The Silence of Scheherazade

by Defne Suman

  Akis, Mimiko, Sofia, Adriana and her sisters and brothers were waiting for them on the road to the Greek Cemetery. The wire fence surrounding Panionios Stadium had been broken through in many places and the grandstands and playing field were filled with refugees. Right behind it, encircled by sturdy cypress trees, the graveyard awaited them, calm and silent. Together, they passed through the stadium, where Minas the Flea had once upon a time performed wonders on the football field, and entered the realm of death.

  Nightmare

  Although Hilmi Rahmi had spent more than half his adult life on battlefields, he had never before witnessed humanity gone so wrong. Maybe it was the heartless power of the fire and the sea; maybe it was because the tragedy was taking place in Smyrna, where he’d been born and raised, where he’d played on the streets, where he’d brought his young bride; maybe it was the sheer number of people – there must have been half a million, including the Christians who’d fled from their fire-ravaged neighbourhoods – squeezed into an area the size of his palm between the flames and the sea, piled one on top of the other on barges.

  Whatever the reason, Hilmi Rahmi was never able to forget the scenes he witnessed on the quay in Izmir on the night of 13 September 1922. The screams of the women continued to tear at his ears and chill his blood in his nightmares. Every night as he drifted off to sleep, he relived that momentary flicker of hope and despair in the eyes of the drowned just before they sank. Eventually, the intense fever of shame which rose from his subconscious seeped into his internal organs and brought about his own death.

  The heat on the quayside was unbearable. The wind was madly blowing the fire from the hills to the sea and the stench of burned flesh from the streets and the water was making everyone vomit, civilians and soldiers alike. Many soldiers had covered their mouths and noses with wet cloths, including Hilmi Rahmi. The side streets, squares, courtyards and school playgrounds were filled with the corpses of men, women, children, cats and dogs. At the quay, pigeons whose hearts had stopped in the heat and seagulls with their wings on fire fell patter, patter to the ground.

  Hilmi Rahmi’s horse was nervous. It kept trying to throw him off its back and escape to somewhere calm and cool. At the same time as attempting to control his horse, Hilmi Rahmi was also inspecting the evacuees crammed into the boats. Twenty, thirty people at a time were boarding the rowing boats they found. If they were lucky, the boat would carry them out to the side of a European ship, after which they’d be at the mercy of the ship’s captain. Many rowing boats capsized before an oar even touched the water, sending every last one of its desperate passengers to the bottom of the dark sea.

  A command had been issued by his superior officer to capture any Greek male between the ages of eighteen and forty-five who was trying to flee. ‘Those delinquents will stay here to rebuild the villages and cities they have razed and destroyed, the railways they blew up. No one will escape without paying the price. Catch them all and line them up in front of me. Shoot those who do not surrender. They deserve it, the thugs.’

  There was no need to waste ammunition on the men who’d come from mountain villages far from the sea. They didn’t know how to swim. When they jumped into the water, their clothes dragged them down and within five minutes they’d sunk to the seabed and were gone. The ones who’d grown up by the shore and knew how to swim were shot as they began to swim towards the European ships.

  The crews on the European ships were no more merciful than the soldiers on the shore. Hilmi Rahmi saw with his own eyes two battleships flying foreign flags refuse rowing boats which had approached them to ask for sanctuary, then throw buckets of water over the heads of those who persisted. Very rarely would a ship put down a ladder for an approaching rowing boat and pull the women and children up on deck.

  Like the civilian robbers who were looting the city, the privates, corporals and sergeants of Kemal Pasha’s army were out of control. A week ago, these perfect soldiers had been well behaved, but as soon as they got to Smyrna, all military discipline and moral codes were forgotten. Aping the gang leaders, they ransacked houses and shops, murdered people in the middle of the street and raped Christian girls and women in public places – all under the eyes of the European generals watching through binoculars from the decks of their ships.

  Smyrna was even bigger, richer and more abundantly provisioned than they had imagined. And with no gendarme installations currently in place, no police to arrest them and no courts to pass judgement, this brief window of time was their chance to make their dirty fantasies a reality. All the suffering they’d endured through the war and all the depredations that they’d witnessed – villages incinerated, women and children hacked to pieces by Greek soldiers – had fired them with a lust for revenge. They were taking out all their hatred on innocent civilians, paying no heed to morals or conscience. The great generals had turned Smyrna over to these outlaws as they met in mansions in Bournabat, busying themselves with the troublesome problem of Istanbul.

  Hilmi Rahmi wiped the sweat from his neck. His handkerchief was already as wet as the red cloth he’d tied over his mouth and nose to filter out the stink of the dead. A little earlier, Captain Mehmet, who’d been riding beside him, had felt faint and had tumbled into the crowd below him. The poor people on the quay, thinking he’d jumped down to grab one of their girls, had screamed and covered their children with their bodies.

  They’d had to pour a pail of water over Mehmet’s head to revive him. From where he lay, the captain was muttering, ‘What’s the point of just saving one or two of them? Best not to get involved.’

  While Hilmi Rahmi was occupied with Mehmet, Brigadier Sadullah – jacketless, hatless, sweaty – cantered up. Paying no attention to the milling crowd, he pointed his bayonet at a young girl cowering behind her grandfather. ‘That’s the one I want,’ he shouted. ‘The chubby one. Bring her. I’m going behind the customs building. Choose one for yourself, Colonel! These days will not come again.’ He galloped off through the crowd towards the port, forcing at least twenty people to leap into the sea to avoid being trampled. Machine-gun fire immediately raked the water.

  Hilmi Rahmi was nauseated. As he remounted his horse, he wished that he too might faint. Maybe Mehmet had been faking. Unbefitting of a soldier though that was, Hilmi Rahmi could understand why.

  He looked over at the poor girl hiding behind her grandfather. Her shirt was stained with blood. Her hair was like a bird’s nest on top of her head, and her arms were covered with festering scratches. What kind of creature could look at this child and feel lust?

  Sensing his eyes upon her, the girl desperately bowed her head. If she behaved docilely, perhaps he would let her go after finishing his business. A woman from Aydin whom she’d met on the quay had told her that after twelve soldiers had raped her, one after the other, they’d dragged her to an empty backyard and gone away. As they left, they’d spat in her face, saying, ‘Compared to what your people did, this is nothing.’ The woman had almost wanted to run after the soldiers and embrace them for not having killed her.

  The devastation that Hilmi Rahmi saw around him had to be the work of the devil. So this was what happened when man lost his faith and his conscience; when he broke his bond with himself and with God. He turned into a monster cut loose from his chains, a base creature, a slave to lust, greed, anger and cruelty.

  He remembered how just a week ago he and Brigadier Sadullah had came upon a village where Greek soldiers had filled the mosque with men and set it alight. The brigadier, whose mouth was right now salivating at the pleasure he would get from torturing the poor girl shivering behind her grandfather, had held the body of a little girl from that village, ten or twelve years old, in his arms and sobbed as blood emptied like a river from between her legs. Who knew how many Greek soldiers had raped her. How could a person unable to hold back his tears at such horror just one week later torture another soul whom Allah had created? What kind of power was it that turned a person into the lowest and most cruel of
living beings?

  The portholes of the battleships anchored in the harbour were reflecting the flames devouring the city. Hilmi Rahmi anxiously turned his head to the hills where his house was located. The fire had not spread to the Turkish district. It was as if there were an invisible barrier between the districts. The flames had raced through the Armenian quarter and then stopped where the Jewish quarter began, as if cut with a knife. Not one spark had fallen on the Turkish neighbourhoods. Thanks be to the Creator, thanks be to Allah.

  He was ashamed to be thinking of his own family when hundreds of thousands were dying in agony in front of his eyes.

  American philanthropists had finally got Nureddin Pasha and their own superiors to agree to send one rescue ship to the quay. The crowd, fighting among themselves, surged towards the dock where the ship was anchored. American sailors were trying to impose some order by hitting people on their backs, shoulders and heads, but they couldn’t control a hundred thousand people engaged in a life-and-death struggle.

  ‘Women and children only! Women and children only!’

  There was no way that all of them could get on the ship and be saved. Hilmi Rahmi was pleased to see that the girl Brigadier Sadullah had chosen was not where he’d left her. Had she managed to board the ship? It was impossible to distinguish any single individual among the vast sea of desperate people massed before him.

  Some who looked as if they were sleeping had already died. If he could only save one life from this multitude of shame… Just one life among the hundred thousand. It might not change the world, but for that one person it would make a world of difference. A family with two children was running towards the rescue ship from Parallel Street. The woman was carrying a baby, the man was holding the hand of his little girl, whose legs had been burned, pulling her along. As Hilmi Rahmi made a swift movement towards them, he heard, amid the flames and the screams, the officer holding the northern end of the quay order the man to stop.

  ‘Halt and surrender!’

  The man didn’t hear him, or he heard but didn’t obey. Life was two strides ahead, on the American ship. The second he took that step forward, towards life, dragging his daughter with him, a bullet pierced his heart. He and his wife fell to the ground together. A second bullet had targeted her. The little girl cast a fearful glance at her dead parents. Then she picked her baby brother up off the ground, ran through the flames and jumped onto the ship.

  Hilmi Rahmi stopped his horse halfway there. His heart felt heavy, as if it had dropped to his stomach. He was probably about to vomit.

  He would not describe to Sumbul, Cengiz or Dogan the scenes he had witnessed. Definitely not. He would do whatever he could for them not to have to carry this shame. He would excise the events of these days from his past and throw them away. If necessary, he would deny them or lie. But would the new country, whose birth was awaited with such excitement and enthusiasm, be built on the premise that this river of blood had never happened, on a lie disconnected from the past? Was the future to be made of this?

  Since his face was already wet with sweat, when tears rolled down his cheeks, no one understood that this young colonel, whose duty it was to squeeze infidels into an area hotter than an oven, between the flames and the sea, was crying for his lost city and for his dreams turned to ashes.

  Confession

  Edith was no longer sobbing in Avinash’s arms on the deck of the Iron Duke. She was rigid inside, a large part of her soul lost to the fire. In the ballroom of the navy ship the military band was still playing polkas and waltzes to suppress the screams rising from the shore, but the faces of the people sitting at the tables set with white tablecloths were as dark as an awful winter’s day.

  The news that the ship would soon be approaching the port to rescue refugees had comforted their uneasy hearts somewhat, but Edith could see from where she stood that only a tiny fraction of the massive crowd would be able to get on the Iron Duke. The throng seemed to spread without end along the length of the shore, and those obliged to stay put would have to carry on waiting, in fear of the flames, the dark water and the machine-gun fire.

  Wood from burning houses was bursting into the sky like fireworks. Without taking her eyes off the terrible spectacle, Edith began to speak, in a voice devoid of emotion.

  ‘I had a baby, Avinash.’

  The shoulder she was leaning on stiffened.

  The wind circled around them, howling in her ears.

  ‘It was a few years before I met you. She died the night she was born; I didn’t even see her face. I’d fainted. My mother took her and buried her in the cemetery of the Catholic church in Bournabat; that’s what she said. Because the baby wasn’t baptized, there was no name, and no grave where I could have placed flowers.’

  Turning, she looked into Avinash’s eyes.

  He was shocked. All that time he’d spent searching for details about Edith’s life before he met her – how was it that pregnancy had never entered his mind? How was it that no one had even hinted that Edith had given birth? People mentioned that she had thrown herself into the bohemian life in Paris, had become the mistress of an artist, had had affairs with women, but they had never said a word about a pregnancy. He felt betrayed – not because Edith had been with another man before himself, but because everyone in Bournabat had colluded in hiding this baby from him.

  As if she understood what he was thinking, Edith continued, ‘No one knows. Only me, my mother, and the midwife who delivered the baby, Midwife Meline.’

  Avinash looked confused.

  ‘When my pregnancy became obvious, the sisters at the Catholic school I was attending in Paris immediately shipped me back to Smyrna. They sent my mother a telegram. She met me at the port and bundled me into one of those carriages with closed curtains, like Turkish ladies use, where you can’t be seen. She’d arranged everything very carefully. When we arrived at the Bournabat mansion, she didn’t even give the butler a chance to see me before she shut me up in the turret.’

  She turned her face towards her beloved Smyrna, which was glowing like a giant orange.

  Avinash was appalled. ‘How long did you stay there?’

  ‘Until I gave birth. Exactly three months, one week and five days. My little girl was born on the night between the sixth and seventh of September and died in the morning. If she had lived, she would be seventeen now.’

  Avinash stood with his mouth agape. He repeated his question, hoping he had perhaps misunderstood. ‘Your mother held you prisoner for three months in the turret of the Bournabat mansion?’

  Edith nodded.

  ‘How cruel. How brutal.’

  As he said these words, the screams followed by machine-gun fire rising from the quay brought the same thought to both their minds: they had no right to talk of ‘cruel’ or ‘brutal’ behaviour.

  Avinash turned Edith’s face to his. ‘I am so sorry, my darling. What a difficult time that must have been for you; what a sad loss. I did not know anything about this.’

  Tears which she’d thought had dried up began streaming down Edith’s cheeks again. It was the first time she’d revealed her secret to anyone. She had written a short note to her classmate Feride, saying that the baby had been born dead, but she hadn’t told her friend of the suffering she’d endured throughout the summer, nor of her powerful suspicion that her mother had had Ali killed by Cakircali’s gang.

  Avinash took her in his arms and held her tight. Edith rested her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes. All the losses formed a knot inside her. As the insatiable flames reduced her beloved Smyrna to ash in front of her eyes, she surrendered to the choking sobs.

  *

  While Edith was standing sobbing on the deck of the Iron Duke, the gates of the French Consulate on Limanaki Street opened and a stream of people exited through them. Among them were Juliette Lamarck, her son Jean-Pierre, his wife Marie and their children Daphne and Louis. The group was lined up in twos. At their head was a naval officer with a French flag in his han
d, and to either side were French soldiers clearing a path through the crowds for them. They walked in the direction of Passport Pier, where a motorboat was waiting.

  Marie, dressed in a spotless cream suit, was at the back, holding her two children’s hands. In front of her walked Juliette with a large straw hat on her head, looking as if she was going to Kordelio for a swim rather than escaping from a fire. She was clutching Jean-Pierre’s arm. Louis had refused to leave his cat in Bournabat, so they’d brought the animal with them in a birdcage, and the boy was now taking tiny steps so as not to startle his pet. His mother kept urging him to hurry, but he just grumbled and continued the argument with his sister that he’d begun inside.

  No one from the French group was able to remember in what order events happened when they got to the motorboat waiting in the inner harbour. A month after the Great Fire, when the family were reunited in a hotel room in Paris, Jean-Pierre struggled to explain it all to Edith. His tongue was tied from shock and sorrow, and his account was muddled, but Edith and Avinash were able to put the pieces together.

  Just as Juliette Lamarck was stepping onto the motorboat with the French flag flying from its bow, she drew back, freed her hand from her son’s arm and ran from the port into the flames, shouting, ‘My grandchild! I must save my grandchild!’ She began asking people on the quay where the orphanage was located and made such a strange spectacle, in her straw hat and stilettos, that even the Turkish soldiers left their posts and came over to her.

  Finally, from among the wretched crowd, a woman came forward. Without taking her eyes off the officers, she pointed towards a place northeast of the quay. Jettisoning her hat, Juliette began to run in the direction the woman had indicated. Jean-Pierre turned to hurry after her but was stopped by Marie. The motorboat that was to take them to the ship the Pierre Loti was about to depart, and the captain could not guarantee them a passage if they missed it. With difficulty, his wife and children persuaded Jean-Pierre aboard.