Birds Without Wings

by Louis de Bernières

  Rustem Bey stepped forward and bent down to look. “By the Prophet!” he exclaimed. Each light was the flame of a candle, and each candle was borne upon the back of an animal. “It’s wonderful,” he said. “Where on earth did you find so many tortoises?”

  “The children,” said Leyla. “I got the children to go out and find them.”

  “It’s wonderful,” repeated Rustem Bey. “I have never seen anything so pretty in all my life. You did this for me?”

  “Yes, my lion.”

  “My lion,” he repeated. “You have never called me that before.”

  “I have,” she replied, softly, “but not so as you would hear.”

  “I might have heard.”

  They stood facing each other, looking into each other’s eyes, the emotion of this encounter transporting them somewhere new and strange. “Come and eat,” she said at last. “I have prepared a feast.”

  Outside the kitchen Rustem Bey found a low table, decorated with tiny lamps, set up with a mezze of small dishes. “Sit down,” said Leyla, her hand upon his shoulder.

  Leyla knelt beside him, breaking bread and dipping the pieces by turn in the humus, the cacik, the yellow lentil, the patlican salatasi. These she fed into the mouth of Rustem Bey as if he were a child or someone sick. “Eat, my lion,” she encouraged him, “eat.”

  Rustem Bey closed his eyes and let the flavours overwhelm him. “So much garlic,” he said, over and over again, “I have never eaten so much garlic.”

  The bulbuls and nightingales set themselves to song, and in the distance the bereaved woman wailed for her slaughtered sons. An owl shrieked, and another whooped. The moon, just at the beginning of the wane, was like a swan adrift on a dark lake. The myriad candle flames wandered slowly about the courtyard, disorientating the senses.

  With her right hand Leyla fed the morsels of lamb into her master’s mouth, chanting, “Eat, my lion, eat.” The fumes of garlic filled his head and intoxicated him. Leyla gave him tumblers of water mixed with lemon juice to clean his palate between mouthfuls. She gave him the glasses of spiced and honeyed camel’s milk, and made sure that he drank it. “This is strange, a strange taste indeed,” he said. Pamuk sat expectantly nearby, patiently waiting for scraps to be handed down.

  A servant brought forth a small clay dish, and lifted the lid. The steam cleared, and Rustem Bey exclaimed, “An entire head? A whole head of garlic!”

  “Baked with olive oil, with its clothes on,” said Leyla. She broke off a clove and squeezed the soft sweet pulp out of the crisp golden skin and on to a sliver of bread. “Eat,” she said.

  Rustem Bey chewed, and shook his head. “It’s astounding. I have never had such a feast in my life, not even at a wedding.”

  “Eat,” said Leyla, “there are no sweets afterwards, so that the taste will not be spoiled. This is all there is. Eat.”

  When Rustem Bey had tried all the dishes and was replete, Leyla disappeared to the kitchen. On the embers of the brazier she placed the small brass cezve. She waited for the magical moment when the foam began to rise off the coffee, and just when it was about to overflow the rim she took it off and let it settle. Then she put it back on to the embers and waited for it to rise again. Only then did she tip it carefully into a small cup, and take it out to Rustem Bey. A servant brought out the narghile, along with an ember in a pair of tongs. Rustem Bey sipped at the coffee and inhaled the cool smoke, which had a flavour, heady and rich, that he had not encountered before. He felt as though adrift. A servant brought out a copper with a few hot cinders in it. From a linen bag Leyla drew out handfuls of the skins from the heads of garlic that they had consumed. “Smell this,” she said, tossing them a few at a time into the dish, and Rustem Bey leaned over and caught the rich but delicate incense in his nostrils. It was exquisite. He looked up at the stars, at the moon, around at the errant candlelight, and then at Leyla. He caught her intently watching his face.

  “All my life, hanim,” he said, “all of it that is granted to remain, I shall remember this night, this feast, these pretty lights, you, your great beauty. What is better, after this? After this, there is only death.”

  “I will sing,” said Leyla. She clapped her hands, and a servant brought out her oud. She sat cross-legged on the cushions, took the instrument, tuned it, and began to pick out the notes with a long plectrum shaved from cherrywood. When she had established the melody with its little rushes and hesitations, its melismas and its small sadnesses, she set to singing, all the while gazing into the face of her companion, as if to hypnotise him:

  “My lion, when I kissed you it was night.

  Who saw?

  The night stars saw, and the moon saw,

  And the moon told the sea,

  And the sea told the oar,

  And the oar told the sailor.

  When you kissed me my lipstick was on your lips,

  Who saw?

  The eagle saw, and went in search

  Of an equal shade of red,

  And the eagle found it

  On the lips of a princess.

  Let’s light the lantern

  And go down to the shore.

  What if the waves are too big

  And carry us far away?

  We’ll turn ourselves both into boats,

  And our hands will become the oars.”

  “Sing something sad,” said Rustem Bey. “If there is too much happiness in one night, someone will give us the evil eye.”

  Leyla stroked the strings, composed herself, and sang, her voice deepening with sorrow:

  “As death approaches,

  My only wish

  Is to die in the place

  Where I was born.

  Life is painful,

  But on it goes.”

  She stopped quite suddenly, and Rustem Bey looked at her. She smiled back, but he asked, “Why are you crying? You have tears in your eyes.”

  “I can’t help it. It’s the sad song.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her sleeve, and added, “I will never again see the place where I was born.” She sang again:

  “Where can I plant you, my red rose?

  I fear the sailors

  If it’s by the shore.

  I fear the cold

  If it’s out upon the mountains.

  I’ll plant you by a mosque,

  I’ll plant you by a church,

  By a beautiful sainted tomb,

  Between two apple trees,

  By two bitter-orange trees,

  So that all their blossom and

  All their fruit will fall

  On you, my red rose,

  And by your root,

  There will I lie asleep.”

  Her warm voice, full of passion and melancholy, carried out over the town and echoed among the ruins of the Lycian tombs, where the Dog lay on a slab and listened. “Have you noticed?” said Rustem Bey. “The nightingales have stopped.”

  They sat silently for a moment. Out in the town the puritanical women and rigid men, decent and narrow, good Muslims and Christians all, tutted in their little rooms and said, “I don’t know what’s happened to our

  Rustem Bey. First he gets himself a whore, and then he lets her play an oud like a man, and sing. It’s a disgrace, it isn’t right, it’s not respectable, and we’ve got to sit here and listen to it, whatever is the world coming to?”

  Leyla and Rustem Bey looked into each other’s faces obliviously. The world had become very small. Very tentatively Leyla leaned forward and placed a soft kiss on Rustem’s lips. She took up her oud and, the corners of her mouth curling upward in the slightest of smiles, sang softly, delicately, salaciously:

  “My lips are sugar,

  My cheeks an apple,

  My breasts paradise, and

  My body is a lily.

  O, my lion,

  I wait for you

  To kiss the sugar,

  To bite the apple,

  To open paradise, and

  Possess the lily.”
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  An owl hooted in the momentary silence, and Rustem Bey felt a kind of drunkenness come over him. Leyla carefully laid the oud upon a cushion. She stood up, shook her hair back, and held out her hand. “Come,” she said, “it’s time. The night is warm and good. The eagle must fly at last to his nest.”

  CHAPTER 40

  The Veiling of Philothei

  There were many who believed that Ali the Snowbringer was so called because his profession was to bring ice down from the mountains, but the truth was that he had earned this sobriquet because, on the night of his birth, it had snowed for the first time in seventy-five years.

  All day long, an unnatural stillness and a dry cold had settled upon the coastal plain. People stamped their feet and grumbled, because this was a place where permanently fair weather had left the inhabitants softer than those from the Anatolian vastness. Only the hunters and shepherds up on the slopes had ever experienced anything quite as penetratingly icy as this. In the late evening the air stirred, and the poyraz wind sprang up from the north-east. Old men of apocalyptic disposition muttered ominously that at this time of year there were supposed to be gales from the south, and that a knife-edged wind at such an odd time could bode the world no good. Dull and heavy clouds gathered above, and the cold intensified as the twilight grew suddenly black.

  It was with wonderment that, as the birth-cries of Ali’s mother died away, the people ran out of the houses and beheld the white flakes begin to descend upon their town. The dogs barked and yelped, bounding up on their hind legs and shaking their heads as they attempted to catch the snowflakes in their teeth, and the townsfolk gathered outdoors, dark and cold as it was, to marvel at the eerily silent descent. “Çok güzel, çok güzel!” they exclaimed, this people innocent of snow, enchanted by its pristine novelty even as they shivered, and the children caught it on their tongues, or scooped it up and crammed it into their mouths.

  It fell only to half a hand’s depth, and by the following mid-morning it had gone, leaving behind it only a new child, and a communal memory that had the savour of those stories that tell of lost Edens and magical lands. Ali amounted to that memory made physical, and therefore, throughout his life, he had the good fortune to be aware of himself as someone special, someone marked out significantly by providence, and this despite the fact that in his whole life he did nothing remarkable until his one noble deed at the time of the exodus. He would explain to people that not only was his donkey a proper Muslim donkey because it was brown all over and had no cross upon its shoulders, but that he spent his life bringing ice down from the mountains because he was Ali the Snowbringer, but he was not Ali the Snowbringer because he brought ice from the mountains.

  He did, however, play a small part in the little drama that was Philothei’s life, for by the time that she was fourteen, as oblivious as anyone else to an outside world that was poised upon the brink of the first technologised mass slaughter in history, she had flowered into a prettiness so irresistible and adorable that it was impossible for any man of the town to remain at ease.

  Shaped by nature and by Leyla Hanim’s careful and loving tutelage, she had grown in physical loveliness day by day, until she had become as luminous as Selene. Even Leyla, generous in spirit as she was, began to find that Philothei’s presence, however enchanting, was causing her anxiety. She perceived that often the sad eyes of Rustem Bey rested upon her companion rather than upon herself, she saw the glittering of his momentary pangs of delight and pleasure, and she felt the points of sexual jealousy pricking at the back of her throat, repress them though she tried.

  It would be easy to say that Philothei was supremely beautiful, but, even though many people certainly thought that she was, such would be an oversimplification. Some women are ugly, but in their presence men become dry-mouthed with desire. Some women are neither ugly nor beautiful, but a light shines out of their faces that causes them to become beloved. Sometimes a woman is objectively beautiful, but no man desires her, because there is no light. In Philothei’s case it was the high spirit that shone out of her face that made her captivating. It was a matter of intelligence and good humour, and consequently it would be unprofitable to taxonomise her beauties, to dwell upon the shape of her mouth, or the arc of her eyebrows, or the line of her nose. She was a pretty girl made beautiful by her youth, her sweet nature and her manner.

  All through his childhood Ibrahim had dogged her faithfully, sure of his destiny as her husband, but now other men began to find her populating their daydreams. When she passed, men in conversation would fall silent and watch her until she had gone. Others knew the times that she went to Leyla Hanim, and arranged to be by the window or the front door, or in the meydan. Even the Dog came down more often from his anchoritic home in the tombs, terrifying Philothei with his ghastly smile as he sidled by her and tried to catch her eye. For his part, Ali the Snowbringer started to neglect his work in order to follow her.

  He would straggle behind, pathetically trying to look as if he were about his business, ambling from door to door, or flitting up an alleyway so that he could descend by another and greet her coming the other way, his expression full of longing and shame. Philothei, entirely oblivious to him, proceeded on her way as if he did not exist, but Ibrahim noticed, and so did many others.

  Thus it was that in the hamam one day, Safiye, wife of Ali the Snowbringer, plonked herself down on the slab next to Ayse, wife of Abdulhamid Hodja, sighed portentously, and began, “Peace upon you, Ayse Efendim.”

  “And upon you,” replied Ayse, even though she heartily wished otherwise. As far as she was concerned the hamam was a sacred place in which one accomplished the essence of nothing, and she resented having to speak in that infernal paradise of steam, olive-oil soap and perspiration. Least of all did she wish to speak to Safiye, who lived in the hollow trunk of an admittedly large tree with her husband, four children and a donkey, and who was, moreover, rather unprepossessing in appearance. Ayse liked to look upon the young women, with the fat shining on their thighs and hips, their round breasts and their sparkling brown eyes. She particularly liked to see Leyla Hanim, even though she was a Circassian whore. Leyla’s good living left her plumper and more at ease in her skin with every day that passed. Ayse took no pleasure in the older women, however, whose breasts pointed downwards, and in this she was, of course, a hypocrite, who, like all hypocrites, would have been the last to realise that that was what she was. The two middle-aged women, identically pendulous, sat side by side in the stupendous humidity whilst Safiye explained her problem.

  Ayse listened wide-eyed, wiped the sweat futilely from her brow, and protested, “Are you serious? You want my husband to do something about it?”

  “Oh please, Ayse Efendim, you must ask him to speak to the father of Philothei.”

  “It’s not Philothei’s fault if your husband has become silly,” replied Ayse. “Why should my husband have anything to do with it?”

  “You don’t understand, it’s because your husband is an important man, and the father of Philothei will listen to him. You don’t know what it’s like! My husband has not brought down any ice for two weeks. We don’t have one para left! He just follows Philothei. I know it, because I followed him myself. He’s bewitched.”

  “You followed him?”

  “What else can a woman do, a poor wife like me?”

  “Why don’t you speak to Philothei’s mother? Surely you know Polyxeni?”

  “I don’t know her. We’ve never spoken. She’s Christian, and her family is richer than us.”

  “Never spoken? A lifetime in the same town, and you’ve never spoken?”

  “I never needed to,” replied Safiye, miserably. “I don’t know how to speak to her.”

  Ayse rolled her eyes impatiently. “Do you think that a Christian would bite your nose off?”

  “Well, they aren’t like us.”

  “They’re not so different either,” Ayse told her, “and a mother is a mother whatever she is. Would you like me to
speak to her?”

  “No. I want Abdulhamid Hodja to speak to her father. Abdulhamid Hodja is wise, and will know what to say.”

  Ayse bristled with indignation. “Safiye Efendim, are you saying that I am not wise?”

  “Oh no, Ayse Efendim. I want someone to speak to her father, because he has more authority, and you can’t speak to him, can you? It wouldn’t be decent.”

  Ayse saw the sense of this observation, and accordingly mentioned the matter to Abdulhamid Hodja that evening after prayers. She relayed Safiye’s request with some scorn and sarcasm, adding, “Whatever next! What a ridiculous thing, not that my opinion ever counts for anything. Not that anyone ever listens to me.”

  Abdulhamid, reverend and sensible as he was, had also been suffering some private discomfort on account of Philothei, and therefore had more insight into the nature of the problem than he might have wished his wife to realise. There was nothing like a young woman’s beauty for sowing discord in the world, and everyone knew many tragical stories concerning it.

  So it was that he found himself in the improbable position of having to approach Charitos, father of Philothei, in the coffeehouse and having to talk quietly to him whilst they played abstractedly at backgammon, that game which mirrors life by being composed half of calculation and half of luck, with the luck, good or bad, mainly occurring in the second half. Charitos drew on the waterpipe that they shared, drank his coffee and listened, twisting the ends of his moustache and frowning.

  “I suggest,” concluded Abdulhamid, having explained the nature of the quandary, and listened sympathetically to Charitos’s protestations of his daughter’s absolute innocence, “that you do as the Sultan once did when the capital was still in Bursa.”

  “What was that?” asked Charitos, the response for which Abdulhamid Hodja had neatly angled.

  “There was an influx of Circassian refugees. More persecution by the Russians, no doubt. The Circassian women were so beautiful that the local men began to fight about them, and so, in order to restore the peace, the Sultan summoned the leader of the Circassians, and told him to veil the women. This was done, and the fighting finished.”