Birds Without Wings

by Louis de Bernières

  “The Cretans in my house. Are they good people? I would hate to think of my house full of bad ones.”

  “The Cretans are mostly good. They have strange dress and customs, and they eat snails, but they do a dance called pentozali which is very good to watch. It makes us like them. Some of our young men are starting to do it. It’s good that they have some high spirits, because it reminds us of all the saints’ days that the Christians used to have.”

  During the process of this long conversation, things were happening down in the town. The Cretan householder who had been disturbed by Mehmetçik’s appearance late the night before had hardly been able to sleep for fear and worry, and in the morning he naturally told his friends. One of these was a Turkish speaker, and he in turn went and told the two gendarmes who were to be found, as always, playing backgammon in the meydan on fine days, or in the coffeehouse on inclement ones.

  What mobilised the gendarmes and the townspeople was the prospect of a large reward, because it was very obvious from the description of the man with the red shirt and the bandoliers that he was none other than the notorious Red Wolf, bandit and outlaw. Since Mehmetçik’s family had kept very quiet about his new identity, there were very few remaining in that town who had the smallest idea that Mehmetçik and Red Wolf were one and the same. Otherwise the reaction of the townspeople might have been a little different. As the rumour spread that Red Wolf had been seen in the vicinity, men got out their muskets, rifles and fowling-pieces, and began to gather in the meydan, where they were mustered into some kind of order by the two gendarmes, neither of whom would normally have been tempted from their backgammon by anything less than the prospect of a large bounty. Among the men who retrieved their weapons, hastily serviced them and rummaged for ammunition, was Iskander the Potter, who had cherished his rifle and his pistol for very many years, ever since the extraordinary Abdul Chrysostomos of Smyrna had finally produced weapons that conformed to the potter’s requirements. It was true that these beautiful guns had made Iskander feel more of a man, and he took great pleasure in hefting their weight in his hands, and aiming them at nothing in particular with one eye asquint. With the rifle Iskander had shot one or two deer, and a goose. In truth he was a little short-sighted, which unsuited him to great feats of marksmanship. Now, with the loaded pistol in his sash, and the rifle over his shoulder, he milled about with the other men in the meydan, awaiting the most exacting and exciting hunt of them all, whilst the women fussed and fretted about them, begging them to be careful. The men’s thoughts were busy whirling in their heads, however, as they privately rehearsed possible arguments about how the bounty should be shared in the event of success. Very soon they would fan out and spread up the mountainside, where, amid the rocks and ancient tombs, were to be found the most obvious hiding places for a fugitive. None of them honestly believed that they would find the Red Wolf, but in any case the true point was to have an interesting and exciting day out.

  Oblivious to these events, the two old friends relaxed in each other’s company, and continued their conversation. “I saw Ibrahim, this morning,” said Mehmetçik. “He looks terrible, and he wouldn’t even talk to me.”

  “He’s gone mad,” said Karatavuk. “No one really knows why. It happened almost as soon as the Christians left.”

  “He kept saying, ‘I killed the little bird.’ ”

  “I know. That’s what he says all the time, ‘It was my fault. I killed the little bird.’ ”

  “Wasn’t ‘the little bird’ his name for Philothei? He didn’t kill her, did he?”

  “Not as far as I know, but I don’t know what happened to her. I suppose she left with the others.” Karatavuk paused. “You know the oddest thing?”

  “What?”

  “Leyla Hanim, you know, Rustem Bey’s whore. She left with the Christians.”

  “Really? Why would she do that?”

  “It’s a complete mystery to everyone. She must have been madder than Ibrahim.”

  Appropriately to the talk of madness, the two friends were quite suddenly interrupted by the Dog, who sprang out before them, clearly in a highly agitated state, giving them both a very considerable surprise, and causing them to exclaim “Ey!” and leap to their feet.

  The Dog was now an old man. His eremitic and arduous life among the tombs, all but naked, and subsisting on the charity of the desperately poor, had greatly reduced him. He was skeletally thin, his meagre hair fell in long white wisps upon his shoulders and face, and his black eyes had shrunk back into his wizened and sunburned face. It is true that people had long become reconciled to his grotesque and horrifying smile, and people pitied him that he must once have had his lips pinned back, and been made to bite down on the red-hot iron rod that had been forced into his mouth. The state of his gums, tongue and teeth had long ceased to shock, but he still carried with him a daemonic air that continued to frighten people, and it was common for mothers to threaten their mischievous children with him, as if he were a bogeyman. This did not, however, prevent the same people from believing that he must be some kind of saint, since the popular imagination inexplicably but routinely associates sainthood with physical deprivation, suffering and the many varieties of masochism.

  Now he appeared, almost dancing with excitement, before the two men, grunting incoherently, and gesticulating, with a strange curving motion of his arm, as if pointing over the boulder behind which Mehmetçik and Karatavuk were concealed. It took a moment for the two to gather their wits, and another for them to realise that they were being told to look over the boulder. When they did so, they both swore.

  “Orospu çocuşu!” exclaimed Mehmetçik. “They’re coming after me!” Down below could plainly be seen the men of the town, spread out across the hillside, picking their way through the maquis, some armed with swords and knives, some with cudgels, and a great many with rifles and pistols. He turned pale, and ducked down behind the boulder. “Shit!” he said. “Shit, shit, shit.” He turned to the Dog, and grasped his hand, bringing it to his mouth and kissing it on the back. He pressed it to his forehead and then to his heart. “Thank you, my friend, thank you,” said Mehmetçik. Astonished and amazed by this gesture of gratitude and respect, the Dog stood motionless for a moment, examining the back of the hand that had been thus treated. Then he ran off, oblivious to the thorns and stones that cut into him, uttering strange and piercing cries of joy.

  “Give me your shirt,” demanded Karatavuk.

  “What?”

  “Your shirt, idiot, give me your shirt.”

  “Why? Look, I’ve got to run.”

  “Give me your shirt. Swap shirts and I’ll lead them astray. When you see them coming after me, go in the opposite direction. For God’s sake get to Kaş, and take yourself to Crete. Come on, your shirt.”

  “What if they shoot you? I can’t let you die for me.”

  “Everyone dies,” declared Karatavuk curtly. “For your mother’s sake give me your shirt. Come on, come on!” He made an impatient beckoning motion with his fingers, adding, “I got through eight years of war and nobody managed to shoot me.”

  Mehmetçik hesitated a moment, and then gave in. His friend commanded so imperiously and emphatically that he was ceded no choice. With both hands he seized the waistline of his shirt and hauled it upwards. There was a small crash at his feet, and he stood holding his red shirt, looking down at the fragments of the small terracotta birdwhistle that he had inadvertently jerked out of its place in his sash. “Shit,” he said.

  “Never mind, take this,” said Karatavuk, handing him his sober and tattered working shirt.

  They stood looking at each for a moment, caught between the reluctance to part and the necessity of flight. “Go to Megiste, get yourself to Crete,” said Karatavuk, and he stepped forward, embraced Mehmetçik and kissed him on both cheeks.

  “Until paradise, if not before,” said Mehmetçik, smiling sadly.

  “Stay here until you are sure they are following me, and then run,” said K
aratavuk. Before he went, he took his own birdwhistle out of his sash, and gave it to Mehmetçik, saying, “I know it sings like a blackbird, but take it anyway, and remember me. I’ll make myself another one.” He turned abruptly and began to scramble away up the rocky path.

  Mehmetçik watched him go, and noticed how he took pains to make himself conspicuous. Sure enough, a shout went up down below, and the line of hunters began to wheel about in pursuit of Karatavuk. Shots crackled and snapped, and bullets began to ricochet off the rocks. “Son of a whore,” muttered Mehmetçik to himself, ashamed of leaving his friend to take the bullets. He hesitated, torn between the alternatives, and then made off as fast as he could up a goat track which intersected with another that would lead him away. “Son of a whore, son of a whore,” he repeated to himself, as if it were an incantation against adversity.

  Karatavuk lay low behind the tomb of the saint, his heart thudding. He had decided on a gamble, and now he was committed to it. He put his hand under the tomb and felt for the hole at the bottom where the olive oil trickled out, having passed over the bones of the saint. There were some drips still clinging to the stone. He touched oil to his lips and his forehead, and placed some on his tongue. He asked help from the saint and from Mary, the mother of Jesus the Nazarene, and hugged his knees to his chest. He rocked back and forth, attempting to conquer his fear by a stupendous effort of will, and, when at last he reckoned from the voices that his pursuers were only a few paces away, he stood up, raised his arms high in the air, and turned to face them. Thinking for the first time that he was going to have some explaining to do, in his embarrassment, he smiled sheepishly.

  Iskander would never understand why he did it. It is true that he was short-sighted, and therefore did not recognise his son, but it is also true that he could see well enough to know that the fugitive had raised his arms in surrender. There was something about being keyed up with excitement, about being ready to shoot at a real man for the first time in the many years since his military service, about the chance to gain some notoriety and kudos as the one who had brought down the Red Wolf, about the chance to use in earnest the beautiful gun that had been made specially for him by Abdul Chrysostomos of Smyrna.

  Iskander raised the rifle to his shoulder, aimed it at the slightly blurred figure standing not twenty paces in front of him, and pulled the trigger. As soon as he felt the bruise of the recoil against his shoulder, as soon as he heard the snap of the shot, as soon as he saw the cloud of cordite blossom from the barrel, he knew that he had dishonoured himself and made an irretrievable mistake.

  In this way Iskander joined the ranks of the very many in those days who did wanton things for which they were never able subsequently to forgive themselves.

  It was for this reason that Karatavuk entirely lost the use of one arm, and at the same time his destiny as a potter.

  When the time came, however, for Mustafa Kemal to abolish the writing of Turkish in Arabic letters, Karatavuk swiftly learned the new Roman letters and, albeit endowed with an imaginative sense of orthography, became the town’s letter-writer. When it became clear that no one was coming back, he moved his growing family into the former house of Daskalos Leonidas, wrote at the same desk by means of the same stinking wick of the same oil lamp, used up Leonidas’s stock of writing paper, and kept a singing finch in the same wire cage outside the front door. Sometimes he even wondered if he were growing into the same irritable and cantankerous character.

  Karatavuk prospered modestly, even though there were some people who adamantly refused to use his services because he was obliged to write with the left hand. By the time that the inevitable blindness overtook him in old age, there was very much less need of his services in any case, and he had become a legend in his own right. He was a hero of the great victory at Çanakkale, he had lost the use of his right arm in a most romantic and honourable way, he had been the friend of the Red Wolf, and he was a scholar who had read many books, and intervened to help many illiterate people in their troubles. He was therefore able to enjoy the pleasure of whiling away the darkness of his declining years in the meydan, seated upright on a stone bench under the plane trees, with his left hand propped on a walking stick, a cloth cap set squarely on his head, receiving the respectful and affectionate greetings of passers-by, and telling stories about the old days to children who clung to his legs, or sat themselves before him in a semicircle in the dust.

  EPILOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  What the New Imam Did

  The new imam was one of those hardliners stereotyped by the religious colleges in Konya, and it was not long after the departure of the Christians that he was righteously inspired to fire up a few followers to perform the following sacred duties:

  Firstly, they broke down the locked doors of the abandoned houses. They did this because they felt it unnecessary to find the neighbours with the keys, and because God rewards the superfluously zealous. Inside the houses they located the stores of wine jars, carried them out into the streets, and emptied them into the alleyways. Then they smashed the jars because of their having been contaminated by wine, and then they went to the vineyards and tore out and burned the vines, even those whose grapes were cultivated solely for the manufacture of raisins.

  Secondly, they entered the Church of St. Nicholas, the little church at the bottom of the town with the owl on the cross-beam, and the little white chapel at the top of the hill behind the town and above the ancient tombs. In these churches they assiduously scraped out the eyes of all the figures depicted in fresco, and broke any religious ornaments that were left.

  Thirdly, they took the few Christian bones that remained in the ossuary behind the little church with the owl, and threw them over the cliff.

  Fourthly, they defaced all figurative work on the tombs left by the Lycians from ancient times.

  Fifthly, with very long poles, they rounded up a small group of pigs that had perforce been abandoned by their old owner. These pigs they drove to the top of the cliff above the little chapel, and, in front of Ibrahim, who was up there with his goats and was still in a state of horror over what had befallen Philothei, they herded them squealing and shrieking over the same cliff where they had disposed of the bones of the Christians.

  Out of all these actions the only one that met with the overt approval of the general population was this last, as the taboo against pig flesh is inexplicably the deepest ingrained in the average Muslim. There were many, however, who would never forget that mouth-watering aroma of roasting pork that used to drift across the town, arousing simultaneous feelings of longing and revulsion. The other sacred acts, most especially the disposal of the wine, were greeted with various degrees of disquiet or horror, but the people were cowed by the mad light of moral certainty in the eyes of those who acted on God’s commands as laid down in holy books that no one was able to read. For that town these events began the interminably tedious years of respectability, observance and decorum that made everyone think that they had lived twice as long as they really had, so that even the Cretan exiles forgot how to sing their sustas and dance the pentozali. Only the substantial number of Alevis, feeling like a minority for the first time in their history, now that they were the only minority left, stubbornly continued in their old habits and escaped the deadening longueurs of a dis-enjoyed life.

  In Greece the abandoned mosques were almost all demolished, and the graveyards of Muslims desecrated. No doubt these deeds were performed with a choleric and righteous zeal essentially identical to that of the holy vandals of Eskibahçe.

  CHAPTER 2

  I Am Karatavuk

  About one year after the Christians were taken away and the Muslim Cretans brought to take their place, I was looking for a small knife that I needed to cut some cord, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. Then I remembered that when I was in the army I used to have one in my knapsack, and it occurred to me that it might still be in there.

  I found my knapsack and put my hand in it, and rummaged ab
out, but didn’t find anything, and so I turned it upside down just in case anything would fall out. What fell out on to the floor wasn’t a knife but a little leather purse, all old and dry.

  I picked it up and looked inside, and I beheld the little handful of soil that my friend Mehmetçik had given me to take away to war, when we were about fourteen years old. I remembered him saying that when I came back from the war I should replace it in the same spot from where it had been taken, and I remembered saying to him that the soil of this place has a special and particular aroma.

  I put the purse to my nose and smelled it, but now it smelled of the leather of the purse. I went to the house of Abdulhamid Hodja where his widow Ayse still lived, and I found the place by the wall where the soil had come from. I had a moment of hesitation because it occurred to me that I might have to go to war again, but then I tipped it back on to the ground in order to honour Mehmetçik’s suggestion. I looked at the little heap of soil for a moment, and then I rubbed it back into the earth with my feet, until it was properly mixed in again. Then I knelt down and smelled the earth—and no doubt anyone who saw me might have thought I was making a salat—and it smelled once more like the proper soil of this place.

  I had some sad thoughts about my friend Mehmetçik, and I thought it was almost certain that he had not been able to take any of the soil of this place with him. I wished I knew where he was so that I could send it to him.

  Later on I was talking to the father of the family that had moved into Mehmetçik’s house, and he was one of the few Cretans who could speak Turkish. I told him about this business of the soil, and his face lit up, and he went into his house and came back out with a little purse, and he loosened the drawstring and showed me inside, and he said, “Soil of Crete.”

  I said to him, “Sooner or later it starts to smell of leather,” and he just shrugged and said, “Everything changes.”