Birds Without Wings (17 page)

The Christian men and women drifted slowly away, ashamed of themselves,
but muttering to each other along the lines of “Who does that imam think he is?” and back in the meydan Abdulhamid Hodja looked down upon the crowd and asked, “Where are the four witnesses? Come on, I ask you, where are the four witnesses who saw this woman naked and fornicating?”

No one stepped forward except Rustem Bey, who was shaking, and attempting not to look down upon the crumpled form of Tamara where she lay beneath the horse. “Her lover came every day, veiled as a woman, until finally I unmasked him.”

“Did you see them fornicating?”

“No, but …”

“Rustem Bey, a man who accuses another of adultery without being a witness of the act, and without four witnesses altogether, is sentenced to scourging with eight stripes. That is the law of God in the Holy Koran. You are fortunate that this is not a court of law and that I am not a judge.”

“I am Rustem Bey. No one scourges me.”

Abdulhamid looked down upon him sympathetically and said merely, “Rustem Efendi, I have known you for a long time.”

The aga was to puzzle over this cryptic remark for many years, but at this moment all he could think to say was “She admitted her guilt in front of all these people.”

“She did, she did,” murmured the crowd, whose members were by now shifting from foot to foot, anxious to escape the wrath of their prayer leader, their access of viciousness having subsided altogether.

“How many times did she admit it?”

“We heard her. She admitted it,” said Ali the Snowbringer, and others muttered in confirmation of the fact.

“How many times?” Abdulhamid looked around at the silent and embarrassed townsfolk and nodded his head sagely. “I thought so. It was only once. Sometimes, because of their sorrows, people wish to die, and they admit things rashly. If she did not admit it four times then you have acted unlawfully and there is a grievous penalty for every one of you upon the Day of Judgement.”

Abdulhamid tapped Nilufer gently upon her neck, and she moved aside, exposing Tamara once more. The imam pointed down at her: “See what you have done in your wickedness and ignorance? If she is alive, bring her to my wife, who will take care of her. If she is dead, bring her all the same, and we will bury her.” He turned to the aga: “Rustem Bey, you have a wound in your arm. You ought to see to it.” With this he turned the head
of the horse and clattered away along the stones, his green cloak flapping out behind him and Nilufer’s bells tinkling. Her brass breastplate glinted in the declining sunlight, her blue beads rattled together, and the green ribbons fluttered in her mane, a sight whose prettiness was incongruous to such a grim occasion. The muezzins began to climb the stairs of the minarets, and a few cowed people knelt in the dust to tend to the fallen Tamara.

Rustem Bey walked home feeling as if it had been he who had been stoned. “Nothing will ever be the same,” he repeated to himself, unable to get the words out of his mind. Outside the haremlik he overturned the corpse of Selim with his toe, and saw again how handsome and wild that young face was, even in death, even with its vacant, half-closed eyes and its lips frozen in mid-breath. He called one of the servants and gave him a heavy handful of coins, saying, “Go and give these to the gendarmes, and keep only one of them for yourself. Tell them that there is the corpse of a stranger at my house, and I wish them to come and take it away.”

Rustem Bey put his hand on the latch and looked down at the battered sandals that would never again prevent him from entering. He picked them up, noted the shiny imprint of the feet that had worn them, and then put them down. He opened the door and entered.

Inside it was dark, but the atmosphere was warm and heavy and sweet with the intimate rituals, aromas and mysteries of disconsolate femininity. He stood for a moment and breathed it in, and then sat down upon the divan where Tamara had sat, and took up her embroidery. He looked at the blue cloth stitched with yellow tulips and red vine leaves. “Now it will never be finished,” he thought, and he pressed it to his face and inhaled. It smelled of vanilla, rosewater, coffee and musk. It smelled of Tamara, his proud, young and self-destroying wife. He looked for the first time at the sinister gash in his forearm, and saw that it was still bleeding. He realised that it was both stinging and aching. He wrapped it tightly in the cloth. The blue grew darker, and the yellow tulips briefly glowed bright with scarlet and then turned dull. He leaned forward, placed his elbows on his knees, and began to choke with sorrow as the muezzins in the minarets sang out in harmony with each other that God is great and there is no God but God.

“Nothing will ever be the same,” thought Rustem Bey. After an hour of heartsick solitude, he went outside and picked up the telltale shoes, with the intention of putting them on the brazier and destroying them; but such small revenges seemed suddenly fatuous. It was black and
chilly now, and Rustem Bey took a lamp and made his way up the alleyways until he reached the edge of town and the thorny scrubland where the Lycian tombs stood out as greater darknesses in the darkness of the stones.

He found the Dog in one of the tombs, and, shivering, he gave him the shoes.

CHAPTER 20

Mustafa Kemal (5)

Far from Eskibahçe, past Antalya, over the Mediterranean Sea, across the island of Cyprus (where no one may go without falling in love), beyond Beirut, Mustafa Kemal, trained as an infantry officer, finds himself in 1905, with characteristic military logic, posted to the 30th Cavalry Regiment.

He is depressed and appalled by Damascus; it is a place without vivacity or pleasure, a place that endures the interminable passage from birth to death behind closed doors and shutters. It is utterly moribund, marooned, medieval, stunted and paralysed by tradition, neurotic respectability and absolutist religion. The locals are Arabs, with whom he has nothing in common and no friendships to make. They are nonetheless loyal Ottoman citizens as the British have not yet seized the chance to stir up Arab nationalism. Mustafa Kemal dresses up in civilian clothes so that he can drink in a café with Italian railway workers and listen to the enchanting and enspiriting sound of mandolins. He befriends an exiled Turkish shopkeeper called Haji Mustafa who, like Mustafa Kemal, is a Francophile who has never been to France and is steeped in French philosophy. He has been expelled from the Military Medical School for subversive activities.

At the house of Haji Mustafa a secret society is formed. It is called “Vatan,” and it is just like a hundred other secret societies that will soon be springing up all over the empire, wherever there are educated young officers who wish to reshape their country. Romantic and passionate speeches are made. Mustafa Kemal drily reminds his co-conspirators that the object is not to die for the revolution, but to live for it.

Mustafa Kemal is disgusted by the behaviour of the 5th Army of which he is a part. It is there to police an accord with the ever-troublesome Druzes, who have agreed to pay taxes in return for exemption from military service. The older officers try to prevent the younger officers from going out on field duty, and Mustafa Kemal is infuriated when he is refused
permission to go out with his men. They tell him that he is in training, that he is needed back at base.

He disobeys orders and sets off to find his unit, buttonholing the officer who has been sent in his place. It turns out that in fact these expeditions are for the purposes of extortion, and the villagers are being terrorised and pillaged under the pretence of tax collection. The soldiers are paid a pittance, usually in arrears, and the tribesmen themselves are little better than bandits. The former strive to collect more tax than is due, and the latter strive not to pay any tax at all.

Mustafa Kemal develops his perverse gift for obstreperous heroism. He accepts the hostility of his senior officers, and refuses to countenance the looting. He prevents an uprising in a Circassian village because he strikes the villagers as trustworthy. One village kidnaps a major, and Mustafa Kemal turns up and harangues them until they release him. He protests about the false or exaggerated reports of victories and triumphs that are being sent back to Istanbul, saying, “I’ll have no part in a fraud.” When a friend is tempted to take his share of the looting, Mustafa asks him coldly, “Do you want to be a man of today or of tomorrow?”

Mustafa Kemal, posted now to a marksmen’s battalion in Jaffa, is determined to start the revolution, and with the connivance of Ahmet Bey, the commandant at Jaffa, absconds to Salonika via Egypt and Piraeus, finally arriving on a Greek ship. He has a forged pass which was supposed to be for Smyrna, and a friend smuggles him through the customs. His mother is appalled, fearing the wrath of the Sultan, and Mustafa himself is mildly disappointed to find that the artillery general with whom he had been hoping to conspire is a conspirator of the purely theoretical variety.

It occurs to Mustafa Kemal that he might be causing himself a few small problems with the military authorities by effectively having deserted, and so he puts on his uniform and goes to the military headquarters in Salonika, where he explains his predicament to an old friend from school, who is now a colonel. They concoct an application for sick leave, pretending that Mustafa is on the general staff rather than serving in Damascus. The ruse works admirably, and in the following four months in Salonika, Mustafa organises a Macedonian branch of his secret society, which is now called “Fatherland and Freedom.” The conspirators are preoccupied by the obvious decline of the empire, and its intransigent political corruption and inefficiency. They feel themselves humiliated and dishonoured by the way that it is being disrupted, hamstrung and gulled by the Great Powers. The men are constitutionalists, and include Mustafa’s old poetic friend
Örner Naci. Mustafa Kemal is just beginning to conceive the notion of a Turkish state within secure borders, with the accretions of empire permanently removed. Amid all the cries of “Greece for the Greeks (Jews and Turks out)” and “Bulgaria for the Bulgarians (Jews and Turks out)” it is hardly surprising that sooner or later someone will begin to say “Turkey for the Turks.” One day Mustafa Kemal will say, “Happy is the man who calls himself a Turk,” and this will be carved into hillsides all over Anatolia. It will become the truth because it was Mustafa Kemal Atatürk who said it.

He and the plotters meet at the house of an officer, newly wed, who is notorious for wearing oriental pyjamas and playing the flute. They swear allegiance to the ideals of the society upon a revolver, which they kiss reverently. Mustafa says, “This revolver is now sacred. Keep it carefully, and one day you will pass it on to me.”

The authorities twig at last that Mustafa Kemal is in the wrong place, and they send orders for him to be arrested. Mustafa hears about it just in time, and hurries back to Jaffa, where Ahmet Bey hastens him to Beersheba, where the army is facing the British in an imperial squabble about the port of Aqaba. The commandant reports to Istanbul, implying that Kemal has been in Beersheba for months, and that the Mustafa in Salonika must therefore be a different one. The papers are shuffled about in Istanbul, heads are scratched. The documents are left in drawers and under piles, misclassified, trodden on, torn at the corners, and finally forgotten. Mustafa is promoted to adjutant major and keeps his nose temporarily clean. At last, to his joy, he is posted back to Macedonia, where he is supposed to be serving with the 3rd Army, but instead finds himself inexplicably with the general staff.

CHAPTER 21

I Am Philothei (4)

Ibrahim comes creeping up and finds me every time I go out on an errand, and I say, “What if we get caught?” and he says, “Who cares? We’re getting married one day anyway,” and I say, “But it’s not decent!” and he just shrugs, and I am really scared about getting caught, but so far it’s been all right, and it’s true that our fathers have come to an agreement, and my mother is already thinking about things for the dowry box and we’re going to embroider some blankets. He says, “Now that you’re twelve, you’re old enough to marry,” and I say, “But you’re not,” and he says nothing, but just takes my hand and looks at me hard in the eyes, and I can see that his eyes are dark and glowing, and it makes my stomach buzz, and then he very carefully places the back of my hand first against his chest, then against his forehead, then against his lips, and finally, before he turns and leaves, back against his heart.