Читать книгу Looking for Aphrodite - David Price Williams - Страница 55

the only jetty, where the little fishing boats tied up, convenient for the daily catch – foreign news from the sea. This was important, because food, especially fish, was one of the main attractions of the Çayhane. The other, the real glue which cemented the diverse elements of the Çayhane together, was alcohol. Cengis sold booze!

It was to the Çayhane that the field staff would repair at the end of the day, to sink an Efes – the appropriately named Ephesus beer. It was to the Çayhane that the villagers would gather to drink tea, or later in the evening, if they felt flush, aslan sütü, lion’s milk, the local sobriquet for rakι, the equivalent of the Arabic arak or the Greek ouzo, that milky-looking fiery liquid that turns a young man into a…well, stumbling wreck! And it was to the Çayhane that I would go to eat with the men each night, on the principle that the Reşadiye Peninsula was a veritable cornucopia of comestible resource, something of which the Expedition’s frugal budgeting had never made use.

On a tiny gas ring, and a small tin tray which acted as a charcoal barbecue, Cengis could produce the most remarkable dishes – kebabed fresh grouper, lamb köfte and a variety of egg recipes. He brought from the village a colossal array of fruits – sweet grapes, huge peaches, green and black figs, mandarins, apples, oranges, apricots and cherries - and olives, which grew in super-abundance, and nuts, especially new-season’s almonds, for which the area around Yazιköy, his own village, was famously and justly renowned. The Çayhane offered an absolute profusion of comestibles for a growing lad like me, and Cengis also had wine - not very good wine, admittedly, but there were suggestive elements of Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ about it, you know, the one about ‘A drowsy numbness pains my senses’ etcetera. Well, it didn’t really classify as quite like Keat’s blushful Hippocrene, but the purple stained mouth was right, and the beaded bubbles winking at the brim, and the drowsy numbness did indeed pain my senses, especially the next morning.

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