Birds Without Wings

by Louis de Bernières

  Soon after, he told me that he had put the soil into a pot where he was growing basil with seed that he had brought from home, so that the soil could make a true Cretan plant. It came up very strongly, and from that plant he took the seeds, and he took the seeds from the new plants that he grew, and he gave seeds away to other people, and in this way all of us here now have Cretan basil on our window sills, to flavour our food and keep away the flies.

  I never did find the knife.

  CHAPTER 3

  Pamuk

  One day in early summer, Rustem Bey was sitting out in his courtyard, smoking, when one of his servants came hurrying out, calling “Master, master!” Rustem Bey turned and the servant said, “The cat Pamuk is very sick.”

  It was true. The cat was lying on its side in the haremlik, its paws twitching, with saliva coming from its mouth, and a look of blank terror in its eyes. Its breathing was hoarse and irregular. Rustem Bey knelt down and said, “Oh, poor little Pamuk.” He put his hand on the cat’s head and felt the velvet of the ears and the bones of the skull underneath. “She is very old,” he said. “She is just bones and fluff.”

  “She had great spirit,” said the servant, adding, “What will you do, master?”

  “I think we should kill her,” said Rustem Bey. “I think this is her last suffering, and we should put an end to it.”

  The servant was disconcerted. He was fond of the cat and was fearful that Rustem Bey would tell him to do the deed. “Master,” he said, “please don’t ask me. Please ask one of the others.”

  “I wouldn’t let anyone else do it,” said Rustem Bey.

  The servant was very considerably relieved. “How should we do it?”

  “We could drown her, break her neck, cut off her head, strangle her, or shoot her,” replied Rustem Bey, but in a gentle tone of voice that belied the honest brutality of the words.

  “It would be a shame to get blood on the beautiful white fur,” said the servant.

  “I’m going to take her outside,” said Rustem Bey. “Bring me a thick cloth of some sort.”

  Out in the courtyard he wrapped the cat in the cloth so that she was well bound up. He sat in a chair with it against his chest, and the top of her head beneath his chin. He could smell her sweet dusty aroma.

  Rocking back and forth in his unhappiness, with his eyes closed, he held the ancient cat across his chest, and hugged her. His right forearm was across her upper flank, and he was hugging just a little too tightly. He hoped that the animal was too sick to know what was going on, and under his breath he muttered, “Bismillah allah akbar, bismillah allah akbar, bismillah allah akbar,” the words helping him focus his mind elsewhere than upon this present sorrow.

  He knew that Pamuk had stopped breathing when her head fell, and the small pink tongue emerged and lolled to one side. He continued to hug the cat tightly, and sat for a very long time.

  Finally he mastered himself and went back indoors with Pamuk still wrapped in the cloth. “She’s dead,” he said to the servant, who had been hovering at a discreet distance, just inside the door of the house.

  “What shall we do?” the latter asked. “Do you want me to take her and leave her up in the rocks?”

  “No. Fetch me a spade. It was always agreed that Pamuk would be buried here in the courtyard in the place where she liked to lie, under the orange tree. She had many happy hours of idleness.”

  “Don’t you want me to do it, master? With your permission, it would please me very much to do it.”

  “No. I will bury her myself.”

  Afterwards, Rustem Bey looked down at the small heap of earth, and remembered when he had first encountered the young Pamuk, staring and hissing angrily from a large wicker birdcage on top of Leyla’s heap of luggage back in Galata all those years ago. The cat had one blue eye and one yellow eye, and its coat was entirely white. He had said, “What’s this?” and Leyla had said, “It’s a cat.” At that time he had not liked cats, and had replied stiffly, “I reckoned on no cat.”

  “There was a lot I hadn’t reckoned on,” thought Rustem Bey, reflecting on the irony that the bond with the cat had outlasted that with its mistress, except that there was a somewhat mystical sense in which no profound bond ever comes to an end.

  Because he did not wish any of his servants to see him upset, Rustem Bey went and found the letter from Leyla Hanim that he had never read, and put it in the pocket of his jacket. He went through the town, up past the fine houses where the Armenians had once lived. He paused at the place where he had begun to build a mosque in fulfilment of his promise. It was now overgrown with weeds and thorns, and an almond tree was growing up from the middle of it. It might as well have been another ruin left by the ancient Greeks. He realised that he ought to feel ashamed of never having completed it, that he should do so now that there were men to build it, and that it was a disgrace in the eyes of the townspeople, but the thought of doing so merely filled him with an immense weariness of spirit. He shrugged and said to himself, “After all, God has no shortage of mosques.”

  He left, and picked his way through the thorns of the maquis on the hillside. He passed the Lycian tombs where the Dog lived, and the tomb of the saint. He saw Ibrahim the Mad and his dog Kopek, and their flock of goats. He stopped a minute to listen to Ibrahim’s strangely beautiful but disconnected playing on the kaval. Finally he took a goat path up to where the land ends.

  It was when he was up there, turning Leyla’s letter over in his hands as its corners fluttered in the sea breeze, that it finally occurred to him that the round, irregular stains on the paper must have been tears.

  Rustem Bey sat on a rock at the clifftop until it grew dark, looking out across the sea, feeling as if he had lived too long.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Epilogue of Iskander the Potter

  You may recall my observation that the people who remained in this place have often asked themselves why it was that Ibrahim went mad. I said that I was the only one who knows, and that I have always been committed to silence, because he begged me to respect his grief, or, as he also put it, to take pity upon his guilt. Now that he is mad, and the sun has long since dried the rain that washed away the blood upon the rocks, and there is almost no one left who remembers her, I have indeed decided that no one would be betrayed if finally the truth of it were known. It is the story of a curse, and I have an inkling of how Ibrahim feels, because once I shot my own son, and have cursed myself every day of my life. At least Karatavuk lives, however, and at least he has forgiven me, and has a wife who has borne him sons to plough his field and daughters to hoe it. It is worse by far for Ibrahim.

  The fact is that Philothei, sweet-natured, Christian, vain and beautiful, was killed by Ibrahim, and it was this that drove him mad. I am no great pasha who understands the great world, I have no education apart from the recitation of the first sura of the Holy Book, and I will probably never know all the causes of things, but to me it seems that Ibrahim was not truly to blame, even though he believed himself to be so.

  I say this not because her death was an accident, but because there would have been no accident if it were not for the great world. It was the great world that went to war with us and attempted to divide us up, and then it was the Greeks who invaded us after the war with the great world, when we were weak and they thought it would be easy to beat us. We won that war, and the Greeks lost it, but it was because of that war that the pashas of the great world decided to take away the Muslims from the Greek land, and deliver them to us, and to take away the Christians from this land and deliver them to the Greeks, and it was because of this decision that Philothei ran to find Ibrahim, and suffered the accident that killed her.

  When the gendarmes arrived unexpectedly, and ordered our Christians to get ready to leave within a few hours, there was terrible confusion. The Christian women were wailing, and there was a panic because none of them knew what to take. We had all heard the stories about the departure of the Armenians eight years before,
when they took along their finest jewellery, hoping to sell it when they arrived at their destination, but they lost all this jewellery because the soldiers who escorted them stole it from them almost immediately. For this reason our Christians were wondering whether to take practical things or precious things, and did not know how long the journey would be, and whether or not they would be fed, and they were going to their Muslim neighbours, saying, “Please, efendi, look after my things until I get back, and take this key to my house, and lock it when we have gone, and look after it until we come back.” I myself have three keys of my old neighbours, and I hang them near the door on a nail, where they get more rusty by the year. I also keep an eye on the land of those neighbours, and keep it in good condition by working on it and growing food on it, and I have their goats, which have bred many times with mine, so that now I would be hard put to work out which kid belongs to which neighbour. This is some recompense for me, since I lost most of my trade when the Christians left, and I was made extremely poor.

  Because of the panic and the hurrying, and the making of last-minute arrangements, Charitos and Polyxeni did not notice that one of their daughters had disappeared until it was too late, and neither did Drosoula notice, who was her best friend, because Drosoula and her mother were trying to get some sense out of her own father, who was always drunk, and Drosoula was planning to run away with her husband.

  This is what happened, and this is what Ibrahim told me when he rushed down the hillside and into the town, pushing aside the poor people who were preparing to depart. I have often wondered why he chose to come to me, and perhaps it was only because my workshop was near the edge of the town, or because my son Karatavuk was a particular friend of his.

  What happened is that the lovely Philothei, fearing that she might never see Ibrahim again, left her father’s house, and went up the hillside through the ancient tombs where the Dog lived, in order to look for her fiancé. He was still her fiancé because they had never married, and they had never married because Ibrahim had been forced to leave and join the army, and since then he had been fighting for about eight years, first against the Franks, and then against the Greeks. He and Philothei had not had the good fortune to marry before he left, but they were due now to be married at some future time.

  Ordinarily a woman would be disappointed to put off her wedding, but it would not destroy her. In this case, however, Philothei was distraught beyond all measure because she and Ibrahim had had the misfortune to have become besotted with each other, and had been thus besotted since they were little children.

  To be in love is generally the worst thing that can happen to a man or to a woman, and when it happens we all look at it and shake our heads, and thank God that it has never happened to us, and pray that it may never happen to our children. It makes people foolish and obsessed, and they disobey their parents in matters of marriage. They do not concentrate, they dream even when awake, they weaken physically, they lose the capacity both for sleep and work, and they become foul-tempered when their reveries are disturbed. It is a sickness that is probably the result of bewitchment or the evil eye, and is something to be shuddered at because it takes away all reason. The drinking of this besotment causes drunkenness that is worse than the stupidity of raki or the vacancy of opium, because it lasts much longer and has no known cure apart from time, or possibly marriage.

  In the case of Philothei and Ibrahim, however, the besotment had been with them since the days when they had played together with Karatavuk and Mehmetçik and all the others of their friends. People used to laugh at the way that Ibrahim followed Philothei faithfully like a dog, and they would note that he was the only boy with whom she was not flighty or coquettish or spiteful or shy. It was as if they both knew that kismet had picked them out for one another. To put it another way, it seemed obvious to all that they had been born married.

  Fortunately, Charitos and Polyxeni had all their lives been friends with Ali the Broken-Nosed and his wife, and not merely friends, because they were all related in one way or another by marriage. With us it was the custom that although a man could not exchange his faith, the woman should take her husband’s religion upon her marriage. It was understood that most often the woman kept her faith in private as long as this never became known. In any case, we all had the custom of offering tamas to the mother of Jesus because this was effective in the event of sickness or ill luck, and, after all, the faith of a woman is not of great concern to God, and therefore it was not a great concern to us. For all these reasons it had been agreed for many years that Philothei and Ibrahim would be married, and so Charitos never placed an empty bottle on the roof of his house even when Ibrahim was away at war and no one knew whether he was alive or dead.

  Now, with the whole town in an uproar, and everybody in tumult, Philothei ran away to find Ibrahim, who was minding the townspeople’s goats on the hillside. He would spend every day up there, and he would have beside him his great mastiff, Kopek, and he would sit there playing softly on the kaval, as he still does, because a goatherd has little to do for much of the time, and so it behoves him to play the kaval. The sound still drifts over the town, especially when the wind comes from the direction of the sea, but the tunes no longer make sense now that he is mad.

  As you know, we have a river that runs across the bottom of the town and curves away below the meydan. It goes round the hill and enters the sea. The hill behind us is very high, and this is where the Dog lived, and you could find the tomb of the saint and the ancient tombs. This is also where Ibrahim and his dog minded the goats that lived off the maquis. The hill goes up and up until it reaches the very small chapel that was used only once or twice a year, and of which no one knew the origin, and then it starts to curve down again, but it is interrupted by a very steep cliff that plummets straight down to the beach. It is a bad place to walk in the dark, because it is easy to walk over the edge; the edge is very liable to crumble away beneath one’s feet, and there are very many demented ghosts of those who have thrown themselves over on purpose and have become accursed by God. Ibrahim and Kopek always returned with the goats before dark because of these spirits. In other places a goatherd will often spend many nights out in the hills with only the wolves to worry him.

  When Philothei found Ibrahim, she was exhausted and she was crying violently. He was right at the clifftop because he was looking down at the beach, where he could see Gerasimos and Drosoula, with their little son Mandras, apparently preparing to put to sea in his little fishing boat. Ibrahim knew nothing of the arrival of the gendarmes to take away the Christians, and he was puzzled by what he saw, and he was waving to them and shouting, but the cliff was very high, and there was wind, and they couldn’t explain anything to him for lack of being heard. Ibrahim was wondering why Gerasimos should be going fishing with a woman and a child, which was not normal, and was not good luck.

  So Philothei found Ibrahim, and she was, as I said, exhausted and tearful. She had been badly cut because in her haste she had fallen frequently among the rocks and thorns, and her hands and face were bleeding. Her clothing was torn. She tried to explain to him what was happening, and at first he could not understand, because it was not a usual thing for the gendarmes to arrive and take away people with no explanation, and it had not happened since the Armenians were removed about eight years before. The reason he was uncomprehending was that it was completely unexpected, and made no sense to anyone. I myself never understood the purpose of it.

  Philothei grew wild and he could not restrain her, and the reason for this was that she was divided into two pieces. Should she go with her family, or should she stay with her betrothed? She could not decide between the two. She was like Nasreddin Hodja when he was given two identical plates of kiz memesi kadayif, and was in danger of starving to death because he could not decide which to eat first, or like Nasreddin Hodja’s donkey, who was in danger of starving to death between two equal bales of hay, except that these examples are frivolous. Perhaps it was more like
the man who is forcibly given the choice of sacrificing one of two equally beloved twins. For Philothei the situation was desperate because her heart was torn in matching parts, and whilst Ibrahim was on his knees pleading with her to stay, she was turning away to go, and then turning back to Ibrahim. This she did over and over again until a kind of madness overcame them both and neither of them knew what they were saying or doing. Ibrahim was waving his arms and shouting, and she was rushing back and forth uttering little cries that he said were cutting into his belly like a sword. To make it worse, their behaviour bewildered the dog Kopek, who began to bark and throw himself upon them.

  It was at one moment when Ibrahim was on his knees with his hands at his temples that he noticed that Philothei was getting too close to the edge of the cliff. She was weeping and gesticulating too much to notice where she was. Overtaken by a sudden panic, he leapt to his feet and tried to grab at her clothing, but in doing so he stumbled, and instead of grasping her to pull her back, he fell against her with his outstretched hand, and she fell backwards over the edge. As she went over, she looked at him with her beautiful eyes so wide with terror and disbelief that the memory of them is one of the reasons that he has never slept a peaceful night again.

  Prone at the edge of the cliff he watched her hurtling down the precipice. He says that it seemed to happen very slowly, and that her body bounced on the outcrops of rocks as if it was not a body but something made of wood. He says that it seemed to take an eternity before she bounced off the last rocks and came to rest on the beach not far from where Drosoula and Gerasimos were preparing the little boat. He says that the two of them ran over to the body, and that when Drosoula saw who it was, that it was her best friend whom she had loved since youth, she threw herself on the body, but then gathered it in her arms and cradled it, stroking the head, and rocking back and forth. Then Gerasimos touched her shoulder and said something, and Gerasimos picked up the body and began to carry it to the boat.