CHAPTER 2

I Am Karatavuk

About one year after the Christians were taken away and the Muslim Cretans brought to take their place, I was looking for a small knife that I needed to cut some cord, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. Then I remembered that when I was in the army I used to have one in my knapsack, and it occurred to me that it might still be in there.

I found my knapsack and put my hand in it, and rummaged about, but didn’t find anything, and so I turned it upside down just in case anything would fall out. What fell out on to the floor wasn’t a knife but a little leather purse, all old and dry.

I picked it up and looked inside, and I beheld the little handful of soil that my friend Mehmetçik had given me to take away to war, when we were about fourteen years old. I remembered him saying that when I came back from the war I should replace it in the same spot from where it had been taken, and I remembered saying to him that the soil of this place has a special and particular aroma.

I put the purse to my nose and smelled it, but now it smelled of the leather of the purse. I went to the house of Abdulhamid Hodja where his widow Ayse still lived, and I found the place by the wall where the soil had come from. I had a moment of hesitation because it occurred to me that I might have to go to war again, but then I tipped it back on to the ground in order to honour Mehmetçik’s suggestion. I looked at the little heap of soil for a moment, and then I rubbed it back into the earth with my feet, until it was properly mixed in again. Then I knelt down and smelled the earth—and no doubt anyone who saw me might have thought I was making a salat—and it smelled once more like the proper soil of this place.

I had some sad thoughts about my friend Mehmetçik, and I thought it was almost certain that he had not been able to take any of the soil of this place with him. I wished I knew where he was so that I could send it to him.

Later on I was talking to the father of the family that had moved into Mehmetçik’s house, and he was one of the few Cretans who could speak Turkish. I told him about this business of the soil, and his face lit up, and he went into his house and came back out with a little purse, and he loosened the drawstring and showed me inside, and he said, “Soil of Crete.”

I said to him, “Sooner or later it starts to smell of leather,” and he just shrugged and said, “Everything changes.”

Soon after, he told me that he had put the soil into a pot where he was growing basil with seed that he had brought from home, so that the soil could make a true Cretan plant. It came up very strongly, and from that plant he took the seeds, and he took the seeds from the new plants that he grew, and he gave seeds away to other people, and in this way all of us here now have Cretan basil on our window sills, to flavour our food and keep away the flies.

I never did find the knife.