Birds Without Wings (87 page)

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER 1

What the New Imam Did

The new imam was one of those hardliners stereotyped by the religious colleges in Konya, and it was not long after the departure of the Christians that he was righteously inspired to fire up a few followers to perform the following sacred duties:

Firstly, they broke down the locked doors of the abandoned houses. They did this because they felt it unnecessary to find the neighbours with the keys, and because God rewards the superfluously zealous. Inside the houses they located the stores of wine jars, carried them out into the streets, and emptied them into the alleyways. Then they smashed the jars because of their having been contaminated by wine, and then they went to the vineyards and tore out and burned the vines, even those whose grapes were cultivated solely for the manufacture of raisins.

Secondly, they entered the Church of St. Nicholas, the little church at the bottom of the town with the owl on the cross-beam, and the little white chapel at the top of the hill behind the town and above the ancient tombs. In these churches they assiduously scraped out the eyes of all the figures depicted in fresco, and broke any religious ornaments that were left.

Thirdly, they took the few Christian bones that remained in the ossuary behind the little church with the owl, and threw them over the cliff.

Fourthly, they defaced all figurative work on the tombs left by the Lycians from ancient times.

Fifthly, with very long poles, they rounded up a small group of pigs that had perforce been abandoned by their old owner. These pigs they drove to the top of the cliff above the little chapel, and, in front of Ibrahim, who was up there with his goats and was still in a state of horror over what had befallen Philothei, they herded them squealing and shrieking over the same cliff where they had disposed of the bones of the Christians.

Out of all these actions the only one that met with the overt approval of
the general population was this last, as the taboo against pig flesh is inexplicably the deepest ingrained in the average Muslim. There were many, however, who would never forget that mouth-watering aroma of roasting pork that used to drift across the town, arousing simultaneous feelings of longing and revulsion. The other sacred acts, most especially the disposal of the wine, were greeted with various degrees of disquiet or horror, but the people were cowed by the mad light of moral certainty in the eyes of those who acted on God’s commands as laid down in holy books that no one was able to read. For that town these events began the interminably tedious years of respectability, observance and decorum that made everyone think that they had lived twice as long as they really had, so that even the Cretan exiles forgot how to sing their sustas and dance the pentozali. Only the substantial number of Alevis, feeling like a minority for the first time in their history, now that they were the only minority left, stubbornly continued in their old habits and escaped the deadening longueurs of a dis-enjoyed life.

In Greece the abandoned mosques were almost all demolished, and the graveyards of Muslims desecrated. No doubt these deeds were performed with a choleric and righteous zeal essentially identical to that of the holy vandals of Eskibahçe.

CHAPTER 2

I Am Karatavuk

About one year after the Christians were taken away and the Muslim Cretans brought to take their place, I was looking for a small knife that I needed to cut some cord, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. Then I remembered that when I was in the army I used to have one in my knapsack, and it occurred to me that it might still be in there.

I found my knapsack and put my hand in it, and rummaged about, but didn’t find anything, and so I turned it upside down just in case anything would fall out. What fell out on to the floor wasn’t a knife but a little leather purse, all old and dry.

I picked it up and looked inside, and I beheld the little handful of soil that my friend Mehmetçik had given me to take away to war, when we were about fourteen years old. I remembered him saying that when I came back from the war I should replace it in the same spot from where it had been taken, and I remembered saying to him that the soil of this place has a special and particular aroma.

I put the purse to my nose and smelled it, but now it smelled of the leather of the purse. I went to the house of Abdulhamid Hodja where his widow Ayse still lived, and I found the place by the wall where the soil had come from. I had a moment of hesitation because it occurred to me that I might have to go to war again, but then I tipped it back on to the ground in order to honour Mehmetçik’s suggestion. I looked at the little heap of soil for a moment, and then I rubbed it back into the earth with my feet, until it was properly mixed in again. Then I knelt down and smelled the earth—and no doubt anyone who saw me might have thought I was making a salat—and it smelled once more like the proper soil of this place.

I had some sad thoughts about my friend Mehmetçik, and I thought it was almost certain that he had not been able to take any of the soil of this place with him. I wished I knew where he was so that I could send it to him.

Later on I was talking to the father of the family that had moved into Mehmetçik’s house, and he was one of the few Cretans who could speak Turkish. I told him about this business of the soil, and his face lit up, and he went into his house and came back out with a little purse, and he loosened the drawstring and showed me inside, and he said, “Soil of Crete.”

I said to him, “Sooner or later it starts to smell of leather,” and he just shrugged and said, “Everything changes.”

Soon after, he told me that he had put the soil into a pot where he was growing basil with seed that he had brought from home, so that the soil could make a true Cretan plant. It came up very strongly, and from that plant he took the seeds, and he took the seeds from the new plants that he grew, and he gave seeds away to other people, and in this way all of us here now have Cretan basil on our window sills, to flavour our food and keep away the flies.

I never did find the knife.

CHAPTER 3

Pamuk

One day in early summer, Rustem Bey was sitting out in his courtyard, smoking, when one of his servants came hurrying out, calling “Master, master!” Rustem Bey turned and the servant said, “The cat Pamuk is very sick.”

It was true. The cat was lying on its side in the haremlik, its paws twitching, with saliva coming from its mouth, and a look of blank terror in its eyes. Its breathing was hoarse and irregular. Rustem Bey knelt down and said, “Oh, poor little Pamuk.” He put his hand on the cat’s head and felt the velvet of the ears and the bones of the skull underneath. “She is very old,” he said. “She is just bones and fluff.”

“She had great spirit,” said the servant, adding, “What will you do, master?”

“I think we should kill her,” said Rustem Bey. “I think this is her last suffering, and we should put an end to it.”

The servant was disconcerted. He was fond of the cat and was fearful that Rustem Bey would tell him to do the deed. “Master,” he said, “please don’t ask me. Please ask one of the others.”

“I wouldn’t let anyone else do it,” said Rustem Bey.

The servant was very considerably relieved. “How should we do it?”

“We could drown her, break her neck, cut off her head, strangle her, or shoot her,” replied Rustem Bey, but in a gentle tone of voice that belied the honest brutality of the words.

“It would be a shame to get blood on the beautiful white fur,” said the servant.

“I’m going to take her outside,” said Rustem Bey. “Bring me a thick cloth of some sort.”

Out in the courtyard he wrapped the cat in the cloth so that she was well bound up. He sat in a chair with it against his chest, and the top of her head beneath his chin. He could smell her sweet dusty aroma.

Rocking back and forth in his unhappiness, with his eyes closed, he held the ancient cat across his chest, and hugged her. His right forearm was across her upper flank, and he was hugging just a little too tightly. He hoped that the animal was too sick to know what was going on, and under his breath he muttered, “Bismillah allah akbar, bismillah allah akbar, bismillah allah akbar,” the words helping him focus his mind elsewhere than upon this present sorrow.

He knew that Pamuk had stopped breathing when her head fell, and the small pink tongue emerged and lolled to one side. He continued to hug the cat tightly, and sat for a very long time.

Finally he mastered himself and went back indoors with Pamuk still wrapped in the cloth. “She’s dead,” he said to the servant, who had been hovering at a discreet distance, just inside the door of the house.

“What shall we do?” the latter asked. “Do you want me to take her and leave her up in the rocks?”

“No. Fetch me a spade. It was always agreed that Pamuk would be buried here in the courtyard in the place where she liked to lie, under the orange tree. She had many happy hours of idleness.”

“Don’t you want me to do it, master? With your permission, it would please me very much to do it.”

“No. I will bury her myself.”

Afterwards, Rustem Bey looked down at the small heap of earth, and remembered when he had first encountered the young Pamuk, staring and hissing angrily from a large wicker birdcage on top of Leyla’s heap of luggage back in Galata all those years ago. The cat had one blue eye and one yellow eye, and its coat was entirely white. He had said, “What’s this?” and Leyla had said, “It’s a cat.” At that time he had not liked cats, and had replied stiffly, “I reckoned on no cat.”

“There was a lot I hadn’t reckoned on,” thought Rustem Bey, reflecting on the irony that the bond with the cat had outlasted that with its mistress, except that there was a somewhat mystical sense in which no profound bond ever comes to an end.

Because he did not wish any of his servants to see him upset, Rustem Bey went and found the letter from Leyla Hanim that he had never read, and put it in the pocket of his jacket. He went through the town, up past the fine houses where the Armenians had once lived. He paused at the place where he had begun to build a mosque in fulfilment of his promise. It was now overgrown with weeds and thorns, and an almond tree was growing up from the middle of it. It might as well have been another ruin left by the
ancient Greeks. He realised that he ought to feel ashamed of never having completed it, that he should do so now that there were men to build it, and that it was a disgrace in the eyes of the townspeople, but the thought of doing so merely filled him with an immense weariness of spirit. He shrugged and said to himself, “After all, God has no shortage of mosques.”

He left, and picked his way through the thorns of the maquis on the hillside. He passed the Lycian tombs where the Dog lived, and the tomb of the saint. He saw Ibrahim the Mad and his dog Kopek, and their flock of goats. He stopped a minute to listen to Ibrahim’s strangely beautiful but disconnected playing on the kaval. Finally he took a goat path up to where the land ends.

It was when he was up there, turning Leyla’s letter over in his hands as its corners fluttered in the sea breeze, that it finally occurred to him that the round, irregular stains on the paper must have been tears.