Birds Without Wings (13 page)

Polyxeni was incensed by a righteous rage, the rage that had eaten away at her for thirty-six months as rumours had circulated and counter-circulated. She seized the skull from the hands of the woman who nursed it, and held it aloft, above her head. She went over to the wall and paraded it back and forth before the Muslim women, strutting in a bold passion, and shouting out as if in accusation: “Is this the head of a poisoner? Look! Only three years, and already the earth has received her! The earth has not refused her! The earth has taken her in! Only three years!” She wheeled triumphantly and thrust the skull in the faces of the women inside the yard, hasting from one to the next. “Do you see flesh?” she demanded. “One scrap of skin? One wisp of hair? Do you see one trace of eyes and lips and tongue?”

With all the courage and confidence of her indignation she stopped before Rustem Bey and let him see the head, defying him. “Clean! Clean!” she screamed, almost hysterical. “Clean as a rock! Clean as the snow! Innocent! Innocent!”

Rustem Bey held out a hand as if to receive the skull, but Polyxeni snatched it away. He reached into his sash, and brought something out. He looked at Polyxeni levelly. “I always knew that your mother was innocent, and for that reason I have brought this purse, as my contribution. Use it well, in memory of your mother, who was a good woman. And let us have no more bad blood.” He turned and scanned the assembled people, raising his voice: “Wasn’t it enough that I should lose all my family in the plague? Wasn’t it enough that Polyxeni Hanim and her brothers and sisters should lose their mother? It’s a mean-spirited and ignorant people that rubs salt and sand in other people’s wounds with all these stories of poison and conspiracy! No more stories! No more bad blood!”

Rustem Bey gestured towards the grave. “This was a good woman,” he announced, simply. He picked his way back through the crowd, and left. Now that they had been reproved by their aga, the people seemed unable to look each other in the face and think of something to say. He had called them “mean-spirited and ignorant,” and this stung like lemon in a cut. Only Polyxeni and her siblings were pleased, although they wondered why it was that an infidel pasha as important as Rustem Bey should have come to make a speech in their defence, and give them a purse of money. People had been saying that his disappointments and misfortunes had
made him long for something more profound than money and domination, and perhaps this new decency was a proof.

Father Kristoforos processed slowly towards the cemetery, hoping beyond hope that the bones disinterred by his wife would have turned out to be clean. It would be a sign of God’s goodness, after so many sinister omens, the pink poppies and the bad dreams, if all bitterness, suspicion and vendetta could be nipped in the bud. He stopped behind an oleander bush and surreptitiously took the precaution of spitting three times in order to avoid ill luck. In one hand he bore a great lighted candle, and in the other he swung his censer, whose fumes of frankincense spread calmness and serenity through the still air, and whose bells jingled like those that Abdulhamid Hodja tied to the neck of his horse. Kristoforos was always afraid that the charcoal in the censer would fail to light, or go out, and the tension that he felt at this moment was at least partly due to this mundane struggle with that most unreliable of the elements. He passed Rustem Bey striding down the hill, and was relieved when the latter announced curtly in passing: “She was innocent, praise God.”

At the gate he asked one of the women: “Are we ready yet?” and upon being answered in the affirmative, he walked with slow dignity towards the grave, casting clouds of incense all about him. The small candles were handed round, and the first one lit from the taper that the priest bore in his right hand. Soon, just as the afternoon light was beginning to fade and the Evening Star emerging, the graveyard was glistering with tiny lights.

“Everlasting be your memory, O our sister,” recited Father Kristoforos. “Our sister who is worthy of blessedness and eternal memory. Through the orisons of the Fathers, Lord Jesus Christ Our God, have mercy and save us. Amen. Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy upon us.”

He received the flagon of red wine that Lydia passed him, and solemnly poured it over the skull and the heap of bones, making the sign of the cross with it three times. The wine, washing motes of soil from the bones, spread out into the white cloth like a bloodstain, and Kristoforos continued, “You shall sprinkle me with hyssop, and I shall be clean. You shall wash me, and I will be whiter than snow. The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof, the world and all that dwell therein. You are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

As the people washed their hands and left the cemetery, their ears ringing with the priest’s sonorous liturgical Greek, Lydia the Barren tied the
bones up into a neat bundle. She gathered it into her arms and went alone, the bones clattering and scraping together as she walked, down through the winding alleyways to the lower church, the one where the owl lived on the beams, and behind which was the ossuary. It was a simple stone structure partially excavated into the hillside. The doorway was open to the air, and at one side were steep steps leading down to a large subterranean room, where, against the back wall, were stacked the accumulated bones of the Christian dead. They rested upon each other in their cloth bundles, but at the lower layers, where the fabric had rotted away, the old bones had tumbled and mingled promiscuously together so that nobody knew any longer whose bones were whose. It smelled of damp and cold, like a cave, and candlelight flickered sorrowfully upon the darkening and softening remnants of those whose lives had passed beyond. Lydia laid down her burden in its place, adjusted Mariora’s cleaned and unjointed skeleton where it lay between that of a child and that of an old man, sighed, crossed herself and left.

By the time that she returned to the churchyard of St. Nicholas, most people had already received their dole of food. Small cups of red wine had been tossed down throats that only a brief time before had been constricted with emotion, and Mariora’s relatives had handed round the koliva, rich with cinnamon and raisins, and the pastries and sweets. Each person licked honey from a spoon in order to sweeten away the recent bitterness of death, thinking of Mariora, and saying, “May God forgive her.” The poorer women hovered, attempting to appear busy, waiting to take away the surplus to their families, because even the living, when they are hungry, do not despise the sweetmeats of the dead.

The close relatives and friends soon departed in a pack to the house of Polyxeni and her husband Charitos, there to be filled with coffee, raki and sweet delicacies served up on trays by Philothei and the other little children, wide-eyed with worry about whether or not they were doing it all properly. Quietly the guests conversed about the cleanness of the bones, about how well it had all gone, and about the dramatic intervention of Rustem Bey, and then they left, bidding farewell to the family, and saying, “You have received her well, yes, very well indeed. May you live long. Patience and courage, patience and courage.”

It was agreed on going home that the exhumation had been a good one, that the food and wine had been generous and of great quality, that the amount of money collected had been wondrous, not least because of the munificence of that infidel, Rustem Bey, and wasn’t it probably wrong to
accept his charity on a Christian occasion, and wasn’t it an unwonted thing for an infidel to step out boldly on to Christian ground. One woman said that the corpse’s shoes and graveclothes had not rotted properly, and that must mean something, and it might be because Mariora’s father had died leaving debts, and may Mariora rest in paradise.

CHAPTER 15

The Proof of Innocence (4): The Message to Mariora

The following evening Lydia the Barren returned to the ossuary and lit a candle for Mariora. She then trudged up the hill to the graveyard, pulled a shovel out of the undergrowth where she had hidden it in a neglected corner, and began to refill the grave. Into the hole she shovelled the flesh-eating earth, along with the stubs of candles and the forlorn remains of the exhumation’s flowers. “Ah, Mariora,” she sighed, “I wish you sunshine and good roads.” She stood and let the declining sun press its warmth into her face, promising herself that she would remember this moment because who knows when the sun will rise again.

At the same time Polyxeni, accompanied by Ayse, who had come along for moral support, was knocking on the door of Daskalos Leonidas, bearing in one hand the wicker cage in which the dove captured by the two boys was still turning in idiotic circles. They had also taken the precaution of bringing Philothei, whose prettiness, they felt sure, would be enough to make malleable the heart even of someone as stony as Daskalos Leonidas. Not far away the child Ibrahim pretended to be occupied, as always keeping his protective and proprietorial eye on Philothei. Whilst they waited for the teacher to come, the women poked their fingers into the bars of the hanging cage that held his pet goldfinch, and made sibilant twittering noises at it.

When Leonidas answered the door he suspected immediately that he was in for another ludicrous episode in which he would have to indulge the wayward ideas of these recalcitrant people. No one, it seemed, ever wanted anything sensible from him. His heart sank when he saw the two women. He hated having to speak Turkish, but in this town nobody spoke anything else, albeit larded with odd offcuts of Persian, Arabic and Greek. He dwelt in a state of perpetual longing for Smyrna, which his memory and his habit of dissatisfaction had embroidered into a fantasy of great
civilisation, as if it too were not teeming with every kind of Levantine and Turk. He looked down at Philothei, who was standing on one leg with her arms folded over the top of her head in one of those pointless experiments so beloved of children, and his heart did indeed soften. “What bright eyes,” he thought to himself.

“Peace be upon you,” said the two women together, and Leonidas, as always, adjusted the spectacles on his nose and demanded, “What do you want? I am rather busy.”

“A favour,” begged Polyxeni, “just a favour. We have brought you something.” Ayse nudged Philothei, who held out a packet containing some of the honeyed pastries left over from the previous night, and thrust them into the teacher’s hand. Leonidas almost smiled. He had recently read of the latest educational theory from Europe, which was that girls should receive some elementary education because it was mothers who were the first big influence on sons, from which it followed that pupils would be more advanced in their learning if mothers were able to begin the process before they even got to school. Leonidas was forward-thinking in these matters, and it occurred to him how charming it would be if he could teach classes of girls, as long as they were all as irresistible as Philothei. It would give him a chance, too, to teach these future mothers to speak clean Greek, and maybe that would put purer tongues in the mouths of the sons.

“As I say, I am very busy.” His voice had a crackling quality, as if his throat were full of dry leaves. “What is it, exactly? I hope it won’t take too long.” Without thinking, he reached out and patted Philothei on the crown of her head. She crossed her eyes and skipped to the other leg.

Falteringly, and with many interjections from Ayse, Polyxeni explained her mission, and even Leonidas was astonished, for this was possibly his most bizarre request yet. “Are you serious?” he asked. “This isn’t some kind of joke? I’ve never heard anything like it.”

Polyxeni tried to keep her patience, astounded at what this educated man apparently did not know. “Please, please,” she begged, “it’s not a great thing.”

“You want me to write on this dove?”

“It’s only a little thing.”

Ayse and Polyxeni had been hoping to see the legendary chaos of Leonidas’s house, but he disappointed them by telling them to wait at the door. He re-emerged with a pen and a jar of ink, saying, “We can do it over here, on this wall.”

“I don’t want you to write it in ink,” said Polyxeni firmly. “I want you to do it with this.” She handed over a small, stoppered glass bottle, whose mouth and neck were moulded curiously concave on one side.

“This is water,” said Leonidas. “I can’t write messages in water.”

“Just dip your pen and write,” Polyxeni told him. She was becoming quite peeved about his obstructive attitude and vexatious manner, and her eyes were beginning to flash. “It isn’t water, it’s tears.”

“Tears?”

“Yes, tears. When she was buried I went every day to the graveside and wept, and these are the tears.”

Leonidas held the diminutive bottle to the light and could not help but feel a sense of wonder. “Holy God,” he exclaimed, “I had no idea that people still did these kinds of things.”

“Lots of people do it,” Polyxeni informed him, “but not many get as much tears as I did.”

“Not many are such good daughters, though they should be, if you ask me, though I’m no one to have an opinion,” added Ayse.

Shaking his head and sighing through his nose, Leonidas let himself be guided by the two women, who had removed the unfortunate dove from her cage, and had effectively immobilised her. Ayse held the bird’s legs between two fingers, and Polyxeni wrapped her hands around the animal’s body in order to still the wings. The dove craned her neck and peered around desperately, whilst Philothei proferred the bottle in two hands and Leonidas dipped the nib and prepared to write. Polyxeni told him: “Say, ‘Beloved Mother, you can rest in peace now because everyone has seen that you are innocent. Your daughter, Polyxeni, who sends you this message and forgets you never.’ ”