Ataturk in bumpy stone or marble, a seated pose, bitterly earned pomposity, a sort of athlete-deputy from the East; or reckless on horseback in the new squares, streaky, brigandish, a furious, suicidal patriot; or in three colors, cheeks lightly pink, a paper image on the walls of restaurants, hotels, living rooms, boats, bank buildings, on the flowered, spotty wall paper in the dismal coffee houses. Again and again, the hot black of his tuxedo lapels and the cold white of his shirt front, almost a dummy in a hire-for-the-evening shop—the official portrait.
He was everywhere, everywhere. “A spectacular fate when you remember that he’s dead,” Harriet observed. They were amused, but even from the first uncomfortable in his presence. Perhaps it was a mistake to have come at all. One might better leave unseen the marvels of old Istanbul than face up to the squalid, inspired frenzy of the new, the democratic desolation. Traveling, like everything else, had become too political. Was Ataturk looking down on his revolution with shriveling benevolence, the greedy dictator’s “love”? No, Eric felt he was simply gazing, in the prodigious multiplication of his portraits and statues, at the intense Turkish atmosphere, appalled, certainly, by the enduring sky of minarets and onion domes, the obstinate Turkish landscape, even now crawling with unreclaimed masses, all black rags and horrors, ignorant, “backward,” Eastern—embarrassing to the point of madness. A sympathetic leader? In their last copy of the Paris Tribune Walter Lippmann had said that an Ataturk revolution was the only hope for Iran and Egypt.
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