Birds Without Wings (3 page)

It was a night when there seemed to be commotion even in corners where nothing was amiss. I felt malice in the air, as if there was a spirit, risen from Gehenna, that was also walking in the town. In this place there are many who die without fulfilling their obligations; they are like shadows who drift ineffectually.

I was unable to resist walking towards the sounds of the parturition, and I passed the window of the Christian schoolmaster, Leonidas Efendi, who was writing furiously by the stinking light of a wick floating in a bowl of olive oil. This teacher was a bad character, stirring up trouble. In those days all of us spoke Turkish, but those who could write did so in the Greek script. This Leonidas, however, was one of the ones who was fussing and campaigning, saying that the Christians should speak Greek and not Turkish. He forced the children to learn the Greek tongue that to them was like chewing stones, and he stirred up resentment in them with stories about how we Osmanlis had taken the land from the Greeks, and that the land was rightly theirs. I have heard it said that this place belonged once to a people called Lycians, and that the Greeks took it from them, so why did this teacher not tell the children that all land is originally stolen? Why did he not say “Let us find the Lycians, and give it back”? That schoolmaster was like too many in that time, the kind who toss water into a pan of smoking fat, so that others, as well as themselves, are burned. I am reminded of the tale of Nasreddin Hodja, who owned a buffalo with enormous horns. He had always wanted to sit between those horns, thinking that it would be like a throne, but always he had refrained. Then one day, when the beast was resting in the grass, he could resist the temptation no more, and he persuaded his wife to help him mount the horns. The buffalo stood up and tossed him into the air, and he came down hard, landing on his unfortunate wife, so that both of them were hurt. Nasreddin said to her, “Sometimes, wife, we must both suffer for my desires.”

Besides being a troublemaker, that schoolmaster was scrawny, he came from Smyrna and so was not one of us, he wore spectacles, he put on airs and he never took a wife.

But I should return to the matter of Philothei. It so happened that I was outside her parents’ house with many others of the curious when the
screaming stopped and the delivery was completed. We heard the triumph and relief in the voice of Mihrimah Efendim as she cut the umbilical cord and cried out deeply, “God is great, God is great, God is great.” It was our custom to name every female child firstly with the original name of the first woman who was with Adam in Paradise, and so when she called out that she named the child “Havva” we all knew that the baby was a girl, “an extra hand at the hoeing” as some people said.

The moment after Mihrimah Efendim cried out, I swear that the whole night was changed. The dogs ceased to howl, the moon broke out from behind the clouds, there was a scent of saffron and olibanum in the air, and a bulbul began to sing in the plane tree down in the centre of the meydan, where the old men sit in the day. I was contented that this new life had begun so well, but at the same time I confess that I could not help reflecting that everything that is born, is born to die. I was standing there wondering how long this person would live, and how it would die, when the father, whose name was Charitos, came out of the house to breathe the air of relief. I approached him and tapped him on the shoulder, giving him a cigarette that I had in truth just rolled in order to smoke it myself. “Salaam aleikum,” I said, handing him my tinderbox.

“And upon you be peace,” he replied, and then added, almost as if he were worried by it, “It’s the prettiest child I’ve ever seen.”

“That’ll be trouble,” I said.

“The women are hanging Bibles and Korans and blue beads and cloves of garlic all over the place,” said Charitos with a wry smile, “but I expect it’ll be trouble nonetheless. Nazar deymesin.”

“God preserve us from the evil eye,” I said.

Later, after the muezzin had intoned the azan at daybreak, and everyone had done their prayers, a rumour began to spread out from her parents’ house, like the ripple of a stone cast into a pond, and soon there was another crowd of the curious who had gathered there to see her, to bring gifts and wish the mother a happy freedom, but also with the intention of marvelling at the reported prettiness of the child. It was one of those towns where everybody is into everyone else’s business, with the women swapping gossip at the wells and in the kitchens of each other’s houses, and the men doing the same thing in the coffeehouses.

Philothei’s family was a Christian one, but at that time we were very much mixed up and, apart from the rantings of a few hotheads whose bellies were filled with raki and the Devil, we lived together in sufficient harmony. Therefore it was not altogether to be wondered at that people of all
sorts called at the door of that house bringing small presents of coffee, lokum, allspice and tobacco, in the hope of catching a glimpse of this child who was becoming a legend before she had even uncrossed her eyes.

It had not been a particularly easy birth, as we had all known on account of the mother’s wails, but even so a rich bed had already been set up in the selamlik, and the mother, Polyxeni, was propped up against cushions, smiling as she held her little finger in the baby’s mouth, in order to console it for the temporary want of a breast.

I had dressed in my best clothes, I brought a gold coin, and I brought some tea flavoured with bergamot that my wife had grated herself. I duly inspected the child, drank my sherbet, and exchanged further pleasantries with Charitos, the father of the child, who was by now thoroughly tired after such a vile night of anxiety. “God bless the mother’s milk,” I said, wondering all over again how a woman can go through such hell, and then be pleased about it afterwards.

“We are going to call the child ‘Philothei,’ ” said Charitos.

“Meaning?”

“It is Greek,” replied Charitos, “and I believe that it means ‘Beloved by God’ or ‘Lover of God’ or something like that. Anyway, it is a very pretty name, and I am using it to remember my own mother, who also bore it.”

“You will have to ask Leonidas Efendi, the teacher who is such a keen speaker of Greek,” I said. “He will tell you what the name means.”

“No, I will ask the priest,” declared Charitos, who, like me, had no time for stoop-shouldered opinionated bookworms who did not even know how to harvest an apple. Charitos turned his weary eyes on me, and asked, very seriously, “Iskander Efendi, will you do me a favour? Will you take a rag and tie it on the red pine for me?”

“You want me to make a wish for you?”

“Yes. This child of mine …” and he nodded towards the baby, “you said a bad thing when you said that such a pretty child will be trouble. I hope that Satan did not hear you and get any ideas, although, to tell the truth, I had misgivings of my own. Please set my mind at rest; go and tie a rag on the red pine, and wish my child an easy life.”

“Charitos Efendi, of course I will. I will tie two rags, and wish the same wish twice. But first I must see the child a little better.”

Polyxeni moved aside her headscarf, revealing the infant Philothei, and I said, “Indeed, very beautiful.”

I have to say, though, that in my opinion this business about babies being ugly or pretty, or just like their father or their aunt, is a very tiresome
fabrication of the deluded. All babies look the same, and to me this particular one appeared to be a very babylike baby. I have had children of my own, and I cannot remember what any of them looked like when they first emerged into the light, except that they all looked like babies, and like nothing else and nobody else at all.

It was at this moment, when I was trying to be sincere about the beauty of this baby who looked exactly like a baby, that the imam entered the house.

Our imam at that time was in the very glory of his life. He was about forty-five years old, very quick and energetic, his beard was long, grizzled and finely combed, and he combined the sharp black eyes of a bird with the hooked nose of an Arab. He still had most of his teeth, and his lips were thin, the lower one protruding further than the upper. He had made the haj twice, and was therefore a hodja twice over, and he had been a softa in the school at Stamboul, where he had qualified in his knowledge of the Sunna tradition. He was able to recite the entire Koran, and was therefore not only a hodja but a hafiz. Furthermore, as if all this were not enough, he had attained the initiation of no less than four Sufi brotherhoods, so that he was one who was amply enabled to return to God and be united with Him. All in all he was a mightily learned man, who knew more Arabic and Persian words than all the Arabs and the Persians put together. Sometimes one was resigned to understanding little of what he said, and sometimes he could speak for five minutes, filling his sentences with “nonethelesses,” “howevers,” “notwithstandings” and “on the other hands,” and you would not know what he was aiming at until he clinched the speech with the final word. Such is the advantage of education.

Why the imam had chosen merely to be an imam when he could have been a qadi in the courts, or a mullah, or an âlim, none of us ever knew. It was suspected that he might have picked up ideas that did not suit the hard old men of the schools, but in my opinion he chose to be simply the leader of our prayers because he wanted to spend the most part of his time with his hands in the earth. He was an ardent grower of vegetables.

His name was Abdulhamid Hodja, and the two great joys of his life were his wife and his horse, although it would be hard to say which he esteemed the more. With regard to his wife, he liked to quote the story of Nasreddin Hodja, who was asked when the end of the world would be, and replied, “The world will end twice; once when my wife dies, and once when I die myself.” I cannot say that I knew his wife, since she came from another place. In those days it was forbidden by custom even to enquire
after the health of another man’s wife, or that of his female relatives, and consequently one knew nothing about them unless one was told. Everything has changed now, and not all of it for the better. Nowadays, now that no woman wears the çarşaf over her face, it is impossible for a man with an ugly wife to boast of her beauty in the coffeehouses. Of course, the Christian women always had their faces unconcealed, and so their husbands never did have the opportunity to bluster, and many a Christian girl never became a bride.

The imam’s horse, however, was a wondrously lovely, silvery creature that he named “Nilufer,” and upon which he lavished great devotion. He gave it a small breastplate in brass, which he polished, and which was engraved with verses from the Koran. He braided the filly’s mane, tying it with green ribbons upon the ends of which were tiny brass bells, and he had a high, rich saddle that he had bought from some Yörük nomads who were on a journey through the Bey Mountains. He washed and brushed the animal, anointed it with perfumes to repel the attentions of insects, and was often to be seen embracing it, whispering endearments to it with his arm about its neck and one hand stroking the velvet of its nose. The consequence was that the horse behaved with all the capriciousness and lack of humility of a Circassian mistress, but it always gave a lift to the heart to see him cantering upon it, with his white turban wrapped around his fez, and his green cloak billowing in his wake. He was a horseman worthy of our ancestors who came out of the East. They say that a man is most a man when he is mounted either upon his wife or his horse.

As I was saying, the imam appeared suddenly at the door, left his shoes with everyone else’s, and entered the room in his habitually vigorous and lordly fashion. “Salaam aleikum,” he said to all of us, and we chorused back “Aleikum salaam” without pausing to think about it.

Naturally, he had come for the same reason as the rest of us, which was because he was bringing a gift, and was curious to see the beautiful child. He bent down and took the infant, holding it high in the air, and scrutinising its features as if he were divining something from them. At last he sighed happily, and recited the first lines of the Koran, which I recognised because I had once learned them myself, despite my ignorance of the Arab tongue. Then he put Philothei down, and bent over, and raised her hand to his lips, and kissed it. Later, her mother found a small crimson blemish on the child’s right hand, which she believed to be the exact place where the imam had placed his lips. Even the Christians, you see, believed that the imam was a saint. Certainly he had the forbearance of one, since he never
took action against those vulgar and thoughtless Christians who had neither sense nor courtesy, who would throw lemon peel at him as a gesture of contempt, and hide themselves before he could recognise them. He could have caused them to be hanged, but instead he punished them by ignoring them. In his wisdom he had recognised that the worst punishment is to be beneath noticeability.

Before he left Charitos’s house, he said, “I wish you happiness with this child,” and then he went out, mounted his silvery horse, and rode away with the bright ribbons fluttering from the saddle and the brass bells tinkling at the reins.

“I wonder what he saw,” said Charitos, and I shrugged. I thought perhaps that he had had the same reaction as myself, namely that every birth entails a death.

The room was now very crowded, and people were beginning to blow thick clouds of smoke from their narghiles, and make a terrible racket in order to keep the evil spirits away. I have always hated this din and smoke, and so I made my excuses to Charitos, having to shout into his ear: “I have work to do, a lot of clay to mix, I had better go. I will make you a water jug as a gift.” And then I remembered. “But first I will tie two rags to the red pine.”

By now the town had burst into life, and I had to make my way uphill through those cobbled ways that were barely wide enough for a donkey. It was as if the place were conceived before the invention of carts. Who knows when that was? At any rate, I had to jostle my way past women carrying water in jars upon their heads, past dogs insolently asleep amid all the hubbub, past pedlars, tradesmen, mendicants and craftsmen, and over the legs of the beggars whose sole function in this life was to shine the souls of those of us who kept them alive by giving them the alms that would perpetuate their idleness. They kept their eyes lowered as they outstretched their palms, since it is better for all of us if such gifts are anonymous. I went to my pottery, and took one of the rags that I had been using to wash off my wheel at the end of each working day.