Birds Without Wings

by Louis de Bernières

  I write to you then, reluctantly, at great expense to my time and patience, but at the insistence of your parents, who are most unrelenting. Your father has presented me with various pots, and so I am obliged to him, and your mother is tearful, which is also hard to endure. Your father has in addition given me one of those birdwhistles with which you and your friends used to torment the town, as if we did not have bulbuls and nightingales enough to keep us awake at night. He advised me to pass it on to any child of which I might be fond, whereupon I declared that, since I am a schoolmaster, there are no longer any such.

  Your parents instruct me to write:

  We pray to God that He and His Angels watch over you and keep you from the bullets and the darkness of the Devil. We pray that there is an angel that spreads his wings above you and around you and protects you. We pray that no bad djinn comes by you. We pray that danger sees you and looks the other way and passes on the other side. We pray that you are well, and not ill, and that you are rewarded with sleep when weary. We pray that you have food for your stomach and water for your throat. We pray that Mary Mother of Jesus also watches over you. We pray that amid hardship you find peace and whatever joy is to be found within it. We pray that if death finds you, there will be a white shroud to carry you to paradise, and a green turban, and that you will be at the gates of paradise to meet us when we come. We pray that no harm will happen to your companions. We pray that you remember us, and do not forget us, and pray for us in this hard and unforgiving world. We pray that God forgives you for the deception of your father, as we have forgiven you, because now we are able to carry on. We pray that the Sultan himself rewards you, and God also, as we will reward you when you return. We pray that if things go well for you, you will not suffer the evil eye.

  There is much trouble in this place. We who had nothing now have even less. Everything that was bad is now worse. Nothing is mended, no good things arrive by road or sea. We are lucky if there is one onion to eat, the tradesmen have no one to trade with.

  The good thing is that Leyla Hanim plays the oud, and the sound of the strings floats out over us and brings us peace. Another good thing is that we of this town have seen an aeroplane for the first time, which flew over our heads making a great clattering noise, and all of us ran outdoors, and some people were most afraid, and the dogs were going mad with barking and jumping up and down. But Rustem Bey knew what it was, and explained that it was a machine that flies with a man in it, and when we looked we saw the man, who waved to us, and he flew once or twice around the town and over our heads, and we have been talking a great deal of this because it is like a miracle, and none of us knows who the man was. I expect that by now you will have seen an aeroplane also, and we wonder what you think of such things. We are not sure that they are good, because God gave it to birds to fly and to us to walk. If we are to become like birds, what will the birds become? What if a man flies so high that he reaches Heaven? What will God do?

  A very bad thing is that the gendarmes have arrived and taken away many of the Christian boys who were forbidden to fight because of the jihad, and there were scenes of the greatest sorrow and alarm because it was all so sudden, and it was said that the boys were taken for labour battalions, who will build roads and bridges and dig holes and put up buildings. We have heard that the life is very bad in the labour battalions because the Christians have been turned against, and they are being worked almost to death and are living in terrible places. Your friend Mehmetçik who taught you to read has been one of the taken, even though he requested to be a soldier, and his mother and father are frightened by it and say that there is no hope, but we have tried to comfort them, and they us, because we are all losing our sons. Now the girls and women that are left are performing the men’s work, and many are thin and ill from the work and the lack of food.

  Another very bad thing is that people have been here from the Sultan taking our animals. They have taken many mules, donkeys and horses, saying that the army needs them in the jihad against the infidels, but how do we know who these people are? They give us papers that we cannot read, and tell us that when we present these papers at a later time we will get our animals back, or animals that are equal. Some say that these men are outlaws and thieves and come not from the Sultan at all. People hid their mules when they heard what was happening and so thank God Ali the Snowbringer still has his mule, but it was most terrible for Abdulhamid Hodja, who has lost his Nilufer. You know how much he loved and defended that horse. She was old but she was still strong, and she was the most beautiful silver horse of all, more beautiful even than the horses of Rustem Bey. It was wonderful to see her with her mane braided, and the green ribbons in her mane and the brass bells, and the brass breastplate engraved with verses, and the Yörük saddle that he bought from the unwashed. And it was wonderful how proud and lovely it was to see Abdulhamid Hodja mounted upon it. When the people from the Sultan saw the horse and the imam upon it, they roughly bade him dismount, even though he is venerable and a hafiz, and they made him part with the horse, and he threw his arms around the neck of the horse and lamented so that everyone heard it and everyone was sorry beyond reason, and he called upon God to spare him the horse but they tore his arms from around the neck of the horse and he fell to the ground, but he stood up and embraced her again and recited in her ears and the horse pricked her ears and stamped her feet, and then two of the people held the imam until Nilufer was led away, and he was shouting and weeping.

  Now Abdulhamid Hodja is very ill on account of despair and sorrow, because he loved the horse, and a horse is a most important thing to anyone that has one, especially if it is good. He says that Nilufer will be worked to death and the army starves such horses until they eat the paint from carts and houses, and he remembers this from when he was a soldier. Now Abdulhamid is on his pallet and will not eat, and he has pains in his sides and says that he will not be long for us in this world, and his wife says that he cannot pass water, so God knows if he will recover. There are no doctors here now because they were all Christians and they have gone to look after the soldiers even though no Christian is allowed to fight, and we are helpless if we are ill except for the cures passed down to us. Abdulhamid Hodja says that he will never see Nilufer again, and that the earth has opened before his feet so that he might lie down in it. Ayse Hanim wrings her hands and weeps, but there is nothing to be done. Abdulhamid Hodja lies upon his pallet and recites the Holy Koran, and he says that when he has finished it and spoken every word that is in it, then he will close his eyes and put on the white shroud and be laid down in the earth among the pines. And if he dies, who will lead our prayers?

  Another thing that has happened is that we thought we had a ghost, because every night there would be crying and wailing after midnight, and it would wake us all up, and we would listen on our pallets shaking with fear, and the wailing would go through the streets and not stop for hours. The dogs would bark and the owls would fall silent and so would the nightingales. We were all talking and wondering what it means, and then Rustem Bey went out at night because he has authority and duty, and he went with Father Kristoforos the priest, but not with Abdulhamid Hodja because he was very ill and in despair, and Father Kristoforos had holy oil and water and an icon and other such Christian things, and there were two servants with them and Rustem Bey had a pistol. It turned out that the ghost was a woman who had lost her husband a few years ago in Macedonia, and now she has lost all her sons in Mesopotamia, and she has gone drunk with grief, and was wandering at night, and so there was no ghost after all, but it was very frightening whilst we thought there was. Now the woman is tied to her doorpost at night to stop her going out, and in the morning she is untied, and she wails and grieves inside her house, so that there is less noise in the streets. You will remember that in the last war there was another woman who was the same.

  Your father says that a soldier is like one of the fingers of a potter and his comrades are the other fingers, and the soldiers of the enem
y are the fingers of the other hand, and they work in opposition because no pot was ever well made with one hand, and the potter is God, and God moulds the world like clay by means of soldiers, so he says you should be proud to be one of God’s fingers, and if not proud, resigned. Your mother says that it is important to wash your clothes whenever possible or else your skin will become itchy and inflamed. And she says that she wishes you were a child once more and did not have to go away to war.

  This concludes the letter of your parents, which has caused me much inconvenience and trouble to transcribe, since both of them talk at once on different topics in a language which unfailingly grates upon the ear and intellect. I have left out much of your mother’s advice and many of her exhortations, since I am sure that you will already have them by heart, having heard them so often repeated whilst you were still among us. It is clear to me that they hold you very dearly in their hearts, suffering much anxiety as to your safety, and so it would be well for them if you were able to write back soon, even though this would no doubt cause me further travail and perplexity.

  I would like to add that I have long been aware that it was you and your friend Mehmetçik who used to steal the linnets and finches from my birdcage, and replace them with sparrows. I also know that it was you two who stole everybody’s shoes from the niches outside their back doors, and swapped them round, causing such confusion and bother. Therefore I say that life is quieter and more equable without you, but I do not say that it is better.

  Leonidas, Schoolmaster.

  CHAPTER 63

  Karatavuk at Gallipoli: Karatavuk Remembers (4)

  Every soldier has a comrade who stands out above the others. If your comrade is killed, you find another after a while, but there is still only one comrade that you remember in particular, and you think of him as being above all other comrades. This is because, after the great comrade has been killed, the wound in your heart makes it impossible to have such a comrade again.

  I will write of Fikret. He was from Pera, and his slogan was “I am from Pera, so I don’t give a shit.” He was built like a stevedore, and the reason for this is that he had been working as a stevedore in the docks at Istanbul. I am not saying that he was big, because he was no taller than I am, but he had the powerful deep chest, and the thick, strong arms and legs of a man who has learned to lift and carry the heaviest things. I know personally that he was very strong, because he was the one who lifted the beams into place when we were making covered trenches, and he was stronger than anyone when we were collecting the wounded during the ceasefires. He could make us laugh by clenching the muscles of his neck, and they would all stand out and make him look grotesque. If you bumped into him accidentally, it was like walking into a tree.

  Fikret was ugly. He had the hooked nose of an Arab, and a loose lower lip. His eyes were not set equally on his face, he had a moustache like the frayed end of a wire hawser, and he was covered with a thick stubble only a couple of hours after shaving. He smelled like a goat much of the time, as did we all, but the goatishness of his smell was on a greater scale than any of the rest of us could manage even after days of furious fighting in the trenches. In the trenches, what you smell is in this order: corpses, cordite, shit, piss, sweat. After a couple of days in action, Fikret’s smell came in between the cordite and the shit.

  What was good about Fikret was the honesty of his badness. To begin with he was always in trouble. He told the imam that he didn’t give a shit about God, and he didn’t give a shit if the war was holy or not, because all that mattered was that it needed fighting, and all of us were outraged by what he said, and the imam reported him so that he was in trouble for conduct likely to demoralise his comrades and undermine the state. He was given extra labour fatigues, and he said afterwards, “I don’t give a shit; I am from Pera.” If Lieutenant Orhan had not intervened, I think he would have been shot. Lieutenant Orhan told him to keep his opinions to himself, and fortunately he had more respect for the lieutenant than he did for the imam or even God Himself, so he confined himself to all the other topics he didn’t give a shit about.

  Fikret was dependably foul-mouthed as well. If you asked him where to put something, or if he knew where someone was, he would always reply, “Up your mother’s cunt.” Normally anyone who said this would expect to get a knife in the throat, but he would say it in a very friendly manner, just as if he were being genuinely helpful, and in any case soldiers quickly adapt to the worst behaviour of their friends. “I am from Pera, so I don’t give a shit” became the slogan of all of us, even though Fikret was the only one who was really from Pera, and soon even the most pious of us was replying “Up your mother’s cunt” when anyone asked where anything was. To this day I still have to catch myself out, and prevent myself from saying it.

  Fikret liked to put on the appearance of being very lazy and apathetic, but when there was something to be done he worked very methodically. He didn’t work fast, but he never needed a rest. He always fought at my side, and we looked out for each other. I don’t know why this happened, because there was no reason for us to be friends.

  I first got to know him because he showed me how to delouse my clothing. It didn’t get washed very often anyway, but even a good washing does not kill the lice. One day when I was itching, Fikret told me to take off my uniform, and not be modest about it, because no one has to be modest in the presence of lice. We sat in the sun and he showed me how to get the lice out of the seams of the uniform, and crack them with the thumbnail against the side of the first finger. Fikret knew a lot about lice, because he said the louse was the number-one animal in Pera. There are three kinds of lice. One of them is the parting keepsake of a whore, one is on the head, so that you have to shave it, and the third is the kind that puts pinpricks in your armpits and thighs and belly, and makes you itch so much that you scratch its shit into your skin with your dirty nails, and that’s how you make yourself ill. It is worse if you are hairy, because the eggs are laid on to the hairs. At Çanakkale we had lice in two sizes, and they were grey or white, unless they were purple from drinking blood. When we went for our relief days behind the lines, we always deloused, except for the kind of ignorant peasant who has always had them anyway. When I first made friends with Fikret, he took my jacket and showed me how to search through the seams, looking on both sides. Up until then I had avoided him, because the things he said were shocking to me, but it was this concern of his about my lice that made me realise that he was not entirely a bad man.

  One day when we were behind the lines at the resting point, Lieutenant Orhan came up to me and ordered me to put my shirt on an anthill that was nearby. I didn’t dare to question the order, and so I did it, and a few hours later Lieutenant Orhan returned, and he picked up the shirt carefully, and shook all the ants off, and he showed the shirt to me, and he said, “Just as I thought. Check this shirt for lice, Abdul Nefer.” There weren’t any lice at all. It turned out that he had been watching the Franks through his binoculars, and had seen them doing this trick with anthills. I don’t know if the ants eat the lice, or kill them, or just drive them away, but my hint for all soldiers who try this is to make sure you get all the ants off before you put the shirt on, because the sting of an ant is very much more painful than the bite of a louse. I also advise all soldiers never to put up their head suddenly over the parapet of a trench, because the sudden movement attracts attention. Always put your head up as slowly as you can possibly manage, even though this takes a lot of nerve. My advice to snipers is that you can cause machine-gun emplacements to collapse by careful shooting. What you do is stitch a row of shots side by side vertically down the sides of the supporting sandbags. This causes the bags to break in half and lose their sand, and the emplacements can sometimes collapse quite suddenly. You do this mainly for entertainment, and the enemy always rebuilds the emplacement during the night.

  One day Fikret had the idea that we should collect all our lice into tins, without killing them, and toss these tins into th
e Frankish trenches. We had the opportunity to do this, because our trenches at one time were only five paces apart. We were laughing about this, when we heard a Frank shouting, “Hey, Abdul,” and the tin came back with a turd in it. The Franks always called us “Abdul,” which was strange to me, as it is my real name and Karatavuk is only a nickname, and sometimes they threw over chocolate, which I had never had before and which I liked a great deal, and we would throw back sweets and cigarettes, which were much better than theirs, and sometimes grapes. We shouted “Haydi, Johnny” when we threw things. The Franks were living off small round hard pieces of unleavened bread that were called biscuit, and also a kind of meat in tins that was called bully beef. After a time they were fed up with eating it, and they would throw it into our trenches. One time I was hit on the head by a can and I had a big bruise. We opened the tins with our bayonets. There came a time when we were fed up with eating it ourselves, because in the hot weather the fat in it melted and it poured out of the tin like slime, and we got Lieutenant Orhan to write a note in French and we tied it to a can and we threw the can back. The note said: “No more bully beef, please, but milk yes.” As for us, when we were in the trench we lived on bulghur wheat and olives and bits of bread. The Franks were lucky, because Greek traders arrived and set up stalls on their beaches, and didn’t care about the shrapnel shells bursting all around them. We had very few Greek traders coming to us, because we had no money anyway. This trading with the Franks made many of us hate the Greeks, because we were sure that many of them were from Ottoman lands. Greeks will trade with anyone, even the murderers of their own mothers.