Birds Without Wings

by Louis de Bernières

Rustem Bey found it hard to concentrate on the sights around him, because his boatman was engaged in the sort of inconsequential monologue that everywhere in the world passes for friendly conversation among such people, rendered curiously stilted and unbalanced by the deep breaths that he drew before each stroke of the oars. The boatman himself had the shoulders and arms of a titan, the skin of a disused waterbag, the moustache of a hog, and the pointed ochre teeth of an inveterate smoker and drinker of highly sugared tea. His black eyes squinted out from beneath beetling eyebrows, and his nose, which must at some time have been flattened in a fight, was like a small aubergine that has been bruised by a passing mule and left in the road for the birds.

  “… so,” he was saying, “this is my uncle, this is, he goes into his neighbour’s house and he says, ‘I feel dizzy, I’m so hungry, you couldn’t spare me a little nibble, could you? My wife’s out and I don’t know where she keeps the food,’ and so this neighbour says, ‘How about a bit of chicken?’ and so my uncle says, ‘That’ll be fine,’ and so he eats two legs of chicken, and the neighbour says, ‘How about some potatoes?’ and my uncle says, ‘That’ll be fine,’ and so eats this heap of potatoes, and then the neighbour says, ‘How about some bread?’ and my uncle says, ‘That’ll be fine,’ and he eats three or four pieces, and then the neighbour says, ‘How about some baklava?’ and my uncle gets all annoyed and says, ‘Do you think I’m a pig or something? I said I only wanted a nibble.’ Well, that’s my uncle for you, that is, that’s just what he’s like, he’s a cantankerous ungrateful old piç, and that’s for sure, and my father says he doesn’t know why God punished him with such a brother …”

  “Yes, yes, how interesting,” interjected Rustem Bey at appropriate points, as the boatman changed seamlessly from one topic to another.

  “… so there’s this old lady and she’s up in court testifying, and the kadi is trying to work out what date she’s talking about, and he asks her, ‘When did this happen, exactly?’ and she says, ‘I can’t be sure, but I do know that we were eating okra,’ so the judge says, ‘Well, it must have been July or August then,’ and she says, ‘Well, I’m not sure about that,’ and he says, ‘Well, it must have been; are you sure it was okra?’ so she says, ‘Yes, I’m sure it was okra,’ so he says, ‘Well then, it must have been July or August because that’s when the okra comes in,’ and she scratches her head and says, ‘Yes, but this okra was pickled,’ so anyway, they never did get that one sorted out.”

  “How interesting,” repeated Rustem Bey, beginning to feel nervous and dubious about what he was about to do when he got to the other side. It was impossible to collect himself whilst enduring the boatman’s disorientating verbal bombardment. Finally he leaned forward and asked, “If I pay you twice the fee we agreed, would you be quiet for the rest of the trip?”

  It was useless, however, for after a few moments’ silence he was told a story about a Greek who ate a lethal herb, which expanded in his stomach so greatly that ultimately he exploded and died, although apparently not before bidding a philosophical farewell to his relatives, and dictating a will in which he forgave his wife for serving him the lethal herb, since it had been a genuine accident, but even so the wife committed suicide because of the remorse.

  As soon as they had scrambled up the ladder to the quay on the other side, Rustem Bey and his servants found themselves besieged by a ragged horde of street urchins. Some fifteen smutty-faced and snotty-nosed gypsy children swooped upon them like a flock of jackdaws upon a carcase, clamouring for coins or for errands to run. Rustem Bey kept his hands firmly upon his purse and, through the thicket of waving hands, searched for one face that looked open and honest. Finally he pointed: “You,” he said.

  The appointed child, a twelve-year-old boy with a confident air and a rent in his shirt that was pulled together with a zigzag of string, led them away from the harbour. Rustem addressed his servants: “Keep your eyes open. Keep your hands on your knives. Don’t look nervous. Puff out your chests. Walk slowly. Look people in the eye but don’t hold their gaze too long. Don’t smile.”

  Rustem Bey himself kept his left hand upon the inlaid hilt of one of the pistols that he had placed conspicuously in his sash, and with the forefinger of his right hand he smoothed his moustache, as if in thought. Thus he overlaid his inner anxiety with a thick carapace of outer calm.

  They entered the lowly streets of Galata. The respectable Muslims of Scutari, on the other side of the water, used to like to whisper in prurient and self-righteous tones that in Galata there lived the worst kinds of Greeks. Here there were pimps and whores, card-sharps, confidence tricksters, counterfeiters, cutpurses and pickpockets, one-legged blind alcoholics, opium addicts, unemployable sailors, abortionists, charlatans, fortune tellers, sexual deviants, poison-makers, false prophets, beggars with sham disabilities, prodigal sons and dissolute daughters, deserters, contract murderers, illegal distillers, foul-mouthed sluts, footpads, procurers, tax officials and thieves.

  The boy led the three men through streets so squalid that Rustem Bey once more felt impelled to pour lemon cologne upon his handkerchief and walk with it held to his nose. Emaciated dogs squabbled with naked infants and pigs over heaps of rubbish, offal and excrement. Prostitutes, filthy, flaunting and inebriated, howled and catcalled from the doorways and balconies. Tattered chickens with bleeding rumps scratched in the gutters. A dead cat lay swelling on the cobbles, circled by crows. Rats preened their whiskers in the cornerways. Shutters and doors sagged from their rotting frames on broken hinges, roofs patched with packing case and cardboard caved gently in upon their beams, and dead-eyed drunks swerved along the straitened alleyways or slept stupefied in the gutters, their mouths working soundlessly, their chins flecked with spittle. “At least,” thought Rustem Bey, “there is no one here who will have to endure the pains and troubles of growing old,” but it was so grim that he found himself thinking that there was nothing to do with such a place, except burn it to the ground and start again. He gave thanks to God that it had not been his destiny to live in such a hell of desperation, filth and iniquity, but it did not yet strike him as paradoxical that he had come here in order to seek his happiness.

  CHAPTER 33

  The Circassian Mistress (3)

  The gypsy boy led them down a tight alleyway, and pointed wordlessly to a doorway that was partially sunken below the level of the stones outside. Rustem Bey looked at the building, and noticed that although the walls were particoloured, and pocked with what appeared to be bullet holes, it was in better condition than those that neighboured it. A musky odour seemed to emanate from it, and from within there came the cheerful sound of someone plucking an oud. He heard the laughter of a young woman, and the tinkle of something brassy being dropped to the floor.

  Wordlessly, the boy held out a grubby hand, palm upward, and Rustem Bey pressed a coin into it. “Stay here,” he said, “I will need you to guide us back.”

  On the door was a knocker in the shape of a small hand holding a ball, and he raised it on its hinge with some trepidation. Back home only the Armenians had door knockers, and having to use one gave him the same kind of misgivings that one might have upon mounting a horse for the first time.

  The grille opened, and a pair of dark eyes peered out, heavily made up with kohl. “Who is it?” demanded a curiously strangulated voice. “I’m very busy just now, and I can’t go wasting my time.”

  “I have come about … something,” said Rustem Bey, his cheeks colouring.

  “Everyone comes about something, my aga. What might this little something be?”

  Rustem had the distinct impression that he was being teased. “I was recommended to come to you by one of the attendants in the hamam. He said I was sure to find … what I was after.”

  “Oh, those hamam boys, they’re just so mischievous,” said the voice, and the eyes rolled theatrically, framed as they were by the grille. “The things I could tell you! Still, I don’t know what we’d do without them.” The eyes examin
ed him for a moment, and then the strange voice said, “Oh well, I suppose you look like a reasonably decent proposition. You wouldn’t believe the dreadful riff-raff we get turning up here sometimes. You’d better come in.”

  The bolt was drawn back, and Rustem Bey told his servants and the gypsy boy to stay where they were. Down the steps he went, holding on to his new fez so that it was not knocked off by the lintel, and found himself in a surprisingly well-appointed room whose walls were hung with heavily made carpets of no mean manufacture. Oil lamps fixed to the walls spilled a dim, reddened light, and in the centre of the floor stood an ornate brass brazier which gave off the scent of charcoal and olibanum. The floor was thick underfoot with kilims laid across each other more or less at random, and cushions and low divans lay about the floor in a kind of ordered abandon. A large and ornate narghile stood by the brazier, with four tubes inserted into its bowl.

  Rustem Bey removed his boots and placed them carefully by the steps, alongside three small pairs of Moroccan slippers, and one pair that seemed absolutely enormous.

  This latter pair belonged without doubt to the creature who stood before him. This epicene person was stupendously tall and thin, and was garbed in richly embroidered robes of green and crimson, and an oversized white turban pinned at the front with an enamelled golden brooch in the form of a peacock. The face was pale but heavily rouged, and the thin lips were painted bright scarlet, in such a way as to make them seem fuller than they were. The eyebrows were plucked, and just at the point of showing stubble where they were beginning to regrow. What struck Rustem Bey particularly was a very large and prominent Adam’s apple that seemed quite out of place in one whose every care was quite clearly to manifest and emphasise the trappings of femininity.

  “Do sit down,” she said, “I shall just nip inside and alert the girls. They’ll be so excited, I can’t tell you. Mind you, they always are.”

  When she returned she stood for a moment looking at her guest, with her hands folded and her lips pursed. Then she produced a pouch from the folds of her robes and bent down to fill the bowl of the narghile, saying, “I expect you’d like a smoke, wouldn’t you? It’s quite a trip on those horrid boats, and as for these streets, well, horrid’s not the word, is it? I don’t know how I bring myself to live here, I really don’t. I used to be in Scutari, but the local people, what prigs! Honestly, it was impossible. They’d be banging on the shutters, throwing stones, they were such animals. And I’ll tell you something else, those very same people banging and throwing stones in daylight were the ones who came back at night hoping for a dip into one of my girls. The hypocrisy! It makes you sick. At least the scum around here know that that’s what they are, so that’s a good thing, isn’t it? I do hope you’re not a hypocrite, my aga, because if you are, I can’t be doing with you.”

  Rustem Bey was much disconcerted by this bizarre and garrulous stranger. He was used to a stiff and carefully patterned formality in his dealings, and always felt uncomfortable to find that there were other worlds than his. He fumbled in the pockets of his Stamboul frock coat, and found the amber mouthpiece that he carried with him. He inserted it into one of the tubes, and sucked as, with a pair of small tongs, his host held a glowing coal to the bowl of tobacco. “Well, that’s something,” she said, “a real gentleman always brings his own mouthpiece. You’ll be surprised at the number of slovens who turn up here and expect us to let them slobber on ours. Makes you sick, it really does. I like to call myself ‘Kardelen,’ by the way. It’s such a pretty little flower, and I was born right at the end of winter, and when you see them peeping out you always know that spring’s not too far off.” She added, “Where I come from, anyway.”

  “It is indeed a lovely name, Kardelen Hanim,” agreed Rustem Bey, who had never seen a snowdrop in his life, and had not a clue as to what she was talking about. He puffed on the pipe, and detected a taste that was unfamiliar, but not unpleasant. His head began to swim a little, and he blinked his eyes.

  One wall of this room was a false one, and behind the hanging carpets three young women, stifling their giggles, listened, whispered excitedly and watched through three strategically placed holes.

  Kardelen threw herself with some dramatic skill down on to a divan, and smiled playfully at Rustem Bey. “Tell me about yourself. You are rich, I hope. I never allow my girls to be taken into poverty. Their welfare is always uppermost in my mind, you know. One gets so fond of them, they become like one’s own daughters, and it would break my heart, it so much would, if any of them ended up in the gutter, or in a brothel, God help us.”

  “I have a very large amount of land,” Rustem Bey told her, embarrassed by the reference to brothels. “I have many servants, and I employ a considerable number of people in my town.” He paused and added, “I have a great number of clocks.”

  “And where would your town be, my aga?”

  “Beyond Smyrna. The nearest large town is Telmessos, but my town is large enough. We have everything. It is very peaceful.”

  “Not too peaceful, I hope. None of my girls cope with boredom, you know. Too much peace can be so tedious, don’t you think? Absolute peace is altogether too much like death, in my opinion.”

  “It’s a town like any other. It’s very old, it’s mainly on a hillside, we have a river below in the valley, and the sea is just over the hill. Let me see. There is a beautiful pine forest that you ride through when you approach it, and we Muslims bury our dead among the trees. It’s a nice thing to see those whitewashed graves among the trees. When you see them you feel you have at last come home.”

  Kardelen shuddered archly. “Oh no, don’t. Please let’s not talk about graves. It makes me feel so … so mortal. What else is there, apart from graves?”

  Rustem Bey struggled to think. “Well, we have lots of Christians, you know, the Greek kind, but they’re quite harmless, and most of them don’t even speak Greek, and we have some Jews doing the usual things that Jews do, and we have some Armenians—the apothecary is Armenian—and we have nomads at harvest time, and all the pedlars who go to Telmessos come to us too. We have a fine mosque.” Here Rustem Bey hesitated. “I have sworn an oath that if I find a good woman here, I will build another mosque.”

  “Forgive me,” said Kardelen, delicately, “but it strikes me as surprising that you don’t have a wife. I mean, a man in your position …”

  “I have a wife,” said Rustem, “but I have put her aside. She was a slut.”

  “My aga, a good slut is not to be sniffed at,” said Kardelen, and before Rustem Bey could think about this, she asked, “You are divorced?”

  “No, but I have put her aside.”

  “And your family have found you no one else?”

  “My family are all dead. It was the fever that comes back with the haj.” At this moment a young black woman appeared as if from nowhere with a tray upon which there were two small glasses of coffee. She placed it on the low table between them, and vanished just as neatly as she had arrived.

  “Oh yes,” observed Kardelen drily, “God reaps a goodly harvest from the haj. Every year He looks around paradise and finds literally thousands of new recruits, all in green turbans. So becoming.”

  “Who was that?” asked Rustem Bey, ignoring Kardelen’s last remark, and tossing his chin in the direction that the girl had taken.

  “One of my girls. So, tell me, what exactly have you come here for?”

  Rustem Bey flushed, reached for his glass of coffee and, avoiding Kardelen’s gaze, said, “I have heard very good things of Circassian women.”

  The black girl behind the carpet pouted and whispered, “He won’t want me then. Damn, he’s so sweet!”

  “He’s too serious!” whispered the Arab girl with the merry face. “You need a man who laughs.”

  “But he’s so lovely,” whispered the ebony girl with the satin skin. “I could go all night with him! Every night, believe me!” She rolled her eyes and puffed out her cheeks.

  The two other girl
s put their hands to their mouths and pretended to be shocked. “You’re such a little fitchet,” said the one with porcelain skin and long black hair, “you’d probably make him die of exhaustion.”

  The black girl put her finger to her lips, and they nudged each other and stifled their laughter as they continued to eavesdrop.

  “Circassian women,” repeated Kardelen. “Round faces, pale as the moon. I suppose you know that story about why so many women wear the veil? It’s rather droll.”

  “I might have heard it,” replied Rustem Bey, “but it escapes my memory.”

  “Oh, it’s such fun!” Kardelen leaned forward, as if imparting a confidence. “The story is that when the capital was still at Bursa there was a positive invasion of Circassians because those Russians, dreadful people, such rapists and drunks, were persecuting Muslims again, and anyway they all arrived in Bursa seeking sanctuary, and the women were so beautiful that all the local men fell in love with them, and every night there were such brawls and arguments and murders because of the men squabbling over the beautiful Circassians! So one day the Sultan, I forget which one, they’re all equally mad, summons the leader of the Circassians, and says to him, ‘You’ve got to tell your women to cover up their faces, because they’re so beautiful that there isn’t any peace around here any more.’ So the leader tells the women to cover up because the Sultan Padishah wants all the fighting to stop. So the women cover up, and then all the other women cover up too, and do you know why? It’s out of vanity! It’s because they want everyone to think that they’re beautiful as well! So all the old hags start to wander about in the marketplaces pretending to be too beautiful to show their faces! It makes you laugh, it really does. Still, it has spared us from having to look at all the ugly women all this time, so some good came out of it after all. Where were we?”

  Rustem Bey had listened to the end of this story with some unease, since he had had direct experience of what ugliness might be hidden beneath a veil, and was not sure what to say next. Finally he offered, “I think I might have heard that story before, but I had forgotten it.”