Birds Without Wings

by Louis de Bernières

  On top of the pile of Leyla’s belongings there is a large wicker birdcage containing not a bird, but a cat. “What’s this?” demands Rustem Bey.

  “It’s a cat,” says Leyla.

  “I reckoned on no cat,” says Rustem Bey.

  “This is Pamuk. This is my cat.”

  “I reckoned on no cat,” repeats Rustem Bey. He has never liked cats and has never seen the point of them. Their yeowling and fighting at night causes almost as much sleeplessness as the nightingales. “I have a tame partridge,” adds Rustem Bey.

  “We’ll keep them separate,” says Leyla, brightly.

  Kardelen intervenes. “She wouldn’t be happy without the cat.” She raises her eyebrows and nods significantly. She seems to be telling Rustem Bey that the resentment of being without the cat will cause her to be especially reluctant to bestow her favours. He looks at the animal. It is a white angora, with a fluffy tail that is thin at the base. It has one yellow eye and one blue eye, and it is plainly indignant. It objects to Rustem Bey looking at it, and it opens its mouth and hisses. Rustem Bey feels insulted. “I don’t like cats,” he says. Nonetheless, he has lost the argument.

  The clocks chime, and Rustem Bey remembers how they got to the quayside and were just about to get into the boat, when suddenly Leyla panics. “I’ve forgotten my medicine!” she cries. “My medicine! We’ve got to go back! We’ve got to go back!”

  “Medicine? You are ill? What medicine?”

  “My medicine, Kardelen Hanim’s got my medicine!”

  “We can get more medicine,” says Rustem Bey, who is anxious to get on with the journey.

  “No! No! No!” wails Leyla. “I’ve got to have my medicine!” She begins to show alarming signs of hysteria, and her tears are irresistible.

  It is useless to try to placate her or put her off. Two servants are dispatched back to Kardelen’s house, and return shortly with a small brown bottle that is corked and sealed with wax. Rustem Bey inspects it, shakes it, looks at it against the light. It is a dark, viscous liquid. He hands it to Leyla, whose face is white with anxiety. She takes it. “What is your illness?” demands Rustem Bey. He is not pleased to have acquired a woman who might be sick. Women have an infinite capacity for lying around groaning. She looks up at him, and recognises the command in his voice. She looks away and says, “It is a woman’s matter. It’s nothing. It passes.”

  “A woman’s matter,” he repeats, and shrugs. His mother and sisters were always referring in hushed tones to “women’s matters.” He knows that further enquiry will be fruitless. It is as forbidden to know about women’s matters as it is to go into the hamam when the women are in it. He remembers himself and his friends as little boys, speculating salaciously about what it might be like to be able to see a whole hamam full of naked women. If only one could have drilled a little hole in the wall.

  Rustem Bey remembers their journey back to Smyrna on a small Italian boat, she keeping to the women’s quarters, and he to the men’s. He has not been able to face another train journey like the last, and has preferred a slower journey in greater comfort. In the daytime they sit awkwardly side by side on the deck. He makes phatic observations about the weather and the state of the sea, and points to places on shore that might be this town or another. In Smyrna they shop for fabrics, for draughts and potions, cosmetics and liniments and lotions, for things that she insists she must have, and of most of which he has never heard. He buys her a string of gold coins to wear about her forehead, and she is so pleased and grateful that she touches his face with her hand. He loves it when she speaks, because her accent is endearing. She likes his accent too, but wishes he were less grave.

  They hear how the young Greek men in this city are out of the control of their elders, are getting overbold and impudent, knocking the fezzes off the heads of respectable old men, jerking at the veils of pious women and, in their infidel script, daubing slogans on walls about Greater Greece. Rustem Bey grows angry, sucks harder on his cigarette, and asks, “Why doesn’t the governor execute a few more of them? What good can come of it?” But this is a city where most of the population are Greek, it is they who have the money and the influence, and they get away with everything. He has to admit to himself that Smyrna is also a city that is much more amusing than his own little town. Its Levantine exuberance always raises his morale. He loves the busy harbour lined with ships from places with unimaginably romantic names like Buenos Aires and Liverpool, and he admires the majestic houses of the merchants that overlook them. He likes the way that the Greek women, their eyes made up heavily with kohl, sit still by their shutters so that they can keep a watch on life while being admired. He likes the way that some of the men of the Greek lowlife shave their heads except for a long pigtail at the nape. Smyrna, he thinks, is a place where one might have an ambition to live. He cannot conceive of anyone becoming lonely or bored in Smyrna.

  “You can’t do anything about Greeks,” says Leyla, apropos of nothing in particular, and smiling ironically to herself.

  Rustem Bey visits the gunsmith, Abdul Chrysostomos. He wants powder and birdshot for his fowling piece, and has to resist the gunsmith’s attempts to interest him in his new invention, a bolt-action rifle with a ten-foot barrel that fires a bullet like a small cannon shell, and is uncannily accurate at an extraordinary range. It has a spring-loaded magazine that holds ten bullets, and it is too heavy to lift. When Rustem Bey says, “I have no ambition to shoot elephants and camels from a great distance,” tears of genuine sadness come unbidden to Abdul’s eyes. It is bitter to be a genius and yet to be so frequently rejected. It is not two years since he has invented a concave mirror that focuses the sun’s rays into a spot so hot that it can burn a wooden ship off the water, and has informed the Sultan by means of a letter written with the aid of a street-scribe. The War Minister’s secretary has finally written to him advising him that the Padishah’s armed forces currently have no use for such a device, at least not until the focus is adjustable. Two years is a long time to wait, when one is only to be disappointed. Nonetheless, he is already working out how to adjust the mirror, and his mind is awhirl with systems of levers and fulcra, and the street-scribes are writing to all and sundry in order to enquire as to whether there is any such thing as flexible silvered glass.

  Rustem Bey and Leyla stay in the Turkish quarter, because the aga feels more at home there and the food is better. In the Greek quarter they cook things too long, and they don’t know how to use spices. Rustem Bey finds a place where they can eat together in a private room, and to their mutual relief they discover that they are both garlic lovers. They ask the proprietor of the lokanta to lace everything with it. “Everything?” asks the patron, and he brings a jug of water with a clove floating on top. Leyla puts her hand to her mouth and laughs, and in a moment Rustem Bey too has overcome his natural solemnity. Leyla says, “One day I am going to make you a meal which has so much garlic in it that it will cause a shortage in the whole vilayet.” Afterwards, somewhat afflated, they go to his customary accommodation, a small khan with a courtyard shaded by figs and planted with rosemary and roses. The rooms are bare and swept meticulously clean, so that no one will pick up bedbugs or fleas. Leyla is in the women’s quarters with her rancorous cat, and Rustem Bey is in the company of the men. He watches Leyla from the balcony as she supervises the toilet of her cat among the flower beds, encouraging it and showering it with endearments. The scene is touching, and she is unaware of being observed. Later he asks her, “Why do you talk to your cat in Greek?”

  Leyla is momentarily dumbfounded. “Do I?” she asks.

  “Yes. I heard you in the courtyard.”

  She looks around, as if for a means of escape. “Greek is the language of cats,” says Leyla at last.

  “On the contrary,” replies Rustem Bey, “Turkish is the language of cats. I have heard of a cat that could say ‘granny’ and ‘grandmother.’ ”

  “Why would it say that?”

  “I don’t know. Perha
ps somebody taught it.”

  They look at each other in silence, and then he says, “I didn’t know you could speak Greek.”

  “Everyone can speak Greek,” replies Leyla. The colour is rising to her cheeks, and trouble appears in her dark eyes.

  “Can they? In my town even the Greeks speak Turkish.”

  “Greek is the universal language of these parts.”

  “I thought it was Italian.”

  “Do you speak Italian?”

  “No.”

  “Well,” she says, “I can speak some Italian too.” She has the air of having trumped him, and whilst he is considering this information, she wanders away to the balcony and leans over. It is not until a long while later that he realises that she still has not told him why she can speak Greek.

  The journey home is hardly a pleasure. There are other men in the caravan, who ride donkeys whilst their women walk behind them, or who ride camels whilst their women ride donkeys behind them, but Rustem Bey knows without further thought that Leyla will never walk for several days in the wake of an animal, and will not be content with a donkey. It is odd how trepidatious he feels with respect to her. He worries about her reactions, her discomforts and pleasures, in a way that he never would have done with Tamara, who was only his wife. He hires a small and pretty camel for her, and a large one for himself. For her luggage he is obliged to hire several donkeys and a drover.

  Despite the trouble taken for her comfort, Leyla is refractory for the entire journey. Lurching and swaying about on the top of a camel for several days is hardly her idea of luxury, even though she enjoys the feeling of superiority that comes from being mounted on an animal. The sun is implacable and oppressive, despite her parasol, and it is awful to have to spend so much time sitting upright when her natural propensity is for the horizontal. She has forgotten to buy mastika, so instead she chews toasted melon seeds irascibly, and spits the husks out on to the hot road. She has the town dweller’s horror of peasants, those who subsist on a starvation diet of cracked wheat, yogurt and outlandish fatalism, whom now she encounters with disturbing frequency, their gnarled hands and nut-brown faces betokening the grinding labour that she finds impossible to contemplate without horror. Except for those moments when she is suddenly struck by the majesty of the Taurus Mountains, she successfully maintains a bad temper for the whole journey, as does the cat Pamuk, who is affronted and appalled by the entire experience, hissing at shepherd mastiffs from the safety of the birdcage that has been lashed behind Leyla’s perch.

  Near Eskibahçe, or Paleoperiboli as it was called by the Greeks, Rustem Bey points out that for some reason all the poppies have come up pink, a piece of information that Leyla receives with absolute lack of interest. Here the road dips suddenly down into the calm and scented slopes of a pine wood, and at the precise moment that one enters it, one feels a sensation of peace, and of the earth’s sanctity. One’s donkey’s feet tread softly upon pine needles instead of stones, the sunlight is broken up into dapples and the birds sing.

  Because of its great tranquillity, this is the place where the Muslims bury their dead, in whitewashed tombs scattered about among the trees. Rustem Bey turns about on his camel, resting his right hand on its croup, and says to Leyla, “This is where we will lie when we are dead.”

  She looks at the pretty graves, the old ones subsiding and slipping at abandoned angles, the new ones upright and pristine, painted with a turban for the men and a tulip for the women, and she feels a pang. She has never bothered much about her faith. She was born a Christian, something that she must henceforth conceal, but she knows nothing about it, and her beliefs have never consisted of anything more than the usual superstitions. Like Kardelen and her fellow odalisques, she is sure that religion has nothing at all to do with life. She finds priests and imams equally otiose. Now, however, she feels an inexplicable dread of being buried among Muslims, which she quickly dismisses from her mind, thinking, “I’m not dead yet,” and, “Who knows what will happen in the end?” She wonders how long she will be able to keep up the pretence of being a Circassian and a Muslim. She glances over at Rustem Bey, and a small flower of affection begins to open up inside her. She also feels a twinge of fear. She knows that one day she will want to please him.

  At the further end of the Elysian pine wood, there lie the ruins of a temple that once was sacred to Leto, Artemis and Apollo. No one knows this now, except for the British archaeologists who came twenty years before with sailors and dragomen, waving a firman from the governor that no one could read, and took away the statues and carvings in wooden crates. What remains of the marble temple has sunk on account of earthquakes, and now it is thigh-deep in clear green water, in which terrapins and frogs lead oblivious lives. Above it there flit swallows and maroon- and crimson-coloured damselflies. Rustem Bey and Leyla see Mohammed the Leech Gatherer, in his grubby turban, dripping wet, standing nearby on a sheet that he has spread upon the stiff grasses. Leyla gasps and cries out in alarm, because, adhering to his bare legs like the fur of a faun, are dozens of glistening, sparkling black leeches. Mohammed raises his hand in greeting, and calls, “Salaam aleikum.” He will wait until the leeches have gorged themselves on his blood, and have dropped off on to the sheet. He will keep them wrapped in damp cloth, and when he has enough he will take them for sale to the Greek doctors in Smyrna. Karatavuk and Mehmetçik are bending down at the water’s edge, filling their birdwhistles with water. Drosoula and Philothei, holding hands, are watching. Philothei smiles at Leyla, who seems to her to be the most wonderfully beautiful woman she has ever seen, and Leyla’s heart melts.

  Beyond the temple and the remains of the Roman theatre, one comes out suddenly beneath the town, and there it is, rising up the hillside in an intimate jumble of homes and alleyways. Leyla sees the houses, painted gaily in pinks and blues, she sees the white minarets of the mosque and the golden dome of the Church of St. Nicholas, she hears the cries of the vendors and artisans, and she feels happy. She is back where she belongs, amid the softness of civilisation.

  That evening, when they have eaten, and are reclining on opposite divans, except for Pamuk who is hiding beneath the low table, she tells Rustem Bey, “I am going to need a servant.”

  “I have a great many servants,” observes the aga reasonably.

  “I mean my own servant, a maid. I would like a girl who is very pretty and young. I need someone who is pretty, otherwise my eyes will be in a bad mood all the time.” She pops a piece of rose-scented lokum into her mouth, chews it, swallows, and says, “Do you remember that little girl who was by the water? Not the ugly one. The very pretty one? That’s the one I want.”

  Rustem Bey looks at her, and she smiles back, her beauty glowing around her face like a nimbus. He says, “The ugly one and the pretty one are always together. I have been wondering if they are sisters.” He pauses. “We have an Armenian here. His name is Levon. He has three very pretty daughters, but they are older, so they might be more useful than the child.” It occurs to him all over again that to have a mistress is not an inexpensive thing.

  “No,” says Leyla, “I want the pretty child.”

  On the far side of the town, Father Kristoforos has dozed off after his meal, and now he wakes suddenly and shakes his head. He has had another one of his disturbing dreams about witnessing the funeral of God, except that this time the angels are dumb, and the coffin is so minute that it would scarcely hold a babe.

  In the aga’s konak the clocks in synchrony tick away the time.

  In the half-light of the brothel Tamara weeps silently as she cradles in her arms the hundred-fathered syphilitic child to which she has just given birth. The disease has ravaged the empire ever since the introduction of compulsory military service, and the child is white-faced and distorted. Its eye sockets are empty, and it scarcely breathes. On one side of her sits a divorcee, and on the other a widow, both of them driven into the profession by poverty. The widow has been a prostitute for a long time, and she says, “Don
’t worry, sister, it can’t live.”

  Tamara’s face runs with fresh tears, she feels as if her heart will burst, and the divorcee puts her arm around her, and says, “Don’t worry, sister, sooner or later you stop conceiving at all.”

  CHAPTER 35

  I Am Philothei (7)

  I have told no one about this, apart from Drosoula and Leyla Hanim.

  My mother had been making reçel, and I was a little sick from eating so much of it. She used more grapes than most people, and extra sugar, and I’d put a lot of it on to bread, because that day there was new baking, and that’s why I was queasy.

  I went outside to breathe away the sickness and it was getting dark, and it was just about to rain so that everyone else had gone indoors and was wondering whether or not it was dark enough to warrant lighting the lamps, and the nightingales were starting to sing, and there were only cats in the street, when suddenly Ibrahim arrived at my side, and I was very surprised, and he said, “Quick, let me kiss your hand,” and I said, “It’s got jam on it,” and so he looked swiftly to all sides, and then he took my hand and licked the jam from my fingers with his tongue, and afterwards I was trembling and I wasn’t normal for hours, and I couldn’t wash my hands because I couldn’t bear to wash away the traces of his tongue.

  CHAPTER 36

  A Cure for Toothache

  It was after dark, and most of the town was asleep. Father Kristoforos was adrift in his dreams, in which he was conversing with the Archangel Gabriel, who was refusing to show his face. “If I show you my face, you will die,” asseverated the archangel. “The light will burn you up completely and you will arrive in paradise in flakes of ash,” whereupon Kristoforos pleaded, “Just one glimpse, just the smallest glimpse!”

  “I will show you one feather of my wing,” said the archangel, and in his dreaming Kristoforos saw a vast white feather, stretching as far as all possible horizons, filling up the entire heaven, and glowing like the autumn moon.