Birds Without Wings

by Louis de Bernières

  CHAPTER 13

  The Proof of Innocence (2): A Bad Start

  Father Kristoforos awoke suddenly in a sweat of horror. He had dreamed of coming across the distended and deliquescent corpse of once-almighty God, laid out amid the weeds of paradise, attended by tattered and impotent angels. As he awoke, the despair of the angels became the wailing of the dawn muezzin. Appalled, he crossed himself hastily several times and muttered the Jesus prayer as he did so. He rubbed his eyes and gave thanks for having awoken to the indifferent pastel light of a reassuringly chilly and ordinary sunrise as it filtered through the shutters, and understood it as an oblique refutation of what his dream had proposed. “Kyrie eleison,” he said to himself, and shook his head and blinked several times. He rose from his pallet, went outside to relieve himself, and came back in to find his wife Lydia laying out olives and slabs of white cheese and bread on a wooden board. He touched her on the shoulder and said, “Wife, I have just had a very horrible dream.”

  She puckered her lips sympathetically, and tutted. “It’s these pink poppies,” she said. “Ever since the poppies started coming up pink instead of red, everyone’s been having bad dreams. Anyway, you shouldn’t worry. You know what they say: ‘Day denies the promises of night.’ ”

  Father Kristoforos tugged at his beard so that the skin on his jaw stretched pleasantly. “Well, I’d noticed the pink poppies, but I didn’t know about the bad dreams.”

  “You’re in another world,” said Lydia, not unkindly, but a little reprovingly nonetheless. “I don’t suppose you’ve been listening to all the talk. You spend your time reading the works of the Fathers, and you don’t notice what’s going on outside the door.”

  “I like to read the Philokalia,” he said.

  “Don’t I know it,” she replied. “It’s me who has to go out and buy oil for the lamps.”

  “Shrouds don’t have pockets,” said the priest sententiously. “You can’t buy oil when you’re dead, and one should read the Fathers whilst there’s still some hope of salvation. And you know what they say: ‘The ink of the learned is equal in merit to the blood of the martyrs.’ ”

  Lydia smiled and pulled the stalks from the olives. “You’ll go to Heaven, and I’ll be wandering about in Hell, looking for oil at a decent price. And anyway, anyone can quote proverbs in pardon of their own faults. And also anyway, if you know what I mean, that saying isn’t one of ours.”

  “I could have sworn it was one of ours. It’s St. Philotheos of Sinai, or Ilias the Presbyter, or someone like that.”

  “Send a little boy to Abdulhamid Hodja, and he’ll tell you it’s one of theirs.”

  “Well, I might do that, just for the curiosity.”

  “If you were in the wrong, you wouldn’t remember to tell me, would you?” accused Lydia, and Kristoforos patted her cheek in mock reproof. “Probably not,” he said, adding, “And anyway again, this is the first of the month, so, God willing, we won’t go hungry for a while, so you won’t have to moan about the price of oil.”

  The couple sat side by side on cushions on the floor, quietly eating breakfast from the low table. They munched in happy and enjoyable silence, of the kind that grows like a vine through the long years of a good marriage, so that when everything that needs to be said has already been pronounced, it is mutually understood that there is an intimate silence that has its own loquacity.

  In the first years of their espousal, Lydia had stood dutifully and modestly beside and behind him whilst he ate, her head bowed and her hands folded together before her, waiting for him to finish before she took the board away and finished the leftovers on her own, but somehow this custom had slipped unnoticed into abeyance, and now, if ever she hesitated, he simply gestured to the cushion beside him and said, “Eat.”

  It helped that they were childless, for there are no customs to keep up when one is unobserved. To begin with, Father Kristoforos had prayed fervently to St. George for his wife’s fertility, and both of them had tied white cloths to the rusted ironwork of the tekke of the saint. Lydia had bought one tama after another from the silversmith, and, if she had fallen pregnant, would have draped them over the icon of the Panagia Glykophilousa in the Church of St. Nicholas, each tama stamped with the image of a child, but she had only been able to afford pewter ones, and sometimes she wondered whether the Virgin would have taken more notice if she had been able to offer tamata made of gold. She felt mean and unworthy, being too poor to give presents tantamount to the real worth of the Mother of God.

  She had even gone to Ayse, wife of Abdulhamid Hodja, and begged her for some of the tiny slips of paper upon which Abdulhamid daily wrote verses of the Koran for the sick to eat. There were special verses, in which children were mentioned. It was an odd feeling trying to swallow them, but Lydia felt a certain glow of divine comfort when she simply placed the morsels on her tongue and kept them there until they were utterly sodden. During those times it was impossible to talk properly, for fear of dislodging the verse or accidentally spitting it out, so she would wait until she went out hoeing, or gathering wild greens. Once she had even bought a scarab beetle from an itinerant Arab quack, and eaten that. She sometimes shuddered at the memory, and wondered how on earth she had brought herself to do it, let alone buy anything from an Arab. Some people said that when God took the cart of vices around the world, He stopped for a rest in Arabia and the Arabs stole it.

  No amount of praying and petitioning, and no amount of foolproof and foul-tasting potions from the Armenian apothecary had made any difference, and so the couple had gradually ceased to preoccupy themselves. Lydia knew that behind her back she was known as “Lydia the Barren” in order to distinguish her from the other Lydias of the town, but not many of the local nicknames were complimentary in any case, and many were much worse. Besides, there were plenty of children wandering about who needed taking care of, or who would put up with being mauled affectionately, and Lydia had enough nephews, nieces and godchildren to keep anybody busy and confused. She particularly liked to sit them in a semicircle and tell them gruesome stories about beheadings, and people who were ambushed in the Bey Mountains by wolves that kicked up snow in their faces in order to blind them, and then ate out their bowels. Sometimes she and the children set up a wonderful groaning to imitate the way that in autumn Mount Solyma groans in order to summon the elect to paradise, and ignorant passers-by would be thoroughly spooked, unless they heard the ensuing gales of childish laughter.

  With breakfast finished, Father Kristoforos donned his cassock, his cross and his black hat. “Is the veil at the back straight?” he asked, and Lydia came up and arranged it so that the fabric flowed neatly and symmetrically down his back. “Your pigtail is getting tatty,” she said. “It looks like an old bit of rope washed up on the beach.”

  “Well, it can wait. We can do it this evening, before the attendance at the grave. Are you all prepared for it?”

  “Well, the food is ready, except for the few things we can do today, but you know how upsetting it always is. I think that Polyxeni will be heartbroken all over again.”

  “What worries me is whether Rustem Bey will turn up, on account of all the rumours.”

  Lydia huffed indignantly: “Well, those rumours were nonsense, and everyone knows them but no one believes them. That idea that her mother made poison to kill all his family! It’s so stupid! Why would she do that? It’s ridiculous! And who is supposed to have poured the poison down their throats? Nobody! Whoever started all that talk should have their tongue cut out. Everyone knows that they died of the plague that comes back with the haj! And we’ve had to make twice the amount of food because of all the people who’ll turn up out of curiosity.”

  Kristoforos sat on the divan whilst Lydia knelt and slipped his shoes on to his feet. Like most Christian priests, he was broad-bottomed and heavy-bellied, and it was altogether too trying to attempt the task himself. “I am wondering why her brothers and sisters agreed to having the ceremony two years early. You must adm
it, it’s a risk.”

  “A dream’s a dream,” replied Lydia, rising to her feet and tucking a stray strand of hair back under her scarf. “If your mother comes in a dream and tells you to do something, then you have to do it. Tonight everyone will see with their own eyes that the old lady was innocent. Just you wait.”

  “I just pray that nothing happens with Rustem Bey,” said the cleric, shaking his head, and with that he left, armed with two capacious bags sewn out of old kilims. He stepped forth into the early morning, in order to call in on each Christian house in turn, so that those therein might exercise their customary privilege of repaying his spiritual work with gifts less lofty but equally indispensable. Naturally there were those who were coincidentally absent every time he came to their door, and naturally there were those who thought it a suspicious thing that a priest should be coming round to collect offerings from their wives, but for the most part he was popularly esteemed, and in any case he also received quite overt offerings from Muslims who were anxious to hedge their bets with God by backing both camels.

  Kristoforos himself did not like to live more or less as a beggar, and, however effusive the welcome, he inevitably experienced a flushing of his cheeks every time a door was answered. He would cross the threshold right foot first, in deference to local superstition, and would then have to munch his way through the obligatory dainties of the house. Despite his comfortable girth, he did not have much of a liking for sweet things, and he found it difficult to cope with the quantities of lokum, hoshmerim and baklava that were presented to him on brass trays by shy daughters who kissed his hands and cast their eyes to the ground. These small but cumulative hospitalities were the price he had to pay for the good loads of aubergines, tomatoes, hórta, garlic, dried beans, cockerel legs and köfte with which he would return to Lydia a few hours later. “I feel ill,” he would complain, throwing himself down upon the divan and clutching his guts with both hands. “I have eaten enough honey and helva to keep me bilious for a week,” to which she would reply, “Just be thankful that there are so many good people.”

  A further tribulation to the priest regularly danced attendance upon him in the form of the town’s most persistently obnoxious beggar, who plagued him particularly upon the first day of the month, when he had food in his bags. This beggar, like the Dog, had arrived in the town without a history, but it was assumed that he had been cast out of his village and had wandered until he had found a home in Eskibahçe. He had the dark thin face and the remnants of clothing of a Kurd, and so it was thought that perhaps he must have drifted in from the north-east, across the measureless plains of Anatolia and through the cyclopean passes of the Taurus Mountains, in search of a climate where there was no snow in winter, so that one could live a beggar without perishing of cold. Whether he was a Muslim, or a Syrian Christian, or a Yezidi, no one ever knew, for he railed equally against all. He was known simply as “The Blasphemer,” and was quite unable to see either a priest, an imam, or a rabbi, without insulting and abusing them. It was a spontaneous and ungovernable impulse with which he had been afflicted almost as soon as he could talk. Only he knew how much he had suffered the whippings of his father, and the scoldings of his mother and aunts, whose shrill reproofs still orbited and collided inside his head every time he tried in vain to sleep. He lived in doorways, embarrassed and perplexed with himself, avoided by almost all, except by those who found in his novel kind of madness a form of amusement. Mischievous customers in the coffeehouses had been known to fetch him and push him out into the street if either Abdulhamid Hodja or Father Kristoforos were thought to be approaching.

  On this occasion the Blasphemer blocked the priest’s way, and the latter’s heart sank. They came face to face in a steep and narrow alleyway made narrower by Ali the Snowbringer’s patient donkey, which, with freezing water dripping down its flanks, was standing with one hoof poised in a dream, whilst Ali himself carried ice into an adjacent house. Kristoforos saw that peculiar grin, that curious and fanatical twitch of the eye, and shuddered as the Blasphemer grasped his hand, kissed it with what seemed like ferocious sarcasm, and then waved his scrawny arms in his face and yelled, “A cucumber up your arse!”

  “Peace! Peace!” intoned the priest, gruffly, his rubicund cheeks reddening still further, rancour and resentment rising up in his breast.

  “Pastis! Anani sikeyim! Malaka!”

  Kristoforos looked round to see if anyone was listening, and told the beggar: “Look, a fart never broke any flagstones, so why don’t you just keep your mouth shut? Is that so difficult?” He made to shoulder the beggar aside, his head ringing with these insults in two languages, feeling that a day that had begun with a terrifying dream had now been sullied further, when the beggar tugged at his robes, his eyes full of sorrow, and exclaimed, “Sorry! I am sorry, Father, sorry! Son of a whore! Forgive me! Shit from the belly of a sow! Your aunt! Your mother! Forgiveness!”

  Father Kristoforos made the sign of the cross over him, and looked down at him sternly. “You poor wretch!” he growled. “Anyone would think you’d been baptised by a priest from Cephalonia.” He reached into one of his bags and brought out a roundel of unleavened bread, a piece of hard white cheese and a tomato. “Eat,” he said. The Blasphemer threw himself upon the food, scrabbling to take it from the priest’s hands and stuffing it into his mouth.

  Kristoforos proceeded on his way, reflecting that by this act of charity he had taken food out of the mouth of his wife, and wishing that the Blasphemer was more like the Dog, who lived out of the way in the Lycian tombs, or like the other idiots of the town, who just sat in a row on the wall near the meydan, grinning and pissing themselves. He wondered whether Lydia and Polyxeni and her sisters had made enough koliva to eat after the ceremony, and, sighing as he tapped upon the door of the irascible Daskalos Leonidas, he felt his heart grow heavy. He prayed to God that the old woman would be proved innocent, but there seemed little to hope for from such an ill-omened day. He noticed that a bedraggled and desiccated pink poppy was growing out of a crack where the wall of the teacher’s house intersected with the cobbles of the street.

  CHAPTER 14

  The Proof of Innocence (3): Mariora Returns to the Light

  When the evening cooled, Polyxeni, her sisters and her friends toiled up the hill. Lydia bore candles and a flagon of red wine, and the others were bearing large baskets filled with pastries, bread and koliva, covered over with white cloth. The latter they left in the church courtyard, and then they made their way to the cemetery. On the roofs of the houses the newly arrived storks squabbled, courted, constructed nests and rattled their bills at each other, impartially confounding as usual the deathless but demonstrably false proverb that no stork will ever nest upon the roof of a Christian. High overhead a booted eagle whistled melodically as it set its course for the woody foothills of the mountains. The wild tulips of spring stood with bent heads, like cheerful but modest virgins, on the banksides, and rock roses, almost ready to flower, sprouted out of the stony earth around the orchards of olives. All day Polyxeni had been feeling eagerness, excitement and pleasure growing in her stomach, so that she began to glow inside as though she had swallowed sunlight. It was the thought of seeing her mother again after these three long years, as if her mother would be the same, and would come forth and kiss her as she used to do when Polyxeni called in on the way to the market. She had already dug up the flowers that for so long she had watered and tended faithfully, and had given them to the woman who mourned her son.

  Now that the hour was drawing near, however, and the bell was ringing out sadly, she began to feel both dread and horror, horror for the obvious reason, and dread in case her dream had been a deception by the Devil or a djinn. How awful, and what a humiliation and a disaster it would be if her mother, Mariora, turned out to be guilty after all! They would have to bury her again so that Rustem Bey could not take her away and burn her. “I feel sick,” she told Lydia the Barren, as they approached the gate of the cemetery, and s
he leaned on her friend’s shoulder for support. “Don’t worry,” said Lydia, “the amount you’ve been up here, washing her with tears and offering prayers, it’s impossible that even the smallest sin remains.”

  “Look at all these people!” exclaimed Polyxeni. “I’ve never seen so many!” The cemetery was full of women, those in most recent mourning at the grave’s edge, so that it was almost lost in flapping black sleeves and headscarves, and those in lesser mourning forming successive outer rings of less sombre colours, extending even to the low and lopsided cemetery walls, upon which sat or sprawled the little children of the town. Outside the walls stood the solemn rows of Muslim women, who would not enter the sacred ground of the infidels, but who came anyway, to serve their sisters of the other faith. Polyxeni saw her friend Ayse, wife of Abdulhamid Hodja, and raised a hand in greeting. Ayse smiled back wanly, her face full of sympathy and concern. Of the town’s men, there were only Mariora’s three surviving sons, standing self-consciously and uneasily among the women by the grave, feeling like mackerel who have suddenly found themselves swimming with dolphins.

  The crowd parted as Polyxeni, her sister and Lydia the Barren made their way to the graveside. Lydia put down her handful of small candles and the flagon of red wine. She took the spade from one of the brothers, and the other women sat nearby on the ground or on the low kerbs of graves. Some of them began to think of their own sorrows, and others felt curiously detached, as though to keep their emotion for later. Lydia bent down, removed the oil lamp and handed it to Polyxeni, who by now was feeling so nauseous with apprehension, mounting grief, suspense and excitement, that she laid the flat of her hand to her diaphragm and tried to force herself to breathe more calmly. Lydia crossed herself, rolled up her sleeves and raised the spade a few inches above the earth. There was a moment of absolute stillness, as if the world had stopped rolling in the heavens, and then a great sigh rose from the crowd as she drove the blade down and cast aside the first spitful of soil. “I can’t bear it!” cried Polyxeni suddenly, throwing herself to the ground. Lydia drove the spade into the earth again, and one of the women outside the gate broke into ululating song: