Through the Smoke, Under the Sycamore, Sharp Eyes for a Deal

"Come on over here, elder brother."

But if the selling is persistent here, it is always soft.

A boy of about 12 looks into the cafe door, the fruit on his shoulder the color of the yellow mesh holding it. "Is there any need for lemons in there?" he asks. He moves on.

A thin man strolls through with sheaves of brightly printed cardboard. Lottery tickets. "They're gonna pull your number," he says. On one of the tickets is a picture of a pigeon.

Gliding from table to table is a waiter with the upswept hair of Kramer in "Seinfeld." Samet clutches a long brass handle in one hand, tongs in the other. His job is to replenish the coals that rest on the top of a water pipe, known here as a nargile .

The fuel fires the moist mixture of tobacco, molasses and mulched fruit that burns in a cup near the top of the pipe. By drawing on the snake-like stem, the customer sucks the sweet, heavy smoke into the base of the pipe and through the water that acts as a filter. Then it flows up and out, soft and smooth by the time it reaches the mouth, throat and deepest reaches of the human lung.

"Let me balance the axle," Samet says, taking from a customer a stem, upholstered in the woven tribal designs that evoke the Orient almost as sweetly as Bahrain red apple, the tobacco brand and flavor he prefers above all.

Time passes. The man nestled in the corner, a dentist playing hooky with a hookah, slips an X-ray back into a teal folder labeled "Confi-Dent," pulls out a toothpick and polices his teeth. Two girls and three boys pass a comic book between them. Tea is ordered.

"I wish I'd left," says a teenager, smiling nervously. His fingertips pull the ends of his sweater into his palms. "If I'd left, it wouldn't have happened."

Someone, it seems, had jumped out a window at a party. "The cops came," his friend says. But he's smiling. Everyone is.

One set of beanbags over, a man takes a sheaf of currency from a business associate. Big bills. He holds a 100-lira note to the pale sunlight. The watermark emerges: the ghost image of Kemal Ataturk, founder of Turkey, arching an eyebrow at the bearer. "You have to be careful," the man says. "They even make fake coins. I'm serious."

The approach of 4 p.m. finds the man with the scarf, named Ahmet, bent over a crossword puzzle. In Turkish newspapers they take up a whole page, the boxes an inch square, as if the whole nation were nearsighted.

" Buyrun!" a waiter calls to a clutch of three young men in black. "If you please!" They keep walking.

The sycamore branches riffle, the breeze slackening like the afternoon. A customer approaches the cashier to settle up. Ahmet hovers.

"Everything okay?" he asks, as if he owns the place. "Okay, not okay, it's up to you."