Birds Without Wings (20 page)

Polyxeni leaned forward and kissed the icon again, and went back out into the sunshine. She blinked, and Ayse asked, “Do you think she heard you?”

A fortnight later, on a Friday, Ayse led Tamara out of Nilufer’s stable. Tamara was unsteady and faltering, as much from despair and foreboding as from the legacy of her injuries, but she knew that she had no other choice, and she permitted Ayse to lead her by the elbow.

Ayse looked neither to right nor left, she ignored the stares, the pointing fingers and the comments. As she and Tamara passed, people stopped what they were doing and watched. When she and Tamara had gone by, they followed in their footsteps, until the two women had a crowd of almost all the townsfolk walking behind them as if at a funeral. “There goes Tamara Hanim,” ran the whisper. Everybody knew it was Tamara even though she wore a heavy shawl over her head that completely shielded her face as she walked slowly at Ayse’s side, with her eyes cast down to the ground in shame. No one was untouched by the young woman’s disgrace, and a sadness settled on the town’s stones like the fine white dust in the days when the wind blew in from Arabia.

The two women and the silent crowd passed along the street where the Armenians lived, through the meydan where the old men waited under the plane trees for Grandfather Death, past the well where Rustem Bey had sat with his back turned during the stoning, past the mosque with two minarets where Abdulhamid Hodja was precentor, past the rough shelter where Iskander threw his pots, past the smallest of the Christian churches where there was an owl that perched on the beams, past the ossuary containing the wine-washed bones of the Christian dead, and beyond to where the street turned a corner sharply and ended with a final, isolated house, flat-roofed, whose façade was draped with climbing roses, and whose windows were latticed in order to conceal the dark interior.

Outside the brothel, Ayse rapped on the heavy door. The people stood silently at a respectful distance, the men observing with set lips, and the women watching with their heads turned sideways and their çarşafs drawn across their mouths as if by this gesture they could shield themselves. In the door was a tiny wrought-iron grille at head height, and suddenly it squeaked open. Drifting out of it came a heavy scent of smoke and ambergris, olibanum, oil of lemon, musk and patchouli, and a huge pair of doleful grey eyes, heavily lined with kohl, looked out. “Welcome,” said a low voice.

“I have brought Tamara Hanim,” said Ayse, full of regret, and a hennaed
finger beckoned from the grille. Tamara approached, put one hand on the door to steady herself, tried to ignore the frightening thumping of her heart, and looked beseechingly into the sympathetic grey eyes. “What do you want, sister?” asked the low voice.

“Sanctuary,” whispered Tamara.

The prostitute sighed, and said, “Sister, we’ve been expecting you.”

CHAPTER 24

I Am Philothei (5)

I went too far when I was looking for hórta, and there was almost nothing because of the time of year, and I was so busy looking that I forgot where I was and suddenly I took fright, because I heard a noise and I thought it might be Markala or some other demon because they like deserted spots, but it was only Ibrahim, and I sat down on a rock because I’d been so frightened in case it was the demon, and I had demons on my mind because it was only the day after epiphany and we’d just burned Siphotis to get rid of the evil and filth.

They tied the rope across from the door handle of my father’s house over to the door handle of Iskander’s house, and they sealed up the cat in the jug and hung it from the middle of the rope, and then they lit the fire of thorns and twigs at one end of the rope, and when the rope broke the jug fell and shattered, and the cat was freed, and that was how Siphotis was got rid of, and everyone danced and sang around the embers, and then the men went round with the coals and put some smoke in everyone’s house and in the stables, and then the men collected gifts, and Ibrahim was tagging along with the men who came to our house to put smoke in it, and somehow he managed to put his hand against my breast when no one was looking, and I practically fainted from the possible shame.

So when he came to the rocks when I was out on the day after epiphany, I turned away and wouldn’t talk. When he gave up and left, I regretted it, though, and I went to the top of a rock to watch him go, and he turned and saw me, and I was caught out and embarrassed, but he just raised his hand in that small gesture that he has, and then he went on his way.

CHAPTER 25

Tales from the Journey to Smyrna

In May the weather can be delightful, but sometimes the days are already too hot, and the roads are beginning to generate the fine white powder that clogs the traveller’s eyes and nostrils, and makes a glue of the sweat on the flanks of the horses. Dust also begins to hang over the sea, so that Rhodes becomes obscured to Carians, and those in Cilicia lose sight of Cyprus, that island where no one ventures without falling in love. At that time the spring flowers are beginning to wither, and the red-backed butcher birds have long since arrived, setting up their gibbets and larders in the trees by impaling their catch of small animals on the long spikes of thorns. The snows have undertaken the beginning of their tactical retreat to the pinnacles of the Taurus Mountains, and the few wolves that remain have returned to higher ground, along with the bandits and brigands, and the wild deer that follow the growth of fresh new grass.

In March there are still rains and cold nights, quaggy patches of red and grey mud in the roadways, and the wind known as El Hossom whipping up the equinoctial gale that blows for eight long days. In the pastures the colossal Sivas Kangal mastiffs with their iron-spiked collars do nocturnal battle with subtle lynxes and desperate wolves, and the green sandpipers have not yet returned to the marshes and woods of the north.

In April the days are bright and gentle, and the showers sweeter, so that when Rustem Bey let it be known that he was travelling with an armed retinue to the famous infidel city of Smyrna, there were many who eagerly jumped at the chance to take advantage of his protection.

In those days the provinces were full of desperadoes who were mainly deserters. The machinations of the Great Powers, and the immemorial turbulence of the Balkans, had dragged the Ottoman state from one impoverishing, bruising and demoralising war to another. Those who were conscripted found themselves serving for indefinite numbers of years
in vile and hostile places hundreds of miles from home, whilst the womenfolk broke their own health in the desperate attempt to run their farms and homes alone. They were hundreds of thousands of Penelopes waiting, sometimes forever, for the men who were blown by fate from one misfortune to another. What made it worse was that the Christians had won equal rights, and were no longer exempt from military service as they had been in the past, and so it was that the wild places of Anatolia were crawling with outlaws, most of whom had more than adequately mastered the arts of brutality, and all of whom were thieves. Harassed though these were by the gendarmerie and the occasional military expedition from Constantinople, it was still unsafe for anyone to travel the great roads alone, so that when Rustem Bey decided to go to Smyrna in the spring, there were many errands and missions that had been stored up against such an opportunity.

Rustem Bey told no one why he was going. This was not the kind of world where men unveiled their hearts to anyone, and in any case the aga had no one in whom to confide, but the truth was that Rustem Bey was looking for a woman. His brief time with Tamara had provided him with inklings of what might be between a man and a woman, and his heart, his stomach, his loins and his throat yearned for something that he could not articulate even to himself. He needed someone to meld with. He knew himself to be something like a garden where the only flowers were those of potatoes, ragweed and neglected onions, but where a true gardener would have been able to drape the trellises with vines, and coax up tulips from the earth. It would be too simple to say that Rustem Bey was looking for romantic love, because in reality he was looking for the missing part of himself, and these are not often the same quest, even though we sometimes think they are. Rustem Bey had conceived the idea that if only he could find himself a Circassian mistress, amusing in demeanour, accomplished in music, red-lipped and fair of skin, excellent and enthusiastic in the techniques of physical love, then his life would be transformed. Every night he lay sleepless, tormented by the implacable songs of the nightingales, reaching out the arms of his imagination to the Circassian odalisque whose face and arms would light up his chambers like the moon. He was going to Smyrna so that he could buy himself several clocks, some patent leather shoes, some black trousers, a Stamboul frock coat of the highest quality and a new red fez. From Smyrna he was going to continue by train to Constantinople, and he was determined that when he arrived he would not be garbed like a provincial lord, in baggy shalwar, his waistcoat and sash crammed with armament. He would arrive in the capital dressed as a
thoroughly modern gentleman, with a trimmed moustache, and he would return with a beauty worthy of his state, who would be the only woman in the vilayet always to know exactly what time it was. He had decided that if God should see fit to let him find a truly marvellous woman, he would build a new mosque at the southern edge of the town, and pay for its upkeep too.

Early that morning the meydan buzzed with activity as the many travellers arrived with their animals, provisions and bedrolls. Iskander the Potter, lean and sinewy, was to make the voyage on foot, as was Mohammed the Leech Gatherer, who had agreed with Ali the Snowbringer that the latter’s donkey should carry his harvest of leeches in return for a small share of his takings. Ali did not have to come far for this assembly, since he and his family had taken up residence in the vast hollow of a plane tree on the square, which now boasted a roofed extension and a proper door.

Levon the Sly, Armenian, apothecary, and one of the astutest merchants of the town, arrived with three camels laden with goods that he had accumulated through half a hundred small but careful deals during the winter, which he would trade in return for drugs and potions, cosmetics and aphrodisiacs.

Stamos the Birdman, his nose red and streaming as usual, carried a cage in which he held a pair of exquisitely colourful bee-eaters. They were green, russet and yellow, with long grey beaks, breasts of Aegean blue, and eye-stripes and collars of black. He reckoned that from one of the great houses that lined the harbour at Smyrna he would be able to obtain a high price for them that would make it worth his while to spend this journey scratching in the barbarous undergrowth of the verges for insects that they could batter to death before eating. Dead insects, he had discovered, were of no great interest to the birds, and it made him smile to think of the rich people’s servants having to go out looking for live ones every day as long as the birds lived.

Daskalos Leonidas was also to make the journey on foot, and was already imagining the dreadful blisters and weariness with which he would soon be afflicted. He was determined upon visiting his family, even though it was not one in which there existed much mutual affection. More importantly he was to attend a meeting of his clandestine society that devoted itself to plots of Byzantine complexity, whose ultimate aim was to restore to Greece the lands lost to the Ottomans so many centuries before. Britain no longer mourns the throne of France, Spain has no project to reclaim the Netherlands, and Portugal has no ambitions on Brazil, but there are those
who are incapable of letting the past pass on, among them the Serbs who will always be obsessed by the loss of Kosovo, and the Greeks who will always be obsessed by the fall of Byzantium. Leonidas was one of these, and he was very far from alone. He was possessed by beautiful visions of Constantinople restored to its place as capital of the Greek world, and, like all who have such beautiful visions, his were predicated on the absolute belief that his own people and his own religion and his own way of life were superior to others, and should therefore have their way. Such people, even those as insignificant as Leonidas, are the motor of history, which is finally nothing but a sorry edifice constructed from hacked flesh in the name of great ideas.