Birds Without Wings

by Louis de Bernières

  As Father Kristoforos lay stupefied in holy wonder, the drunken Constantinos walked unsurely through the alleyways of the Armenian quarter, trying to make the most of the minimal light of the oil lamps whose residual glow seeped out of the chinks of the shutters. Some of the time he ran his hands along the walls of the houses so that he could be sure of keeping to the way, and every now and then he would come up against the slumbering form of a dog or a donkey, so that he and the animal concerned would recoil with alarm. The town’s cats yeowled their threats and love songs on walls and roofs, and from the almond trees the operatic nightingales and bulbuls projected into the night their medleys of arias and cantatas. Far off, Leyla Hanim’s clear voice could be heard, as she plucked at her oud and sang to Rustem Bey the night’s last lullaby, which was in reality addressed to the child she wished she had, and which she sang in Greek.

  Constantinos was not so intoxicated as to be infirm of purpose, or incapable of finding the house for which he searched. He knew that it had a brass door knocker in the shape of a hand holding a ball, and he was therefore very carefully running his hands over each door in order to find the knocker and see what shape it was. The style of door knocker was quite common, and so he was looking for the third one on the right-hand side of this particular alleyway.

  When he found it he dropped his head forward and rested it on the door, as if reflecting on his mission, or perhaps wearily summoning up his resources. He sighed, breathed heavily once or twice, and then knocked. He heard the sound echo in the room behind, and put his ear to the wooden planks of the door in order to be able to hear the approach of a servant.

  Somehow the servant approached quite noiselessly, however, and Constantinos suffered the embarrassment of having the door opened when he was still crouching with his ear to it. He almost lost his balance, and sprang upright with the exaggerated alertness of the drunk who is trying to appear otherwise.

  The servant was bearing an oil lamp in one hand, and he stood there with a dim yellow glow casting his face into shadows. He held out the lamp to shed light upon the visitor’s face, and then withdrew it again. “Yes?” he said.

  “I have come to see the Armenian,” said Constantinos, with some effort.

  “Come back in the morning. The master has gone to bed, and the house is closed.”

  “I can’t come back. Not in the light. I must see him.”

  “It’s impossible.”

  “Please ask him.”

  The servant was impressed by the urgency of the request, which had been expressed in a tone of voice that was halfway between pleading and desperation, and he was hesitating in the doorway, when Levon himself, dressed for the night, appeared at his shoulder. “What’s going on?” he demanded. “Who is knocking so late at night?”

  “It’s a townsman,” said the servant, and Constantinos stepped forward and said, “It’s me. I must speak with you.”

  Levon started when he saw his erstwhile attacker, and stepped back. “I have no wish to speak to you. I must ask you to leave.”

  Constantinos ignored the request, asking, “Are you all right? Are you much injured?”

  “I have trouble in breathing, and a great deal of pain. I don’t know why you think you can come here like this, after what you have done. In your position one would surely be ashamed.”

  Constantinos cast his eyes down and conceded, “I am ashamed.” He paused, looked up, and said, “I know you are not a traitor. I know you are not the things I said.”

  “I have given your wife medicines at cost price,” said Levon stiffly, “because of your poverty. Look how you repaid me.”

  “I know, I know, efendi.”

  “It’s very late. Are you drunk again?”

  “Of course I am drunk. I have come here because I am always drunk.”

  “To make yourself ridiculous is one thing,” said Levon contemptuously, “but to allow yourself to stoop to violence is another.”

  “I am drunk because I am always drunk,” said Constantinos, marshalling his thoughts.

  “So everyone sees,” said Levon.

  “And I am always drunk because I am always drinking.”

  “Evidently.”

  “And I am always drinking because of the teeth.”

  “The teeth?”

  “Yes, efendi. Because of the teeth.”

  “I am sorry, I don’t follow.”

  Constantinos tapped the side of his mouth with his hand. “My teeth,” he said. “I have such pain, such terrible pain. It goes on all day and all night. It has been a torment all my life. I have never known peace for more than an hour. It was all because of my teeth.”

  Levon thought that he almost heard a sob of self-pity in his interlocutor’s voice, and was suddenly struck by how much one’s understanding of people can be amiss. “Toothache,” he reflected, “the universal torture of all mankind. How sweet life would be without it.”

  “I have often thought of death,” continued Constantinos, “but it would be a sin.”

  “And that is why you drink?”

  Constantinos nodded slowly and miserably, and Levon added, “You drink to dull the pain?”

  “That’s why I am drunk. That’s why I live in poverty and that’s why my wife and daughter hate me, and that’s why everybody despises me.”

  “Why have you done nothing about it? Why have you never explained yourself?”

  “I am a man. A man endures pain, and doesn’t complain.”

  “You should have your teeth pulled. Don’t you know which tooth it is?”

  “The pain fills all my head, and it goes into my ears and down into my throat. I don’t know which one it is. It could be all of them for all I know. I can’t eat, and so I get drunk quicker, and a tooth-puller costs money. When the tooth-puller comes he asks to be paid before the teeth are pulled, and he sees that I am drunk and he knows that I have no money. What am I supposed to do?”

  “There is no one more heartless than a drawtooth,” said the Armenian. “Have you tried opium? I sell it, and it’s very effective.”

  “I have no money.”

  “Just as well, perhaps. Some get addicted to it, and finally they go crazy. The lunatic asylums are full of them. Sometimes I refuse to sell it to certain people; I say I don’t have any left, though I would be a lot richer if I was less scrupulous.”

  “Does this man have to be standing here?” asked Constantinos, nodding in the direction of the servant. “Does he have to listen to all of this? Don’t I have enough to bear?”

  “If he goes, he will have to give me the light, and then he won’t have a light to find his way back to his pallet. If he takes the light with him, then we two will be talking in the dark.”

  “I don’t follow,” said Constantinos. “I would probably follow if I wasn’t pissed.”

  “Anyway,” said the merchant, “I will do you a favour, even though you don’t deserve it.”

  “A favour?”

  “A favour, yes. I will pay for your teeth to be pulled.”

  “You’ll give me money? After my misdeed?” Constantinos was incredulous.

  “No, I won’t give you money, because you’ll only drink it. What I will do is send a servant for you next time the drawtooth comes from Telmessos. I will pay him directly, and he will pull the rotten teeth. Then you will have less pain, and perhaps you will not need to drink so much.”

  Constantinos raised his face, and affected a pitiful tone of voice. “Have you got a drink, Levon Efendi? A little glass of raki? I am beginning to need one.”

  “Stay here,” said the Armenian, and he took the lamp from his servant and disappeared into the house.

  “If I was him,” confided the servant, in his master’s absence, “I’d have your throat cut.”

  “Well, you can just fuck off,” replied Constantinos. “If I could see you, I’d knock your head off.”

  “Pisshead,” said the servant contemptuously.

  Oblivious to this uncouth exchange, Levon returne
d bearing a half-bottle of amber liquid. It had foreign writing on it, in Roman script, and there was a picture of a bird on the label that looked somewhat like a partridge. He handed it to Constantinos, who inspected it suspiciously, swaying on his feet as he tried to concentrate. “Is it alcohol?”

  “Yes. It’s called Scotch, and in the absence of a drawtooth, it’s the best possible treatment for toothache.”

  “Better than raki?”

  “Well, I think so. If you use it correctly it can kill a toothache for a couple of days. I get it in Smyrna, and it’s very precious. It comes from a place called Scotland, which is a Frankish country somewhere a very long way in the north.” Levon gestured in a vaguely northerly direction. “It’s so far north that it’s exceedingly cold. I’ve heard it said that in Scotland you can sometimes go hunting by just picking the birds out of the branches, because their feet freeze to the twigs at night, and they say that the people are marvellously hairy, so that they can keep warm, and the women have an extra breast under each arm. They make this drink as a cure for toothache and many other ills.”

  “Extra breasts? That’s quite something.” Constantinos opened the bottle and sniffed it. “Smells good.”

  “What you have to do is take a sip, and swill the stuff back and forth through your teeth. It might hurt quite a lot at first. Then you keep the stuff in your mouth, swilling it back and forth, back and forth, for as long as you possibly can, and you keep doing it until you find that you have to speak to someone, and so you have to swallow it.”

  Constantinos took a mouthful and did as he was advised, watched with interest by the master and servant. There was an initial rush of lancinating pain, and he grimaced and winced, but then he began to feel the working of the panacea. He waved the bottle at Levon and pointed to it with his other hand, as if poking at it appreciatively. He tried to grunt, but Levon said, “Don’t speak. Just keep swilling.”

  “Nggggggg,” said Constantinos.

  “I hope you can find your way home,” said Levon. “I’m going to bed. I wish you a very good night.”

  “Ngggggg,” repeated Constantinos, sucking the whisky through his teeth, and waving the bottle to signal his farewells.

  The servant closed the door, and said, “If I were you, master, I’d have his throat cut.”

  Levon demurred, “No doubt you would, but really he’s just another unfortunate. The raki will kill him soon enough, whether his teeth are cured or not, and that’ll be another poor useless nobody under the earth, with no one to regret him. I doubt if any of those Greeks will even dig his bones up to wash them.”

  As they proceeded back into the house, Levon shook his head and said, “There’s altogether too much affliction in this world. And I have just given away a most precious bottle of medicine that’s as rare as a feathered goat. I must be mad.”

  CHAPTER 37

  Mustafa Kemal (8)

  Mustafa Kemal decides to follow his own precepts, and gets out of politics. He will be a soldier, tout court. He joins the Training Command of the 3rd Army, and initially antagonises the old-fashioned types with his newfangled ideas and his trenchant criticisms, but he impresses his pupils by his lucid teaching, and his unnatural ability to arrive fresh and early each morning, despite his long nocturnal bouts of crapulence. Adjutant Major Mustafa Kemal is scornful of anyone above his own rank.

  The Germans are donating their military expertise to the Ottomans, and Mustafa Kemal neither likes nor trusts them. He does, however, think that they are wonderful soldiers, and he sets out to learn as much from them as he can. He translates a military manual by General Litzman, and he impresses Marshal von der Goltz when the latter comes to supervise an exercise for which Kemal has devised the general scheme. He conducts more and more exercises, with himself in charge. On exercises where he is not in charge, he prepares his own plans and orders, and then compares them to the ones actually used. During debriefs he is unstinting in his criticisms, and pernickety about details.

  He is still vexatious to his superiors, and they put him in charge of a regiment in the hope that the great theoretician will make a fool of himself in practice. During an Albanian uprising Kemal draws up a plan for the capture of a crucial pass, and it is taken without the loss of one soldier. The uprising is crushed. At the celebratory dinner in Salonika, Mustafa Kemal prophesies that one day there will be a Turkish, not an Ottoman army, and that it will save the nation. He tells Colonel von Anderten that the Turkish army will not have done its duty until it has also saved Turkey from its own backwardness.

  Mustafa Kemal goes to Paris with a military delegation, and before he goes he buys himself a hat and a suit that he thinks are Western. When he arrives, his friend Fethi meets him at the station, and mocks him delightedly because the hat is too jaunty and the suit is green. Mustafa Kemal and Fethi go out to buy him another suit that Parisians might take seriously. During the military discussions, when he is in uniform, Kemal makes himself conspicuous by vociferously advocating his own plans during the manoeuvres, and a French officer tells him that no matter how brilliant he is, no one will take him seriously as long as he wears a kalpak on his head. One day, when he is dictator of Turkey, the kalpak will go the way of the turban and the fez, Mustafa Kemal having become the only dictator in the history of the world with a profound grasp of the semiotics of headwear.

  Back in Salonika, Kemal becomes disillusioned and depressed. There has been no promotion and there seems to be no future. He tells a friend that he is resigning his commission, but after an encouraging drinking bout at the White Tower, he changes his mind.

  He also seems to have changed his mind about staying out of politics. He has become frustrated, and when out drinking likes to tell his friends of the government offices to which he will one day appoint them. Fethi, who is Kemal’s putative roaming ambassador, starts to tease him by calling him “Mustafa Kemal, the drunken Sultan.”

  Mustafa Kemal is frustrated because he knows that he is destined for greatness, but does not see how it will come about. He is not in charge of the revolution, and his fellow revolutionaries are bar-room theoreticians, talkers and dreamers. They operate within gratifyingly elaborate systems of secrecy, a world of passwords and arcane oaths, and they devote much of their time to conspiring against each other. Mustafa Kemal wants things to be clear and direct, he wants specific goals to be set, and he wants unerring action to be taken in achieving them. Mustafa Kemal wants to reform the whole political system, and he has clearly understood, as his future career will demonstrate, exactly what Rousseau meant when he said that a people must be forced to be free.

  Mustafa Kemal has to conceal his agnosticism from his respectably Muslim co-conspirators, but everyone knows of it, just as they know of his promiscuity and his bibulousness. Nonetheless, there are those who incline towards Kemal’s ideas; Islam is gradually being replaced by Turkish nationalism, and the argument is going to be about the nature of this nationalism. There is in Salonika a revolutionary professor who bears upon his forehead the romantic cruciform scars of a failed suicide, who animadverts that Turks should revert to their pre-Islamic ways, but Mustafa Kemal is of the opinion that Turkey should become a modern Western state. Gradually he is finding people who agree with him, and the authorities are becoming suspicious again. They transfer him from his regimental command, and install him at the office of the general staff in Istanbul, where they can keep a close eye on him.

  Fate intervenes in the form of the imperial Western powers, which are at the height of their weening self-confidence. They are generously bringing Western civilisation to the unenlightened lesser breeds, whether the latter wish it or not, and with the notable omission of the democratic institutions that are precisely what make Western civilisation worth having. Germany seizes Agadir, whereupon the French become indignant, and it is ultimately agreed with the Germans that France shall have Morocco, and Germany shall have some of the Congo. The Italians, piqued at not having been invited to the party, seize Cyrenaica and
Tripolitania, which are, inconveniently, but pertinently to the progress of Mustafa Kemal, Ottoman possessions.

  Accordingly, the empire has to go to war, and the handsome, romantic, but unintellectual Enver Pasha is duly dispatched to Tripoli with a dashing contingent of officers. Mustafa Kemal does not really care about North Africa, since Turks do not live there, and in any case the Balkans are a far more present danger, but he seizes the chance to attain a little glory, and, disguised as a journalist, bearing false papers, off he sails on a Russian ship, accompanied by the poetic Ömer Naci. Also with him, much to his irritation, comes Yakup Cemil, his former would-be assassin. He has had to raise the money for the journey all by himself.

  Whilst he is in Libya, his native town, his beloved Salonika, is taken by the Greeks, and he will never see it again. The Greeks demolish the mosques one by one, and those Turks who have the means to do so contrive to leave. The great fire of 1917 will further obliterate the town of his youth, and the remnants of the Turks will be forcibly deported at the end of this story, during the catastrophic events of 1923. For the moment the ancient colony of Spanish-speaking Hebrews are permitted to remain, only to disappear twenty years later, when the Nazis in their turn will have taken Salonika from the Greeks.

  CHAPTER 38

  Exiled in Cephalonia, Drosoula Remembers Leyla and Philothei

  Well, as I’ve always said, you have your mother’s prettiness, God rest her soul, but do you want to know how to be beautiful, koritsimou? No, no, don’t pretend to modesty you don’t have. I’ve seen you preening yourself often enough. “Make the most of it” is what I say; make the most of it whilst you’re young and you’ve still got it. You can’t be pretty for ever, you know that? But you can always be beautiful. At least, that’s what Leyla Hanim said to me and Philothei.