The Great Fire (37 page)

Most were driven toward Magnesia and beyond. Many were killed at a deep canyon along the Magnesia Road called Buyuk Dere.

News of the deportations spread through the exhausted hordes of people and created a new panic. Tens of thousands gathered around the American consulate and Jennings’s safe houses, trying to get as close to them as possible. Even if they could not get inside, they hoped that simply being near an American institution would protect them. The consulate and safe houses, combined with the destroyers anchored close to the Quay, created a strong American presence near the tip of the Point. America had a reputation for justice among all the peoples of Asia Minor—Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Jews, and Arabs—and the refugees, who knew their tormenters, felt that the very presence of Americans would be an obstacle to Turkish cruelty. They were mostly correct—an incident was less likely to occur in the presence of an American.

But out of the sight of the Americans, the deportations continued—and none of the Turkish authorities offered information about the ultimate fate of the people who were being removed. “Turks were proceeding with evacuation of refugees in wholesale manner,” Knauss noted in his diary. “At the cemetery and football field the refugees had been evacuated and the road to Dadagatch [actually, “Daragatch,” north and east of Smyrna to Bournabat—Author] was filled with women and children being driven towards the interior.” Knauss saw that the Turks were gathering refugees at the Quay and in the small and unburned northern sections and moving them toward the back of the city and then toward the Daragatch road “in order to escape notice from the Quay.” The lieutenant commander, who had been moved by the refugee suffering from the beginning, added, “Some very pitiful sights were noted. It is said that the Turks keep them on the go until they drop.”

Jacob also witnessed the roundups. “The seizing of all men of military age, and on both sides of the age line,” he wrote, “is being energetically pushed. The process complete in a given camp, the women and children are thrust into the streets, the prey of both soldiers and civilian Turkish
rabble.” Even Lieutenant Merrill, who had been indifferent to the suffering, took note: “The Turks never miss an opportunity to frighten the Armenians and Greeks. In passing through crowd of refugees they will invariably feel their bayonet points, whet their sabers or work the bolts of their guns.”

Powell was doing his best, with the scant capacity he had to work with, to remove at least the orphan children who were collected in several places around the city under the protection of the relief committee, including at an unburned brewery. He sent another message to Bristol on September 19, this time via a British vessel, HMS
Serapis,
explaining that he was trying to get by with one destroyer so he could evacuate the orphans. Powell’s note did not seek permission; it declared his intention to remove the children. He would eventually get it done, though it would take a few more days to work it out. He couldn’t get the children off his mind.

M
ustapha Kemal fell in love soon after he entered Smyrna.

He had established his residence at a grand seaside home in Cordelio in one of two houses that had been selected as his headquarters, and, ironically, the same house that King Constantine had used when he had come to Smyrna in 1921. It was there that two elderly Turkish women cared for Kemal, preparing and serving his meals, laying out his clothes, emptying his overflowing ashtrays, and attending to his comfort. He smoked three packs of cigarettes and consumed fifteen cups of strong Turkish coffee each day. He did most of his work at Cordelio in the days soon after his arrival, concentrating on Chanak and talks with the Allied powers.

On September 11 or 12, a young woman who lived nearby—the daughter of Smyrna’s richest Turkish resident, Muammer Bey—called on him. She was dressed modestly in European clothes but wore a black scarf over her head, the minimum of what was expected of a Moslem woman. She was petite, though not fragile; her hair was black and cut short into a style that was close to a bob, though not so daring. She had dark eyes, under dark eyebrows, that turned down slightly at their outer edges, which gave her a sleepy look, and a soft round face and high prominent brow. She was twenty-three years old and not particularly attractive
except in a sensitive and intelligent way that invited a longer look. There was something oddly beguiling about her appearance.

Her name was Latife. Her family, with the exception of her father’s mother, was living in exile, having departed soon after the Greek landing, and they were staying at their home in Paris. (They had another at Biarritz.) Latife had returned to Smyrna four months earlier on a steamer, by way of Marseille and Constantinople. She was living in the family’s Cordelio house with her grandmother and their servants. She had returned from France with a single objective—to meet Kemal, whose successes she had followed in the newspapers. She was smitten before she met him.

Her call on Kemal at his headquarters in Cordelio was ostensibly to offer him the use of her family’s second house in Smyrna. The aide told her that Kemal was too busy to see her, but she insisted on seeing him. It was clear to the aide that she was an upper-class woman, and being unable to persuade to her leave, he went to Kemal and reported that there was a woman in the anteroom who was asking to see him. Kemal declined to see her, but she walked into his office. She introduced herself and showed him a locket that she wore around her neck that contained a newspaper photograph of him.

“Do you mind?” she said.

“Why should I mind?” he answered.

He smiled and rose from his chair.

She said she had come to offer him the use of her family home in Göztepe, a district of summer villas just south of the city. She explained that her family was in France and the home was empty and available for his use. It was in a peaceful location; the air was known to be fresh. He would find, she said, that there were additional houses on the property that could be used by his staff. They talked some more, and Kemal was struck by her confident bearing and her direct eye contact. It was immediately clear to him that she was well educated. She had, in fact, studied law at the Sorbonne and attended a British boarding school. She had a quick mind and a pleasant voice. Her talk was clever and informed. Kemal was intrigued. He thanked her for the offer of her home and said he would consider it. Later in the day, he told Halide
Edib, who was among his staff at headquarters, that he had met a most unusual woman. He was in a very good mood.
^*
Latife, for her part, later described the meeting in a letter to her uncle: “I met a pair of beautiful blue eyes.”

Latife’s family, known by the name Ushakizade, was commercial royalty in Smyrna. Her great-grandfather, Haci Ali Bey, had come to Smyrna from Ushak, where he had begun a carpet manufacturing business. One of his company’s carpets had won the gold medal at the 1869 Paris Exhibition, and Emperor Napoleon III had given it as a gift to his wife. Ali Bey brought the business to Smyrna, where he lived as a cultivated businessman, and his book-filled home was an Ottoman salon. His son (Latife’s grandfather), Sadik Bey, extended the family’s holdings into transport between Aydin and Smyrna. He was said to own a camel train that reached nearly the entire seventy miles between the two cities. Sadik Bey held a seat on the New York Cotton Exchange. On a trip to Constantinople, Sadik fell in love with a Circassian concubine and married her. (Concubinage—slavery for sex with both women and boys—remained legal in the nineteenth century in Turkey; Circassian women, from the Caucasus, were considered the most desirable due to their light skin and perfect proportions.) Like his father, Sadik Bey also was a cultivated businessman, an aesthete. The house was full of books, music, and tutors. Sadik Bey’s son and Latife’s father, Muammer, further built the family’s wealth and took a leading position in the city. He had been Smyrna’s mayor and for a time was chairman of the district’s Young Turks organization. He was a member of the Sporting Club and an avid bridge player, an obsession he shared with his close friend, the French consul general with whom he often played in the garden of the house at Göztepe. The family lived in splendor—their home in Cordelio was decorated as an English manor house. They traveled to Europe for vacations.

Muammer spent lavishly on his children’s educations. Latife had an
English governess and tutors in German, English, Latin, French, and Arabic. The family had Greek servants, and when Latife came of age, her father hired a Greek girl to be her companion. At fourteen, Latife traveled to Constantinople and lived with her uncle, a chamberlain of Sultan Abdul Hamid, while she attended the American College for Girls. From there, she went to a British boarding school. Latife had taken a strong interest in all things German—language, music, and culture—and could recite long passages from Faust. She was tutored by the niece of the German poet Rilke, who said “she was the most talented of all my students” and looked like a “Murillo Madonna.”

In addition to being an indulgent father, Muammer—a big man, bald but suavely handsome—had a reputation as a ladies’ man and was connected, at least in Smyrna gossip, to a Greek cabaret dancer who performed in the decidedly downscale Quarantine district of the waterfront, where sailors sought amusement. The dancer’s name was Despina, and Muammer fell hard for her. He carried on an affair with her but she ultimately threw him off for a handsome young Greek officer. Muammar was heartbroken, and the story made the rounds of Smyrna society, high and low, and found its way into song and a poem by one of Turkey’s most famous poets, Atilla Ilhan. It suggests the exotic potion that was Smyrna, simultaneously mixing and separating its people against a sensual backdrop of entertainment and pleasure.

KEMAL DID NOT IMMEDIATELY ACCEPT
Latife’s offer of the house.

On September 12, he moved his headquarters to the Quay and occupied the home of an Armenian who had left city. He was at work there when the fire broke out, and he stayed as the flames approached the Quay. Then when the home caught fire, at about the time Charles Davis left the
Litchfield
to seek Allied help in rescuing refugees, Kemal and his staff abandoned the Quay headquarters, Kemal and a few others in the big Mercedes and others in a truck. They returned to the first headquarters, at Cordelio.

Kemal remained there for several days until the smell of the corpses and dead animals decomposing in the harbor forced his departure. The south wind brought the putrid odor into the big windows of the Cordelio house. He and his staff moved to Latife’s Göztepe home on September 17—the day Powell walked the Quay to the Konak and met Jennings. It was also the day General Pelle was in Smyrna, suggesting that Kemal likely stopped at the Konak to talk with Pelle—or brought him to Göztepe for talks about the Allied naval presence in the harbor.

The house that Latife had offered Kemal was a four-story white mansion set on a steep hill back from the harbor and among tall trees. It had two curving sets of front steps that led around and over a first-floor arched doorway to a second-story veranda and the home’s main entrance. The veranda was hung with jasmine, roses, ivy, and wisteria, and there were flower gardens spread among the grounds. Kemal took it as his home
and headquarters. His office was in a big room at the front left of the second floor, and his bedroom was directly above the office. At first, Latife remained with her grandmother in Cordelio, but soon the two moved with their servants to the white mansion. She looked after Kemal and ensured his comfort, making sure his favorite foods were served, fresh flowers were in the vase on the table next to his bed, and his photos from the newspapers were prominently displayed in his office. Soon she was serving as his secretary—translating documents, writing letters, and offering ideas. Right about this time, Kemal—whose health from military life, hard dinking, and chain smoking was precarious—suffered some sort of cardiac spasm, and Muammer’s doctor was called. He proscribed tobacco and alcohol, and Latife tried to limit Kemal’s indulgence. She placed only two cigarettes next to his bed at night.

It was clear to the people around Kemal that he was infatuated with Latife. He talked of her continually to Halide Edib, extolling her good manners, education, and ideas. Kemal was impressed too by her patriotism—she dismissed her father’s losses in the fire as less important than the nationalist victory.

But the situation for Kemal was complicated. Most of his experience with women had been as a soldier, and he had a reputation for a voracious sexual appetite, which he satisfied casually, often with prostitutes. He possessed, as a confidant said, an instinct for the harem. Latife, as an upper-class Moslem woman, guarded her modesty.

Since boyhood Kemal had displayed an uneasy relationship with women, especially with his mother, against whose religion and control he had rebelled as a boy but to whom he had shown unfailing Moslem respect and deference as an adult. There was one sexual relationship that had figured importantly in life. It was with a woman who was a cousin through marriage. Her name was Fikriye. Slim and attractive with dark eyes and a long face, she was sixteen years younger than Kemal. His mother had taken in the girl, who was essentially an orphan, when they had lived in Salonika. Mother and adopted daughter moved to Constantinople after Salonika had passed to Greece. Kemal and Fikriye were lovers in Constantinople soon after the end of World War I. Kemal was thirty-six; she was twenty. She worshipped him. During the
Greek-Turkish War, she had followed him to Ankara and lived with him as a companion. Kemal was affectionate to her, though he continued his loose life in Ankara. He enjoyed the comfortable home life she had made for them, but standing between Kemal and Fikriye was Kemal’s mother, who did not approve of her as a match. Fikriye was educated, played the piano, and was an expert rider, but Kemal’s mother wanted a woman of higher social standing for her son, and the son was mindful of his mother’s opposition.

On September 19, Latife put together a party for Kemal at the white mansion and invited his closest commanders and the Turkish journalists who had arrived from Constantinople. Kemal and the guests drove to the mansion from the city in the early evening. They came up the curved steps and were greeted on the veranda by Latife. Among them were Halide Edib and Ismet and Falih Refki. (None of the accounts place Noureddin at the party, suggesting that Kemal had relied on his military prowess but felt no affection for him.) Latife, dressed in black, met them at the veranda and offered each a greeting of peace, “
As-salamu, alaykum
.” Kemal disappeared briefly to his room upstairs and returned to the main sitting room on the second floor wearing a white Caucasus Mountain tunic with a belt, his hair brushed back, eyes gleaming. “She was dazzled by him and he was frankly in love,” wrote Halide Edib. “So the strong current of human attraction between the two enlivened the evening.”

At one point, Kemal, who was standing next to a table of drinks, said to Halide, “We are celebrating Smyrna—you must drink with us.” Halide refused his raki, but accepted a glass of champagne. She raised her glass and wished the two of them happiness. Latife also refused Kemal’s raki, which upset him—a minor moment of unpleasantness that would suggest much trouble ahead between the two strong personalities.

But it was a night of celebration, and Kemal’s spirits soared. He reminisced about his life in Salonika and told stories of the many battlefronts he had experienced. In the night’s conversation, Kemal had dismissed the fire that had burned Smyrna as the cost of war. He showed no particular concern for the refugees. (Latife would later quote him as having said, “Let it burn. Let it crash down.”) The Victrola was wound, music
was played, and Kemal sang Roumeli folks songs—the peasant songs of Macedonia and the southern Balkans. As he commanded the table with his stories and songs, Halide Edib was thinking of Fikriye, and of the pain she would experience on learning of Latife’s entrance into Kemal’s life. (In a few months, Fikriye would put a pistol to her head and commit suicide.) Kemal carried on at the table, laughing, talking, and singing. He dominated the room. Halide was beginning to find the night tiresome.