Birds Without Wings (6 page)

Mustafa makes a strangely self-possessed pupil. He refuses to join in the children’s games, saying that he prefers to watch. He refuses to bend his body in order to play leapfrog, demanding that others, should they wish to overleap him, must do so with him standing up. He is only twelve years old, but he turns out to be an astonishing mathematician. His teacher, also called Mustafa, puts him in charge of classes. He socialises with older boys rather than his contemporaries, and his teachers find him opinionated and difficult. He assumes equality with them.

His mother remarries, much to his alarm, jealousy and disgust, and he refuses to live in his stepfather’s house, but he finds that he has an inspirational new stepbrother who is an officer in the army, who preaches to him about honour and duty, about never accepting a blow or an insult. He gives the little boy a flick knife in case some predatory man finds him too pretty for his own good, and tells him never to use it unwisely. The boy’s own predilections are clearly for the fair sex, however, and it is more likely that the danger to Virtue rather derives from him.

His teacher, Mustafa, gives him a name to distinguish him from himself. The new name that he will carry all his life is “Kemal,” Perfection.

CHAPTER 7

The Dog

The town of which I speak was finally destroyed by two earthquakes, in 1956 and 1957. It is now populated only by small lizards and huge cicadas. Stiff grasses grow up between the stones, and the voices of the nightingales, whose massed improvisations at night used to drive the populace crazy with sleeplessness, now drift out across a sea of rubble, and away over a quiet river that has grown preoccupied and sad. The few peasants who come to cultivate the strips of land along the banks look up at the ruins, where their children forage for old knives and coins, and try to imagine how it used to be. “It should be rebuilt,” they often say, but then someone says, “I wouldn’t live there; there are too many ghosts.”

Not many years ago a bishop came from Rhodes, and an imam came from Fethiye, and in the broken carapace of the Church of Aghios Nikolaos, they prayed together for the rebirth of the place and its community, where, side by side, there used to live Christians who spoke only Turkish, but wrote it in the Greek script, and Muslims who also spoke only Turkish, and also wrote it in the Greek script. Neither God, for reasons best known to Himself, nor the Turkish government, for cogent reasons of expense, have answered the prayers of the bishop and the imam, and the town of Eskibahçe, whose Greek name in the Byzantine age was “Paleoperiboli,” slumbers on in death, without an epitaph, and with no one to remember it.

When the town was alive, the walls of the houses were rendered with mortar and painted jauntily in dark shades of pink. Its streets were so narrow as to be more like alleyways, but there was no oppressive sense of enclosure, since the buildings were stacked up one slope of a valley, so that every dwelling received light and air. In truth, the town seemed to have been marvellously designed by some ancient genius whose name has been lost, and there was probably no other place like it in all of Lydia, Caria or Lycia. Each habitation had its lowest rooms carved directly out of the rock, many of them with capacious storage spaces cut even further into the
hillside, as if the earliest inhabitants had whiled away the tedium of their winters by chipping out cellars for themselves. Directly into the walls were cut niches for stoves, guns and brass cooking pots.

These lowest rooms were blessedly cool in the summers, and in the winter were commonly occupied by animals, whose natural warmth eased the chill of the room above, which itself was accessible either by a wooden ladder, or by stairs cut out of the rock. In the upper room were to be found the hearth and the divans, arranged around three sides of the room, with a fine carpet occupying the central space.

Because each house had a roof that was almost flat, this amounted to an extra room when the weather was fine, the same roof acting as a trap for rainwater, which flowed directly into a very large cistern built on to the side of the structure. Thus, for the most part of the year, the women were saved the arduous task of fetching water from the wells, or from the river that cut through the very lush flood plain immediately below, where almost everybody owned a few decares of land for cultivation. Each house also possessed a separate earth closet, which had to be emptied frequently in hot weather on account of the oppressiveness of the flies. There were those who used it only when the women were cooking, because then the insects left the closet in order to investigate the food.

Naturally, not all the buildings corresponded to this pattern, for over the centuries the population had grown a little, and there were more conventional houses on the periphery, and on the hillside opposite, that were divided into a selamlik, which was, as it were, the reception area, and the haremlik, which was the private quarters. Nonetheless, the habit of hacking extra rooms out of the rock also pertained in these buildings, and they had the same heavy walls, as thick as the length of an arm, and the same dark and tranquil interiors that had the effect of diminishing one’s sense of time.

Some of the houses, it is true, were so overcrowded as to be almost hellish, for it was the custom then, as in many places it still is now, for the sons to bring their new wives into their paternal house. If there were many sons who married, and produced numerous children, then there was neither room to move nor sleep, nor was there any privacy, and there was much bad temper, especially during times of pernicious weather. Upon the death of the family patriarch, however, the sons and their families would move out to new houses where the cycle would begin again, and there would be a few years of spaciousness in one’s own house, which seemed both disconcerting and marvellous.

Behind the town the scrubby hillside rolled to a gentle crest, and beyond
that there was a small depression that, had it had more ambition, might have amounted to a valley. There were a few vertical rock faces, for the land had originally been laid down in flat layers that had been folded and broken by the uncompassioned northern drift of Africa and Arabia. Many of these faces had been carved into elegant façades for sepulchres in Lycian times, but one had been deeply excavated for lime, and beyond, just over another crest, was the sharp and stony incline that fell steeply down to the vivid waters where the Aegean merges into the Mediterranean Sea. It was in this wasteland between the town and the ocean, a place fit only for goats, that the man who came to be known as the Dog took up residence among the Lycian tombs, becoming a spectre even before he had properly died.

Sometimes it happens that the manner of a man’s death is discernible beforehand in his face, and sometimes it is clear from the manner of a man’s life. In the case of the one they named “The Dog,” it was always clear that he would die alone and in squalor, because this was what he had explicitly chosen when he undertook to lead the life that he did.

Karatavuk and Mehmetçik were very small boys at the time, but they would never forget the day that the Dog arrived. They had been sent out by their respective mothers to gather wild greens, of which there were a hundred varieties growing on the hillsides and around the edges of the pastures, all of them edible, but some of them very bitter until one was used to them and learned to perceive the delicate flavours, which might remind one of walnut or garlic or lemon. Into their goatskin satchels they had stuffed everything that they had found, and were wasting time in conspiratorial fashion in order to delay their return home, where they would probably be given yet another task. Sometimes one’s mother sent one out to collect tezek, the dried dung that was used for fuel now that the trees had all been cut down and the goats had destroyed most of the shrubs. The only good thing about collecting tezek was finding the interesting and varicoloured species of beetles that inhabited it.

They were sitting on one side of the sunken track that led past the almost intact ruins of a Roman theatre, which the townspeople still used for big meetings and celebrations. They were idly tossing small stones across the track, their target a small burrow made in the opposite bank by a mouse. “Why don’t we pee in the hole?” suggested Mehmetçik. “Then the mouse might come out, and we can catch it.”

Karatavuk frowned. “I don’t want to catch a mouse.” Karatavuk always wanted to appear more serious and adult than he really was, and it is more
than likely that he would have liked to urinate in the hole to make the mouse come out, if only he had thought of it first.

“Anyway,” said Mehmetçik, “if we pee in the mousehole, we might drown it.”

Karatavuk nodded wisely in agreement, and the two boys continued to toss their stones. Karatavuk was the second son of Iskander the Potter, and he had the handsome face of a young man even though he was only six years old, with golden skin, and shining black hair that fell across his eyes, so that frequently he had to sweep it upward with the back of his hand. He had fine lips, and when he smiled he revealed a pointed tongue and small white teeth that had no gaps, but which were just crooked enough to be charming. His mood always seemed to be more sober than it was.

Mehmetçik, who came from one of the Christian families, was shorter and stockier, and it was clear that one day he would grow up into the kind of man who can perform surprising feats of strength, the sort who can hold a heavy door in place whilst it is screwed on to its hinges. Like Karatavuk, his skin was tawny, his eyes dark brown, and his hair black and straight. They might easily have been brothers or cousins in two versions, one slim and lively, the other more solid. In fact, they were related, but in a manner tenuous enough for everyone to have forgotten how it came about. A great-great-grandfather had changed faith and married into the other family, perhaps, or a distant grandmother had married twice, the first or perhaps the second husband being of the other family. In any case, and in one way or another, if one traced it back far enough, there was no one in that town who was not in some way a relation of everybody else, whatever the theories that Daskalos Leonidas might have propounded.

The boys compared toes, Karatavuk’s thin and long, Mehmetçik’s shorter and stouter. What they had in common was that they were powdery with white dust from the road, and tanned dark by the early-summer sun. Karatavuk was demonstrating that he could waggle each toe separately, and Mehmetçik was frowning with concentration in the effort to duplicate the feat, when they became aware that someone had come over the brow of the hill and was bearing down upon them.

Even before they saw him closely, they realised that he was unusual. There was something uneven and exaggerated in his stride, as if he was so used to hurrying that he was incapable of proceeding at a measured pace. Furthermore, he did not walk in a straight line, but veered slightly from one side to the other, so that his out-turned footprints in the dust left behind them the winding track of a river or a snake.

The boys sat up and watched him approach with a mixture of fascination and fear. They jumped to their feet with the single idea that they should run away, but there was something about the man’s demeanour that prevented them. It was as if they were in no danger because the man did not live in the same world, and would not even see them.

Indeed, perhaps he did not see them. He was tall and very thin, with spindly legs that were nonetheless tautly muscled from his years of walking, and he was clad only in a ragged scrap of grey sheet with a hole torn out for his head, and which at front and back hardly attained the level of his knees. He had a length of ship’s rope about his waist, the weight of whose knot at the front barely preserved his decency. One could see clearly the sides of his buttocks, and occasionally there were dark hints of his genitals as he walked.

His arms were as thin and sinewy as his legs, and his fingers were long and spatulate. In his right hand he grasped a quarterstaff of well-worn ash, and with this he helped to propel himself along at his unnatural speed. His left hand rested upon the neck of a black-and-white goatskin water flagon, which was suspended on a leather thong that ran diagonally down across his chest.

The tattered man was oblivious. He looked neither right nor left, with eyes that were lightest blue, like those of a Frank from the far north. His full head of disordered grey hair was knotted and matted, caked with dust, and the sweat of his brow ran down from it, leaving clean tracks across the filth that had accumulated upon his shrunken and aquiline face. With every step he groaned inarticulately, as if in conquerable pain, a groan such as one hears from a madman, or from a deaf man who has never learned to speak. These vocalisations, it seemed, were his marching song.

He swept past the two boys, and they, as of one mind, followed him, mimicking his erratic stride and giggling to each other, timidly at first, but then with greater boldness, as the man who was the object of their mirth ignored them altogether.

They approached the lower end of the town, and soon the procession grew as more children tagged along behind, in order to experience the novelty of imitating the extraordinary man. Fat little pug-nosed Drosoula, the exquisite Philothei, Ibrahim, son of Ali the Broken-Nosed, who even at that age was already following Philothei everywhere, and Gerasimos, son of the fisherman Menas, who was already feeling a fascination for Drosoula, all joined the happy ragtaggle of mockers and mimics, attracting also the town’s stray dogs, which barked senselessly, prancing at the
edges of the procession, which before long numbered perhaps fifteen or twenty children.