Birds Without Wings Page 12

  Accordingly, when the bowed and veiled figure emerged from the door and closed it, Rustem Bey rose quickly to his feet, and stood in the way. “Fatima Hanimefendi, I must speak to you.”

  Fatima mumbled something indistinct, and turned away, as if in modesty, but Rustem reached out, and took hold of the corner of her veil. The woman reacted with a curious movement of her arms beneath her garment, as if she were fumbling desperately for something but failing to find it, and then, just in time, Rustem saw the flash of a blade and leapt back. From his sash he took out one of his pistols, and pointed it at his attacker. Without thought he pulled the trigger, only to recall with a mixture of impatience, panic and embarrassment that he had not carried a loaded pistol in his sash ever since an uncle of his had caused fatal damage to himself by so doing. The stranger crouched, balancing on his heels, and brandished the shining curved steel of the yataghan in his face. Rustem struck out with the pistol. He caught his victim across the side of the temple and took advantage of the moment to draw out his own dagger, the same good weapon with which his doughty ancestors had cut off the ears and lips of rebel Serbs and Bulgarians.

  Rustem thrust hard, slicing himself across the forearm on the other’s weapon as he did so, and he watched dispassionately as the stranger sank slowly to the ground. He slashed downward with his yataghan, leaving a horrible gash upon the hand, and forcing it to relinquish hold of its weapon. Rustem picked the blade up, placed it carefully in his own sash, and then leaned down and tore the scarf and veil away.

  He beheld a tousled head of black hair, bowed down in pain. He grasped the mop of hair and forced the head back. That handsome, fine face had malicious black eyes, a week’s stubble, and a superb and glossy black moustache. Rustem saw the lips move. “Orospu çocuşu.”

  Rustem laughed bitterly. “I am a son of a whore? Think again.” He lashed out with his left foot and sent the young man toppling sideways. The fine lips moved again, even though the eyes were dull with the nausea of approaching death: “Cehenneme git. Kerata.”

  “A cuckold I may be,” declared Rustem, “but it will surely be you who goes to hell. You and my whore of a wife.” Rustem felt as if it were not he but someone else using his body, who was saying and doing all these things. He was both surprised and alarmed by his own efficiency in dealing with a matter so untoward and vile. He pushed open the door of the haremlik, and called, “Wife, come out and see your whore-maker die. You shouldn’t miss it.”

  He had expected Tamara to emerge cowed and trembling, and was startled when she hurtled out of the door, pushed him aside, and threw herself upon the body of the dying young man. “Selim! Selim!” she wailed, “My aslan, my lion! What has he done? Selim! Oh God, oh God! No! No! No! My God, my eyes’ light!”

  She stroked Selim’s cheek and with her çarşaf she dabbed at the blood and saliva that frothed at his lips. She was whimpering desperately. Suddenly she stood up and confronted her husband. He saw that her lips were trembling and that tears streamed down both cheeks even though she was not sobbing. She took off her scarf, so that her long hair fell loose about her shoulders. She swept it back with one hand, and offered him her throat. “Now kill me,” she said.

  Rustem was puzzled to find a half of himself feeling sorry for her. He even admired her defiance and her bold resignation. He saw the grief and the anger in her eyes, and realised anew how lovely she was, but by now he was caught up in a current of events from which there was no possibility of extricating himself with honour. Her lover lay dying at his feet, and before him stood an unfaithful wife. He reached out his hand and grasped a hank of her hair. “Come with me,” he said, “and take this opportunity to beg God for forgiveness.” With a heavy, unwilling heart but with every semblance of implacable resolution, Rustem Bey did what he knew he had to do, and dragged his wife by the hair to the meydan.

  A crowd gathered almost instantaneously, as Rustem knew it would, a crowd that assembled for the lowest motives of meanness and curiosity. It was an astounding thing to see a husband revealing his wife’s hair to the shame and indignity of public exposure, and such public abuse of a wife could mean only one thing. In the meydan, Rustem Bey, his voice shaking with both anger at what had been done and horror at what was about to be done, announced to the crowd: “This woman is my wife. She is a whore and an adulteress.”

  He stood aside from Tamara and watched, as calmly she placed her hair back under her scarf. He bowed his head when she looked up and said simply, “I am guilty and I do not wish to live. Kill me, like the wolves and dogs you are in this disgusting place.”

  The first stone was flung half-heartedly, almost humorously, and fell at her feet. She looked down at it and smiled. The second stone was thrown more boldly, and struck her upon the thigh. The third stone flew past her head and glanced off the trunk of one of the planes. A buzz of animal noises began to stir in the crowd, and an ugliness spiralled up in it, the evil that emanates as if from nowhere when people are permitted to act basely in a righteous cause. Women whose hearts would normally be brimming with concern and tenderness picked up stones and began to shriek as they hurled them. Children whose parents beat them for throwing stones at dogs fought each other for stones to throw at a young woman. Men for whom it was beneath their dignity to strike a woman picked up stones and bayed like hounds. Faces that were habitually calm and beneficent began to contort with gleeful cruelty, and steadily a malevolent barbarism rose up and began to feed upon itself. It was satisfying, in any case, for those lowly folk to have the opportunity to destroy a spoiled and perfumed darling from a higher walk of life.

  Tamara was struck upon the head by a large cobble, and fell to her knees. The crowd drew in upon her as people hustled forward to pick up once more the stones that had already been flung. Rustem Bey sat on the low wall of the well at the foot of a plane tree, with his back to the horrible scene, feeling his heart clench within him like a fist. He heard the rabble chanting “Orospu! Orospu! Orospu!” and put his hands over his ears. In his mind’s eye he saw Tamara on their wedding night, her eyes glowing with grief in the lamplight as she turned her head aside and parted her legs as she had been warned she would have to do. He remembered her flinching, her rhythmic gasps of pain, and the sadness that had come upon him afterwards, when he had found himself wishing that he had been born to another kind of life.

  The crowd were directly over her now, pelting her, those without stones resorting to savage blows with their feet. Old women and small children darted in to spit. Tamara, curiously detached from all this fury and the cruelty of the pain, began to dream of Selim.

  Nobody saw Abdulhamid Hodja ride up on Nilufer, and the first thing anyone knew was that people had been thrown aside and that his horse was standing over the fallen adulteress. Abdulhamid himself was roaring at the crowd with such passion and authority that it pressed back as if pushed by invisible hands.

  “Who is responsible for this?” he bellowed. “By whose authority is this? Stand back, by God, stand back.”

  Rustem Bey stood up slowly and came forward. “It is by my authority, efendi. She is my wife and I caught her lover coming out of the haremlik. I killed him, and I am responsible for this.”

  Abdulhamid glowered down at him, and Rustem added, “She is an adulteress, and has to be stoned.”

  The imam ignored him and demanded of the entire assembly, “Don’t you know the law? I know it. I am not a doctor, but I know it.” He paused, and then continued, “The law is that …” He stopped suddenly and examined the faces in the crowd. “You,” he said, pointing at Charitos. “Come forward. I have never seen you in the mosque. You are a Christian.”

  The father of the lovely Philothei stepped forward, nervously adjusting his fez upon his head. The imam pointed to other Christians, one after the other. “Do you follow the prophet, Jesus of Nazareth, peace be upon him? Well, do you?”

  Charitos and the other Christians murmured that they did, and Abdulhamid commanded, “Go and find your priest. Ask him wh
at it was that the prophet Jesus said when he prevented the stoning of an adulteress. Leave this place! Go and ask him. Father Kristoforos will tell you what you ought to know already. Go now, and do not condemn yourselves any further.”

  The Christian men and women drifted slowly away, ashamed of themselves, but muttering to each other along the lines of “Who does that imam think he is?” and back in the meydan Abdulhamid Hodja looked down upon the crowd and asked, “Where are the four witnesses? Come on, I ask you, where are the four witnesses who saw this woman naked and fornicating?”

  No one stepped forward except Rustem Bey, who was shaking, and attempting not to look down upon the crumpled form of Tamara where she lay beneath the horse. “Her lover came every day, veiled as a woman, until finally I unmasked him.”

  “Did you see them fornicating?”

  “No, but …”

  “Rustem Bey, a man who accuses another of adultery without being a witness of the act, and without four witnesses altogether, is sentenced to scourging with eight stripes. That is the law of God in the Holy Koran. You are fortunate that this is not a court of law and that I am not a judge.”

  “I am Rustem Bey. No one scourges me.”

  Abdulhamid looked down upon him sympathetically and said merely, “Rustem Efendi, I have known you for a long time.”

  The aga was to puzzle over this cryptic remark for many years, but at this moment all he could think to say was “She admitted her guilt in front of all these people.”

  “She did, she did,” murmured the crowd, whose members were by now shifting from foot to foot, anxious to escape the wrath of their prayer leader, their access of viciousness having subsided altogether.

  “How many times did she admit it?”

  “We heard her. She admitted it,” said Ali the Snowbringer, and others muttered in confirmation of the fact.

  “How many times?” Abdulhamid looked around at the silent and embarrassed townsfolk and nodded his head sagely. “I thought so. It was only once. Sometimes, because of their sorrows, people wish to die, and they admit things rashly. If she did not admit it four times then you have acted unlawfully and there is a grievous penalty for every one of you upon the Day of Judgement.”

  Abdulhamid tapped Nilufer gently upon her neck, and she moved aside, exposing Tamara once more. The imam pointed down at her: “See what you have done in your wickedness and ignorance? If she is alive, bring her to my wife, who will take care of her. If she is dead, bring her all the same, and we will bury her.” He turned to the aga: “Rustem Bey, you have a wound in your arm. You ought to see to it.” With this he turned the head of the horse and clattered away along the stones, his green cloak flapping out behind him and Nilufer’s bells tinkling. Her brass breastplate glinted in the declining sunlight, her blue beads rattled together, and the green ribbons fluttered in her mane, a sight whose prettiness was incongruous to such a grim occasion. The muezzins began to climb the stairs of the minarets, and a few cowed people knelt in the dust to tend to the fallen Tamara.

  Rustem Bey walked home feeling as if it had been he who had been stoned. “Nothing will ever be the same,” he repeated to himself, unable to get the words out of his mind. Outside the haremlik he overturned the corpse of Selim with his toe, and saw again how handsome and wild that young face was, even in death, even with its vacant, half-closed eyes and its lips frozen in mid-breath. He called one of the servants and gave him a heavy handful of coins, saying, “Go and give these to the gendarmes, and keep only one of them for yourself. Tell them that there is the corpse of a stranger at my house, and I wish them to come and take it away.”

  Rustem Bey put his hand on the latch and looked down at the battered sandals that would never again prevent him from entering. He picked them up, noted the shiny imprint of the feet that had worn them, and then put them down. He opened the door and entered.

  Inside it was dark, but the atmosphere was warm and heavy and sweet with the intimate rituals, aromas and mysteries of disconsolate femininity. He stood for a moment and breathed it in, and then sat down upon the divan where Tamara had sat, and took up her embroidery. He looked at the blue cloth stitched with yellow tulips and red vine leaves. “Now it will never be finished,” he thought, and he pressed it to his face and inhaled. It smelled of vanilla, rosewater, coffee and musk. It smelled of Tamara, his proud, young and self-destroying wife. He looked for the first time at the sinister gash in his forearm, and saw that it was still bleeding. He realised that it was both stinging and aching. He wrapped it tightly in the cloth. The blue grew darker, and the yellow tulips briefly glowed bright with scarlet and then turned dull. He leaned forward, placed his elbows on his knees, and began to choke with sorrow as the muezzins in the minarets sang out in harmony with each other that God is great and there is no God but God.

  “Nothing will ever be the same,” thought Rustem Bey. After an hour of heartsick solitude, he went outside and picked up the telltale shoes, with the intention of putting them on the brazier and destroying them; but such small revenges seemed suddenly fatuous. It was black and chilly now, and Rustem Bey took a lamp and made his way up the alleyways until he reached the edge of town and the thorny scrubland where the Lycian tombs stood out as greater darknesses in the darkness of the stones.

  He found the Dog in one of the tombs, and, shivering, he gave him the shoes.

  CHAPTER 20

  Mustafa Kemal (5)

  Far from Eskibahçe, past Antalya, over the Mediterranean Sea, across the island of Cyprus (where no one may go without falling in love), beyond Beirut, Mustafa Kemal, trained as an infantry officer, finds himself in 1905, with characteristic military logic, posted to the 30th Cavalry Regiment.

  He is depressed and appalled by Damascus; it is a place without vivacity or pleasure, a place that endures the interminable passage from birth to death behind closed doors and shutters. It is utterly moribund, marooned, medieval, stunted and paralysed by tradition, neurotic respectability and absolutist religion. The locals are Arabs, with whom he has nothing in common and no friendships to make. They are nonetheless loyal Ottoman citizens as the British have not yet seized the chance to stir up Arab nationalism. Mustafa Kemal dresses up in civilian clothes so that he can drink in a café with Italian railway workers and listen to the enchanting and enspiriting sound of mandolins. He befriends an exiled Turkish shopkeeper called Haji Mustafa who, like Mustafa Kemal, is a Francophile who has never been to France and is steeped in French philosophy. He has been expelled from the Military Medical School for subversive activities.

  At the house of Haji Mustafa a secret society is formed. It is called “Vatan,” and it is just like a hundred other secret societies that will soon be springing up all over the empire, wherever there are educated young officers who wish to reshape their country. Romantic and passionate speeches are made. Mustafa Kemal drily reminds his co-conspirators that the object is not to die for the revolution, but to live for it.

  Mustafa Kemal is disgusted by the behaviour of the 5th Army of which he is a part. It is there to police an accord with the ever-troublesome Druzes, who have agreed to pay taxes in return for exemption from military service. The older officers try to prevent the younger officers from going out on field duty, and Mustafa Kemal is infuriated when he is refused permission to go out with his men. They tell him that he is in training, that he is needed back at base.

  He disobeys orders and sets off to find his unit, buttonholing the officer who has been sent in his place. It turns out that in fact these expeditions are for the purposes of extortion, and the villagers are being terrorised and pillaged under the pretence of tax collection. The soldiers are paid a pittance, usually in arrears, and the tribesmen themselves are little better than bandits. The former strive to collect more tax than is due, and the latter strive not to pay any tax at all.

  Mustafa Kemal develops his perverse gift for obstreperous heroism. He accepts the hostility of his senior officers, and refuses to countenance the looting. He prevents an up
rising in a Circassian village because he strikes the villagers as trustworthy. One village kidnaps a major, and Mustafa Kemal turns up and harangues them until they release him. He protests about the false or exaggerated reports of victories and triumphs that are being sent back to Istanbul, saying, “I’ll have no part in a fraud.” When a friend is tempted to take his share of the looting, Mustafa asks him coldly, “Do you want to be a man of today or of tomorrow?”

  Mustafa Kemal, posted now to a marksmen’s battalion in Jaffa, is determined to start the revolution, and with the connivance of Ahmet Bey, the commandant at Jaffa, absconds to Salonika via Egypt and Piraeus, finally arriving on a Greek ship. He has a forged pass which was supposed to be for Smyrna, and a friend smuggles him through the customs. His mother is appalled, fearing the wrath of the Sultan, and Mustafa himself is mildly disappointed to find that the artillery general with whom he had been hoping to conspire is a conspirator of the purely theoretical variety.

  It occurs to Mustafa Kemal that he might be causing himself a few small problems with the military authorities by effectively having deserted, and so he puts on his uniform and goes to the military headquarters in Salonika, where he explains his predicament to an old friend from school, who is now a colonel. They concoct an application for sick leave, pretending that Mustafa is on the general staff rather than serving in Damascus. The ruse works admirably, and in the following four months in Salonika, Mustafa organises a Macedonian branch of his secret society, which is now called “Fatherland and Freedom.” The conspirators are preoccupied by the obvious decline of the empire, and its intransigent political corruption and inefficiency. They feel themselves humiliated and dishonoured by the way that it is being disrupted, hamstrung and gulled by the Great Powers. The men are constitutionalists, and include Mustafa’s old poetic friend Örner Naci. Mustafa Kemal is just beginning to conceive the notion of a Turkish state within secure borders, with the accretions of empire permanently removed. Amid all the cries of “Greece for the Greeks (Jews and Turks out)” and “Bulgaria for the Bulgarians (Jews and Turks out)” it is hardly surprising that sooner or later someone will begin to say “Turkey for the Turks.” One day Mustafa Kemal will say, “Happy is the man who calls himself a Turk,” and this will be carved into hillsides all over Anatolia. It will become the truth because it was Mustafa Kemal Atatürk who said it.