Birds Without Wings

by Louis de Bernières

  When they went they also blew up all their ammunition on the beach, and it made a very great roaring, a huge red cloud shaped like a mushroom. It was the loudest noise and the greatest fire ever seen.

  I will tell you a sad thing about the leaving of the Franks, which affected me very much. When we went down to the beaches we found all the mules and horses that they had left behind. They were well-fed, big animals, and they were combed and brushed and beautiful, with fine markings, and they were tethered on the beach in a line. But the Franks had not been able to take them away with them, and so, to prevent us from having them, and even though they obviously cared for them, the Franks had sacrificed them all, with love in their hearts, and had cut their throats or shot them after feeding and combing them. Some Frankish soldiers disobeyed the order, however, as we would find donkeys hidden away in the bushes with a big bag of hay, and this is what happens in war, which is that out of all the vileness, a small light still shines.

  The good thing about the leaving of the Franks was that they left a great deal of food among the abandoned stores. The sentries couldn’t hold us back, and we carried away many jars of sticky fruit in glass jars that was extremely sweet, and I ate so much of it that I felt very strange, as if I was drifting, and it hurt my teeth. There was a marvellous quantity of flour. Also, they left a great deal of useful cloth and pieces of clothing, so for some time many of us who had been dressed in rags wore new breeches made of Frankish flags, and we put Australian hats on our heads, and we made belts out of their puttees, and we looked very colourful and strange, and our officers were not pleased as we did not appear military, but they knew very well that there was no choice because we never received new uniforms. My new officer was killed when he opened the firebox of a steam traction engine that had been left behind, and that had been booby-trapped with melinite.

  After the Franks left I felt bereavement, because they had been the whole purpose of my life and my sufferings for many months. I had killed a very large number of them by sniping, usually through the head, even at great distances, and they had killed most of my comrades, including my best comrade, Fikret. After the hatred at first, and the merciless killing, we and the Franks had got to know each other a little, and I think that, strange as it may sound, we had come to like each other. Speaking for myself, I had discovered that infidels are not necessarily devils, which I should have known already because, after all, I grew up in a town among many different kinds of them, except that they weren’t Frankish. I still remember with a smile how the Frankish soldiers used to catapult their tins of bully beef over to us, and we would fill them with stones and put messages inside, saying things like “We’re going to miss you when you go. See you at Suez,” and we would catapult them back again, and I still remember how they and we would cut little slots in the shells of tortoises, and put folded messages in the slots, and prod the tortoises in the direction of the enemy lines, and I still remember how if a mouse or a rat appeared between the lines, it would be shot at from both sides, for the sport of it, and when it was dead, only then would we go back to taking shots at each other.

  Most of the men on the peninsula were reassigned to other theatres of war, but I stayed with the garrison. It took almost two years to clear up everything that the Franks had left behind.

  I couldn’t find where we had buried Fikret, even though I looked whenever I had the time. The land came back to life so quickly that it soon became hard to recognise even the most familiar places. We didn’t mark graves the way the Franks did, and often the dead were tipped into pits or buried in trenches. We never did get rid of corpses as efficiently as them, and I remember living and fighting among the dead almost all the time. We just put up with them. When we took Frankish prisoners and led them through our trenches, they were always horrified, and at the time we took it as a sign of weakness.

  There were many who believed that if you were not buried in a white shroud, you would not be admitted to paradise. If that is true, there must be many ghosts wandering at Çanakkale. It became customary for me to walk everywhere among the decomposing and shrivelling corpses that had been left on the surface, all dressed in shreds of uniform and lying in strange twisted positions, and I would find rifles and bayonets rusting in the spring rains, and in the turpentine pines the yellow birds sang in the sunlight as if nothing had ever happened. I would often look at the bodies and wonder which of these Franks I had killed myself, when I was sniping, and I would look to see which of the corpses had been shot in the head. I lost count of my kills because I got weary of counting, but it must have been two or three hundred.

  I was frustrated by being left behind with the garrison. I wanted to carry on fighting. I loved the fighting, the excitement of it, the way that my soul seemed to lift out of my body and watch what my body was doing, the rushing of the blood in the veins, the joy and intoxication of chanting “Allah, Allah” all together as we followed the banner over the parapets and charged to martyrdom. It was only a long time afterwards that I began to reflect on the killing that I did. Of course there were more wars and more fighting to come, but back then I didn’t know it, and I felt as though the taste of life had fallen dull on my tongue. I thought, “How can I go home, now, and get married, and make children, and live mildly, and make pots, and grow aubergines, as if I had never been to war?” Without the Franks I felt lonely. I felt sad as I did my patrols and my guard duties and my training in that place. The night sky did not seem correct without the parachute flares and Very lights that lit up no man’s land at night and made the world stand out in perfect white light and perfect black shadow; and rockets and star shells, the brief glimmers of shells as they landed and the howitzers as they fired, the bright spark and sparkle of bullets as they ricocheted from the stones. The air was not correct without the stench of cordite, shit, piss, sweat and rottenness, the buzzing of bullets, the whistle and thump of incoming shells, the miaowing of the high-explosive fragments and the grunting of the sixty-pounders, the coughing of aeroplanes, the screams and wails of the wounded, and the laughter and songs coming over from the Frankish trenches, those odd jerky melodies that I can still remember and whose words I never understood. My shoulder did not feel correct without the constant reliable bruise from the recoil of my Mauser, and my forefinger did not feel correct with no trigger to fold itself around. It did not feel correct that there were no more tiny whirlwinds made of dust, skipping away from the impact of a shell. It did not feel correct that I no longer spent my days up trees, or crawling about in the stones with twigs and branches tied around me. It did not feel correct that Mustafa Kemal was no longer there, getting thinner and paler, and more bright-eyed and hoarse-voiced and courageous every day, crawling in the dark along the parapets of the trenches to encourage us before an attack, whispering, “Follow me, and don’t charge until I raise my sword,” and his being always there in the worst of the fighting, and always being by a miracle in the right place with his troops at the right time, and never once being struck except for the ball of shrapnel that hit his watch.

  In the deserted trenches and ragged trees I heard constantly the voice of Fikret, saying, “I am from Pera and I don’t give a shit,” and I caught glimpses of the faces of comrades that I thought I had forgotten, and the faces of Franks that I had killed. Sometimes I would wake up suddenly, my heart thudding with eagerness, and make a grab for my rifle, because I hoped there was an attack.

  The huge cloud of angry shit-coloured dust that had hung over us for months, laden with the sweet smell of rottenness, finally began to disperse. The sides of the trenches began to fall in, and everywhere the dead lay in strange poses as they forgot about their senses and their flesh. In the Frankish trenches we found by the hundred the entrenching tools that we had been so short of and which we always carried away in raids, and which we didn’t need now that there were so many of them to be had for no effort. The oleander, the myrtle and thyme sprang up among them in the stones, and in spring the poppies came up and covered
the battlefields, and the hillside of Achi Baba turned scarlet red, because disturbed ground throws up poppies like a corpse makes maggots. I imagined that each poppy was a message from a soldier, and each poppy was scarlet because of a soldier’s blood, and I remembered all those years back home when for some reason all the poppies came up pink, and people used to remark on it and wonder what it meant.

  Now, as the great Frankish ships rusted on the beach, and the great Frankish armies went to fight elsewhere, the goatherds returned with their savage round-eared dogs, the farmers began to collect the military barbed wire for their own fences, townspeople from Maydos came to scavenge among the shrivelling corpses for watches and rings and coins and cigarette cases, tortoises clattered about once more among the ruins of the fortresses, and again the frogs and crickets set up their croaking and sawing. Yellow flowers sprang up in the woods, and yellow birds sang again in the pines, and in this beautiful peace I was covered up in sadness and in solitude.

  CHAPTER 70

  Tamara Receives a Visitor

  It was the summer of 1916, one year after the deportation of Levon and the other Armenians, and just a few months after the Frankish Allies had crept off the Gallipoli peninsula in the dark of a winter’s night. Karatavuk was still there with the occupying garrison, but Mehmetçik had escaped his labour battalion to live precariously as an outlaw in the uncompromising Taurus Mountains. Levon and his wife were dead of exhaustion, cruelty, starvation and despair somewhere on the ossuarial road to Syria Deserta.

  Little remained the same. In Eskibahçe the work was being done by children, the women, the very old, and the few men who had returned crippled from active service. All the townsfolk were half starved, and most of them were desperate. The stock was regularly rustled by gangs of deserters, and there were those who stole from their neighbours’ fields, even though the punishment for being caught was absolute and condign. There were no camels left, no horses except those of Rustem Bey, and but few goats and donkeys.

  The town evidenced its economic and moral decline in its very appearance. The dilapidated streets remained uncleaned, broken shutters hung at drunken angles from torn window frames, and the cheerful pastel paintwork of walls and woodwork had long since begun to peel away. The stray dogs, no longer benignly supplied with crusts of bread by the kind-hearted, died in the streets and rotted there, filling the air with the same pervasive, sweet and rich stink of death that had supplanted the scent of satisfied earth and wild flowers all across the disfigured fields of Europe. The row of idiots who used to sit on the walls together, laughing and gesticulating, now sat there in rags, all the pleasures and disinhibitions of insanity done away with by the dejection of hunger. They had ceased to be entertainment either to themselves or to anyone else.

  The few shops that opened had almost nothing to sell, and no one had any money with which to buy. Some of the ones that used to belong to the Armenians had been looted. The wonderfully varied stalls that used to make the meydan almost impassable were sagging on their trestles, unused and unmaintained. Stamos the Birdman was not to be found there, since nowadays his pretty little finches were barbecued on sticks and eaten, bones and all, by himself and his family. Neither was Mehmet the Tinsman ever there, because his tin was no longer arriving from the far and exotic land of Cornwall, and in any case, the pots were wearing out more slowly for lack of the wherewithal to cook in them. Neither was Ali the Broken-Nosed there, because he had no goats’ milk to sell now that most of his flock had been taken by brigands. Ali the Snowbringer, still living with his wife and four children in the hollowed trunk of a mighty tree, did not pass through the meydan with his dripping sacks, because no one had a few paras to spare for ice. He counted himself lucky that he and his donkey had been out on the mountainsides when the gendarmerie had arrived to requisition the pack animals. Equally lucky was Gerasimos, now happily married to Drosoula. He had been out in his boat when the gendarmerie had arrived to take away the young Christian men for the labour battalions, and these days he slept down on the beach, near his boat, in case they returned, and on good days he brought fish to the town. He was one of the very few who was richer than he had been before, not least because there was no longer anything to buy, and so his coins merely accumulated. No strong men came to the town any more, with their cannons and striped pantaloons, and neither were there acrobats and jugglers. Abdulhamid Hodja was no longer seen there, because he was already beginning to die, and only the two gendarmes continued to play backgammon in the shade of the planes.

  Only a few things remained the same. Leonidas, thinner and more cantankerous, continued to write his subversive political tracts at night, by the stinking wick of an olive-oil lamp, and persisted in sending his writings to his few accomplices in Smyrna, undeterred by the undoubtedly inconvenient truth that it was only mainland Greeks who really wanted Greece to expand into Anatolia and fulfil “The Great Idea.” Drosoula’s father, Constantinos, jaundiced and delirious, still drank away the agony of toothache, and as usual incurred the obloquy of all. The Blasphemer, now skeletal and more mad, still cursed God and His representatives in the streets. The Dog still lived obliviously among the Lycian tombs, occasionally wearing the remains of Selim’s telltale shoes, and apparently thriving on locusts. Iskander still made pots and birdwhistles, and Mohammed the Leech Gatherer still stood heron-like in the pool of the Letoun, because leeches were still required by the doctors of Smyrna. Leyla Hanim still sang to her oud at night, sending sad lullabies in misremembered Greek out over the roofs. She had turned temporarily into a housewife, since most of the male servants had gone to war, and she had taken to improvising meals out of the few things that Rustem Bey shot on the mountainsides, or that she could find in the market. Nowadays she went out like any other woman, to look for wild greens, and it is true to say that the change had done her good. Sometimes she looked at the dried skin of her hands, with their ingrained dirt and scuffed nails, and even felt a little proud of herself. She no longer had that enjoyable but nonetheless guilty sense of wasting her life on frippery and idleness, and she most usually glowed with good humour in spite of the many unwonted difficulties of life in wartime. She still employed Philothei, and together they went out frequently to gather wild food, accompanied by a sleepy and very elderly retainer, who had been armed with a musket for their protection. Unlike Drosoula, Philothei had been unable to marry on time, and now she waited for Ibrahim to come back from the front. There had been no news for months, and if it had not been for the cheerful company of Leyla Hanim, she would have suffered a great deal more from the constant fear and worry. At night in Eskibahçe the bulbuls and nightingales still kept light sleepers irritably awake.

  It was on one such bird-struck night that a figure slipped out of one of the richer homes at the top corner of the town, and vanished into the darkened alleyways. He was wrapped so heavily in a black cloak as to be almost invisible, and it was obvious that he was being deliberately furtive. He stood still for a while, accustoming his eyes to the darkness, and then he set off. He stumbled occasionally against rocks that protruded through the cobbles, and was brushed by the sweet-smelling leaves of the figs that grew from the interstice of wall and road. Even in that darkness, it was clear that he knew where he was going, and there was something in his manner that betrayed great purpose.

  He passed the former houses of the few Armenians, and the mosque, with its two minarets and silenced fountain. He passed through the meydan, and the Church of St. Nicholas, with its icon by St. Luke of the Virgin Sweet-and-Loving. He passed the lower church, where there was still an owl that perched on the beams, and where the ossuary was that contained the wine-washed bones of the Christian dead. He came to where the street turned a corner sharply, and ended with a final, isolated house, flat-roofed, whose façade was draped with climbing roses, and whose windows were latticed in order to conceal the dark interior.

  He rapped on the heavy door, in which there was a tiny wrought-iron grille at head height. Suddenly it s
queaked open, and, drifting out, came a heavy scent of smoke and ambergris, olibanum, oil of lemon, musk and patchouli. A huge pair of doleful grey eyes, heavily lined with kohl, looked out. “Welcome,” said a low voice. “What do you want?”