Birds Without Wings

by Louis de Bernières

  “He looks at me as if I have just informed him of the death of his mother, and the long and short of it is that finally I agree to come back in another couple of months with the next caravan.

  “So I come back the third time, and now he’s made me a pistol with a rifled barrel and a revolving chamber that takes seven bullets, and the calibre of it is so huge that it would knock over the wall of a house with a single shot. Honestly, I could get my first finger up the barrel. And he’s made a rifle that has a barrel six feet long because he says that it’s more accurate and with a barrel like that you could hit a single ball of rabbit shit from a thousand yards. We go through the whole process again, and he starts crying, and he says he’s an artist and he can’t help being carried away by his creative impulses, and I say, ‘Well, you could say that I am an artist too, but when someone commissions a pot, they get what they ask for, and I do it as well as I can, because the art is just as much in the making as in the conceiving, and a thing doesn’t have to be complicated to be finely made.’ ”

  Iskander paused. “Now I’m going back, for the fourth time, in the hope that finally I’ll get the pistol and rifle I asked for, and I’ve been through all this trouble and inconvenience just because my son had a fight with his friend and made me feel bad about having no gun. I think I have been a fool.” He pointed to the sky. “I think that God is probably up there laughing at me.”

  “Nonetheless,” Ali comforted him, “a man needs a gun to feel completely himself. That’s just the way it is. When you go back your wife will have greater respect for you, and your sons will be proud of you, and when you stroll around the town in the evening, you will be feeling as important as Rustem Bey himself.”

  Rustem Bey smiled at this implied flattery, and Iskander admitted, “I do feel a certain excitement already.”

  Stamos wiped his nose with his sleeve, and said, “That’s a story without an ending. I don’t feel satisfied. You will have to tell us what happens next when we make the return.”

  “I liked the bit where you described the gunsmith,” said Mohammed. “I could just imagine him, with all those gold rings and the plait.” He looked around at his fellows, and asked, “Who’s next?”

  Levon the Sly raised his right hand. “I know the one about the Forty Viziers.”

  “Now that’s the longest story in the world,” exclaimed Iskander.

  “It is if you can remember all of it,” said Levon. “I fear that many of the tales will escape my memory.”

  “I expect we can remind you,” said Stamos.

  So it was that for two days Levon the Sly related the lengthiest story that has ever been composed about the trickery and perfidy of women. Everyone laughed, and no one took the misogyny too seriously, except for Rustem Bey, who fell silent and unhappy, and curiously ashamed. Nonetheless, it was Levon the Sly who won the yataghan, which was perhaps a little ironical, since the Armenian merchant was the only infidel who told a story, and he was the only storyteller there who had no interest in weapons whatsoever.

  CHAPTER 26

  Mustafa Kemal (6)

  Far away from Eskibahçe, past the Dodekanissos and across the Aegean Sea, it is 1907, and Mustafa Kemal is at last back in Salonika, the town of his birth. He finds to his frustration and irritation that his exile in Damascus has spoiled his chances of becoming a leader of the revolutionaries. There is a new Committee of Union and Progress, consisting of people like Tâlat Bey, Çemal and Ali Fethi. They meet in Masonic secrecy, swear oaths on swords and the Koran, and will one day soon become widely known as “The Young Turks.” They are suspicious of Mustafa Kemal, who finds all the hocus-pocus very tedious, and whose Fatherland and Freedom Society becomes absorbed into the new entity. He spends his time inspecting the Macedonian railways, excluded from the seat of action.

  The Sultan sends two commissions to deal with the Committee of Union and Progress, and the leader of the first is shot and wounded. The second apparently seeks conciliation, but there is a young and dashing major who, instead of going to Istanbul to parley, takes his men to the hills. This man is Enver, who is shortly joined by another officer who is an expert in guerrilla warfare. The revolution is openly proclaimed at last, and the Sultan sends troops to deal with it, but they join the revolution instead. The Sultan is forced to restore the old liberal constitution of 1876. The handsome Enver appears on the balcony of the Olympus Palace Hotel, and proclaims the new policy of Ottomanism. There will be no more special privileges for particular ethnic and religious groups, and from now on all obligations and rights are the same for everybody. There is euphoria in Salonika. Rabbis and imams embrace, political prisoners emerge, astonished, into the light. Agents of the Sultan are murdered, and the bodies are spat upon in the streets.

  Enver is just the sort of man that Kemal dislikes. He is a good and respectable Muslim who neither smokes nor drinks, and he is vain and punctilious. Kemal is also envious of his leadership and success, and sees no good coming from it. He sees that Enver is a fine officer in the field, but detects no other quality to redeem him. Mustafa Kemal chafes because he is keenly aware of his own superiority.

  The revolution is a half-baked affair. It has no real plan and no real ideology beyond the intention to restore the empire to its previous strength. The revolutionaries do not comprehend the power and seduction of the new nationalisms. The Christians are not necessarily pleased at having earned the right to do compulsory military service and become free Ottoman citizens, and very soon the Young Turks find that they have accelerated the disintegration of the empire instead of arresting it. Bulgaria declares independence. Crete declares union with Greece. Austria illegally and opportunistically annexes Bosnia and Herzegovina, thereby setting in train the dismal events that will distort the entire course of European history for more than a hundred years.

  Mustafa Kemal sees the chaos, and is more than disgruntled. In the Kristal café, in the White Tower café, in the Olympus café, he complains loudly and bitterly to his brother officers. The Committee of Union and Progress decides to pack him off to Tripoli in order to sort out some local business and Kemal reluctantly agrees to go.

  On the way he disembarks in Sicily, and the local children bombard him with lemon peel and mock his Ottoman fez. He suddenly sees for the first time that the fez epitomises all that makes the empire ridiculous in the eyes of foreigners, and he begins to conceive a hatred of it. One day, when he is dictator of Turkey, he will outlaw it in a fit of illiberality.

  In Tripoli, Mustafa Kemal has to deal both with fractious Arabs and old-fashioned Ottomans who do not acknowledge the authority of the CUP. He browbeats the local pasha, and, characteristically and unfailingly heroic, he goes to the courtyard of a mosque that is the headquarters of Arabs who are planning to abduct him. He addresses the hostile crowds and ladles patriotism and religion over their heads. He threatens them implicitly by emphasising the power of the CUP, but comforts them by promising that this power is for their protection only.

  Mustafa Kemal impresses a sceptical Arab sheikh by tearing up his own papers of accreditation, announcing that his own word is enough and that he has no need of papers, whereupon the sheikh releases from prison the three previous emissaries who had mistakenly relied too heavily upon their own such letters.

  In Benghazi, Sheikh Mansour has overborne the local Ottoman authorities, and Mustafa Kemal thinks up a ruse to defeat him. He gathers the local troops together in the barracks, and proposes to the officers that he should lead them in an exercise. He tells them that they are to imagine that they are an infantry regiment marching to confront an enemy upon the left, but which then receives notice to wheel about and face an enemy on the right.

  In this way, and without anyone suspecting it in advance, Mustafa Kemal surrounds the house of Sheikh Mansour, who is obliged to send out an emissary with a white flag, and a parley is set up. Mustafa Kemal lectures him upon the nature and intentions of the CUP, and in his turn the sheikh gets Mustafa Kemal to swear upon the Koran
that he will not harm the Sultan, the Lord Caliph. It is doubtful in the extreme that Mustafa Kemal would have invested any great seriousness in a Koranic oath, but nonetheless honour is satisfied and order is restored. Mustafa Kemal, his mission entirely accomplished, returns in triumph to Salonika, only to find that the revolution has run aground.

  CHAPTER 27

  The Tyranny of Honour

  Yusuf the Tall loved all his children equally, with a passionate adoration that, when he thought about it, sometimes made him lachrymose. If his life were like a garden, then his daughters would be like the roses growing alongside its walls, and his sons would be like young trees that formed a palisade against the world. When they were small he devoted happy hours to their entertainment, and when they grew older he hugged them until their eyes bulged and they thought that their ribs would crack. He had grown to love his wife too, partly because this is what happens when a wife is well chosen, and partly because from her loins had sprung these brooks and becks of happiness.

  But now Yusuf the Tall did not know what to do with his hands. It seemed as though they were behaving on their own. The thumb and middle finger of his left hand stroked across his eyeballs, meeting at the bridge of his nose. It was comforting, perhaps, for a scintilla of time. There was no comfort longer than that in this terrible situation. Sometimes his hands lay side by side on his face, the tips of his thumbs touching the lobes of his ears. He had thrown off his fez so that they could stroke his hair backwards, coming to rest on the back of his neck. The maroon fez lay in a corner on its side, so that his wife Kaya kept glancing at it. Despite this awful emergency, and the drama in which she was caught up, her instinct was to tidy it away, even if it were only to set it upright. She sat on the low divan, kneading her fingers, biting her lip and looking up at her husband. She was as helpless as one who stands before the throne of God.

  Yusuf the Tall strode up and down the room, waving his hands, protesting and expostulating, sometimes burying his face in his hands. Kaya had not seen him so anguished and begrieved since the death of his mother three years before. He had painted the tulip on the headstone with his own hands, and had taken bread and olives so that he could eat at the graveside, imagining his mother underneath the stones, but unable to picture her as anything but living and intact.

  Yusuf had passed the stage of anger. The time had gone when these patrollings of the room had been accompanied by obscenities so fearful that Kaya and her children had had to flee the house with their hands over their ears, their heads ringing with his curses against his daughter and the Christian: “Orospu çocuşu! Orospu çocuşu! Piç!”

  By now, however, Yusuf the Tall was in that state of grief which foreknew in its full import the horror of what was inescapably to come. His face glistened with anticipatory tears, and when he threw his head back and opened his mouth to groan, thick saliva strung itself across his teeth.

  Overtaken, finally, by weariness, Kaya had given up pleading with him, partly because she herself could see no other way to deal with what had occurred. If it had been a Muslim, perhaps they could have married her to him, or perhaps they could have repeated what had been done with Tamara Hanim. Perhaps they could have kept her concealed in the house, unmarried for ever, and perhaps the child could have been given away. Perhaps they could have left it at the gates of a monastery. Perhaps they could have sent her away in disgrace, to fend for herself and suffer whatever indignities fate and divine malice should rain upon her head. It had not been a Muslim, however, it had been an infidel.

  Yusuf was an implacable and undeviating adherent to his faith. Originally from Konya, he was not like the other Muslims of this mongrel town who seemed to be neither one thing nor the other, getting converted when they married, drinking wine with Christians either overtly or in secret, begging favours in their prayers from Mary Mother of Jesus, not asking what the white meat was when they shared a meal, and being buried with a silver cross wrapped in a scrap of the Koran enfolded in their hands, just because it was wise to back both camels in salvation’s race. Yusuf the Tall regarded such people with disdain. Moreover, it is one of the greatest curses of religion that it takes only the very slightest twist of a knife tip in the cloth of a shirt to turn neighbours who have loved each other into bitter enemies. He had lived serenely among Christians for most of his life, but now that she had despoiled and defiled herself with an infidel, this was the worst in all that tormented him.

  Yusuf stopped pacing the room, and at last called his sons together. His other daughters assembled too, standing silent and cowed at the back of the darkened room.

  When his sons were before him, Yusuf took his pistol from his sash, weighed it in his hand, took it by the barrel, and handed it to his second son, Sadettin. Sadettin took it by the butt, and looked at it in disbelief. At first his voice seemed to fail him. “Baba, not me,” he said.

  “I have tried,” said Yusuf, “and I can’t. I am ashamed, but I can’t.”

  “Not me, Baba. Why me?”

  “You have courage. Great courage. And you are obedient. This is my command.”

  “Baba!”

  Yusuf beheld the spiritual and moral agony of his second son, and the surprise, but he would not relent.

  “It should be Ekrem,” pleaded his second son, gesturing towards the first-born. “Ekrem is oldest.” Ekrem held out his hands as if to push his brother away, shaking his head vigorously.

  “Ekrem will take my place when your mother dies,” said Yusuf. “He is the first-born. You are all used to obeying him. He will be head of the family. It is you who must do this thing.” He paused. “I command it.”

  Father and second son looked at each other for a long moment. “I command it,” repeated Yusuf the Tall.

  “I would rather kill myself,” said Sadettin at last.

  “I have other sons.” Yusuf placed his hand on Sadettin’s shoulder. “I am your father.”

  “I will never forgive you,” replied his second son.

  “I know. Nonetheless, it is my decision. Sometimes …” and here he hesitated, trying to name whatever it is that takes our choices away, “… sometimes we are defeated.”

  Yusuf and Sadettin stood facing each other silently, and at the back of the room one of the girls began to sob. Sadettin appealed to his mother; kneeling before her and taking her hands in his, “Annecişim! Annecişim!”

  Kaya removed her hands from his grasp, and raised them in a small gesture of impotence. She seemed suddenly like an old woman who has turned her back on life.

  “I command you,” said Yusuf the Tall.

  “It will be on your head,” exclaimed Sadettin angrily, rising to his feet.

  “On my head,” repeated Yusuf.

  Sadettin entered the haremlik. It was dark because the shutters were closed, and it smelled comfortingly of things feminine and mysterious. In the corner, glowing and glittering with terror in the half-light, he saw the eyes of his sweet sister, Bezmialem, of all his sisters the most gentle, and the one he loved the best.

  “Sadettin,” she murmured, her soft voice full of resignation. “I thought it would be Ekrem.”

  “I thought it would be him,” said Sadettin.

  She glanced at the pistol, placed her hand on her stomach and looked down. “You will kill both of us.”

  “Yes.”

  “The child is innocent.”

  Sadettin felt the pistol grow heavier in his hand. To himself he thought, “I won’t defile my right hand,” and he transferred it to his left.

  “I am innocent,” said Sadettin.

  “We are all innocent,” replied Bezmialem.

  “You are not.” He felt a sudden surge of anger. He blamed her for bringing down the shame, and for shutting him in this trap.

  “I found something better than honour,” she said, her eyes momentarily shining with happy remembrance.

  “What is better than honour?”

  “I don’t know the name of it. But it is better. It makes me innocent.�
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  Sadettin took his sister’s right hand in his, knelt before her, and touched it to his heart, his lips and his forehead. He kissed it. He tried to suppress his pain, and he bowed his head. “It is not me who does this thing,” he managed to say at last. He said it as quickly as he could, so that the words would not be throttled by sorrow and die in his throat.

  “It is our father who does this,” said his sister. “The injustice isn’t yours.”

  “May God receive you in paradise,” said Sadettin.

  “May I see you there,” replied Bezmialem.

  “May the angels carry you.”

  “And you when the time comes.”

  Sadettin raised himself up and realised that after all he would have to defile his right hand. He transferred the pistol, threw his left arm around his sister’s neck and embraced her. They stood together, trembling. Softly she put her arms around him, as if he were a lover. He felt the soft pulse of her breath on his neck. He placed the muzzle of his pistol against her heart, clenched his eyes shut, muttered, “In the name of God …” and fired. He held Bezmialem to him as she choked and the spasms and convulsions overcame her. He thought that they would never end, and the dread came over him that he might have to go out, reload the pistol and shoot her again. For a desperate few seconds he wondered if it might not be possible to take her to a surgeon and save her. At last her head fell on his shoulder, and finally he let her down gently to the floor. He knelt and kissed her, the arc of his motion so familiar because so akin to the rituals of the mosque, and then he rested his forehead on hers.

  When Sadettin emerged into the selamlik, his shirt was glistening with the dark blood that his sister had coughed up, and it was as if he had become another man. He threw the gun down at his father’s feet in a brutal gesture of contempt, held his father’s gaze, and wiped his hands so roughly together that they made a sound like clapping. “I have defiled my right hand because of you. I am finished with you all,” he said.