement was eclectic but bespoke a refined taste; the furniture was sparse but well-made, and the walls were lined with books in half a dozen languages. Vámbéry stopped at a table by the window, and the two took seats facing a polished wooden centerpiece that looked more African than Turkic.
“Oh, that,” Vámbéry said, seeing where Doyle’s gaze had traveled. “That was sent to me by a correspondent of mine, a coffee and tea exporter late of the Bugandan army by way of the Honvéd and an Ottoman prison camp. Weisz, his name is. He writes me now and then about the folklore – there are some vampire legends that might interest you, actually.”
“They would indeed. I’m much more familiar with the West African stories…”
“Most certainly. I enjoyed your
Firefly, and
The Thief of Timbuktu was quite good as well; I hadn’t realized there were such legends on the upper Niger.”
“It isn’t widely known.”
“Then we should talk about that later. But now, I’d assume you’re hungry. The woman who comes to cook for me is away, so I thought we’d go down to Malka’s. They make the best Ashkenazi food in this part of the city; you’d swear you were in Poland, or dare I say it, Hungary. We’d be away from the Mimouna crowds, and we can discuss Transylvanian vampires, which is why you’re really here.”
“That sounds excellent – but how did you know that?”
Vámbéry thought of telling Doyle about the letter his colleague had written, which was much more detailed than his own cryptic note and which went on at length about his latest literary project. But then he decided there was no need for that; he was an old man, and he was entitled to have his fun.
“It was elementary.”
