Birds Without Wings

by Louis de Bernières

  My lion, you have been fooled all these years, and in more ways than I would like to confess. I am ashamed of my deceptions, but I have made up for them by means of the very many pleasures that we have enjoyed together.

  My lion, I am longing to hear Greeks call me by my real name, to speak my own language, and to hear the sweet melody of it in my ears. I was disappointed when I arrived here and found that the Greeks did not speak Greek. Now they will have to learn it.

  My lion, if I had stayed here, I would have died with the name “Ithaca” on my lips. Now, however, in Ithaca when I die the name on my lips shall be yours. I shall say “Rustem, my lion,” and then I shall die. When you die, let the name on your lips be mine, and the face in the eyes of your mind be mine also.

  My lion, please do not come after me. I am going to find Ithaca, which has occupied my dreams for so many years, and which has been fastened to my heart like an invisible rope, and is now drawing me back, even against my will. May you also find your Ithaca, if you have one. If you do not have one, you should raise one up before you.

  I am leaving you with Pamuk, who is too old and idle to travel, and too used to blissfulness, and has come to love you more than she ever loved me. You must be good to her because she never tried to eat any of your pet partridges, despite your fears. Remember to feed her with cheese, and pieces of liver, and to comb her so that the fur does not mat, now that her teeth have all fallen out and she cannot remove the matting herself. When she dies, cause her to be buried decently under the orange tree in the courtyard, in the place that she likes, and do not cast her out to be eaten by dogs or birds. I am taking only necessities and my oud, and the string of gold coins to go around my forehead, which was the first present you ever gave me, and which is the thing in the world that I prize the most, and I am taking other gifts you made to me, so that I can remember you, and not so that I can use the wealth.

  My lion, farewell with a full heart, and with love and gratitude forever, and until we meet again in Heaven, this is your Ioanna who was Leyla, and who loves you under all names she has ever had, and regardless of names.

  She waited until the very early dawn of the day after the Christians’ departure, and then, having picked up Pamuk and, for a long moment, pressed her face into the fur of her neck for the last time, she slipped out before the servants were awake. With her oud and a small cloth bag over her shoulder, dressed in the least immodest of her mistresslike clothes, and with her thickest-soled slippers upon her feet, she set off in the wake of the refugees, secure in the knowledge that she could catch them up, but terrified in case she should fail to do so.

  When Rustem Bey finally returned from his hunting with a deer slung over the saddle of his horse, he was astounded to find the town half empty, and many of his servants gone. Those that remained were almost too terrified to explain what had become of Leyla Hanim. In the haremlik he found the letter. He sat down heavily on the divan, and stared at it as if he could make it speak by sufficiently tenacious scrutiny. Angrily he went out into the town to find somebody who could read it, but in any case there would only have been Daskalos Leonidas, and he had left. For some reason he did not set off in pursuit of the Christians, as if he knew in his core that Leyla had forbidden it.

  Rustem Bey kept the letter carefully, folded into the family Koran, and never had it translated. Its perpetual obscurity raised its status in his eyes until it became as sacred as the book within which it resided. Rustem Bey was a restrained and dignified gentleman, and it was a long time before he realised what the strange circular washings of the ink on the letter must have been.

  Leyla Hanim caught up with the Christians on the evening of the second day. She was filthy, hungry and exhausted, but in good spirits, and when she entered the encampment she made a special point of walking confidently and holding her head high. She had anticipated a hostile reception, and was not surprised when she received one. After their initial surprise, the Christians, and especially the women, soon began to mutter against her. “What’s she doing here? We don’t want Rustem Bey’s Circassian whore. Why should we walk with a slut like that?”

  Having received the representations of the respectable, Father Kristoforos approached her as she sat on the ground near the fire, removing the shoes from her blistered and aching feet. “Leyla Hanim, why are you here?” he demanded. “You have no place among us. What makes you think you can come to Greece? None of us here wants you with us.”

  Leyla Hanim did not even look up at him. “Eimai pio Ellinida apo olous sas,” she said tartly. “Genithika stin Ithaki kai esis den isaste para mia ageli apo bastardi Tourki.”

  Father Kristoforos’s Greek extended only to the snippets of the old ecclesiastical variety that he had learned by rote for the purposes of his ministry, and he was taken aback by this unexpected reply that he barely understood. He had spoken to her in his native Turkish, and now asked of those at the fire, “What did she say? What’s she saying?”

  Sitting near the flames, Daskalos Leonidas had been momentarily awakened from his mute dejection by hearing his own tongue spoken, and he stirred and looked up wearily at Father Kristoforos. “I’ll translate for you,” he said. “Leyla Hanim said, ‘I am more Greek than any of you. I was born in Ithaca, and you are nothing but a pack of mongrel Turks.’ ”

  “She said that?” asked Father Kristoforos incredulously. “Christ have mercy!”

  “From now on,” said Leyla Hanim, reverting to Turkish, “my name is Ioanna, and you will speak to me with respect.”

  CHAPTER 91

  Exiled in Cephalonia, Drosoula Remembers the Death of Philothei

  It hardly seems credible to me now, the way we were just gathered up and taken away. I am sure it couldn’t happen nowadays. Look at all the trouble it caused. Nowadays no one would say, “I think we’ll remove all these people from their homes and send them to another country.” In those days we didn’t question so much. If the gendarmes turned up and told you to leave, you just left. We were simple people then. We were docile and we had the habit of obedience to authority, so you see, we weren’t like Greeks at all. Some of the Turks used to refer to us as the Raya, which means Cattle.

  My husband wasn’t so simple though. He didn’t have the cattle mentality. It just so happened that he wasn’t out fishing when the gendarmes arrived. If he had been, then God knows I might have had to set out without him, because there wouldn’t have been any choice, and who knows where Mandras and I might have ended up? It shows that fate depends upon the smallest things.

  You know about my son of course. We called him Mandras because I had a dream in which my dead grandfather told me his name was to be Mandras. Everybody said, “Mandras? What kind of name is Mandras? Whoever heard of this name?” and I said, “I heard of it, it’s what my grandfather told me when I was eight months gone.” They said, “But he should be called after his father, or his grandfather, or somebody. At least his name should be the name of a saint. And everyone knows that pregnant women have strange desires.” There were lots of arguments, but I was very obstinate, and finally one day my husband took me aside and said, “Look, I am sick of all this dispute. Why don’t we baptise him by one name and just call him by another? Everyone has a nickname after all.”

  I resisted for a while, but in the end the common sense of my husband won me over, and so he was really baptised as Menas, after the saint. Naturally I called him Mandras all the time, and that’s what he became as far as most people were concerned. Mandras died a long time ago, at the end of the war with the Germans. It was his own fault. He came to a bad end. If a mother doesn’t have one sorrow, then she invariably has another. You know, they say a walnut tree brings death when first it fruits. Mandras was my first and only fruit, and I was like that walnut tree. He had a fiancée for a while, and with time this Pelagia has become like a daughter to me, thanks be to God. She made me like the almond tree, that blossoms in midwinter. We set up this taverna, and so that’s how we live.

  Anywa
y, Mandras was only a tiny boy at the time, and he was a very pretty boy, he didn’t take after me at all, but after his father, which was lucky for him. He began to look more ugly, like me, after he came back from the war.

  When the gendarmes arrived and told us we had only a few hours in which to prepare to leave, we were at first dumbfounded, and then there was a kind of panic. The first thing I did was run to Leyla Hanim, because I was her maidservant. She had a strange reaction, she seemed very excited, but I was too hurried to consider it. She gave me money for the journey. Then I rushed to my parents’ house, where my mother was trying to organise herself. My father was already drunk, and my mother was shaking him and slapping his face, and saying, “You good for nothing son of a horse, I am going to leave you behind, you sow’s backside.”

  Well, my husband Gerasimos arrived at that point and said to me, absolutely straight, “Come on, we’re leaving. Come back to the house and get ready, and get some food in a basket, and as many water bottles as we can carry, and some warm clothes, and then we’re going.”

  “What?” I said. “What do you mean? I know we’re leaving.”

  He looked at me, and he was very cool. He said, “We’re leaving in the boat.”

  I was aghast, and so was my mother. I said, “The boat? I’ve never been in the boat. What about my mother and father?”

  “You have other sisters. They can go with your mother and father. You and the boy are coming with me in the boat.”

  My mother and my husband were looking straight at each other with a kind of honesty that was very hard, like metal. My mother turned to me and said, “You should do as your husband says. We’ll be all right. We’ll manage.”

  “But, Ana,” I said, and my mother placed a finger on my lips. “Go with your husband,” she said. “Your place is with him. We will meet again if God wills.”

  “We are going to Cephalonia,” said my husband. “Can you remember that?”

  “Cephalonia?” said my mother.

  “Repeat it,” commanded my husband. “Repeat it until you remember it.”

  My mother stood there, saying, “Cephalonia, Cephalonia, Cephalonia.”

  “Have you remembered it?” demanded my husband.

  “Cephalonia,” repeated my mother, with her eyes full of tears, and her voice choking.

  “When you get to Greece, find your way to Cephalonia, ask for the family of Drapanitikos. If God wills, you will find us.”

  “Drapanitikos, Drapanitikos,” repeated my mother, “Drapanitikos.”

  My husband kissed her hand and touched it to his forehead and then to his heart, and then he embraced her. He embraced my sisters, and then took my father’s hand and kissed it, even though he was in a stupor and not far from being sick, because he’d been drinking to kill the toothache as usual, and Levon the Armenian had never after all paid to have the bad teeth pulled, because all the Armenians were taken away before the return of the drawtooth.

  I kissed my mother and my sisters, and to tell the truth I was too stunned to weep. I hurried after my husband, who had already left, and I said, “Why Cephalonia?” and he said, “Because it’s the only place in Greece I’ve ever heard of. My grandfather, who was shipwrecked and was washed ashore here, was from Cephalonia, and his name was Gerasimos Drapanitikos, and I was named after him. He met my grandmother and never went home. He said that Cephalonians are wanderers who are hardly ever buried in their native land, so he considered it natural that he should die here.”

  “Why aren’t you called Drapanitikos?”

  “Because I am not. It’s a second name, and no one has one round here anyway.”

  This conversation took place whilst we were almost running up the hill back to the house, and so it was not very complicated, on account of our breathlessness.

  “Where is Cephalonia?”

  “In the west. Somewhere. We’ll ask after it, and when we get there we will find the family of Drapanitikos. Then we won’t be nobodies in a land of strangers.”

  “What about my mother and my sisters?”

  “The boat isn’t big enough. We’d sink, and that would be the end of all of us.”

  “Why have we got to go in the boat? Why can’t we go with the others? We can go to Cephalonia later.”

  He stopped and looked at me very candidly, and he said, “For one thing, the boat is the only thing I’ve got. With that boat I can earn us a living wherever there’s a sea. For another thing, I don’t trust the gendarmes. Remember what happened to Levon and the other Armenians? They didn’t get a day out of here before they were dead. That’s what everyone said.”

  “Those were Kurds that took them away. They were tribesmen. They were wild men from the east. They weren’t even proper soldiers. Everyone knows that the Kurds hate the Armenians. These are gendarmes, and they don’t hate us.”

  “All the same,” said my husband. “Do you see horses and carts, do you see any provisions made for us? Any shelters loaded on mules and donkeys? If you ask me, we’ll be lucky to arrive anywhere without half of us dying.”

  “But my mother …” I said, “and my sisters.”

  He looked at me and replied, “I give you the choice. I don’t order you. You are my wife, but I don’t order you. I could order you, but I don’t. If you want you can go with your mother, and meet me in Cephalonia, when you find the family of Drapanitikos.”

  It was then that I made the most difficult decision of my life. I didn’t choose between one duty and another duty. I chose between one kind of love and another, and I never saw any of my family again, and I never found out what happened to them.

  It was when we were on the beach preparing the boat and putting food and water into it, that the most terrible thing happened. It overshadowed the whole voyage and has been with me all my life. I often dream about it, and I can’t get the images out of my mind even if I get up and take a big swig of raki in the middle of the night. I think it was worse than saying goodbye to my family, because I didn’t know then that I would never see them again.

  I expect that I told you about my childhood friend Philothei. She was betrothed to a goatherd called Ibrahim, who was also a childhood friend. Philothei was pretty enough to marry the Sultan, but she was happy to marry Ibrahim because they had always loved each other, it had been arranged since childhood, and anyway, a goatherd earns a good living because he takes payment for looking after other people’s goats. There were some people who hardly saw a coin from one year to the next. With him she would have been rich by comparison. The only disadvantage was that she would have had to change her religion, but in that place back then, it never amounted to much for a Christian woman to change to a Muslim if she married one. The beliefs were all mixed up anyway, and sometimes Muslims came to Christian services and stood at the back with their arms folded. I don’t know why they always folded their arms. Anyway, Philothei would have carried on going to visit the icon whether she’d turned Muslim or not. It wasn’t like now, when everyone has to be one thing or another.

  When the gendarmes came to take away the Christians, I suppose that Philothei ran off to find Ibrahim, because they weren’t married yet and she would have had to leave without marrying him. I don’t know what they could have said to each other. You can only guess. The trouble was that Ibrahim wasn’t normal after he came back from the wars, and the families were waiting for him to get normal again. If he hadn’t been mad maybe he wouldn’t have pushed Philothei off the cliff.

  I saw them up there on high. They were running back and forth in a very curious manner, and they were shouting and gesticulating at each other, but I couldn’t make out the words, and I saw them do things like put their hands to their heads and over their eyes, and grab at each other’s sleeves. You can only imagine the turmoil they were in, especially with him not being normal yet. It looked to me almost as if they were fighting, and Ibrahim’s huge mastiff dog was jumping up and down at them and barking, and making everything worse. Then I saw Ibrahim lunge forward and Phil
othei sort of spun round and fell.

  Philothei hit an outcrop of rock a few yards down the cliff, and bounced as if she were made of wood. Then she fell straight down and smashed into the slope of scree at the bottom of the cliff, and bounced off that, and ended up a few paces away on the shingle.

  Gerasimos and I were paralysed for a moment, and just looked at each other dumbly. Then I ran over to Philothei and turned her over. I felt like a machine because all the feelings hadn’t arrived yet.

  I find it hard to tell you about the state she was in. When I think about Philothei I realise that there isn’t much to describe. I mean, she wasn’t intelligent or funny or particularly interesting. She didn’t have any knowledge or education. She didn’t really have any high spirits. She only had two ambitions. One was to be beautiful, and the other was to marry Ibrahim. No doubt she would have lost the beauty after a few children, and she wouldn’t have minded by then, because motherhood makes you too busy for vanities. In lots of ways Philothei was nobody at all and she only lived in a very little world, and she was destined to be ordinary. I expect that if she had lived to old age, you could have written her biography in half a page, and I expect that if she had never been born, it would have made no difference to the world at all.

  But the fact is that everyone who knew her loved her. She was very gentle and sweet-natured, and she had no complications and no malice, and on top of that she was exceedingly pretty, and she loved pretty things. You could tell from her face and her expressions that she was sweet of soul.

  So when I saw her at the bottom of the cliff, I could hardly bear the horror, because the stones had scraped deep cuts into her beauty. The cuts were more like tears than cuts. They were V-shaped, and full of little pieces of stone. Her clothes had been torn open. Her face was scraped to the bone in places, and the tip of her nose had gone. I tried to wipe the blood from her eyes, but they kept filling up again. I was saying, “Philothei, Philothei, Philothei,” and I could feel my voice filling up with sobs and anger.