Birds Without Wings

by Louis de Bernières

  The stranger put one hand on the door to steady himself, tried to ignore the frightening thumping of his heart, and looked beseechingly into the sympathetic grey eyes. “I have come to see Tamara Hanim,” he whispered. The prostitute sighed, and pulled back the latches to let him in.

  He had never been in the place before, and at first he found the dark pink light almost too dim, even though he had just come in out of utter darkness. He was in a room that in its respectable days would have been the selamlik, but which was now divided into smaller chambers by large kilims hanging across it on cords. In each chamber there were cushions and in some there were divans. In most of the chambers he could just discern the figures of thinly clad women, lolling, their faces unnaturally white, their lips painted thickly in scarlet, and their eyes kohled into huge circles. Some of them beckoned to him with poorly simulated salacity, saying, “Come to me, my lion, to me, to me. Let it be me, my lion,” and others, their eyes large and empty, sucked deeply on waterpipes and scarcely registered his presence at all, blowing clouds of smoke out of their mouths with a pleasure that seemed both profound and melancholy. “I had no idea there were so many here,” said the man to the doorkeeper, who was still accompanying him. “Well, you haven’t been here before,” came the soft answer. In the background were the sounds of a woman in the agony of childbirth, of another woman sobbing, and of a man approaching a noisy climax. To the visitor’s ear the frenzied voice sounded somewhat like that of Ali the Broken-Nosed.

  Tamara Hanim was in what used to be the haremlik, in a similar small chamber composed of hanging carpets, cushions and a divan. She was simply sitting motionless and timeless on the divan, with her hands between her knees, and her head bowed. He recognised something about her immediately, her outline, or perhaps her atmosphere, even though he had not seen her now for many years. “Tamara,” he said, and the doorkeeper silently left.

  She looked up, unbelieving. He loosened his cloak and folded it on his arm before laying it on the floor by one of the cushions. She saw the sash with the familiar silver-handled pistols and the yataghan, and she raised her eyes to see his face. He was thinner and older, but he had scarcely changed, except that his eyes had in them less pride and more kindness than before. “It’s you,” she said at last.

  “It’s me.”

  “Why?”

  He gestured confusedly. “I had to come.” He tapped his chest with the knuckles of his right hand, and said, “It was in here. Like a voice. I have ignored it for years, but finally I have listened. And so, as you see, I have come at last.”

  Tamara began to weep silently, and tears rolled down her cheeks, splashing on to the hands that were now trembling in her lap. “You’ve come,” she said.

  He gestured again. “I had to.”

  “Sit down if you like,” she said, and he sat down at the other end of the divan. She put her head into her hands and wept more noisily now, her shoulders heaving with sobs, uttering little cries that reminded him of a whipped puppy. He could think of nothing to do or say, and he watched in anxious alarm as the tears emerged from between her fingers and ran down the backs of her hands.

  After a long interval she stopped, removed her hands from her face, and smiled wanly. “I am sorry,” she said, “these are women’s tears.”

  “They are not just a woman’s tears,” he said quietly. “These tears are yours.”

  “I am very rich when it comes to tears,” she said, but without any bitterness in her voice. “It doesn’t matter how many I spend, I always have more and I never run out. If I had as many coins as I have tears, I could buy the world from the Devil.”

  “I am sorry for your tears,” he said soberly.

  She dabbed her eyes and looked at him. “Are you well?”

  “I am very well,” he replied.

  “You seem thinner.”

  “I have a lot of exercise. I spend a great deal of time out hunting, for days at a time. Otherwise it is hard to eat.”

  “Even for you?”

  “Yes, even for us.”

  “Do you still have a tame partridge to tempt the other birds, so that you can shoot them?”

  “Yes, I still have a partridge.”

  “I liked the partridge. It was very pretty, and sometimes it had funny ways. Some men call their wives and daughters ‘My little partridge.’ Did you know that?”

  He nodded. “I once heard my father say it to my mother, when he thought that there was no one there. I was quite surprised. He was a hard man, as far as I knew.” There was a long pause, and then he asked, “Do you have enough to eat?”

  She looked him straight in the eye, and shook her head. “No. We are all starving. There are no young men any more, and the old ones are too poor. Some of us use opium to take away the cramps and the faintness.”

  “Is that what this heavy smell is?”

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  “But you don’t use it?”

  “They do it mostly to forget, but I don’t want to forget. I want to remember. And in any case it either kills them or sends them mad.” She smiled wryly and continued, almost to herself alone, as if she were merely voicing a repetitive old thought, “But that’s how you leave this place anyway, I suppose. You go to the asylum or you go to the earth. I might as well smoke opium, but I just don’t. I am going to the earth in my own time, and I am sure that it won’t be long.”

  “I can bring you food,” he said.

  “Why should you do that.?”

  “I have the desire, that’s all.”

  “I would like food,” she said.

  “I heard that you were all starving,” he said. “I brought you this.” He reached into his sash and brought out a package wrapped in a cloth. He handed it to her and she took it. “I’ll eat it when you’ve gone,” she said.

  “It has a lot of good things in it,” he said.

  “May giving it do you as much good as I will get from receiving it,” she said, very formally. After another long pause she said, “I sometimes hear news of you from Leyla Hanim.”

  “She tells me news of you,” said Rustem Bey. “She told me you were ill.”

  “The respectable women won’t sit with her in the hamam, and so she comes and sits with us,” said Tamara scornfully. “I hate those women. If I was a man who was married to one of them, I would wade out into the sea and drown. They are as sour as wild cherries and as dry as leather, and their hearts and bellies are full of grave dust and ground glass. They say that Leyla Hanim is just a concubine, and so they don’t sit with her.”

  “I have heard Leyla Hanim’s complaints,” he said.

  Tamara wanted to reply “And so have we heard them,” but she restrained herself for Leyla’s sake.

  “I have heard from Leyla Hanim that you have had children,” he said, with obvious pain in his voice.

  “They are all dead. I had four, but now they’re dead. I buried them under the stones, among the tombs where the Dog lives, and near the tomb of the saint. I don’t think I’ll have any more.” She fell silent, and then she demanded suddenly, “Why haven’t you divorced me?”

  He was much taken aback by the directness of the question, and he hung his head to ponder it. At last he replied, “It was for the sake of something that I can’t explain. Well, perhaps I can explain it, but to most people the explanation would make very little sense.” He glanced up. “I don’t talk to anyone about these things. I am not practised in this kind of talk.”

  “I am glad to see you,” she replied. “Try to explain it anyway.”

  “Do you remember when I discovered you with Selim, and I killed him, and I dragged you out to be stoned, and the people started to stone you?”

  “You dragged me out by the hair, and turned your back whilst they attacked me in the meydan, and started to kill me. Your hands had been bleeding, and you had Selim’s blood on you, and your blood and his blood were on me, and I was thinking when they attacked me that your blood and his blood were mixing up with mine.”<
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  “I did it because I thought it was right, and for the sake of my honour. I not only thought it was right, but I knew it. It says in the Holy Koran that adulterers shall be stoned. It’s the custom, and it’s the sharia. I knew it was right. I did it because there was no question.

  “But even then the certainty was too uncertain. When I had my back to you, it was only shame that prevented me from rising up and whipping away those vermin that surrounded you. I was wishing that I had not dragged you out. The longing for justice and vengeance became less than my longing to save you and take you away. The revenge tasted like copper and vinegar in my mouth, and all the sweetness and satisfaction of it vanished away. It was only the shame that stopped me … and then when Abdulhamid Hodja arrived and saved you, my heart was singing with relief even at the same time as I should have killed him for taking away my just revenge. If I had killed him, no one would have found me guilty.”

  “Abdulhamid Hodja will surely rest forever in paradise,” said Tamara Hanim softly.

  “I didn’t divorce you, because you had suffered enough shame.”

  “It would have been less shame than this,” she said, indicating her surroundings with a small wave of her hand. “Do you think that divorce would have been any shame to me at all, compared to this?”

  He looked at her a little guiltily. “I did suffer,” he said.

  “Your suffering was like a dewdrop compared to the ocean,” she said.

  “Sometimes the dewdrop believes itself to be an ocean.”

  “It believes mistakenly.”

  “I went to Abdulhamid Hodja. We have often talked about this. He asked me if I have wavering in my soul, because in a righteous man this is the consciousness of wrongdoing.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I told him that I have a terrible wavering in my soul.”

  “Do you?” she asked.

  “Even though every good opinion is on my side, I have always felt a terrible wavering in my soul about what was done to you, and about what I did. Because of this wavering I did not divorce you, even though it was a great scandal and still is. You are still my wife, and when you die you will still be my wife, and I will provide the white shroud and the grave, and the headstone in the shape of a tulip, should you be the first to die. This is nothing perhaps, but it reduces the wavering in my soul.”

  “If you don’t divorce me, you can’t marry Leyla Hanim.”

  “A man can have more than one wife. Look how many the Prophet had.”

  “But you are a modern man. You are like the people in Smyrna. You like to dress in Frankish clothes, and have only one wife.”

  “Yes, I can only have one wife.”

  “What about Leyla Hanim?”

  “Leyla Hanim is a hetaira. She might want to be a wife, but she would be like a bird that sits and sings with its feet tied to a branch, and finally tears out its own feathers and bleeds to death. She would be a bad wife, but she is an excellent concubine. If I made her into a wife it would be like chaining up a dog and expecting it to bleat and give milk.”

  “She wants to be a wife. I know it. You misjudge her. And if you are not married to her and you are still married to me, then you are an adulterer when you lie with her.”

  He laughed ironically. “Then I should be stoned by the rabble in the meydan, no doubt.”

  “You would never be stoned. You are not a wife as I was. You are not a young woman who is easy to stone. You are a lion and the rabble are like little dogs. If you roared, they would run away.”

  He smiled at her. “You have changed a great deal. There was a time when you would have been too timid and too humble to talk to me like this. Now you talk to me directly, as Leyla Hanim does. It is a very unusual thing in a woman.”

  Tamara bridled a little. “I knew my place. I knew what was expected. I was respectable. Leyla Hanim and I are not respectable, and so we speak as we see.”

  He added, as if in afterthought, as if returning to a previous train of thought, “I have only one wife.”

  “I am no use as a wife,” she said.

  He summoned up his courage and then told her, more directly than he had intended, “Tamara Hanim, I want to lie with you again.”

  She looked at him in astonishment, and repeated, “Lie with me again?”

  “Yes.”

  “After all that I have been? After all that has happened? What about the daughters of Levon the Armenian that I have heard you rescued? Aren’t they very beautiful? What about Leyla Hanim? Isn’t she a good mistress?”

  “The daughters of the Armenian are very beautiful, but they are under my protection. I saved them from dishonour, and therefore I cannot dishonour them myself. They are like you when you first came to me. They are frightened and unhappy and bewildered, and so I have sheltered them under my wing. As for Leyla Hanim, she has been very good. But the time has passed by and at last I can no longer forget myself with her. There was always a doubt in my mind, and the pleasure is still very great, but it is not the kind of drunkenness it was. She has become my companion, and we live together because it is very pleasant and we have become like two vines that have twisted together. And despite this, I have also begun to be alone. For a long time I didn’t feel that. She banished it, but now it has come back.”

  “All the same, it sounds very good, being with her,” observed Tamara.

  “It is very good. I remember that when I went to Istanbul to find her, I went to a mosque first, and it was a Friday morning. I told the beads of my tespih, and made a promise to God.”

  “A promise to God?”

  “Yes. I promised Him that if I found a woman who would bring me all that I wanted in a woman, then I would build Him a mosque. Well, I was just beginning the mosque when the war with the Franks broke out, and the young men were taken away, and so the mosque only has some trenches for the foundations, and these are slowly being filled in with plants and falls of earth.”

  “God doesn’t want His mosque, then,” said Tamara.

  “The odd thing is that when I made the promise, I had the feeling that I was promising it to no one, that no one was listening. I started to build it anyway, because I had made the promise.” He raised his eyebrows and sighed. The wails of the woman in childbirth suddenly ended, and they waited for the infant’s cry, but none came.

  “Another dead one,” said Tamara.

  “I have never forgotten you,” he exclaimed suddenly, “I have always had you in my mind, you are like someone who waves to me from a distant ridge, who cries out and whose voice it takes me a little while to recognise. In the short time that you were with me you also planted a seed, and that seed continued to grow even though most of the time I was unaware of it, and now I have realised that that seed is also a vine that has entwined with my vine. I have missed you, and I want to lie with you again, even though …”

  “I have become a whore?”

  “No.”

  “Even though I was unskilled and very poor entertainment?”

  His lack of response signalled that this was precisely what he had meant, and she said, “I am still unskilled, and very poor entertainment. I have never made any pretence as I should have done to earn my keep. I am among the poorest of these poor whores.”

  “Sometimes it is not entertainment that one wants. With us, something has been sundered, like a pot that has fallen on the floor and broken into two pieces. Sometimes, if you haven’t thrown away the pieces, you pick them up and fit them together, and look at how good the fit is, and see whether or not there are little chips missing, and your heart wishes that they could be joined once more. Sometimes when I am lying with Leyla Hanim I see her face in the dark and my mind changes her face and her body into yours.”

  “This is a kind of infidelity,” said Tamara, “but no one can stone you for it, I suppose.” She looked down at her hands, as if they were not hers, and watched her fingers twisting together nervously. When she looked up, there were tears running down her cheeks again
. “I can’t lie with you. I have too many diseases.”

  “Diseases?”

  “Yes, diseases. That is what killed my babies. If I lie with you, you will become diseased, and you will give the sicknesses to Leyla Hanim, and you might go mad, as many of these whores do, and certainly you will both die too soon, as I will. For this reason I will only lie with worthless people.”

  “You don’t think me worthless then?”

  “I have thought many things of you, but I have never once thought you worthless. I have become worthless, and so I can lie with the worthless. Their worthlessness and my worthlessness is what gives me permission, and excuses what I do.”

  “I once knew that you were worthless,” he said, “but even when I knew it, I didn’t believe it, and now I think that I was mistaken. My knowledge came from what I knew as common knowledge, but not from what I knew in here.” He tapped his chest once more with the knuckles of his right hand. He changed the subject. “Can these diseases be cured?”

  “Now that Levon the Armenian has been taken away, there is no apothecary, and the doctor who looked after us out of kindness was also Armenian.”

  “What if I took you to Smyrna? There must be doctors there who can cure you.”

  “There are no cures, or none that anyone has heard of. The cures that they offer make you just as sick, and I think that none of them is any good.”

  “I would like to send you to Smyrna to be cured.”

  Very calmly she said, “I am happy to die too soon. This life is just death’s selamlik, and I have no pleasure. Even if I was cured, I would have no happiness, and I would still be waiting to die. Besides,” she continued, “these poor women in here are my companions. We care for each other, after a fashion. These women are divorced, or widowed, or dishonoured, and I am pleased to keep them as my sisters and mothers until it is my turn to be buried near my babies.”

  “Nonetheless, when I next go to Smyrna, I shall enquire of the doctors.”

  “You can enquire,” she said.

  Rustem Bey stood up, as if to leave, and began to wrap himself once more in his copious black cloak. “If you were not diseased, and I had asked you, would you have lain with me again?”