Birds Without Wings (15 page)

“Show me my name,” asked Karatavuk suddenly. “Write my name in the dust.”

“Do you want ‘Karatavuk’ or ‘Abdul?’ ”

“Put ‘Karatavuk.’ ”

Mehmetçik scuffed out his own names with his foot, took the stick, and scratched the new name in the dust. Karatavuk gazed at it and felt an excitement, a curious sensation of existing more securely than he had before. He took the stick from Mehmetçik and carefully copied the letters. “Look,” he said proudly, “I’ve written my name.”

Mehmetçik inspected his work and said sceptically, “It’s not very good.”

Karatavuk was excited. “Teach me reading and writing. Teach me those other things, that adding-up and taking-away stuff. When you come out of school you can teach me what you just learned.”

“But your school’s nicer than ours,” protested Mehmetçik. “You sit under a tree in the meydan with Abdulhamid Hodja, who is kind and makes you laugh, and we have to sit inside in the dark and scratch on our slates with Daskalos Leonidas, who hits us on the head and calls us bad names.”

“I want reading and writing,” said Karatavuk firmly. “You Christians are always richer than us, and my father says it’s all because of reading and writing and adding up and taking away, and that’s why you’re so good at deceiving us, and he says that we Muslims only learn what we need to get us into paradise, which is all that matters in the end, but you Christians get all the advantages on earth because you learn about all the other things as well. I want those other things too.”

Mehmetçik frowned. “If I teach you reading and writing, I’m warning you I’ve got to hit you on the head and call you bad names when you’re stupid, because that’s how you do teaching.”

“If you hit me too hard, I’ll have to hit you back, though, and you’ve got to promise not to tell anyone. Promise?”

“All right,” agreed Mehmetçik. He got up and searched for a short time in the maquis, returning with another stick, which he handed to his friend. “You’ve got to learn the alphabet first, and then you’ve got to learn some new words every day, and when you’ve learned new words we’ll do adding up to begin with because it’s the easiest.”

Karatavuk watched eagerly as Mehmetçik leaned down and scratched the letter alpha into the soil. Mehmetçik straightened up, hit him lightly on the back of the head and told him to copy it. Then he hit him again and told him how to pronounce it.

CHAPTER 18

I Am Philothei (3)

I’ve been dying to tell you, but don’t tell anyone else or I’ll die. Today Ibrahim found me when I was out gathering hórta, and he just stood there looking at me, just a few paces away, and I didn’t know what to say, and we just looked at each other, and then he went away, and before he went he made a little gesture of his hand, like this.

CHAPTER 19

The Telltale Shoes

It was the shoes that did it, those accursed shoes, but it was not always the same pair of shoes. Standing there outside the door of the haremlik with his hand on the latch, the aga, Rustem Bey, would look down and behold the footwear that would, yet again, announce that his wife had a visitor so that therefore he could not enter.

Sometimes there would be dusty sandals whose leather was worn, contorted and limp. If it had been raining they would be darkened and stiffening. As time went by Rustem Bey was able to take stock of the new stitches and patches, and sometimes the new leather straps. They were neither big nor small, they were sandals that bespoke an unremarkable life, humdrum and modest, and yet Rustem Bey had come to regard them with a sharp loathing. The sight of them caused the blood to beat behind his eyes and his lips to tighten grimly.

Sometimes there would be a pretty pair of embroidered slippers that, he was absolutely sure, really belonged to his wife. He seemed to remember bringing them back from Smyrna as a gift in the early months of their marriage, and she had accepted them with a gracious lack of enthusiasm that had brought childish tears of disappointment to his eyes, which he had, with dignity and a show of indifference, held back. He had so much hoped that she would be seduced by their soft red fabric and their stitching of yellow silk and gold thread, but now she used them merely in order to pretend that she had a visitor. Once he had entertained hopes that their marriage might become more than the usual formal dance of strangers that only grows into anything better with the slow passage of time and the mutual concern for children. He knew families in Smyrna where there was a comely intimacy between man and wife, and that was what he had wanted when he married. He was a modern man, or, if he was not, that was certainly what he wanted to be. How irritating and uncomfortable it was,
to feel too sophisticated at home in Eskibahçe, and yet to feel quite out of his depth in Smyrna or Constantinople; it meant that he had never found friends with whom he felt at ease. In the one case he was dealing with his peasants and tenants, and in the other he was inevitably suspicious that he was being subtly mocked. Every rural landlord that he knew suffered from the same insidious loneliness, and he had quite naively hoped that marriage with the daughter of one of them would help to fill out a life that nursed an emptiness at its core.

For Tamara, he had expanded the women’s quarters from something bare and functional, but pleasant enough, into a haven of warm red drapery, cooling draughts that could be controlled by the judicious opening and closing of shutters, and smooth furniture shaped out of walnut and inlaid with satinwood. He had even bought her a bed that had arrived in pieces on the backs of two refractory camels, and he had bought chairs. Tamara had tried sleeping in the bed for a while, but finally she had lost patience with it, and reverted to the customary pallet on the floor. The beautiful bed was duly dismantled and stored in a hut that otherwise contained brooms and buckets. In the absence of a high table, the chairs too seemed curiously anomalous and redundant, and eventually they were stacked in a corner so that Tamara and her visitors could use the divans like normal people. In truth, Tamara was interested only in using the things that she had brought with her as her half of the marriage agreement, as if she could only feel at home by surrounding herself with familiar objects from her parental home near Telmessos.

Above all she prized her cezve, the tapered brass pot with the long handle, in which her mother had made coffee. Tamara’s mother had been the best coffee-maker in the family, and upon her death it seemed only right that the cezve should pass to Tamara, who was the second best. When Tamara was newly wed, she would sleep with the cezve at her side, and sometimes in the night when her eyes opened and she felt the terror of the bride, she would reach out, take it and clutch it to her throat beneath the covers, as if by means of this cold metal she could feel once again the dry but loving hand that had held the pot so often, and see the grey eyes that had watched so assiduously for the froth to rise. Tamara made coffee in the same way as her mother, on a little heap of white ash in the middle of the glowing charcoal, so that it brewed as slowly as possible, and sometimes she felt as if she were possessed by her mother’s spirit, cut off as she was, so far from Telmessos and those she loved.

Rustem Bey, outside the women’s quarters, looking down at those
shoes, with his hand on the latch, knew very well who it was that Tamara loved. He knew that ever since her childhood she had adored her cousin Selim. The family had been quite open about it, so that he would not be deceived, but they had assured him that Tamara would grow out of it, that they had persuaded her as to the unsuitability of the match, that she was dutiful and obedient and would marry the husband chosen for her in accordance with the wisdom of her elders.

Under ordinary circumstances the family would have been happy to marry Tamara to the cousin of her choice, but Selim was a human powder keg, so unreliable and ungovernable that for shame his own parents would not have consented to his marriage to anyone they respected. Tamara believed that if her mother had been alive, she might have swayed things in Selim’s favour, but in that she was almost certainly mistaken. Selim was charming and handsome, but he was, even from infancy, unmistakably marked out for a bad end.

He had always been small, a little graceless in his movements, but quick and nervy. He had a dazzling smile that conveyed to a startling degree the dangerousness of his disposition, and those who saw it for the first time were always taken aback. One felt like the traveller who is approached by a dog that is wagging its tail, but which is clearly tensed for attack. When he was small, his own mother sometimes neglected to cut his hair because she was afraid that he might snatch the scissors from her, and indeed there had been occasions when his unprompted rages grew into such violent paroxysms that even his own father had felt a well-founded fear as he picked the flailing child up around the waist and carried him outdoors to be dumped unceremoniously into the cattle trough. His father would, hating himself for the brutality and necessity of it, hold him under the slimy water by the neck until imminent choking restored Selim to sanity.

The imam in Telmessos recommended attendance at the mektep in order to learn to recite some verses of the Koran, because the word of God can have a remarkably civilising effect, but Selim, who learned the mellifluous but incomprehensible Arabic with surprising facility, remained incorrigible. The Greek doctors in the city told Selim’s father forthrightly that there was nothing one could do about a savage child if beating and confinement had failed. “He will probably grow out of it,” they said, “children often do.”

So, in fact, it almost turned out, except that Selim transformed himself slowly from a chaotic and nerve-wracking child into a young adult of fatal charm and absolute lack of principle. She had always worshipped the wayward
little boy, but now it was for his youthful charm that Tamara fell, and Selim had certainly been astute enough to notice her infatuation. He had only to catch her gazing at him adoringly at the Bayram feast, and within a day he was whispering to her through the shutters at night. A sound beating from Tamara’s father with the flat of a sword was Selim’s last memory of Telmessos, but as he trudged away into near exile, disowned by his own family, his thoughts were concerned not with the dishonour and humiliation of having been caught out in evildoing, but instead with mulling over the sharp lesson he had just learned, namely that one should be sure of whispering through the correct window during an attempted seduction.

Tamara was devastated by Selim’s dismissal, and he too felt a certain stabbing pain in the heart when he contemplated his memories of her lovely face. Her family decided to arrest her obsession and her sadness in mid-flow by finding her a suitable husband whose steadiness was beyond question. Having nothing but her happiness and prosperity in mind, they were delighted when Rustem Bey confessed his considerable interest. Rustem was the great-grandson of a tax farmer, and the wealth and land accrued by that individual had miraculously passed down intact to his descendants. The great-grandfather, like all tax farmers, had been an unsavoury, corrupt and harsh individual, but by Rustem’s time the old system had been long abolished, and Rustem Bey himself was nothing if not an upright and respectable man who cared better for his tenants and his estates than was commonly expected.

Tamara knew that Rustem Bey was a better prospect than anyone had a right to hope for, and she married him out of fatalism and common sense. After their wedding night, however, Rustem Bey knew with angry resignation that much as he might invade her body, he would never touch her heart. Thus it was that he reaped nothing but heartache from his assault on happiness, and he was lonelier than he had been before, living with this lovely girl whose shoes, or those of another, were always outside the haremlik door.

Her cousin Selim was not greatly discouraged by his disgrace, and in a short while he had set himself up as a travelling mountebank, deriving a kind of exhilarated malicious pleasure from pissing into small bottles and adding sugar and a few sprigs of wild mint. These bottles he flourished in market places from Yediburun to Yaniklar; “Selim’s elixir, Selim’s elixir, the water of life itself! Guaranteed against the colic and the gleet! Efficacious against the barren womb and the bad-air fever! No, I’m not saying that it restores youth, but for all I know it probably does that too! Compounded
by the renowned apothecary, Gevork the Armenian of Ararat, tested and approved by Athanasios the Greek of Athens, by appointment to the Sultan Padishah himself! You, efendi, yes, you! I can see you’re a little pale! Yes, you are! Isn’t he, my friends? Try some, it’ll do you good! Who’s got a wife who’s always moaning on her pallet at hoeing time? You, efendi? Give her some of this and she’ll be bounding out there doing two fields a day!”