Birds Without Wings (90 page)

The copper slowly ascended to red heat, and Rustem Bey stood further and further back. Mehmet removed the glowing sheet with two pairs of tongs, and laid it across four flattened stones to cool off. “Does it take much longer?” asked Rustem Bey.

“Well, efendi, you have to beat it, which is very noisy indeed, and then it is so hard that you have to heat it up again to red heat, and you can either quench it or let it cool on its own, and then you can begin to make the designs.”

“So it all takes a very long time?” interrupted Rustem Bey. “I think I may not have time to stay and see all of this.”

“Indeed,” replied Mehmet. “It takes a long time, but a long time to us is a short time to God, and a long way for us is a short way for a bird, if it has wings.”

“You are speaking in proverbs, just like Iskander the Potter,” said Rustem Bey, laughing lightly. “But in any case, God’s time is not a time that I would want to wait, and the heat in here is becoming intolerable. When shall I come back?”

“The engraving will take time if you wish it to be good.”

“I wish it to be good,” confirmed Rustem Bey.

“Then come back in three days, just before the evening azan.”

Rustem Bey duly arrived three days later, just before the call to prayer, and found Mehmet the Tinsman, amid much huffing and puffing, vigorously shaking a large black goatskin bag. His initial impression was that Mehmet must have gone mad. The latter stopped for a moment, and explained breathlessly, “Water and river sand. Giving it a polish in the old way. Can’t use acid. Nearly run out.”

Mehmet sat down for a while to recover his breath, and rolled a fat cigarette as consolation and reward for his efforts. The heavy perfume of Latakia tobacco superimposed itself upon that of hot metal and coals. When he had recovered, he removed the huge platter from the goatskin, and took it over to a pail of water, where he carefully washed it down. For a moment he held it up and admired it, pristine, virgin, untarnished, brilliantly shining. He turned and presented it to Rustem Bey, saying, “From my hands to yours, Aga Efendi, may it go with good fortune.”

Rustem Bey took it reverentially and felt an unfamiliar pang of aesthetic pleasure. It had come out even better than he had dreamed of it. Around the rim, in Arabic text that he could not read, there was a line from the Koran. In the centre, set amid swirling acanthus leaves, were five beasts. One was an eagle with two heads growing out of the one body, each head looking in opposite directions. Two of the beasts were identical geese, breast to breast and paddle to paddle, but with their heads flung directly back over their bodies so that they saw both the world and themselves upside down, but could not see each other, and two of the beasts were the prettiest and most elegant antelopes imaginable, identical, both winged, tails flicked high, both hoof to hoof and chest to chest. They might have been sisters, twins of the same dam, but they too were looking not at each other, but in diametrically opposite directions, backwards over their shoulders.

CHAPTER 6

The Epilogue of Karatavuk the Letter-Writer

I have just reminded myself of someone I should not have forgotten, since now I live in what was his house. I was sitting here whilst my family slept, with the paper before me and a pen in my left hand, wondering how to start. I was looking at the glow of the oil lamp, when I suddenly remembered Daskalos Leonidas, who was the teacher to the Christian children in the years just before they had to leave. He was not well liked by anyone, but I have reason to think that there was some warmth in his heart, because he was kind to my parents during the war when they asked him to read a letter, and to write in reply. Also, he knew that it was me who exchanged sparrows for the songbirds in his cage, but he never pursued me for it. The reason I am reminded of him is that he used to write all night. There was always a light coming through his shutters. No one knew what he was writing, and I cannot myself read the papers he left behind, but it was said that he was a conspirator and was working out plots to make all these parts Greek. Perhaps he is dead by now, but wherever he is, he must know that all the plans like his ended up with these parts becoming completely Turkish, and that this happened after we had all had to wade in lakes of blood. My father Iskander would have thought of a proverb to illustrate the futility of great plans and big ideas, but I am reminded of a story about Death, who sent a message to someone to say “I will see you tomorrow night in Telmessos,” and so the man ran away to Smyrna, thinking that he had made a fortunate escape, and then he was walking along in the Armenian quarter, and he met Death coming the other way, and Death said to him, “How fortunate! I had been planning to meet you in Telmessos, but something came up, and I had to come here instead.” This is to say, that in seeking our good ends we often bring about our own misfortune.

When I think about it, I realise that without Daskalos Leonidas, I would not be sitting here writing whilst my family sleeps, because it was he who
taught my friend Mehmetçik to read and write, and it was Mehmetçik who taught me. In our day the Muslim boys learned to recite only the first lines of the Koran, in Arabic, and that was all our education, which was why we were always helpless when the Christians wanted to outwit us. I pestered Mehmetçik until he gave in, and every day in the rocks above the town, where the Dog lived, he would teach me as Daskalos Leonidas had taught him, which is to say that he put on an irritated tone of voice and hit me frequently with a stick, and I would scratch out words in the dirt with a stick. I still smile when I remember the antics of our childhood, all that running about in the rocks and blowing on birdwhistles and finding interesting things to piss on. I wonder if he still is wearing red things, should he have managed to escape. I still have birdwhistles that my father made, and I wonder if Mehmetçik still has the one that I gave him when I last saw him, just before my own father maimed me.

Well, after that I had to change my course in life, since a one-armed potter is an impossibility. It is also because of that meeting that I am writing this with my left hand, which, according to my wife, is the hand of Satan. She says, “Nothing good comes out of what is done by the left hand,” but this is not true, because now I write with my left hand, and this is how I live.

I agree that nothing will come of this particular writing, neither good nor bad, but not for the reasons proposed by my wife, who thinks like a woman, and is preoccupied with female things. Mehmetçik taught me to write in Greek characters, teaching me all the sounds that the letters signify, and so I used to write my own Turkish language in Greek letters. There used to be many others who did this, but I don’t know if there are any left. I have heard that it is still done on the island of Rhodes. After the wars were all finished, Ghazi Mustafa Kemal Atatürk Pasha made everyone learn to write in the Roman letters used by the Franks, and so now no one can read what was written in the old Ottoman script, and no one can read what was written in Greek script either, except for a few people like me, and then only if the language is Turkish and not Greek. Mustafa Kemal also made us take second names, and so obviously I took the surname Karatavuk, so now I am Abdul Karatavuk Efendi, and I am “Efendi” because I can write, and this has brought me great honour, which is a consolation.

This new way of writing, with Frankish letters, is a good one. I can write knowing that I will be understood. Not all writing, however, is done so that other people may understand. If I write in Greek letters, as I used
to, then it amounts to a very good code that only I can read, and the only other people who will ever understand it will be those who will take the trouble to work it all out with great sweat and labour. The reason to write like that would be if I had things to say that I did not wish to become common knowledge. As it is, I wish only the fine things I have done to be remembered, and these are things that I can tell to my sons by word of mouth, and to my friends in the coffeehouses, and I would write them in the new Roman letters so that I will be remembered for them.

I have heard that there is a type of Christian who goes to their priest and tells him all the bad things that they have done, and then the priest forgives them on God’s behalf, because it is said that Jesus Son of Mary gave his disciples the power to forgive sins. I don’t know anything about this, but I do know that if there is someone to whom you can tell the bad things, then it takes the burden from your shoulders, if only for a little time. I have only paper to tell these things to, and paper has no power of forgiveness.

Fortunately, I have had long years of practice in writing with my left hand, which used to be awkward and clumsy, but now it is so easy that I would only cease if the price of lamp-oil became too great. I have become the town’s letter-writer, and so I always have work, and I sometimes write to make myself feel better about the things that I experienced, because it is better to confide to a piece of paper than not to confide at all and to feel the dishonourable things eating at your guts like a rat in the night. I have dishonourable things to remember from the years when I was at war.

Here are the things that I would like to tell Mehmetçik if I knew where he was. I am sorry that you were not allowed to fight for the empire like an honourable soldier, and although it was a jihad I think that those who wanted to fight for the Sultan should have been trusted. There were Arabs at Çanakkale who were Muslims but did not fight, and were traitors to the empire, and ran away. Also the Franks had Muslim soldiers from India who fought very fiercely for them, and did not believe it was a jihad. Therefore this proves that to exclude Christians from the army was beside the point.

I am sorry that you were taken away and used like a slave in the labour battalions, because they should have used convicts, and not men who wanted to be soldiers. I am sorry that in this way you were made to lose your allegiance, and become an outlaw. I am also sorry that all the Christians have gone, because many of us were comforted by the presence of
the icon of Mary Mother of Jesus, and because the Christians were merrier than us. It is fortunate that the new Muslims from Crete brought some of their high spirits with them, but unfortunately we have too many sanctimonious old men here who are always telling us that to enjoy ourselves is a sin, and so we spend too much of our lives sitting grimly and waiting for death, because it is only after death that we will be allowed to have a good time.

I have written many of the things that I would have told Mehmetçik after the wars were over, and many of the things that I would have told him if not for the intervention of fate and my father wounding me. I wrote them whilst imagining that I was with Mehmetçik in the rocks, before my father interrupted us with his rifle. The papers will be found after my death no doubt, and then who knows what will happen to them? I originally began it like this:

My dear and well-loved friend who has long gone from me, when you came back after all the wars, I had been sure that I would never see you again. Your family had left for wherever they were sent, and your house was occupied by those who came from Crete. These people slowly became like us, and now they are Turks. They have learned Turkish, especially the children, but sometimes they still use the Greek language, and they gather snails and make them into dishes with tomatoes and onions and rice, and they have beautiful songs and a kind of dance which is very popular with us at feasts when we ask them to dance for us. My dear Mehmetçik, you would not be bitter if you saw them in your old house, because they are good people and your house is as happy as it was before, and no doubt the old Cretan people in it long for their old home as much as you must long for yours. I know what it is to long for home, because I was at war for eight years and lost my youth and much of my decency when I should have been at home making pots and making sons, and when I came home everything was changed. Who knows? One day it all might change back again, and your people will be back with us, and our people with yours. In the meantime, I remember you with a smile, and hope that you also remember us.

I smile about the time when I last saw you, when you told me that Sadettin had become the Black Wolf, and you were the Red Wolf. I couldn’t at first believe it when I heard such a familiar sound of robins coming from beyond the town, up the hill where the Dog lived among the tombs. I thought, “That music sounds just like Mehmetçik’s bird-whistle,” and I began to think of the days of our childhood when we were friends. And then I thought, “That music is going on a long time, and is not completely like a bird.” I often listened to birds when I was at war, because when the battle goes quiet, and you are perhaps behind the lines in the reserve area, perhaps in a patch of woodland, you often hear the songs of the birds loudly and clearly, because they are saying to each other, “When these people have gone, this land will be ours again,” and I remember when the long battle against the Franks was over, and we moved into their trenches, and the guns were silent at last, all you could hear was the song of birds, and at night we heard the nightingales and bulbuls, just as we do here in this town.