Birds Without Wings Read online

  Mehmetçik inspected his work and said sceptically, “It’s not very good.”

  Karatavuk was excited. “Teach me reading and writing. Teach me those other things, that adding-up and taking-away stuff. When you come out of school you can teach me what you just learned.”

  “But your school’s nicer than ours,” protested Mehmetçik. “You sit under a tree in the meydan with Abdulhamid Hodja, who is kind and makes you laugh, and we have to sit inside in the dark and scratch on our slates with Daskalos Leonidas, who hits us on the head and calls us bad names.”

  “I want reading and writing,” said Karatavuk firmly. “You Christians are always richer than us, and my father says it’s all because of reading and writing and adding up and taking away, and that’s why you’re so good at deceiving us, and he says that we Muslims only learn what we need to get us into paradise, which is all that matters in the end, but you Christians get all the advantages on earth because you learn about all the other things as well. I want those other things too.”

  Mehmetçik frowned. “If I teach you reading and writing, I’m warning you I’ve got to hit you on the head and call you bad names when you’re stupid, because that’s how you do teaching.”

  “If you hit me too hard, I’ll have to hit you back, though, and you’ve got to promise not to tell anyone. Promise?”

  “All right,” agreed Mehmetçik. He got up and searched for a short time in the maquis, returning with another stick, which he handed to his friend. “You’ve got to learn the alphabet first, and then you’ve got to learn some new words every day, and when you’ve learned new words we’ll do adding up to begin with because it’s the easiest.”

  Karatavuk watched eagerly as Mehmetçik leaned down and scratched the letter alpha into the soil. Mehmetçik straightened up, hit him lightly on the back of the head and told him to copy it. Then he hit him again and told him how to pronounce it.

  CHAPTER 18

  I Am Philothei (3)

  I’ve been dying to tell you, but don’t tell anyone else or I’ll die. Today Ibrahim found me when I was out gathering hórta, and he just stood there looking at me, just a few paces away, and I didn’t know what to say, and we just looked at each other, and then he went away, and before he went he made a little gesture of his hand, like this.

  CHAPTER 19

  The Telltale Shoes

  It was the shoes that did it, those accursed shoes, but it was not always the same pair of shoes. Standing there outside the door of the haremlik with his hand on the latch, the aga, Rustem Bey, would look down and behold the footwear that would, yet again, announce that his wife had a visitor so that therefore he could not enter.

  Sometimes there would be dusty sandals whose leather was worn, contorted and limp. If it had been raining they would be darkened and stiffening. As time went by Rustem Bey was able to take stock of the new stitches and patches, and sometimes the new leather straps. They were neither big nor small, they were sandals that bespoke an unremarkable life, humdrum and modest, and yet Rustem Bey had come to regard them with a sharp loathing. The sight of them caused the blood to beat behind his eyes and his lips to tighten grimly.

  Sometimes there would be a pretty pair of embroidered slippers that, he was absolutely sure, really belonged to his wife. He seemed to remember bringing them back from Smyrna as a gift in the early months of their marriage, and she had accepted them with a gracious lack of enthusiasm that had brought childish tears of disappointment to his eyes, which he had, with dignity and a show of indifference, held back. He had so much hoped that she would be seduced by their soft red fabric and their stitching of yellow silk and gold thread, but now she used them merely in order to pretend that she had a visitor. Once he had entertained hopes that their marriage might become more than the usual formal dance of strangers that only grows into anything better with the slow passage of time and the mutual concern for children. He knew families in Smyrna where there was a comely intimacy between man and wife, and that was what he had wanted when he married. He was a modern man, or, if he was not, that was certainly what he wanted to be. How irritating and uncomfortable it was, to feel too sophisticated at home in Eskibahçe, and yet to feel quite out of his depth in Smyrna or Constantinople; it meant that he had never found friends with whom he felt at ease. In the one case he was dealing with his peasants and tenants, and in the other he was inevitably suspicious that he was being subtly mocked. Every rural landlord that he knew suffered from the same insidious loneliness, and he had quite naively hoped that marriage with the daughter of one of them would help to fill out a life that nursed an emptiness at its core.

  For Tamara, he had expanded the women’s quarters from something bare and functional, but pleasant enough, into a haven of warm red drapery, cooling draughts that could be controlled by the judicious opening and closing of shutters, and smooth furniture shaped out of walnut and inlaid with satinwood. He had even bought her a bed that had arrived in pieces on the backs of two refractory camels, and he had bought chairs. Tamara had tried sleeping in the bed for a while, but finally she had lost patience with it, and reverted to the customary pallet on the floor. The beautiful bed was duly dismantled and stored in a hut that otherwise contained brooms and buckets. In the absence of a high table, the chairs too seemed curiously anomalous and redundant, and eventually they were stacked in a corner so that Tamara and her visitors could use the divans like normal people. In truth, Tamara was interested only in using the things that she had brought with her as her half of the marriage agreement, as if she could only feel at home by surrounding herself with familiar objects from her parental home near Telmessos.

  Above all she prized her cezve, the tapered brass pot with the long handle, in which her mother had made coffee. Tamara’s mother had been the best coffee-maker in the family, and upon her death it seemed only right that the cezve should pass to Tamara, who was the second best. When Tamara was newly wed, she would sleep with the cezve at her side, and sometimes in the night when her eyes opened and she felt the terror of the bride, she would reach out, take it and clutch it to her throat beneath the covers, as if by means of this cold metal she could feel once again the dry but loving hand that had held the pot so often, and see the grey eyes that had watched so assiduously for the froth to rise. Tamara made coffee in the same way as her mother, on a little heap of white ash in the middle of the glowing charcoal, so that it brewed as slowly as possible, and sometimes she felt as if she were possessed by her mother’s spirit, cut off as she was, so far from Telmessos and those she loved.

  Rustem Bey, outside the women’s quarters, looking down at those shoes, with his hand on the latch, knew very well who it was that Tamara loved. He knew that ever since her childhood she had adored her cousin Selim. The family had been quite open about it, so that he would not be deceived, but they had assured him that Tamara would grow out of it, that they had persuaded her as to the unsuitability of the match, that she was dutiful and obedient and would marry the husband chosen for her in accordance with the wisdom of her elders.

  Under ordinary circumstances the family would have been happy to marry Tamara to the cousin of her choice, but Selim was a human powder keg, so unreliable and ungovernable that for shame his own parents would not have consented to his marriage to anyone they respected. Tamara believed that if her mother had been alive, she might have swayed things in Selim’s favour, but in that she was almost certainly mistaken. Selim was charming and handsome, but he was, even from infancy, unmistakably marked out for a bad end.

  He had always been small, a little graceless in his movements, but quick and nervy. He had a dazzling smile that conveyed to a startling degree the dangerousness of his disposition, and those who saw it for the first time were always taken aback. One felt like the traveller who is approached by a dog that is wagging its tail, but which is clearly tensed for attack. When he was small, his own mother sometimes neglected to cut his hair because she was afraid that he might snatch the scissors from her, and indeed t
here had been occasions when his unprompted rages grew into such violent paroxysms that even his own father had felt a well-founded fear as he picked the flailing child up around the waist and carried him outdoors to be dumped unceremoniously into the cattle trough. His father would, hating himself for the brutality and necessity of it, hold him under the slimy water by the neck until imminent choking restored Selim to sanity.

  The imam in Telmessos recommended attendance at the mektep in order to learn to recite some verses of the Koran, because the word of God can have a remarkably civilising effect, but Selim, who learned the mellifluous but incomprehensible Arabic with surprising facility, remained incorrigible. The Greek doctors in the city told Selim’s father forthrightly that there was nothing one could do about a savage child if beating and confinement had failed. “He will probably grow out of it,” they said, “children often do.”

  So, in fact, it almost turned out, except that Selim transformed himself slowly from a chaotic and nerve-wracking child into a young adult of fatal charm and absolute lack of principle. She had always worshipped the wayward little boy, but now it was for his youthful charm that Tamara fell, and Selim had certainly been astute enough to notice her infatuation. He had only to catch her gazing at him adoringly at the Bayram feast, and within a day he was whispering to her through the shutters at night. A sound beating from Tamara’s father with the flat of a sword was Selim’s last memory of Telmessos, but as he trudged away into near exile, disowned by his own family, his thoughts were concerned not with the dishonour and humiliation of having been caught out in evildoing, but instead with mulling over the sharp lesson he had just learned, namely that one should be sure of whispering through the correct window during an attempted seduction.

  Tamara was devastated by Selim’s dismissal, and he too felt a certain stabbing pain in the heart when he contemplated his memories of her lovely face. Her family decided to arrest her obsession and her sadness in mid-flow by finding her a suitable husband whose steadiness was beyond question. Having nothing but her happiness and prosperity in mind, they were delighted when Rustem Bey confessed his considerable interest. Rustem was the great-grandson of a tax farmer, and the wealth and land accrued by that individual had miraculously passed down intact to his descendants. The great-grandfather, like all tax farmers, had been an unsavoury, corrupt and harsh individual, but by Rustem’s time the old system had been long abolished, and Rustem Bey himself was nothing if not an upright and respectable man who cared better for his tenants and his estates than was commonly expected.

  Tamara knew that Rustem Bey was a better prospect than anyone had a right to hope for, and she married him out of fatalism and common sense. After their wedding night, however, Rustem Bey knew with angry resignation that much as he might invade her body, he would never touch her heart. Thus it was that he reaped nothing but heartache from his assault on happiness, and he was lonelier than he had been before, living with this lovely girl whose shoes, or those of another, were always outside the haremlik door.

  Her cousin Selim was not greatly discouraged by his disgrace, and in a short while he had set himself up as a travelling mountebank, deriving a kind of exhilarated malicious pleasure from pissing into small bottles and adding sugar and a few sprigs of wild mint. These bottles he flourished in market places from Yediburun to Yaniklar; “Selim’s elixir, Selim’s elixir, the water of life itself! Guaranteed against the colic and the gleet! Efficacious against the barren womb and the bad-air fever! No, I’m not saying that it restores youth, but for all I know it probably does that too! Compounded by the renowned apothecary, Gevork the Armenian of Ararat, tested and approved by Athanasios the Greek of Athens, by appointment to the Sultan Padishah himself! You, efendi, yes, you! I can see you’re a little pale! Yes, you are! Isn’t he, my friends? Try some, it’ll do you good! Who’s got a wife who’s always moaning on her pallet at hoeing time? You, efendi? Give her some of this and she’ll be bounding out there doing two fields a day!”

  It was a hard life, trudging through the stones from one town to another all year long, in all kinds of weather, dizzy with heat in the summer and knee-deep in clinging mud in the times of rain. He learned to accept the attentions of brigands, losing his earnings over and over again to ruffians who sometimes even took all his clothes, and so it was with pleasure and relief that he had found a place in life at Eskibahçe, where he had had the good fortune to be recognised by his fair cousin, Tamara, one day as he was hawking his elixir in the meydan, in the shade of the plane tree where the old men sat.

  Rustem Bey, with his hand on the latch, unable to enter, knew only that someone as heavily veiled as a shia woman from Persia arrived almost every day, knocked softly, and was admitted to the haremlik by his wife, leaving those crumpled sandals outside. When it was just the embroidered slippers from Smyrna, Rustem Bey knew with bitter certainty that his wife had no visitors at all, but was merely employing a shallow ruse to keep the private quarters to herself. What he did know was that there was something not quite right about the hunched figure with bowed shoulders and head who slipped out of the haremlik and hastened away. The voice that piped a muffled “Aleikum salaam” when greeted did not seem quite right, and neither did the bony, angular feet that slipped on the dusty sandals and pattered away down the hill past the houses where the few Armenians lived.

  Rustem Bey was reduced to the shameful and shaming expedient of spying. He repeatedly tried to follow the figure through the streets, in order to find out where it lived, but was always defeated, partly because of the chaos of dogs, traders, camels and gossiping friends, but mainly because, being one of the most important men in the whole region, he was automatically waylaid by those who wished to pay their respects, or beg for alms, or a favour. He would look down on his interlocutor who had taken hold of his sleeve, and a sweat of anxiety would break out on his forehead as he tried desperately to see where the swathed figure had gone. It occurred to him that he might have the person followed by a servant, but he restrained himself. The last thing that any self-respecting man needs is to be demeaned in the eyes of his servants by involving them in skullduggery.

  One evening Rustem Bey entered the haremlik after the visitor had departed, but before Tamara could put out her slippers, and asked, “Who is that woman who comes here? Every day she is here, and I demand to know who she is.”

  With studied coolness, Tamara took a morsel of lokum from the small brass tray, chewed it a while, and then looked up innocently. “She is a friend. No one of any importance.” A little insolently, she drew the corner of her çarşaf across her mouth.

  Rustem Bey felt his anger mount. “No woman veils herself in front of her husband! Unveil yourself! I want to know who she is.”

  Tamara let the çarşaf fall away, and cast her gaze modestly to the ground. “I don’t have any friends here. In the hamam they don’t talk in front of me because of who my husband is, and all my relatives are in Telmessos. I need to have a friend who visits me.”

  “Listen. You women do what you want. You slip in and out of each other’s back doors when a man has to stand at the front and knock. Have as many friends as you like. But who is that woman?”

  “She is nobody. She is my only companion in this place.”

  “You have a husband. If you were less indifferent, you would have children, and the company of other women who have children.”

  Tamara flushed. “I try to do my duty.”

  Rustem Bey raised his right hand in a small gesture of exasperation. “There is no pleasure in your duty. I might as well go to a whore and couple with my eyes closed. You should know that there is more to a marriage than ignoring your husband while you idle at his expense.”

  “You shouldn’t talk to your wife so coarsely. It disturbs me.”

  “I am disturbed,” declared Rustem Bey vehemently. “I am disturbed that my wife has an unknown visitor almost every day. Any other husband with a wife like you would give her a beating, I swear it.”

  “Bea
t me then,” said Tamara levelly, “but you have no reason to be disturbed, my husband. She is an old woman called Fatima who has befriended me.”

  “In this place all the women are called Fatima. Which ‘Fatima’ is it? Who are her family? Where do they live?”

  “She lives at the edge of the town. Beyond the Armenians. I have never been there. She is ashamed of her poverty, because she is a widow and all her sons have been called away on military service for ten long years. They call her ‘Fatima Lackluck.’ She comes here, and for charity I let her eat and drink a little, and ease her poor heart in talking.” Tamara gestured towards a piece of blue fabric that lay carelessly across the divan, and added, “She has been teaching me to embroider, and I pay her a little slipper money, just a few paras. So, you see, I am not so idle.”

  Rustem Bey looked into the dark eyes of his wife, but found no clue as to her veracity. He turned on his heel and left. Outside the door he paused, thought a while, lit up a fat cigarette, and then strode down the hill, past the houses and workshops of the Armenians, and began to ask around for a widow called Fatima Lackluck whose sons were all away upon military service.

  The next evening, Rustem fetched a low stool and waited outside the haremlik, smoking so many cigarettes, one after the other, that a small heap of butts grew at his feet. His mouth felt as dry as summer’s clay, and his heart beat so unevenly that from time to time he had to catch his breath. All day a suspicion had burned like acid into his thoughts, and a terrible agitation had taken possession of his mind, so that he knew he would not know equanimity again unless he broke a rule that in the normal course of life he held as sacred and inviolable. He knew that he might be about to disgrace himself in the eyes of his wife and the whole town, and he knew that, despite his rank, it was possible that outraged family members might arrive to take vengeance upon him, yet he knew exactly what had to be done.