Birds Without Wings Read online

  They must have gazed at themselves for a good half-hour. You know, I think that that time, and all the times afterwards that they did it together, they were making use of each other, borrowing each other’s power. How can I explain it? It’s as if two beautiful people side by side doing that in the mirror, doing that magic, end up with the beauty of four people rather than two. It’s the mathematics of angels. What I do know is that from then on Philothei’s beauty almost got out of control and started to make for difficulties. Maybe I’ll tell you about that another time.

  Anyway, at the end, they sighed at the same moment, and shook their heads, as if to come back to the world. I couldn’t possibly put my finger on the precise reasons, but they both looked more beautiful than they had before, and I’m not making that up. It’s true, and I saw it myself, not just then, but many more times too. Maybe you should try it, even though you’re probably too pretty for your own good already.

  Did I try it? Well, Leyla Hanim asked me to come to the mirror, but I was ashamed, and I shook my head. Later on I went down to the pool at the sunken temple, where Mohammed the Leech Gatherer used to catch his leeches, and I knelt down to study myself in the water. We didn’t have a mirror at home, thank God, because of our poverty, and anyway, I didn’t want anyone to see me. Gerasimos wasn’t there, or I wouldn’t have tried it, I know.

  Well, I took one look at that great ugly moonface looking back out at me, and I knew straight away that it was hopeless.

  CHAPTER 39

  The Seduction of Rustem Bey

  Rustem Bey had been placed in an invidious position. The promises extracted from him by Kardelen, and the conditions imposed, were quite unreasonable, and before long he was beginning to feel that he had been put upon. He had expended much time, parted with a very large sum of money, had been generous and patient afterwards, and as yet had enjoyed no embraces from his mistress at all. It was as if he were looking after a very expensive sister. If it were not for the fact that he felt obscurely that everything was as it should be, he would have become much more irritated than he did. He was not the kind of man who could have brought himself to impose upon a reluctant subject, a solution that would have cut the Gordian knot (but left him afterwards with a perpetually resentful woman), and so he knew that his alternatives were either to wait, or to repudiate. He appreciated that she was not like a wife, whose lot is simply to cooperate and resign, and he had grown fond of her too, so, despite many moments when he contemplated sending her back to Istanbul, he lay awake each night listening to the bulbuls, his imagination and his loins burning, steeling himself to be perseverant. In any case, he felt a distinct pleasure in having her in the house, and he often reminded himself that he was happier than he had been before, even though it had become remarkably less easy to accumulate wealth. Unlike Tamara Hanim, Leyla had an unending list of expensive requirements of which Rustem Bey had never previously heard. She had brought about a small boom in trade for everyone from Levon the Armenian Apothecary to Ali the Snowbringer to Iskander the Potter. On the other hand, unlike Tamara, who had often had the air of a cowed and frightened rabbit, she brought a certain joy to the house, with her oud music, her laughter and her pleasure in appetite. Rustem Bey had even grown fond of her obstreperous cat, Pamuk, who had fortunately shown no interest at all in his pet partridge.

  Leyla watched Rustem Bey carefully, knowing that she could not afford to keep him waiting too long. It gave her a kind of teasing pleasure to do so, however, and besides, she felt that she had the right, even though she would not have been able to say precisely why. She was a woman with a strong sense of right timing, and she was herself waiting with longing and impatience. When she lay with him she wanted it to be natural and wholehearted, because she had had enough of struggle and pretence in that past which Rustem Bey must never know.

  One night in midsummer, just before the time when many of the populace move out of town and up into the mountain pastures, she found that she could not sleep. The clocks kept her awake instead of soothing her, and the nightingales’ battles of song cut the air into jagged slices instead of smoothing it out. She had woken from a dream in which she had been making love to Rustem Bey among the graves of the Muslims in the pine woods, and she was sweating, agitated and lubricious. She rose from her bed and went to the window, throwing open the shutters even though the common wisdom was that it was the night air of summer that caused malaria. She leaned on the sill and looked out. Everything was divided sharply between eerie silver light and blackest shadow. She saw the dim yellow glow of Daskalos Leonidas’s olive-oil lamp as he wrote through the small hours. A cat yeowled and a couple of dogs barked pointlessly. She felt her belly stirring, thinking that she had never known such peace and contentment in her life. She wondered whether she still missed Kardelen and the girls, wondered what had become of them in the time since she had left, and decided that she did not miss them at all. They were as part of another life. “This is where I am,” she thought. “This funny little place that is nowhere at all, is where I am.” With her fingers she smoothed her hair back so that it rested momentarily behind her ears, and she shook her head in a kind of bewilderment at herself. She was an impostor in half a dozen ways, and yet it seemed that God had smiled.

  Leyla left her room softly and, with her hand against the wall, found her way to the room where her master lay sleeping. She hesitated a moment in the doorway, trying to locate herself in the semi-darkness, and then she approached the form that slept upon the low divan.

  But Rustem Bey was not asleep at all, for the same reasons as had kept his mistress wakeful. He heard her come to the door, smelled the scent of musk and rosewater that always preceded her, and pretended to be asleep. He knew that there was about to be some sort of enchantment and, although his heart knocked in his chest, he lay absolutely still.

  Leyla knelt down beside his divan, and her hair lightly brushed his cheek. He felt her very gently laying the side of her face against his. Her soft breath played across his ear. He could both hear it and feel it. She held herself there motionless, and suddenly he felt something very hot and wet slide from her face on to his. She had shed a tear that ran down his cheek and into the corner of his mouth. He tasted that wondrous alien salt on his tongue. “Why is she crying?” he thought, even though he seemed to know the reason intuitively. She lifted her head and he felt the back of her hand delicately stroking his temple. “My lion,” she whispered, “my lion, my beautiful lion, my strong and beautiful lion.” The words were like a spell, binding him to be the thing she named. She bent forward once more and kissed him softly on the temple. Her lips were warm and lingering.

  Leyla sat back on her haunches, and then was gone. Rustem Bey remained absolutely still for a moment, and then thought of following her, but knew instinctively that it would have been a mistake. He turned on to his back and thought about her sweet accent whispering “My lion, my lion, my beautiful lion, my strong and beautiful lion.” Happiness awoke in his bowels and spread outwards down his legs, up into his lungs and into his throat. Tears prickled in his eyes, but he suppressed them. For some reason Tamara came into his mind and a small sadness and bitterness flowered where wonder and gratitude had been, but then his thoughts turned back to the mysterious and vibrant creature that he had all but bought and almost won. Once again, his life appeared to his inward eye to be a road at a forking of the ways, and he knew that there was a destiny that he had chosen himself, but which took away his choice. “Master and slave,” he thought, without quite knowing why, “master and slave.”

  Outside, the bulbuls and nightingales dissected the night with their swords of song, and in his cluttered room, by the light of a stinking wick, Daskalos Leonidas wrote his endless vehement screeds about Freedom and the Great Idea, and Greater Greece, one more propagandist for a war that was yet to come, whose atrocity and wastefulness, like so many others, he would fail to foresee.

  A woman wailed somewhere out in the streets, and those who were awake shuddere
d. There had been a time when everyone had believed that the wailing woman was a ghost, but eventually it had transpired that it was just someone who had lost all her sons in the wars that the imperilled empire had been fighting year upon year. So many conscripted sons had been lost that at night the town consented to let the maddened woman wail for all of them. These days there were not enough men to bring in the harvest or build the houses, there were not enough men to make bridegrooms, no one to make the music for the weddings, no one to father the babies for sacrifice in future wars.

  In the morning Leyla came to life with an energy that no one who knew her would have believed possible. She had much to do. Before she forgot it, she made sure that Kardelen’s small brown bottle of chicken blood was safely to hand, so that at the opportune moment she could reclaim her virginity to Rustem Bey’s satisfaction. Him she told that she was preparing a special treat for the evening, and that he should stay away from the kitchens, the haremlik and the inner court. “There was never a man so treated in his own house,” he thought, unable to believe how tractable he had become under her tutelage, but he could tell from her happy and conspiratorial mien that it was to his profit to indulge her. He mounted his horse and went to inspect some of his lands to the west. Leyla sent Philothei out with an urgent message to all the children of the town, offering rewards, and causing Karatavuk and Mehmetçik, Ibrahim, Gerasimos and Drosoula to spend a day in the heat of the hillside, scared of the Dog as they were, becoming more and more grubby, scratched and parched as they searched amid the stony maquis and filled their sacks. Leyla sent out the servants to bully the town’s traders into selling her their entire stock of candles, and to smallholders for their bulbs of garlic, sending others to raid the vegetable plots of Rustem Bey’s own land.

  Leyla took over the kitchen, causing some initial disgruntlement to the cook. This amiable and portly fellow was a native of the vilayet of Bolu, the area by Lake Abant where marvellous chefs spring up like mushrooms, only to be enticed away by the rich. Rustem Bey’s cook had done his ten years of apprenticeship and had earned his sash and his silver watch, and it is doubtful if there was another cook as good as him in the whole of the south-west. He had long been won over by Leyla’s unbounded enthusiasm for his cuisine, however, and like so many others, he had also fallen for her vivaciousness and charm, and so it was with surprising ease that she won him over to her plan, the creation of a magnificent feast of the flavour that she and Rustem Bey loved the best. It was to be an orgy of garlic. Leyla took two aubergines and charred them over the brazier, leaving them until they became soft enough to mash up with lemon juice, garlic and olive oil. She boiled potatoes until they were utterly soft, and mashed them up with the same ingredients, adding the olive oil drip by drip. She made cacik with mint and yogurt, garlic and cucumber. She prepared humus so that the chickpeas would provide an aphrodisiac, and she mixed a marvellous and exotic drink of camel’s milk with honey, cinnamon, nutmeg and cardamom, with the same aim in mind. She made a paste of yellow lentils, in order that happiness and laughter should come into the house. The cook took cubes of lamb, made a small slot in each, and hid a small clove of garlic in every one. He browned them over a quick flame and then simmered them at almost indiscernible heat for the whole day, in a ratatouille of parsley, tomatoes, onions and pepper. He would add the remaining flavours at the last minute so that they would be full in the mouth. He made Smyrna meatballs and Adana kebabs. In honour of Leyla he created Circassian chicken, rich with tarragon, cloves, paprika, walnuts, garlic and walnut oil. He laid it out on a great flat dish so that it would be as white and round and lovely as the face of the Circassian maid that she purported to be.

  All morning they laboured, filling the street outside with odours that caused a knot of beggars to congregate, and passers-by to salivate with envy. Then Leyla went to the hamam in order to steam every grain of dirt from her skin. She lolled, oblivious in the stifling humidity, chewing mastika to sweeten her breath, calculating and weighing all the lovely and poetic things that she would say once she was in her master’s arms. Her stomach contracted with nervousness and often she closed her eyes and forced herself to be calm. It was not as if she was in terra incognita, but this time she wanted it all to be as perfect as God and providence might allow. When finally she emerged, she had quietened the doubts and quelled the anxieties. She foresaw the success of the night so clearly and strongly that she could no longer doubt it. Nevertheless, she bought a tama depicting a woman, and sneaked into the Church of St. Nicholas when she thought that there was no one inside, in order to hang it over the icon of the Panagia Glykophilousa. Polyxeni was in there, however, lighting a candle to place in the bowl of sand, and she didn’t know what to think, and neither did the rest of the town when the gossip spread.

  Leyla practised a while on her oud, until she grew bored with being unable to concentrate, and then combed the long white hair of her cat Pamuk, who, as usual, became wild-eyed, carried away by the ecstasy, and started to kick and bite when she was grooming its stomach. “Gentle, gentle,” reproached Leyla. “I don’t want any scratches and holes in my hands tonight. You and I have got to be beautiful, both of us.” She went and sat in front of her mirror, mesmerising herself until she was dizzy with the effort. Finally she blinked her eyes, and told her reflection, “This is as beautiful as we shall ever be.” She and her image smiled confidingly at each other. She placed a kiss upon her fingers and touched them to the kiss on the fingers of her reflection. “Wish me luck,” the two of them said, adding “Nazar deymesin” in case there was anyone about with the evil eye.

  She supervised the setting out of the low table and the cushions in the inner courtyard, and then she went to the room where she could inspect the results of the children’s hunt on the hillside. She set a servant, albeit one mightily bemused by the task, to dealing with the business of the candles. It was all very satisfactory; the nearer that it came to the time, the more confident she grew, and the more triumphant in advance.

  Leyla returned to the mirror and carefully outlined her eyes in kohl. She dabbed rouge on each cheek, combed her eyelashes and eyebrows, put musk on her wrists and neck, and sprinkled rosewater on the clothing that she had laid out on the bed. She undressed, sat on the side of the bed, and carefully trimmed her dark wedge of pubic hair neatly with a small pair of scissors, not too much, and just enough. It was important that nothing should seem unnatural. She stroked herself a little to make sure that it felt soft and inviting to the hand, finding that it did. She put a little musk on the insides of her thighs, where the soft flesh begins, just above the knees. She stood in front of the mirror and massaged something milky and sweet into her flesh, kneading her breasts, relishing the cool slipperiness of the lotion and the sensations that rippled down to her belly.

  Finding that she had an hour or two to kill, she lay down and dozed, forcing herself to sleep a little so that later she would have the vivacity to face a long night. Pamuk settled on her bosom and purred too loudly. The cat had a habit of dribbling when it was happy, and Leyla tolerated this with some displeasure. The worst thing was getting a drop of saliva down your ear when you were sleeping on your side at night.

  The sun fell behind the hill, and Rustem Bey came home to his konak at the appointed hour, unsure of what was in store, but with good presentiment. Leyla met him in the selamlik as he came in, and he stopped dead when he saw her. Not only did she smell delicious, but never before had he seen her looking so free and so lovely. She was dressed very lightly in loose baggy shirt and shalwar, scarlet, with a lilac-coloured sash around her waist. Her waistcoat was of black velvet with embroidery of heavy gold thread, and her slippers were of the same design and material. Her fingers were heavy with silver rings. Her black hair was superbly brushed and shining, and her eyes seemed huge and infinitely dark. They glittered in the half-light. Across her forehead glowed the string of gold coins that he had bought for her in Smyrna on their travels, and from the lobes of her ears hung more gold coi
ns, in descending order of size. “Hanim, there is a beautiful moon tonight,” said Rustem Bey. “One can see in the dark quite clearly.”

  “Like last night,” said Leyla Hanim.

  “You too are very beautiful,” he said awkwardly, after a hesitation.

  She held out her hand, took his, placed it to her heart, kissed it and then touched it to her forehead. “My beauty, if I have any … it’s for you,” she said. “Come, I have something to show you.”

  Rustem Bey allowed himself to be led by the sleeve. When they reached the door to the inner courtyard, Leyla Hanim said, “Close your eyes.”

  A few steps later she said, “Open them.”

  Rustem Bey beheld something so marvellous, so unwonted, that he fell speechless. He put one hand to his forehead, and laughed out loud with delight. Finally he asked, “What have you done? Have I come to paradise?”

  The inner court was a sea of glimmering, moving golden-yellow lights. There was no pattern to it. Some of the flames were momentarily still, and others were travelling, meandering slowly among the lemon trees, the pots of pelargonium, oregano, mint and rose. It was as if the stars had been captured from Heaven and been set in motion there in that small square of the lower world. Leyla laughed with pleasure to see him so amazed. “I did it for you,” she exclaimed. “I did it for you.”