Birds Without Wings

by Louis de Bernières

  When I think about it, I realise that without Daskalos Leonidas, I would not be sitting here writing whilst my family sleeps, because it was he who taught my friend Mehmetçik to read and write, and it was Mehmetçik who taught me. In our day the Muslim boys learned to recite only the first lines of the Koran, in Arabic, and that was all our education, which was why we were always helpless when the Christians wanted to outwit us. I pestered Mehmetçik until he gave in, and every day in the rocks above the town, where the Dog lived, he would teach me as Daskalos Leonidas had taught him, which is to say that he put on an irritated tone of voice and hit me frequently with a stick, and I would scratch out words in the dirt with a stick. I still smile when I remember the antics of our childhood, all that running about in the rocks and blowing on birdwhistles and finding interesting things to piss on. I wonder if he still is wearing red things, should he have managed to escape. I still have birdwhistles that my father made, and I wonder if Mehmetçik still has the one that I gave him when I last saw him, just before my own father maimed me.

  Well, after that I had to change my course in life, since a one-armed potter is an impossibility. It is also because of that meeting that I am writing this with my left hand, which, according to my wife, is the hand of Satan. She says, “Nothing good comes out of what is done by the left hand,” but this is not true, because now I write with my left hand, and this is how I live.

  I agree that nothing will come of this particular writing, neither good nor bad, but not for the reasons proposed by my wife, who thinks like a woman, and is preoccupied with female things. Mehmetçik taught me to write in Greek characters, teaching me all the sounds that the letters signify, and so I used to write my own Turkish language in Greek letters. There used to be many others who did this, but I don’t know if there are any left. I have heard that it is still done on the island of Rhodes. After the wars were all finished, Ghazi Mustafa Kemal Atatürk Pasha made everyone learn to write in the Roman letters used by the Franks, and so now no one can read what was written in the old Ottoman script, and no one can read what was written in Greek script either, except for a few people like me, and then only if the language is Turkish and not Greek. Mustafa Kemal also made us take second names, and so obviously I took the surname Karatavuk, so now I am Abdul Karatavuk Efendi, and I am “Efendi” because I can write, and this has brought me great honour, which is a consolation.

  This new way of writing, with Frankish letters, is a good one. I can write knowing that I will be understood. Not all writing, however, is done so that other people may understand. If I write in Greek letters, as I used to, then it amounts to a very good code that only I can read, and the only other people who will ever understand it will be those who will take the trouble to work it all out with great sweat and labour. The reason to write like that would be if I had things to say that I did not wish to become common knowledge. As it is, I wish only the fine things I have done to be remembered, and these are things that I can tell to my sons by word of mouth, and to my friends in the coffeehouses, and I would write them in the new Roman letters so that I will be remembered for them.

  I have heard that there is a type of Christian who goes to their priest and tells him all the bad things that they have done, and then the priest forgives them on God’s behalf, because it is said that Jesus Son of Mary gave his disciples the power to forgive sins. I don’t know anything about this, but I do know that if there is someone to whom you can tell the bad things, then it takes the burden from your shoulders, if only for a little time. I have only paper to tell these things to, and paper has no power of forgiveness.

  Fortunately, I have had long years of practice in writing with my left hand, which used to be awkward and clumsy, but now it is so easy that I would only cease if the price of lamp-oil became too great. I have become the town’s letter-writer, and so I always have work, and I sometimes write to make myself feel better about the things that I experienced, because it is better to confide to a piece of paper than not to confide at all and to feel the dishonourable things eating at your guts like a rat in the night. I have dishonourable things to remember from the years when I was at war.

  Here are the things that I would like to tell Mehmetçik if I knew where he was. I am sorry that you were not allowed to fight for the empire like an honourable soldier, and although it was a jihad I think that those who wanted to fight for the Sultan should have been trusted. There were Arabs at Çanakkale who were Muslims but did not fight, and were traitors to the empire, and ran away. Also the Franks had Muslim soldiers from India who fought very fiercely for them, and did not believe it was a jihad. Therefore this proves that to exclude Christians from the army was beside the point.

  I am sorry that you were taken away and used like a slave in the labour battalions, because they should have used convicts, and not men who wanted to be soldiers. I am sorry that in this way you were made to lose your allegiance, and become an outlaw. I am also sorry that all the Christians have gone, because many of us were comforted by the presence of the icon of Mary Mother of Jesus, and because the Christians were merrier than us. It is fortunate that the new Muslims from Crete brought some of their high spirits with them, but unfortunately we have too many sanctimonious old men here who are always telling us that to enjoy ourselves is a sin, and so we spend too much of our lives sitting grimly and waiting for death, because it is only after death that we will be allowed to have a good time.

  I have written many of the things that I would have told Mehmetçik after the wars were over, and many of the things that I would have told him if not for the intervention of fate and my father wounding me. I wrote them whilst imagining that I was with Mehmetçik in the rocks, before my father interrupted us with his rifle. The papers will be found after my death no doubt, and then who knows what will happen to them? I originally began it like this:

  My dear and well-loved friend who has long gone from me, when you came back after all the wars, I had been sure that I would never see you again. Your family had left for wherever they were sent, and your house was occupied by those who came from Crete. These people slowly became like us, and now they are Turks. They have learned Turkish, especially the children, but sometimes they still use the Greek language, and they gather snails and make them into dishes with tomatoes and onions and rice, and they have beautiful songs and a kind of dance which is very popular with us at feasts when we ask them to dance for us. My dear Mehmetçik, you would not be bitter if you saw them in your old house, because they are good people and your house is as happy as it was before, and no doubt the old Cretan people in it long for their old home as much as you must long for yours. I know what it is to long for home, because I was at war for eight years and lost my youth and much of my decency when I should have been at home making pots and making sons, and when I came home everything was changed. Who knows? One day it all might change back again, and your people will be back with us, and our people with yours. In the meantime, I remember you with a smile, and hope that you also remember us.

  I smile about the time when I last saw you, when you told me that Sadettin had become the Black Wolf, and you were the Red Wolf. I couldn’t at first believe it when I heard such a familiar sound of robins coming from beyond the town, up the hill where the Dog lived among the tombs. I thought, “That music sounds just like Mehmetçik’s bird-whistle,” and I began to think of the days of our childhood when we were friends. And then I thought, “That music is going on a long time, and is not completely like a bird.” I often listened to birds when I was at war, because when the battle goes quiet, and you are perhaps behind the lines in the reserve area, perhaps in a patch of woodland, you often hear the songs of the birds loudly and clearly, because they are saying to each other, “When these people have gone, this land will be ours again,” and I remember when the long battle against the Franks was over, and we moved into their trenches, and the guns were silent at last, all you could hear was the song of birds, and at night we heard the nightingales and bulb
uls, just as we do here in this town.

  Of course I suddenly knew it was you out there in the rocks, and it made me very joyful.

  When I saw you again, I didn’t know what to say at first. How much you had changed! Your skin was dark from the sun, and you had a great beard, and your body had filled out, and you were dressed like the outlaw you were, with a cutlass and pistols in your sash, and a bandolier full of bullets across your chest, and a rifle in your hand, and round your brow you had wrapped a red cloth so that it was like a turban, and you stepped out from behind the tomb and embraced me.

  I had heard so much about this Red Wolf, who was an outlaw and a brigand, a plague to the gendarmes. I said, “I thought you must have left with your family and the other Christians,” and you said, “How could I? I wasn’t here. I was already hiding.”

  It was then that we sat by a tomb and I began to tell you all that had happened to me, because our bargain was that I would speak first, and then you would speak, and so we would swap histories.

  Of course it didn’t work out, because we were interrupted, and now finally I have decided that I will not write my story as a long letter to you. I have no idea where you are or even if you are alive, and it pains me to write to you when you might indeed be a ghost. What I will do instead is to imagine that I have readers that I do not know, and so I will begin my story again, with the words “I will not relate what happened during my training.” This will be left for my children to read, and anybody else who may have an interest.

  This is the last time I will speak to you, by means of this writing that you will never read. There was a custom you may remember, of sending birds to take messages to the dead, and how I wish that I had a bird who could take my thoughts to you. If you know me at all, you will know that I have missed you all of my life, and I still miss you now that I am an old man and my eyes are beginning to fail, as a scribe’s eyes always do. I have a wife and children and grandchildren, and I have seen my country grow into a great one with a new purpose. It is not frightened by anyone. I have mainly lived a good and honourable life and I have forgiven myself for the things of which I was ashamed. This place is still very beautiful, and the bulbuls and nightingales still keep us awake at night. The gendarmes still play backgammon in the meydan. It is easy to be contented here. All the same, I miss you, my old friend, and in the hope that there is a life after this, I will enter death anticipating that we will become boys again in the old paradise, filling our birdwhistles with water, running about and flapping our arms, and calling to each other among the tombs, and that there we will find the people of our childhood who have all slipped beneath the earth: Rustem Bey, Leyla Hanim, Ali the Snowbringer, the Dog, the Blasphemer, Ali the Broken-Nosed, Stamos the Birdman, Mohammed the Leech Gatherer, Charitos and Polyxeni, Ayse and Abdulhamid Hodja, Lydia the Barren and Father Kristoforos, my own father Iskander and my mother Nermin; and there we might find again the companions of our childhood: Philothei the Beautiful, Drosoula the Ugly, Sadettin who had to kill his sister and then ran away to become Black Wolf, and Ibrahim the Mad. There perhaps will also be Fikret from Pera, and my comrades from the wars, and there we will find again our old enchantment.

  For me the stars are growing dim, and everything has almost gone, and I wonder if you have come to the same conclusions as I have. It is often useless to plan for things, even when you know exactly what you are doing. The present is confounded by the future, the future is confounded by the future beyond it, and the memories bubble up in disorder, and the heart is unpredictable.

  You and I once fancied ourselves as birds, and we were very happy even when we flapped our wings and fell down and bruised ourselves, but the truth is that we were birds without wings. You were a robin and I was a blackbird, and there were some who were eagles, or vultures, or pretty goldfinches, but none of us had wings.

  For birds with wings nothing changes; they fly where they will and they know nothing about borders and their quarrels are very small.

  But we are always confined to earth, no matter how much we climb to the high places and flap our arms. Because we cannot fly, we are condemned to do things that do not agree with us. Because we have no wings we are pushed into struggles and abominations that we did not seek, and then, after all that, the years go by, the mountains are levelled, the valleys rise, the rivers are blocked by sand and the cliffs fall into the sea.

  POSTSCRIPT

  Fethiye in the Twenty-first Century

  One story is that in 1913 Fethi Bey, an intrepid Ottoman aviator endowed with a Blériot monoplane and memorable moustaches, crashed into the bay of Telmessos and was untimely killed. In 1923 the town of Telmessos changed its name in his honour, and became Fethiye.

  On the other hand it might be that in 1913 Fethi Bey, an intrepid Ottoman aviator endowed with a Blériot monoplane and memorable moustaches, undertook to fly from Istanbul to Cairo and was killed when his plane crashed in Palestine. Louis Blériot, world famous not only for flying the English Channel and winning the thousand-pound prize offered by the Daily Mail but also for his own unsurpassable record of spectacular and marvellous crashes, most charmingly and honestly acknowledged that the wires above the wings of his aeroplanes were insufficient to withstand the download caused by turbulence. The French army grounded its Blériot monoplanes, and in 1923 the town of Telmessos changed its name to Fethiye in honour of the first Ottoman pilot to have been killed by a design fault.

  Another version is that in 1923 the town of Telmessos changed its name to Fethiye in honour of a pilot named Fethi Bey, who had been killed in action during the Turkish War of Independence.

  Since “Fethiye” means “conquest,” however, the town might equally have been renamed to celebrate Atatürk’s expulsion of foreigners and the establishment of the modern Turkish state. The identity and manner of death of Fethi Bey, aerial, intrepid and unfortunate, are concealed forever behind the tangled contradictions of multiple and congenial myth, and he lives on solely in the name of a pleasant and modest town that may not indeed be named after him, having existed, it seems, solely for the purpose of demonstrating the impossibility of history.

  Every Tuesday there is a market in Fethiye that bestraddles the sides of a shallow and limpid canal that carries the water of the mountains into the sea. It is a market that seems to go on forever, to be crowded by every nationality, and to sell the strangest possible combination of touristic handicrafts and daily necessities.

  There are agriculture and carpentry stalls, laden with nails, adzes and sickles, stalls with generous and redolent bags of spice and saffron, stalls with brass tea sets, coffee grinders, kebab skewers, and mortars and pestles, stalls with wondrous aubergines and turgid watermelons, stalls with tapes that alternately blast out the equally lamentable pop songs of both Turkey and America, stalls selling priceless carpets inveigled for a song from the naive peasants of Anatolia, stalls selling hand-sewn silks, waistcoats, hats and socks, and stalls selling seductively beautiful musical instruments, geometrically inlaid, which Turks can play by instinct, but which Westerners find impossible, even in theory.

  Many of the traders have formerly lived in London; “Cheaper than Tesco,” they cry, “cheaper than Asda, better than Harrods. Buy one and get one for nothing. Pay me next year. Who cares about the money? Look, look. English? Deutsch? Please, please, very nice, very cheap. Lovely jubbly.” They trade con brio, bursting with joy and panache, and each of them has a samovar on a portable gas ring in order to fill themselves and their customers with hospitable and inexhaustible draughts of sweetened apple tea.

  There are old ladies crouching in the dust next to cotton cloths upon which is arranged complex and exquisite silver jewellery set with rich semi-precious stones. Young men wander among the throng insisting upon the purchase of genuine Lacoste socks and genuine Cartier watches and genuine Reebok trainers and genuine Chanel perfume. Middle-aged women intent upon the weekly stocking of provisions curse the tourists and mutter to each other irritably as they haul
their baskets through the cosmopolitan muddle. A boy is determined to sell his authentic French designer fragrances: “Ten pound for one,” he exclaims, and then, “Eight pound for one. OK, five pound for one. OK, one pound for one. OK, OK, ten for one pound.”

  Noisy women from Manchester and Newcastle howl and cackle like hens as a spouse tries on a fez. Roasted and rubicund middle-aged blond couples from Amsterdam and The Hague blink in confusion as a dark small boy attempts to sell them a self-illuminating yo-yo or a small carving with an astounding phallus. Policemen on duty, stupefied by boredom, smoke surreptitiously, their aromatic cigarettes smouldering in cupped hands behind their backs.

  There is a tall and heartbreakingly lovely German girl. She is golden-haired and freshly minted, moving with catlike confidence and grace through the crowds between the stalls. She wears the skimpiest of tops, and her interminable legs disappear into the shortest of shorts, which have been slashed deliberately across the buttocks in order to expose firm alabaster flesh of inestimable delight. She astounds the local men, who gaze after her with popping eyes, their mouths agape with censorious longing and disgusted desire.