Birds Without Wings

by Louis de Bernières

  The French agree a plan with Kemal that gives him everything he wants, but the British are unaware of it. They decide to present him with an ultimatum, but General Harrington decides that it is better not to deliver it. He knows that he cannot defeat Mustafa Kemal when he has only a few thousand men. Poincaré is most relieved, and Lloyd George is furious, but in the end everything is smoothed over when armistice discussions are put in place. Ismet Pasha is a leading negotiator, and, since he is partly deaf, he simply pretends not to hear anything uncongenial or awkward.

  In Greece, the fickle people turn against King Constantine, whom they had welcomed back with such excess of joy only a short time before. They suddenly remember how much they used to hate him, and now they blame him for losing the war started by his greatest enemy, Eleftherios Venizelos. Constantine abdicates in favour of his eldest son, and will die in exile in Sicily within four months, a broken and heartbroken man. He has learned the bitter lesson of all Greek royalty, which is that it is better to mourn in exile than to reign at home, because the Greek people will only ever treat a king as if he is a president.

  General Hazianestis and five ministers are put on trial and condemned to be stripped of their rank and shot. Rather than be degraded by anyone else, General Hazianestis strips his own insignia from his uniform before boldly stepping out to face the firing squad. His legs are firm beneath him, and do not, after all, turn out to have been made of glass or sugar. His execution and those of his comrades provoke outrage in the rest of the world, because it is obvious that they have been made scapegoats. Venizelos reappears, inexplicably disculpated, and the new military junta in Greece announces its intention to retain Thrace. Only Lloyd George has any patience with this vain ambition.

  Kemal continues to threaten the Allies with war, and finally he gets his way. Eastern Thrace is to be Turkish after all. Its large Greek population leaves amid the usual heart-rending and pathetic scenes, the usual deaths on the roadsides, and it will be many years before it is replaced by Turkish refugees from Bulgaria and Greece, who will also have endured long and desperate treks from their homelands.

  History begins again. The disastrous Lloyd George falls from power, and Winston Churchill loses office. Mustafa Kemal commences the construction of an entirely new country. He abolishes the sultanate, and then the caliphate. He sets up a secular constitution. He changes the alphabet from Arabic to Roman, thereby inadvertently ensuring that almost no future historians will really be able to understand the disordered archives left over from Ottoman times. He establishes equal rights for women, and outlaws both the veil and the fez. He sets up entire industries. He puts in motion events that are planned to lead to a Western-style liberal democracy just as soon as he dies, in which event he considers that he will automatically lose interest in holding on to personal power.

  Mustafa Kemal also signs up to the Treaty of Lausanne, one of whose provisions is that almost all Turkish Christians, regardless of which language they speak, will be removed to Greece. Another provision is that almost all Greek Muslims, whether of Greek or Turkish origin, and regardless of which language they speak, will be removed from Greece and sent to Turkey. The criteria are explicitly religious rather than ethnic, and in the interests of preventing future strife it looks like a good idea, until one takes into account the innocent people concerned.

  One day in Turkey they will call it “The Demographic Catastrophe,” because it is the Christians who know how to get everything done. Turks are soldiers and peasants and landowners, but Christians are merchants and craftsmen. Their loss will delay economic recovery for decades.

  In Greece they call it “The Asia Minor Catastrophe.” Those who leave will forever feel that they have been arbitrarily thrown out of paradise. One and a half million of them arrive in Greece, causing the utmost difficulty for a government trying to accommodate and incorporate them. They bring with them their education, their sophistication, their talents, their nostalgia, and a music that will turn out to be rembetika. They also bring with them their absolute destitution and sense of injustice, and this will contribute perhaps more than anything else to the rise of communism in Greece, which will in turn lead to the Greek civil war.

  In Turkey, committees are sent out to all the places where there are Christian communities. Their job is to assess the value of property so that it can be sent ahead, or its value reimbursed to the refugees on arrival. There is no transport provided, however, simply because Turkey has nothing left after the decade of war, and the goods will not arrive. For many of the refugees it turns out to be yet another death march.

  In Eskibahçe they don’t take the arrival of the committee very seriously. The Turkish and Greek Christians there, who have recently had a quiet time on account of the Italian occupation, feel little of the bitterness left over from the war with Greece. They still think that they are Ottomans, and that Mustafa Kemal is a good servant of the Sultan. Many of them still wear turbans, which were banned absolutely years ago.

  The survivors of the conflict begin to trickle home. The celebrations that now seem to be occurring almost every day expose an inevitable undercurrent of terrible sadness. There are soldiers who return to find that their mother or father died years ago, or that they have lost their brothers. They find the fields overgrown, the animals gone and the houses dilapidated. Families wait in desperate anticipation as the lapse of time makes it increasingly clear that their sons are lost forever. The town fills up with cripples. When Karatavuk returns, handsome, fully grown, upright, full of confidence and covered in medals, the joy in Iskander’s house is unbounded. Nermin cannot stop weeping with relief, and Iskander, bursting with pride, tells his son that he too has had a good war, chasing the brigands with Rustem Bey. They take Abdul Chrysostomos’s rifle and go hunting. Karatavuk and his brother both get a deer, and Iskander misses one. Karatavuk assures him that the ammunition must have been faulty, and deliberately misses the next target.

  When Ibrahim comes back, he is abject and trembling. His hands shake so much that he cannot drink from a glass. He seems to be terrified of his mother and his sisters, cowers in a corner, and hides his eyes behind his forearm. Philothei can hardly resist the joyous impulse to run round to see him, but Ali the Broken-Nosed soon appears at Charitos’s door and says that it is obvious that the wedding will have to be delayed. He offers to release the family from their agreement, but Philothei vehemently refuses when the idea is suggested to her by her mother. She works furiously at her trousseau. Ali says that Ibrahim is exhausted and very sick, but soon everyone is spreading the gossip that he has gone half mad. When Drosoula mentions this to her friend, Philothei becomes so infuriated that Drosoula never dares to bring it up again. Philothei finds that one kind of misery has simply been replaced by another. She remembers every time that she and Ibrahim have crossed each other’s paths. She reminisces about them constantly. They are little stories, without trajectory or consequence, and soon Drosoula and Leyla Hanim resort to pretending that they are listening. Her nostalgia eats at her like a cancer. All her stories seem to begin with “One day when I was out gathering wild greens …” She catches no glimpses of her betrothed even though he is only a few doors away.

  The news has come through that Smyrna has been largely destroyed by fire and that all the Armenians and Greeks have gone. For months afterwards Iskander the Potter glumly surveys his shelves, packed out with five hundred children’s birdwhistles. He hopes that Georgio P. Theodorou has survived, and that one day he will come and get the whistles. Otherwise he has no idea what he is going to do with them.

  CHAPTER 87

  I Am Philothei (14)

  What can I do, but wait and wait and wait? I have waited so long, I’ve waited since I was a little child, and now I wish I’d married when I was twelve, because some girls do, but it was Ibrahim who was too young. Thirteen is too young for a boy. At that age boys are disinclined to seriousness.

  I have whiled away the years tending to Leyla Hanim, who mostly seems ju
st to want a little company, and who doesn’t? And the coins I have been paid for this have been a benefit to my family. But all the time I’ve had this longing, for as long as I can remember. It’s a longing that makes my throat ache, and my heart, and I have a kind of shivering whenever I think of him, and things begin to happen that affect me in my legs and stomach, and it’s a kind of hunger and restlessness, and I keep picturing him in my mind, and it is as if I really see him, but it is a curious kind of seeing, because it is seeing in a manner of not seeing, and I see my beloved like that. I look up at the hillside and the hillside ought to have Ibrahim on it, and I look at the meydan and it ought to have Ibrahim in it, and when I see a goat, or hear one, I think of my beloved, because he is a goatherd, and sometimes I see Kopek, Ibrahim’s mastiff, who is quite an old dog now. And when I used to see Kopek, I would wonder who would die first, me or Kopek, both of us dying from the yearning of waiting for Ibrahim.

  They say that I am beautiful, and once they made me wear a veil because I was too disturbing to the men, and they say that I was beautiful even on the day I was born, and Abdulhamid Hodja came to see me, and he was a saint and he blessed me even though I was girl. And it was Leyla Hanim who taught me to be even more beautiful, how to adorn myself, how to employ aromas and balms, how to sit in front of the mirror and compose myself until I was perfected.

  I have found that perfection is not enough. I would give up this perfection for the pains of childbed and the weariness of working in his father’s house, and the humiliation of being the least among the women in that house, and the pity of seeing my perfection washed out of me by the duties of a wife.

  I have waited seven years since my beloved left for the wars, and these have been seven years in the house of Rustem Bey, and I have been observing my perfection dripping away drop by drop because of the pain of longing, and I have been afraid that my beloved would lose his love for me if he saw me after his return.

  And now he has returned. He has fought in a place called Mesopotamia, a desert place of scorpions and stones, and he has been in Syria, and he has been in the armies of Mustafa Kemal in the fight against the Old Greeks, and this has concerned me, because perhaps he wouldn’t want me because my father is a Christian, and now there is bitterness against Christians because of the Old Greeks.

  Now my heart is hurting and heaving in my chest, because he has returned and I have hardly seen him, not even in the company of his mother. And we have been betrothed by means of a gold coin, and he is very thin and has lost some teeth, and his voice is ragged, and his speech confused, and his laugh is high-pitched and peculiar, and his hands shake, and they say that he smokes continuously, even in front of his elders, so that his moustache has turned orange in the middle.

  And Ibrahim’s father came to see mine, and he said that my beloved was unsettled, and that he was not right in the head after coming back from the war, and my father agreed with Ali that the wedding should wait a little while until Ibrahim was back in balance, and when my father told me this it was like the stinging of lemons, and I wept because I had already waited so long, and perhaps I would have to wait another seven years or seven times seven, and I ran to the konak of Rustem Bey. In that house I wept with Leyla Hanim, who was like honey with me, and we went to the hillside and spied on my beloved, and the wind was booming over the sky, and we heard him playing the kaval, which is the sweetest sound in the world, sweeter than robins and linnets, and we saw him seated on a rock, and he put down his kaval and was caressing Kopek’s ears, and then he began to sob and rub his face with his hands, and Leyla and I crept away because it is unseemly to spy on a man who is weeping.

  Leyla Hanim took me back and sat me in front of the mirror and made braids in my hair and then undid them and redid them in different styles, and made me laugh a little by making me look unwonted, and she stroked my neck tenderly and kissed me on the cheek, and she said that since Drosoula had got married to Gerasimos, I had been much more than a handmaid and maidservant, and she hugged me and I was comforted.

  And I told her about the ache in my throat and the yearnings in my stomach, and the restlessness and shivering, and the deep hunger, and the never-ending hoping, and the seeing everything with him in it even when he was absent, and Leyla told me, “I know a word for this,” and I said, “Tell me the word,” and she said, “The word is agapi,” and I said, “What does it mean?” and she laughed and said, “Silly girl, it means all those things you have just told me about,” and I said, “What language is it?” and she said, “Promise not to tell anyone?” and I said, “Promise,” and she said, “It’s Greek,” and then she said, “And do you want to know what to say to your beloved when you want to tell him about the feelings, when you are in his bed or you are lying privately in a field, and he covers you?” and I blushed and said, “Tell me, Leyla Hanim,” and she said, “You call him ‘agapi mou,’ ” and I repeated, ‘Agapi mou, agapi mou,’ until it was memorised, and then Leyla Hanim said, “When you want to tell him about your heart, when the feelings overwhelm you and they have to come out, you say ‘S’agapo,’” and I repeated, “S’agapo, s’agapo, s’agapo.”

  Leyla said, “Now say, ‘S’agapo, agapi mou.’ ” And I repeated, “S’agapo, agapi mou, s’agapo, agapi mou,” and she stroked my face and said, “This is the language of your forefathers that the Christians in this place have gradually forgotten,” and I said, “Are there no words in my own tongue?” and she said, “Silly girl, of course there are, but Greek is the best language for love.”

  And every night before I slept I thought of Ibrahim, so close and yet so seldom seen, and made a picture of him in my mind, and I said to him, “S’agapo, s’agapo, s’agapo,” and when I dreamed of my beloved and I was running to him amid the tombs, I called him “Agapi mou,” and eventually I realised that what Leyla Hanim had told me was true, that these words were the most perfect of any language in the world, and of all the words in the languages of the world, they were the most beautiful, and they were also the words that most meant what I was meaning to say.

  CHAPTER 88

  Exodus

  In the turbulence of his sleep Father Kristoforos dreamed once again of the funeral of God. The dream recurred in a thousand infinitesimally different variations, and for some time he had found it a potent source of psychological and spiritual strain. Lydia the Barren fretted about the dark rings under her husband’s eyes, and the pallor of his face, but she had found no potions to yield him better sleep. In the version of this particular night, Father Kristoforos had dreamed that he had been the priest officiating at God’s funeral, and the Angel Azrael, his maliciously aristocratic face gleeful with Todeslust, had been the gravedigger. The latter had greatly shocked him by his irreverent comments about the state of the corpse, and Kristoforos had been awakened by his own shouts of protest, just as the gendarmerie arrived at dawn.

  They were commanded by the same Sergeant Osman as had arrived years earlier to collect recruits, and with whom Karatavuk had left to join the army in the place of his father. The sergeant had aged greatly, partly because of the toll taken on his health by old wounds, and partly because of the parlous conditions of his life over many years. His limp had become more pronounced, and sometimes he experienced difficulty in breathing, a problem that he sought to alleviate by smoking continuously, a habit that had dyed most of his thick moustachio in various shades of brown and yellow ochre. He still considered himself a proper soldier, and his pride had caused his carriage to remain erect and his speech simple and direct. Upon arrival, after several days’ march from Telmessos, he went immediately for a shave, and then, perfumed and refreshed with lemon cologne, set up office in the meydan under the same plane tree under which he had directed operations years before. Thence he dispatched his gendarmes to impart his orders to the populace.

  At first no one believed what the gendarmes were telling them, but it soon became apparent that this was no prank. Sergeant Osman’s orders were to collect the entire Christian p
opulation of the town and march it to Telmessos, whence it would be transferred by ships to Greece. Sergeant Osman had been given no transport, no provisions and no money with which to accomplish this feat. It was not long before he was besieged by groups of Christians who were at the very edge of hysteria.

  “What about my house?”

  “Lock it up.”

  “What about my animals?”

  “Ask your neighbours to care for them. Sell them.”

  “What about my mother? She’s sick. What will become of her?”

  “No one can be left behind.”

  “What about my son? He’s away for three days. What will become of him when he returns?”

  “He will be sent after us.”

  “What about my samovar? It is very valuable.”

  “Don’t bring anything you can’t carry all the way to the sea. If you have any sense bring food and clothing.”

  “Tomorrow I am supposed to be meeting someone to talk about some land.”

  “It’s cancelled.”

  “What about my things? I haven’t got a cart to carry them in.”

  Sergeant Osman would raise his hands to appeal for calm, repeating, “Listen, all of you, in your new home you will get compensation to the exact value of everything you have lost. There will be an issue of certificates.”