Читать книгу Looking for Aphrodite - David Price Williams - Страница 61

non-eventfulness of man landing on the moon that even the Americans have stopped sending people there.

And for me, was I ever touched by it? Well, I was once given a frying pan of some ceramic substance which I was assured by the label was totally heat resistant and absolutely non-stick, because the material had been developed for the nose cone of the rocket that took man to the moon. It was totally resistant to anything adhering to it, it said. Well, let me tell you, the NASA space team which sent those astronauts to the moon that July night should be very grateful that the Earth’s outer atmosphere is not made up of hen’s eggs, because an egg fried in this extra-terrestrial wonder pan, with or without oil, instantly welds itself to the pan’s surface with such tenacious permanence that at one time I might even have considered marketing the product as a super-bond adhesive. But in the end I threw the pan away.

One giant step bollocks! Pass the rakι!

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Cengis was of course from the Village, from Yazιköy, of which more later. His hair was already turning grey, which with his marked Asiatic features gave him a distinguished appearance, not unlike a latter day but slimmed down Confucius. This singular oriental mien enabled him to stand slightly aloof from the cut and thrust of day to day Çayhane life, ever the servant but ever above the fray. It turned out that his father was the local hodja, the person who presided over the mosque at Yazιköy, the equivalent I suppose of the village priest, since it was Cengis’ dad who officiated, amongst other things, at most of the marriages and funerals.

By and large, we had all taken this information about Cengis’ dad fairly matter-of-factly, so that when, one morning, it was announced that the holy father was about to come to see his son in Knidos that afternoon, no-one

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