Birds Without Wings (40 page)

I noticed, oddly enough, that the poppies that grew in the stones were all pink instead of red, and I remember that my uncle used to say that women were like poppies; they fall away to nothing as soon as they are plucked, or words to that effect. There were swathes of prostrate capers, with their delicate and strange lilac swirls of stamen inside their cups of four white petals, crowding out of the walls and verges, alongside those dark blue bells of convolvulus. There was a knot of scruffy little children plucking the flowers and blowing into them until they popped loudly. I tried it myself later on, when no one was about, and it was curiously satisfying and amusing.

On my right, below the road, was a great pool full of ancient ruins, a temple, I suppose, that had about it an aura of femininity. It was decorated, as it were, by crimson damselflies, martens perched sideways on reeds and little flotillas of ducks. Frogs squelched and yelped like rubber cats, and turtles glided about beneath the water from one stone to another. In the centre of the pool stood a still and silent man with his shalwar rolled up above his knees, who very much resembled a heron, and was clearly a leech gatherer.

The town itself rose up to the left-hand side, occupying a concave hillside that was like a vast amphitheatre. In it our ancestors could have built the biggest theatre in the world, had the idea occurred to them, because down at the bottom was the meydan, which might have been a natural stage. In the meydan, and I swear this is not some mischievous traveller’s tale, there was actually a family living with an asthmatic donkey in the hollowed trunk of an enormous tree. More than anything else this illustrates
how quickly civilised standards tailed away the further you got from Smyrna. This was the kind of place where you might find beehives actually inside people’s houses, and people making cattle food in their kitchens, consisting of cakes made of apricot and walnut leaves. There was a small group of people there who had turned Turk because they had got fed up with the exactions of Lent, and it wasn’t uncommon for Turks to go into churches and light candles. Sometimes they even went to observe the services, and would stand at the back of the church with their arms folded, in the perfect attitude of interested scepticism. Apparently they particularly enjoyed the service on Resurrection Day.

Once I was in the town in a time of drought, and the townswomen were busy making rain. I was astonished to see it.

There was a woman wearing a cow’s forehead and horns on her own head, all bedecked with ribbons and beads, and all the women were quaintly dressed in rags and wildflowers and herbs, and they pranced and danced and sang from house to house, and the people in the houses would give them nuts and chickpeas and raisins, and they sang a song which went:

“May May my Constantine
Give rain here and mud there
To our meadows
To our water pots
Seven times
Seven times
Once here, once there
Once in Charon’s yard.”

I remember this in particular, because when I saw it there was a marvellously ugly little girl in the procession who was accompanied by one who was marvellously pretty, and I couldn’t help noticing the anomaly of it.

The town was a bafflingly intractable labyrinth, but at the same time it was, in my opinion, very well thought out. Streets wide enough only for the passing of two camels radiated up the hillside and twisted almost horizontally along its contours, so that houses and courtyards were connected to each other in the most surprising ways, all of them eventually converging upon the Church of St. Nicholas, with its famous nine chandeliers, its exterior walls cleverly rendered to appear like stone, its efficacious and benefacient icon of the Panagia Glykophilousa, and its mosaicked courtyard of chevrons, roundels and squares, all executed beautifully in fragments
of marble, maroon and white and black, with the number “1910” set in to commemorate its recent renovation. In this church, strange to report, and much to my astonishment, some of the Christians lit their candles and placed them in the sandbox as you might expect, but then knelt down and prayed whilst making Muslim prostrations. Behind the church was its ossuary, perhaps two metres deep, and from that dank cave emanated the disconsolate odour of mouldering rags and slowly decomposing bones. Because it was a church of St. Nicholas, the olive tree outside it was tied with rags put there by barren women. There was a woman who tied many rags there, and she was apparently the wife of the priest. This woman was sometimes called upon to cure children who were late to learn how to speak, and she cured them by pressing the crosspiece of the church key against their lips. Whether it worked or not, I have no idea.

I thought the construction of the houses wonderfully sensible, for they were made in stone with a system of terracotta guttering that replenished large cisterns that were invariably built on to the side of every house. This must have reduced enormously the difficulties one often has with a shortage of water in the summer, and must have saved the women from making many arduous trips to the wells, whose stonework was deeply grooved from so many centuries of raising and lowering the buckets. On another outside corner of every house was a small but decent round-roofed earth closet with a proper door and a comfortably made seat, and a little window high up to carry off any unpleasant miasma.

Many of the houses had wooden platforms slotted into their sides in order to increase space, surmounted by gaily coloured canopies to reduce the oppression of the sun. The chimney tops were of a most practical design, resembling small houses with pitched roofs, and windows cut into the sides to let out the smoke. The fireplaces themselves were always on the upper floor, since it was customary to keep animals below in winter, so that their warmth could rise up and supplement the effects of the fires. One’s impression of the interiors was dominated by the fact that everyone painted their woodwork in a most jolly shade of cornflower blue. The exteriors, on the other hand, were painted in gentle pinks, blues and yellows, and each one had a songbird in a small cage suspended outside a window or the front door, so that the town not only presented a very pretty and homely picture indeed as it rose higgledy-piggledy up the hillside, but was always rich in competitive birdsong.

There was a lower church at the bottom of the town, a modest but pleasant building dedicated to St. Minas, who had a great following in
those parts. It had its own ossuary round the back, protected by a wrought-iron grille, and its floor was cleverly but cheaply made out of black and white pebbles carefully arranged to resemble a big star surrounded by an entwinement of vine tendrils. What particularly struck me about this church was that an owl was permitted to live in it unmolested, spending its days perched on a beam, occasionally opening its eyes to inspect scornfully those who stood below and disturbed its repose. A cloth was placed on the floor beneath its perch, for obvious reasons.

Because the town was built on the side of a hill whose other side slopes down to a cliff above the sea, there is a constant wind that deflects off the rocks above and produces a sound like thunder. This booming is so regular and perpetual that very quickly one ceases to notice it. I climbed and wended up those steep, rough-stoned, stepped pathways to the top of the town, where there is a broken Byzantine watch tower and a tiny white chapel, and found that nearby there is a cleft where a deliciously cool wind blows through and preserves the town from the bad air disease in summer, when God in His infinite perversity decrees that the hardest work must be done at the hottest time of the year. Cut into the ground is a deep lime quarry full of hidey-holes, where sometimes the children play in the evenings.

I walked along the ridge above the town and saw that there were many old tombs. There was a dumb man living there as a sort of hermit of unknown provenance, though some thought that he might have been a Kalandar dervish, whose smile was so hideous that no one could bear to behold it. When I saw it I received such a shock that I recoiled violently and fell over, knocking my head on a rock and grazing my hand. It was said that he must at some time have had his lips pinned back and been forced to bite down upon a large red-hot iron that caused unspeakable damage to his teeth, his gums and his tongue. He was a harmless lost soul, known by everyone as the Dog, and was a frequent object of charity, whose spirit in the town he helped to nourish by his presence.

I also saw the “tekke of the saint,” as they called it, which was a tomb that had a small hole drilled in the lid and another beneath. The custom was that anyone of any faith would pour olive oil through the top hole so that it would wash over the bones before emerging from the bottom hole, to be used as a general panacea. No one knew anything about this saint, except that he was one, although it looked to me as though the tomb must greatly predate the time of Christ. Certainly he must have been the saint with the oiliest bones in the world, and I collected a small phial of this oil
just in case it turned out to be of any use. I employed it on a small patch of dry skin, with efficacious results.

The rocky wilderness above the town was rich in peppery oregano, thyme, stunted melissa, mountain tea, figs, exuberantly coloured beetles and wonderful charcoal-coloured crickets that flashed red wings when they jumped. It was a fine thing to sit up there at dusk as the sun descended behind me, watching the smoke rise up from the braziers, and seeing the gold leaf of the minaret of the mosque sparkling ruby in the day’s last rays.

Where was I? I’ve forgotten what I was supposed to be talking about. I think I must have digressed somewhat. Ah, yes, well, it was Leonidas. I do apologise. You will have realised that I was enthusiastic about this town and its amenities, not least because it was one of the very few I have ever visited that provided the comfort and consolation of a public urinal. It is a poignant experience to see that forsaken paradise now, mainly reduced to rubble, looted, uninhabited except by ghosts, lizards and the traces of ancient memory.

Yes, I loved that town, enough to build it a pump house at my own expense, but I was considerably less keen on the dwelling of Leonidas. He lived in the most appalling and abject disorder in a house that would have been eminently pleasant had it been occupied by anyone else. Leonidas, however, had visited upon it an apocalypse of dust, scattered papers and books heaped up in tottering columns. God alone knows how he subsisted, because I encountered no food in his house, and nothing that I would dignify with the name of bedding. I regretted greatly that my servants and bodyguards were in the khan without me, but found that I could not decently leave immediately because Leonidas himself was in a terrible state. His hands were shaking, he could barely walk, and he was incoherent with rage and fright, despite the events which had upset him having occurred two days before. He had dark rings round his eyes, his hair was dishevelled and his face was white with shock.

When I came into his house he threw his arms around my neck and kissed me on both cheeks, which was most uncharacteristic behaviour, since he was normally as reserved as a German, and then, even more uncharacteristically, he began to sob, his shoulders heaving as he took in great gulps of air. I was somewhat disconcerted.

Leonidas told me that he had had to endure a series of humiliations, the least of which was that whenever he bought a songbird to put in the little cage outside his window, someone would immediately replace it with a
sparrow, and the greatest of which was that he had been abducted and abased in front of a substantial proportion of the townsmen.

It’s a complicated story, but it appears that it was all because a substantial minority of the townspeople were Alevis, the people who believe in the twelve imams and that Mohammed passed on special knowledge to Ali. Don’t ask me to explain it all, I’m a Christian, or perhaps I should say that I was supposed to be one, and it’s all mysterious to me. I just know that there are an awful lot of Alevis, they’re different from other Muslims, and you can scratch your head wondering, should you feel so inclined, whether they’re really Muslims at all. A lot of the men there were called Ali, if that is of any interest.

These Alevis, it transpired, used to have secret drinking parties called “muhabbets,” and because of the general confusion of the population in that place, all the intermarriage and changing of faiths and so on, a lot of people who weren’t Alevis at all, or maybe just a bit Alevi, used to get to go to these parties. The puritanical Leonidas was disgusted that so many Christians were there, acting like infidels, but it seemed to me to be perfectly understandable that all sorts of people should like to gather together and get paralysed with drink and hilarity. It’s the sort of thing I used to do myself when I was young and silly, which Leonidas unfortunately never was.

At these muhabbets there was always someone who was in charge, who would order people to start drinking raki, and would then order people to drink more. If you defied him or left the table without his permission, you were fined a bottle of raki and a cockerel, an imposition that for some reason they called a Gabriel.

The party in question had been going for some time, and they had drunk a great deal whilst listening to drinking songs and tragic dirges about the death of Ali, when the inebriated conversation of the men turned to deciding upon who was the most unpleasant and least popular person in the town, and, I regret to say (although I am not surprised to find myself saying it), that Leonidas was elected unanimously.

What happened was that two strong young men were sent out to bring him in, and he was dragged in his night attire through the streets, struggling and shouting, witnessed by all those who came to their doors and did nothing to intervene. He was hauled into the house where the muhabbet was taking place, thrown down on the floor, and heartily mocked and abused. Then he was ordered to drink raki, which he refused, so it was poured down his throat whilst he was forced to his knees and his head held
back by the hair. Then the saki ordered him to dance, and when he failed to comply they started to stamp on his toes so that he would have to dance in order to avoid his feet being crushed. He was forced alternately to drink and dance until he could barely stand, so he said, and his heart was thumping so hard that he thought he was going to die. With a pistol at his head they made him recite lists of dreadful insults against himself, and then someone fetched a donkey’s pack saddle, saddled him with it, and forced him to dance and drink and vomit until he was so insensible that they disposed of him simply by throwing him out in the street, still besaddled, where he crawled a short way before falling unconscious, and where at dawn he was found in a pool of his own effluents by the imam, who fetched two Christians to carry him home. Before long someone called Ali the Snowbringer, stupendously drunk, turned up and without the slightest hint of compunction reclaimed the saddle.