Birds Without Wings

by Louis de Bernières

  At the same time Polyxeni, accompanied by Ayse, who had come along for moral support, was knocking on the door of Daskalos Leonidas, bearing in one hand the wicker cage in which the dove captured by the two boys was still turning in idiotic circles. They had also taken the precaution of bringing Philothei, whose prettiness, they felt sure, would be enough to make malleable the heart even of someone as stony as Daskalos Leonidas. Not far away the child Ibrahim pretended to be occupied, as always keeping his protective and proprietorial eye on Philothei. Whilst they waited for the teacher to come, the women poked their fingers into the bars of the hanging cage that held his pet goldfinch, and made sibilant twittering noises at it.

  When Leonidas answered the door he suspected immediately that he was in for another ludicrous episode in which he would have to indulge the wayward ideas of these recalcitrant people. No one, it seemed, ever wanted anything sensible from him. His heart sank when he saw the two women. He hated having to speak Turkish, but in this town nobody spoke anything else, albeit larded with odd offcuts of Persian, Arabic and Greek. He dwelt in a state of perpetual longing for Smyrna, which his memory and his habit of dissatisfaction had embroidered into a fantasy of great civilisation, as if it too were not teeming with every kind of Levantine and Turk. He looked down at Philothei, who was standing on one leg with her arms folded over the top of her head in one of those pointless experiments so beloved of children, and his heart did indeed soften. “What bright eyes,” he thought to himself.

  “Peace be upon you,” said the two women together, and Leonidas, as always, adjusted the spectacles on his nose and demanded, “What do you want? I am rather busy.”

  “A favour,” begged Polyxeni, “just a favour. We have brought you something.” Ayse nudged Philothei, who held out a packet containing some of the honeyed pastries left over from the previous night, and thrust them into the teacher’s hand. Leonidas almost smiled. He had recently read of the latest educational theory from Europe, which was that girls should receive some elementary education because it was mothers who were the first big influence on sons, from which it followed that pupils would be more advanced in their learning if mothers were able to begin the process before they even got to school. Leonidas was forward-thinking in these matters, and it occurred to him how charming it would be if he could teach classes of girls, as long as they were all as irresistible as Philothei. It would give him a chance, too, to teach these future mothers to speak clean Greek, and maybe that would put purer tongues in the mouths of the sons.

  “As I say, I am very busy.” His voice had a crackling quality, as if his throat were full of dry leaves. “What is it, exactly? I hope it won’t take too long.” Without thinking, he reached out and patted Philothei on the crown of her head. She crossed her eyes and skipped to the other leg.

  Falteringly, and with many interjections from Ayse, Polyxeni explained her mission, and even Leonidas was astonished, for this was possibly his most bizarre request yet. “Are you serious?” he asked. “This isn’t some kind of joke? I’ve never heard anything like it.”

  Polyxeni tried to keep her patience, astounded at what this educated man apparently did not know. “Please, please,” she begged, “it’s not a great thing.”

  “You want me to write on this dove?”

  “It’s only a little thing.”

  Ayse and Polyxeni had been hoping to see the legendary chaos of Leonidas’s house, but he disappointed them by telling them to wait at the door. He re-emerged with a pen and a jar of ink, saying, “We can do it over here, on this wall.”

  “I don’t want you to write it in ink,” said Polyxeni firmly. “I want you to do it with this.” She handed over a small, stoppered glass bottle, whose mouth and neck were moulded curiously concave on one side.

  “This is water,” said Leonidas. “I can’t write messages in water.”

  “Just dip your pen and write,” Polyxeni told him. She was becoming quite peeved about his obstructive attitude and vexatious manner, and her eyes were beginning to flash. “It isn’t water, it’s tears.”

  “Tears?”

  “Yes, tears. When she was buried I went every day to the graveside and wept, and these are the tears.”

  Leonidas held the diminutive bottle to the light and could not help but feel a sense of wonder. “Holy God,” he exclaimed, “I had no idea that people still did these kinds of things.”

  “Lots of people do it,” Polyxeni informed him, “but not many get as much tears as I did.”

  “Not many are such good daughters, though they should be, if you ask me, though I’m no one to have an opinion,” added Ayse.

  Shaking his head and sighing through his nose, Leonidas let himself be guided by the two women, who had removed the unfortunate dove from her cage, and had effectively immobilised her. Ayse held the bird’s legs between two fingers, and Polyxeni wrapped her hands around the animal’s body in order to still the wings. The dove craned her neck and peered around desperately, whilst Philothei proferred the bottle in two hands and Leonidas dipped the nib and prepared to write. Polyxeni told him: “Say, ‘Beloved Mother, you can rest in peace now because everyone has seen that you are innocent. Your daughter, Polyxeni, who sends you this message and forgets you never.’ ”

  Leonidas winced, for the message was expressed in an outrageous mixture of dog Turkish and pig Greek. It occurred to him that he could write anything at all, or indeed nothing, and the women would not be any the wiser, but he conquered his instinctive superciliousness, and, dipping the pen several times into the bottle of tears, faithfully transcribed the words on to the back of the bird, albeit somewhat schematically, given the impossibility of writing properly on feathers, and the difficulty of seeing what he had written already. “Can your mother read?” he asked.

  “No,” said Polyxeni.

  “Then how shall she read this?” Leonidas twisted his mouth and raised his eyebrows condescendingly.

  The two women exchanged glances, and then Polyxeni looked at him pityingly. Patiently she explained: “In the gardens on the other side of the river there are those who can read, and one of them will read the message to her.”

  “The writing will be invisible.”

  “The dead can read tears.”

  “I see,” said the teacher, lowering his eyebrows again, and feeling a little embarrassed. He wondered why Ayse had not thought of asking her husband to write the message, since she was married to the hodja, but he was afraid of hearing a long and complicated explanation, so he restrained his curiosity. It would not have occurred to him that she was like all women, who like to keep a side of life secret from their spouses.

  After the two had departed with their captive dove, Leonidas went back inside his house and opened the packet of food. He found a small but very sticky and seductive treasure trove of lokma, tulumba tatlisi and vezir parmagi. His mouth watered, and he settled into his chair. “It’s incredible,” he thought to himself as he crammed the sweet cakes and fritters into his mouth, “these are the heirs of Alexander, and Constantine, and Socrates! And they’re no better than children!”

  Ayse, Polyxeni and Philothei went back to the churchyard, and Ayse waited by the gate as the other two went over to the grave that Lydia had just filled in. Polyxeni told Philothei to open the door of the cage, and before the bird could escape she reached a hand in and carefully brought it out. “Now look,” she said, admonishing it very seriously, eye to eye, “don’t just go straight back to the pines to see your husband and your friends. Go and find my mother, and make sure that someone reads what’s written, and then you can do what you like. And I’ll know if you’ve done it, because one day my mother will tell me in a dream, and if you haven’t done it, there’ll be trouble, and all your little chicks will turn out to be crows, and when you die the earth won’t receive you. Fly well, pretty bird.”

  She kissed the bird on the middle of its back, between the wings, and invited Philothei to do the same. The little girl was surprised, because feather
s are hard and springy even though they look so soft. Polyxeni dropped her hands a little, and then flung the bird into the air. It wheeled skyward, flying higher and higher, and Ayse and Polyxeni waved it Godspeed, calling, “Fly well! Fly well!” Polyxeni jumped up and down, and was jubilant: “She flew east! She flew east! Did you see? She flew east!” A couple of downy breast feathers floated down, and she caught them and told Philothei to look after them, for the sake of the memory.

  With Philothei hanging and swinging between them like a basket, the two friends began to walk back down the hill, chattering and sharing each other’s happiness at how well it had all worked out. As they passed the house of Daskalos Leonidas, Ayse rolled her eyes and whispered, “It’s incredible! A man with that much education, and he didn’t even know about how to get a message to the dead.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Mustafa Kemal, Infantry Lieutenant 1474 (4)

  Far away from Eskibahçe, three hundred miles across the mountains, over Denizli, over Uşak, over Bursa, across the Marmara Sea, Mustafa Kemal enrols in the War College in Harbiye, Istanbul. It is 1899 and the proud young Macedonian who, as a boy, had refused to bend down during games of leapfrog, saying, “If you want to overleap me, you can do it with me standing up,” is now a little nobody from the provinces, as perplexed by the rowdy modernist harlotry of the Christian sector of the city as he is by the medieval torpor and decay of the Muslim parts.

  Life is hard at the college. It is accepted that sergeants can strike the cadets, as long as they address them as “efendi,” and the food is even worse than that of a British public school. No newspapers or books are allowed, Islamic piety is strictly enforced, no alcohol is allowed, and there is fasting at Ramadan. But the Christian part of the city is full of newspapers, bars and brothels. There is the Petits-Champs café, where one can get whisky, there is Yonyo’s, and Stefan’s and Yani’s, all run and frequented by Armenians, Greeks, the improbable riff-raff of the Levant. He makes a friend of Ali Fuat, a cadet of good family, and together they go on boat trips, practise oratory, and bivouac in the woods of the islands. Ali introduces his friend to raki, and Mustafa takes one sip and says, “What a wonderful drink this is. It makes one want to be a poet.” Raki will shape Kemal’s destiny. It will help him to sleep, overcome his shyness, free his inspiration, complicate his relationships and finally kill him. Mustafa Kemal continues to read the works of the great French thinkers, and starts to develop the idea that something must be done to save his country both from the foreigners and from itself. He gets into the habit of thinking so passionately at night that he begins to be persecuted by insomnia. He becomes simultaneously an admirer of Napoleon Bonaparte and John Stuart Mill, taking from the latter the idea that all moral and political action should tend towards the greatest happiness of the greatest number. He graduates as a lieutenant, passes on to the Staff College, and, shamelessly employing the facilities of the Department of Veterinary Science, starts a subversive newspaper whose programme is to expose corruption and abuse of power. His superior officer is detailed to apprehend him, but deliberately turns a blind eye. The Sultan has become a strangely half-baked tyrant, of such self-doubting paranoia and vacillating incompetence, such a self-defeating mixture of conciliatoriness and absolutism, that not even his own officers feel much allegiance to him any more.

  He is commissioned as a captain, and he and some friends rent accommodation in an Armenian’s house at Beyazit. They talk revolution, as young men do, and they accumulate forbidden European books, until one day a friend of theirs who has become one of the Sultan’s vast network of spies betrays them to the police, lures them to a café, and they are arrested.

  Mustafa and his friends are ill-treated, but Ali Fuat tells his interrogators with dignity and aplomb, but with a certain lack of realism, that, since he wears the Sultan’s uniform, no one below the rank of Sultan is entitled to strike him. Mustafa Kemal’s mother is convinced that he is going to be executed, but Mustafa contentedly spends his time in prison writing poetry and reading.

  There is an inquiry, and the authorities are persuaded that Mustafa and Ali Fuat are silly boys who will grow out of their silliness and become good officers with the due passage of time. It is decreed that one should be sent to Adrianopolis and the other to Salonika, and it is left to them to agree which one will go where. They agree so quickly that the authorities find it suspicious, and send them both to Damascus. Ali Fuat and Mustafa Kemal spend their last day in Istanbul drinking whisky, and then an Austrian liner takes them to Beirut. The journey takes all of eighty days, causing one to wonder whether this Austrian liner is being propelled not by engines but by a small school of captive sardines.

  CHAPTER 17

  Of Reading and Writing

  Karatavuk, second son of Iskander the Potter, and Mehmetçik, son of Charitos and brother of Philothei, sat side by side on a rock above the town. They had been sent out to gather tezek, but had spent most of the time spying on the Dog, and throwing stones at a broken bottle that they had set up in the fork of a small almond tree. Now that the bottle was completely demolished, and its green fragments lay glistening and dangerous beneath the tree, the two boys took advantage of their opportunity to waste yet more time.

  The boys tipped a little water from their leather bottles into their bird-whistles, and for a few minutes vied with each other to produce the longest and most elaborate cascades of birdsong. Down in the town the people paused for a few seconds to listen, and the finches and linnets in their cages hopped on their perches and cocked their heads in agitation.

  Tiring of this music, Mehmetçik carefully stuffed his clay robin into his sash, and began to write in the dust at his feet with a stick.

  “What have you written?” asked Karatavuk, intrigued.

  “My names,” replied his friend. “It says ‘Nicos,’ and ‘Mehmetçik.’ ”

  “Which one is which, then?”

  “The longer one is ‘Mehmetçik,’ ‘cause it’s longer, stupid.”

  “Stupid yourself. Why does that one say ‘Nicos’ and that one ‘Mehmetçik?’ ”

  Mehmetçik frowned. How does one explain something as simple as this? “It just does,” he replied at last. “These letters make ‘Nicos’ and these ones make ‘Mehmetçik.’ ”

  “I wish I could read and write,” said Karatavuk.

  “What do you learn at school, then? What does Abdulhamid Hodja teach you?”

  “We learn about the Prophet and his three hundred authenticated miracles, and about Abraham and Isaac and Jonah and Omar and Ali and Hind and Fatima and the saints, and sometimes the big battles of Saladin against the barbarians. And we recite the Holy Koran because we have to learn al-Fatihah by heart.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s the beginning.”

  “What’s it like?”

  Karatavuk closed his eyes and recited: “Bismillah al-rahman al-rahim …” When he had finished he opened his eyes, and mopped his forehead. “It’s difficult,” he observed.

  “I didn’t understand any of it,” complained Mehmetçik. “It sounds nice, though. Was it language?”

  “Of course it was language, stupid. It’s Arabic.”

  “What’s that, then?”

  “It’s what Arabs speak. And it’s what God speaks, and that’s why we have to learn to recite it. It’s something about being merciful and the Day of Judgement and showing us the right path, and if anything is going wrong, or you’re worried, or someone’s sick, you just have to say al-Fatihah and everything will probably be all right.”

  “I didn’t know that God spoke language,” observed Mehmetçik. “Father Kristoforos speaks to Him in Greek, but we don’t understand that either.”

  “What do you learn, then?”

  “We learn more than you,” answered Mehmetçik self-importantly. “We learn about Jesus Son of Mary and his miracles and St. Nicholas and St. Dmitri and St. Menas and the saints and Abraham and Isaac and Jonah and Emperor Constantine and Alexander the G
reat and the Marble Emperor, and the great battles against the barbarians, and the War of Independence, and we learn reading and writing and adding up and taking away and multiplication and division.”

  “Don’t you learn al-Fatihah, then?”

  “When things go wrong we say ‘Kyrie eleison,’ and we’ve got a proper prayer as well.”

  “What’s that like?”

  Mehmetçik screwed up his eyes in unconscious imitation of his friend, and recited: “Pater imon, o en tois ouranis, agiasthito to onoma sou, eltheto i vasileia sou …”

  When Mehmetçik had finished, Karatavuk asked, “What’s that about, then? Is that some kind of language?”

  “It’s Greek. It’s what we speak to God. I don’t know exactly what it means, it’s something about our father who’s in heaven and forgive us our daily bread, and lead us not into temptation, but it doesn’t matter if we don’t understand it, because God does.”

  “Maybe,” pondered Karatavuk, “Greek and Arabic are actually the same language, and that’s how God understands us, like sometimes I’m Abdul and sometimes I’m Karatavuk, and sometimes you’re Nicos and sometimes you’re Mehmetçik, but it’s two names and there’s only one me and there’s only one you, so it might be all one language that’s called Greek sometimes and Arabic sometimes.”

  “I don’t know,” responded Mehmetçik doubtfully. “I suppose we’d have to ask.”

  “Show me my name,” asked Karatavuk suddenly. “Write my name in the dust.”

  “Do you want ‘Karatavuk’ or ‘Abdul?’ ”

  “Put ‘Karatavuk.’ ”

  Mehmetçik scuffed out his own names with his foot, took the stick, and scratched the new name in the dust. Karatavuk gazed at it and felt an excitement, a curious sensation of existing more securely than he had before. He took the stick from Mehmetçik and carefully copied the letters. “Look,” he said proudly, “I’ve written my name.”