Birds Without Wings

by Louis de Bernières

  “I had a cypress in my garden,

  A cypress tall,

  But the north wind blew,

  And my cypress fell

  And my strength was broken too.”

  There was another moment of silence, broken only by the metallic slicing of iron in earth, and then the woman who mourned her son felt words move inside her, both on her own and on Polyxeni’s behalf:

  “Vay! Vay! Vay!

  For death is the camel

  The dark camel

  That kneels at every door.”

  Polyxeni leaned over so far to peer into the grave that Lydia had to push her gently aside. Her spade rose and fell rhythmically. She was working evenly from one end to the other, and sweat was pearling on her brow. She was hoping that Mariora had not been buried too deeply, not just because of the work, but because bodies last longer when they are deeply buried. Shameful as it might be, she was also consumed with the same violent curiosity that had attracted the large attendance of the townsfolk. She felt gravesoil working its way into her shoes and settling uncomfortably and awkwardly between her toes. From time to time she paused to draw breath and wipe her forehead. Perspiration made her clothes cling to her back and to the backs of her legs. She became so absorbed in her task that she scarcely heard the several laments that were now pouring forth simultaneously from the women around, whose passions were transporting them all the more strongly as the spade cut deeper and the heap of ochre soil rose:

  “You are better off than me, even grieving,

  You eat in the daylight and sleep on high …

  Pour water, dissolve these silken threads

  With which you sewed my eyes.

  I want to see you. Pour water …

  I wept for you but the tears burned

  And now my face is black … …

  Pour water …

  I placed a pretty partridge in the black earth

  But took out rotten quinces,

  I planted a rose

  And harvested bones …

  … I want to see …

  Where is our gold and silver?

  All is shadow and dust and damp wood …

  … Dissolve these silken threads …

  I looked down and I understood.

  I said “Who is she that was queen?

  Who was a soldier?

  Who was poor?

  Who is the righteous?

  Who has sinned? …

  … You are better off than me …

  Give me a window for the birds,

  For the nightingales,

  For me to see the new leaves,

  For the children to talk …

  … Now my face is black …

  I’m afraid,

  For now I hear the shovel’s thunder,

  I hear the ring of the hoe …

  … Where is our gold and silver? …

  You gave me kisses like honey,

  But the last kiss was poison and bitter,

  And so was your leaving,

  I kissed you, I bent over and kissed you,

  I tasted the grief on your lips …

  … Give me a window for the birds …

  Bid farewell to these narrow streets,

  Your little feet will never walk on them again …

  She is married to Charos,

  Rise up,

  Your daughter is waiting …

  … Give me a window for the birds …

  Tell me, beloved, how did Charos receive you?

  Charos the Huntsman, dressed in black,

  Charos with the black horse,

  He sits on my knees, his head on my chest,

  When hungry he eats from my body,

  When thirsty he drinks from my eyes …

  … Give me a window for the birds … pour water …

  Rise up,

  Your daughter is waiting.

  … I ask only a window for the birds.”

  Polyxeni trembled, unable to sing at all. She crouched by the side of the grave, watching the spade’s work, reaching down and picking out handfuls of soil, which she crumbled and let rain from between her fingers. She raised one handful to her nose and inhaled deeply, as if she might scent the absorption of her mother’s flesh. From time to time she uttered inarticulate little exclamations, and Lydia would say, “Sing, sister, try to sing, it will unlock your heart.” Suddenly, one of her sisters who was squatting at the other side of the grave pointed, saying, “Look!”

  Lydia stopped. She followed the line of the pointing finger, and saw the first dark brown moist fibres of rotted wood, and the blacker shade of the earth. She laid aside the spade and took up the olivewood spatula that one of Polyxeni’s brothers handed to her. “The skull first,” advised an old woman, as if Lydia did not know by now how these things were done. She began to delve carefully, and felt the implement come into contact with something hard but hollow. She scraped the soil aside, and exposed the bone just above one eye socket. Working gently, she cleared the earth all around, brushing at the relics with her fingers. Polyxeni’s brothers and sisters leaned over and tossed white flowers into the grave. Lydia the Barren crossed herself, and then, very solicitously, she lifted the skull. She wiped the clagged earth off it with her fingers, loosening it from the eye sockets and shaking it out. She lifted the jawbone out of the grave, wiped that with her fingers, pushed a loosened tooth back into its bed, and located the jaw into the skull, which she then laid on a white cloth. Reverently, she held the head before her at eye level, and noted the gapped and honey-blackened teeth that were all that could be said to be reminiscent of the living Mariora. All the singing ceased. In its place there rose a wild and dreadful keening, an animal sound that could have been a herd of wounded beasts immolated in a burning wilderness. It was as if the women had expected to see Mariora as she was before. Lydia kissed the skull upon the forehead, and placed a coin upon the cloth. Finally she handed it to Polyxeni, saying, “You have received her well.”

  Polyxeni was overwhelmed. She touched it three times to her forehead, kissed it fervently and held the dead bone to her cheek as if it were her living mother. Her face contorted with sobs. Her younger sister, equally wrought, struggled to take it away from her, but she clutched on to it fiercely, exclaiming “Alimono! Alimono! Maalesef! Maalesef!”

  Finally she mastered herself, and relinquished her hold. She had devotedly embroidered a white scarf in the preceding month, and this she wrapped around the head, so that it looked like nothing so much as death’s mockery of a living woman. She too placed a coin on the cloth, and then allowed the skull to be passed from hand to hand. She wanted them all to see it so that everyone would know that Mariora had been innocent in her life. The women took the skull and philosophised:

  “It doesn’t matter what you do, we all come to this …” “This is how my mother will be too, one day she’ll die and be exhumed, and this is all there’ll be …” “Day becomes night …” “Ah, if only these bones could speak and bring us news …” “We are like candles that burn in an hour …” “Even the God of Death is scared of death …” “Where are all her troubles now? …” “Death is the veil over all things …” “What use is money and a good house after all? …”

  Polyxeni made her way through the crowd and lifted Philothei off the wall. “Come and welcome your grandmother,” she said, leading the child to the graveside. “Look, she is coming back to see the light for the last time, and get the weight of earth from her chest.” Philothei held her mother’s hand and peered down as, bone by bone, Mariora rose from the grave. The little girl could hardly work out what to think, except that she knew that this was more serious than anything she had ever seen before. She was more fascinated and amazed than horrified, and looked up at her mother in perplexity before casting her eyes down, watching, biting her lip as Lydia lifted out the ribs one by one and placed them neatly on the white cloth that she had laid out at the side of the pit. Philothei could not make any connection between these light, soil-encrusted
bones, and the woman whose face and voice she remembered but dimly, but whose affection and generosity had already entered into the annals of family myth.

  Lydia toiled on, ignoring the stream of advice: “Don’t forget to count the bones …” “… don’t break anything …” “… there are some bones from the hand over there, look, the little ones, don’t lose them …” “… there was a gold ring …” “… there was a silver cross …” “… take out the feet bones before the leg bones, and that way you won’t lose them …”

  When the remains were perhaps half exhumed, there was a buzz in the crowd, and all faces turned towards the gate, for there stood Rustem Bey. His hair and moustache were freshly oiled, his cheeks were recently shaved, his bearing was proud, his scarlet fez was well brushed, his boots were gleaming with new polish, and in his sash he carried his silver-handled pistols, his yataghans and the knife that he had taken from Selim. There was a deep silence. Suddenly he strode forward, knowing with unthought certainty that everyone would step aside and make way. He stopped by the graveside with an abruptness and precision that was almost military, and looked down intently at the bones.

  Polyxeni was incensed by a righteous rage, the rage that had eaten away at her for thirty-six months as rumours had circulated and counter-circulated. She seized the skull from the hands of the woman who nursed it, and held it aloft, above her head. She went over to the wall and paraded it back and forth before the Muslim women, strutting in a bold passion, and shouting out as if in accusation: “Is this the head of a poisoner? Look! Only three years, and already the earth has received her! The earth has not refused her! The earth has taken her in! Only three years!” She wheeled triumphantly and thrust the skull in the faces of the women inside the yard, hasting from one to the next. “Do you see flesh?” she demanded. “One scrap of skin? One wisp of hair? Do you see one trace of eyes and lips and tongue?”

  With all the courage and confidence of her indignation she stopped before Rustem Bey and let him see the head, defying him. “Clean! Clean!” she screamed, almost hysterical. “Clean as a rock! Clean as the snow! Innocent! Innocent!”

  Rustem Bey held out a hand as if to receive the skull, but Polyxeni snatched it away. He reached into his sash, and brought something out. He looked at Polyxeni levelly. “I always knew that your mother was innocent, and for that reason I have brought this purse, as my contribution. Use it well, in memory of your mother, who was a good woman. And let us have no more bad blood.” He turned and scanned the assembled people, raising his voice: “Wasn’t it enough that I should lose all my family in the plague? Wasn’t it enough that Polyxeni Hanim and her brothers and sisters should lose their mother? It’s a mean-spirited and ignorant people that rubs salt and sand in other people’s wounds with all these stories of poison and conspiracy! No more stories! No more bad blood!”

  Rustem Bey gestured towards the grave. “This was a good woman,” he announced, simply. He picked his way back through the crowd, and left. Now that they had been reproved by their aga, the people seemed unable to look each other in the face and think of something to say. He had called them “mean-spirited and ignorant,” and this stung like lemon in a cut. Only Polyxeni and her siblings were pleased, although they wondered why it was that an infidel pasha as important as Rustem Bey should have come to make a speech in their defence, and give them a purse of money. People had been saying that his disappointments and misfortunes had made him long for something more profound than money and domination, and perhaps this new decency was a proof.

  Father Kristoforos processed slowly towards the cemetery, hoping beyond hope that the bones disinterred by his wife would have turned out to be clean. It would be a sign of God’s goodness, after so many sinister omens, the pink poppies and the bad dreams, if all bitterness, suspicion and vendetta could be nipped in the bud. He stopped behind an oleander bush and surreptitiously took the precaution of spitting three times in order to avoid ill luck. In one hand he bore a great lighted candle, and in the other he swung his censer, whose fumes of frankincense spread calmness and serenity through the still air, and whose bells jingled like those that Abdulhamid Hodja tied to the neck of his horse. Kristoforos was always afraid that the charcoal in the censer would fail to light, or go out, and the tension that he felt at this moment was at least partly due to this mundane struggle with that most unreliable of the elements. He passed Rustem Bey striding down the hill, and was relieved when the latter announced curtly in passing: “She was innocent, praise God.”

  At the gate he asked one of the women: “Are we ready yet?” and upon being answered in the affirmative, he walked with slow dignity towards the grave, casting clouds of incense all about him. The small candles were handed round, and the first one lit from the taper that the priest bore in his right hand. Soon, just as the afternoon light was beginning to fade and the Evening Star emerging, the graveyard was glistering with tiny lights.

  “Everlasting be your memory, O our sister,” recited Father Kristoforos. “Our sister who is worthy of blessedness and eternal memory. Through the orisons of the Fathers, Lord Jesus Christ Our God, have mercy and save us. Amen. Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy upon us.”

  He received the flagon of red wine that Lydia passed him, and solemnly poured it over the skull and the heap of bones, making the sign of the cross with it three times. The wine, washing motes of soil from the bones, spread out into the white cloth like a bloodstain, and Kristoforos continued, “You shall sprinkle me with hyssop, and I shall be clean. You shall wash me, and I will be whiter than snow. The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof, the world and all that dwell therein. You are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

  As the people washed their hands and left the cemetery, their ears ringing with the priest’s sonorous liturgical Greek, Lydia the Barren tied the bones up into a neat bundle. She gathered it into her arms and went alone, the bones clattering and scraping together as she walked, down through the winding alleyways to the lower church, the one where the owl lived on the beams, and behind which was the ossuary. It was a simple stone structure partially excavated into the hillside. The doorway was open to the air, and at one side were steep steps leading down to a large subterranean room, where, against the back wall, were stacked the accumulated bones of the Christian dead. They rested upon each other in their cloth bundles, but at the lower layers, where the fabric had rotted away, the old bones had tumbled and mingled promiscuously together so that nobody knew any longer whose bones were whose. It smelled of damp and cold, like a cave, and candlelight flickered sorrowfully upon the darkening and softening remnants of those whose lives had passed beyond. Lydia laid down her burden in its place, adjusted Mariora’s cleaned and unjointed skeleton where it lay between that of a child and that of an old man, sighed, crossed herself and left.

  By the time that she returned to the churchyard of St. Nicholas, most people had already received their dole of food. Small cups of red wine had been tossed down throats that only a brief time before had been constricted with emotion, and Mariora’s relatives had handed round the koliva, rich with cinnamon and raisins, and the pastries and sweets. Each person licked honey from a spoon in order to sweeten away the recent bitterness of death, thinking of Mariora, and saying, “May God forgive her.” The poorer women hovered, attempting to appear busy, waiting to take away the surplus to their families, because even the living, when they are hungry, do not despise the sweetmeats of the dead.

  The close relatives and friends soon departed in a pack to the house of Polyxeni and her husband Charitos, there to be filled with coffee, raki and sweet delicacies served up on trays by Philothei and the other little children, wide-eyed with worry about whether or not they were doing it all properly. Quietly the guests conversed about the cleanness of the bones, about how well it had all gone, and about the dramatic intervention of Rustem Bey, and then they left, bidding farewell to the family, and saying, “You have received her well, yes, very well indeed. May you live
long. Patience and courage, patience and courage.”

  It was agreed on going home that the exhumation had been a good one, that the food and wine had been generous and of great quality, that the amount of money collected had been wondrous, not least because of the munificence of that infidel, Rustem Bey, and wasn’t it probably wrong to accept his charity on a Christian occasion, and wasn’t it an unwonted thing for an infidel to step out boldly on to Christian ground. One woman said that the corpse’s shoes and graveclothes had not rotted properly, and that must mean something, and it might be because Mariora’s father had died leaving debts, and may Mariora rest in paradise.

  CHAPTER 15

  The Proof of Innocence (4): The Message to Mariora

  The following evening Lydia the Barren returned to the ossuary and lit a candle for Mariora. She then trudged up the hill to the graveyard, pulled a shovel out of the undergrowth where she had hidden it in a neglected corner, and began to refill the grave. Into the hole she shovelled the flesh-eating earth, along with the stubs of candles and the forlorn remains of the exhumation’s flowers. “Ah, Mariora,” she sighed, “I wish you sunshine and good roads.” She stood and let the declining sun press its warmth into her face, promising herself that she would remember this moment because who knows when the sun will rise again.