Birds Without Wings

by Louis de Bernières

  “When? Where?”

  “I don’t know exactly. I expect it will get sorted out at Telmessos.”

  “Where is Greece?”

  “Over the sea. It’s not far. Don’t worry, you will be looked after by the Greeks and the Franks. They will find you new homes, as good as your old ones.”

  “Are the Greeks Ottomans like us?”

  “No, from now on you are Greeks, not Ottomans. And we are not Ottomans any more either, we are Turks.” The sergeant held out his hands and shrugged. “And tomorrow, who knows? We might be something else, and you might be Negros, and rabbits will become cats.”

  In their houses the Christians attempted to deal with the bewildering and impossible task of working out what to take. There were some families who regularly took animals up to the yaylas in the summer months, and were accustomed to trekking away into the distance with all they could carry, but even so they had never had to do so under such conditions of haste and uncertainty. Most people had been plunged quite suddenly into extreme states of emotion, and were completely confused. Some were shocked and silent, some hysterical and weeping, whilst others talked wildly of disobedience and defiance, of hiding until the gendarmes had gone, even as they obediently sorted through their possessions.

  Some loaded themselves up only with food and water, and others deemed it better to take valuables that they could sell to raise cash, such as copper pots and dowry jewellery. Some sold their effects to their neighbours at knock-down rates, thinking that cash would be of more use than chattels. Some sorted out objects of sentimental value, and some looked, with greater or lesser irrationality, for things that may or may not turn out to be useful, such as small coils of rope, or the head of a hoe. It was one of those exceedingly rare occasions when blessed indeed are the poor, for by far the greater proportion of the people lived in such straitened circumstances that there were relatively few choices to make. These humble souls gathered what little they had into bundles, and foregathered in the meydan. Humbler even than them were the dozen beggars of Christian origin, who were alone in experiencing optimism in the place of despair. Some were mad, some retarded and some fugitive, but for all of them the hope of a new and better life in a new land was suddenly held out. They would follow the column of refugees, imploring alms from those who had nothing to give. Among their number was not to be found the Dog. He remained amid the tombs, removed from all considerations of race and religion by virtue of his speechlessness, his mutilation and his anchoritic life. Neither did any of the Christian prostitutes arrive from the brothel, being similarly removed from all considerations of race and religion by virtue of their profession.

  Sergeant Osman’s troubles truly began when the time came to marshal the people and get them moving. In the first place there was the problem of the teacher.

  Daskalos Leonidas appeared in the meydan just when it seemed that at last the Christians were ready to depart. He was skinnier and more dishevelled than ever, the lenses of his spectacles were smeared, and his Frankish clothes were ragged and greasy. Because no one had seen fit to inform him, and he had no friends or relatives in the town who might have done so, he had not found out until relatively late what was about to happen.

  Whereas to most of the Christians the disaster was a personal one, to Leonidas it was also a political and ideological one. He saw his dreams evaporating. Fired up with the courage of the outraged, he found enough audacity within himself to scramble clumsily up on to the very table under the plane tree where the town’s gendarmes customarily played their infinitely repeated games of backgammon.

  Sweating and trembling, he began to wave his arms and shout, in order to attract the attention of the milling crowd. “Friends! Friends! Listen! Listen to me! You have to listen!”

  “Get down and shut up, idiot,” demanded Sergeant Osman, looking up at him. He was ignored.

  “Listen! Listen!”

  There was something desperate and commanding in that thin dry voice, something that made even Sergeant Osman want to hear what he had to say, and so he stayed the hand of a comrade who was about to thump Leonidas in the back of the knee with the butt of his rifle. “Go on,” said Osman. “Say what you have to say, and hurry up about it. I give you a few words, that’s all.”

  No one suspected what Leonidas was about to say, and it came to them almost as a shock. They fell silent, their faces trained up towards him, and he made an eloquent gesture with both hands. “Since ancient times,” he said, as if beginning a lesson, “we have lived here. This is our home. In their greatest days our ancestors built the magnificent things that you see fallen about you in ruins. We had the greatest civilisation in the history of the world. They tell you that you are being taken to Greece, but this was Greece. This must be Greece again. It is Greece. We are Greeks and this is our home in Greece. We cannot leave. In this place it is the Turks who are foreigners. They arrived long after we did. You must all go back to your houses. We must all refuse to go. This is our home. This is Greece. This is the land of the Patriarch. We must refuse to go. You must stay here for the love of Greece and the love of God.” He let his hands fall to his sides, and then raised them again, holding them out beseechingly, palms upward.

  The people looked up at him, unresponding. It was true that this was home, but how could they refuse to go when there were men here with guns and authority? How could they become defiant when they were probably under the orders of the Sultan Padishah himself, refuge of the world, and under the orders of Ghazi Mustafa Kemal Pasha, terror of the Franks? How were little people, most of them illiterate, bred to docility and hierarchy, suddenly supposed to become lions? The metamorphosis can be made under the leadership of a demagogue, but Leonidas up on his table did not amount to such; he seemed ludicrous, and a little mad.

  Sergeant Osman looked up at him wearily, and tugged at the cuff of his trousers, saying, “Come down now, or I will have to shoot you. It will give me no pleasure, unfortunately, but we are running out of time.”

  Daskalos Leonidas looked at the upturned faces of those below. It seemed to him that they were regarding him with a curiously mild interest, as if he were a strange but harmless animal that had wandered away from a menagerie.

  “Come down,” said Sergeant Osman, but instead of coming down Leonidas remained on the table, hung his head, closed his eyes and began to sob. His shoulders shook, and tears began to slide down his cheeks, gather on the point of his chin and splash on to his boots. The people watched, and Leonidas wept.

  He was weeping for the loss of everything that he had believed in and for which he had fought. All his adult life he had dreamed and worked for the idea of Greater Greece, of the days to come when Greece would again encompass all the historic territories, of the days when Greeks would rule over themselves and cease to be anyone else’s subjects. It had seemed for so long that history was on his side, as Greece grew bigger and bigger. Crete, the Ionian Islands, Salonika had all become Greek. He had passed so many nights, engaged in a protracted epistolary conspiracy, writing about the inevitability of it all by the light of a stinking wick, and now it was impossible to imagine that suddenly history had changed sides, and created a country called Turkey in a Greek place. Leonidas was a nationalist in the days before the erosions and landslips of time exposed the miserable stupidity of nationalism. If he had lived three generations later, an intellectual like Leonidas would have thought of nationalism and religion as the unholy spouses from whose fetid conjugal bed nothing but evil can crawl forth, but these were innocent days, when orthodoxy was the sole and obvious truth, and nationalism was still romantic, reputable and glorious. Dry and cantankerous as he may have been, Leonidas was the highest romantic, and his tears were those of a romantic who has seen all his aspirations crushed. Leonidas, disowned by his family, all of whom had in any case irretrievably disappeared during the burning of Smyrna, friendless in this backward place, betrayed by history, now had not even his wonderful ideas for which to live. On the long march to Telm
essos, he would speak only once, when the moment came for him to translate some Greek, the language he had for so many years tried in vain to teach to the children of the town, and which soon they would all have to learn, whether they wanted it or not.

  When Leonidas finally descended dejectedly from the table, he turned and said bitterly to the sergeant, “You will never be forgiven for this.”

  The gendarme looked back at him, and replied simply, “I have nothing to be forgiven for. I’ve got nothing against you. I don’t care about you at all, in fact. I don’t care if you live here or in Greece or on the moon or up a tree like an ape, or up the backside of a camel, and as a matter of fact one of my grandmothers was a Christian from Serbia, so I don’t even care if you’re an infidel. If you want to blame somebody, blame the Greeks for invading us and laying half the country to waste. This,” he said, indicating the proceedings all about them with a wave of the hand, “is thanks to orders from above, and I just have to assume that those above us know what they’re doing. If you give me any trouble in carrying out my instructions, you will find that I lose patience very suddenly, and no doubt one of my men will be glad to give you some indications of my displeasure. I hope this is all very clear to you.”

  Daskalos Leonidas stood for a minute, scrutinising Osman’s face. It was not the face of an enemy, and this perplexed him. The brown eyes were those of a grandfather. Leonidas turned and went back into the crowd, where he stood, his ears burning with shame, embarrassed and enraged both by these sheeplike people and by what was being done to them, repeating to himself the formulae which seemed to him to be so just, but to which no one wished to pay attention.

  It seemed to Sergeant Osman that at last he could get everyone moving. To him, too, they were like sheep, but more skittish. Perhaps they were less skittish than goats. Everything was in place. As far as he knew, he had all the Christians gathered together in reasonably good order.

  Surveying them, however, his heart sank. There were many very old people, some bent double from their lives’ labours. There were pregnant women, and tiny children too small to walk long distances, but too heavy to carry. There were even beggars, mad people and idiots. He shook his head and rubbed his eyes with his hands. It was odd how when one thought of a generic human being, one had the mental image of a man perhaps between twenty and thirty, but here was visible proof that such generic ideas were impertinent to reality. He could tell in advance that without transport the whole operation was going to be a fiasco. Inevitably there would be deaths on the road, and delays brought about by those deaths.

  The rest of the population had gathered to observe the departure, but were not apparently about to do anything untoward. They seemed curious, and oddly subdued, as if they were about to witness a passing procession of animals rather than the deportation of their friends and neighbours.

  The first untoward event came not from the onlookers, but was sparked by Polyxeni, who had already been semi-hysterical for some time because her daughter Philothei was nowhere to be found. Now she suddenly remembered Mariora. “Mother! Mother!” she cried, and abruptly she dropped the bundle she was carrying, left the side of her husband Charitos, and ran off in the direction of the little church at the bottom corner of the town.

  There was the briefest moment of puzzlement as people thought, “But Mariora is dead,” and then there was an equal moment of collective revelation as everybody realised what Polyxeni was doing. Once it had become clear, it seemed inconceivable not to follow her example. Likewise dropping their bundles, the people ran off, exclaiming and crying out to each other, ignoring the cries and warning shots of the gendarmes.

  “Son of a whore!” muttered Sergeant Osman, his pistol in his hand, looking around at the mêlée, utterly confounded by this extraordinary turn of events.

  Some people ran to the cemetery and flung themselves headlong upon the newer graves, speaking into the earth, “I’ll come back for you, I promise. I promise I’ll come back.” Those who believed that their loved ones might have sufficiently rotted began hurried exhumations without the assistance of the priest, and without the customary washing with wine. Many were horrified to find that a particular body would need much longer in the earth. There are few things more unforgettably appalling on this earth than to see and smell the corpse of a loved one who is half decomposed.

  Others more fortunate crowded into the ossuaries of the two churches, gathering up the linen-bound bundles. Polyxeni was lucky in getting there first. Her mother’s bones were near the top, and the linen had not yet rotted. Against the tide of the crowd, triumphantly bearing her mother’s remains, she found her way safely back to the meydan.

  There were scenes that would have been amusing had they not been macabre. People altercated over questions of identity, particularly with respect to the older bones that had long turned brown. There were tugging contests whose inevitable consequence was that many bones were spilled, falling to the stones with a hollow clattering, becoming mixed up on the ground. The linen wrappings of the long dead crumbled apart, scattering their contents. Brothers argued over who had the most right, or the greatest duty, to particular relatives. There was much running hither and thither to find sacks and bolts of cloth in which to carry the precious cargo.

  It was a full hour before the Christians were once more gathered in the meydan, and ready to depart, now bearing bundles of bones in addition to their essentials. Sergeant Osman regarded them balefully. As far as he was concerned, it was sacrilege to disturb the remains of the dead, and he found himself feeling outraged and repelled. After some minutes of discussion with his corporal, he decided that it would now be impossible to travel any significant distance before the intervention of darkness, and he climbed up on the table to address the Christians.

  “Return to your houses. We depart an hour after dawn. Listen for the azan, and make sure you are out of your houses promptly. Anyone causing delays will be dealt with very severely. Get well rested, and prepare yourselves for a long hard day. That is all.”

  He jumped down, landed awkwardly because of his bad leg, and straightened up. He and his men would spend the night in the town’s khan, and awaiting them they anticipated yet another unappetising dinner of bulghur wheat, bread, cheese and raw onions. They were more than delighted when a servant of Rustem Bey’s appeared, bearing platters of kadin budu and chicken with saffron. Rustem Bey’s sense of noblesse oblige had made it a matter of principle for him always to bestow hospitality upon new arrivals in the khan, and his servants were instructed so to do, even, as in this case, in their master’s absence. That evening the gendarmes went to sleep replete, their bellies pleasantly rounded, and their mouths tingling with the softly bitter taste of cooled tobacco smoke, inhaled from the waterpipe that had also arrived from the aga’s house in the wake of a tray of rosewater lokum. “I tell you what, lads,” commented Sergeant Osman as he rolled out his pallet, “I wouldn’t mind staying here and forgetting about this whore’s cunt of a job altogether.”

  “Well,” said the corporal, “there’ll be plenty of empty houses if you ever feel like coming back.”

  “I might just do that,” said Osman. “I’m getting too old for all this.”

  In the first light of dawn, as the sun ascended from behind the mountains and spread its rosy fingers across the horizon, the entire population of the town reassembled in the meydan, the Muslims remaining at its periphery under the lime trees, and the Christians milling about at the centre. There was a better sense of order than there had been on the eve, and Osman felt vindicated in having made the decision to postpone their departure. He was enjoying the first chill, and the first cigarette, of the morning, and was feeling more confident about the task that lay ahead of him. He had no delusions about the difficult decisions that awaited him, or the occasional brutalities that might have to be committed for the good of all, in order to keep the column moving. That morning, as he had touched his head seven times to the prayer mat, he had explicitly asked God to forg
ive him in advance, and to be merciful, and now he felt himself fortified.

  Osman saw that the Christians must have spent much of the night in preparation. Those who owned goats had improvised little pack saddles for them, which were laden with provisions tied up in bundles of clothing. Chickens had been tied by the feet to these saddles, and they flapped and squawked as they repeatedly lost their balance. The few that possessed mules or donkeys had piled them with preposterous loads that would almost certainly topple off before long. The most curious thing of all was that everybody had, by some process of apparently telepathic unanimity, decked themselves out in their very best clothes, as if they were going to a wedding or celebrating a saint’s day.

  Just as Osman was thinking that it was time to go, Father Kristoforos appeared from the direction of the Church of St. Nicholas. Behind him came Lydia, his wife, bearing a large bundle of bones upon her back, which was held in place by means of a band of cloth circumposed about her forehead.

  Attired in his priestly robes, Father Kristoforos, his eyes half closed either in grief or in meditation, was singing the theotokian from the prayers for the departed. The people fell silent as his rich baritone sent the ecclesiastical Greek echoing from the walls of the town. “O pure and spotless Virgin,” he sang, “who ineffably bore God, intercede for the salvation of the souls of thy servants.” Suspended about his neck on a chain, and held out before him, his hands gripping the thick, elaborately engraved silver frame still draped with tamas of the faithful, Kristoforos bore the icon of the Virgin Panagia Glykophilousa.

  The Christians fell to their knees and crossed themselves. How could they have forgotten about their icon? The Muslims, too, could not help but let out a low moan of despair. Was there any one of them who had not at some time asked a Christian acquaintance to solicit some favour on their behalf from Mary Mother of Jesus? Wasn’t it true that the icon had for centuries watched over the town for all who had lived in it, and mitigated its bad luck, regardless of faith? Those who were destined to remain in that town suddenly had the appalling feeling that they were being left helpless.