Birds Without Wings (8 page)

One day Mustafa Kemal is at Salonika railway station with his poetic friend Ömer. There is more war fever, and troops are being entrained. There is a party of dervishes in their long pointed hats and voluminous robes, overblowing on their shawms and neys, crashing their cymbals and thrashing their drums, salivating, screaming, rolling their eyes. All around them the ordinary folk are falling into the contagious hysteria, crying out, swooning, in an ebullition of fanaticism.

Mustafa Kemal sees this and feels a bitter shame and embarrassment on behalf of his people. The blood rises to his cheeks, and anger to his throat. He divines clearly the advanced symptoms of spiritual and philosophical immaturity, he smells a repellent backwardness, a radical irrationality and credulity which is only just beneath the surface, and he is increasingly convinced that it is Islam that is holding his people back, locking them behind the door that separates the medieval from the modern age. He will never understand why it is that so many of them actually like to be there, locked behind that door, enwombed within their tiny horizon, perpetually consoled and reassured by their tendentious but unchanging certainties.

CHAPTER 10

How Karatavuk and Mehmetçik Came to Be Called Karatavuk and Mehmetçik

“I bet that my father is stronger than yours,” said Mehmetçik, who at that time was known to everyone by his real name, which was Nicos.

“Oh do you?” replied Karatavuk, whose real name was Abdul. “My father is stronger than your father and all your uncles put together. In fact, when there was an earthquake he stood in the doorway of the house and held it up all by himself, for two whole days.”

Mehmetçik frowned sceptically. “What earthquake?”

“Before we were born, stupid.”

“Don’t call me stupid, stupid.”

“Why not, stupid, if you are stupid?”

“My sisters are stupid,” confided Mehmetçik, “all they do is whisper together, and then when anyone else comes into the haremlik they pretend to be busy.”

“Everyone says that your sister Philothei is very beautiful,” said Karatavuk, “but I haven’t noticed myself.”

“She’s the most beautiful in the world,” replied his friend, “and when she’s grown up she’s going to marry the Sultan Padishah himself, and she’s going to send us money and sweets from Constantinopoli.”

“Ibrahim won’t like that,” giggled Karatavuk. It was a shared joke among everybody that little Ibrahim was besotted with Philothei even though they were less than ten years old. Philothei ignored him, as though he were a stray dog hoping for a pat on the head, but she had become used to his silent and respectful adoration, feeling uncomfortable without it, should she pass from one house to another and fail to glimpse him trailing in the distance, as often as not pretending to be poking in corners with a stick, affecting to have no interest in her whatsoever.

“Let’s go and look at the Dog,” suggested Mehmetçik. “If we take him a present he might smile.”

Karatavuk shuddered.

“Come on,” persisted Mehmetçik, “let’s.”

The children were no different from everyone else in their continued and insatiable fascination for the Dog. If the Dog had taken up residence in the Lycian tombs with the intention of living as an anchorite, then those intentions had definitely been confounded. Apart from anything else, the tombs were considered to be haunted, and even the bravest regarded them with superstitious dread. It was true that the Lycian inscriptions were said to speak of the whereabouts of hidden treasure, but only half of the alphabet was Greek, and the other letters had fallen out of use so long ago that not even Abdulhamid Hodja had any idea what their sounds were. Those who pored over the epitaphs and the other messages to posterity that were engraved on the stones came away frustrated, having been unable to concentrate in any case, on account of the fear of ghosts.

The Dog, therefore, was either wildly brave or quite insane to live in the tombs, and this added to his intrinsic and extraordinary mystique.

It had not taken long for him to become an integral part of the town’s conception of itself, because the rules of hospitality were inflexibly observed. Visitors were either the responsibility of the aga, who was obliged to entertain them in his konak, or else of the entire community, in which case the guest stayed in the khan, and the men would arrive with small dishes of food, sitting afterwards, smoking their çubuks in exemplary and companionable silence, until it was time to sleep. It was bad manners indeed for a guest to be left alone even for a moment, and their resolute and stalwart hosts soon developed a mental technique for enduring hours of abject boredom with perfect equanimity.

In the case of the Dog, however, it was unclear as to whether this was a guest or a new resident, or even whether he could be considered to be a bona fide human being. Besides, nobody, however bold their disposition or generous their nature, very much wanted to sit about with a creature of such ghastly aspect, amid the evening chill of the tombs and the emerging stars, and so it was that they arrived with their small but honourable offerings of kadinbudu köfte, green beans in olive oil and iç pilàv, and then departed, having greeted him with a quiet “Hoş geldiniz.” Upon their return they told their wide-eyed wives and children about the grotesque and horrifying smile of the stranger, and from that time on the Dog went barely a day without a steady trickle of small gifts from those who arrived to observe him quite shamelessly, as if he were an entertainment provided for them by fate. When the aga heard about his arrival he sent a servant up
with the customary sabre and loaded pistol, so that the stranger would have the capacity for self-defence. The weapons rusted in a corner of a tomb, until finally they were stolen by one of the unwashed at the time of the olive harvest.

Karatavuk and Mehmetçik scrambled through the rocks, their steps releasing the scents of oregano and thyme, and the sun causing the stones to radiate with a borrowed but mysteriously magnified heat. They passed the first of the sarcophagal tombs, whose sides were carved with serried naked warriors brandishing swords and shields, and then stopped to catch their breath and look around. The Dog had got into the habit of moving from tomb to tomb, living in one, and then another, as if he were spoiled for choice and could not make up his mind. The boys spotted him further up the hillside, and then spied on him with disgusted delight as he scraped a hole in the earth with a stone, defecated into it painfully and then covered it once again with soil. “He does it like a cat,” whispered Karatavuk, his voice full of wonder.

“He’s supposed to be a dog,” said Mehmetçik.

“Let’s go and see my father working,” suggested Karatavuk, feeling guilty about having watched the Dog at a moment that should have been absolutely private. In any case, it was always wonderful to see his father shaping pots and getting splattered by mud. “I’ll race you down the hill,” said Mehmetçik, and set off at a run before his friend had had a chance to agree. “Cheat! Cheat!” shouted Karatavuk, leaping down the hillside in Mehmetçik’s wake, pulling threads out of the legs of his baggy shalwar as they caught on the thorns of the maquis.

Iskander the Potter looked up with pleasure as the two little boys thudded breathlessly to a halt in the shadow of the wicker canopy that served him as shelter for his work. Karatavuk was his favourite child, and it always gave him a thrill of pride and pleasure when his beloved son took his hand, kissed it, touched it to his forehead, and called him “Baba.” The child never minded getting wet clay on his lips, and strained upward when his father bent down to kiss him on the top of his head, calling him “My lion.” Karatavuk was glad of his father, and basked in such signs of affection. As far as he was concerned, his father’s only shortcoming, albeit a grievous one, was that he did not possess a gun, although he did have a yataghan with a heavy curved blade and engraved handle, inlaid with silver, and he did have a few equally beautiful daggers that he wore through his sash. Iskander the Potter felt the lack of a gun as keenly as his son, and was in fact producing a surplus of pots so that he could sell them in Telmessos, in order to raise the money for the smith.

Iskander was tall and wiry, with massive hands whose fingers had been worn flat and smooth by so much shaping of clay. He was burned dark by the sun, even though he worked in the shade, and the roots of his hair were just beginning to turn grey. His moustache drooped at the corners of his mouth, and when he laughed his teeth, like those of almost everyone else, were revealed to be browned and corroded by so much toping of sweetened apple tea. His legs were lean and muscular from so much kicking of the stone wheel, and for the same reason he moved with a subtle and graceful rhythm that reminded women of making love. He was fond of inventing riddles and improbable proverbs, and possessed the kind of impatient wit that showed a certain lack of resignation.

Iskander had three sets of clothes: one for working at the wheel, when he would become caked in clay, one for the tea house, and one for high days. In general he was pleased to be a potter, and therefore such a necessary man, but he was wearied by life’s lack of variety. Like everyone else, he also worked his own small plot of land, in addition to another one rented from the aga in return for a proportion of his crop, and was irritated with himself because whenever he was at his pots he wished he was at his fields, and whenever he was at his fields he wished he was at his wheel.

When the two boys arrived, Iskander was making a crock large enough to hold a fair measure of water, and his hands were moving in concert up and down the surface of it, leaving behind the even spiral created by his fingers. “Which is more useful,” he asked them, “the sun or the moon?”

“The moon,” said Mehmetçik.

“How did you know?” asked Iskander, disappointed.

Mehmetçik rubbed his nose with his hand and replied, “I guessed.”

“Well, you’re right, but you don’t know why.” He paused for effect, and said, “The moon is more important because you need the light more at night than you do during the day when it’s light.” He smiled, gratified by his pleasantry, and scratched his forehead, passing his finger under his turban, and leaving yet another dirty streak upon it. The boys looked at each other in bemusement, trying to figure the sense of the potter’s answer, and Iskander asked them, “Why is a potter second only to God?”

The boys shook their heads in unison, and Iskander explained, “Because God created everything out of earth, air, fire and water, and these are the very same things that a potter uses to make his vessels. When a potter makes something, he acts in the image of God.”

“Are you more important than the Sultan Padishah, then?” asked Mehmetçik, astonished.

“Not on earth,” replied Iskander, “but perhaps in paradise.” He got up
from his seat and stretched, saying, “I’ve made something for you, something special.” He reached into his sash and brought out two small terracotta objects, presenting one to each of the boys, one for Abdul his son, and the other for Nicos.

What he gave them appeared at first sight to be a small amphora, except that he had moulded the neck so that it resembled the head of a bird, with a beak and two small holes for eyes. Out of sheer whimsy, he had given each one a small turban. Instead of a handle he had made a hollow tail whose extremity was skilfully pierced so that it became a whistle, and he had placed two simple loops of clay upon the shoulders of the pot on either side of the neck, so that they resembled wings. “I’ve made you some musical birds,” he said. “Give them back to me, and I’ll show you. You half fill them with water, like this, and then you blow down the whistle.” Iskander tried some experimental puffs, emptied a little water out of each, and then blew again, placing one at each corner of his mouth. To the amazement and delight of the little boys, a torrent of birdsong cascaded out of the terracotta birds, liquid, warbling and utterly enchanting. They jumped up and down with pleasure, and, forgetting their manners, reached out their hands, impatient to receive them. “This one,” said Iskander, “sounds exactly like a karatavuk.” He gave it to his son, asking, “You know the karatavuk? The one which is completely black and has the yellow beak? It goes vuk vuk vuk in the oleander to warn you away, and then it praises God at the top of the tree in the evening.” Iskander gave the other to Nicos, saying, “and this one sounds like a mehmetçik, which some people call kizilgerdan and some call the fire-nightingale.”

“It’s the little one with the red breast,” said Nicos, excited, but at the same time a little resentful that Abdul’s produced the song of a larger bird than his.

The boys blew hard into their clay birds, and Iskander laughed. “Gently, gently, you’re blowing out the water.”

In the months that elapsed afterwards the two boys became maestros at imitating the songs of the karatavuk and mehmetçik, using the clay birds to call each other across the valleys and rocks. From time to time they became carried away, running about the hibiscus shrubs and wild pomegranates with the whistles in their mouths, flapping their arms, and wondering whether or not it might be possible to fly if only they flapped their arms enough. “Man is a bird without wings,” Iskander told them, “and a bird is a man without sorrows.”