The Silence of Scheherazade

by Defne Suman

  Pavlo knew that the soldiers trying to win the girl’s heart could never give the correct answer. If one of the innocent boys should say, ‘I’m for Venizelos,’ the flirtatious beauty would answer, ‘Ah, too bad. I’m a royalist.’ If he should say, ‘I support King Constantine,’ she would bow her white-bonneted head over her basket and say, ‘Forgive me, soldier, zito o Venizelos.’ From the next-door garden Pavlo would see that as she lowered her face she was biting her lip to keep from laughing. She was quite aware that the lieutenant in the neighbouring mansion was watching her tricks, but not once did she turn and look in the direction of Commander Zafiro’s headquarters.

  Before he saw Panagiota that summer evening sitting with the other girls like birds lined up on a telegraph wire, Pavlo had thought the servant girl with the white cap was the prettiest girl in the world. If Commander Zafiro had not been sent to the front, and if his posting in Bournabat had therefore not come to an end, he would have proposed to her. Afterwards, he considered finding a reason to return there. The only thing holding him back was that the girl would ask why he hadn’t gone to the front as well; why he, a great lieutenant, had been left at a police station in a poor neighbourhood. ‘We have stayed here to protect you, little lady,’ he could perhaps have said, but he had never spoken with that sort of bravado in his life and wasn’t sure he could now, particularly to her. Now, however, the storm in his heart brought about by this cherry-lipped angel had erased in a single swipe the meaningful words he’d planned to say to the Bournabat servant girl. The owner of those appraising eyes that had once haunted his dreams and the puckered mouth that used to say, ‘Tell me, are you for Venizelos or are you a royalist?’ was now no more significant to him than the ordinary village girls of Ioannina.

  Panagiota, leaving her shouting friends, jumped down from the wall. There’d been some bad cheating in the game and an argument had broken out. No one noticed her slipping away. Except Pavlo. Glancing up shyly through her long lashes, the girl walked towards one of the streets that opened off the square, went into a grocery shop and disappeared. Her shoes were too tight and she was perhaps a little skinny, but Pavlo’s doting mother would feed her on lamb shank marinated in milk, buttery pilaf and fig marmalade. With these pleasures in mind, he bought a cone of dried chickpeas from the nut seller who had set his tray down in the middle of the square and leaned against the wall in a spot where he could see the door of the grocery shop. Though he knew he should appear serious, he couldn’t keep the smile from his face. Nearby, the girls were shouting, ‘You’re out, you’re out!’, as they crossed and uncrossed their fingers. From one of the houses, a French melody came wafting over the street. Either someone was having a music lesson or there was a gramophone.

  For the first time since Pavlo had set foot in Smyrna last May, he thought it would be possible to establish a life there. If that goddess accepted his marriage proposal – and why wouldn’t she? – he could build a house there, he could embrace those slender white arms. He got dizzy just thinking about the nights when he would have her in his bed. He had to go and talk to her father as soon as possible.

  *

  The first serenade that made Akis furious took place that night.

  Pavlo left Great Taverns Street after a few hours and headed back to his officer’s lodgings behind the police station. It was a warm night and moonlight was painting the city silver. The young lieutenant was half drunk. He considered going to one of the ‘houses’ of the girls who worked in the Hiotika neighbourhood, but, as usual, he couldn’t summon the courage. Anyway, he had again got upset in the tavern. The reluctance of these men of Smyrna to enlist in the Greek army offended him. He and his fellow soldiers had left their homeland and come all the way there to save these people, and yet, like whining children, they routinely came up with a thousand excuses for not going to war. And this at a time when the army needed them more than ever.

  What had happened to that crowd that had greeted them with such joy a year ago? Rich families were sending their sons to Europe, even to America, to avoid military service. Meanwhile, men like him, soldiers of mainland Greece who had no connection to this land, were being mown down in the fight against bandits and armed gangs on the arid plains and mountainsides of Asia Minor. All to safeguard the lives of the Christians of Asia Minor, to rescue them from five hundred years of tyranny. How to explain all this?

  That evening the whole tavern had with one voice expressed the view that the Greek army should not advance beyond the province of Aydin. At any rate, the peace treaty with the Allies, which was expected to be signed soon, would formally turn the administration of Smyrna over to Greece, and in a few years Smyrna would surely be annexed to Greece. In which case, was not the decision to advance to Bursa based purely on greed? Pavlo argued that to ensure the security of Smyrna province, all the land to the west of the Eskisehir–Afyonkarahisar line needed to be under the control of the Greek army and that even the Ottoman sultan’s signing of the peace treaty was connected to the victory of the Greek forces. But somehow he wasn’t able to get a handful of drunk Ottoman Greeks to understand this.

  ‘What are you going to do after you take Eskisehir – go on to Ankara and fight Kemal?’ they said, then laughed and toasted each other with their glasses of wine. The more they drank, the more they talked. They cursed Stergiadis, the Greek High Commissioner; the commander-in-chief of the Greek army, General Paraskevopoulos; the general of the newly formed Turkish military forces, Mustafa Kemal; and the British prime minister Lloyd George, who was using Greece to further his own ambitions.

  There were as many Turks drinking there as there were Ottoman Greeks. When they were drunk, just like the Greeks, they would swear in a strange mixture of Turkish and Greek. If war broke out, the economy would be in tatters, and it was this that really concerned them. Which made Pavlo even more unhappy. Pavlo and his fellow soldiers were putting their lives in danger, they’d come all the way there, and all these people could think about was filling their moneybags. Where was the great Hellenistic soul?

  ‘If there’s war, the caravan won’t come next January.’

  ‘Do we use caravans now, Kyr Kosta? You are living in the past. Our goods all come by train now.’

  ‘Yeah, these railways took all the bread from the camel drivers’ hands.’

  ‘Caravan or train, the harvest won’t come, I say. On the other side of the mountains, they’re laying waste to the land. My beloved Aydin was reduced to ashes in a week. There will be nothing but chaos from now on; only the gangs will thrive.’

  ‘Yes, there are bandits every step of the way.’

  ‘If the trains stop, even the Europeans won’t be able to work.’

  ‘Whoa, not so fast. Those people can make money out of anything, war or peace.’

  ‘It seems to be different this time. Their businesses have slowed down already. My son-in-law is a waiter at Panellinion – you know, that restaurant that used to be Kraemer’s – and he says they’ve taken to making their midday meals last a really long time, ordering wine and not whisky. Instead of going back to their offices, they stay at the bar drinking until their cheeks turn red. Even the Europeans have become lethargic.’

  ‘Even them, eh?’

  ‘I’ll drink to that, then! Come on. Gia mas! To our health!’

  Everybody laughed and clinked glasses of wine or raki. A breeze brought the smell of jasmine in through the open window. The tavern owner Yorgi got up and refilled the glasses.

  ‘They’re going to hang lanterns in front of our houses,’ someone said. At first nobody understood what he was talking about. It was an old man who spoke in a low voice. His Greek sounded like the Greek spoken by the Muslims of Ioannina. He had white hair, a white beard, and wore a fez proudly on his head, with the tassel carefully combed and hanging from the left side.

  ‘The Greek Administrative Committee is going to decree that all Turks have to hang lanterns in front of their houses. That’s what I heard, but…’

  E
verybody shook their heads as if to say, ‘Such a thing is not possible.’ Some of them couldn’t look the old man in the eye. Several of them turned and stared at Pavlo sitting by himself at one end of the table, as if he himself had told the Turks to hang lanterns in front of their houses.

  ‘It will all pass, Mustafa,’ said a small man sitting beside him with deep-set eyes like an owl. ‘Public order will be maintained. Maybe the army will just stay where it is and not go any further. Anyway, Kemal is having his own struggles with the Ottoman forces. He’s proceeding in an orderly way, with steady steps. He’s a clever man. He won’t come as far as Smyrna.’

  ‘If he got the Bolsheviks behind him, he could go as far as Athens. He wants to take back Salonica anyway.’

  At these last words from a red-cheeked Greek, an uncomfortable atmosphere settled over the tavern. A fat middle-aged man sitting on his own at the other end of the long table from Pavlo said comfortingly to the Turk, ‘Our Smyrna will be like it was in the past. Look at Stergiadis. We say a lot of stuff about him, but the man has a strong sense of fairness. He treats all Turks, Greeks and Armenians the same, and that’s how it will be in the future. There’s no other way.’

  Mustafa shook his head sadly. The drinkers in the tavern remembered with shame that the year before the old man had been beaten and left for dead in the garden of an abandoned mansion. To mask their shame, they again turned their eyes on Pavlo, as if he were the enemy.

  Without saying anything, Pavlo left two drahoma beside his raki glass, got up, left the tavern and began to walk along the quay, which was brightly lit by the hotels. To his left, the dark water swelled like the pointed tops of miniature tents. A bit further out, beyond the harbour area, three fishing-boat lanterns were sparkling. Street dogs passed him, and children riding donkeys, and whispering couples. The moonlight was making the bay glitter like a diamond. Songs spilled out from the bars, some sad, some happy, mixed with drunken laughter.

  He rolled a cigarette and lit it. He felt confused. The raki and the moonlight were making him burn with homesickness for his country. It seemed that all the things which gave meaning to his life were slipping from his hands, one by one. Living among these bad-tempered old men, his excitement about the Megali Idea, the dream of a Greater Greece, was fading. Let the army take Akhisar, then Bursa, then Canakkale, then Thrace, even Istanbul. Then he would go to Yorgi’s Tavern and order raki for everyone – even the Turkos – to celebrate the victory! He threw his cigarette to the ground, crushed it with his boot, and turned off Bella Vista.

  The neighbourhood coffeehouse was closed, the chairs under the arbour upturned. There was nobody around except a few young men having a drunken chat in front of the fountain under the plane tree. The gas lamps which lent a greenish hue to the streets hadn’t been lit for some time, but the full moon was lighting up the city as if it were daytime. He stopped suddenly, thinking of the Hiotika women. There was music coming from somewhere. A mandolin, a drum, jangling tambourines, even a ukulele. Laughter and croaky voices singing love songs.

  Curiosity sent him in the direction of the music. A crowd had gathered on one of the streets that opened off the square near the police station, and a group of five serenaders were standing under a bay window, trying, by turns seriously and then lackadaisically, to sing a song. In the windows of the nearby houses, women and children with sleep dripping from their faces were leaning with their elbows on the sills, watching the merrymaking as if it were a theatre performance. It was only in the house of the girl being serenaded that there was no movement. All of a sudden, Pavlo realized that this was the second floor of the grocery shop into which the angel he’d seen earlier had disappeared.

  Which meant that these brats were serenading the girl he loved! Damn their shamelessness! Damn their impudence! Insolent rascals!

  The military position he held and the raki he had drunk gave him the courage to walk into the middle of the street and shout. The boys scattered in every direction. Looking up, he seemed to see in the girl’s window a twitch of the tulle curtain which was shining like silver in the moonlight. Immediately, he grabbed two of the boys who were hiding round the corner and dragged them in front of the shop.

  ‘Play, you brats – the most colourful of amanedes among your soulful Smyrna songs.’

  Without wasting any time, Minas the Flea and the fisherman’s son Niko began to play a song Pavlo had learned as a child from a Tunisian friend he used to play with in the street. The boys didn’t know the song but had no trouble improvising. A little later, Pandelis emerged from his hiding place and joined in with his tambourine.

  Entering into the spirit, Pavlo took off his jacket, slung it over his shoulder, unbuttoned his shirt to expose his chest, got down on one knee and began a dance resembling the zeibekiko. At the same time as he was belting out the song that began with the words ‘Aman, aman’ and continued in a language the boys didn’t know, he was also continually squatting down and standing up again beneath the lightless street lamp. He had taken off his cap and placed it on the head of Minas, whose fingers were flying over the mandolin.

  It was this scene that met Akis when he went to the window to perform his nightly duty of shooing away the boys. An officer with a bare head and bare chest was down on his knees under the window shouting out a song in Arabic at the top of his voice. The neighbourhood boys had come out from their hiding places and were clapping their hands and beating their drums, egging on his strange dance.

  Akis immediately headed to his bedroom, grabbed the gun he had hidden in the drawer of his bedside table, ran down the steep stairs in his white nightshirt and slippered feet, and stormed out of the blue door. At the sight of Akis having come all the way down to the street with a gun in his hand, the boys got lost in a trice. Pavlo was so caught up in his dance that until the grocer fired his six-shooter in the air, he noticed neither that the music had ceased nor that the street was now deserted.

  Revolver still in hand, Akis stood looming over the lieutenant, who was jumping around on his knees. Before beginning his dance, Pavlo had put his own gun on the doorstep of the house across the street. He now straightened up and took a step towards it, but he was too slow. Akis grabbed him by the open collar of his shirt and with the strength of his onetime wrestler’s arms hoisted him into the air. Pavlo’s uniform jacket, which he had so pretentiously thrown over his shoulder, fell to the ground.

  The street, which had grown accustomed to the wailing sound of the fiddle, banjo, drum and breaking voices singing ‘Aman, aman’ was now utterly silent, the quiet broken only by the screams of seagulls diving in the bay. And Akis’s voice.

  ‘Have you no shame? You, a great officer, making a mockery of the honour of the neighbourhood?’

  The whole neighbourhood knew how Akis roared when he was angry. A few more shutters creaked open. An apprentice at the grocery shop had once accused a refugee child recently arrived from Bulgaria of taking some sweets that he had in fact pocketed himself. When Akis found the sweets, he beat the apprentice in the middle of the street. ‘You insolent, immoral dog! Son of a donkey! Did I teach you these kinds of manners? Get away from here, and let my eyes not see you again, you scoundrel, you malaka!’ He had roared so loudly that the cats waiting to steal some cheese from the outside counter had gone into hiding beneath it.

  ‘I hope Akis beats this idiot up,’ whispered Minas with an uneasy expression on his face. ‘I don’t like foreigners like him wandering around our neighbourhood. They make passes at our girls.’

  ‘Our girls are not innocent either… It’s obvious that Panagiota has looked sideways at this fellow, otherwise, where would he have found the courage? Our girls are really off track, my friend; they’re all set on becoming an officer’s girlfriend. Somebody saw Elpiniki with an officer – a high-ranking officer, too. They were sitting together at the bar next to Messageries Maritimes – you know, that Anglo-American bar – and we know what that means. Nobody goes to that bar who hasn’t first been to the hotel up
stairs.’

  Minas mumbled something unintelligible.

  When the boys returned to Menekse Street from their hiding places, Pavlo was walking towards his lodgings behind the police station. His head was bowed, his clothes dishevelled. Akis waited by the grocery door until Pavlo had turned into the square and disappeared from sight. Then he picked up the gun left on the fisherman’s doorstep and examined it. His hood had slipped from his head and fallen to his shoulders; his hair, which he slicked down with British pomade every morning, was sticking up on end, like thorns, but he was pleased with himself. After this, his wife couldn’t accuse him of behaving too leniently regarding his daughter’s honour. He had thoroughly frightened that poor excuse for an officer. It remained to be seen whether he would dare come for his weapon in the morning.

  If he had glanced up and seen the bay window’s tulle curtains moving, he would have put it down to the wind. He went back inside, mumbling to himself, ‘If only this war would come to a good conclusion and we could have some peace.’ Rearranging his hood over his head, he dropped into a deep, self-satisfied sleep full of manly pride at having pleased his wife.