Birds Without Wings

by Louis de Bernières

  You must excuse an old woman her memories, and who am I to talk about beauty after all, but we women have secrets and a duty to pass them on, don’t you think? I’m too far gone to be beautiful, I always was, unlike most, but I can tell you what Leyla Hanim said to Philothei and me.

  Let me see, it was not long after Yusuf the Tall murdered his daughter and was taken away by the gendarmes, and Sadettin left for the mountains. Everyone was still talking about it. I was standing with Philothei by the pool with the ruins in it, and who should pass by but Rustem Bey on a camel, and a small caravan of donkeys. Just behind him on a pert little camel was a woman. She was very pretty—the woman that is, not the camel—and there was something about her that made the corners of your mouth lift when you saw her. You could tell she had a good heart. She had a veil of course, she came from a town, you see, but it was so thin that she may as well not have bothered. It was just a little bit of gauze. More to do with encouraging temptation than preventing it. Anyway, she had the kind of eyebrows that arch over in a very nice curve and just about meet in the middle. She had dark eyes that sparkled, and they were made up with kohl. People used kohl very heavily in those days, at least in those parts. God knows what was going on back then, here in Cephalonia; I expect you were all still in the caves. Apart from your father, of course; he was still at sea, learning to be a doctor from those books of his, no doubt. No, he would have been a little boy. He’s the same age as me! How stupid I’m becoming! What was I talking about? Oh yes, Leyla Hanim. Her lips were very red. I remember she had lovely clothes, they were everyone’s envy, and she wore gold, lots of it, so that she rattled in a dull sort of way every time she moved. She had a chain of gold coins that she wore around her forehead, the kind that you used to borrow from your relatives when you got married.

  Anyway, she spotted Philothei as she passed into the town for the first time, standing by the sunken temple, and she and Philothei smiled at each other. I remember it well, because it was as if those two recognised something in each other. The curse of beauty, or the blessing of it, I suppose, and she asked Rustem Bey if she could have her as a maid, which is why Rustem Bey sent a servant to call in on Charitos. Well, we all heard that Polyxeni kicked up a fuss, not least from Polyxeni herself, saying things like, “I’m not sending my little girl to be the servant of a rich man’s whore, and an infidel into the bargain,” but the fact is that you didn’t refuse a request from the aga back in those days. It wasn’t that Rustem Bey was a bad man. Most people respected him, and a lot of people liked him, but it’s just that you don’t refuse the man who owns all the land as far as you can walk in every direction, and who everyone depends on. Charitos said something like, “She isn’t a whore, she’s a mistress,” though I don’t suppose that Polyxeni saw any difference, and pointed out that the aga was offering a good sum for Philothei’s hire. It wasn’t as if he was trying to abduct Philothei or anything, and so Polyxeni had to give in. I’m sure that Polyxeni wasn’t averse to the money either, though she wouldn’t have said so, and anyway, as everyone knows, the servants of a rich man find ways of sneaking nice things out of the house, and that’s one of the attractions of being a servant. It’s like being a wife who’s happy to serve her husband a meal and stand behind him humbly whilst he’s eating it, because unbeknownst to him she’s eaten all the best bits in the kitchen when she was preparing it. Leyla Hanim once told me that there were two kinds of wives, the stupid ones, and the ones who ate the best bits in the kitchen. She used to say lots of things like that. She once said that if you were lazy, the only way not to get bored was to work hard at it.

  We were just little girls, and we didn’t know anything about anything, so it didn’t occur to me that I wasn’t supposed to go along with Philothei when she reported for work at the aga’s konak. We went around to the back door and took off our shoes, and just went in. In those days Ibrahim was already following Philothei, and Gerasimos was following me, we were still young enough for it to be innocent, you see, and we had to leave them outside. Sometimes they would wait for hours together, drawing in the sand with a stick, or trying to catch crickets, but as far as I know they never said a word to each other. Isn’t that odd? They weren’t like Karatavuk and Mehmetçik who spent all their time pretending to be birds and getting up to mischief. I suppose it was because they were there for us rather than for each other.

  What I remember about the aga’s house is that it was full of clocks that ticked together, but chimed out of tune with each other. Some of them were very beautiful and complicated. The walls were hung with very nice carpets, most of them red, and there were red carpets on the floor too. The place smelled of tobacco smoke, frankincense and rosewater. It was dark but very calm and peaceful; you wouldn’t have believed that so much drama had happened there, what with the business of the aga’s unfaithful wife, and all his family dying at once of the fever that comes back from the haj.

  We were wondering what to do, just standing there inside the door, when Leyla Hanim herself came out of the haremlik, and when she saw us she gave a little cry of delight. In her hand she had an amazingly long cigarette holder, it was as long as your arm, and in the end was smouldering one of those tiny slim cigarettes that she used to roll for herself. I think the idea was that you don’t get yellow stains on your hair or your hands. She kissed Philothei on the cheeks, and then she leaned back and looked down on me. “I never expected two of you,” she said. I think she must have seen the look in my face, and I’ll always remember this as a demonstration of her good heart, because suddenly she leaned down, took my face in her hands, and kissed me on the cheeks as well, ugly and unwanted as I was. Her lips were so soft, and she smelled of something that made your head reel as if you’d been drinking wine. In retrospect I can quite see why Rustem Bey besought her.

  She took each of us by the hand, and led us into the haremlik to show us round. She was the first person in that town to have a bed, and we girls were enormously impressed by it. It’s the bed that I remember the most. Once the news spread, of course, it wasn’t very long before all sorts of people started to think that they wanted a bed too. We slept just as well on a bedroll on the floor, though. At least with a bedroll you just roll it up in the daytime, and that makes more space, doesn’t it? It’s because of all these beds that people want big houses nowadays. Most of us had houses that were one room up and one room down, and in the winter you had your animals downstairs so that the heat came up. It was lovely and warm, and the smell wasn’t as bad as you’d think. Sometimes it was quite nice, in fact. Only meat-eaters’ dung smells bad.

  Anyway, Leyla Hanim said something in a foreign language, and we just stood there dumbly and looked back at her. Then she said, “I thought you people were Greek.” We didn’t know what she was getting at, and we felt uneasy, and then she said, “Doesn’t anybody speak Greek?” Philothei said, “Daskalos Leonidas does. He tries to teach it to the boys. And Father Kristoforos, he does.”

  “What a shame,” said Leyla Hanim. “I’d been looking forward to speaking Greek.” She looked quite wistful. Then she said to Philothei, “Do you know why I’ve hired you, little one?”

  Philothei didn’t know she’d been hired. Why should she know anything? She just knew that from then on she was going to be with Leyla Hanim for much of the time. She shook her head, and Leyla Hanim said, “It’s because you’re so pretty. Having you about the place will make me feel … lighter. And I don’t mind if you bring your little friend sometimes, but I don’t think Rustem Bey will pay anything.” She laughed, and added, “You can only get so much out of a man, even a good one.”

  Now, I don’t remember Philothei having to do anything in particular whilst she was Leyla Hanim’s servant. They went together to the hamam on ladies’ afternoons, and they would both come out so exhausted they could hardly walk from the steaming and pummelling you got in there, and their faces would be glowing like lamps. It was lovely in the hamam. It was only a small one, but it was about five hundred yea
rs old, and it looked like a tiny little mosque, with white walls and a dome and everything, and when you got inside you poured water over yourself from a brass dish, and you just sat and sweated in the steam room until it was your turn to get scrubbed and battered by the masseuses. In the old days it was shiny black ugly eunuchs from Ethiopia, so they said. I’ll never forget, they used to fill a muslin bag with olive-oil soap suds, and blow in it till it frothed, and waft the bag up and down you. It was lovely. And then they’d scrub you with a mitt made of that rough string. You wouldn’t believe how much filthy skin got sloughed off. Anyway, it was a lovely place to go, and all the women could just sit around naked, huffing and puffing in the heat, laughing and gossiping, knowing that no one’s husband was ever going to come in and ask for his dinner. I’ll tell you something else. The older women used to go in there to select the nicest young girls to be wives for their sons. Don’t laugh! It’s true! They’d look out for nice round breasts and thighs, a decent bit of fat, and hips big enough for babies, and they’d get an idea of what the girl was like, because there’s nothing like being in a hamam with no clothes on for getting to know someone, and I’ll tell you something else, just between you and me, and that is that when a girl took a fancy to any boy in particular she’d make a special point of fussing over the mother in the hamam. I know several cases where it worked like a charm.

  Anyway, Leyla Hanim used to go to the hamam with Philothei, and even though some of the women wouldn’t talk to Leyla because they said she was a whore, Leyla never noticed or took offence because she always had Philothei to laugh with.

  I’ve forgotten what it was I was telling you about. Oh yes, it was about being beautiful. Anyway, one day we had all come back from the hamam, all glowing and scented with rosewater, feeling on top of the world, and we were back in Leyla’s haremlik, and she was brushing Philothei’s hair to get out the tangles. Suddenly she asked, “Do you think I’m beautiful?”

  It was a surprising question, but Philothei said straight away, “Oh yes.”

  “Truly beautiful?”

  “Truly, truly, truly,” said Philothei, who was sitting on her knee. You see, Philothei and Leyla loved each other, I am sure of that, and if you love someone they become beautiful, even if they aren’t. And Leyla Hanim leaned forward and whispered, “Well, I’ll tell you a secret.” She put her finger to her lips and made a conspirator’s face.

  “What, what, what?” chanted Philothei. “What secret?”

  “Promise you won’t tell anyone?”

  “Promise.”

  She looked at me. “Do you promise too?”

  “Promise,” I said.

  “Promise by the Beard of the Prophet and the Hem of the Virgin’s Gown?”

  “Promise!”

  “All right,” she said, “my secret is that I’m not really beautiful at all.” She looked at us a bit wryly and waited for a response. We just sat there open-mouthed, because it wasn’t true, but anyway, we half believed her just because she’d said it, and we couldn’t understand how we’d been wrong. You can tell children almost anything and they’ll take it seriously.

  “My real secret is that the secret of being beautiful is to make people believe that you are, until you believe in it yourself, and then it becomes true.” She saw that we didn’t understand, and she smiled to herself. “I’ll tell you about being a beautiful woman.

  “The first thing is that being beautiful is like having a job. You know, if you’re a man you can be a peasant, or an apothecary, or a soldier. If you’re a woman you can be a mother or a servant or something, but you can also be beautiful. If you’re beautiful it’s better than working, even if you have to work at it, because you can always get what you want sooner or later. It’s like having money, except more fun, because having a job is work, and being beautiful is a game.

  “And it’s more than money. It’s a weapon. What’s a weapon for, unless it’s for getting what you want? If a beautiful woman smiles at a man, it’s like giving him a gift, it’s a reward, you can make him happy for a whole day. If a beautiful woman scowls at a man, it’s like a stab in the heart. You can make him miserable for a whole day. What a power that is! That’s where the pleasure is! A man becomes a prince or a leper, just depending on how you look at him. It’s true! And there’s another thing …” She leaned and whispered something in Philothei’s ear, and then they both looked at me and giggled. Afterwards I asked Philothei what it was, and she refused to tell me. I kept asking her right up to the time we left Anatolia altogether, and she still never told me, so I still don’t know what it was. She just said, “It’s better if you don’t know, honestly. Anyway, it’s not important, and if it was, I’d probably tell you, except that Leyla Hanim made me promise not to, and anyway it wouldn’t do you any good, so I’d better not.” So it’s always remained a mystery, even though I nagged and nagged and nagged, and sometimes I still wonder what it was.

  Leyla Hanim said, “I’ll tell you some bad things about being beautiful. You know, if you’re beautiful it’s easy to forget other people. It’s probably like being rich, or being the Sultan. There’s always someone else who wants to know you, and so no one ever matters very much, so you tend to lose even the ones you’re fond of. And another thing is, that if you’re beautiful, you always have to be suspicious. If Rustem Bey says that he loves me, how do I know that it isn’t because he wants to avail himself? Sometimes you wonder why people are being nice to you, and sometimes you know that your beauty is the reason that some people want to be horrible to you. People think that they want to know you, but really they are fascinated by a mask.” Leyla ran her fingernails over her face. “You know what? If I tore the skin off my face to the thickness of a piece of paper, I would be the ugliest and most horrible thing in the world, and everyone who used to think they wanted to know me would put their hands over their eyes and run away.” Philothei and I felt a bit sick after she said this. We were both wide-eyed with horror at the thought of Leyla Hanim’s face being flayed. “If you are beautiful,” added Leyla, “you never know how real is the friendliness of your friends. You have to keep testing them, and then sometimes you go too far, and that way you lose them. It’s a kind of loneliness that you never escape, but if you don’t want anyone to know you, to know you as you really are, then beauty is the perfect protection. You get solitude. Freedom.

  “I am going to tell you things that you don’t need to know,” said Leyla, “because you two will grow up and get married and be ordinary people, faithful little wives. But when you’re old, and you remember me, I want you to understand a little bit about who I was, because I want you to remember me as something better than what people might be saying.

  “You know, when a man wins a beautiful woman, to begin with he feels very proud and pleased with himself. But then he feels scared that he is going to lose her, and he gets jealous. It’s so pathetic! You don’t know whether to laugh or cry, despise him or be pleased! And sometimes he gets cantankerous, and sometimes he tries to spoil you to keep you sweet. And, between you and me, if he doesn’t spoil you quite enough, you start to get annoyed. And if you’re beautiful, and … and … well, if you’re the kind of woman I am, then you can have any man you want, more or less, so every time you try to find a man who’s better than the last. It makes you fickle. Sometimes I think that I won’t be content until I know I’ve found someone who’s better than me, someone who makes me feel more beautiful every day just because he’s mine. Rustem Bey … who knows … perhaps …” Leyla fell silent for a short time, and then she smiled and said, “You know, if you let yourself get ugly on the inside, then you get ugly on the outside too. The beauty doesn’t last. If you don’t try and keep your spirit beautiful, it soon starts to show, and people won’t want you any more.

  “But it’s not all bad! Who wants to be beautiful?” She raised a finger, and so did Philothei. I hesitated, and then raised my finger too. “Ah, beauty,” she said, smiling and shaking her head, “it’s like opium, it’s
an addiction, you’ve got to have more and more of it, it’s like a great heat in the heart that expands and expands and expands and fills you up—like having a sun inside. I just want to get more and more and more beautiful all the time, and I want everything around me to get more beautiful. I’m beauty’s slave. Really.”

  I suppose that we girls might have been looking a bit mystified—did I tell you that she had a slightly strange accent when she spoke, and that it made her seem even more exotic, like a princess?—and so she turned towards the mirror and put Philothei beside her. There wasn’t room for three faces side by side in the mirror, so I just stood at the side and watched. “I don’t let Rustem Bey see me in the morning, and I don’t go out at all, until I’ve made sure that I’m beautiful,” she said. “I’ve got to do the magic so that no one but me ever knows that really I’m not beautiful at all, apart from you two girls. Do you want to see the magic?”

  We did, as you can imagine.

  “Well, you just sit quietly in front of the mirror, and you concentrate very hard, and you just look and look at yourself until you’re sure that you’re beautiful again, and getting more and more beautiful. Philothei and I’ll do it first, and then you can change places with Philothei, Drosoulakimou.” It was the first time that anyone had ever called me that, and it wasn’t till years later that I remembered it and realised that it was Greek. Where she got that bit of Greek from, I can’t imagine. One of the curious things about her was that she was always looking for someone to speak Greek to. She tried most of the women in the hamam, but really she might just as well have asked it of a cow.

  Anyway, she and Philothei sat side by side gazing at themselves in the mirror. It was fascinating to watch. They went into a sort of hypnosis. Philothei was breathing so hard with concentration that I could see her nostrils flaring a little with every breath. Her cheeks flushed and her eyes got blacker and brighter. Her lips got a little redder. The same sort of thing was happening with Leyla Hanim. They were both just sitting there, sort of composing their faces, willing them to get more lovely, absolutely mesmerised by whatever it was that they were doing. I felt a definite chill of fear running up and down my back, but I couldn’t break away in case it disturbed them. It was a kind of magic, as Leyla Hanim said. I bet you that if the Holy Patriarch in Constantinople found out about it, or even Father Arsenios, he’d try to forbid it.