Birds Without Wings

by Louis de Bernières

  Drosoula looked up at the top of the cliff, and saw Ibrahim looking down. Ibrahim says that he was helpless. There was no way down to the beach, and he was too horrified to move. He says that he had at that moment no feelings inside because the feelings were too great to feel without breaking him into fragments like a fallen pot, and causing him to die. He says that Drosoula seemed tiny so far away down on that beach. He says that then Drosoula raised her arms and cursed him. He says that despite the distance, he heard every word of the curse, and will never forget one word of it. He says that the curse is too terrible to repeat aloud, and he has never told me exactly what it was. He says that it was a very long curse, and that it made the sweat pour down his back as cold as snow. He says that it took the spirit out of his body and twisted it like wire, and that it took his body and removed the goodness and the flame. However, Ibrahim says that Drosoula’s curse was not as terrible as the curse which at the same time he was making against himself, and which he has never ceased to make more telling in the years that pass.

  I will never forget the day when the Christians left, and Ibrahim ran to find me. He was bleeding from many cuts because he had fallen a great deal among the rocks and tombs as he came back to the town. His eyes were blinded by tears, and he had been running, and the madness was already beginning to come upon him. His voice was strange and agonised, and when he could speak, the first words he said were “I’ve killed the little bird.”

  It was for these reasons and causes that Ibrahim went mad, and for these that the lovely Philothei was killed. Ibrahim, as I have said, blamed himself, and now he is too insane ever to be persuaded otherwise, but in my opinion, as I have also said, everything that happened was made to do so by the great world.

  CHAPTER 5

  Mehmet the Tinsman and the New Copper Dish

  All these events having transpired, and the Christians having been deported, the people that remained in that place soon got into the new habit of referring to their former neighbours as Greeks. Certainly, it was to Greece that they had been deported, and they had become Greeks whether they had wanted it or not, even if their new compatriots often deprecated them as Turks. The word “Ottoman” would fall into disuse and disrepute until such time as the inevitable revisions of later days, when the world would realise that the Ottoman Empire had been cosmopolitan and tolerant.

  The population of Anatolia was in mourning. Ten years of war, in the Balkans, then against the Franks, then in the War of Independence against the Greeks, had left tens of thousands of widows and orphans, tens of thousands of parents without inheritors, tens of thousands of brotherless sisters. It was a people bereaved and worn out beyond endurance, and it would climb out of the pit of misery only because it would have the miraculous good luck to fall under the quirky but brilliant leadership of Mustafa Kemal, who had recently decreed that from now on everyone must have a surname, and that his own was Atatürk.

  It was bereaved also of those who had not died. Eskibahçe was dying on its feet because not enough Greek Turks had arrived to fill the empty houses of the Turkish Greeks, and in any case they had brought virtually no wealth with them. Some of the abandoned houses were looted, especially those whose owners were reputed to have secreted treasure, but those whose owners had left keys and a trust of guardianship with their Muslim neighbours simply rotted slowly away against the return of their owners, until the timbers sagged, the roofs collapsed, the cisterns clogged, and the door jambs and window frames fell away from the walls. The wrought-iron gates of the two Christian ossuaries rusted and the few ribs and teeth that were left became the playthings of ghoulish little children.

  Down at the entrance to the polis, the great pump house built in 1919 as an act of philanthropy by the garrulous merchant of Smyrna, Georgio P. Theodorou, broke down and fell into disuse, because there was no one left who knew how to repair it. Travellers emerging from the pines were no longer met by the joyful sound of cool running water, and their thirst was unslaked, their hands and faces unrefreshed.

  Indeed, almost no one remained who knew how to get anything done. There had been such a clear division of labour between the former inhabitants that when the Christians left, the Muslims were reduced temporarily to helplessness. There was no pharmacist now, no doctor, no banker, no blacksmith, no shoemaker, no saddle-maker, no ironmonger, no paint-maker, no jeweller, no stonemason, no tiler, no merchant, no spicer. The race that had preoccupied itself solely with ruling, tilling and soldiering now found itself baulked and perplexed, without any obvious means of support.

  There were only two artisans left, Iskander the Potter, much diminished by the terrible wound that he had inflicted upon his favourite son, and Mehmet the Tinsman.

  Mehmet was descended from Armenians who had arrived in the time of the Seljuks, and converted to Islam, and the family had provided the town with an unbroken line of tinsmiths for many generations. Although Mehmet did not know it, his skills and designs had filtered out of India three thousand years before, but he was still conversant with the esoteric meanings of the goats, griffons, winged lions, fish and hexagrams with which he adorned his dishes, his cooking pots and his spring-lidded powder horns. Indeed, Mehmet was one of the few of his family who still made these representations and knew their semiotic, for the more devout had ceased to do so entirely, decorating their work only with complicated geometrical designs.

  Mehmet the Tinsman loved his work, and there was nothing else that he was willing or qualified to do, but the fact was that a good half of his clientele had disappeared overnight. His mainstay had always been the retinning of copper and brass pots, and he found that, instead of waiting happily in his workshop for customers to arrive, he was obliged to travel from place to place in order to improvise any kind of living at all. With one exception, all the rich people had gone and now there was no one to buy his new copperware. “Perhaps,” he often thought, “it is just as well, because I no longer know where to get my acids, my nisadir powder, my sheets of raw copper, and I no longer know where to get my tin. God help me when my stock runs out.” His copper used to arrive from Smyrna in huge, blackened, fifty-kilogram sheets, and his tin used to come from a far-off, exotic, barbarian, Frankish place of which it was impossible to conceive, and which was named “Cornwall.” Mehmet had never had much desire to travel, but his Cornish tin had a special crackling sound to it, and he imagined the shining rods being rolled in the great hairy hands of Cornish djinns that lived and laboured underground in the stannaries, and possibly had one eye, or perhaps three. It was his ambition, one day, to travel to Cornwall and see the tin djinns for himself.

  Nowadays, his enforced travel was confined to the surrounding towns and villages, whose populations had likewise halved, and whose craftsmen had similarly disappeared. He had acquired a donkey, and was therefore able to take advantage of the fact that he was the only tinsman left in the area. If it were not for him, all the pots would wear down to the copper, and people would be poisoned by their own cooking. Recently, indeed, people had begun to walk for miles to bring him their pots, because somebody in the family had already fallen ill. Sometimes Mehmet thanked God that tinning lasts only for eight months, because otherwise he would have had no prospect of a long life.

  One day Rustem Bey walked into Mehmet the Tinsman’s workshop, and, unbeknownst, watched the latter diligently tinning a skillet. He was at his bench, surrounded by the clutter of his extraordinary collection of strangely shaped hammers, anvils, dollies and punches, sprinkling the white nisadir powder over the copper, and repeatedly wiping it over with a cotton wad that he was dipping in a pot of molten tin that bubbled on the brazier beside him. Rustem Bey marvelled that the tinsmith did not burn his fingers. When Mehmet had finished, he sensed that someone was watching him and looked up. He stood and took the aga’s hand in respect, touching it to his heart, his lips and his forehead. Rustem was the only wealthy man left in the whole district, and it was widely known that he was charitably using his wealth in order to create
work for those less fortunate.

  “Fortunate” is a relative term, and certainly Rustem Bey did not feel fortunate. The interesting people with whom he used to socialise and converse, including the Italian officer, had all gone. The abscondence of Leyla Hanim had left a hole in his heart and in his life, even though, out of opportunism and loneliness of the spirit, he had finally taken all three of Levon the Armenian’s daughters as his mistresses, keeping them in houses at opposite extremes of his estates. He had not grown cynical about love itself, but he had resigned himself personally to the idea that he would never have it, that it was not something intended for him. He had long since buried his rejected wife Tamara among the white graves in the pine woods.

  He often remembered how it had felt like a blow to the stomach when a messenger had arrived from the brothel, to tell him that Tamara Hanim had died, and asking him whether he had any instructions as to what to do with the body, because otherwise they would leave it under stones among the ancient tombs where the Dog lived. They said that she had died of the plague that comes back with the haj, but he knew in his heart that really she had died of attrition. He had been convinced of this when he had collected her body and seen what appalling ravages had befallen her once comely face. He provided her with a respectable shroud, and made her a decent and honourable grave. He attended the burial, which was carried out by the new imam and his servants, and felt a lurch of dread and sorrow when the body was lowered into the ground. He had the tomb painted white, with the exception of the headstone, which was made in the shape of a tulip, and which was picked out in green and painted red. When he walked away from the place after the interment, he felt again that weariness of someone who knows that they have lived too long, and which can come upon a person at any age.

  Like many others who remained, living amid so much absence, Rustem Bey felt like a ghost in a land of ghosts. Nowadays he had to imagine what had once been a daily reality; the clanging of the bell at angelus, the raucous and drunken Christian holy days that seemed to happen every week, the sheer exuberance and variety of the community’s former self. For his own part, he had grown resigned, and wiser. He had been defeated and subdued by life, but he had remained dignified and had never lost his sense of having a role in the scheme of things. He still had no children, despite having the three mistresses, and despite having had a wife and Leyla Hanim. This caused him much grief and self-doubt.

  Physically he was greatly changed. He had lost the muscularity of his prime, but without losing much of his strength, and he looked visibly smaller. His cheeks had sunken in because he had begun to lose some of his teeth, and his hair and moustache had long since begun their journey from black to snowy white. Because he was a modern man he had ceased to wear breeches and a sash at all, and wore Frankish clothes as a matter of course. Nowadays he seldom wore his silver-handled pistols and dagger, and ever since Mustafa Kemal had forbidden the wearing of the fez because it was ridiculed by the rest of the world, he had taken to wearing a trilby. He had put his fez away in a box, and in secret every now and then he retrieved it and turned it over in his hands, because without it he felt somewhat unlike his authentic self.

  When he had been greeted in Mehmet the Tinsman’s workshop, he said, “Mehmet Efendi, I have come to ask you to make something for me, for which I am prepared to pay you an honest price.”

  “An honest price is all I ever demand,” replied Mehmet, flattered that Rustem Bey had addressed him as “efendi” when he was not an educated man at all.

  “I had a dream,” said Rustem Bey. “I dreamed of a great copper plate, a big ekmek saç, you know, a big bread-baking plate, and it had a particular pattern, and when I awoke I felt that I would like this plate made. I remembered the designs.”

  “I will do it if I can,” said Mehmet, and when Rustem Bey had explained his intentions, he exclaimed, “Why, those are old ones! My father used to like to do them, and my grandfather too, but not with all of those beasts on one plate. You would have each on separate plates.”

  “Perhaps I have seen them before somewhere,” said Rustem Bey. “Quite often a thing goes into your mind without you realising it, and then you can’t remember why it is there. In any case, it’s the one I dreamed, and I would like it made, all on one big plate, if you have the time, and since it’s a big plate, you should be able to fit in all the beasts.”

  “I could do it now,” said Mehmet with enthusiasm.

  “How long will it take?”

  “Who knows? That depends upon how well it goes. God’s in charge.”

  “I will stay and see you begin,” said Rustem Bey. “I am not as busy as I was.”

  Mehmet went to his stack of crude, oxidic copper sheets and scratched a large circle in the one on top, using a wooden pattern and a long pointed scriber. He cut the shape out with a heavy, blackened pair of shears that must have been in the family for generations, and brought it over to his table. He threw charcoal dust and some oil on to the very big brazier that stood, permanently aglow, in one corner of the workshop, and fanned it up to temperature, putting on more coals as the temperature rose. When he was satisfied, he laid the copper roundel across the griddle, and stood back as it heated up. Rustem Bey observed him, envying him his skill and his sense of belonging in the world. It was true that Mehmet was filthy and stinking, it was true that his complexion was reddened, coarsened and ruined, that his hands and forearms were covered with the healed scabs of a lifetime’s minor burns, that his clothes and even his turban were everywhere full of charred holes, that his fingernails were broken and his fingers engrained with grime, but it was also true that Mehmet was fulfilled and that he knew happiness by personal acquaintance. Happiness and contentment were indeed his wife and mistress, and they slept with him in the same bed.

  The copper slowly ascended to red heat, and Rustem Bey stood further and further back. Mehmet removed the glowing sheet with two pairs of tongs, and laid it across four flattened stones to cool off. “Does it take much longer?” asked Rustem Bey.

  “Well, efendi, you have to beat it, which is very noisy indeed, and then it is so hard that you have to heat it up again to red heat, and you can either quench it or let it cool on its own, and then you can begin to make the designs.”

  “So it all takes a very long time?” interrupted Rustem Bey. “I think I may not have time to stay and see all of this.”

  “Indeed,” replied Mehmet. “It takes a long time, but a long time to us is a short time to God, and a long way for us is a short way for a bird, if it has wings.”

  “You are speaking in proverbs, just like Iskander the Potter,” said Rustem Bey, laughing lightly. “But in any case, God’s time is not a time that I would want to wait, and the heat in here is becoming intolerable. When shall I come back?”

  “The engraving will take time if you wish it to be good.”

  “I wish it to be good,” confirmed Rustem Bey.

  “Then come back in three days, just before the evening azan.”

  Rustem Bey duly arrived three days later, just before the call to prayer, and found Mehmet the Tinsman, amid much huffing and puffing, vigorously shaking a large black goatskin bag. His initial impression was that Mehmet must have gone mad. The latter stopped for a moment, and explained breathlessly, “Water and river sand. Giving it a polish in the old way. Can’t use acid. Nearly run out.”

  Mehmet sat down for a while to recover his breath, and rolled a fat cigarette as consolation and reward for his efforts. The heavy perfume of Latakia tobacco superimposed itself upon that of hot metal and coals. When he had recovered, he removed the huge platter from the goatskin, and took it over to a pail of water, where he carefully washed it down. For a moment he held it up and admired it, pristine, virgin, untarnished, brilliantly shining. He turned and presented it to Rustem Bey, saying, “From my hands to yours, Aga Efendi, may it go with good fortune.”

  Rustem Bey took it reverentially and felt an unfamiliar pang of aesthetic pleasure. It had come out even be
tter than he had dreamed of it. Around the rim, in Arabic text that he could not read, there was a line from the Koran. In the centre, set amid swirling acanthus leaves, were five beasts. One was an eagle with two heads growing out of the one body, each head looking in opposite directions. Two of the beasts were identical geese, breast to breast and paddle to paddle, but with their heads flung directly back over their bodies so that they saw both the world and themselves upside down, but could not see each other, and two of the beasts were the prettiest and most elegant antelopes imaginable, identical, both winged, tails flicked high, both hoof to hoof and chest to chest. They might have been sisters, twins of the same dam, but they too were looking not at each other, but in diametrically opposite directions, backwards over their shoulders.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Epilogue of Karatavuk the Letter-Writer

  I have just reminded myself of someone I should not have forgotten, since now I live in what was his house. I was sitting here whilst my family slept, with the paper before me and a pen in my left hand, wondering how to start. I was looking at the glow of the oil lamp, when I suddenly remembered Daskalos Leonidas, who was the teacher to the Christian children in the years just before they had to leave. He was not well liked by anyone, but I have reason to think that there was some warmth in his heart, because he was kind to my parents during the war when they asked him to read a letter, and to write in reply. Also, he knew that it was me who exchanged sparrows for the songbirds in his cage, but he never pursued me for it. The reason I am reminded of him is that he used to write all night. There was always a light coming through his shutters. No one knew what he was writing, and I cannot myself read the papers he left behind, but it was said that he was a conspirator and was working out plots to make all these parts Greek. Perhaps he is dead by now, but wherever he is, he must know that all the plans like his ended up with these parts becoming completely Turkish, and that this happened after we had all had to wade in lakes of blood. My father Iskander would have thought of a proverb to illustrate the futility of great plans and big ideas, but I am reminded of a story about Death, who sent a message to someone to say “I will see you tomorrow night in Telmessos,” and so the man ran away to Smyrna, thinking that he had made a fortunate escape, and then he was walking along in the Armenian quarter, and he met Death coming the other way, and Death said to him, “How fortunate! I had been planning to meet you in Telmessos, but something came up, and I had to come here instead.” This is to say, that in seeking our good ends we often bring about our own misfortune.