Birds Without Wings (67 page)

The British persuade the Ottoman government to take action against those officials and officers who have been implicated in war crimes, such as the death marches of Armenians and British prisoners of war, and the deportations of west-coast Greeks in 1914. This is a good opportunity to get rid of Enver Pasha’s old cronies from the Committee of Union and Progress, the Young Turks who are not quite so young any more, and many of whom have blood on their hands. Mustafa Kemal is not arrested, and the Italian ambassador offers to protect him, should the British decide
to exile him. In any case, he has never been implicated in any war crimes, and his military career has been nothing but distinguished. The Sultan checks the legal validity of the death sentences with the Sheikulislam, and the executions begin. Mustafa Kemal enters into full-time plotting with other nationalist officers; their plan is to get rid of the Allies in the entire Turkish heartland.

The nationalists contrive to obstruct the demobilisation and disarmament of the Ottoman army, and to retain sympathisers in high office. The gendarmerie mysteriously gets bigger as the army gets smaller. An officer named Kâzim Karabekir, another child of Destiny, calls in on Mustafa Kemal to sound him out about the idea of forming a national government in eastern Anatolia, in defiance, if necessary, of the government in Istanbul. “It’s an idea,” says Kemal. There are dozens of like-minded officers waiting for the right moment.

The Italians move in on western Anatolia, officially in order to put an end to brigandage, but really to get there before the Greeks. Ottoman Societies for the Defence of National Rights spring up like toadstools, and violence increases between rival ethnicities. Prince Abdürrahim sets off on a conciliation mission, and is welcomed by Muslims in Smyrna. In Antalya and Konya the cynical Italians, who also happen to be the only occupying force with any sense, turn out their own soldiers to greet him with full honours. Whilst the Prince is there, news comes in of the Greek landing at Smyrna. The royal attempts at peacemaking are boycotted everywhere by Christians, who do not want peace. In Pontus, on the south coast of the Black Sea, where the disappeared Armenians are being replaced by Greek refugees from communist Russia, the Greeks are demanding independence. The Muslims, many of them also refugees from Russia and the Caucasus, would rather die fighting than submit to Greeks and Armenians. Their bandit chiefs inaugurate a campaign of terror against the local Christians. The British make token efforts to restore order, but they lack the will to do it properly. They are beginning the long process of realising that to be the world’s police force and to have the largest empire in the history of the world is expensive, tiresome and unrewarding.

Mustafa Kemal is appointed by the Sultan to investigate Greek complaints and prevent the formation of soviets in the 9th Army. His powers are so great that the Sultan has effectively appointed him the military and civil commander of eastern Anatolia. Nothing could be better for Mustafa Kemal. The 9th Army is large, powerful, well equipped, a long way from
Istanbul and in exactly the right place. The Sultan presents him with a gold watch. Kemal is just about to go, when the Greeks land at Smyrna.

The Greeks have been given permission to do so by Presidents Wilson and Clemenceau, and Prime Minister Lloyd George. The Allied intention is to use one Ally, Greece, to frustrate another Ally, the Italians. Venizelos, the Greek Prime Minister, really wants to annex western Anatolia permanently, to accomplish what the Greeks have always referred to as “The Big Idea.” It almost amounts to the rebuilding of Byzantium. In the British government, Lloyd George, sanguine and ignorant, is the only one who thinks that the Greek landing is a good thing.

The landing goes disastrously wrong, and within a few days many Turks have been killed by Greek troops and rioting Greek civilians. After a few days Aristeides Stergiadis arrives and takes control. He is a tough and principled man with an extraordinary sense of fair play, so that local Greeks routinely accuse him of being pro-Turk, but even he cannot control the Bashi-Bazouks and renegade soldiers in the interior, nor repair the intercommunal damage done by the fiasco of the landing. Stergiadis offends the local bigwigs mainly by refusing to go to their dinner parties. He has to cope with an anomalous situation in which a British general in Istanbul is technically in command of the Greek army, even though he isn’t, in a place which is technically still under the sovereignty of the Sultan, but is actually under Greek rule.

The Allies inform the Ottoman government of the landing only the day before it happens, and Mustafa Kemal finds everyone in a state of outraged disbelief. An Italian occupation might have been acceptable, but a Greek one is intolerable. It puts steel into the hearts of Mustafa Kemal and everyone like him. The British hesitate before granting him a travel permit.

Before he goes, his ship is inspected for smuggled goods, and Mustafa Kemal says, “We are not taking contraband or weapons, but faith and determination.”

Back in Eskibahçe, a little strength and determination is rekindling in the inhabitants, along with the return of some of its menfolk, who are beginning to arrive from all directions, starving, ragged and bootless. Many of them are deserters, and others are from units that have somehow dissolved in the general chaos. Some of them say that they can’t stay long, they’ve got to find Mustafa Kemal. Karatavuk’s brother comes back, provoking wails of joy from their mother, Nermin, who immediately runs to tell Ayse and Polyxeni.

Ayse has been reduced to penury by the death of Abdulhamid Hodja.
She does not have his skill in cultivation, and, worse than this, she has very little hope. “I am waiting to die,” she says, “and I pray it might be soon.” She has been living off the charity of her friends, who also have nothing. Even Ayse, however, is affected by the arrival of the long lost, and casts around for something positive to do. She finds a pot of whitewash in the corner of Nilufer’s empty stable, and she has a good idea. She collects twenty large stones and paints them white.

One by one she takes them down to Abdulhamid’s grave, and lays them around it to make a border.

She has another idea. She goes to fetch the brass ornaments and the blue beads and the green ribbons. She rubs the verdigris off the brass with vinegar, and takes Abdulhamid’s spade from its hook on the wall.

She overturns a few spadefuls of earth, and buries Nilufer’s accoutrements in her husband’s grave. She stands over it for a few moments, leaning on the spade to catch her breath, feeling weak and dizzy. She reflects that by now Abdulhamid must be nothing other than ochre bones. When she has recovered she kneels down and whispers into the earth so that he can hear her clearly. “My lion,” she says. She thinks about how she is going to continue, because one has to be economical when addressing the deceased. “I expect that Nilufer is dead by now,” she says. “I’ve brought you her things, and now you can ride her in Heaven.”

Ayse puts her ear to the earth, and listens.

CHAPTER 76

Lieutenant Granitola’s Occupation (2)

Whilst the war between Greece and the rebel forces of Mustafa Kemal unrolled elsewhere, Lieutenant Granitola’s platoon of Italians settled into their occupation of Eskibahçe.

The Lieutenant was initially much vexed by the problem of how he was supposed to communicate with headquarters, which was at a great distance, at the end of a very bad road that was infested with bandits. It was not good to feel so completely cut off from the rest of the army, without the slightest idea of what was happening in the great world, without a telephone line, and no assurance of supplies.

Rustem Bey solved this problem by proposing that tradesmen and other citizens wishing to travel back and forth to Telmessos should guide and feed a section of the occupying soldiers, in return for their protection on the journey. Upon arrival, the soldiers would report to base, collect pay, orders and supplies, and then escort the traders and travellers back again. The problem with this system was that pack animals had been conscripted and killed at the same rate as human beings during the Great War, and there was an intractable shortage of camels and mules. There were not enough left from which to breed, and those which had been bred in the war’s aftermath were only just maturing to the age when they could be usefully employed. The only person in the town who still had a donkey was Ali the Snowbringer, and since it was at present impossible to go safely to the mountains to fetch ice, he and his donkey now found a new role which certainly saved his family from desperate straits. Similarly it was now possible for Mohammed the Leech Gatherer and Stamos the Birdman to resume their vocations, although there were few doctors left to purchase leeches, and few folk who could afford to splash out on anything as frivolous as a pet bird. Rustem Bey lent two old but serviceable horses to the trains, and often went on the journeys himself, since he liked to ride, and
enjoyed the adventures that were often entailed. In addition, although he was a modernising Turk, he still had ancient mores deeply ingrained in his psyche, and he felt morally obliged to protect those who were beneath him. There was perhaps also a part of him that realistically knew that his position of privilege could not endure unless he was seen very publicly to deserve it, and those such as Ali the Snowbringer certainly felt great relief if they heard that Rustem Bey was to be part of the escort.

For Rustem Bey the Italian occupation was probably the golden age of his life, because for the first time he had a friend in the town who assumed equality with him. Whereas Leyla Hanim had filled out more than one half of what was missing in his life, in Lieutenant Granitola he found a true comrade. Granitola was himself a snob, and it was natural and inevitable for him to befriend unselfconsciously the most important person he could find in the whole community.

Lieutenant Gofredo Granitola was a slim man of average height, but his habit of authority made him seem taller than he really was. He wore an exiguous military moustache, and on his left cheek he bore the neatly angled scar of a bayonet wound that gave him the romantic air of a gentleman pirate. He liked to be smart at all times, believing that this was good for the morale of his men, and had achieved some notoriety in the Austrian campaign for shaving punctiliously at dawn even under shellfire, when expecting an imminent assault. He had kept his boots polished even when the soles had detached themselves. He had been decorated for gallantry twice, and been presented to the King, but he had failed to be promoted on account of his sedulous cultivation of the art of offending military superiors that he considered to be socially otherwise. If not for this, he could by now have expected to have become a lieutenant colonel. He had, however, no intention of staying in the army after the death of his father and the entailment of the family estates, but envisaged for himself a career in politics. He did indeed join the Fascist Party in 1926, only to secede quietly from it in 1930, having scotched his prospects by being scornfully rude to Roberto Farinacci at a ball. Thereafter he made wine, travelled to stay with Rustem Bey in the new republic of Turkey, and had children with a variety of mistresses until his life was abbreviated by a misdirected Allied bomb

Initially, the friendship between Granitola and Rustem Bey came about because of the necessity of feeding the Italian soldiers, who for a while were obliged to live off bulghur wheat and olives, supplemented by the few fish that they could purchase from Gerasimos the Fisherman, husband
of Drosoula, and father of Mandras. Granitola mentioned the problem of meat to Rustem Bey one evening when they were sharing a waterpipe in the khan, and the latter proposed that the only solution was to go hunting. Granitola had already created a small flock of military chickens by giving the escorts money to buy them in the market at Telmessos. These chickens, each with a name and a rank, now lived by pecking about in the courtyard of the khan, which they quickly reduced to an inglorious dust bath.

Eggs were not quite enough to keep the men happy, however, and so it was that Rustem Bey and Granitola set out into the wilderness very early one morning armed with two scatterguns, and with Rustem Bey’s pet partridge dangling from his saddle in a wickerwork cage. Granitola had never experienced this method of hunting before, and he was very intrigued when Rustem Bey tied the bird to a bush in the middle of a relatively clear space, scattered some seed for it to browse on, scattered more seed at a safe distance from it, and then retired to a place of concealment. “Please don’t shoot the tame partridge,” Rustem Bey told him. “They are hard to replace, and I am quite fond of it.”

The method certainly worked, since one could often get two or three birds at once by waiting for them to bunch up. However, it was rare to get very many birds, and certainly not enough to feed a whole platoon, so Granitola had to introduce a rota system. This naturally led to the kind of griping so enjoyed by soldiers, since soldier B would complain of being given a pigeon when soldier A had been given a partridge the week before.