Birds Without Wings

by Louis de Bernières

  “Yes?” said Leonidas when he saw Iskander standing humbly at his doorstep.

  “Peace upon you,” said Iskander.

  “What do you want?” asked Leonidas. “I am rather busy.”

  “I have a letter,” said Iskander, holding it out, “and I can’t read it.” Iskander tried to look past Leonidas into his house. It was said to be an extraordinary and stupendous chaos of books, papers, cobwebs and dust. It was said that Leonidas did not know how to cook, and was too miserly to pay anyone else to do it, so he lived off bread and olives. They said he was such a miser that he regretted having to shit.

  Leonidas took the letter grudgingly, and peered through his spectacles at it. “It’s in Turkish,” he said, “really I don’t care to read it. It jars on the tongue.” The teacher’s voice was like the creaking of a wheel.

  Iskander did not know whether to be angry or wistful. “The letters are Greek,” he said, advancing the fact as a mitigating circumstance.

  “Indeed, indeed,” agreed Leonidas, adding, “It is a letter to your wife, you know.”

  “If you read it to me, I will remember it, and tell her. I have an excellent memory for words, even if I can’t write them.”

  Leonidas read the letter to himself, and his attitude seemed to mollify. “This is from your son,” he said. “I have to admit it has a certain beauty. It’s quite remarkable, really. I wouldn’t have thought that such a one would have had it in him.”

  “Please read it,” begged Iskander.

  “You should fetch your wife, I think,” said Leonidas. “Really you should both hear it.”

  “I will hear it, and then decide,” insisted Iskander.

  “Oh, very well, then,” said Leonidas impatiently; these small-town Turks were nothing if not obtuse. “The letter was, incidentally, written about a month ago.”

  “Thank you, thank you,” said Iskander, and Leonidas began to read: “Validecişim, Iki asker doşurmakla müftehir …”

  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, and my enchantment was increased on account of your words. I read it, and whilst I read it I learned the lessons that you wrote in it. I read it again. I was glad to do the task of reading your letter, because the task was beautiful and holy. I opened my eyes and looked far away. The green wheat bending with the wind was as though in salutation to the letter of my mother. The wheat and the trees were bending towards me as congratulation for the letter of my mother.

  I looked towards the right side; the mighty pine trees at the bottom of the slope were greeting me with their proper sound. I looked towards the left side, and the stream was chattering and smiling and playing and foaming because of the letter of my mother. I raised my head and I looked at the leaves of the tree above the place where I was resting. All of the leaves were dancing and sharing my happiness so that I should feel it even more myself. I looked to a branch in the tree, and a nightingale was greeting me, and its watery sweet voice was sharing my feelings in its throat.

  During this moment, my friend came, and said, “Here is some tea.”

  “This is good,” I said, and I took the cup and looked, and it was tea with milk, and I asked him: “Fikret, from where did you get this milk?” and he said, “Do you know the flock that goes by the stream?” and I said, “Yes, I love to see it,” and he said, “I bought it from the shepherd for ten paras.” Dear Mother, it was pure milk, without water in it, for ten paras, coming from a sheep. I took it and drank. But I was thinking, “My mother has no milk to drink. Is this possible? Why is it so?” and the nightingale was singing, “What can we do? It is your mother’s fate. If she were a man she could drink this milk, smell these flowers, see these crops bending, and see the slow flight of the stream and listen to its voice.”

  Please do not worry about my brother. Perhaps he too will see beautiful things.

  Dear Mother, don’t be sorry. One day I will bring you here and show you how beautiful it is.

  On the green side of this gentle meadow the soldiers are washing their clothes.

  Someone with a voice of angels was calling the faithful to prayer.

  O God, how beautiful was his voice echoing over the plain. Even the birds stopped singing. The wheat fell still, and the stream also was still. Everybody was silent, all creatures and all things, attending to the voice.

  The azan was over, and I washed myself in the waters of the stream. Together we prayed, kneeling down on the fresh grass. When my forehead touched the ground I smelled the musk of the earth. I forgot the tumult and the glory of the world. I raised my hands and looked up, and these words came out of my mouth: “O mighty God of the Turks, creator of the singing bird, of the bleating sheep, of the worshipping wheat and grass and the mountains of majesty; You gave all these things to the Turks. Permit us to keep them. For such loveliness is proper to the Turks, we who praise You, we who believe in the mercy and strength and truth of our God.

  “O God, the sole wish of these soldiers is to make Your name known to the Franks. Accept the honourable wish of the soldiers. Make sharp our bayonets and scatter the Franks.”

  Dear Mother, when I raised myself up, no one could imagine how my heart was full.

  This is the loveliest place in the world, but here there aren’t any weddings. When I come home I think I would like to marry. Soon the enemy will make a landing, and afterwards there might be a time for weddings.

  Dear Mother, please don’t send me any money. I don’t need underwear. I promise that I will not cut my toenails and my fingernails on the same day, and I won’t cut my fingernails at night. If I die, remember that death is a mule; mount it, and it takes you to paradise. If I die, don’t grieve.

  Tell the mother of Mehmetçik to tell Mehmetçik that I have the bird-whistle, and that I remember him.

  I kiss my father’s hands, and on my knees I kiss your hands, and I carry your face in my heart.

  Your son Karatavuk.

  When Daskalos Leonidas had finished, both men were deeply moved, and neither spoke. Iskander was astonished by the power of Karatavuk’s devotion for his mother. The potter had truly never realised how strong it was, and he even felt a pang of wistful jealousy that a father cannot be loved in such a deep and overwhelming way. “A woman is not loved until she has a son, and then she is loved absolutely,” he thought.

  Leonidas, on the other hand, was engaged in an inner struggle; he had spent so many years and expended so much energy on cultivating his sense of superiority to the Turks that it came as a shock to disencrypt the tender soul of Karatavuk. Much as he despised the young man’s faith, he could not but be affected by its beauty and sincerity. “It’s a fine letter,” he said at length, “it has poetry. A fine letter indeed.”

  “If I bring my wife, will you read it again?” asked Iskander. “I didn’t know that she had caused a letter to be written. I will bring you something. Perhaps candlesticks? Or a bowl, or a vase of some sort? To express my gratitude.”

  “By all means,” said Leonidas, still softened and disconcerted, and it was not until Iskander had gone that he noticed that some prankster had taken his goldfinch and replaced it with a sparrow. The metallic taste of disdain returned reassuringly to his tongue.

  CHAPTER 57

  Karatavuk at Gallipoli: Karatavuk Remembers (1)

  I will not relate what happened during my training. It was hard and I was more miserable even than when I was at war in the winter, but at least it was over quickly, which was because we were needed urgently at the front. Also, we were all indignant about the way the Franks had cheated us out of the battleships, and our anger carried us through. One good thing was that I did well, I learned very quickly, and this was noti
ced by my superiors, and they thought it all the more remarkable because I was so young, and they esteemed me because I had volunteered to come in the place of my father. One of the things I remember is that we had a kind of grenade thrower that you operated when lying on the ground, and we practised with rocks of the correct weight, and I could hit anything with it. I was a master with that weapon, and who would have guessed that one day I would use such a weapon for hurling cans of bully beef? I also became a very good shot with a rifle, and because of this I arrived at my regiment with a recommendation that I would make a good sniper, and this recommendation is probably why I am alive today whilst most of my comrades are dead, because there came a time when I was creeping about doing sniping duties whilst my comrades were sitting in the trench, and many of them were suddenly killed by a mine that had been put in a sap underneath.

  When I think back to those early days, the first thing I recall was that all of us believed it was a holy war. We were told this over and over again, and every unit had an imam who repeated it to us, and the Sultan himself declared that it was a jihad. As the first fighting broke out on the Feast of the Sacrifice, we all understood that it was we who were the lambs. I will say now that I doubt if there is any such thing as a holy war, because war is unholy by nature, just as a dog is a dog by nature, and I will say now, since no one will read these lines until I am dead, that in my opinion there is no God either. I think this because I have seen too many evil things and I have done too many evil things even when I believed in Him, and I think that if there was a God He would have prevented all these evil things. These are thoughts that I have not dared to say to anyone, and every Friday I go to the mosque like everyone else, and I move the beads on my tespih. I observe the fast at ramadan, and I touch my forehead to the ground when I make my salats, but all the time I am wondering how many of those doing the same things around me are respectable hypocrites like me. I will say that if there is no God, then everything is inexplicable, and that would be very hard for us, but if there is God, then He is not good. Now that the years have passed by I will say that the war was sacred for a different reason, and this reason is that it caused Turkey to be born out of the empire, which was mother of it, and gave birth to it as she lay dying.

  But at that time not one of us doubted that it was a holy war, and all of us were intoxicated with the idea of martyrdom, and the imams told us that if we died in a holy war, then we would meet the Prophet himself in the garden where he abides, and we would be carried there by the green birds of paradise that come only for martyrs, and we knew that God had promised us success, and we knew that it is hard to get to Heaven and easy to get to Hell, and we were being given a chance to go straight to Heaven with no questions asked. It made us feel very good. If we shed a drop of blood, it would wash away our sins on the instant, God would not judge us, and on the day of resurrection each of us would have the privilege of naming seventy people who we wished to enter paradise with us, and they would enter it, and so all our family and our friends would be there with us, and the best thing was that when we reached paradise we would have seventy-two virgins to wait on us and do our pleasure. When we were in a coarse mood we often talked about the seventy-two virgins, and if you are a young man, what more could you want in your imagination? For us there was a wavering between this world and the next, and we were joyful because eternal bliss was at our fingertips and the wall between us and bliss was as thin as this paper on which I write, and as easy to tear asunder. Many of us took the oath of martyrdom with one hand on the Koran, and I was one of them, but even then I thought there was something not quite right, but I did come to understand why they would not let Christians come and fight, because the Christians would have doubted that it was a holy war and they might have dampened our enthusiasm, because doubt, when it is spilt, spreads like water. I do remember that I fought like a mastiff with a wolf, because I thought that the war was holy, and I fought thinking that with God alongside me I was invincible. To tell the truth, I often enjoyed the fighting. There is a wild excitement that takes you over when the attacks begin, and the fear and trembling has been overruled by action. Sometimes I feel sad when I remember the enthusiasm of those days, because I was never happier than when I had those beliefs and thought I was doing God’s work. I smile when I think of how I envied the men of the 57th Regiment, who were all wiped out in one battle, right at the beginning, when Mustafa Kemal commanded them all not only to fight, but to die, telling them that in the time they took to die, reinforcements would have time to arrive, and so it was that all of them died, including the imam and the water boy. But now I am glad I was not in that regiment but in another. Certainly I will never forget what it was like when we put our ladders up against the parapet, and the standard bearer would unfurl the white flag with the red crescent moon and star on it, and we would call on the name of God, and climb the ladders, and pour out of the trenches, and charge the enemy. All of us knew we would go to paradise. Of course, the standard bearer was always the first to get killed.

  My heart sinks at the thought of describing my eight years of chaos and destruction in two separate wars. How can I describe all the things I learned, and how quickly I learned them?

  I was assigned to the 5th Army, and so I arrived at Maydos in the early spring, or the late winter if that is how you would prefer to say it. It is a place where the olive trees and the pines are the same size. At that time there was cistus growing in the rocks, and poppies redder than pigeon’s blood, lilac and pink mallows, little orchids, ox-eye daisies, oregano as sharp and strong as pepper, and tiny red flowers with black at the centre. There were old men and little boys in the streets, selling bread on sticks. With the other recruits I had marched for days, and now I come to think of it, I must have marched far enough in my time as a soldier to go three times round the world. There was never any transport, and we marched the length and breadth of the earth. I am surprised that my legs were not worn down to stumps from all that marching, and I cannot count the number of pairs of boots I must have used up. Anyone who has been a soldier understands the value of boots. One of the things you look forward to, when somebody is killed, is the prospect of finding a better pair of boots, and we took them equally from the dead enemy and our own comrades, but it was often enough that we were reduced to fighting with nothing on our feet at all. Sometimes if you had a special comrade with good boots, he would let it be known who was to inherit them when he was killed. I had a comrade called Fikret who was killed, but before he was wounded we had an agreement like that. I said to him, “If I am killed first, I would like you to have my boots,” and he said, “If you are killed first, I would rather have your seventy-two virgins, so perhaps you could send them down from paradise,” and we both laughed, but it was he who was killed first, and I got his belt, which was better than mine, and I took what remained of his ammunition, and with it I killed fifteen Franks by sniping, and that is how I avenged him.

  At first I didn’t have a proper uniform. I was wearing bits and pieces of the white summer uniform that was abolished, and I was wearing a fez on my head instead of a proper enverieh. The corporal who was my first corporal made me rub it with mud to take away the brightness of it, and laughed at me when I was reluctant, and anyway it was blown off my head in the naval bombardment, and I never found it again.

  Maydos was a pretty town by the water’s side. It had rough streets paved with heavy stones, and there were soft-eyed dogs asleep on steps and in doorways. There were figs and vines, and the sparrows were very noisy in the eves. There were goats making idiot noise, and mournful cows lowing, and cockerels crowing in competition. There was a wealthy street taken up with Greek jewellers. There was an old man selling fish that were threaded on to string through the gills. I remember that we were sent almost immediately to Divrin Plain, and there I wrote a long letter to my mother, because she had managed to send one to me, and I told her of how beautiful the place was, and how my mother’s letter had given it enchantment. I think I
told her that when I got home I would like to get married. I wonder what happened to the letter, because I cannot imagine that my mother would have thrown it away. After that I was not allowed to write any more, and in any case the great Frankish battleships were coming, and there was fighting to be done almost immediately.

  I was sent straight away to assist the field artillery, because the big ships were coming, and it was their intention to get through the minefield so that Istanbul could be taken, but they couldn’t get their big ships through until the mines were cleared, and they couldn’t get the minesweepers in until the big ships had knocked out our guns, but the big ships couldn’t knock out our guns until the mines were cleared. So it was a difficult situation for the Franks.

  I have never seen anything like those big ships. I think there were about sixteen of them. I can’t explain to you in words how vast they were. They were like islands. They filled the heavens with black smoke, and they had guns so enormous that it was impossible to imagine how these were made by human hands. When we saw them filling the sea our hearts sank and we felt that it was all hopeless, but the officers seemed confident, and they kept us very occupied, and so we drew hope from them.

  Do you know the strangest thing about being a soldier? It is that you are repeatedly ordered to commit suicide, and you obey. So it was lucky that so many of us wanted to get to paradise. Almost all of the attacks were frontal assaults on well-defended positions. This was true of the Frankish attacks and of our own, and when we saw the heaps of Frankish dead in front of our trenches, we began to feel sorry for them. I wonder if they felt sorry for us when they saw our dead heaped up in front of theirs. There were times when the dead lay three-deep, all mixed up with the wounded.