Birds Without Wings (83 page)

I am the little tiny man. I am the one who contemplates the gibberish
and confusion, but I am taking this moment of clarity to report that when I was a little boy it was Iskander the Potter who told me that to fall in love was the worst misfortune that could ever come upon a man. He was a great maker of sayings, and I still don’t sit in the shade of the red pines because he once made a proverb which was “He who sits in the shade of the red pines gets shat upon by doves.” Iskander told me about the misfortune of falling in love because even when I was a little boy he could see that I was in love with Philothei, and she was a Christian and I was not, and probably we would not be able to marry, and he said that the man who is in love should never marry the one he loves, he should instead learn to love the one he marries. I never understood what he was talking about, but now I know that the churning and churning and aching and aching was what he meant, because it makes all life impossible. But even so, I was going to marry her and there was no problem because our families were agreed and we were betrothed by means of a gold coin, and she also loved me with the same aching and churning, and then the terrible accident happened and there was no more Philothei and no more marriage, and then Drosoula laid her curse upon me, and that was when the madness came down and there was only me in the corner who didn’t go mad.

And now I have times when the pictures come before my eyes and I see them before me among the stones and in the shadows of the tombs, and these pictures are not just of Philothei, but of all the things that happened in the long years of war. They are things from the campaign against the Greeks.

Sometimes I look back with wonder and think it strange that after the war with the Franks was lost, I should have begged and stolen my way for hundreds of miles from Aleppo to join Mustafa Kemal in Ankara. I could have come home and married, but there was something in me that would not accept defeat, and so when I heard that the Greeks had invaded at Smyrna, and I heard that Mustafa Kemal was gathering an army against them, that was when I set off, and I passed not far from this town, and I didn’t come back to it even though it would have been easy and no one would have thought badly of me, and I could easily have joined a band of chettas and fought against the Greeks like that, but I was a proper soldier and I didn’t want to be a bandit. By the time I got to Ankara I was in no condition to fight anyway, and maybe part of me was already mad, but not a very big part, and this would have been because of all the fighting and suffering I had already done, but it wasn’t long before I was well, and I was at every battle that we fought for the three years. In Cilicia our soldiers
were driving out the French and their Armenian legionaries, and in Armenia General Karabekir defeated the Armenians altogether, but I was not there. I was facing the Greeks, and I was at both the battles of the Inönü. I remember how we beat the Greeks and still had to retreat, and how bitter that was, and then I remember how finally we broke the Greek army at Sakarya, and they had no second line to fall back on, and finally we chased them across the countryside until all the soldiers got into ships and left, and we entered Smyrna and then immediately went north to confront the British.

There is something I have always wanted to say, because I have a certain guilt, and this guilt is as bad and gives me almost the same churning and aching as being in love, and the same aching and churning that I have because of the accident to Philothei, but I have an excuse.

The excuse is that when we were advancing towards the sea and driving the Greek army before us, we found that they were destroying everything and leaving behind them nothing but a smoking desert, and from the survivors who had not managed to flee to the Italian sector we heard terrible stories about what the Greeks did to our people. There was town after town, village after village, laid waste and devastated, everything looted and stolen, the farmland destroyed. I saw so many sights.

There would be children crucified on doors, gravestones smeared with shit, mosques that had been made into latrines, mosques full of the corpses of people who had been pushed in and had a grenade thrown among them, people burned in their houses, men who had been hung up by their feet and had piles of straw ignited beneath them, little boys buggered and bayoneted, women who had been stripped naked and tied to the ground and had fires lighted on their chests.

I learned that there is no end to the number of things that can be forced up inside a woman. You can kill them by running in a red-hot iron. You can impale them upright on pointed rods that are set into the ground. We found one whose arm was cut off and put inside so that it looked as if a hand was waving at you from between her legs, and she had a breast cut off and put into her mouth. Then there was a woman who was dead in her house, and her husband had managed to hide, and he said that she had been told that she would be spared if she were baptised as a Christian, and so in her fear she agreed to undergo it, and when the ceremony was over they took her from the church to her house and raped her and flayed the skin from her face and killed her.

I don’t know how much of this was done by the Greek soldiers, and
how much by the Greek chettas, and how much by the Christians of the villages who fled in the wake of the army, but I do know that by the time we reached Smyrna there was nothing that we wouldn’t have done for the sheer sweetness of revenge, because there was no limit to our rage.

All of that is my excuse. We had orders from Mustafa Kemal himself that we had to behave well, on pain of death, and in the big public places we did behave, but no one could stop us going about the little alleyways, and sealing them off with sentries, and going into the houses in the Greek quarter and the Armenian quarter, and it wasn’t possible for our officers to be with all of us at once. There was a corporal who was mainly interested in rape and he took four of us from house to house and he would knock on the door, and when it was answered he would smile politely and say, “We mean no harm, we only want to fuck the women,” and then we would have to kill the men who attempted to resist, and I would have to help strip the women and hold them down, and I would have to pretend to rape them when my turn came. I was no good at it, I couldn’t manage it, but I had to pretend, and I would kneel down and lean forward before exposing myself, so that no one would see that I was having to pretend, and I don’t even know if it made any difference to the women that I was pretending, because they cried and wailed just the same, whoever was on top of them. Once I said to the corporal, “I can’t fuck this woman, she’s bleeding,” and he said, “That makes it slip in and out more nicely.” Once there was an old Greek man that I had bayoneted, and the bayonet was still in his guts and he was holding on to the muzzle of the rifle to prevent me from moving the bayonet, and we looked at each other and because he had a broken nose he reminded me of my father, and he said, “Filthy Turk, you are nothing but an animal.”

I was cold and said, “We are doing nothing to you that you have not been doing to us,” and he said, “And we have done nothing to you that you have not been doing to us.”

Then I pulled out the bayonet suddenly, and he staggered forward a couple of paces and fell to his knees, clutching his stomach, and it looked as if he were about to pray, and before he fell on to his face he looked up at me and said, “As for me, I never harmed anyone in my life.”

It was when we were marching north to face the British, just after the city burned, that the shame suddenly descended on me. My face filled up with blood and my ears started to burn, and the misery came into my heart like a heated knife, and this is why I didn’t marry Philothei the moment I came home after the war, and delayed it, and it was because she was a
woman, and after my experience I couldn’t perceive her in the same way as when I was pure.

I am Ibrahim the Mad, who used to be called Ibrahim the Goatherd, and I have an excuse, and there is a little tiny man who is not mad, who hides in one corner of my head.

CHAPTER 94

Drosoula Remembers the Voyage into Exile

Gerasimos and I were lucky in one way. There was an El Saleeb wind that did not happen very often. It used to blow for maybe two or three days in the late summer, and on this occasion it wasn’t too violent. We arrived in the port of Rhodes much quicker than I expected.

I had wanted to bury the body of my friend there, the one I told you about. I don’t know now why we didn’t bury her on the beach where she fell. Maybe we were anxious to get away before we were discovered. Maybe I was too upset to part with her straight away. I said to Gerasimos, “Help me get her into the boat,” and that’s what we did, without even arguing about it. It was only after a few hours that we started thinking about what to do with her.

I didn’t want to drop the body into the sea because it might float about and be eaten by fishes, but Gerasimos said that if we arrived in port with a dead body in the boat, we would surely get arrested on suspicion of murder. That is why we had to decide to put the body into the sea after all. I took the crucifix from around my neck and placed it round hers, and we crossed ourselves and tried to think of prayers, and then we tipped her gently over the side. She floated for a while, but then the weight of the water in her clothes made the body sink, thank God. Her beautiful black hair floated behind her in the water as she sank, and I thought, “What use is being beautiful now?” and an emptiness came over me that has never been filled. Saying farewell to Philothei and watching her slowly sinking out of sight in the blue water was like saying goodbye to Anatolia and to the life that I would have had there, and these farewells always leave you empty. I wonder where Philothei washed up. My clothes had her bloodstains on them until I was able to obtain new ones.

I was very sick, both with grief and because of the sea, but my little boy Mandras wasn’t too bad. Sometimes I got very cold even though the
weather wasn’t too severe. I was sunburned as well. I hated having to go over the side, if you know what I mean, even when Gerasimos was averting his gaze. The worst thing was when we were caught out at sea at night. Believe me, I know what terror is, and I know what it is to be caught up by the whims of God.

I learned things about my husband. He had never sailed across open water before. A sensible fisherman stays close to the rocks around the coast, where all the fish are. A sensible fisherman always keeps land in sight. What I learned about my husband was that he had fantastic courage and fantastic wisdom. His courage was not the foolish kind of a young and silly man. It was the courage of a man who looks danger in the face, and forces himself not to flinch. He had the calmness of a condemned man who is reconciled. My love for him increased because of those voyages, and it was a love that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. I am pleased that I experienced that kind of love. My husband sailed successfully even though he was ignorant. He never sailed if there was the slightest sign of a storm and heavy seas, because he had all our lives to consider. He made a prayer to the Panagia, promising that if we arrived safely in Cephalonia, he would silverplate an icon in her honour, and this is what he eventually did, once he had earned enough money to do it. At some point the Virgin stopped watching over him, though, because a few years after we arrived he was drowned in a sudden squall between here and Zante. After that I lost my respect for the Panagia, God help me. In my opinion Gerasimos should have learned to swim, but all the sailors and fishermen say that you shouldn’t, because it’s better to drown quickly than to struggle for hours in a state of desperation. In my opinion he should have learned to swim, and then he could have swum ashore, like that English sailor from the submarine that sank during the war.

I remember everything about those travels, which lasted for many months. I discovered that there are two kinds of people: those who are thoughtless, and those who have hearts. The thoughtless ones call you a filthy Turk, and spit at you, and tell you to go to the devil, and say “Piss off back to Turkey,” and the heartful ones give you coins and bread, and offer you work, and make a fuss of your little boy, and offer you clothes they have finished with, because they pity your rags.

We stayed in Rhodes for about a week, because there were people there who spoke Turkish, and could tell us what to do next. In those days the Italians were in charge, just as they had been for a while back home, and just as they were here in the first years of the war. I feel familiar with Italians.
God knows, they don’t ever manage to stay long, but they aren’t too bad, unlike some I could mention. Anyway, we harboured at a little place called Mandraki, which had two nice little statues of a fawn and a deer on top of a column at each side of the harbour. I loved those statues. I had never seen a complete statue before, because at home all ours were very old, and they were all broken and lying about. We had to sleep in the boat under the sailcloth, because some people were unkind to those who slept in doorways. I got used to it. I felt an affinity to the port of Mandraki because it was like “little Mandras” and when my son was a small boy I often called him Mandraki from that time on.