Birds Without Wings (62 page)

“Abdulhamid Hodja will surely rest forever in paradise,” said Tamara Hanim softly.

“I didn’t divorce you, because you had suffered enough shame.”

“It would have been less shame than this,” she said, indicating her surroundings with a small wave of her hand. “Do you think that divorce would have been any shame to me at all, compared to this?”

He looked at her a little guiltily. “I did suffer,” he said.

“Your suffering was like a dewdrop compared to the ocean,” she said.

“Sometimes the dewdrop believes itself to be an ocean.”

“It believes mistakenly.”

“I went to Abdulhamid Hodja. We have often talked about this. He asked me if I have wavering in my soul, because in a righteous man this is the consciousness of wrongdoing.”

“What did you say?”

“I told him that I have a terrible wavering in my soul.”

“Do you?” she asked.

“Even though every good opinion is on my side, I have always felt a terrible wavering in my soul about what was done to you, and about what I did. Because of this wavering I did not divorce you, even though it was a great scandal and still is. You are still my wife, and when you die you will still be my wife, and I will provide the white shroud and the grave, and the headstone in the shape of a tulip, should you be the first to die. This is nothing perhaps, but it reduces the wavering in my soul.”

“If you don’t divorce me, you can’t marry Leyla Hanim.”

“A man can have more than one wife. Look how many the Prophet had.”

“But you are a modern man. You are like the people in Smyrna. You like to dress in Frankish clothes, and have only one wife.”

“Yes, I can only have one wife.”

“What about Leyla Hanim?”

“Leyla Hanim is a hetaira. She might want to be a wife, but she would be like a bird that sits and sings with its feet tied to a branch, and finally tears out its own feathers and bleeds to death. She would be a bad wife, but she is an excellent concubine. If I made her into a wife it would be like chaining up a dog and expecting it to bleat and give milk.”

“She wants to be a wife. I know it. You misjudge her. And if you are not married to her and you are still married to me, then you are an adulterer when you lie with her.”

He laughed ironically. “Then I should be stoned by the rabble in the meydan, no doubt.”

“You would never be stoned. You are not a wife as I was. You are not a young woman who is easy to stone. You are a lion and the rabble are like little dogs. If you roared, they would run away.”

He smiled at her. “You have changed a great deal. There was a time when you would have been too timid and too humble to talk to me like this. Now you talk to me directly, as Leyla Hanim does. It is a very unusual thing in a woman.”

Tamara bridled a little. “I knew my place. I knew what was expected. I was respectable. Leyla Hanim and I are not respectable, and so we speak as we see.”

He added, as if in afterthought, as if returning to a previous train of thought, “I have only one wife.”

“I am no use as a wife,” she said.

He summoned up his courage and then told her, more directly than he had intended, “Tamara Hanim, I want to lie with you again.”

She looked at him in astonishment, and repeated, “Lie with me again?”

“Yes.”

“After all that I have been? After all that has happened? What about the daughters of Levon the Armenian that I have heard you rescued? Aren’t they very beautiful? What about Leyla Hanim? Isn’t she a good mistress?”

“The daughters of the Armenian are very beautiful, but they are under my protection. I saved them from dishonour, and therefore I cannot dishonour them myself. They are like you when you first came to me. They are frightened and unhappy and bewildered, and so I have sheltered them under my wing. As for Leyla Hanim, she has been very good. But the time has passed by and at last I can no longer forget myself with her. There was always a doubt in my mind, and the pleasure is still very great, but it is not the kind of drunkenness it was. She has become my companion, and we live together because it is very pleasant and we have become like two vines that have twisted together. And despite this, I have also begun to be alone. For a long time I didn’t feel that. She banished it, but now it has come back.”

“All the same, it sounds very good, being with her,” observed Tamara.

“It is very good. I remember that when I went to Istanbul to find her, I went to a mosque first, and it was a Friday morning. I told the beads of my tespih, and made a promise to God.”

“A promise to God?”

“Yes. I promised Him that if I found a woman who would bring me all that I wanted in a woman, then I would build Him a mosque. Well, I was just beginning the mosque when the war with the Franks broke out, and the young men were taken away, and so the mosque only has some trenches for the foundations, and these are slowly being filled in with plants and falls of earth.”

“God doesn’t want His mosque, then,” said Tamara.

“The odd thing is that when I made the promise, I had the feeling that I was promising it to no one, that no one was listening. I started to build it anyway, because I had made the promise.” He raised his eyebrows and sighed. The wails of the woman in childbirth suddenly ended, and they waited for the infant’s cry, but none came.

“Another dead one,” said Tamara.

“I have never forgotten you,” he exclaimed suddenly, “I have always had you in my mind, you are like someone who waves to me from a distant ridge, who cries out and whose voice it takes me a little while to recognise. In the short time that you were with me you also planted a seed, and that seed continued to grow even though most of the time I was unaware of it, and now I have realised that that seed is also a vine that has entwined with my vine. I have missed you, and I want to lie with you again, even though …”

“I have become a whore?”

“No.”

“Even though I was unskilled and very poor entertainment?”

His lack of response signalled that this was precisely what he had meant, and she said, “I am still unskilled, and very poor entertainment. I have never made any pretence as I should have done to earn my keep. I am among the poorest of these poor whores.”

“Sometimes it is not entertainment that one wants. With us, something has been sundered, like a pot that has fallen on the floor and broken into two pieces. Sometimes, if you haven’t thrown away the pieces, you pick them up and fit them together, and look at how good the fit is, and see whether or not there are little chips missing, and your heart wishes that they could be joined once more. Sometimes when I am lying with Leyla Hanim I see her face in the dark and my mind changes her face and her body into yours.”

“This is a kind of infidelity,” said Tamara, “but no one can stone you for it, I suppose.” She looked down at her hands, as if they were not hers, and watched her fingers twisting together nervously. When she looked up, there were tears running down her cheeks again. “I can’t lie with you. I have too many diseases.”

“Diseases?”

“Yes, diseases. That is what killed my babies. If I lie with you, you will become diseased, and you will give the sicknesses to Leyla Hanim, and you might go mad, as many of these whores do, and certainly you will
both die too soon, as I will. For this reason I will only lie with worthless people.”

“You don’t think me worthless then?”

“I have thought many things of you, but I have never once thought you worthless. I have become worthless, and so I can lie with the worthless. Their worthlessness and my worthlessness is what gives me permission, and excuses what I do.”

“I once knew that you were worthless,” he said, “but even when I knew it, I didn’t believe it, and now I think that I was mistaken. My knowledge came from what I knew as common knowledge, but not from what I knew in here.” He tapped his chest once more with the knuckles of his right hand. He changed the subject. “Can these diseases be cured?”

“Now that Levon the Armenian has been taken away, there is no apothecary, and the doctor who looked after us out of kindness was also Armenian.”

“What if I took you to Smyrna? There must be doctors there who can cure you.”

“There are no cures, or none that anyone has heard of. The cures that they offer make you just as sick, and I think that none of them is any good.”

“I would like to send you to Smyrna to be cured.”

Very calmly she said, “I am happy to die too soon. This life is just death’s selamlik, and I have no pleasure. Even if I was cured, I would have no happiness, and I would still be waiting to die. Besides,” she continued, “these poor women in here are my companions. We care for each other, after a fashion. These women are divorced, or widowed, or dishonoured, and I am pleased to keep them as my sisters and mothers until it is my turn to be buried near my babies.”

“Nonetheless, when I next go to Smyrna, I shall enquire of the doctors.”

“You can enquire,” she said.

Rustem Bey stood up, as if to leave, and began to wrap himself once more in his copious black cloak. “If you were not diseased, and I had asked you, would you have lain with me again?”

She gazed at him very sincerely. “Yes, my lion, I would have done, and afterwards I would have wept again, and perhaps I never would have stopped.”

He approached more closely and put his hands on her head, as if in benediction. He tried to tip her head back a little. “Let me look at your face
again. Let me look at your eyes that used to look at me so sadly when you were young.”

She pulled herself away. “No, don’t look at me! Why do you think we keep the light so dim? If you look at me you will see the diseases, and you will see that I am under a curse, and you will not be able to think of me.” She let her head fall, put her hands to her face, and clenched the muscles of her shoulders to resist him.

He stepped back, and his hands fell to his sides. “I will bring you food and money whenever I can.”

“Will you tell Leyla Hanim that you came?”

“No.”

Tamara nodded, and he said, as if trying to lighten the conversation and ease the farewells, “The woman who let me in is very strange. She is quite beautiful in an ugly sort of way, and she has a low voice, and is very tall, and has hands like a man. I once came across a woman like that in Istanbul. It gives me an uncomfortable feeling.”

Tamara smiled at his innocence. “He’s a eunuch,” she said. “Some men come here specially for him.”

After he had gone, Tamara undid the package and found olives, cheese, bread and cooked chicken. She also found a pair of earrings made out of gold coins, and a pair of embroidered slippers that she recognised as a gift that he had brought back from Smyrna in the early months of their marriage, and which she had accepted graciously, but without enthusiasm or gratitude. She remembered that she used to put these embroidered slippers outside her door in order to make him think that she had a visitor.

CHAPTER 71

The Death of Abdulhamid Hodja

After the battle of Gallipoli, Karatavuk was spared any further military action until the invasion of the Greeks some years later, as he was detailed to remain with the Ottoman garrison on the peninsula, chafing with boredom, and longing to return to battle. The time was passed in an endless round of drill, guard duty and tinkering with the defences. The fact that he was an accomplished sniper with expertise in concealment meant, however, that he was able to spend many a contemplative day hidden in various remote spots, watching for anything suspicious. In these places he was the only living creature in the midst of silent hordes of contorted and decomposing dead. He became used to them, and even lost his curiosity. The carrion birds departed, and the rats starved and ate each other.

The task of disposing of so many corpses was too great for the military authorities to contemplate, and so it was that armies of soldiers lay undisturbed except by the grasses and shrubs that grew through their bones until, after the war, Allied authorities would arrive to try to identify thousand upon thousand of clean skeletons, most still clad in the remnants of their uniforms. Without a uniform, it is impossible to tell the nationality of a soldier’s frame, and many an unidentifiable, incomplete and anonymous heap of fractured bones ended up in co-interment with those of former enemies, near monuments speciously engraved with the sentiment that “Their Name Liveth For Evermore.”

In deference to such spectacular carnage it is perhaps perverse to dwell upon one person’s death, but we are creatures so constituted that the passing of one friend or one acquaintance has a profounder effect than that of 100,000 strangers. If there is any metaphorical truth in the Jewish proverb that he who saves one life saves the whole world, then there is equal metaphorical truth in the proposition that when one person dies, the whole world dies with them.

Abdulhamid Hodja began to fall ill at roughly the time when the Allies
were withdrawing from Gallipoli, but no one had seriously thought that he had only a few months in which to live.

On a day when new flowers were forcing themselves out of the land, Ayse Hanim, ragged and thin, made her way through streets that were eerily uncluttered, and came to the back door of Polyxeni’s house, where she put her shoes into the niche in the wall. They were nearly worn out, and more often than not these days Ayse went barefoot in order to conserve them. She opened the door, called softly, and slipped inside.