Birds Without Wings

by Louis de Bernières

  Karatavuk arrives in Maydos; he has been hurriedly initiated into the military arts, and has proved a naturally good shot. He is incandescent with enthusiasm for the jihad, and he is looking forward to meeting the Prophet in his own garden in paradise. Furthermore, he is thrilled by the natural beauty of the Gallipoli peninsula, and he writes to his mother in a strange ecstasy:

  My dear Mother,

  You are proud to have given birth to two soldiers. It was a delight to my heart to receive the letter that you caused to be written to me with a neighbour’s pen. It was so full of advice. When it was given to me I was sitting under a pear tree nearby a stream in the middle of Divrin Plain, so beautiful and green. My soul was enchanted already by the sweetness of the land …

  CHAPTER 56

  The Letter from Karatavuk

  Iskander kicked at his wheel to set it spinning, gave it a few surplus kicks as if to inform it of his intention to get a decent amount of work done, wet his hands in the bowl that he kept on a stool at his side, and picked up a large ball of clay. He frequently did not know what he was going to make until he had started to make it. This was a kind of courtesy to his material, which seemed often to have preconceived ideas about what it wanted to become. Sometimes it would wobble about, or collapse, if he tried to make a bowl out of clay that wanted to be a pot, or vice versa, and it was best just to mould it in the fingers for a short while, get the feel of it and then watch it grow into something. “Take your time,” he would say to himself, “if the cat’s in a hurry, she has peculiar kittens.”

  Iskander made pots these days partly to take the world off his mind. His sons had gone to war, his wife and daughters were having to do the men’s work in the fields as well as their own, and they kept falling ill, which was one of the natural hazards of being female, it seemed. It was entirely possible that one of these days he too would have to go to fight, if the authorities remembered his existence, since one was in the reserve for half a lifetime after one’s national service. He remembered his five years in the army with a shudder, even though he had made unforgettable friends, and had learned that the most terrible things can be endured. It was true that this war was a jihad, and therefore he would be bound to die gladly for the love of God, but all the same it was puzzling to the faith when one learned that the Arabs had sided with the British, as had the Muslims from the other side of Persia. It seemed that only Turks took the jihad seriously. “I am a Turk,” he thought, rolling the idea around his mind, remembering the days when the word “Turk” implied something almost shameful, a barbarian out of the East. Nowadays, instead of saying, “We are Osmanlis,” or “We are Ottomans,” people were saying, “Yes, we are Turks.” How strange that the world should change because of words, and words change because of the world. “Iskander the Turk,” he said to himself, internally scrutinising the strange and novel sensation of possessing a deeper identity, of being something beyond himself. Some people said that the word “Turk” meant “strength.” He squeezed the clay with extra force, and it sprouted upward between his fingers. “Ah, a candlestick,” said Iskander.

  “Salaam aleikum,” said a voice very nearby, and Iskander, lost so deeply in his thoughts, started with almost comic surprise. He looked up, placing a hand over his heart to still the shock, and the stranger bowed his head a little, both as greeting and apology. Iskander beheld a round, friendly and deeply sunburned face capped by a battered and dusty fez, and realised from the man’s clothes that he had once been wealthy, but had fallen on harder times. His accent was that of a man from further south, perhaps from Kibris. “Forgive me,” he said, “but are you Iskander the Potter?” The man nodded towards the wheel, adding, “I have reason to suspect that you might be. I am sorry to disturb you at your work. He who works hard is the equal of he who fights in the holy war, so they say.”

  “A good proverb seasons the speech,” said Iskander, “and a neat lie satisfies more than a sloppy truth. But I have sons in the war, and I think that their work is greater than making pots.”

  “These are precarious times,” said the stranger. “There is a great battle in the north.”

  “My sons are there,” sighed Iskander, “at Gallipoli. War is easier to watch when soldiers are other people’s sons.”

  “Perhaps I bring consolation,” said the stranger, burrowing among the pistols and yataghans that were stuffed into his sash, until eventually he produced a very battered envelope. It had clearly been passed from hand to hand over a period of some weeks, and bore traces of several people who must have held it. There was soot from a forge, honey from somebody’s table, grease that was probably from the axle of a cart, a circle of olive oil that had left a transparent patch in the paper, and a smell of patchouli. “I am sorry it’s so mangled,” said the stranger, “but a letter arrives by any means that it may. I was given it in Telmessos when it was heard that I was coming this way. I wish you well of its news.”

  Iskander turned the letter over in his hands, covering it with wet clay in his excitement. He had never received a letter before, and it gave him both a sense of enormous importance, and a sense of dread. “Çay?” he asked the traveller. “May I offer you tea?”

  “God forgive me,” replied the stranger, “but I had çay the moment I got here—I was tired and hot, and I should have come to find you first of all, but the flesh is weak. So, I have had some tea, but I thank you all the same. I am going to Knidos, I don’t have much time, and I am going down to the sea to find out if there are any fishing boats that can drop me along the coast. My feet and I have had quite enough of walking.”

  “Only with travel can a man ripen,” observed Iskander, who had travelled nowhere further than Smyrna for some fifteen years.

  The stranger grinned, but gave a bitter and knowing laugh. “Every journey is a little bit of hell. Remain well.”

  “Go well,” called Iskander after him, and he sat at his wheel wondering what to do with his letter, which he turned over and over in his hands, marking it with more buff-coloured splodges of clay. What if it held bad news? What if one of his sons, or both of them, were dead? What if it was a letter saying that he too had to go to war? What if it was from somebody who wanted money? Still, as they always say, when the messenger is slow, then the news is good, and this letter had clearly been a long time in the coming.

  Iskander stepped out of the shade of his potting stall, and was stroked by the heat of the sun. It was May, and in two months’ time the sun would strike like a wooden mallet. Iskander wondered whether anyone would be going up to the yaylas this year; everything was in chaos, with so many of the men missing, so how could the journey be managed? And everybody was always waiting for news, which would never arrive if they were up in the high pastures. But on the other hand, the heat would be insufferable, and would bring illnesses and vile, tormenting insects if the people remained. But if the women took the cattle and pets and children up to the high ground, would the old men be able to protect them from opportunists and brigands? Who would prevent them from spending too much money buying carpets from nomads?

  These were problems for all to consider before too long, but just now the weather was perfect and all the wild flowers had come out, succeeding the bulbs, which had died back, leaving fat seed-heads, and desiccated stalks and leaves. Poppies of darkest scarlet embellished the fields of wheat down in the river valley, and ox-eye daisies, huge blue-bearded irises and white orchids blew in the grasses of the verges. Iskander walked to his house, enjoying the loveliness of the world at the same time as he worried about the possible burden of the letter, which became more and more portentous as he passed it from hand to hand, looking down at the strange swirls that he was unable to read. It occurred to him that the writing probably said something like “Iskander the Potter at Eskibahçe, not far from Telmessos’.” For the first time in his life it struck him that it might be a very useful thing to be able to read, and now he understood why Karatavuk had persuaded Mehmetçik to teach him. It was true that the Chr
istians always had the advantage, they learned to read and write, and do complicated things with numbers, and that was why you always had to be suspicious of them, and that was why they made you feel stupid, but it was also why you depended upon them so often for help. Iskander had gone to the mektep when he was a child, and had learned nothing except to recite by heart the holy verses of the Koran. The Arabic phrases still rolled off his tongue, but he knew not what they might mean, and yes, he would go to paradise, but it was Jews and Christians who organised the world. “Fortunately,” thought Iskander, “for the bird that cannot soar, God has provided low branches.”

  He removed his muddy shoes, placed them in the niche in the wall outside his back door, and entered the house. His wife had become so expert at indicating her disapproval of all the clay dust that he brought in with him that he barely dared to touch anything, or even exist at all, until he had changed into his clean clothes. He feared the oppression of her pursed lips, the click of her tongue, the furrowing of her brow, the busy air that she adopted as she cleaned things, so that her whole body seemed to be the veritable incarnation and epitome of uncomplaining complaint. He found her slicing onions on the table, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand and shaking her head against the smarting.

  “I have a letter,” Iskander told her, holding it out to show her.

  “A letter,” she repeated, having troubled thoughts that exactly echoed those of her husband. “Who is it from? What can it be? Who will read it for us? I pray God that the news is good.”

  There was something about his wife’s anxiety that strengthened Iskander. They had been together for so long now that he could not imagine life without her, even though at times he had heartily detested her. It had been a struggle to maintain his dignity and self-respect in the face of her clear but unspoken belief that she might have married a better man, but he knew that after all this time they had grown to suit each other, just as a boot and a foot change shape to accommodate the pressure of each other’s forms. “Every woman,” he used to say to console himself, “thinks that she could have married the Sultan if only she had not been married to her husband first.”

  “I think I should ask Abdulhamid Hodja to read it,” said Iskander, and his wife’s face brightened. He was pleased that she thought he was right. “I will come back afterwards, and if the news concerns you, I will tell you what it is.”

  She nodded, and cut another slice off the onion. “Be back soon,” she said.

  It was seldom difficult to find Abdulhamid Hodja, who was either conspicuous upon the back of Nilufer (who was now approaching the end of her days), or was tending his vegetables in the large patch that he cultivated, halfway down to the river, and not far from the sunken temple of Leto.

  Iskander found Abdulhamid wandering about amid his plants, bending down and putting things into a large sack. He watched the imam for a while, so absorbed in his work, and reflected that the hodja must now be about sixty years old. His beard had become completely white, and his cheeks had imperceptibly sunken over the years. Thickets of stout grey hairs had sprouted out of his nose and ears, and his glinting eyes seemed to have receded further into his head with the passing of time. Nonetheless, he was still strong and virile, and it was touching to see the way that he did everything with as much absorption and concern as he always had. If Nilufer was lame, which she often was now that she was old and tired, then the hodja led her about by a rope until she got better, saying that the exercise would do her good, but refusing to ride her. He still braided her mane, tying it up with green ribbons and bells, and he still polished her brass breastplate, so that it glinted in the sun even though the engraved verses of the Koran were wearing away. “Nilufer still believes that she is young and beautiful,” he used to say, “and who am I to disabuse her?”

  “Salaam aleikum,” said Iskander, startling the imam just as he had himself been startled by the stranger with the letter.

  “I’m too old to be crept up on,” protested the cleric, remembering to add “aleikum salaam” as an afterthought. Iskander took his hand and kissed it, pressing it afterwards to his forehead. “I’m too old for so much respect, as well,” added the imam a little testily. “Sooner or later one wearies of it.”

  “Respect can only be earned,” said Iskander, adopting a learned air, “and the same is true of disrespect.”

  “Well then, well then, I shall have to do some disgraceful and disreputable things,” replied the imam. “What can I do for you, anyway? I don’t suppose that you came to find me merely in order to make me jump out of my skin.”

  “I need to learn to read,” said Iskander. “I’ve just received a letter.”

  “It takes more than a few minutes, you know,” said the imam. “In fact, it takes months of work, and even then you are still learning how to do it for the rest of your life.”

  “Perhaps you could read it,” said Iskander hopefully, “and tell me what it says. Otherwise it tells me as little as the songs of the birds.”

  Abdulhamid took the grubby envelope and read: “To Nermin, wife of Iskander the Potter, in the town of Eskibahçe, two or three days’ journey from Telmessos.” He looked up. “It’s for your wife.”

  “If you read it to me I can tell her what it says,” said Iskander, adding, “A wife’s letters are not a secret from her husband.”

  “Of course, of course,” said the imam, unsealing the envelope and pulling out two sheets of unbleached paper covered in writing. “Ah,” he said, “I’m afraid I can’t read this.”

  “You can’t read it?” repeated Iskander, perplexed. He raised his hands in puzzlement, and the imam waved the sheets of paper. “Look,” he said, “it’s written in Greek. I don’t know Greek.”

  “I thought you knew all languages,” said Iskander, mildly disappointed to discover that the imam was not, after all, omniscient.

  “I know Persian, Arabic and Turkic, but these letters are Greek. If you don’t believe me, go and look at the letters on the old tombs. Some of them are the same as this.”

  “But you read the envelope,” protested Iskander.

  The imam showed him the envelope and poked at the writing with his finger. “This,” he said, “is written in Arabic script, but in our language. Whoever wrote the letter knew that the address had to be in Arabic script, or else it might never arrive; our Christian friends are not too popular with the rest of us these days. No doubt the address was written by somebody else, just to make sure that it reached here.”

  “My son learned how to write the Greek letters,” said Iskander. “Mehmetçik taught him, even though at first I forbade it.”

  “You were right; much harm can come from writing,” said the imam, “perhaps even more than comes from speaking. So the letter might be from Karatavuk? That would be a very happy thing.”

  “What shall I do?” asked Iskander.

  “You will have to ask the troublemaker,” said the imam.

  “Leonidas the Greek? He wouldn’t do anything for anyone.”

  “I can’t think of anyone else, can you? Perhaps you should take him a present to soften him up. The thing is, I can’t tell from looking at this whether it’s Turkic written in Greek letters, or Greek written in Greek letters. The quickest way to find out is to ask Leonidas, obnoxious as he might be.”

  Iskander’s eye was suddenly distracted. “Excuse me,” he said, “but I just noticed something moving about inside your sack.”

  Abdulhamid Hodja, a little abashed, opened the neck of the sack and showed Iskander the contents. Iskander peered in and saw a heap of what at first appeared to be clods of earth, or rocks. “Tortoises,” explained the hodja. “They wreak havoc among the vegetables, but I don’t have the heart to kill them. So I collect them up and go for a ride on Nilufer. When we find a nice place out of harm’s way, I let them all go.” He reached into the sack and brought out a very large one. “Look at this monster,” he said proudly. The tortoise popped its head out of its shell, opened its mouth and hissed ve
hemently. “That’s courage for you,” said the imam. “It’s like me: too old to be frightened of anything.”

  Iskander regarded the petulant beast, and raised his eyebrows. The imam’s saintly eccentricity was inexhaustibly surprising. He tapped the heavily ridged shell, and the animal hissed again. “Bad temper, bad marriage,” said the imam, reproaching it.

  It was with reluctance and with severe reservations that Iskander tapped upon the door of Daskalos Leonidas. He had always despised the Greek, whose ability to foster division and rancour was quite unsurpassed. Additionally, Iskander doubted that the teacher had ever forgiven him for having abetted in his humiliation at the muhabbet so many years before. Moreover, Iskander found himself feeling awkward, and clumsy of speech, when dealing with a Christian bookworm.

  Whilst he waited, he noticed that there was something odd about the songbird that occupied the cage by the door. Almost everyone had a finch, or a nightingale, or a yellowhammer, or a robin, so that at dawn and dusk, at the same time as the muezzin called from the minaret of the mosque, the birds would fill the town with their own call to prayer. The bird in Daskalos Leonidas’s cage, however, was very much like the teacher himself. It was scrawny, drab, depressed, and had the air of knowing a great deal about nothing.

  Iskander was looking at it in astonishment when Leonidas opened the door, irritated at having been interrupted just when he was writing to another member of the secret society in Smyrna. It concerned matters of some confidentiality, and a knock on his door when no one was expected was enough to cause him a small attack of panic. He lived in constant fear of arrest, and had no illusions as to his treatment in the event. Certainly he was prepared to suffer and to die for Greece, but he knew that he was not made naturally in the heroic mould. His life was a kind of martyrdom, believing so much in a great ideal and an historic mission, but at the same time knowing perfectly well that he was no Agamemnon or Achilles.