Birds Without Wings (58 page)

After a while Fikret and I were moved to a hospital that had been set up further behind the lines, near Maydos. We were taken on a cart pulled by a little donkey, and the cart was full of men, and the road was very bad, and you could tell that the donkey was being worked to death, its ribs stuck out against the skin, it was blind in one eye and was covered in scars, and out of pity some of the wounded got out of the cart and stumbled along at the back of it, half pushing it and half being held up by it.

One good thing I remember about the hospital was a nurse who took an interest in Fikret and me. The military nurses were like angels or ghosts, dressed completely in robes of white with only their faces showing, and they went silently from man to man, and spoke in modest voices, but they could be very strong when it was necessary, such as when a man was in a delirium or in too much agony. It seems strange now that I should have been tended and cleaned up by women who were not from my family, and touched me, but spoke to me as a mother does. I was too ill to let it concern me back then, and everybody knows that in time of war all the rules are changed, and it is like a man who eats the flesh of a pig because he is starving and there is nothing else to eat, and therefore he is forgiven.

The nurse who was very good to Fikret and me spoke Turkish badly, with an odd accent that we couldn’t identify, and she had a Frankish name, which was “Georgina,” and she had an extra name. Instead of being “Georgina, daughter of so-and-so,” she had an extra name which was “Iliff.” I said, “What does it mean?” and she answered, “I’m told it means ‘long life,’ ” and Fikret, who was feeling not so bad by then, said, “Are you sure it’s not ilik?”
^*
and she laughed because she was very pretty, and she made a deep impression, and it was a good compliment, and after a time she became very like a sister to us, and it is acceptable to be familiar with a sister. I looked at her blue eyes and fair complexion and pink cheeks, and I said, “Are you a Frank? Or are you Circassian?” and she said, “I am Irish,” and I said, “Is that a kind of Frank?” and she said, “I suppose so,” and I said, “Are you a Christian?” and she said, “Yes, I am,” and Fikret said, “Even so, I am going to marry you when I get out of here, and you won’t even have to convert,” and she said, “The bride price is very high, and in any case my husband would object,” and we wondered what kind of a man
it was who let his wife work with men, and be in contact with them, and we concluded that he must be an infidel, and it turned out that her husband was a diplomat who had married this Georgina in England before being recalled when the war began. We said, “Is your husband an infidel?” and she was puzzled at first, and then said, “He’s an Ottoman, and his mother is from Serbia and his father is from Smyrna.” Fikret said, “Why are you here in the hospital?” and she sighed and said, “Because I didn’t want to be useless.” This Georgina made us mint tea with a great deal of sugar in it, and I am sure it was a good medicine for dysentery, and she said we should eat salt, and she gave us ayran with salt in it if there was any ayran to be had. That good nurse is one of the excellent memories that I have of the war, and it also saddened me because it reminded me of the sisters and mother I had left behind in Eskibahçe. When I left, I gave her one of my miracles that I had picked up at the front. It was a German bullet perfectly penetrated through the middle by a French bullet, so that it made the shape of a cross, and Georgina Iliff was very pleased with it, and she said she would have it made into a brooch, but I don’t know if she ever did.

Fikret and I were back in the lines for the big attack that happened in late summer, when the heat is at its worst. We were both very weak, and probably we should not have gone back, and I think that if we had not been so weak, then perhaps Fikret would have survived his wound. We believed that we should prove ourselves men, and not let down our comrades, and we pretended to the Greek doctors that we were better than we were.

The Franks began their bombardment in the afternoon, and there was no air to breathe and no wind, and so when the shells exploded they threw up great clouds of dust that hung in the air and made the world invisible, and the world was shaking and vibrating all around us because of the explosions, and I remember this in particular because at the time I had a toothache, and the vibrating of every explosion made it much worse, and sent pain through my head with every impact. It was like the continuous roaring of a storm when you are standing by the sea, but much louder.

About an hour and a half after the bombardment began, we realised that the British Frankish troops were coming, even though we couldn’t see them, and our guns opened fire on the space between the lines, hoping to kill the Franks as they advanced. When we were able to see the British Franks, we shot them down. As a result of this, their attack failed. In another part of the line the Australian and New Zealander Franks managed to capture a trench after two days of fighting in the darkness, and
it was said that we lost five thousand men. At the same time there was an attack from Suvla Bay, but it was no good, and the Franks were beaten.

Because it was high summer all the bushes were very dry, and because of the guns these bushes caught fire. As a result, the Frankish soldiers who fell wounded were burned to death, or suffocated, and most often their ammunition pouches exploded, and that killed them even if the fires did not, and that was just as well, because otherwise the ants would attack the wounds and the burns of the wounded, which was an agony, and the thirst of dying out in the stones among the burning bushes was also an agony, and we could hear them crying out for hours. There was a very big fire in the other attack that was taking place not far from us, and the sky was full of smoke and dust, and the smell of charring meat, and the bullets were whistling like birds.

In this battle Fikret stood up on a ladder to get a better field of fire, and there did not seem to be much danger because it was we who were mowing down the Franks, and not them us. Suddenly he fell back from the ladder, and for a moment I thought he must have been hit in the head. I was torn between tending to him and continuing to shoot down the British Franks, and I knew my duty was to shoot the Franks, so I had to leave Fikret. I kept turning to look at him, and he seemed not too bad. He was just sitting with his legs out before him, staring at the opposite wall of the trench, and trying to say something.

Fortunately the attack of the British Franks ended, and as soon as I was sure that no more were coming upon us, I came down from the firing step and knelt down beside him at his left side, saying, “Where are you hit, my friend, where are you hit?” and with his left arm he reached round and pointed to his right arm, but said nothing.

I looked and I saw that a bullet had gone through his arm above the elbow, and completely shattered the bones, and the rest of his arm was just hanging there as if it belonged to no one, and there was scarlet blood pouring down it and dripping to the end of the fingers, which had no life in them. He also had a bullet through his belly, and the dark bloodstains were swelling out into his tunic both at the front and the back, and I realised that this would be the wound that would kill him, because the blood just fills the belly.

Fikret turned his head very slowly, and his eyes had the look of a dead man, and he said, “Is your bayonet sharp?” and I said, “Yes, my friend, very sharp,” and I thought he was going to ask me to kill him.

He gestured again with his left hand and pointed to his right arm, and said, “You’d better cut it off.”

“Cut it off?” I repeated, feeling a sickness coming over me.

“It’s no good. I want it cut off.”

“I can’t,” I said.

“If you love me, cut it off. It offends me. If you honour me, cut it off.”

So I took my bayonet, and made sure it was sharp. I went round to his right side, and I knelt beside him, and I prayed, and first I cut through the cloth of his uniform, and then I held the lower arm in my left hand, and I said, “In the name of God,” and with the bayonet in my right hand began to cut through the muscles and tendons that were full of shining white fragments of bone. Fikret was a strong man, and he had big muscles. When I was cutting him, it was like cutting meat off a sheep, and made a crunching sound, and he was moaning softly, and I was weeping, with tears that ran down my cheeks and fell on to him. I wept so that I had to keep wiping my eyes with my sleeves, because otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to see, and because I was weeping I could not speak to him.

When I had cut away the arm, and laid it gently down beside him, he said, “Tie something round the stump,” so I took the piece of sleeve I had cut off, and cut it into strips, and the strips were just long enough to tie around the stump, and when I had done this, the bleeding was much less. With his left hand Fikret picked up his right arm, and hefted it in his hand, and he said, “I didn’t know my own arm was so heavy,” and I thought it strange that he was holding his own right arm and couldn’t move the fingers of the hand any more because it was just meat. He put the arm down, and then held hands with it, feeling the fingers with his fingers. Fikret said, “It was a good arm,” but I thought it didn’t look as though it belonged to anyone at all, it was just an object. He said, “How the whores of Pera are going to miss these fingers.”

All this time some of my comrades had been standing watching, because there is a fascination in these things, and for the ones who see the dead and wounded there is always the thought that is secretly in their head, which is “Thank God it wasn’t me.” One of them kept saying, “Be strong, Fikret, God’s the boss,” and then finally Fikret just looked at him, and you could tell that Fikret’s look was saying “Go and fuck your mother’s cunt,” and so the soldier shut up.

Fikret said, “I would like a cigarette,” but mine were all finished, and no one else had one either, and the imam wouldn’t give me any, so I went to the officer, who was not Orhan, because Orhan had been killed some time
before. This officer was a Turk from Bosnia, and he was good, and he had a Bosnian accent. I said to him, “Permission to speak, sir,” and he said, “What is it, Abdul Nefer?” and I said, “Fikret Nefer has had his arm shot off, and he has requested a cigarette, sir.”

So the officer took out his silver cigarette case, which he had taken from a dead Frankish officer along with his watch, and he gave me not one, but five cigarettes. He said, “If Fikret Nefer dies before he finishes them, please return the surplus ones to me.”

I saluted him and he saluted back, and I took the cigarettes to Fikret and laid them on his left side where he could pick them up.

When Fikret started to smoke, he proved that his character had not changed, because he blew out the first puff, and said, “By God, that’s almost as good as a cunt.”

“We should get you to the field hospital,” I said, and he blew out more smoke and replied, “No. This is it.” He smoked some more, and said, “Why are you weeping, stupid son of a bitch?” and I didn’t know till then that I was weeping.

I sat beside him as he smoked, first one cigarette, and then two, and by the third cigarette his head was beginning to fall and his eyes to close. I put my head close to his face, and he said, “This time I’m really fucked. I’ve got no blood left.”

He managed to smoke another cigarette, but mostly it smouldered between his fingers. When I realised he was truly dying, I was seized by a certain curiosity, and I said, “Fikret, Fikret, can you see the green birds?”

Very slowly and quietly and sadly he said, “There are no green birds.”

I wanted to say something light, so I said, “Will you send me your spare virgins?” and he smiled a very little and shook his head to say no, and then he sighed very deeply and died. I took his cigarette from between his fingers and finished it for him. I looked at him, and saw how beaten down he was. His uniform was patched with pieces of hessian taken from sandbags, and his boots were different sizes because they had been taken from different corpses. He looked like a beggar. For a long time I looked at the profile of his face, the Arab nose, the loose lower lip, and felt a coldness coming over me. I was shocked by how little I felt, by how quickly I got bored sitting next to his corpse and wanted to do something else. It was only later that the grief began to trickle out of my hidden heart and into my veins, when I remembered the conversations that we had for many hours on many nights under the stars, when we discussed everything that there was to discuss, and we talked of our homes and our memories, and the
plans, and he would say, “Now you describe every olive tree in your home town, and then I will describe every Greek harlot and every Greek café in Pera,” and that’s what we did, until we had talked about everything that ever was, and we smoked and laughed and talked of coarse things the way that soldiers do, and in the daytime we set up little battles between, say, a scorpion and an ant-lion, or an ant-lion and a beetle, and he would support one insect and I would support the other, and we would be crouching down in the stones cheering our insect on, and we would do a little dance of triumph if our insect won, and we’d never felt so careless in our lives.

I took Fikret’s ammunition, and with it I killed fifteen Franks over the next few days, but just then, for the sake of something to do, I took the spare cigarette back to the officer, but he glanced at the blood on it and said, “Smoke it yourself, Abdul Nefer,” so I took it, and I sat next to Fikret, whose head had dropped to his chest, and I leaned up against him, and I smoked the cigarette, thinking about the great preciousness of tobacco, with his blood congealing and darkening on my bayonet and on my hands, and the field guns falling silent, and the corpse flies buzzing and diving.

*
“Ilik” means “delicious” in Turkish.

CHAPTER 68