Birds Without Wings (32 page)

“Well, I think so. If you use it correctly it can kill a toothache for a couple of days. I get it in Smyrna, and it’s very precious. It comes from a place called Scotland, which is a Frankish country somewhere a very long way in the north.” Levon gestured in a vaguely northerly direction. “It’s so far north that it’s exceedingly cold. I’ve heard it said that in Scotland you can sometimes go hunting by just picking the birds out of the branches, because their feet freeze to the twigs at night, and they say that the people are marvellously hairy, so that they can keep warm, and the women have an extra breast under each arm. They make this drink as a cure for toothache and many other ills.”

“Extra breasts? That’s quite something.” Constantinos opened the bottle and sniffed it. “Smells good.”

“What you have to do is take a sip, and swill the stuff back and forth through your teeth. It might hurt quite a lot at first. Then you keep the stuff in your mouth, swilling it back and forth, back and forth, for as long as you possibly can, and you keep doing it until you find that you have to speak to someone, and so you have to swallow it.”

Constantinos took a mouthful and did as he was advised, watched with interest by the master and servant. There was an initial rush of lancinating pain, and he grimaced and winced, but then he began to feel the working of the panacea. He waved the bottle at Levon and pointed to it with his other hand, as if poking at it appreciatively. He tried to grunt, but Levon said, “Don’t speak. Just keep swilling.”

“Nggggggg,” said Constantinos.

“I hope you can find your way home,” said Levon. “I’m going to bed. I wish you a very good night.”

“Ngggggg,” repeated Constantinos, sucking the whisky through his teeth, and waving the bottle to signal his farewells.

The servant closed the door, and said, “If I were you, master, I’d have his throat cut.”

Levon demurred, “No doubt you would, but really he’s just another
unfortunate. The raki will kill him soon enough, whether his teeth are cured or not, and that’ll be another poor useless nobody under the earth, with no one to regret him. I doubt if any of those Greeks will even dig his bones up to wash them.”

As they proceeded back into the house, Levon shook his head and said, “There’s altogether too much affliction in this world. And I have just given away a most precious bottle of medicine that’s as rare as a feathered goat. I must be mad.”

CHAPTER 37

Mustafa Kemal (8)

Mustafa Kemal decides to follow his own precepts, and gets out of politics. He will be a soldier,
tout court
. He joins the Training Command of the 3rd Army, and initially antagonises the old-fashioned types with his newfangled ideas and his trenchant criticisms, but he impresses his pupils by his lucid teaching, and his unnatural ability to arrive fresh and early each morning, despite his long nocturnal bouts of crapulence. Adjutant Major Mustafa Kemal is scornful of anyone above his own rank.

The Germans are donating their military expertise to the Ottomans, and Mustafa Kemal neither likes nor trusts them. He does, however, think that they are wonderful soldiers, and he sets out to learn as much from them as he can. He translates a military manual by General Litzman, and he impresses Marshal von der Goltz when the latter comes to supervise an exercise for which Kemal has devised the general scheme. He conducts more and more exercises, with himself in charge. On exercises where he is not in charge, he prepares his own plans and orders, and then compares them to the ones actually used. During debriefs he is unstinting in his criticisms, and pernickety about details.

He is still vexatious to his superiors, and they put him in charge of a regiment in the hope that the great theoretician will make a fool of himself in practice. During an Albanian uprising Kemal draws up a plan for the capture of a crucial pass, and it is taken without the loss of one soldier. The uprising is crushed. At the celebratory dinner in Salonika, Mustafa Kemal prophesies that one day there will be a Turkish, not an Ottoman army, and that it will save the nation. He tells Colonel von Anderten that the Turkish army will not have done its duty until it has also saved Turkey from its own backwardness.

Mustafa Kemal goes to Paris with a military delegation, and before he goes he buys himself a hat and a suit that he thinks are Western. When he
arrives, his friend Fethi meets him at the station, and mocks him delightedly because the hat is too jaunty and the suit is green. Mustafa Kemal and Fethi go out to buy him another suit that Parisians might take seriously. During the military discussions, when he is in uniform, Kemal makes himself conspicuous by vociferously advocating his own plans during the manoeuvres, and a French officer tells him that no matter how brilliant he is, no one will take him seriously as long as he wears a kalpak on his head. One day, when he is dictator of Turkey, the kalpak will go the way of the turban and the fez, Mustafa Kemal having become the only dictator in the history of the world with a profound grasp of the semiotics of headwear.

Back in Salonika, Kemal becomes disillusioned and depressed. There has been no promotion and there seems to be no future. He tells a friend that he is resigning his commission, but after an encouraging drinking bout at the White Tower, he changes his mind.

He also seems to have changed his mind about staying out of politics. He has become frustrated, and when out drinking likes to tell his friends of the government offices to which he will one day appoint them. Fethi, who is Kemal’s putative roaming ambassador, starts to tease him by calling him “Mustafa Kemal, the drunken Sultan.”

Mustafa Kemal is frustrated because he knows that he is destined for greatness, but does not see how it will come about. He is not in charge of the revolution, and his fellow revolutionaries are bar-room theoreticians, talkers and dreamers. They operate within gratifyingly elaborate systems of secrecy, a world of passwords and arcane oaths, and they devote much of their time to conspiring against each other. Mustafa Kemal wants things to be clear and direct, he wants specific goals to be set, and he wants unerring action to be taken in achieving them. Mustafa Kemal wants to reform the whole political system, and he has clearly understood, as his future career will demonstrate, exactly what Rousseau meant when he said that a people must be forced to be free.

Mustafa Kemal has to conceal his agnosticism from his respectably Muslim co-conspirators, but everyone knows of it, just as they know of his promiscuity and his bibulousness. Nonetheless, there are those who incline towards Kemal’s ideas; Islam is gradually being replaced by Turkish nationalism, and the argument is going to be about the nature of this nationalism. There is in Salonika a revolutionary professor who bears upon his forehead the romantic cruciform scars of a failed suicide, who animadverts that Turks should revert to their pre-Islamic ways, but Mustafa Kemal is of the opinion that Turkey should become a modern Western
state. Gradually he is finding people who agree with him, and the authorities are becoming suspicious again. They transfer him from his regimental command, and install him at the office of the general staff in Istanbul, where they can keep a close eye on him.

Fate intervenes in the form of the imperial Western powers, which are at the height of their weening self-confidence. They are generously bringing Western civilisation to the unenlightened lesser breeds, whether the latter wish it or not, and with the notable omission of the democratic institutions that are precisely what make Western civilisation worth having. Germany seizes Agadir, whereupon the French become indignant, and it is ultimately agreed with the Germans that France shall have Morocco, and Germany shall have some of the Congo. The Italians, piqued at not having been invited to the party, seize Cyrenaica and Tripolitania, which are, inconveniently, but pertinently to the progress of Mustafa Kemal, Ottoman possessions.

Accordingly, the empire has to go to war, and the handsome, romantic, but unintellectual Enver Pasha is duly dispatched to Tripoli with a dashing contingent of officers. Mustafa Kemal does not really care about North Africa, since Turks do not live there, and in any case the Balkans are a far more present danger, but he seizes the chance to attain a little glory, and, disguised as a journalist, bearing false papers, off he sails on a Russian ship, accompanied by the poetic Ömer Naci. Also with him, much to his irritation, comes Yakup Cemil, his former would-be assassin. He has had to raise the money for the journey all by himself.

Whilst he is in Libya, his native town, his beloved Salonika, is taken by the Greeks, and he will never see it again. The Greeks demolish the mosques one by one, and those Turks who have the means to do so contrive to leave. The great fire of 1917 will further obliterate the town of his youth, and the remnants of the Turks will be forcibly deported at the end of this story, during the catastrophic events of 1923. For the moment the ancient colony of Spanish-speaking Hebrews are permitted to remain, only to disappear twenty years later, when the Nazis in their turn will have taken Salonika from the Greeks.

CHAPTER 38

Exiled in Cephalonia, Drosoula Remembers Leyla and Philothei

Well, as I’ve always said, you have your mother’s prettiness, God rest her soul, but do you want to know how to be beautiful, koritsimou? No, no, don’t pretend to modesty you don’t have. I’ve seen you preening yourself often enough. “Make the most of it” is what I say; make the most of it whilst you’re young and you’ve still got it. You can’t be pretty for ever, you know that? But you can always be beautiful. At least, that’s what Leyla Hanim said to me and Philothei.

You must excuse an old woman her memories, and who am I to talk about beauty after all, but we women have secrets and a duty to pass them on, don’t you think? I’m too far gone to be beautiful, I always was, unlike most, but I can tell you what Leyla Hanim said to Philothei and me.

Let me see, it was not long after Yusuf the Tall murdered his daughter and was taken away by the gendarmes, and Sadettin left for the mountains. Everyone was still talking about it. I was standing with Philothei by the pool with the ruins in it, and who should pass by but Rustem Bey on a camel, and a small caravan of donkeys. Just behind him on a pert little camel was a woman. She was very pretty—the woman that is, not the camel—and there was something about her that made the corners of your mouth lift when you saw her. You could tell she had a good heart. She had a veil of course, she came from a town, you see, but it was so thin that she may as well not have bothered. It was just a little bit of gauze. More to do with encouraging temptation than preventing it. Anyway, she had the kind of eyebrows that arch over in a very nice curve and just about meet in the middle. She had dark eyes that sparkled, and they were made up with kohl. People used kohl very heavily in those days, at least in those parts. God knows what was going on back then, here in Cephalonia; I expect you were all still in the caves. Apart from your father, of course; he was still at sea, learning to be a doctor from those books of his, no doubt. No, he
would have been a little boy. He’s the same age as me! How stupid I’m becoming! What was I talking about? Oh yes, Leyla Hanim. Her lips were very red. I remember she had lovely clothes, they were everyone’s envy, and she wore gold, lots of it, so that she rattled in a dull sort of way every time she moved. She had a chain of gold coins that she wore around her forehead, the kind that you used to borrow from your relatives when you got married.

Anyway, she spotted Philothei as she passed into the town for the first time, standing by the sunken temple, and she and Philothei smiled at each other. I remember it well, because it was as if those two recognised something in each other. The curse of beauty, or the blessing of it, I suppose, and she asked Rustem Bey if she could have her as a maid, which is why Rustem Bey sent a servant to call in on Charitos. Well, we all heard that Polyxeni kicked up a fuss, not least from Polyxeni herself, saying things like, “I’m not sending my little girl to be the servant of a rich man’s whore, and an infidel into the bargain,” but the fact is that you didn’t refuse a request from the aga back in those days. It wasn’t that Rustem Bey was a bad man. Most people respected him, and a lot of people liked him, but it’s just that you don’t refuse the man who owns all the land as far as you can walk in every direction, and who everyone depends on. Charitos said something like, “She isn’t a whore, she’s a mistress,” though I don’t suppose that Polyxeni saw any difference, and pointed out that the aga was offering a good sum for Philothei’s hire. It wasn’t as if he was trying to abduct Philothei or anything, and so Polyxeni had to give in. I’m sure that Polyxeni wasn’t averse to the money either, though she wouldn’t have said so, and anyway, as everyone knows, the servants of a rich man find ways of sneaking nice things out of the house, and that’s one of the attractions of being a servant. It’s like being a wife who’s happy to serve her husband a meal and stand behind him humbly whilst he’s eating it, because unbeknownst to him she’s eaten all the best bits in the kitchen when she was preparing it. Leyla Hanim once told me that there were two kinds of wives, the stupid ones, and the ones who ate the best bits in the kitchen. She used to say lots of things like that. She once said that if you were lazy, the only way not to get bored was to work hard at it.