Birds Without Wings Read online

  “I wonder what he saw,” said Charitos, and I shrugged. I thought perhaps that he had had the same reaction as myself, namely that every birth entails a death.

  The room was now very crowded, and people were beginning to blow thick clouds of smoke from their narghiles, and make a terrible racket in order to keep the evil spirits away. I have always hated this din and smoke, and so I made my excuses to Charitos, having to shout into his ear: “I have work to do, a lot of clay to mix, I had better go. I will make you a water jug as a gift.” And then I remembered. “But first I will tie two rags to the red pine.”

  By now the town had burst into life, and I had to make my way uphill through those cobbled ways that were barely wide enough for a donkey. It was as if the place were conceived before the invention of carts. Who knows when that was? At any rate, I had to jostle my way past women carrying water in jars upon their heads, past dogs insolently asleep amid all the hubbub, past pedlars, tradesmen, mendicants and craftsmen, and over the legs of the beggars whose sole function in this life was to shine the souls of those of us who kept them alive by giving them the alms that would perpetuate their idleness. They kept their eyes lowered as they outstretched their palms, since it is better for all of us if such gifts are anonymous. I went to my pottery, and took one of the rags that I had been using to wash off my wheel at the end of each working day.

  The red pines stood in a group of five, halfway up the slope to the top of the cliff, very near the place where lime was dug out for the manufacture of mortar. They were lovely trees, with a rich bark, and branches that fanned out as if longing to spread their shade for we who were below. I like sometimes to invent proverbs, and one that occurred to me on that day, as I looked up at the boughs, was “The man who seeks the shade of the red pine will be shat upon by doves.” There were always a dozen or so of those small grey doves with the black ring about the neck, very pretty, but also very generous with their bodily refuse. The good things in life are always accompanied by a detriment.

  The lower branches were copiously hung with rags that represented the wishes of an entire town over many years, and it was always a challenge to find a new place where a rag could be tied. Sometimes, when a wish had come true, the wisher would return and fetch their rag, so that they could use it again for another wish. In my opinion this displayed a certain paltriness of spirit, since a new rag is not difficult to obtain.

  In those days I was still young enough to climb with agility, and I ascended to the very top of the tallest pine, where I tied my rag so that it would flutter like the pennant of a ship. The sun was already strong and bright, teasing out the scent of resin in the bark of the tree. The palms of my hands were covered with that tenacious, sticky, dusty black film that is caused by gripping such a tree when it is climbed. This irritated me, but then I reflected that it would be abraded away soon enough when I set down to my potting. A breeze stirred, and I forced my turban down a little harder on to the crown of my head. I could see some children playing in the waters of the ruined temple. No doubt they were tormenting the frogs.

  I stayed up there for a while, making wishes on behalf of Philothei in between marvelling at the view of the town. To see such a place from above, particularly if it has a fine mosque and a church, is to be reminded that there is something miraculous in the falling out of things. In the early evenings I used to go sometimes to the top of the cliff where the land ends and the sea begins, because the golden dome of the mosque would sparkle in the scarlet light, and the smoke of all the cooking fires would carry up the delicious smell of roasting meat.

  On the way down, hoping that they would be newly laid, I took four dove’s eggs to bring to my wife, one for each of my sons.

  What strikes me as remarkable, in thinking back, is that the birth of Philothei was the first and only time that I remember there being such a monumental fuss over the advent of a female child.

  CHAPTER 3

  Mustafa Kemal (1)

  Far away from Eskibahçe, past the Dodekanissos and across the Aegean Sea, one of Destiny’s men is born. It is nineteen years before the birth of Philothei, the year being 1881 by the Gregorian calendar, a year during which (and thereby perpetrating one of the most entertaining ironies of European history) Macedonia gives to the world its greatest Turk, just as once it gave to the world its most-conquering Greek.

  In 1881 Macedonia is the home of Vlachs, Greeks, Bulgarians, Turks, Serbs, Slavs and Albanians. In Salonika, where the child is born, there are also “Franks” of many European origins, and a huge colony of Jews whose ancestors fled the persecutions in Spain. Half of these Jews are Muslim by religion, since their ancestors fell into disillusionment after the failures of a local seventeenth-century messiah. By the end of the Second World War, however, extinguished by the Nazis, there will be no more Jews in Salonika, and their curious antique Spanish will have all but vanished with them.

  The child is born into a world where the seeds of Nazism have been long sewn, and are waiting only for the dark rain. Stirred up by Austria-Hungary and by Russia, the various peoples of the Balkans and the Near East are abrogating their long coexistence and codependence. Their hotheads and ideologues are propounding doctrines of separateness and superiority. The slogans are “Serbia for the Serbs, Bulgaria for the Bulgarians, Greece for the Greeks, Turks and Jews out!” There has been interbreeding for centuries, but no one stops to ask what exactly a Serb or a Macedonian or a Bulgarian or a Greek actually is. It is enough that there are sufficient opportunists calling themselves freedom fighters and liberators, who will exploit these ideas in order to become bandits and local heroes in the war of all against all. Mustafa is born into a world where law and order are fast collapsing, where looting has become more profitable than working, where the arts of peace are becoming more and more unpracticable, and personal tolerance makes less and less difference.

  The courtyarded house of his nativity is surrounded by high walls, and is divided classically into selamlik and haremlik. Iron bars protect the windows on the ground floor, and lattices screen those on the overhanging upper storey. Behind its pink walls, Zübeyde, fair-haired and blue-eyed, resolutely old-fashioned and devoutly Muslim, pushes Destiny’s child out into the world with one last cry of anguish, and his father, timber merchant, customs officer and administrator of Pious Foundations, leans over and whispers his name as the umbilical cord is cut. His name is to be Mustafa, the Chosen.

  CHAPTER 4

  i am philothei (1)

  i am philothei an i am six eveone says wat a pritty gilr an i was born lik that an so i am usd to it i am prittier than anyon else but i dont bost abot it i sor ibrahim today an he was folowing me and I wosent sposed to see him i went with drosoula who is not pritty by ugli but she is my fren anway an ibrahim was playign with karatavuk and mehmetçik and they were blowing thier berdwhissles an pertendin to be berds an ibrahin sed wen we are old we wil be maried an I sed yes proberly an he gav me a fether an a snale shel an a pink stone with a patern on an he tuched my arm an tomorow we are gong to eat pijjun becos it is my name day and i will go to the curckh with the ikon of my saynt and leve it ther al nite with candels

  CHAPTER 5

  Exiled in Cephalonia, Drosoula Remembers Philothei

  Philothei was my best friend, even though she was so beautiful and I was born so hideous. We were born at about the same time, but I might as well have been born in the shade. She was like the evening star, when I was like a bug.

  When you are old your memory plays tricks with you. Sometimes I can’t remember what I was doing five minutes ago, or where I put down the onion I was peeling, but then sometimes I can remember things that happened when I was seven years old, so clearly that it’s as if I was a little girl again. I’ve noticed, though, that occasionally you think you remember something as if you’d witnessed it yourself, when in fact it’s only that you’ve been told it so many times, and you’ve thought about it so much, that eventually you come to think that it really is your own memory when
in fact it isn’t. What I am saying is, that although Philothei was my best friend, I can no longer separate my own memories of her from all the stories that people liked to tell about her.

  I know it’s stupid to claim that one human being is special, or picked out by God, when in fact there are hundreds of millions of human beings in the world, and God knows how many millions of people long dead who have been lost to history, all of whom were probably special to someone, but I still think that Philothei was touched by an angel, and I don’t suppose it matters much to you whether or not what I say is true. I am just an old woman, and you know what old women are like, going on and on about their memories, and sighing over the old days that they won’t see the like of again. You don’t have to pay any attention.

  I remember hearing so many times about how Abdulhamid Hodja, the imam, came to visit her when she was born, and left a saintly stigma on her hand where he kissed it. I can’t remember seeing it exactly, but I feel as though I did. I picture it as being red and blotchy, like those stains that you sometimes see on people’s faces.

  And why are you screwing up your face like that, and spitting? Because I mentioned the imam? Because I mentioned a Turk? Well, you should think before you spit, because I may be Greek now, but I was practically a Turk then, and I’m not ashamed of it either, and I’m not the only one, and this country’s full of people like me who came from Anatolia because we didn’t have any choice in the matter. When I came here I didn’t even speak Greek, didn’t you know that? I still dream in Turkish sometimes. I came here because the Christians had to leave, and they thought all the Christians like me were Greek, because the people who run the world never did and never will have any idea how complicated it really is, so if you call me a Turk you might think you’re insulting me, but it’s half true, and I am not ashamed. People used to call me “Turk” when I first came here, and they didn’t mean it kindly either, and they pushed in front of me and shoved me aside, and they muttered things under their breath when I passed by. I’m not like you, you see. You were brought up thinking all the Turks are devils, but you’ve never met one, and you probably never will, and you don’t know a damned thing about it, and it’s ignorant people like you who stir up all the trouble. So don’t spit when I mention an imam who happened to be a Turk and a saint too, and if you don’t like it I’ll just talk to someone else who’s got more sense. And I’ll tell you something else, and I don’t care if you don’t like to hear it, and that is that before all the clever Christians came here from Asia Minor, you people were living like dogs and didn’t have a clue about anything, and this island had almost nobody on it because anyone with any sense had left, so I’ll have no more spitting when I mention the imam, and while I’m on this subject I’ll just remind you of something you probably don’t want to know, and that is that in all the hundreds of years of occupation the Turks never did anything to us that was half as bad as what we Greeks did to each other in the civil war, and that’s something I know about, believe me.

  Now I’ve got all worked up. One day some idiot’s going to give me a heart attack. I was talking about my best friend, Philothei.

  I thought she was picked out. I’ve had a good life, even though I lost my husband and my only son, and so I am not ungrateful to God, but I used to think that He gave my share of everything to Philothei, so that I was left with just the bare bones to gnaw upon. I wasn’t bitter about it, because I too was intoxicated by how lovely she was, and even though I am old and decrepit now, I still feel a kind of gratitude that Philothei came to earth.

  Philothei was vain and melodramatic, and sentimental, and unreliable and infuriating, but she was also soft-hearted and sweet-natured, and easily wounded and intelligent. She was my best friend, my heart’s true friend, and I loved her because even her faults made her lovable and amusing. I followed her around as faithfully as a dog, and as shamelessly as Ibrahim, who was in love with her from the day that both of them were born. When I think back I realise that he was courting her from infancy, and that doesn’t happen too often, and finally it was Ibrahim she was betrothed to, even though he was of the other faith. It did happen sometimes, so don’t believe anyone who says it didn’t.

  If the stories are true, she was born beautiful. It was said that the imam declared her to be the most exquisite Christian child that the town had ever seen. They say that her eyes were dark as well water, so that those who leaned over the crib and looked into them had the sensation of falling and whirling. My father, for instance, I don’t mind telling you that he was a brute and a drunk, and there wasn’t any man ever born who was harder to love, but even he would tell us: “When I saw her eyes I was afraid of God for the first time in my life. It was as if they belonged to someone who had lived too long and seen too much. They were an angel’s eyes, and they made me think of death. I went out and drank some lemon raki to get over it, and then I went into the church to pray, and, I don’t know why, but I fell down on the church steps and couldn’t be raised. I lay there a long time, with the dogs licking my face, till I woke up again and went in and kissed the icon of the Virgin Mary Panagia Glykophilousa.” That is what my father said, but he was a complete sot, and my mother cursed the day she married him, and she used to go out to the taverns with a slipper in her hand and drive him home as if he were a sheep. My mother told me that he had indeed got drunk on that day, and passed out on the church steps, but that the priest—his name was Father Kristoforos—had delegated a couple of young men to carry him home. I think he would have got drunk whether he had seen the infant Philothei or not, since it needed no pretty child to provoke his drunkenness on any other day.

  Philothei had very dark eyes. You couldn’t even see the pupils because the iris was so dark a brown as to be black, and consequently no one ever really knew what Philothei was feeling. Normally you glean more from someone’s eyes than you do from their speech, but I could read nothing at all from hers. If Philothei said something, then I just had to take her at her word, because it was impossible to look into that darkness and discover whether or not she was lying, whether or not she liked or disliked me at that moment, or whether or not she was sad. Once I pointed this out to her, I think we were about fifteen years old at the time—it was the second year of the war against the Franks, and all the boys were at Gallipoli or in the labour battalions—and she ran inside to gaze into herself in the mirror. She came back out about half an hour later, and she was quite distressed, and she said, with a tone of wonder in her voice, “Drosoulaki, what you said is true. I can’t see myself in the eyes.” Sometimes it was difficult to commune with her because of this, because words are just the vapour of the heart.

  She had lovely hair too. I don’t know if this is true, but it was said that she was born with a full head of hair, so black and thick and plentiful that it was like the fishing nets draped over the harbour wall in Argostoli harbour, or a flock of goats on a hill, or the tails of horses gathered and bound together. When it was first washed, so they say, her grandmother braided her hair and wound it three times about her head. This sort of thing does happen, I suppose.

  I do remember her skin. It was so fine and delicate that even when she was six years old she could raise her hand against the light, and one could see the bones and veins. Mehmetçik and Karatavuk—I don’t suppose I told you about them—and Ibrahim as well, they used to say, “Philothei, Philothei, hold your hands up to the sun, we want to see, we want to see,” and she would put her hands right up to their faces so that the sun was blocked out, and they would feel sick, which is odd if you remember that in those days you could see all our ancestors’ bones in the little ossuary behind the church, because there was no land for burial, and we needed the land, and in any case that was the custom. I suppose it’s more horrible when you see the bones of someone who is still alive, because you don’t expect it. I often think about those bones in the ossuary, and what we did with them when we left Anatolia that we loved so much and will probably mourn for ever.

&nb
sp; But it was more than a question of hair and skin and eyes, because what one saw was more than just her beauty. You see, my father, drunkard though he was, was right when he said that she reminded you of death. When you looked at Philothei, you were reminded of a terrible truth, which is that everything decays away and is lost. Beauty is precious, you see, and the more beautiful something is, the more precious it is; and the more precious something is, the more it hurts us that it will fade away; and the more we are hurt by beauty, the more we love the world; and the more we love it, the more we are saddened that it is like finely powdered salt that runs away through the fingers, or is puffed away by the wind, or is washed away by the rain. You see, I am ugly. I have always been ugly. If I had died in my youth no one would have said, “Look how much poorer is the world,” but to be entranced by Philothei was to receive a lesson in fate.

  I was, as I have said, born hideous, and before I married I would have been better off as a goat. There was a blessing in those days which went “May all your children be sons, and all your sheep be ewes,” and the curse was “May all your children be daughters, and all your sheep be rams.” My mother once told me that when I was born my father flew into a rage, and spat on her even as she lay exhausted on the divan, because she had inflicted another daughter upon him, who would one day have to be disposed of with a dowry.

  I have always been without attractions and allure, and I still thank God that for a few years I had a husband who loved me before he was drowned. You see, I was lucky because I have had much affection and respect, and much disinterested love. Perhaps I was luckier than Philothei, whose perfection was a misfortune because she never had any peace.