Birds Without Wings (23 page)

“Abdul looks very crestfallen, and says, ‘Don’t you want it then? I thought it was very fine, and that you’d be pleased.’

“ ‘Abdul Efendi,’ I say, ‘it’s absolutely beautiful, but it isn’t what I asked for, and I bet it’s more expensive too.’

“He puts on this voice like a little child, and his bottom lip begins to quiver, and a tear runs down one cheek, and this great big brute of a man starts to cry, and he says, ‘I thought you’d like it. I worked so hard, I made it with so much love, and it only costs twice as much.’

“I try to comfort him, and I say, ‘Abdul, it’s a masterpiece, and you should send it as a gift to the Sultan Padishah himself, because it is worthy of the Royal Armoury, but it is too good for me, and I can’t afford it. Have you got the rifle?’

“Abdul Chrysostomos wipes his face with the back of his hand, so that it’s smeared with wet soot, and he fetches the rifle, and I look at it, and I can hardly believe my eyes, because this one has six barrels all joined together, and when you pull the trigger they revolve one at a time. The
stock is made of ebony, and it’s inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and it’s very beautiful, and it’s so heavy because of all the barrels that I actually can’t lift it to my shoulder. Abdul smiles and says proudly, ‘It’s my newest design.’

“I say, ‘Abdul Efendi, this is another one for the Sultan Padishah. It’s exquisite, but it’s too heavy to lift, and it isn’t what I ordered.’

“He looks at me as if I have just informed him of the death of his mother, and the long and short of it is that finally I agree to come back in another couple of months with the next caravan.

“So I come back the third time, and now he’s made me a pistol with a rifled barrel and a revolving chamber that takes seven bullets, and the calibre of it is so huge that it would knock over the wall of a house with a single shot. Honestly, I could get my first finger up the barrel. And he’s made a rifle that has a barrel six feet long because he says that it’s more accurate and with a barrel like that you could hit a single ball of rabbit shit from a thousand yards. We go through the whole process again, and he starts crying, and he says he’s an artist and he can’t help being carried away by his creative impulses, and I say, ‘Well, you could say that I am an artist too, but when someone commissions a pot, they get what they ask for, and I do it as well as I can, because the art is just as much in the making as in the conceiving, and a thing doesn’t have to be complicated to be finely made.’ ”

Iskander paused. “Now I’m going back, for the fourth time, in the hope that finally I’ll get the pistol and rifle I asked for, and I’ve been through all this trouble and inconvenience just because my son had a fight with his friend and made me feel bad about having no gun. I think I have been a fool.” He pointed to the sky. “I think that God is probably up there laughing at me.”

“Nonetheless,” Ali comforted him, “a man needs a gun to feel completely himself. That’s just the way it is. When you go back your wife will have greater respect for you, and your sons will be proud of you, and when you stroll around the town in the evening, you will be feeling as important as Rustem Bey himself.”

Rustem Bey smiled at this implied flattery, and Iskander admitted, “I do feel a certain excitement already.”

Stamos wiped his nose with his sleeve, and said, “That’s a story without an ending. I don’t feel satisfied. You will have to tell us what happens next when we make the return.”

“I liked the bit where you described the gunsmith,” said Mohammed. “I could just imagine him, with all those gold rings and the plait.” He looked around at his fellows, and asked, “Who’s next?”

Levon the Sly raised his right hand. “I know the one about the Forty Viziers.”

“Now that’s the longest story in the world,” exclaimed Iskander.

“It is if you can remember all of it,” said Levon. “I fear that many of the tales will escape my memory.”

“I expect we can remind you,” said Stamos.

So it was that for two days Levon the Sly related the lengthiest story that has ever been composed about the trickery and perfidy of women. Everyone laughed, and no one took the misogyny too seriously, except for Rustem Bey, who fell silent and unhappy, and curiously ashamed. Nonetheless, it was Levon the Sly who won the yataghan, which was perhaps a little ironical, since the Armenian merchant was the only infidel who told a story, and he was the only storyteller there who had no interest in weapons whatsoever.

CHAPTER 26

Mustafa Kemal (6)

Far away from Eskibahçe, past the Dodekanissos and across the Aegean Sea, it is 1907, and Mustafa Kemal is at last back in Salonika, the town of his birth. He finds to his frustration and irritation that his exile in Damascus has spoiled his chances of becoming a leader of the revolutionaries. There is a new Committee of Union and Progress, consisting of people like Tâlat Bey, Çemal and Ali Fethi. They meet in Masonic secrecy, swear oaths on swords and the Koran, and will one day soon become widely known as “The Young Turks.” They are suspicious of Mustafa Kemal, who finds all the hocus-pocus very tedious, and whose Fatherland and Freedom Society becomes absorbed into the new entity. He spends his time inspecting the Macedonian railways, excluded from the seat of action.

The Sultan sends two commissions to deal with the Committee of Union and Progress, and the leader of the first is shot and wounded. The second apparently seeks conciliation, but there is a young and dashing major who, instead of going to Istanbul to parley, takes his men to the hills. This man is Enver, who is shortly joined by another officer who is an expert in guerrilla warfare. The revolution is openly proclaimed at last, and the Sultan sends troops to deal with it, but they join the revolution instead. The Sultan is forced to restore the old liberal constitution of 1876. The handsome Enver appears on the balcony of the Olympus Palace Hotel, and proclaims the new policy of Ottomanism. There will be no more special privileges for particular ethnic and religious groups, and from now on all obligations and rights are the same for everybody. There is euphoria in Salonika. Rabbis and imams embrace, political prisoners emerge, astonished, into the light. Agents of the Sultan are murdered, and the bodies are spat upon in the streets.

Enver is just the sort of man that Kemal dislikes. He is a good and respectable Muslim who neither smokes nor drinks, and he is vain and
punctilious. Kemal is also envious of his leadership and success, and sees no good coming from it. He sees that Enver is a fine officer in the field, but detects no other quality to redeem him. Mustafa Kemal chafes because he is keenly aware of his own superiority.

The revolution is a half-baked affair. It has no real plan and no real ideology beyond the intention to restore the empire to its previous strength. The revolutionaries do not comprehend the power and seduction of the new nationalisms. The Christians are not necessarily pleased at having earned the right to do compulsory military service and become free Ottoman citizens, and very soon the Young Turks find that they have accelerated the disintegration of the empire instead of arresting it. Bulgaria declares independence. Crete declares union with Greece. Austria illegally and opportunistically annexes Bosnia and Herzegovina, thereby setting in train the dismal events that will distort the entire course of European history for more than a hundred years.

Mustafa Kemal sees the chaos, and is more than disgruntled. In the Kristal café, in the White Tower café, in the Olympus café, he complains loudly and bitterly to his brother officers. The Committee of Union and Progress decides to pack him off to Tripoli in order to sort out some local business and Kemal reluctantly agrees to go.

On the way he disembarks in Sicily, and the local children bombard him with lemon peel and mock his Ottoman fez. He suddenly sees for the first time that the fez epitomises all that makes the empire ridiculous in the eyes of foreigners, and he begins to conceive a hatred of it. One day, when he is dictator of Turkey, he will outlaw it in a fit of illiberality.

In Tripoli, Mustafa Kemal has to deal both with fractious Arabs and old-fashioned Ottomans who do not acknowledge the authority of the CUP. He browbeats the local pasha, and, characteristically and unfailingly heroic, he goes to the courtyard of a mosque that is the headquarters of Arabs who are planning to abduct him. He addresses the hostile crowds and ladles patriotism and religion over their heads. He threatens them implicitly by emphasising the power of the CUP, but comforts them by promising that this power is for their protection only.

Mustafa Kemal impresses a sceptical Arab sheikh by tearing up his own papers of accreditation, announcing that his own word is enough and that he has no need of papers, whereupon the sheikh releases from prison the three previous emissaries who had mistakenly relied too heavily upon their own such letters.

In Benghazi, Sheikh Mansour has overborne the local Ottoman authorities,
and Mustafa Kemal thinks up a ruse to defeat him. He gathers the local troops together in the barracks, and proposes to the officers that he should lead them in an exercise. He tells them that they are to imagine that they are an infantry regiment marching to confront an enemy upon the left, but which then receives notice to wheel about and face an enemy on the right.

In this way, and without anyone suspecting it in advance, Mustafa Kemal surrounds the house of Sheikh Mansour, who is obliged to send out an emissary with a white flag, and a parley is set up. Mustafa Kemal lectures him upon the nature and intentions of the CUP, and in his turn the sheikh gets Mustafa Kemal to swear upon the Koran that he will not harm the Sultan, the Lord Caliph. It is doubtful in the extreme that Mustafa Kemal would have invested any great seriousness in a Koranic oath, but nonetheless honour is satisfied and order is restored. Mustafa Kemal, his mission entirely accomplished, returns in triumph to Salonika, only to find that the revolution has run aground.

CHAPTER 27

The Tyranny of Honour

Yusuf the Tall loved all his children equally, with a passionate adoration that, when he thought about it, sometimes made him lachrymose. If his life were like a garden, then his daughters would be like the roses growing alongside its walls, and his sons would be like young trees that formed a palisade against the world. When they were small he devoted happy hours to their entertainment, and when they grew older he hugged them until their eyes bulged and they thought that their ribs would crack. He had grown to love his wife too, partly because this is what happens when a wife is well chosen, and partly because from her loins had sprung these brooks and becks of happiness.

But now Yusuf the Tall did not know what to do with his hands. It seemed as though they were behaving on their own. The thumb and middle finger of his left hand stroked across his eyeballs, meeting at the bridge of his nose. It was comforting, perhaps, for a scintilla of time. There was no comfort longer than that in this terrible situation. Sometimes his hands lay side by side on his face, the tips of his thumbs touching the lobes of his ears. He had thrown off his fez so that they could stroke his hair backwards, coming to rest on the back of his neck. The maroon fez lay in a corner on its side, so that his wife Kaya kept glancing at it. Despite this awful emergency, and the drama in which she was caught up, her instinct was to tidy it away, even if it were only to set it upright. She sat on the low divan, kneading her fingers, biting her lip and looking up at her husband. She was as helpless as one who stands before the throne of God.

Yusuf the Tall strode up and down the room, waving his hands, protesting and expostulating, sometimes burying his face in his hands. Kaya had not seen him so anguished and begrieved since the death of his mother three years before. He had painted the tulip on the headstone with his own
hands, and had taken bread and olives so that he could eat at the graveside, imagining his mother underneath the stones, but unable to picture her as anything but living and intact.

Yusuf had passed the stage of anger. The time had gone when these patrollings of the room had been accompanied by obscenities so fearful that Kaya and her children had had to flee the house with their hands over their ears, their heads ringing with his curses against his daughter and the Christian: “Orospu çocuşu! Orospu çocuşu! Piç!”