Birds Without Wings

by Louis de Bernières

  She heard me, because she said “Drosoulakimou” very softly, and she smiled a little bit as if she was remembering me, and when I cradled her head the blood came out of her mouth and ran down the sides of her chin. I remembered that Leyla Hanim had called me that, and Philothei had learned it from her.

  After a moment Gerasimos put his hand on my shoulder and said, “She’s dead,” and I realised that he was right.

  It was then that I saw that Ibrahim and his dog were at the top of the cliff, two little specks looking down at us, and my soul filled up. I felt as if I were possessed.

  In this rage of possession I shouted curses at Ibrahim, and now they come back to haunt me, and I wake up hearing them come out of my own mouth. I said, “May you never have a son to lay you in your grave, may you never have a daughter to mourn for you, may your eyes well up with blood, may your ears be full of howling, may your bowels fill with stones …”

  I don’t know where these curses came from, because I had never heard the like of them from anyone before. When I hear them in my memory, those Turkish words that don’t sound right in this place, with my own voice ringing them out from somewhere deep inside my chest, I put my hands over my ears, but nothing blocks them out, and I can’t forget them. I was full of the white rage, and this rage has never entirely left. Sometimes it has made me strong, but I would have had a better life without it.

  The only other time I have felt that rage was when I found my son Mandras on the point of violating a woman, and I told him that he was not my son. I said, “I disown you, I do not know you, you will not come back, never in my life do I want to see you, I have forgotten you, my curse goes with you. May you never know peace, may your heart burst in your chest, may you die alone.” I said to him, “Get out before I kill you.”

  That was a strong curse, but it was nothing compared to the one with which I cursed Ibrahim, even though Ibrahim was a friend of my childhood and was well loved. I have often wondered whether these curses that welled up from inside me are a sign that I am an evil woman. I sometimes wonder if, because of me, Ibrahim walked accursed for all the days of life. When I had finished cursing he just stood there unmoving, and he was still standing there when we were out at sea.

  Of course I didn’t forget my son Mandras. I loved him as a mother has to love a son, and you don’t forget your son even if you announce that you have done so in a curse. To lose a child is the hardest thing that a human has to bear. Mandras died in the sea, just like my husband Gerasimos, and now I am here in Cephalonia with no family at all. I was orphaned by my own decision in Turkey when I was faced by an impossible choice, then I was widowed by my husband, and then I was orphaned by my own child.

  Even so, I am not complaining. Don’t misunderstand me. I have had some happiness, and I am grateful for a lot of things. Home isn’t only the place you come from, after all.

  Now I will tell you how we got from Turkey to Cephalonia.

  CHAPTER 92

  I Am Ayse

  On the morning after the Christians departed there were very many of us who were left bewildered, and we were very sorry, and we began to be frightened about what would happen to them. They had so many things to carry and such a long way to walk, and as well as that, we knew that when Levon the Armenian and the other Armenians were taken away, they were killed only a day’s journey away, because Stamos the Birdman found them when he was going to Telmessos with a cage of finches, and out of modesty he went into the woods to do his business. He said that he found skeletons with holes and cuts in their heads, and there was clothing, and he recognised the headscarf of the wife of Levon the Armenian, and he said that when he looked at her bones he saw that her feet had been nailed to donkey shoes, and I know I’m no one to have an opinion, but when I heard of that I thought it was a good thing that Rustem Bey had brought back the daughters of Levon the Armenian even though at the time I didn’t care if every Armenian in the world got killed, because we hated them so much, but now when I think about it, it wasn’t our Armenians in this town who ever did anyone any harm, but the ones who attacked our army when we were fighting the Russians, and Levon was a good man and his wife was a good woman and his daughters were sweet-natured girls.

  So some people decided to follow the Christians and help them on their journey by carrying things, and some of the men took their guns and swords because they wanted to make sure that the escort was behaving, and they followed on after the Christians and caught them up quite soon. Some of the women went, but I couldn’t go because, since Abdulhamid Hodja my husband died, I had no man who was a relative to protect me, and for the same reason my daughters didn’t go either, but we wanted to go very much and it caused me great pain that I might never see Polyxeni again, and so I gave an embroidered scarf and a coin to Nermin the wife of Iskander the Potter so that she could give them to Polyxeni as another farewell gift, and I sent pitta bread stuffed with cheese and honey, and I asked Nermin to ask Polyxeni to come back whenever she could, and to tell Polyxeni that I would always keep the trunk she left in my care that has all the things from her dowry in it, and I will keep it until I die and after I die I will give it into the care of my eldest daughter, and like that it will be safe for all time. I am proud to say that even though the trunk is not locked I have never lifted the lid once, and neither will I ever lift the lid and that way my hands and my conscience will be clean and I will have no temptation even though I am poor. I wish I had had more money to buy things from her before she left.

  It turned out that the Christians were not being badly treated, because the escort were gendarmes and not tribesmen, but they were still weary and desperate, and so it was that our people helped them to carry their things. They were astonished to find that Leyla Hanim was with the Christians, and she had nothing except a bundle and her oud, and I think to this day that Rustem Bey does not know why she went. They also found that Polyxeni was weeping and crying out because her daughter Philothei had vanished and had not come with them.

  At Telmessos some Christians kissed the earth, and some Christians took a leaf or a flower or even an insect or a feather or a handful of the earth because they wanted something from their native land, and when the time came for the ship to leave the quay, there was much hugging and weeping, and promises were made, and the little boys who could swim swam out after the ship for a little way, and the women who had mirrors took them out of their sashes and they held them up to the sun so that the little flashes could sparkle on the ship until it was out of sight, and that way the sunlight of their native land followed the exiles even when they left it. And there were people who were saying, “A curse on all those who are responsible for this, we curse them and we curse them and we curse them,” but I never did find out who was responsible except that it was probably the Franks.

  And it was said that the ship took our people to Crete, which is a land in the west, and it was from that land that some Muslims came to replace them, but not as many as the number we lost. And these Cretan Muslims are rather like the Christians that we lost, so that we wonder why it was necessary to exchange them, because these Cretans dance and sing as our Christians used to do, except that they have a new dance called pentozali which it lifts the heart to watch. A few of these Cretans speak only Greek. At least all of our Christians knew how to speak Turk. Not that I am anyone to have an opinion of course, and one good thing is that my daughter Hasseki has found a good-looking husband among them who is a good Muslim and knows how to make locks and hammers and ploughs and all sorts of useful things made of metal.

  And when our people came home from seeing the Christians leave, two very strange things happened. One was that the bell of the church fell off the bell tower of St. Nicholas, and broke into two pieces on the paving stones, and the other thing is that for days afterwards all you heard at night was the crying of the cats. They drowned out the bulbuls and nightingales, crying and crying, lamenting and complaining, complaining and lamenting. They were on the roofs and in the alleyways,
they were on the walls and in the almond trees, in the courtyard of the mosque and in the cemetery of the Christians, and they were wandering about, distressed, crying that low moaning cry and some of them wailing, and it was a terrible sound and it was frightening, and I lay on my pallet listening to them, and I couldn’t sleep, and I understood why they were crying in the great sudden loneliness and strangeness of the town, and that is what I remember more than anything else, the crying of the cats.

  CHAPTER 93

  I Am Ibrahim

  They like to call me Ibrahim the Mad, even to my face, because they think I am beyond understanding, but there is a little part of me that never went mad, and this little part is like a tiny man who lives in the corner of my head, and he watches the rest of me being mad, and thinks about it and makes comments about it, and sometimes when I am very mad he becomes frightened and hides in my head or somewhere else in my body, and doesn’t come out until the danger has passed. This tiny man knows that I am not completely mad, and it is he who is able to watch over the goats and return them to their owners at the right season, and it is this tiny man who cares for my dog Kopek, and he knows how to play the kaval out among the tombs and he uses the music to calm the rest of me down so that the mad part of me sometimes gets a rest. He is very good on the kaval, and the naked man they call the Dog who lives out among the tombs and near the tekke of the saint likes to hear him play it and sometimes he comes out and sits with me when I play, and he doesn’t say anything because he can’t speak, and anyway his mouth and tongue were destroyed by a red-hot iron. The Dog writes things in the dust with the end of a stick, and then he rubs it all out again, and he points at the dust where the writing was, and laughs. The Dog is the only friend I have now, because I am mad, and even Karatavuk who was my friend from childhood doesn’t talk to me any more because when he speaks to me it is the mad part of me that answers, and not the little tiny man who is not mad and hides in a corner of my head, watching.

  When there were Christians here they used to tie the mad up in their church for forty days, and that would cure them, and after they left my family tied me up in there for forty days to see if it still worked, but there was no success.

  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 h
arm, 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.”