Birds Without Wings (5 page)

If the stories are true, she was born beautiful. It was said that the imam declared her to be the most exquisite Christian child that the town had ever seen. They say that her eyes were dark as well water, so that those who leaned over the crib and looked into them had the sensation of falling and whirling. My father, for instance, I don’t mind telling you that he was a brute and a drunk, and there wasn’t any man ever born who was harder to love, but even he would tell us: “When I saw her eyes I was afraid of God for the first time in my life. It was as if they belonged to someone who had lived too long and seen too much. They were an angel’s eyes, and they made me think of death. I went out and drank some lemon raki to get over it, and then I went into the church to pray, and, I don’t know why, but I fell down on the church steps and couldn’t be raised. I lay there a long time, with the dogs licking my face, till I woke up again and went in and kissed the icon of the Virgin Mary Panagia Glykophilousa.” That is what my father said, but he was a complete sot, and my mother cursed the day she married him, and she used to go out to the taverns with a slipper in her hand and drive him home as if he were a sheep. My mother told me that he had indeed got drunk on that day, and passed out on the church steps, but that the priest—his name was Father Kristoforos—had delegated a couple of young men to carry him home. I think he would have got drunk whether he had seen the infant Philothei or not, since it needed no pretty child to provoke his drunkenness on any other day.

Philothei had very dark eyes. You couldn’t even see the pupils because the iris was so dark a brown as to be black, and consequently no one ever really knew what Philothei was feeling. Normally you glean more from someone’s eyes than you do from their speech, but I could read nothing at all from hers. If Philothei said something, then I just had to take her at her word, because it was impossible to look into that darkness and discover whether or not she was lying, whether or not she liked or disliked me at that moment, or whether or not she was sad. Once I pointed this out to her, I think we were about fifteen years old at the time—it was the second year
of the war against the Franks, and all the boys were at Gallipoli or in the labour battalions—and she ran inside to gaze into herself in the mirror. She came back out about half an hour later, and she was quite distressed, and she said, with a tone of wonder in her voice, “Drosoulaki, what you said is true. I can’t see myself in the eyes.” Sometimes it was difficult to commune with her because of this, because words are just the vapour of the heart.

She had lovely hair too. I don’t know if this is true, but it was said that she was born with a full head of hair, so black and thick and plentiful that it was like the fishing nets draped over the harbour wall in Argostoli harbour, or a flock of goats on a hill, or the tails of horses gathered and bound together. When it was first washed, so they say, her grandmother braided her hair and wound it three times about her head. This sort of thing does happen, I suppose.

I do remember her skin. It was so fine and delicate that even when she was six years old she could raise her hand against the light, and one could see the bones and veins. Mehmetçik and Karatavuk—I don’t suppose I told you about them—and Ibrahim as well, they used to say, “Philothei, Philothei, hold your hands up to the sun, we want to see, we want to see,” and she would put her hands right up to their faces so that the sun was blocked out, and they would feel sick, which is odd if you remember that in those days you could see all our ancestors’ bones in the little ossuary behind the church, because there was no land for burial, and we needed the land, and in any case that was the custom. I suppose it’s more horrible when you see the bones of someone who is still alive, because you don’t expect it. I often think about those bones in the ossuary, and what we did with them when we left Anatolia that we loved so much and will probably mourn for ever.

But it was more than a question of hair and skin and eyes, because what one saw was more than just her beauty. You see, my father, drunkard though he was, was right when he said that she reminded you of death. When you looked at Philothei, you were reminded of a terrible truth, which is that everything decays away and is lost. Beauty is precious, you see, and the more beautiful something is, the more precious it is; and the more precious something is, the more it hurts us that it will fade away; and the more we are hurt by beauty, the more we love the world; and the more we love it, the more we are saddened that it is like finely powdered salt that runs away through the fingers, or is puffed away by the wind, or is washed away by the rain. You see, I am ugly. I have always been ugly. If I had died
in my youth no one would have said, “Look how much poorer is the world,” but to be entranced by Philothei was to receive a lesson in fate.

I was, as I have said, born hideous, and before I married I would have been better off as a goat. There was a blessing in those days which went “May all your children be sons, and all your sheep be ewes,” and the curse was “May all your children be daughters, and all your sheep be rams.” My mother once told me that when I was born my father flew into a rage, and spat on her even as she lay exhausted on the divan, because she had inflicted another daughter upon him, who would one day have to be disposed of with a dowry.

I have always been without attractions and allure, and I still thank God that for a few years I had a husband who loved me before he was drowned. You see, I was lucky because I have had much affection and respect, and much disinterested love. Perhaps I was luckier than Philothei, whose perfection was a misfortune because she never had any peace.

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.