Birds Without Wings

by Louis de Bernières

  (“He’s so solemn!” whispered the Arab girl behind the hanging carpet.)

  Kardelen sipped her coffee coyly, and continued. “Of course, there probably isn’t one little iota of truth in it. The best stories are always lies, I find.”

  (The white-skinned girl sighed, and whispered, “I think he might be just what I need. He’s so handsome! And gentle too!”

  “You’re so lucky,” whispered the black girl.

  “If he chooses me.”

  “He couldn’t resist you,” said the Arab girl, “nobody can.”

  The fair one pulled a grimace. “That last one was a nightmare. If he ever finds me, I’m going to kill myself.”)

  Kardelen sipped at her coffee again, adopted a confiding expression, and said, “I do happen to have a Circassian girl.”

  (“Completely brazen!” whispered the black girl.)

  “It’s such a sad story too,” said Kardelen.

  (“Hark at this!” whispered the Arab.)

  “Her father was a bandit, quite a notorious one, and you know what these Circassian bandits are like. They keep their sons and teach them to be brigands, and the daughters they give away to be brought up by someone else, and then they come back for them when they’re ready to get married off. Well, in this case the bandit got killed by the gendarmes, and no one ever came back for poor little Leyla.”

  (“Leyla?” repeated the fair one. “Is that what I’ve got to call myself?”

  “Well, you can’t call yourself Ioanna if you’re going to be Circassian,” whispered the Arab.)

  “Poor little Leyla!” continued Kardelen, emotionally. “Fragrant as a rose, sweeter than the apples of Nevsehir! Intoxicating as the honey of Pontus!”

  (“Brilliant!” whispered the black girl.)

  Rustem Bey began to feel even more strange, and wondered if there was something odd about the tobacco. He was experiencing a pleasant but disorientating light-headedness, a kind of unbalanced serenity. “Might I see the young woman concerned?” he asked.

  Kardelen leaned forward and touched his knee with her hand. “If only you saw her naked …”

  “Is such a thing possible?” asked Rustem Bey, much to his own surprise. He was abruptly overcome with such shame that he looked about the room, as if to check whether anybody else had been witness to it. Stronger than his shame, however, was his animal instinct, and stronger even than that was the common-sense determination that if he was going to disburse an enormous sum of money to this loquacious androgyne, he would make very sure that the goods were worth the expense.

  Behind the hanging carpet, the fair one with the black hair cursed under her breath and whispered vehemently, “God, I hate it when I have to do this! I never get enough warning!” She slipped away as silently as she could, and the other two girls exchanged glances of amused complicity.

  “It so happens that Leyla likes to be naked when she’s in her room,” said Kardelen, raising one eyebrow and shaking her head salaciously, “and I happen to know where there’s a little chink in the hangings.” She took Rustem Bey’s hand, and he found that he was unable to resist her. It was as if he had been mesmerised into docility. He stumbled after her, still holding on to her bony fingers, and shortly afterwards found himself most uncomfortably bent double, peering into a poorly lit but richly furnished chamber through a knot-hole in the planking.

  Inside, he beheld the marble-white form of a young naked woman, reclining on her cushions, apparently absorbed in combing out her long, shining black hair. Occasionally she puffed delicately on a very slim cigarette that she held to her lips by means of a small pair of ornate silver tongs. Languidly the young woman moved, and Rustem saw her round plump breasts, the gentle mound of her stomach (whose navel was embellished with a blood-red garnet set in silver), the graceful curve of her neck, and the sensual tapering of her thighs. Conquering his better inclinations, he tried to see what there was at the apex of her legs, but her pose and the shadows made it impossible. He felt short of breath. He had never seen his own wife Tamara as naked as this. He had never really seen her naked at all. He suddenly realised, with a sense of profound wonder, that he had never appreciated before how beautiful a woman was, and how strange and unlike anything else this beauty was. He found himself wondering with a pang whether Tamara had been beautiful like this. He was borne in upon by a disturbing sense of the sacred.

  The young woman moved on to her belly in order to polish her nails, and Rustem took in the pert roundness of her backside and the quick contours of her back. He saw how small her feet were, and that she had a gold chain about one of her ankles, but most of all he saw how full of life she was, how much she seemed to glow with inner light, how little she was akin to the oxen-like women who worked in his field and drudged away their unavailing lives in Eskibahçe. He backed away from the wall and returned silently to the antechamber.

  “Sit down,” said Kardelen, and Rustem Bey sat down. “I have seen what I should not have seen,” he said, his voice weak and uncertain.

  “You poor thing,” drawled Kardelen, her voice expressing both sympathy and sarcasm. She always found it very tiresome when people’s niceties and scruples got in the way of pleasures or beauty, but she realised that Rustem Bey was in a state of some perplexity.

  “As you can see,” said Kardelen, suddenly becoming businesslike, “she is the ideal of beauty. Her face is slightly oval, her skin is very fine and white, her eyebrows are black and meet in the middle, her lips are very red and fresh. She is neither tall nor squat. Furthermore, she plays the oud very delightfully, and she sings. She makes coffee as well as any girl I have ever known. She is educated reasonably well, and I have myself taught her everything she could possibly need to know about how to please a man.”

  Rustem Bey looked worried. “She is a virgin?”

  Kardelen smiled indulgently. “Well, naturally she is a virgin, my aga. She is as virgin as the day she was born, and no one can be more virgin than that, not even Mary Mother of Jesus, may she rest in paradise. I have told her everything she needs to know, in very great detail, I may say, but she has had no direct experience of it.”

  (Ioanna, soon to be renamed Leyla, but still naked, had by now rejoined the two girls who were observing these proceedings, and the Arabess put her hand to Leyla’s ear and whispered, “Guess what? You’re a virgin again!”

  Ioanna bit her lower lip and wagged her head. “Again!” she exclaimed. “Our dear Kardelen works so many miracles with chicken blood.”)

  “And how old is she?”

  “She is fifteen years old, just at the very beginning of what will be a long period of beauty, in my estimation.”

  (“You’ve got young again!” whispered the Negress, her white teeth sparkling in her suppressed mirth.)

  “And how much are you selling her for?” asked Rustem Bey.

  Kardelen bridled visibly. “She is not for sale. I sell nobody, and there have been no slaves in Istanbul for more than fifty years. You must know that, surely.”

  “How do I … acquire her, then?” asked Rustem Bey.

  “This is what happens,” said Kardelen. “I take in these poor girls who are orphans, or fugitives, or whatever, and have no one to care for them. Clearly they have nothing of their own, and I am by no means rich, and so the poor things have no dowry, so marriage is difficult or out of the question, although not always impossible. When they reach the age of attractiveness I find men for them who are seeking another kind of arrangement, but I do it with the utmost care. My girls are such darlings, and I grow fond of them. We have a happy time here, and I don’t like to let them go at all, to tell the truth, but naturally one needs the money.”

  “The money?” repeated Rustem Bey.

  “The money,” said Kardelen. “The money is to recompense me for the time and toil that I have put into their education, their clothing, their feeding, and suchlike. Naturally the money must be sufficient for me to be able to begin again with a new girl.” Kardelen paused portentou
sly, and then announced rather quickly, “In the case of Leyla, who is exceptional, the recompense will have to be sixty thousand piastres.”

  Rustem Bey winced. “Do you have any other girls?”

  “I have a fine young Abyssinian who was abducted from her master in Alexandria (not by me, I hasten to say) and abandoned in Adrianopolis, and I have a plump little Arabess from Lebanon, who is a complete sweetheart. Neither of them is Circassian, by any stretch of the imagination, since one is black and the other is golden.”

  “Sixty thousand piastres is far more than I have come with,” said Rustem Bey, who by now had set his heart upon having the Circassian, mainly because he thought he saw her slipping out of his grasp.

  “If she likes you, I might drop the price,” said Kardelen. “Perhaps you will excuse me for a few minutes.” She got up with great dignity and swept out of the room, as if disgusted by Rustem Bey’s ungentlemanly stinginess.

  Kardelen, Ioanna and the other two girls convened in the kitchen, and chattered excitedly to each other. “What do you think?” asked Kardelen.

  “He’s gorgeous,” exclaimed the Negress, “you’re so lucky!”

  “He is handsome,” agreed Ioanna, “and his clothes are very smart. And his accent is so sweet and funny! Do they all talk like that in the south?”

  “He must be quite rich,” said the Arabess, adding, “Don’t you think he looks sad, though?”

  “The point is, do you think you would enjoy pleasing him?” asked Kardelen, and Ioanna smiled coyly. “I think I would. For a while, anyway. You know me.”

  “You mustn’t run away again and get me into even more trouble,” said Kardelen, her voice full of mock reproach. “I can’t tell you what a horror it was having to move everything at such short notice. Twice! I could have killed you.”

  “I was bored with him,” Ioanna excused herself, “and he was mean, and he was a pig. At least I’ve earned you money twice over. The best thing about this one is that he comes from so far away that no one will ever find me.” She paused, and then a thought occurred to her. “Do I really have to be Leyla? Don’t you think he’ll realise I’m a Greek?”

  “He wouldn’t know a real Circassian if one fell out of his backside,” said Kardelen. “They don’t have any in the south, and anyway, you’re not any old shitty Greek from a hole in the ground. You’re practically Italian, darling. Come along, put your clothes on and make us some coffee.”

  “And I get half the money?”

  “Of course you do, sweetie, but I don’t think I’ll get sixty thousand, so don’t expect too much.”

  “What if I have to go in the mosque?” asked Ioanna, but Kardelen had already left. She re-entered the selamlik, her hips swaying perhaps a little too much, and folded her long limbs and bony ankles beneath her on the divan. Rustem Bey extracted his mouthpiece from the narghile, and put it back in his pocket. He was feeling even more light-headed, and a little sick. “I can offer you thirty thousand piastres,” he said. Kardelen merely raised her eyebrows and smiled condescendingly.

  “There are conditions,” said Kardelen.

  “Conditions?”

  “One: you cannot hire Leyla out to anyone else, and you cannot sell her or pass her on without her consent. If, after twelve years, she wants her freedom, you must grant it, and make provision for her. If she declines it, you must keep her as before. If you marry her, she must be the equal of any other wife, and if she has children they must be cared for as your own. And, by the way, thirty thousand piastres is quite out of the question. I might possibly consider fifty thousand.”

  “How do you enforce these conditions?” asked Rustem Bey, genuinely puzzled.

  “Enforce them? I only allow my girls to go to honourable men, and so I make them promise. You would have to promise. You are an honourable man?”

  “Of course.”

  “And do you promise?”

  Rustem Bey felt confused. The strange tobacco and the heavy atmosphere of the room had fuddled his intellect. “What were those conditions again?”

  The gynandrous Kardelen repeated them, again adding, “Do you promise?”

  “I promise,” said Rustem Bey at last.

  “Very well. Tomorrow you must return with fifty thousand piastres and a couple of hamals, and Leyla will be packed and ready, inshallah. Not that she’s ever on time for anything, in my experience.”

  Rustem Bey emerged into the polluted sunlight with his head thumping, and gripped himself hard across the temples between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. He stood with his head bowed, screwing up his eyes. Finally he lifted his head, shook it as if to clear away its buzz of disconnected thoughts and impressions, and signalled his servants and guide to walk ahead. The suspicion occurred to him quite instanter that the somewhat intersexual Kardelen might have been a deviant man rather than a masculine woman, if indeed she was either, and he was brushed simultaneously by an uncomfortable intuition that the flow of his destiny had veered off course. He braced himself for whatever was to come, and took a caique back to Scutari, where he made his way to the Ayazma Mosque, to pray once more to the Deity whose unaccustomed aid he had so recently thought to enlist. As he touched his forehead to the prayer mat, he had the distinct impression that no one was listening, and when he emerged back into the meydan, he felt as though he had begun to inhabit a life other than his own.

  CHAPTER 34

  Rustem Bey and Leyla Hanim

  Rustem Bey sits smoking in the selamlik of his konak and listens to the clocks. He has collected so many of them, because this is a country where it is hard to think of things to buy, and this is how in any case the rich display their wealth. As time has passed, the clocks have surreptitiously synchronised their beat, and in quiet times, when the bustle of the town has ceased, or when the bulbuls have fallen silent, the steady tick of the clocks resounds through the almost empty house like the pulse of a great mechanical heart that registers succinctly the falling away of life. When the hours are struck, the house is filled with a strange but beautiful disharmony that is never twice the same. Tamara Hanim once asked the servants to switch off the chimes, and Rustem had found the silence so oppressive that he had got up in the middle of the night, lit an oil lamp, and gone round the rooms returning the levers to the chime.

  Rustem Bey senses that his life has been taken off course, but he does not care. Despite his better judgement, he finds everything about Leyla refreshing and enchanting, and he regrets only that his own manner is too formal to match her own exuberance and savoir vivre. At this moment she is in the haremlik, happily ordering the servants to put this there, take that away, move this a little. She is delighted with the bed that Tamara rejected, and it has been reassembled and polished with walnut oil scented with oil of lavender. She lolls on its thickly stuffed mattress, eating loukoúmi and combing her hair, and when he tells her that she’s lazy, she adopts an arch expression, laughs, and says, “Me? I’m not lazy, I’m just passionate about leisure.”

  He recalls his arrival back at Kardelen’s residence, as agreed, accompanied by his servants and two particularly gigantic hamals, to find the narrow alleyway crammed and heaped with Leyla’s possessions. There are carpets, bulging boxes of clothes whose lids are unfastenable, sacks of shoes, slippers and parasols. He wonders how she has managed to accumulate so much. Whilst Leyla is busy, Kardelen takes him aside and tells him very seriously, “Now, you mustn’t mind me saying this, but you won’t get anywhere with Leyla if you try to hurry her. Let her come to you in her own time, and she will be the best mistress in the world, I promise you. If you force things …” and here Kardelen shudders theatrically and rolls her eyes, “… well, it’ll be a disaster. Remember she’s a virgin, and she’s a mistress, not a wife, so don’t treat her like one. I trust you know what I mean? A wife is a cross between a slave and a brood mare, but a mistress is the smell of a rose that comes in through the shutters on a summer night. Think of her as semi-divine.” Kardelen flutters her hands, as if in
intimation of divinity. She pauses, and enquires, “Do you know what is the most difficult thing in the world?”

  Rustem Bey scratches the side of his nose, and replies, “Stalking a pigeon.”

  Kardelen looks at him as if he has gone mad, and the aga explains, “They always see you, and they always fly off.”

  “I see,” says Kardelen, curling her lip. “I suppose I wouldn’t know about such … country matters.” She pauses for rhetorical effect, and says, “The hardest thing in the world is to learn how to become irresistible to a woman, so that you don’t have to force the issue, if you take my meaning. Do you want my advice?”

  “I feel that you are going to give it,” says Rustem drily.

  “Indeed I am. You should simply accept as an inevitable fact that Leyla will come to adore you and will give herself to you sooner or later. It’s a question of faith.”

  “Faith?”

  “Oh yes, faith moves women like nothing else.”

  It is true that he has been wondering how to approach this delicate issue. He has not been able to sleep because of remembering her nakedness, and longing to see it again. His throat aches from desire, and alarming and unprecedented tingles travel through his body. He imagines making love to her, and wonders how such a thing can come about. He is not by nature a violator, and he feels a mild relief that effectively Leyla’s body is to be left in Leyla’s gift, but he also feels a mild irritation that he has come so far, spent so much money, and done so much, only to achieve a bargain with no guarantee. He resents it that this freakish creature can give him advice with so much natural authority, when she is so much below him in the order of the world. He does not know that Kardelen has sternly warned Leyla not to delay too long in delivering her favours, “… or there’ll be another fiasco, you can be sure of it, and I’m not going to bail you out again. And don’t forget the little bottle.”