Birds Without Wings

by Louis de Bernières

  “Of course you are,” agreed Leyla, meaning it quite sincerely. This was a man who disappeared for days at a time to hunt in the mountains. He could lift the dead deer up on to his horse’s back as if they were made of stuffed felt.

  “I would go,” said Rustem Bey. “In fact, I made enquiries with my old regiment as soon as war seemed likely. However, I have had a message from the governor asking me to raise a militia and maintain law and order. It seems that most of the gendarmerie will be called to the front.”

  “A militia?”

  “Old men and little boys and cripples,” said Rustem Bey, “and as soon as the little boys are old enough, they’ll be off to the front too, and then I will have to go and look for more little boys to replace them.”

  “So you will stay?”

  “Yes, I will stay. But not without some guilt and regret.”

  “Oh, thank God,” she said. “Without you here I couldn’t live.” She knew that his presence in the town was the only reason for which she was treated with any consideration or respect.

  “I am also sad just because there is a war,” said Rustem Bey, ignoring her, and speaking as if to himself. “In the first place, we are now at war with France, and France is the civilisation towards which everyone like me naturally aspires. In my regiment the officers all learned French and tried to speak it to each other. In the second place, we are at war with Britain, which has excellent soldiers and sailors, and the biggest empire in the history of the world, and which used to be our best friend, and in the third place, we are at war with Russia, which has always hated us and obstructed us and wanted to take Istanbul from us. On our side we have Austria-Hungary, about which I know very little, and Germany, about which I know less, except that she seems to be extremely good from a military point of view.”

  “We have Enver Pasha,” said Leyla, wondering which side the Greeks would take, and wondering who, in her case, “we” really were.

  Rustem snorted. “Enver Pasha has grown great by taking advantage of good luck and by taking the credit for what has really been achieved by other people. He is certainly ambitious.”

  “Well, I don’t know about these things,” sighed Leyla. Military and political matters did not interest her very greatly. What really concerned her was that she should not lose Rustem Bey.

  “Another thing,” continued Rustem Bey, as if no one were listening, “I have seen battlefields strewn with the bodies of young men, and old ones too. I have smelled the corpses when there wasn’t enough time to bury them before they began to rot. I’ve seen what happens to the women and the children. The Sultan Padishah has declared it a holy war.”

  Rustem Bey paused and Leyla wondered what it signified. “A holy war?”

  “Yes, a holy war. The Sultan Padishah has never been on a burial party when the corpses have been left too long. I will say this to you, my tulip, but I would not say it to anyone else because of what it would do to my reputation … do you promise never to repeat this?”

  “Repeat what?”

  “What I am about to say.”

  “I won’t repeat it if you don’t want me to. Who would I repeat it to anyway? Pamuk?”

  “You like to talk with Philothei and Drosoula. Sometimes you do it for hours. I have no doubt that what gets said here is repeated in the town.”

  “But what is it that I am not to repeat? And I promise I won’t repeat it to them or even to Pamuk.”

  “I have an opinion about holy war, which in general I must keep to myself. I have no wish to be known as a heretic. It is … that if a war can be holy, then God cannot. At best, a war can only be necessary.”

  “Oh,” said Leyla, realising that she would have to think about this before its full import would sink in.

  Rustem Bey stood up and faced her. He touched a hand tenderly to her cheek and smiled ironically. “You shouldn’t assume I’ll survive, you know. Every time there’s a war, the countryside fills up with outlaws and bandits because all the dregs of the armies take the first opportunity to desert, and take their weapons with them. I’ll be out there after them with my invincible squads of cripples, old men and little boys.”

  “I want you to survive,” said Leyla, her eyes beginning to brim.

  “Maybe I’d better leave the invincible squads behind and go after them on my own, then,” said Rustem Bey. “I suppose I had better start to get something organised.” He touched her face again, and went back into the house. Leyla took his place on the wall, wondering what might come, and fearing for Rustem Bey and herself.

  CHAPTER 52

  A Small Act of Kindness

  Polyxeni hurried through the alleyways with a pot in her hands, and was struck all over again by how much more quiet the place had become since so many of the men had been called away. It had only been a few days, and the town already had a hollow feel, everything one saw had the air of being a backdrop to an absence. There were so many faces missing, so many shadows uncast, so many deep or raucous voices unechoed by the walls. The air missed its usual smells of sweat and tobacco, and the tables of the coffeehouse seemed uneasy without their work-shy habitués bent over the backgammon boards. There was no news from the war. In this empire, so vast and disorganised, so besieged on all sides, so crippled by perpetual attack, one often only knew whether one’s husband or son was dead when there was no news of him for years.

  Polyxeni kicked off her shoes at the back door of Nermin’s house, knocked, did not wait for a reply, and entered. She found Nermin peeling onions in the semi-darkness, and for that reason was not sure what she was crying about. “You should do them under water,” advised Polyxeni, “and that way you don’t weep so much.”

  “If it wasn’t onions …” replied Nermin, shrugging.

  “How are you?”

  “Two of my sons have gone,” said Nermin. “Karatavuk went in place of his father, and now Iskander’s in a fury. He says he was lied to by his own son.”

  “It was a noble lie.”

  “Yes, it was good. But who knows if he will ever come back? The Sultan calls, and the men go away and die, and we women, we are left to eat the dust and drink tears.”

  “Mehmetçik’s in a fury too. They wouldn’t let him go with Karatavuk.” Polyxeni touched her friend’s arm. “Everything is in God’s hands. God arranges everything and we don’t know the plan, but God knows it. God knows where every sparrow falls, and to what place every grain of sand is carried by the wind.”

  “God gives us hardship and sorrow. I want to ask God, ‘Why do we deserve it?’ Did I tell you that Karatavuk says he will write letters to us? I asked him how, thinking that he would find a comrade to write for him, and he told me then that Mehmetçik taught him to read and write when they were boys, writing in the dust with sticks. I knew nothing about it. I was amazed, and then I was happy, and then I thought, ‘But how will I read them?’ ”

  “You will find someone to read them for you.”

  “I often thought,” replied Nermin, “what would happen if we learned to read and write? I thought, ‘Who cares?’ Reading is not for us. What is there to read? What is our life? We hoe, we make food, we give birth, what’s the use of reading? What is there to know?” She paused. “Now that my sons have gone, I know the use.”

  The two women looked at each other for a moment, and then Polyxeni held out the pot she had been carrying. Nermin recognised her own husband’s handiwork, and briefly felt a warm glow in the pit of her stomach. “For you,” said Polyxeni.

  “What is it?” Nermin took it, lifted the lid, and peered inside.

  “Olives. In my family we have a tree, and we believe that if you eat olives from this tree when your loved ones are away, it makes them come back safely. It’s always worked for us, so maybe it’ll work for you too. You should eat one a day, and your sons will come back.”

  Nermin was touched. “Oh,” she said, “but shouldn’t you keep them? One day they’ll come for Mehmetçik, for the labour battalions. That’s what Karatavuk sa
id.”

  “It’s a good tree,” said Polyxeni. “We have a lot of olives. We save them up and don’t eat them unless someone is away. If you run out, I’ll give you some more. But when your sons return, can I have the pot back? It’s a good pot, and I haven’t got so many. Iskander made it.”

  “I know,” said Nermin. “When I hold one of his pots in my hands, it is very like holding his hands. It gives me the feeling of being comforted. I can feel the strength of his fingers.”

  “I must go,” said Polyxeni. “There’s nothing to eat, and I have to go and invent something out of thin air as usual.”

  “Take one of these onions,” said Nermin, “and can I ask you one more thing?”

  “Yes?”

  “Thank you for the olives. But can you kiss the icon and ask your Panagia to watch over my Karatavuk?”

  “I’ll slip into the church on my way past,” agreed Polyxeni. “Have courage.”

  Nermin raised a hand and smiled weakly in return. She reminded herself to tell her husband to go and tie another rag to the red pine, and it occurred to her that she should go to the tomb of the saint and collect some olive oil that had run over the bones, in case a son came home wounded and needed a salve. Outside the back door Polyxeni slid her feet into her shoes, and turned to go back out into the unnatural peace of the town.

  CHAPTER 53

  The Removal

  For many decades there had been troubles in the east of Anatolia. Living separate lives in separate villages, Armenians and other tribesmen had been assiduously at each other’s throats, committing against each other the banal but vile atrocities so frequently rehearsed by those who are deeply addicted to the orgasmic pleasures of extreme mutual hatred. Relations were particularly bad between Kurds and Armenians, both convinced of the superiority of their own race and religion. The Kurds were fanatically Islamic, even though it is doubtful that any of them had ever read a word of the Koran, and in the case of the Armenians there was the strong belief that they were the descendants of Noah, and that this made them special. A reasonably attentive reading of the Bible would have revealed the obvious fact that if its account is true, then absolutely everyone is a descendant of Noah. Many Armenians desired an autonomous land for themselves, aspiring to situate it even in places where they were not in the majority. The Kurds were at that time still more or less loyal to the state, and the state itself was too chaotic to impose tolerance or order on these far-flung and undeveloped places, where life had become equally perilous and abject for all races. To this day the Kurds of that region and the descendants of the Armenians will tell identical stories against each other, perhaps the most common being that one had to disguise one’s little girls as boys, and women as men. Armenian guerrillas were armed through the charitable efforts of Russian Armenians, and encouraged by Great Britain, whose politicians calculated that an independent Armenian state would constitute an excellent buffer to keep out the Russians.

  There had been for years a campaign of brutal brigandage between the various parties, accompanied by predictable literatures of hatred, which inevitably polarised populations that had for centuries lived side by side. The empire now officially operated a policy known as “Ottomanisation,” whereby all races had equal rights, liberties and duties. Among the latter was included the duty of military service, and the only way out of it was to pay a special tax, which applied equally to all. As a consequence the armies of the empire were now filled with reluctant conscripts whose families had been too poor to pay the tax. There were thus a great many Armenian soldiers in the Ottoman army, whose natural aspiration was towards an independent Armenian state.

  The first step that led the Armenian people into their great tragedy came about when the Ottomans were at war with the Russians on the eastern front, and a deputy of the assembly at Erzurum named Garo Pastermadjian led most of the Armenian officers and men of the 3rd Army over to the Russian side, returning with them in their campaign of pillage and rapine through the Muslim villages in their path.

  The Ottomans, seething with indignation over what from their point of view was high treason, removed all remaining Armenian officers and men from the 3rd Army, and put them to work in labour battalions, where conditions were so bad that there was a wave of desertions. Soon there were bands of roaming francs-tireurs behind the Ottoman lines, sometimes officered by Russians, and whether one calls them terrorists, bandits or freedom fighters is in a sense beside the point, as they quite easily managed to be all three simultaneously. Telegraph lines and bridges were cut, ammunition and supply columns were attacked, as well as caravans of the wounded coming back from the front. Their campaigns against Kurdish and Circassian villages were greatly facilitated by the fact that all able-bodied men had been called up.

  On 2 May 1915, Enver Pasha sent a fatal telegram to Tâlat Bey, the Minister for the Interior, proposing that the only way to deal with an intolerable situation was to remove all Armenians from behind Ottoman lines, and replace them with Muslim refugees from elsewhere. Over the next few months this policy began to be implemented, with many directives coming out of Istanbul that there should be no ill treatment. The plan was to auction the possessions of each family and give them the money when they arrived at their destinations, so that they could start life afresh.

  The policy of removal and compensation may have seemed like the obvious solution, but the government could not control what actually happened at such great distances in places where there were virtually no systems of communication or of command and control. There was no proper organisation, no transport, no medical assistance, no food, no money, and very little pity. The straggling columns of refugees fell victim to epidemics, they died of thirst, exhaustion and hunger, and they were easy targets for brigands and for the vengefulness and cruelty of the troops that escorted them and considered them to be traitors. These troops were often not proper soldiers, since those were at the fronts, but Kurdish irregulars, recruited from wild and ignorant tribesmen who had every reason to loathe and despise those whom they were escorting.

  It is not possible to calculate how many Armenians died on the forced marches. In 1915 the number was thought to be 300,000, a figure which has been progressively increased ever since, thanks to the efforts of angry propagandists. To argue about whether it was 300,000 or 2,000,000 is in a sense irrelevant and distasteful, however, since both numbers are great enough to be equally distressing, and the suffering of individual victims in their trajectory towards death is in both cases immeasurable.

  It is sometimes alleged that Tâlat Bey was colluding in a deliberate campaign of extermination without the knowledge of other government members. This is for others to argue about. What is decidedly strange is that many Armenians were deported even from places where they were not immediately behind the lines of the army, depending, it seems, upon the enthusiasms of local governors.

  This can be the only explanation for the arrival of a band of irregulars in Eskibahçe, who came to remove the small number of Armenians resident there, including the only one with whom we have become acquainted, Levon Krikorian, apothecary, husband of Gadar, father of three young girls, and sometimes known as “the Sly.”

  Ever since it had become known that bands of Armenians had effectively started a civil war behind the lines on the Russian front, Levon Krikorian and his family had had to put up with small insults. He sometimes heard the words “vatan haini” muttered as he passed by, and once there had been stones thrown against his shutters at night. He and the womenfolk had become anxious and worried, but not yet frightened.

  The gendarmes in the meydan were initially puzzled when a nefarious-looking band of mounted and armed irregulars turned up and interrupted their lifelong games of backgammon, demanding in unfamiliar accents to know where the traitors’ quarter was, and brandishing an order from the governor that in fact no one was able to read. The gendarmes were impressed by the official-looking seals and flourishes, and, once they had understood that the traitors were the Arm
enians, accompanied the troops to their quarter, which consisted of no more than a few pleasant and spacious houses along one side of a small street up one flank of the hillside.

  What occurred there that day did not seem particularly sinister. Whilst the troops lounged about in the meydan, their sergeant went from door to door in the company of one of the gendarmes, informing the occupants that they were to be relocated in the interests of the Sultan Caliph and for their own protection. They were to gather in the meydan at dawn, bringing with them only their most valuable possessions, so that these could be sold at their destination in order to help them begin a new life. They were also to compile a complete inventory of all possessions left behind, so that they could be compensated upon arrival with goods to a similar value.

  The unexpected news almost struck people dumb, and it was only slowly that the reality of the situation began to sink in.

  “We can’t just leave everything behind,” said Gadar, wife of the apothecary. “Why should we go? We don’t need protecting. No one will hurt us here.”

  “How far have we got to walk?” asked Anoush, and her sisters Sirvart and Sossy wanted to know if they were going to Telmessos or somewhere nice like that. The girls were very typical of their race, with fair skin and dramatic black hair and heavy eyebrows. No doubt they would all grow up to be beautiful for as long as time condescended to bestow its conditional generosity.

  Levon went down to the meydan to make enquiries, and found every other paterfamilias already there, asking the same questions. When he saw the troops he grew pale and agitated, and hurried back to his house. He ushered his wife into the back room and told her, “Gadar, it’s very bad. They’ve sent Hamidiye to get us. Hamidiye! Can you imagine? God knows where they got them from! It can’t be from anywhere here! It’s not good, it’s not good at all.”