Birds Without Wings Read online

  There’s something I think about, you know, and that is that if Philothei were still alive, then she would by now be an old crone like me, and perhaps there would be no longer anything to choose between us. It’s a strange thought. How cruel God is. One old bone is as good as another for throwing to a dog, and the earth is as greedy for one corpse as it is for any other.

  Sometimes I still miss the best friend of my youth, and I think of all the other things that have been lost. I lost my family, my town, my language and my earth. Perhaps it’s only possible to be happy, as I am here in this foreign land that someone decided was my home, if one forgets not only the evil things, but also the very perfect ones. To forget the bad things is good. That is obvious. But sometimes one should also forget the things that were wonderful and beautiful, because if you remember them, then you have to endure the sadness of knowing that they have gone. They have gone as irrevocably as my mother, and my Anatolia, and my son who became a devil and drowned, and my sweet husband who also drowned at sea, and all those who died here in the war.

  I know that all these things, all my sorrow, all my memories, all these things will disappear, and it will be as if they had never been. I ask myself why God creates all these things, only to let them go. Why does God give us a garden, and put a snake in it? What can anything mean, if all will be forgotten?

  I am an old woman now. I am old and useless. I’ve pondered these things all my life. My flesh is not what it was, and neither are my bones. When I was young my soul seemed to be the same thing as my body. There didn’t seem to be any difference, I remember that. When I needed to climb some steps, my legs just climbed, and that was all there was to it. My mind and my muscles were all one. Now when I want to climb some steps I look down at my feet and I say, “Move, in the name of St. Gerasimos, move!” and slowly they move, and then I stop to draw breath, and my lungs feel hard and dry, and I feel my heart fluttering in vain like the last poor starving butterfly, and this is how I have come to know in my own way that there is a soul who is not the body, but lives inside it.

  You see, I still have in me the spirit of a girl of twenty that sings when I dream of running to meet my husband when he comes back safe from the sea, or of embracing sweet Philothei when I meet her in the street, and this spirit rebels against the prison that my body has become, and my spirit is like a chrysalis that is ready to burst its shell, and when the shell bursts, it longs to be reborn in paradise, where I can touch the golden hem of the robe of the gracious, blessed, all-holy Mother of God, and it will be like washing in water at a hot day’s journey’s end.

  And if I am reborn in Heaven, which maybe I don’t deserve, then perhaps all my doubts will be answered. If I still remember those that I have loved, then I won’t have lived for nothing, for what would be the point of anything, if nothing is remembered?

  I am just an old woman in exile, I have no education, I am ugliness personified, but if I could break open my ribs with my bare hands, I would show you that I have a heart grown huge with love, and grief, and memory.

  CHAPTER 6

  Mustafa Kemal (2)

  Far away from Eskibahçe, past the Dodekanissos and across the Aegean Sea, Mustafa is growing up. He has been named after an uncle that his father killed by accident whilst an infant. He has a Negro nurse whose ancestors used to be slaves, and who sings to him.

  The family of the child moves to Mount Olympus, where his father Ali Riza Efendi is a customs officer on the new border with Greece, and where he will have the brainwave of starting a timber business.

  Mustafa’s mother Zübeyde wants the boy to become a hafiz, and learn the Koran by heart. She thinks that he must make the pilgrimage to Mecca and become a hodja. She wants him to go to a religious school, but Ali Riza, who is a progressive and a liberal, wants to enrol him in the modern school of Şemsi Efendi. Zübeyde wins, and he is enrolled at the religious school, where he arrives in procession to the cheers of his new schoolmates, bearing a golden stick, and attired in white and gold.

  Here the first seeds will be planted of his lifelong aversion to religion in general and Islam in particular. He thinks it stupid and pointless to learn Arabic. The classes are obliged to sit on the floor, cross-legged, but one day he stands up. “Sit down,” says the teacher.

  “I am cramped up,” explains Mustafa.

  “Sit down at once,” orders the teacher.

  “No,” says Mustafa. “Infidel children don’t have to sit like this. Why should we?”

  “You dare disobey me?”

  “Yes, I dare disobey you.”

  The teacher and Mustafa glare at each other for a moment, and then the whole class rises to its feet, and says, “We all dare disobey you.”

  Shortly afterwards, perhaps at the school’s behest, Ali Riza removes his son, and enrols him in the modern and liberal establishment of Şemsi Efendi.

  Now, however, Ali Riza’s timber business fails because Greek brigands, who are liberating the region by means of blackmail and extortion, menace his workers and demand protection money from him, under the threat of burning his timber. Ali Riza gives them the money, and they burn his timber anyway. They ambush his wagons on the way to the coast, and attack his men in the forest. The commander of the gendarmerie, who is supposed to be controlling the outlaws, advises him to quit. He goes into the salt trade, fails, takes to drink, develops tuberculosis, and within three years is dead.

  Zübeyde moves the family out into the country, and Mustafa and his sister happily run wild on his uncle’s farm, chasing the crows from the bean crops, fighting each other, waxing strong on good food from the rusty earth, among villages where storks nest on roofs and bullocks graze the pastures.

  Mustafa grows dissatisfied with his unengaged mind. To his mother he says, “I want to go to school,” and to his uncle Hussein he says, “I want to go to school.”

  Surprisingly, they send him to the school of the local Greek priest, but he finds the language detestable and the Christian boys arrogant and tribal. He is sent to the school of the imam, but he finds the religiosity repulsive. A local woman offers her services, but he refuses to be educated by a female. He is given a tutor, but denounces him as ignorant. He is sent back to Salonika to attend the school of Kaymak Hafiz, but here he is severely beaten for fighting, and refuses to go back.

  The boy yearns to go to the Military Secondary School where one can wear proper modern clothes instead of the embarrassingly old-fashioned shalwar and sash. He has a little friend called Ahmed, who looks wonderful in the military uniform. Zübeyde forbids him to go because she foresees nothing but death or perpetual absence in a military career, and in any case, if he is not to be a holy man, he could at least be a merchant and bring in some money.

  Mustafa conspires with Ahmed’s father, Kadri, a major in the army, and he sits the entrance exam without his mother’s knowledge. He passes, and presents his mother with a fait accompli. She refuses to let him go to the school, which requires her written consent, and Mustafa tells her, “When I was born my father gave me a sword and hung it up on the wall above my bed. Obviously he wanted me to be a soldier. I was born a soldier, and I shall die as one.”

  Zübeyde is half persuaded and half dubious, but one night she is visited by a marvellous veridical dream, wherein she sees Mustafa perched on a golden tray at the very summit of a minaret. She runs to him, only to hear a voice telling her, “If you permit your son to go to the military school, he will remain up here on high. If you do not, he shall be cast down.” One is tempted to imagine Mustafa whispering into the ears of the righteous matriarch as she slumbers.

  Mustafa makes a strangely self-possessed pupil. He refuses to join in the children’s games, saying that he prefers to watch. He refuses to bend his body in order to play leapfrog, demanding that others, should they wish to overleap him, must do so with him standing up. He is only twelve years old, but he turns out to be an astonishing mathematician. His teacher, also called Mustafa, puts him in charge of classes. He socialis
es with older boys rather than his contemporaries, and his teachers find him opinionated and difficult. He assumes equality with them.

  His mother remarries, much to his alarm, jealousy and disgust, and he refuses to live in his stepfather’s house, but he finds that he has an inspirational new stepbrother who is an officer in the army, who preaches to him about honour and duty, about never accepting a blow or an insult. He gives the little boy a flick knife in case some predatory man finds him too pretty for his own good, and tells him never to use it unwisely. The boy’s own predilections are clearly for the fair sex, however, and it is more likely that the danger to Virtue rather derives from him.

  His teacher, Mustafa, gives him a name to distinguish him from himself. The new name that he will carry all his life is “Kemal,” Perfection.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Dog

  The town of which I speak was finally destroyed by two earthquakes, in 1956 and 1957. It is now populated only by small lizards and huge cicadas. Stiff grasses grow up between the stones, and the voices of the nightingales, whose massed improvisations at night used to drive the populace crazy with sleeplessness, now drift out across a sea of rubble, and away over a quiet river that has grown preoccupied and sad. The few peasants who come to cultivate the strips of land along the banks look up at the ruins, where their children forage for old knives and coins, and try to imagine how it used to be. “It should be rebuilt,” they often say, but then someone says, “I wouldn’t live there; there are too many ghosts.”

  Not many years ago a bishop came from Rhodes, and an imam came from Fethiye, and in the broken carapace of the Church of Aghios Nikolaos, they prayed together for the rebirth of the place and its community, where, side by side, there used to live Christians who spoke only Turkish, but wrote it in the Greek script, and Muslims who also spoke only Turkish, and also wrote it in the Greek script. Neither God, for reasons best known to Himself, nor the Turkish government, for cogent reasons of expense, have answered the prayers of the bishop and the imam, and the town of Eskibahçe, whose Greek name in the Byzantine age was “Paleoperiboli,” slumbers on in death, without an epitaph, and with no one to remember it.

  When the town was alive, the walls of the houses were rendered with mortar and painted jauntily in dark shades of pink. Its streets were so narrow as to be more like alleyways, but there was no oppressive sense of enclosure, since the buildings were stacked up one slope of a valley, so that every dwelling received light and air. In truth, the town seemed to have been marvellously designed by some ancient genius whose name has been lost, and there was probably no other place like it in all of Lydia, Caria or Lycia. Each habitation had its lowest rooms carved directly out of the rock, many of them with capacious storage spaces cut even further into the hillside, as if the earliest inhabitants had whiled away the tedium of their winters by chipping out cellars for themselves. Directly into the walls were cut niches for stoves, guns and brass cooking pots.

  These lowest rooms were blessedly cool in the summers, and in the winter were commonly occupied by animals, whose natural warmth eased the chill of the room above, which itself was accessible either by a wooden ladder, or by stairs cut out of the rock. In the upper room were to be found the hearth and the divans, arranged around three sides of the room, with a fine carpet occupying the central space.

  Because each house had a roof that was almost flat, this amounted to an extra room when the weather was fine, the same roof acting as a trap for rainwater, which flowed directly into a very large cistern built on to the side of the structure. Thus, for the most part of the year, the women were saved the arduous task of fetching water from the wells, or from the river that cut through the very lush flood plain immediately below, where almost everybody owned a few decares of land for cultivation. Each house also possessed a separate earth closet, which had to be emptied frequently in hot weather on account of the oppressiveness of the flies. There were those who used it only when the women were cooking, because then the insects left the closet in order to investigate the food.

  Naturally, not all the buildings corresponded to this pattern, for over the centuries the population had grown a little, and there were more conventional houses on the periphery, and on the hillside opposite, that were divided into a selamlik, which was, as it were, the reception area, and the haremlik, which was the private quarters. Nonetheless, the habit of hacking extra rooms out of the rock also pertained in these buildings, and they had the same heavy walls, as thick as the length of an arm, and the same dark and tranquil interiors that had the effect of diminishing one’s sense of time.

  Some of the houses, it is true, were so overcrowded as to be almost hellish, for it was the custom then, as in many places it still is now, for the sons to bring their new wives into their paternal house. If there were many sons who married, and produced numerous children, then there was neither room to move nor sleep, nor was there any privacy, and there was much bad temper, especially during times of pernicious weather. Upon the death of the family patriarch, however, the sons and their families would move out to new houses where the cycle would begin again, and there would be a few years of spaciousness in one’s own house, which seemed both disconcerting and marvellous.

  Behind the town the scrubby hillside rolled to a gentle crest, and beyond that there was a small depression that, had it had more ambition, might have amounted to a valley. There were a few vertical rock faces, for the land had originally been laid down in flat layers that had been folded and broken by the uncompassioned northern drift of Africa and Arabia. Many of these faces had been carved into elegant façades for sepulchres in Lycian times, but one had been deeply excavated for lime, and beyond, just over another crest, was the sharp and stony incline that fell steeply down to the vivid waters where the Aegean merges into the Mediterranean Sea. It was in this wasteland between the town and the ocean, a place fit only for goats, that the man who came to be known as the Dog took up residence among the Lycian tombs, becoming a spectre even before he had properly died.

  Sometimes it happens that the manner of a man’s death is discernible beforehand in his face, and sometimes it is clear from the manner of a man’s life. In the case of the one they named “The Dog,” it was always clear that he would die alone and in squalor, because this was what he had explicitly chosen when he undertook to lead the life that he did.

  Karatavuk and Mehmetçik were very small boys at the time, but they would never forget the day that the Dog arrived. They had been sent out by their respective mothers to gather wild greens, of which there were a hundred varieties growing on the hillsides and around the edges of the pastures, all of them edible, but some of them very bitter until one was used to them and learned to perceive the delicate flavours, which might remind one of walnut or garlic or lemon. Into their goatskin satchels they had stuffed everything that they had found, and were wasting time in conspiratorial fashion in order to delay their return home, where they would probably be given yet another task. Sometimes one’s mother sent one out to collect tezek, the dried dung that was used for fuel now that the trees had all been cut down and the goats had destroyed most of the shrubs. The only good thing about collecting tezek was finding the interesting and varicoloured species of beetles that inhabited it.

  They were sitting on one side of the sunken track that led past the almost intact ruins of a Roman theatre, which the townspeople still used for big meetings and celebrations. They were idly tossing small stones across the track, their target a small burrow made in the opposite bank by a mouse. “Why don’t we pee in the hole?” suggested Mehmetçik. “Then the mouse might come out, and we can catch it.”

  Karatavuk frowned. “I don’t want to catch a mouse.” Karatavuk always wanted to appear more serious and adult than he really was, and it is more than likely that he would have liked to urinate in the hole to make the mouse come out, if only he had thought of it first.

  “Anyway,” said Mehmetçik, “if we pee in the mousehole, we might drown it.”r />
  Karatavuk nodded wisely in agreement, and the two boys continued to toss their stones. Karatavuk was the second son of Iskander the Potter, and he had the handsome face of a young man even though he was only six years old, with golden skin, and shining black hair that fell across his eyes, so that frequently he had to sweep it upward with the back of his hand. He had fine lips, and when he smiled he revealed a pointed tongue and small white teeth that had no gaps, but which were just crooked enough to be charming. His mood always seemed to be more sober than it was.

  Mehmetçik, who came from one of the Christian families, was shorter and stockier, and it was clear that one day he would grow up into the kind of man who can perform surprising feats of strength, the sort who can hold a heavy door in place whilst it is screwed on to its hinges. Like Karatavuk, his skin was tawny, his eyes dark brown, and his hair black and straight. They might easily have been brothers or cousins in two versions, one slim and lively, the other more solid. In fact, they were related, but in a manner tenuous enough for everyone to have forgotten how it came about. A great-great-grandfather had changed faith and married into the other family, perhaps, or a distant grandmother had married twice, the first or perhaps the second husband being of the other family. In any case, and in one way or another, if one traced it back far enough, there was no one in that town who was not in some way a relation of everybody else, whatever the theories that Daskalos Leonidas might have propounded.

  The boys compared toes, Karatavuk’s thin and long, Mehmetçik’s shorter and stouter. What they had in common was that they were powdery with white dust from the road, and tanned dark by the early-summer sun. Karatavuk was demonstrating that he could waggle each toe separately, and Mehmetçik was frowning with concentration in the effort to duplicate the feat, when they became aware that someone had come over the brow of the hill and was bearing down upon them.