Birds Without Wings

by Louis de Bernières

  “I’m talking about dignity, the national soul. I am not talking about being fat and complacent.”

  “Fat and complacent! Fat and complacent! Your head is full of dogfart! All the money I spent on your education, and you learned nothing! You’re no son of mine. Your mother must have been with someone else.”

  Leonidas’s mother scowled at her husband, but maintained her composure. She was quite used to this particular rhetorical flourish, which was not to a standard that matched the general quality of his intellect. All of their sons and daughters had been accused at one time or another of not being children of his, and she used to remark drily that if she had had as many lovers as he sometimes supposed, she would have had an eventful and exhausting life indeed.

  I mention this conversation, which was typical of many, because it reflects a general tendency at the time. We Asia Minor Greeks were caught between the hot-headed idealists and nationalists who wanted to turn the world upside down in the name of a beautiful vision of Byzantium, and the sensible fellows like me and Leonidas’s father, who wanted a nice comfortable life trading in commodities and getting whatever we wanted because we were clever and rich enough to get it. I do remember that in those days everyone thought they were entitled to an empire, and perhaps Leonidas and his friends were just a symptom of the times, like Mussolini. Personally, I liked the idea of a new Greater Greece, in theory, but I couldn’t see the point of risking anything for it, and I couldn’t stop thinking of the mainlanders as at worst a bunch of crazy foreigners, or at best like embarrassing cousins with too many halfwits in the family. I wasn’t in any kind of mood to die for them, and no one was more surprised than me when they decided to come over and die for us. I can’t say I was very surprised, however, when the fiasco concluded with all of us losing everything, and it was we who died for them.

  I also mention that conversation because it shows why Leonidas ended up as a teacher in an insignificant little town, rather than as a merchant like the rest of us. He defied his father firmly, and went to Eskibahçe to try and educate the Greeks back into being Greeks. He wanted to knock the Turkishness out of them. He wanted them to speak Greek instead of Turkish, and learn about the classical past. He wanted to fire them up about the War of Independence, and the struggles in Crete. He wanted to tell them about heroic women who hurled their children over precipices rather than yield them to the Turks. He wanted them to understand the church services, instead of listening to all that rolling ecclesiastical liturgy in dumb and uncomprehending awe.

  It was hard to like Leonidas, but I’ll say one thing for him: he might have been a romantic, but he really did manage to get the Christians to send their children to his little school. He lived off practically nothing, endured ingratitude and ridicule, and spent his nights writing fiery tracts that got stuck up crooked on walls, and which no one could be bothered to read. I read them of course, because he always sent me copies, much to my consternation. I shudder to think how much oil and wakefulness he wasted. As I know from poring over my accounts late at night, it leaves you feeling disorientated and unhealthy. What I would like to add is that, just as we sensible types feared all along, the romantic enthusiasms of people like Leonidas ended up with peaceable fellows like me drowning in harbours whilst their cities burned.

  In that little town Leonidas suffered much humiliation, and to be honest, I would guess it was mostly his own fault. He had that sense of personal superiority that automatically puts people’s backs up, and which no merchant would dare to express publicly because he would lose half his customers. Just imagine what would have happened if I’d told my Jewish or Armenian clients what I really thought of them! Or the Turkish officials! Commercial catastrophe, that’s what. Give me nice polite hypocrisy any time, which is something all of us could profitably learn from the English, I’d say.

  Anyway, there came a time when I had to go to Eskibahçe because I had heard that there was a very good potter there who worked hard and made excellent things. I had seen the little clay whistles that he made in the shape of various birds, which you half filled with water, and then they warbled like a bird when you blew into them. Such toys were very common of course, but his were definitely a cut above the rest because of the quality of the design and decoration, and because they always sounded like the bird they represented, which was by no means usual with other people’s. I wanted to visit this Iskander the Potter because it occurred to me that I could probably make four hundred per cent profit by selling his wares to the Italians, whilst at the same time doubling the profits that he took for himself. The man concerned turned out to be an amiable, grubby-turbaned fellow with a disconcerting habit of speaking in proverbs that he seemed to have invented himself, but we struck a good deal, and there was something for everyone, which is what it’s all about when it comes down to it. He had a blind old man walking up and down in his great tank of clay, picking out the stones between his toes, an arrangement that struck me as peculiarly inspired, since it was the ideal job for a blind old man, and no doubt the exercise kept him robust in his senescence.

  Because I knew that Leonidas was in that town, I sent a message to say that I would come and stay with him, but that he wasn’t to go to any trouble, and a week later I turned up. I sent my bodyguards and servants to stay in the khan, which was very clean and comfortable, and I went to stay in Leonidas’s house, which very much wasn’t, and I saw that indeed he had conscientiously honoured my request, and not gone to any trouble at all.

  I must say, though, that I took a fancy to that town the moment I saw it. What a lovely place! I can quite see why it was called Paleoperiboli in ancient times. I arrived in the early evening when the swallows had come down for the flies and the tortoises had clattered out for their daily peripato. From the minaret of the mosque the muezzin was calling the azan at the top of his lungs, and the resound of it was echoing with half a second’s delay from the hillside behind. Like many Christians I always found the azan both irritating and exciting.

  You approach the town through a lovely shady pine wood that, here and there, shelters the lopsided whitewashed tombs of the Muslims, some of them freshly sparkling and others so dilapidated, grey and subsiding as to have become part of the natural scree of the forest floor. A perfect spot to rest, I would say, at any rate somewhat superior to being cremated in your own house or shredded by crabs in the mud at the bottom of a harbour. Amid the sand and rock, thick with pine needles, grew little shrubs of holly, and in the clearings I saw groups of euphorbia and indigo wild delphinium. In one place there were deep red hibiscus, and chickens roosting in the trees. The smell of figs was intoxicating, and I leaned over from my horse and picked one that was scarlet and slightly overripe, and tasted of coconut. At the ingress to the town there were two dogs, forgive me for mentioning it, hopelessly knotted together after the sexual act, going round in circles and being taunted by other dogs who wanted to get at the bitch. I felt that was a good metaphor for something, but I couldn’t think what. There was also a small house, outside which a Muslim woman was sitting in the shade of a vine, rolling thin unleavened bread on a lapboard with a slim rolling pin, the very image of domestic contentment. From her I bought a salty glass of ayran, because I prefer it to the sweet kind, drank it whilst I observed the unfortunate dogs, and felt infinitely refreshed. Opposite this house, a little trickle of water came out of the hillside and ran across the road, which is what inspired me to build a pump house there, with a trough and a drinking fountain. As I was dusty and thirsty from travel, I was surprised that no one had thought of it before. A man who does well in this world has to put something back in, I say, and, let’s face it, it never does a man any commercial harm to generate some goodwill with the occasional act of generosity.

  I noticed, oddly enough, that the poppies that grew in the stones were all pink instead of red, and I remember that my uncle used to say that women were like poppies; they fall away to nothing as soon as they are plucked, or words to that effect. There were sw
athes of prostrate capers, with their delicate and strange lilac swirls of stamen inside their cups of four white petals, crowding out of the walls and verges, alongside those dark blue bells of convolvulus. There was a knot of scruffy little children plucking the flowers and blowing into them until they popped loudly. I tried it myself later on, when no one was about, and it was curiously satisfying and amusing.

  On my right, below the road, was a great pool full of ancient ruins, a temple, I suppose, that had about it an aura of femininity. It was decorated, as it were, by crimson damselflies, martens perched sideways on reeds and little flotillas of ducks. Frogs squelched and yelped like rubber cats, and turtles glided about beneath the water from one stone to another. In the centre of the pool stood a still and silent man with his shalwar rolled up above his knees, who very much resembled a heron, and was clearly a leech gatherer.

  The town itself rose up to the left-hand side, occupying a concave hillside that was like a vast amphitheatre. In it our ancestors could have built the biggest theatre in the world, had the idea occurred to them, because down at the bottom was the meydan, which might have been a natural stage. In the meydan, and I swear this is not some mischievous traveller’s tale, there was actually a family living with an asthmatic donkey in the hollowed trunk of an enormous tree. More than anything else this illustrates how quickly civilised standards tailed away the further you got from Smyrna. This was the kind of place where you might find beehives actually inside people’s houses, and people making cattle food in their kitchens, consisting of cakes made of apricot and walnut leaves. There was a small group of people there who had turned Turk because they had got fed up with the exactions of Lent, and it wasn’t uncommon for Turks to go into churches and light candles. Sometimes they even went to observe the services, and would stand at the back of the church with their arms folded, in the perfect attitude of interested scepticism. Apparently they particularly enjoyed the service on Resurrection Day.

  Once I was in the town in a time of drought, and the townswomen were busy making rain. I was astonished to see it.

  There was a woman wearing a cow’s forehead and horns on her own head, all bedecked with ribbons and beads, and all the women were quaintly dressed in rags and wildflowers and herbs, and they pranced and danced and sang from house to house, and the people in the houses would give them nuts and chickpeas and raisins, and they sang a song which went:

  “May May my Constantine

  Give rain here and mud there

  To our meadows

  To our water pots

  Seven times

  Seven times

  Once here, once there

  Once in Charon’s yard.”

  I remember this in particular, because when I saw it there was a marvellously ugly little girl in the procession who was accompanied by one who was marvellously pretty, and I couldn’t help noticing the anomaly of it.

  The town was a bafflingly intractable labyrinth, but at the same time it was, in my opinion, very well thought out. Streets wide enough only for the passing of two camels radiated up the hillside and twisted almost horizontally along its contours, so that houses and courtyards were connected to each other in the most surprising ways, all of them eventually converging upon the Church of St. Nicholas, with its famous nine chandeliers, its exterior walls cleverly rendered to appear like stone, its efficacious and benefacient icon of the Panagia Glykophilousa, and its mosaicked courtyard of chevrons, roundels and squares, all executed beautifully in fragments of marble, maroon and white and black, with the number “1910” set in to commemorate its recent renovation. In this church, strange to report, and much to my astonishment, some of the Christians lit their candles and placed them in the sandbox as you might expect, but then knelt down and prayed whilst making Muslim prostrations. Behind the church was its ossuary, perhaps two metres deep, and from that dank cave emanated the disconsolate odour of mouldering rags and slowly decomposing bones. Because it was a church of St. Nicholas, the olive tree outside it was tied with rags put there by barren women. There was a woman who tied many rags there, and she was apparently the wife of the priest. This woman was sometimes called upon to cure children who were late to learn how to speak, and she cured them by pressing the crosspiece of the church key against their lips. Whether it worked or not, I have no idea.

  I thought the construction of the houses wonderfully sensible, for they were made in stone with a system of terracotta guttering that replenished large cisterns that were invariably built on to the side of every house. This must have reduced enormously the difficulties one often has with a shortage of water in the summer, and must have saved the women from making many arduous trips to the wells, whose stonework was deeply grooved from so many centuries of raising and lowering the buckets. On another outside corner of every house was a small but decent round-roofed earth closet with a proper door and a comfortably made seat, and a little window high up to carry off any unpleasant miasma.

  Many of the houses had wooden platforms slotted into their sides in order to increase space, surmounted by gaily coloured canopies to reduce the oppression of the sun. The chimney tops were of a most practical design, resembling small houses with pitched roofs, and windows cut into the sides to let out the smoke. The fireplaces themselves were always on the upper floor, since it was customary to keep animals below in winter, so that their warmth could rise up and supplement the effects of the fires. One’s impression of the interiors was dominated by the fact that everyone painted their woodwork in a most jolly shade of cornflower blue. The exteriors, on the other hand, were painted in gentle pinks, blues and yellows, and each one had a songbird in a small cage suspended outside a window or the front door, so that the town not only presented a very pretty and homely picture indeed as it rose higgledy-piggledy up the hillside, but was always rich in competitive birdsong.

  There was a lower church at the bottom of the town, a modest but pleasant building dedicated to St. Minas, who had a great following in those parts. It had its own ossuary round the back, protected by a wrought-iron grille, and its floor was cleverly but cheaply made out of black and white pebbles carefully arranged to resemble a big star surrounded by an entwinement of vine tendrils. What particularly struck me about this church was that an owl was permitted to live in it unmolested, spending its days perched on a beam, occasionally opening its eyes to inspect scornfully those who stood below and disturbed its repose. A cloth was placed on the floor beneath its perch, for obvious reasons.

  Because the town was built on the side of a hill whose other side slopes down to a cliff above the sea, there is a constant wind that deflects off the rocks above and produces a sound like thunder. This booming is so regular and perpetual that very quickly one ceases to notice it. I climbed and wended up those steep, rough-stoned, stepped pathways to the top of the town, where there is a broken Byzantine watch tower and a tiny white chapel, and found that nearby there is a cleft where a deliciously cool wind blows through and preserves the town from the bad air disease in summer, when God in His infinite perversity decrees that the hardest work must be done at the hottest time of the year. Cut into the ground is a deep lime quarry full of hidey-holes, where sometimes the children play in the evenings.

  I walked along the ridge above the town and saw that there were many old tombs. There was a dumb man living there as a sort of hermit of unknown provenance, though some thought that he might have been a Kalandar dervish, whose smile was so hideous that no one could bear to behold it. When I saw it I received such a shock that I recoiled violently and fell over, knocking my head on a rock and grazing my hand. It was said that he must at some time have had his lips pinned back and been forced to bite down upon a large red-hot iron that caused unspeakable damage to his teeth, his gums and his tongue. He was a harmless lost soul, known by everyone as the Dog, and was a frequent object of charity, whose spirit in the town he helped to nourish by his presence.

  I also saw the “tekke of the saint,” as they called it, which w
as a tomb that had a small hole drilled in the lid and another beneath. The custom was that anyone of any faith would pour olive oil through the top hole so that it would wash over the bones before emerging from the bottom hole, to be used as a general panacea. No one knew anything about this saint, except that he was one, although it looked to me as though the tomb must greatly predate the time of Christ. Certainly he must have been the saint with the oiliest bones in the world, and I collected a small phial of this oil just in case it turned out to be of any use. I employed it on a small patch of dry skin, with efficacious results.

  The rocky wilderness above the town was rich in peppery oregano, thyme, stunted melissa, mountain tea, figs, exuberantly coloured beetles and wonderful charcoal-coloured crickets that flashed red wings when they jumped. It was a fine thing to sit up there at dusk as the sun descended behind me, watching the smoke rise up from the braziers, and seeing the gold leaf of the minaret of the mosque sparkling ruby in the day’s last rays.

  Where was I? I’ve forgotten what I was supposed to be talking about. I think I must have digressed somewhat. Ah, yes, well, it was Leonidas. I do apologise. You will have realised that I was enthusiastic about this town and its amenities, not least because it was one of the very few I have ever visited that provided the comfort and consolation of a public urinal. It is a poignant experience to see that forsaken paradise now, mainly reduced to rubble, looted, uninhabited except by ghosts, lizards and the traces of ancient memory.

  Yes, I loved that town, enough to build it a pump house at my own expense, but I was considerably less keen on the dwelling of Leonidas. He lived in the most appalling and abject disorder in a house that would have been eminently pleasant had it been occupied by anyone else. Leonidas, however, had visited upon it an apocalypse of dust, scattered papers and books heaped up in tottering columns. God alone knows how he subsisted, because I encountered no food in his house, and nothing that I would dignify with the name of bedding. I regretted greatly that my servants and bodyguards were in the khan without me, but found that I could not decently leave immediately because Leonidas himself was in a terrible state. His hands were shaking, he could barely walk, and he was incoherent with rage and fright, despite the events which had upset him having occurred two days before. He had dark rings round his eyes, his hair was dishevelled and his face was white with shock.