Birds Without Wings (39 page)

The Humiliation of Daskalos Leonidas

Allow me to introduce myself, although you won’t have heard of me unless you have approached Eskibahçe from the lower end, where the road emerges from the pine forest that has all the Muslim graves in it, and where you would have found on your left the ruins of a pump house with constantly running water. It was modest enough, but it served to water both men and horses when they arrived, and was a very welcome addition to the amenities of the town, especially in high summer. What could be better than to enter a shady, cool and dignified little building of neoclassical design in order to drink water and wash your face after a long journey? Above the door you can still read, in Greek script, “Constructed for the Benefit of All, by Georgio P. Theodorou, 1919.”

That’s me. I am Georgio P. Theodorou, at your service, ladies and gentlemen, and I wasn’t even a citizen of that town, but I did belong to one of the societies in Smyrna who engaged in little works of philanthropy aimed at improving the lives of our people in the more obscure places. I was a merchant, you see; you name it, I obtained it and sold it on at a profit. Smyrna was the ideal place for a port, halfway to Africa, halfway to Europe, and, apart from that, it was a delightful city altogether, before it was burned down, a real cosmopolis. I built that little pump house in Eskibahçe with funds I earned from supplying the Ottoman authorities with a few essential items during the Great War, and my connection with that town was that Leonidas the teacher lived there.

I can say, with some truth, that I did know Daskalos Leonidas quite well, and was one of the few people that liked him. Most people thought he was a pain in the proctol aperture, as a medical friend of mine used to say. He was the son of another friend, a merchant like me, and so I watched Leonidas grow up. You could say that I was like an uncle to him. It was me who listened to him when he started to get big ideas as a teenager. Even
then he was scrawny and dry-voiced, and if he laughed or smiled it gave you a sense of present discomfort and imminent unpleasantness. Nonetheless, he was very intelligent, and what made me sympathise with him was that he always suffered in his soul. I felt sorry for him in the same way as one feels sorry for an aged athlete or an overladen donkey, or a dedicated artist who is never quite good enough to sell any paintings.

I remember one night when I was at his father’s house, and Leonidas was about twenty years old. We were at dinner when he mentioned quite casually that he had joined the local Philiki Etairia, knowing perfectly well that his father would throw a fit. He always was courageous, you can say that for him, and was always prepared to stand up to his father. In this respect he was quite out of the ordinary, because in those days everyone knew what was what, and you didn’t contradict your father. If he’d been my son I would have thrashed him I should think, but as he was someone else’s I was able to admire his independence of spirit.

“What?” shouted his father, practically expelling a mouthful of meatballs. “You’ve joined the Philiki Etairia? Are you stupid or something? Do you want to get us arrested? Do you want your mother and me to be thrown in prison?” He glared at his son and gestured around at the walls, richly decorated as they were, with the carved furniture, the heavy carpets, and the silver candlesticks and samovar. “Do you want us to lose everything?”

Leonidas paled under his father’s rage, but said simply, “It’s for Greece.”

Perhaps I should explain that the Philiki Etairia were secret societies formed to bring about the reunification of Greece, because there were many who said that Thrace, the Black Sea coast, the west coast of Turkey, and, of course, Constantinople, were historically Greek, and mainly populated by Greeks, and ought to be Greek again. It was all about reconstructing Byzantium and turning Haghia Sophia back into a cathedral, and bringing about “Greater Greece,” and having a King Constantine back on the throne, and the whole caboodle was known as “The Big Idea.” For all I know there may be those who call it so still.

“Those idiots with their Big Idea!” bawled his father. “They have no idea! Can Greece win a war against the Turks? Do you know how many of them there are? You’re crazy! You want to be ruled from Athens? Have you ever been to Athens? It’s a shitty little village, that’s what! A shitty little provincial village with some ruins and no theatre worth going to, and the people with no education and no culture, and the houses with all the
paint peeled off, and they can’t even speak Greek properly! Is that what you want? You’re a fool.”

Leonidas tried to defend himself: “The new Greece would be ruled from Constantinople, Father, just as the old Greece was.”

“We are already ruled from Constantinople,” replied his father.

“By Turks.”

“Well, why should we care, precisely? Here in Smyrna we have the most pleasant and delightful city in the world. We are all prosperous. We don’t have to give a damn about what happens in the capital. We Greeks occupy all the most important and powerful positions. We virtually make our own laws. We are in paradise, and you and your friends want to mess it up with your stupid Big Idea, for God’s sake! It’s nostalgia, pure and simple! Do you want us all to go to the wall for the sake of nostalgia?”

“We are governed by Turks,” replied Leonidas, with some dignity. “They are inferior to us in every way, and it cannot be natural. They breed like rabbits, and soon there’ll be no room for all of us to live.”

“We are all Ottomans now. Times have changed. Anyway, look at all my servants. What are they? They are all Turks. Look at Georgio’s servants. They are all Turks. Who digs the roads and carries away the night-soil? Turks. Who slaves in the fields to grow the produce that we sell on? Turks. Don’t tell me we are governed by Turks, when the evidence to the contrary is right in front of your eyes. What would we do without them? How can a son of mine be so stupid? That’s what I want to know! And you want to destroy everything we are!”

“Greece was great once,” replied Leonidas, his voice rising. “Some of us have more ambition for Greece! Greece was the light of the world! At one time you couldn’t be called civilised if you didn’t speak Greek. Why do you think the Turks call us Romans? Because eventually even the Romans spoke Greek! We are the greatest race in the world, and look what we’ve come down to, Father. Our time must come again. All it needs is our determination, and perhaps a new Alexander.”

“Alexander?” sneered his father. “Spreading our culture and civilisation all over the world? Well, forgive me my heterodoxy, but he did it by spreading slaughter and destruction from Macedonia to India. How many weeping widows and raped virgins went and thanked him for his culture, do you suppose? Don’t you know what inevitably arrives in the wake of glorious military conquest? Famine and disease, famine and disease.”

“It was worth it,” replied Leonidas. “The naturally superior must rise to the top by any means, because their superiority legitimates the means.”

“I’ll tell you something, my son,” said his father, jabbing in his direction with a fork. “I’d have more respect for Alexander and you and your friends if you were bright enough to understand that it’s money and enterprise and brains that make the world turn round. All these military campaigns, and revolutions, and conspiracies, and talk about racial this and racial that … What do they bring? Bloodshed and disaster. If you want to be any use in the world, put money in your pocket.”

Leonidas looked at his father pityingly, and the latter repeated, “Put money in your pocket.”

“Money won’t restore Greece,” said Leonidas.

“Idiot! It’s the only thing that will. You should be like Georgio here! Make a lot of money and spend it on useful little works of philanthropy. That way you’ll live usefully and die respected. It’s simple.”

“I’m talking about dignity, the national soul. I am not talking about being fat and complacent.”

“Fat and complacent! Fat and complacent! Your head is full of dogfart! All the money I spent on your education, and you learned nothing! You’re no son of mine. Your mother must have been with someone else.”

Leonidas’s mother scowled at her husband, but maintained her composure. She was quite used to this particular rhetorical flourish, which was not to a standard that matched the general quality of his intellect. All of their sons and daughters had been accused at one time or another of not being children of his, and she used to remark drily that if she had had as many lovers as he sometimes supposed, she would have had an eventful and exhausting life indeed.

I mention this conversation, which was typical of many, because it reflects a general tendency at the time. We Asia Minor Greeks were caught between the hot-headed idealists and nationalists who wanted to turn the world upside down in the name of a beautiful vision of Byzantium, and the sensible fellows like me and Leonidas’s father, who wanted a nice comfortable life trading in commodities and getting whatever we wanted because we were clever and rich enough to get it. I do remember that in those days everyone thought they were entitled to an empire, and perhaps Leonidas and his friends were just a symptom of the times, like Mussolini. Personally, I liked the idea of a new Greater Greece, in theory, but I couldn’t see the point of risking anything for it, and I couldn’t stop thinking of the mainlanders as at worst a bunch of crazy foreigners, or at best like embarrassing cousins with too many halfwits in the family. I wasn’t in any kind of mood to die for them, and no one was more surprised than me when
they decided to come over and die for us. I can’t say I was very surprised, however, when the fiasco concluded with all of us losing everything, and it was we who died for them.

I also mention that conversation because it shows why Leonidas ended up as a teacher in an insignificant little town, rather than as a merchant like the rest of us. He defied his father firmly, and went to Eskibahçe to try and educate the Greeks back into being Greeks. He wanted to knock the Turkishness out of them. He wanted them to speak Greek instead of Turkish, and learn about the classical past. He wanted to fire them up about the War of Independence, and the struggles in Crete. He wanted to tell them about heroic women who hurled their children over precipices rather than yield them to the Turks. He wanted them to understand the church services, instead of listening to all that rolling ecclesiastical liturgy in dumb and uncomprehending awe.

It was hard to like Leonidas, but I’ll say one thing for him: he might have been a romantic, but he really did manage to get the Christians to send their children to his little school. He lived off practically nothing, endured ingratitude and ridicule, and spent his nights writing fiery tracts that got stuck up crooked on walls, and which no one could be bothered to read. I read them of course, because he always sent me copies, much to my consternation. I shudder to think how much oil and wakefulness he wasted. As I know from poring over my accounts late at night, it leaves you feeling disorientated and unhealthy. What I would like to add is that, just as we sensible types feared all along, the romantic enthusiasms of people like Leonidas ended up with peaceable fellows like me drowning in harbours whilst their cities burned.

In that little town Leonidas suffered much humiliation, and to be honest, I would guess it was mostly his own fault. He had that sense of personal superiority that automatically puts people’s backs up, and which no merchant would dare to express publicly because he would lose half his customers. Just imagine what would have happened if I’d told my Jewish or Armenian clients what I really thought of them! Or the Turkish officials! Commercial catastrophe, that’s what. Give me nice polite hypocrisy any time, which is something all of us could profitably learn from the English, I’d say.

Anyway, there came a time when I had to go to Eskibahçe because I had heard that there was a very good potter there who worked hard and made excellent things. I had seen the little clay whistles that he made in the shape of various birds, which you half filled with water, and then they warbled like a bird when you blew into them. Such toys were very common of
course, but his were definitely a cut above the rest because of the quality of the design and decoration, and because they always sounded like the bird they represented, which was by no means usual with other people’s. I wanted to visit this Iskander the Potter because it occurred to me that I could probably make four hundred per cent profit by selling his wares to the Italians, whilst at the same time doubling the profits that he took for himself. The man concerned turned out to be an amiable, grubby-turbaned fellow with a disconcerting habit of speaking in proverbs that he seemed to have invented himself, but we struck a good deal, and there was something for everyone, which is what it’s all about when it comes down to it. He had a blind old man walking up and down in his great tank of clay, picking out the stones between his toes, an arrangement that struck me as peculiarly inspired, since it was the ideal job for a blind old man, and no doubt the exercise kept him robust in his senescence.

Because I knew that Leonidas was in that town, I sent a message to say that I would come and stay with him, but that he wasn’t to go to any trouble, and a week later I turned up. I sent my bodyguards and servants to stay in the khan, which was very clean and comfortable, and I went to stay in Leonidas’s house, which very much wasn’t, and I saw that indeed he had conscientiously honoured my request, and not gone to any trouble at all.

I must say, though, that I took a fancy to that town the moment I saw it. What a lovely place! I can quite see why it was called Paleoperiboli in ancient times. I arrived in the early evening when the swallows had come down for the flies and the tortoises had clattered out for their daily peripato. From the minaret of the mosque the muezzin was calling the azan at the top of his lungs, and the resound of it was echoing with half a second’s delay from the hillside behind. Like many Christians I always found the azan both irritating and exciting.

You approach the town through a lovely shady pine wood that, here and there, shelters the lopsided whitewashed tombs of the Muslims, some of them freshly sparkling and others so dilapidated, grey and subsiding as to have become part of the natural scree of the forest floor. A perfect spot to rest, I would say, at any rate somewhat superior to being cremated in your own house or shredded by crabs in the mud at the bottom of a harbour. Amid the sand and rock, thick with pine needles, grew little shrubs of holly, and in the clearings I saw groups of euphorbia and indigo wild delphinium. In one place there were deep red hibiscus, and chickens roosting in the trees. The smell of figs was intoxicating, and I leaned over from my horse and picked one that was scarlet and slightly overripe, and tasted of coconut. At the ingress to the town there were two dogs, forgive me for
mentioning it, hopelessly knotted together after the sexual act, going round in circles and being taunted by other dogs who wanted to get at the bitch. I felt that was a good metaphor for something, but I couldn’t think what. There was also a small house, outside which a Muslim woman was sitting in the shade of a vine, rolling thin unleavened bread on a lapboard with a slim rolling pin, the very image of domestic contentment. From her I bought a salty glass of ayran, because I prefer it to the sweet kind, drank it whilst I observed the unfortunate dogs, and felt infinitely refreshed. Opposite this house, a little trickle of water came out of the hillside and ran across the road, which is what inspired me to build a pump house there, with a trough and a drinking fountain. As I was dusty and thirsty from travel, I was surprised that no one had thought of it before. A man who does well in this world has to put something back in, I say, and, let’s face it, it never does a man any commercial harm to generate some goodwill with the occasional act of generosity.