CHAPTER 6
Mustafa Kemal (2)
Far away from Eskibahçe, past the Dodekanissos and across the Aegean Sea, Mustafa is growing up. He has been named after an uncle that his father killed by accident whilst an infant. He has a Negro nurse whose ancestors used to be slaves, and who sings to him.
The family of the child moves to Mount Olympus, where his father Ali Riza Efendi is a customs officer on the new border with Greece, and where he will have the brainwave of starting a timber business.
Mustafa’s mother Zübeyde wants the boy to become a hafiz, and learn the Koran by heart. She thinks that he must make the pilgrimage to Mecca and become a hodja. She wants him to go to a religious school, but Ali Riza, who is a progressive and a liberal, wants to enrol him in the modern school of Şemsi Efendi. Zübeyde wins, and he is enrolled at the religious school, where he arrives in procession to the cheers of his new schoolmates, bearing a golden stick, and attired in white and gold.
Here the first seeds will be planted of his lifelong aversion to religion in general and Islam in particular. He thinks it stupid and pointless to learn Arabic. The classes are obliged to sit on the floor, cross-legged, but one day he stands up. “Sit down,” says the teacher.
“I am cramped up,” explains Mustafa.
“Sit down at once,” orders the teacher.
“No,” says Mustafa. “Infidel children don’t have to sit like this. Why should we?”
“You dare disobey me?”
“Yes, I dare disobey you.”
The teacher and Mustafa glare at each other for a moment, and then the whole class rises to its feet, and says, “We all dare disobey you.”
Shortly afterwards, perhaps at the school’s behest, Ali Riza removes his son, and enrols him in the modern and liberal establishment of Şemsi Efendi.
Now, however, Ali Riza’s timber business fails because Greek brigands, who are liberating the region by means of blackmail and extortion, menace his workers and demand protection money from him, under the threat of burning his timber. Ali Riza gives them the money, and they burn his timber anyway. They ambush his wagons on the way to the coast, and attack his men in the forest. The commander of the gendarmerie, who is supposed to be controlling the outlaws, advises him to quit. He goes into the salt trade, fails, takes to drink, develops tuberculosis, and within three years is dead.
Zübeyde moves the family out into the country, and Mustafa and his sister happily run wild on his uncle’s farm, chasing the crows from the bean crops, fighting each other, waxing strong on good food from the rusty earth, among villages where storks nest on roofs and bullocks graze the pastures.
Mustafa grows dissatisfied with his unengaged mind. To his mother he says, “I want to go to school,” and to his uncle Hussein he says, “I want to go to school.”
Surprisingly, they send him to the school of the local Greek priest, but he finds the language detestable and the Christian boys arrogant and tribal. He is sent to the school of the imam, but he finds the religiosity repulsive. A local woman offers her services, but he refuses to be educated by a female. He is given a tutor, but denounces him as ignorant. He is sent back to Salonika to attend the school of Kaymak Hafiz, but here he is severely beaten for fighting, and refuses to go back.
The boy yearns to go to the Military Secondary School where one can wear proper modern clothes instead of the embarrassingly old-fashioned shalwar and sash. He has a little friend called Ahmed, who looks wonderful in the military uniform. Zübeyde forbids him to go because she foresees nothing but death or perpetual absence in a military career, and in any case, if he is not to be a holy man, he could at least be a merchant and bring in some money.
Mustafa conspires with Ahmed’s father, Kadri, a major in the army, and he sits the entrance exam without his mother’s knowledge. He passes, and presents his mother with a fait accompli. She refuses to let him go to the school, which requires her written consent, and Mustafa tells her, “When I was born my father gave me a sword and hung it up on the wall above my bed. Obviously he wanted me to be a soldier. I was born a soldier, and I shall die as one.”
Zübeyde is half persuaded and half dubious, but one night she is visited by a marvellous veridical dream, wherein she sees Mustafa perched on a golden tray at the very summit of a minaret. She runs to him, only to hear a voice telling her, “If you permit your son to go to the military school, he will remain up here on high. If you do not, he shall be cast down.” One is tempted to imagine Mustafa whispering into the ears of the righteous matriarch as she slumbers.
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.