The wingless bird falls from one branch to another until it lands in the mud. The trainees leave for yet another marching drill, but Kemal does not join them. He picks up the wooden creature, tracing his fingers over its crudely carved body. Tiny slashes imitating feathers cover the entire surface, but its eyes and beak are barely visible. Kemal takes a pencil from his breast pocket. He cleans the dust and debris off with the linen; then using his pencil, he begins to revive the pathetic bird. First, he works on the creature’s eyes, creating an expression of such fragile beauty that the more difficult task of refashioning its wings becomes a necessity. He ignores the break in the wood where the wings once were and decides to render the bird at rest instead of in midflight. Soon a pair of wings graces the sides of its breast, and expertly drawn tail feathers are etched in its rump.
“Get up, boy.” His commanding officer, Nurredin Pasha, stands against a cloudless sky with Lieutenant Hikmet at his side. Kemal stands up, looking straight ahead, back straight, arms at his side, the finch in one hand and the pencil in the other.
“What are you doing here, soldier?” Nurredin asks.
Kemal knows not to answer.
“Why are you not marching with the rest? Who do you think this training is for?”
Kemal says nothing.
“He has a pencil in his hand, sir,” Hikmet says. “And a kerchief.”
Nurredin snatches Lucine’s kerchief from Kemal’s hand. He turns it over with disinterest, then throws it back at Kemal.
“A peasant with a pencil,” Nureddin says. “Interesting.”
“Like a woman with a sword.” Hikmet chuckles.
“Tomorrow you will report to the officer’s tent for a literacy test,” Nurredin says. “But for now, a lesson in obedience. Whip him,” he tells Hikmet.
When the first blow lands on his bare back, it makes a noise that rings in his ears and vibrates all the way down his spine. Kemal winces but does not scream. Each time the leather belt lands on his skin, he squeezes the bird in the palm of his hand. And when the thrashing is over, Kemal suddenly decides it will not go to waste. He swipes his fingers across his lower back and spreads the warm red liquid of his insides all over the finch’s belly.
Kemal limps to the barracks, carrying the red bird over to the straw mat where Tekin is resting.
“What the hell happened to you?” Tekin asks.
“For your son,” replies Kemal, handing him the red-bellied bird.
Tekin stares at Kemal, then at the bird in disbelief. “How?” he begins but does not finish. “Thank you,” he says finally cradling the bird in one massive palm.
That evening, Tekin strokes the wooden finch as they listen to the other men talk. In the cover of darkness, Kemal tries to forget his stinging back. He holds Lucine’s kerchief to his nose. The faint smell of lavender is all but gone, replaced by the smell of his own sweat.
Hüsnü, a merchant from Istanbul, who on the first day naively demanded sugar with his tea, is complaining again. “How do they expect us to learn how to fight on an empty stomach?” he asks.
“What’s a little hunger when you are doing God’s work?” Mehmet the Babe, so called for his childlike face and small frame, answers him. “Soon the Prophet himself will open the gates of heaven and present us with seventy-two virgins.”
“You can keep your virgins. I’ll take a good whore and a long life,” Hüsnü says. Peals of laughter rip through the room.
“The keys to paradise are no laughing matter,” Mehmet says. “We took an oath of martyrdom on the Koran. We are guaranteed a victory by Allah himself and will be rewarded accordingly.”
“Yes, and what will you do with that reward, Mehmet?” Hüsnü asks. “You wouldn’t know what to do with one virgin, never mind seventy-two.”
Tekin laughs.
“I know plenty,” Mehmet says.
“Really? Well, then let’s talk about this, shall we?” says Hüsnü, and he begins a graphic discussion of the pleasures of heaven, with heavy emphasis on dark-eyed houris.
Kemal smiles to himself. They are a sorry bunch, as far as soldiers go, but brave. Like him, their training consists mainly of marching under the Anatolian sun, but in their company he goes from being an only son to a brother. Here he is one of 370 conscripts, all born at the tail end of the nineteenth century, to one father, the Ottoman nation. Three hundred seventy young men sleeping in one barrack, eating in one mess hall, training and marching endlessly as one. And though the heat, exhaustion, and monotony are sometimes unbearable, Kemal is cured of his loneliness.
Six weeks later, Kemal is riding a train toward Aleppo and then Baghdad. They are to fight in the Mesopotamian campaign against the British and British India. At certain points on the road, their paths run alongside the deportees, who are being driven to the Syrian Desert. The sight of this collection of displaced humanity, whatever their crime might be, causes Kemal’s stomach to turn. He scans the slow-moving crowd, looking from one hollowed-out face to the next. Dirty rags hang like wet laundry from their bones, and their vacant eyes look for death or mercy. He takes comfort in the knowledge that Lucine would not be among them. Her family has money and plenty of connections. Even so, the sight of one woman in particular, her hair tied in a style he recognizes to be a familiar French twist, reminds him of Mrs. Melkonian. Though the woman is a stranger and not his former employer, the sight of her tattered European dress causes Kemal to vomit his breakfast of black bread and tea. He bends over, but the crammed quarters of the railcar make discretion impossible.
“Donkey fucker!” Hüsnü says, shoving him a little. “Get away from my boots.”
“See something you can’t handle?” says Tekin.
Kemal wipes his mouth with his sleeve but says nothing.
“Before you cry for the Armenian,” Tekin continues, “remember he would gladly hand a Russian the knife to slit your throat. The only reason they’re out there and you’re in here is because we beat them to it.”
“It’s true,” Mehmet adds. “They say hundreds of Armenians have joined the Russians in the eastern province of Van. They store guns and celebrate every time we lose a battle. They even shed Muslim blood on our streets.”
Kemal takes another look at the people on foot. There seem to be a thousand or more, mostly women and children, huddled together. Walking against the wind, their backs hunched under bundles, they look more like burdened mules than revolutionaries. He tells himself that the Melkonians are no revolutionaries. Lucine is probably somewhere in the West by now, practicing her English with a prissy young man, someone with new boots and a last name. Suddenly Kemal realizes what the enemy is truly after. If we don’t stop them, he thinks, the West will take away more than just our land. They will take our women and our pride, our mosques and our manhood.
Kemal turns his gaze away from the deportees. He studies the uniformed men around him like he would a landscape or tapestry, with an eye toward detail. He notices Hüsnü’s clipped fingernails and pomaded mustache, and the way Tekin’s face softens whenever he’s whittling. He sees Mehmet’s grip tighten on his bayonet whenever he speaks of the enemy or death. White knuckles on brown wood grain.
The details give Kemal an insight into the most tender parts of his new friends. His heart aches for them and for himself, and there is a part of him that hopes this war is truly holy and sanctioned by Allah, because how else can they bear it, really?
THE BATTLE IS to take place in Ctesiphon, which lies on the left bank of the Tigris River in the barren Mesopotamian desert, about sixteen miles southeast of Baghdad. Nurredin Pasha, whose hatred for the Greeks and Armenians, any Christians really, will prove to be useful in battle, now commands two other divisions, but they consist mostly of Arabs. Together his men number over eighteen thousand strong. The Arab soldiers are more seasoned. They eye Kemal and the other conscripts with a palpable contempt. Commander Nurredin speaks to the Arabs in their own tongue, which impresses Kemal. He will never reconcile the man’s intelligence wit
h his brutality. It is the first time Kemal has ever seen those qualities contained within a single man.
Kemal follows every order, listens much, and speaks little. He scans faces and landscapes, taking notes and measuring the frailty of friend and foe alike. His eyes, which once only searched for beauty, can now see a target from miles away. The men take to calling him Eagle Eye. When Nurredin Pasha hears of this, he calls Kemal to a private meeting and hands him a Mauser. Unlike the standard issue Turkish rifle and bayonet, it incorporates the clip and magazine into a single detachable mechanism, and although it is unsuited for rapid-fire warfare, the fitted optical sight piece makes it ideal for sniping. It is the only one of its kind in the division, and Kemal promises the pasha he will put it to good use. Secretly, he says a prayer of gratitude, relieved that his hands at least will not be stained with a stranger’s blood. He will not have to hear a man groan or meet his last gaze.
In Ctesiphon, the 130-degree heat of the Mesopotamian desert gives way to the torrential rains of the fall season. Soldiers who for months prayed for water and shade now strive to keep everything from washing away. The men dig from dusk until dawn, creating a continuous embankment along the trenches of the riverbank. Sand bags are piled twelve feet high and moats are dug around each and every tent in camp.
Kemal is stationed three miles south of the main line in an ancient fortress, with a giant arch at its center. Rumored to be the remains of a Parthian capital, it now serves as an observation post. He spends hours, days, and weeks patiently looking through his scope. He imagines a line, smooth and obedient, stretching from his eye to the tip of the Mauser and eventually to the target.
Mehmet the Babe is given the task of positioning an old fez in multiple locations along where the enemy is expected. Kemal blinks, holds his breath, and only when he is sure the bullet is ready, and the line will be drawn perfectly, does he release both his breath and the bullet. Kemal discovers he can make a bullet do things others cannot. The fez is transformed into a mutilated red rag in a matter of minutes. Kemal is told to target the birds instead.
The first time he kills, Kemal weeps over the body of his victim, a yellow-breasted bulbul. He holds the bird in his palm, its one eye staring up at him.
“What in Allah’s name are you crying about?” Tekin asks. “What did you think you were conscripted for?”
Kemal turns away, suppressing his tears.
“What? Did you think you would be immune to tragedy in that big safe arch of yours?”
“He was innocent,” Kemal says, wiping his face.
“We are all innocent,” says Tekin. “Stand up.” His voice is more gentle than usual. “Put the bird down,” he says, placing his hands on Kemal’s shoulders.
“I’d give my left arm to be stationed in that throne of safety you call an observation post. You don’t have to smell and taste death, like the rest of us. But you’re still here to do the same job. Understand?”
Kemal says nothing.
“Do you believe the bit about the virgins?” Tekin asks.
“I’m not sure,” replies Kemal.
Tekin nods. “Well, what about your mother? You are eager to get back to her, am I right?”
Kemal thinks about this. He tries to recall an image of his mother, but she died so long ago. All he sees is his grandmother competing at the loom with Emineh.
“Never mind that. What about a woman? Have you got your eye on a woman?”
Kemal’s face flushes as he remembers Hüsnü’s detailed description of a woman’s body. He thinks of his own innocent sketches of Lucine, of all the parts of her he never knew. The thought makes his chest hurt and his eyes sting. He shrugs Tekin’s hands off his shoulders. “No. There’s no woman,” he says.
“Then why so angry all of a sudden?”
“I’m not angry,” says Kemal.
“The hell you’re not.”
“Fuck off, Tekin.”
Tekin laughs deeply, from his belly. “Fine, I’ll fuck off. You can forget the woman or not, it’s none of my business, but let me tell you something. Here, you are Eagle Eye. You have a job to do and that is to survive.”
I am Eagle Eye, Kemal tells himself, so that one day he can abandon the name and the scope and return to being Kemal again.
CHAPTER 23
Ctesiphon
THE BRITISH ATTACK begins on an especially clear evening in the middle of November, with the kind of night sky made for stargazing. Nurredin Pasha orders the men to form two well-camouflaged lines of trenches crossing the Tigris River. The more seasoned Arab soldiers are placed on the east bank, where the brown water is already rising to meet the land. His friends in the Forty-fifth Division are stationed somewhere on the west bank. But this isn’t the time to think of them.
Eagle Eye is lying flat, with his chest, stomach, knees and feet immersed in the runny shit-colored mud of the earth. His body and rifle are covered entirely by leaves and branches. When he stays motionless, as he is now, even his comrades have trouble finding him. Behind him the din of machine guns and artillery rifles rip through sky, earth and limbs.
He shuts his eyes and listens to his breath. It travels up his chest, to his neck, then back again, until finally it reaches his right index finger. He opens his eyes again. His breath, vision, and rifle become one. Through his scope, he sees two enemy officers standing beside a low table near a mud-covered tent. He knows from the missionaries what a European man looks like, but these men look nothing like what he expected. They are dark-skinned and sport large curving mustaches. Nurredin calls these brown men who are British subjects “Indyan.” The older one wears a turban on his head like those who’ve visited the haj. Any minute now they may place a prayer rug in the direction of Mecca. Nothing about this war makes sense. How can this be a holy war if our allies pray to the Christian god and our enemies look as if they carry prayer rugs? He remembers Tekin’s words. He has a job to do, to survive, and these two would stop him if they could.
The one with the turban points down at what Eagle assumes is a map. They think they are safe. They are not. They stand on a mound of elevated mud, 150 meters away from where he is, and though his rifle is only capable of launching a bullet 120 meters, Eagle isn’t worried. He doesn’t think about the thirty-degree angle of elevation he’s supposed to assume to maximize the distance of his bullets. He doesn’t pay any attention to the kinds of calculations they taught him during training. He simply closes his eye, steadies his breath, and draws a line. A clean line from his eye, to the tip of his rifle, and beyond. Not a straight line but an arc, lovely and pure, only it ends in death.
Eagle releases breath and bullet. The turbaned one doing all the pointing drops to the floor, a privilege due to his higher ranking. There is very little blood. Eagle makes sure of it. The other soldier ducks behind a boulder. He looks around but sees nothing. Eagle stays still. This one will live. He will go back to France or England or wherever his dark-skinned people live, never knowing that a man called Eagle Eye, who once was Kemal, who once loved Lucine, considered killing him.
He continues this way until nightfall, remembering the face of every man he kills, trying hard not to think about who they are or aren’t. More than once, he envies his friends in the trenches. How wrong he had been to think of sniping as a gentler brand of killing. In the trenches, men engage in dozens of fifteen-minute offensives, with every weapon in the division firing collectively in the general direction of the enemy. No one can be certain of the trajectory of his own bullet. And their shared shame or glory is, in Kemal’s view, a much lighter burden to bear.
The brown British advance slowly up the river. The mud rises to their knees, making easy targets of all but the most careful ones. Kemal likens their clumsy bodies to flightless ducks. He marvels at the congruence of ingenuity and idiocy of this race. How can these men, who can’t even navigate their bodies safely across the water, be responsible for the massive battleships and gunboats that float down the river? How have these fools, who cal
l everyone on the Turkish side “Abdul,” managed to build air vessels that glide across the sky, laying explosive eggs all over the land?
Thankfully, their gunboats explode in puffs of dark smoke, eliminated by carefully laid mines in the river. And Kemal is grateful that he need only face these men and not their machines. Though the enemy manages somehow to capture the first line of trenches, it is a small victory. Their dead litter the banks of the Tigris.
Kemal shivers as an errant drop of rainwater trickles down his neck. He wiggles his toes, numb and wet in their ill-fitting army boots. Through his scope, he spots Hüsnü and Tekin. His friends are safe.
He turns around to find the enemy, but they are out of range, moving closer to the river, no doubt in search of water. Dozens are busy loading the wounded onto springless carts. The cartloads of tattered bodies will be bumped to death or killed by the fresh downpour that will inevitably rain on their open wounds, but what is it to him? The enemy is retreating or else taking a much-deserved break.
THE NEXT DAY, Kemal is sleeping in a trench when the sun beats down on his head and wakes him. The familiar call of the bugle is missing, and the screaming sirens of death have gone silent.
“They’re gone,” says Mehmet the Babe. He is washing himself with a British helmet filled with water.
“Have we won?” asks Kemal, removing a branch from his back.
“Glory be to God. Nurredin was about to call a retreat, but it looks like we’ll be chasing the infidels to Kut now.”
“Kut?”
“Toward Baghdad.”
Survival is a strange thing, he thinks. Not as triumphant as he had imagined. Not a thing separate from death but akin to it. And though Kemal is still living, death permeates his every breath. Death floats in the material world, hiding in every sight, sound and smell, until everything is perceived in relation to it.
“Where’s Tekin?” Kemal asks.
Mehmet says nothing.
“Hüsnü?” asks Kemal.
Mehmet points toward the river. “He’s probably combing through the sea of corpses for a new pair of boots,” he says.
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