Birds Without Wings (91 page)
Of course I suddenly knew it was you out there in the rocks, and it made me very joyful.
When I saw you again, I didn’t know what to say at first. How much you had changed! Your skin was dark from the sun, and you had a great beard, and your body had filled out, and you were dressed like the outlaw you were, with a cutlass and pistols in your sash, and a bandolier full of bullets across your chest, and a rifle in your hand, and round your brow you had wrapped a red cloth so that it was like a turban, and you stepped out from behind the tomb and embraced me.
I had heard so much about this Red Wolf, who was an outlaw and a brigand, a plague to the gendarmes. I said, “I thought you must have left with your family and the other Christians,” and you said, “How could I? I wasn’t here. I was already hiding.”
It was then that we sat by a tomb and I began to tell you all that had happened to me, because our bargain was that I would speak first, and then you would speak, and so we would swap histories.
Of course it didn’t work out, because we were interrupted, and now finally I have decided that I will not write my story as a long letter to you. I have no idea where you are or even if you are alive, and it pains me to write to you when you might indeed be a ghost. What I will do instead is to imagine that I have readers that I do not know, and so I will begin my story again, with the words “I will not relate what happened during my training.” This will be left for my children to read, and anybody else who may have an interest.
This is the last time I will speak to you, by means of this writing that you will never read. There was a custom you may remember, of sending birds to take messages to the dead, and how I wish that I had a bird who could take my thoughts to you. If you know me at all, you will know that I have missed you all of my life, and I still miss you now that I am an old man and my eyes are beginning to fail, as a scribe’s eyes always do. I have a wife and children and grandchildren, and I have seen my country grow into a great one with a new purpose. It is not frightened by anyone. I have mainly lived a good and honourable life and I have forgiven myself for the things of which I was ashamed. This place is still very beautiful, and the bulbuls and nightingales still keep us awake at night. The gendarmes still play backgammon in the meydan. It is easy to be contented here. All the same, I miss you, my old friend, and in the hope that there is a life after this, I will enter death anticipating that we will become boys again in the old paradise, filling our birdwhistles with water, running about and flapping our arms, and calling to each other among the tombs, and that there we will find the people of our childhood who have all slipped beneath the earth: Rustem Bey, Leyla Hanim, Ali the Snowbringer, the Dog, the Blasphemer, Ali the Broken-Nosed, Stamos the Birdman, Mohammed the Leech Gatherer, Charitos and Polyxeni, Ayse and Abdulhamid Hodja, Lydia the Barren and Father Kristoforos, my own father Iskander and my mother Nermin; and there we might find again the companions of our childhood: Philothei the Beautiful, Drosoula the Ugly, Sadettin who had to kill his sister and then ran away to become Black Wolf, and Ibrahim the Mad. There perhaps will also be Fikret from Pera, and my comrades from the wars, and there we will find again our old enchantment.
For me the stars are growing dim, and everything has almost gone, and I wonder if you have come to the same conclusions as I have. It is often useless to plan for things, even when you know exactly what you are doing. The present is confounded by the future, the future is confounded by the future beyond it, and the memories bubble up in disorder, and the heart is unpredictable.
You and I once fancied ourselves as birds, and we were very happy even when we flapped our wings and fell down and bruised ourselves, but the truth is that we were birds without wings. You were a robin and I was a blackbird, and there were some who were eagles, or vultures, or pretty goldfinches, but none of us had wings.
For birds with wings nothing changes; they fly where they will and they know nothing about borders and their quarrels are very small.
But we are always confined to earth, no matter how much we climb to the high places and flap our arms. Because we cannot fly, we are condemned to do things that do not agree with us. Because we have no wings we are pushed into struggles and abominations that we did not seek, and then, after all that, the years go by, the mountains are levelled, the valleys rise, the rivers are blocked by sand and the cliffs fall into the sea.
POSTSCRIPT
Fethiye in the Twenty-first Century
One story is that in 1913 Fethi Bey, an intrepid Ottoman aviator endowed with a Blériot monoplane and memorable moustaches, crashed into the bay of Telmessos and was untimely killed. In 1923 the town of Telmessos changed its name in his honour, and became Fethiye.
On the other hand it might be that in 1913 Fethi Bey, an intrepid Ottoman aviator endowed with a Blériot monoplane and memorable moustaches, undertook to fly from Istanbul to Cairo and was killed when his plane crashed in Palestine. Louis Blériot, world famous not only for flying the English Channel and winning the thousand-pound prize offered by the
Daily Mail
but also for his own unsurpassable record of spectacular and marvellous crashes, most charmingly and honestly acknowledged that the wires above the wings of his aeroplanes were insufficient to withstand the download caused by turbulence. The French army grounded its Blériot monoplanes, and in 1923 the town of Telmessos changed its name to Fethiye in honour of the first Ottoman pilot to have been killed by a design fault.
Another version is that in 1923 the town of Telmessos changed its name to Fethiye in honour of a pilot named Fethi Bey, who had been killed in action during the Turkish War of Independence.
Since “Fethiye” means “conquest,” however, the town might equally have been renamed to celebrate Atatürk’s expulsion of foreigners and the establishment of the modern Turkish state. The identity and manner of death of Fethi Bey, aerial, intrepid and unfortunate, are concealed forever behind the tangled contradictions of multiple and congenial myth, and he lives on solely in the name of a pleasant and modest town that may not indeed be named after him, having existed, it seems, solely for the purpose of demonstrating the impossibility of history.
Every Tuesday there is a market in Fethiye that bestraddles the sides of a shallow and limpid canal that carries the water of the mountains
into the sea. It is a market that seems to go on forever, to be crowded by every nationality, and to sell the strangest possible combination of touristic handicrafts and daily necessities.
There are agriculture and carpentry stalls, laden with nails, adzes and sickles, stalls with generous and redolent bags of spice and saffron, stalls with brass tea sets, coffee grinders, kebab skewers, and mortars and pestles, stalls with wondrous aubergines and turgid watermelons, stalls with tapes that alternately blast out the equally lamentable pop songs of both Turkey and America, stalls selling priceless carpets inveigled for a song from the naive peasants of Anatolia, stalls selling hand-sewn silks, waistcoats, hats and socks, and stalls selling seductively beautiful musical instruments, geometrically inlaid, which Turks can play by instinct, but which Westerners find impossible, even in theory.
Many of the traders have formerly lived in London; “Cheaper than Tesco,” they cry, “cheaper than Asda, better than Harrods. Buy one and get one for nothing. Pay me next year. Who cares about the money? Look, look. English? Deutsch? Please, please, very nice, very cheap. Lovely jubbly.” They trade con brio, bursting with joy and panache, and each of them has a samovar on a portable gas ring in order to fill themselves and their customers with hospitable and inexhaustible draughts of sweetened apple tea.
There are old ladies crouching in the dust next to cotton cloths upon which is arranged complex and exquisite silver jewellery set with rich semi-precious stones. Young men wander among the throng insisting upon the purchase of genuine Lacoste socks and genuine Cartier watches and genuine Reebok trainers and genuine Chanel perfume. Middle-aged women intent upon the weekly stocking of provisions curse the tourists and mutter to each other irritably as they haul their baskets through the cosmopolitan muddle. A boy is determined to sell his authentic French designer fragrances: “Ten pound for one,” he exclaims, and then, “Eight pound for one. OK, five pound for one. OK, one pound for one. OK, OK, ten for one pound.”
Noisy women from Manchester and Newcastle howl and cackle like hens as a spouse tries on a fez. Roasted and rubicund middle-aged blond couples from Amsterdam and The Hague blink in confusion as a dark small boy attempts to sell them a self-illuminating yo-yo or a small carving with an astounding phallus. Policemen on duty, stupefied by boredom, smoke surreptitiously, their aromatic cigarettes smouldering in cupped hands behind their backs.
There is a tall and heartbreakingly lovely German girl. She is golden-haired
and freshly minted, moving with catlike confidence and grace through the crowds between the stalls. She wears the skimpiest of tops, and her interminable legs disappear into the shortest of shorts, which have been slashed deliberately across the buttocks in order to expose firm alabaster flesh of inestimable delight. She astounds the local men, who gaze after her with popping eyes, their mouths agape with censorious longing and disgusted desire.
There is only one woman completely enrobed in black, in the Iranian style. There is another who is also clothed in black, except that she wears an ordinary black headscarf and skirt, and a black T-shirt. She is trying to be both East and West, and she is indeed fortunate that she is innocent of the English tongue, for her T-shirt bears the immodest and un-Islamic message “Red Hot and Ready to Go.”
All this is quite normal and unremarkable for the town of Fethiye, whose old name was Telmessos, meaning “City of Light,” or “Megri,” meaning “The Faraway Land.” The truly anomalous and remarkable thing about Fethiye, its market and the region of Lycia, is that there are no Greeks.
VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2005
Copyright © 2004 Louis de Bernières
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Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2004. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Vintage Canada and colophon are registered trademarks
of Random House of Canada Limited.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
De Bernières, Louis
Birds without wings / Louis de Bernières.
eISBN: 978-0-307-36887-4
I. Title.
PR6054.E132B47 2005 823’.914 C2004-906979-9
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