Birds Without Wings (31 page)

That evening, when they have eaten, and are reclining on opposite divans, except for Pamuk who is hiding beneath the low table, she tells Rustem Bey, “I am going to need a servant.”

“I have a great many servants,” observes the aga reasonably.

“I mean my own servant, a maid. I would like a girl who is very pretty and young. I need someone who is pretty, otherwise my eyes will be in a bad mood all the time.” She pops a piece of rose-scented lokum into her mouth, chews it, swallows, and says, “Do you remember that little girl who was by the water? Not the ugly one. The very pretty one? That’s the one I want.”

Rustem Bey looks at her, and she smiles back, her beauty glowing around her face like a nimbus. He says, “The ugly one and the pretty one are always together. I have been wondering if they are sisters.” He pauses. “We have an Armenian here. His name is Levon. He has three very pretty daughters, but they are older, so they might be more useful than the child.”
It occurs to him all over again that to have a mistress is not an inexpensive thing.

“No,” says Leyla, “I want the pretty child.”

On the far side of the town, Father Kristoforos has dozed off after his meal, and now he wakes suddenly and shakes his head. He has had another one of his disturbing dreams about witnessing the funeral of God, except that this time the angels are dumb, and the coffin is so minute that it would scarcely hold a babe.

In the aga’s konak the clocks in synchrony tick away the time.

In the half-light of the brothel Tamara weeps silently as she cradles in her arms the hundred-fathered syphilitic child to which she has just given birth. The disease has ravaged the empire ever since the introduction of compulsory military service, and the child is white-faced and distorted. Its eye sockets are empty, and it scarcely breathes. On one side of her sits a divorcee, and on the other a widow, both of them driven into the profession by poverty. The widow has been a prostitute for a long time, and she says, “Don’t worry, sister, it can’t live.”

Tamara’s face runs with fresh tears, she feels as if her heart will burst, and the divorcee puts her arm around her, and says, “Don’t worry, sister, sooner or later you stop conceiving at all.”

CHAPTER 35

I Am Philothei (7)

I have told no one about this, apart from Drosoula and Leyla Hanim.

My mother had been making reçel, and I was a little sick from eating so much of it. She used more grapes than most people, and extra sugar, and I’d put a lot of it on to bread, because that day there was new baking, and that’s why I was queasy.

I went outside to breathe away the sickness and it was getting dark, and it was just about to rain so that everyone else had gone indoors and was wondering whether or not it was dark enough to warrant lighting the lamps, and the nightingales were starting to sing, and there were only cats in the street, when suddenly Ibrahim arrived at my side, and I was very surprised, and he said, “Quick, let me kiss your hand,” and I said, “It’s got jam on it,” and so he looked swiftly to all sides, and then he took my hand and licked the jam from my fingers with his tongue, and afterwards I was trembling and I wasn’t normal for hours, and I couldn’t wash my hands because I couldn’t bear to wash away the traces of his tongue.

CHAPTER 36

A Cure for Toothache

It was after dark, and most of the town was asleep. Father Kristoforos was adrift in his dreams, in which he was conversing with the Archangel Gabriel, who was refusing to show his face. “If I show you my face, you will die,” asseverated the archangel. “The light will burn you up completely and you will arrive in paradise in flakes of ash,” whereupon Kristoforos pleaded, “Just one glimpse, just the smallest glimpse!”

“I will show you one feather of my wing,” said the archangel, and in his dreaming Kristoforos saw a vast white feather, stretching as far as all possible horizons, filling up the entire heaven, and glowing like the autumn moon.

As Father Kristoforos lay stupefied in holy wonder, the drunken Constantinos walked unsurely through the alleyways of the Armenian quarter, trying to make the most of the minimal light of the oil lamps whose residual glow seeped out of the chinks of the shutters. Some of the time he ran his hands along the walls of the houses so that he could be sure of keeping to the way, and every now and then he would come up against the slumbering form of a dog or a donkey, so that he and the animal concerned would recoil with alarm. The town’s cats yeowled their threats and love songs on walls and roofs, and from the almond trees the operatic nightingales and bulbuls projected into the night their medleys of arias and cantatas. Far off, Leyla Hanim’s clear voice could be heard, as she plucked at her oud and sang to Rustem Bey the night’s last lullaby, which was in reality addressed to the child she wished she had, and which she sang in Greek.

Constantinos was not so intoxicated as to be infirm of purpose, or incapable of finding the house for which he searched. He knew that it had a brass door knocker in the shape of a hand holding a ball, and he was therefore very carefully running his hands over each door in order to find the
knocker and see what shape it was. The style of door knocker was quite common, and so he was looking for the third one on the right-hand side of this particular alleyway.

When he found it he dropped his head forward and rested it on the door, as if reflecting on his mission, or perhaps wearily summoning up his resources. He sighed, breathed heavily once or twice, and then knocked. He heard the sound echo in the room behind, and put his ear to the wooden planks of the door in order to be able to hear the approach of a servant.

Somehow the servant approached quite noiselessly, however, and Constantinos suffered the embarrassment of having the door opened when he was still crouching with his ear to it. He almost lost his balance, and sprang upright with the exaggerated alertness of the drunk who is trying to appear otherwise.

The servant was bearing an oil lamp in one hand, and he stood there with a dim yellow glow casting his face into shadows. He held out the lamp to shed light upon the visitor’s face, and then withdrew it again. “Yes?” he said.

“I have come to see the Armenian,” said Constantinos, with some effort.

“Come back in the morning. The master has gone to bed, and the house is closed.”

“I can’t come back. Not in the light. I must see him.”

“It’s impossible.”

“Please ask him.”

The servant was impressed by the urgency of the request, which had been expressed in a tone of voice that was halfway between pleading and desperation, and he was hesitating in the doorway, when Levon himself, dressed for the night, appeared at his shoulder. “What’s going on?” he demanded. “Who is knocking so late at night?”

“It’s a townsman,” said the servant, and Constantinos stepped forward and said, “It’s me. I must speak with you.”

Levon started when he saw his erstwhile attacker, and stepped back. “I have no wish to speak to you. I must ask you to leave.”

Constantinos ignored the request, asking, “Are you all right? Are you much injured?”

“I have trouble in breathing, and a great deal of pain. I don’t know why you think you can come here like this, after what you have done. In your position one would surely be ashamed.”

Constantinos cast his eyes down and conceded, “I am ashamed.” He
paused, looked up, and said, “I know you are not a traitor. I know you are not the things I said.”

“I have given your wife medicines at cost price,” said Levon stiffly, “because of your poverty. Look how you repaid me.”

“I know, I know, efendi.”

“It’s very late. Are you drunk again?”

“Of course I am drunk. I have come here because I am always drunk.”

“To make yourself ridiculous is one thing,” said Levon contemptuously, “but to allow yourself to stoop to violence is another.”

“I am drunk because I am always drunk,” said Constantinos, marshalling his thoughts.

“So everyone sees,” said Levon.

“And I am always drunk because I am always drinking.”

“Evidently.”

“And I am always drinking because of the teeth.”

“The teeth?”

“Yes, efendi. Because of the teeth.”

“I am sorry, I don’t follow.”

Constantinos tapped the side of his mouth with his hand. “My teeth,” he said. “I have such pain, such terrible pain. It goes on all day and all night. It has been a torment all my life. I have never known peace for more than an hour. It was all because of my teeth.”

Levon thought that he almost heard a sob of self-pity in his interlocutor’s voice, and was suddenly struck by how much one’s understanding of people can be amiss. “Toothache,” he reflected, “the universal torture of all mankind. How sweet life would be without it.”

“I have often thought of death,” continued Constantinos, “but it would be a sin.”

“And that is why you drink?”

Constantinos nodded slowly and miserably, and Levon added, “You drink to dull the pain?”

“That’s why I am drunk. That’s why I live in poverty and that’s why my wife and daughter hate me, and that’s why everybody despises me.”

“Why have you done nothing about it? Why have you never explained yourself?”

“I am a man. A man endures pain, and doesn’t complain.”

“You should have your teeth pulled. Don’t you know which tooth it is?”

“The pain fills all my head, and it goes into my ears and down into my throat. I don’t know which one it is. It could be all of them for all I know. I
can’t eat, and so I get drunk quicker, and a tooth-puller costs money. When the tooth-puller comes he asks to be paid before the teeth are pulled, and he sees that I am drunk and he knows that I have no money. What am I supposed to do?”

“There is no one more heartless than a drawtooth,” said the Armenian. “Have you tried opium? I sell it, and it’s very effective.”

“I have no money.”

“Just as well, perhaps. Some get addicted to it, and finally they go crazy. The lunatic asylums are full of them. Sometimes I refuse to sell it to certain people; I say I don’t have any left, though I would be a lot richer if I was less scrupulous.”

“Does this man have to be standing here?” asked Constantinos, nodding in the direction of the servant. “Does he have to listen to all of this? Don’t I have enough to bear?”

“If he goes, he will have to give me the light, and then he won’t have a light to find his way back to his pallet. If he takes the light with him, then we two will be talking in the dark.”

“I don’t follow,” said Constantinos. “I would probably follow if I wasn’t pissed.”

“Anyway,” said the merchant, “I will do you a favour, even though you don’t deserve it.”

“A favour?”

“A favour, yes. I will pay for your teeth to be pulled.”

“You’ll give me money? After my misdeed?” Constantinos was incredulous.

“No, I won’t give you money, because you’ll only drink it. What I will do is send a servant for you next time the drawtooth comes from Telmessos. I will pay him directly, and he will pull the rotten teeth. Then you will have less pain, and perhaps you will not need to drink so much.”

Constantinos raised his face, and affected a pitiful tone of voice. “Have you got a drink, Levon Efendi? A little glass of raki? I am beginning to need one.”

“Stay here,” said the Armenian, and he took the lamp from his servant and disappeared into the house.

“If I was him,” confided the servant, in his master’s absence, “I’d have your throat cut.”

“Well, you can just fuck off,” replied Constantinos. “If I could see you, I’d knock your head off.”

“Pisshead,” said the servant contemptuously.

Oblivious to this uncouth exchange, Levon returned bearing a half-bottle of amber liquid. It had foreign writing on it, in Roman script, and there was a picture of a bird on the label that looked somewhat like a partridge. He handed it to Constantinos, who inspected it suspiciously, swaying on his feet as he tried to concentrate. “Is it alcohol?”

“Yes. It’s called Scotch, and in the absence of a drawtooth, it’s the best possible treatment for toothache.”

“Better than raki?”