Birds Without Wings (47 page)

Rustem Bey assessed their degree of stupidity as quite high, and he told them, “You can’t have these women. They are already taken.”

“Taken, efendi?” said one of the men.

“Yes. It was all arranged, and they have been removed by mistake. As they are mine, I have come to take them back.” He looked at the girls and silently begged them to say nothing.

The troopers exchanged glances, unsure what to make of this.

“One of them is to be my wife, and the other two have been betrothed to my brothers,” said Rustem Bey firmly.

“Three brothers with infidel wives?” said another of the troopers. “All sisters?”

“They will become Muslim when they marry,” asserted Rustem Bey.

“This one is only about ten,” said the first man, indicating Sossy. “How can she be married?”

“If she is old enough to rape, she is old enough to marry,” replied Rustem Bey. “You were about to rape my betrothed wife and the betrothed wives of my brothers.” He raised his pistol a little and said, “You must know the penalty for rape. And I am well acquainted with the governor. You should be grateful that I have saved you from this crime and the punishment that would have followed from it.”

The troopers calculated that Rustem Bey very probably did know the governor, and very probably could have them stoned to death. Besides, their sadistic sexual ardour had cooled completely thanks to the appearance of the aga and the ensuing confrontation. Rustem Bey looked at their faces, realised that he had won, and said imperiously, “Go back to your comrades.” He told the girls, “Stay here until I come back.”

He rode back to the column, accompanied by the perplexed and baulked troopers, and looked for Levon’s face in the crowd, beckoning to him to come over. He leaned down from his horse and said softly, “I have saved your daughters. But I can’t save you all.”

“Keep them safe, Rustem Beyefendi,” begged Levon tearfully, taking his hand and kissing it.

“I promise you by my honour,” said Rustem Bey.

The aga trudged into town that evening, exhausted and dusty, still shaking a little, and still disbelievingly impressed by his own bluster. He was also still upset by having found on the road the corpses of the old folk who had been battered to death, and whom he had known since boyhood. The three miserable young girls sat in a row astride his equally exhausted horse, as they had rapidly become unable to walk. The girls he consigned to the haremlik, and the horse he tended to himself, since the remains of all of his grooms had long since begun to dissolve beneath the dank earth of the Russian front.

After she had nobly forced herself to overcome her initial jealousy and
her suspicions of Rustem Bey’s motives, Leyla Hanim washed the young sisters and gave them perfume and new clothes. She persuaded them to eat a little food, and played the oud, sitting with them, and singing sad half-remembered Greek lullabies whilst they shook with fright and clung to each other late into the night.

CHAPTER 54

Olives

Nermin began to wonder if now it was more probable that her sons would never return. Over the next few days the feeling of unease grew so great that finally she decided to go and see her friend.

She found Polyxeni outside the back of her house, breaking up twigs for use in her brazier. Nermin felt ashamed to be asking for something directly, and Polyxeni perceived her confusion. Nermin was fiddling with a pot that she held in her hands, rotating it, and putting her fingers inside it, not knowing where to look with her eyes. Polyxeni knew straight away what Nermin wanted, because of the pot, but she teased her friend a little anyway. She said, “You know you can say what you want! Come on, what is it?”

“Oh, Polyxeni,” exclaimed Nermin at last, “Polyxeni, I’ve finished the last of the lucky olives you gave me, and I ate one every day, as you said, and everything felt good, but now I’ve eaten the last one, and I worry that now my luck will run out, and my sons won’t return. I am sorry to ask, normally I would never ask, but do you have any left? Without them I don’t feel lucky any more. And I brought Iskander’s pot back, just as you asked.”

Polyxeni laughed. “Is that all?” She took the pot and went inside and filled it. When she came back out she gave the pot to Nermin, and said, “I haven’t heard from Mehmetçik since they took all the Christian boys for the labour battalions.”

Nermin looked at her tearfully. “Will you have enough lucky olives for both of us?”

“Pray for a good harvest,” said Polyxeni.

The two women embraced before Nermin left. On the way home she ate one lucky olive for each day that she had missed.

CHAPTER 55

Mustafa Kemal (12)

Enver Pasha, young, respectable, handsome, dashing, nephew-in-law to the Sultan, sets off on an egregiously Napoleonic misadventure. Mustafa Kemal has already turned down the command of one of Enver’s madder schemes, to send three regiments through Persia to India, in order to raise a rebellion among the Muslims there. Enver has sent someone to Afghanistan as well, who is quite nonplussed about how to raise the people in revolt, and eventually returns home, having distributed much gold to Afghan warlords who then mysteriously disappear.

Now Enver wishes to attack Russia. He has long dreamed of expanding the empire to the east, a dream that he will never relinquish, and which will be the main reason for the loss of the war, and he also wants an immediate offensive in the south.

General Liman von Sanders tells him that the eastern campaign is a very bad idea, that the armed forces need a long period of training, reequipping and consolidation, but Enver puts himself in command of the expedition, and blithely departs across the Caucasus Mountains in the direction of Russia. The Allahuekber range is three thousand metres high, the temperature is -26°, the snow is in places six metres deep, and it snows all the time. Most of the soldiers freeze to death, the remnant is defeated by the Russians at Sarikamiş, and the 10,000 who manage to return are all but wiped out by typhus. It is a disaster of almost unimaginable proportions.

In the south, an army of 18,000 is led across Sinai, and the Suez Canal is assaulted. Six hundred manage to get across it, but they are repelled by the British. The Muslims of Egypt do not rebel against their colonial masters, and the master plan necessarily fails. The army returns to Palestine, its roll-call now numbering three thousand fewer. The British vigorously set about reinforcing the defences along the Suez Canal, and put it permanently beyond attack.

When Mustafa Kemal sees Enver in Istanbul, he finds him pale and shaken. Enver is vague about Kemal’s appointment, and advises him to enquire at the offices of the general staff, who, embarrassingly, do not seem to have heard either of Mustafa Kemal or of the 19th Division to whose command he has been appointed. Finally the confusion is sorted out, and he departs for Maydos, on the Gallipoli peninsula. Maydos is a charming little harbour town, and there are many wealthy Greeks there who live in big and airy houses. There are also a great many craftsmen jewellers. After the war, after the Greeks have gone, the little town will be renamed Eceabat. It will sport several statues of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and the optimistic locals will never cease their sanguine excavations in search of the jewels and money that the Greeks are supposed to have cached in gardens, walls and cellars.

Now, however, Mustafa Kemal has with him the 57th Regiment, which is undermanned, ill-trained and ill-equipped. His troops will have to endure heavy bombardment, and resist many incursions by small Allied landing parties who are intent upon destroying the defences. The 72nd and 77th Regiments arrive, but they are not the units that Mustafa Kemal expected. They are mainly Arabs, many are opposed to the war, and they have not been trained. Mustafa Kemal stiffly requests proper Turkish troops, and is refused.

Karatavuk arrives in Maydos; he has been hurriedly initiated into the military arts, and has proved a naturally good shot. He is incandescent with enthusiasm for the jihad, and he is looking forward to meeting the Prophet in his own garden in paradise. Furthermore, he is thrilled by the natural beauty of the Gallipoli peninsula, and he writes to his mother in a strange ecstasy:

My dear Mother,

You are proud to have given birth to two soldiers. It was a delight to my heart to receive the letter that you caused to be written to me with a neighbour’s pen. It was so full of advice. When it was given to me I was sitting under a pear tree nearby a stream in the middle of Divrin Plain, so beautiful and green. My soul was enchanted already by the sweetness of the land …

CHAPTER 56

The Letter from Karatavuk

Iskander kicked at his wheel to set it spinning, gave it a few surplus kicks as if to inform it of his intention to get a decent amount of work done, wet his hands in the bowl that he kept on a stool at his side, and picked up a large ball of clay. He frequently did not know what he was going to make until he had started to make it. This was a kind of courtesy to his material, which seemed often to have preconceived ideas about what it wanted to become. Sometimes it would wobble about, or collapse, if he tried to make a bowl out of clay that wanted to be a pot, or vice versa, and it was best just to mould it in the fingers for a short while, get the feel of it and then watch it grow into something. “Take your time,” he would say to himself, “if the cat’s in a hurry, she has peculiar kittens.”

Iskander made pots these days partly to take the world off his mind. His sons had gone to war, his wife and daughters were having to do the men’s work in the fields as well as their own, and they kept falling ill, which was one of the natural hazards of being female, it seemed. It was entirely possible that one of these days he too would have to go to fight, if the authorities remembered his existence, since one was in the reserve for half a lifetime after one’s national service. He remembered his five years in the army with a shudder, even though he had made unforgettable friends, and had learned that the most terrible things can be endured. It was true that this war was a jihad, and therefore he would be bound to die gladly for the love of God, but all the same it was puzzling to the faith when one learned that the Arabs had sided with the British, as had the Muslims from the other side of Persia. It seemed that only Turks took the jihad seriously. “I am a Turk,” he thought, rolling the idea around his mind, remembering the days when the word “Turk” implied something almost shameful, a barbarian out of the East. Nowadays, instead of saying, “We are Osmanlis,” or “We are Ottomans,” people were saying, “Yes, we are
Turks.” How strange that the world should change because of words, and words change because of the world. “Iskander the Turk,” he said to himself, internally scrutinising the strange and novel sensation of possessing a deeper identity, of being something beyond himself. Some people said that the word “Turk” meant “strength.” He squeezed the clay with extra force, and it sprouted upward between his fingers. “Ah, a candlestick,” said Iskander.

“Salaam aleikum,” said a voice very nearby, and Iskander, lost so deeply in his thoughts, started with almost comic surprise. He looked up, placing a hand over his heart to still the shock, and the stranger bowed his head a little, both as greeting and apology. Iskander beheld a round, friendly and deeply sunburned face capped by a battered and dusty fez, and realised from the man’s clothes that he had once been wealthy, but had fallen on harder times. His accent was that of a man from further south, perhaps from Kibris. “Forgive me,” he said, “but are you Iskander the Potter?” The man nodded towards the wheel, adding, “I have reason to suspect that you might be. I am sorry to disturb you at your work. He who works hard is the equal of he who fights in the holy war, so they say.”