CHAPTER 70

Tamara Receives a Visitor

It was the summer of 1916, one year after the deportation of Levon and the other Armenians, and just a few months after the Frankish Allies had crept off the Gallipoli peninsula in the dark of a winter’s night. Karatavuk was still there with the occupying garrison, but Mehmetçik had escaped his labour battalion to live precariously as an outlaw in the uncompromising Taurus Mountains. Levon and his wife were dead of exhaustion, cruelty, starvation and despair somewhere on the ossuarial road to Syria Deserta.

Little remained the same. In Eskibahçe the work was being done by children, the women, the very old, and the few men who had returned crippled from active service. All the townsfolk were half starved, and most of them were desperate. The stock was regularly rustled by gangs of deserters, and there were those who stole from their neighbours’ fields, even though the punishment for being caught was absolute and condign. There were no camels left, no horses except those of Rustem Bey, and but few goats and donkeys.

The town evidenced its economic and moral decline in its very appearance. The dilapidated streets remained uncleaned, broken shutters hung at drunken angles from torn window frames, and the cheerful pastel paintwork of walls and woodwork had long since begun to peel away. The stray dogs, no longer benignly supplied with crusts of bread by the kind-hearted, died in the streets and rotted there, filling the air with the same pervasive, sweet and rich stink of death that had supplanted the scent of satisfied earth and wild flowers all across the disfigured fields of Europe. The row of idiots who used to sit on the walls together, laughing and gesticulating, now sat there in rags, all the pleasures and disinhibitions of insanity done away with by the dejection of hunger. They had ceased to be entertainment either to themselves or to anyone else.

The few shops that opened had almost nothing to sell, and no one had any money with which to buy. Some of the ones that used to belong to the Armenians had been looted. The wonderfully varied stalls that used to make the meydan almost impassable were sagging on their trestles, unused and unmaintained. Stamos the Birdman was not to be found there, since nowadays his pretty little finches were barbecued on sticks and eaten, bones and all, by himself and his family. Neither was Mehmet the Tinsman ever there, because his tin was no longer arriving from the far and exotic land of Cornwall, and in any case, the pots were wearing out more slowly for lack of the wherewithal to cook in them. Neither was Ali the Broken-Nosed there, because he had no goats’ milk to sell now that most of his flock had been taken by brigands. Ali the Snowbringer, still living with his wife and four children in the hollowed trunk of a mighty tree, did not pass through the meydan with his dripping sacks, because no one had a few paras to spare for ice. He counted himself lucky that he and his donkey had been out on the mountainsides when the gendarmerie had arrived to requisition the pack animals. Equally lucky was Gerasimos, now happily married to Drosoula. He had been out in his boat when the gendarmerie had arrived to take away the young Christian men for the labour battalions, and these days he slept down on the beach, near his boat, in case they returned, and on good days he brought fish to the town. He was one of the very few who was richer than he had been before, not least because there was no longer anything to buy, and so his coins merely accumulated. No strong men came to the town any more, with their cannons and striped pantaloons, and neither were there acrobats and jugglers. Abdulhamid Hodja was no longer seen there, because he was already beginning to die, and only the two gendarmes continued to play backgammon in the shade of the planes.

Only a few things remained the same. Leonidas, thinner and more cantankerous, continued to write his subversive political tracts at night, by the stinking wick of an olive-oil lamp, and persisted in sending his writings to his few accomplices in Smyrna, undeterred by the undoubtedly inconvenient truth that it was only mainland Greeks who really wanted Greece to expand into Anatolia and fulfil “The Great Idea.” Drosoula’s father, Constantinos, jaundiced and delirious, still drank away the agony of toothache, and as usual incurred the obloquy of all. The Blasphemer, now skeletal and more mad, still cursed God and His representatives in the streets. The Dog still lived obliviously among the Lycian tombs, occasionally wearing the remains of Selim’s telltale shoes, and apparently thriving on locusts. Iskander still made pots and birdwhistles, and Mohammed the Leech Gatherer still stood heron-like in the pool of the Letoun, because leeches were still required by the doctors of Smyrna. Leyla Hanim still sang to her oud at night, sending sad lullabies in misremembered Greek out over the roofs. She had turned temporarily into a housewife, since most of the male servants had gone to war, and she had taken to improvising meals out of the few things that Rustem Bey shot on the mountainsides, or that she could find in the market. Nowadays she went out like any other woman, to look for wild greens, and it is true to say that the change had done her good. Sometimes she looked at the dried skin of her hands, with their ingrained dirt and scuffed nails, and even felt a little proud of herself. She no longer had that enjoyable but nonetheless guilty sense of wasting her life on frippery and idleness, and she most usually glowed with good humour in spite of the many unwonted difficulties of life in wartime. She still employed Philothei, and together they went out frequently to gather wild food, accompanied by a sleepy and very elderly retainer, who had been armed with a musket for their protection. Unlike Drosoula, Philothei had been unable to marry on time, and now she waited for Ibrahim to come back from the front. There had been no news for months, and if it had not been for the cheerful company of Leyla Hanim, she would have suffered a great deal more from the constant fear and worry. At night in Eskibahçe the bulbuls and nightingales still kept light sleepers irritably awake.

It was on one such bird-struck night that a figure slipped out of one of the richer homes at the top corner of the town, and vanished into the darkened alleyways. He was wrapped so heavily in a black cloak as to be almost invisible, and it was obvious that he was being deliberately furtive. He stood still for a while, accustoming his eyes to the darkness, and then he set off. He stumbled occasionally against rocks that protruded through the cobbles, and was brushed by the sweet-smelling leaves of the figs that grew from the interstice of wall and road. Even in that darkness, it was clear that he knew where he was going, and there was something in his manner that betrayed great purpose.

He passed the former houses of the few Armenians, and the mosque, with its two minarets and silenced fountain. He passed through the meydan, and the Church of St. Nicholas, with its icon by St. Luke of the Virgin Sweet-and-Loving. He passed the lower church, where there was still an owl that perched on the beams, and where the ossuary was that contained the wine-washed bones of the Christian dead. He came to where the street turned a corner sharply, and ended with a final, isolated house, flat-roofed, whose façade was draped with climbing roses, and whose windows were latticed in order to conceal the dark interior.

He rapped on the heavy door, in which there was a tiny wrought-iron grille at head height. Suddenly it squeaked open, and, drifting out, came a heavy scent of smoke and ambergris, olibanum, oil of lemon, musk and patchouli. A huge pair of doleful grey eyes, heavily lined with kohl, looked out. “Welcome,” said a low voice. “What do you want?”

The stranger put one hand on the door to steady himself, tried to ignore the frightening thumping of his heart, and looked beseechingly into the sympathetic grey eyes. “I have come to see Tamara Hanim,” he whispered. The prostitute sighed, and pulled back the latches to let him in.

He had never been in the place before, and at first he found the dark pink light almost too dim, even though he had just come in out of utter darkness. He was in a room that in its respectable days would have been the selamlik, but which was now divided into smaller chambers by large kilims hanging across it on cords. In each chamber there were cushions and in some there were divans. In most of the chambers he could just discern the figures of thinly clad women, lolling, their faces unnaturally white, their lips painted thickly in scarlet, and their eyes kohled into huge circles. Some of them beckoned to him with poorly simulated salacity, saying, “Come to me, my lion, to me, to me. Let it be me, my lion,” and others, their eyes large and empty, sucked deeply on waterpipes and scarcely registered his presence at all, blowing clouds of smoke out of their mouths with a pleasure that seemed both profound and melancholy. “I had no idea there were so many here,” said the man to the doorkeeper, who was still accompanying him. “Well, you haven’t been here before,” came the soft answer. In the background were the sounds of a woman in the agony of childbirth, of another woman sobbing, and of a man approaching a noisy climax. To the visitor’s ear the frenzied voice sounded somewhat like that of Ali the Broken-Nosed.

Tamara Hanim was in what used to be the haremlik, in a similar small chamber composed of hanging carpets, cushions and a divan. She was simply sitting motionless and timeless on the divan, with her hands between her knees, and her head bowed. He recognised something about her immediately, her outline, or perhaps her atmosphere, even though he had not seen her now for many years. “Tamara,” he said, and the doorkeeper silently left.

She looked up, unbelieving. He loosened his cloak and folded it on his arm before laying it on the floor by one of the cushions. She saw the sash with the familiar silver-handled pistols and the yataghan, and she raised her eyes to see his face. He was thinner and older, but he had scarcely changed, except that his eyes had in them less pride and more kindness than before. “It’s you,” she said at last.

“It’s me.”

“Why?”

He gestured confusedly. “I had to come.” He tapped his chest with the knuckles of his right hand, and said, “It was in here. Like a voice. I have ignored it for years, but finally I have listened. And so, as you see, I have come at last.”

Tamara began to weep silently, and tears rolled down her cheeks, splashing on to the hands that were now trembling in her lap. “You’ve come,” she said.

He gestured again. “I had to.”

“Sit down if you like,” she said, and he sat down at the other end of the divan. She put her head into her hands and wept more noisily now, her shoulders heaving with sobs, uttering little cries that reminded him of a whipped puppy. He could think of nothing to do or say, and he watched in anxious alarm as the tears emerged from between her fingers and ran down the backs of her hands.

After a long interval she stopped, removed her hands from her face, and smiled wanly. “I am sorry,” she said, “these are women’s tears.”

“They are not just a woman’s tears,” he said quietly. “These tears are yours.”

“I am very rich when it comes to tears,” she said, but without any bitterness in her voice. “It doesn’t matter how many I spend, I always have more and I never run out. If I had as many coins as I have tears, I could buy the world from the Devil.”

“I am sorry for your tears,” he said soberly.

She dabbed her eyes and looked at him. “Are you well?”

“I am very well,” he replied.

“You seem thinner.”

“I have a lot of exercise. I spend a great deal of time out hunting, for days at a time. Otherwise it is hard to eat.”

“Even for you?”

“Yes, even for us.”

“Do you still have a tame partridge to tempt the other birds, so that you can shoot them?”

“Yes, I still have a partridge.”

“I liked the partridge. It was very pretty, and sometimes it had funny ways. Some men call their wives and daughters ‘My little partridge.’ Did you know that?”

He nodded. “I once heard my father say it to my mother, when he thought that there was no one there. I was quite surprised. He was a hard man, as far as I knew.” There was a long pause, and then he asked, “Do you have enough to eat?”

She looked him straight in the eye, and shook her head. “No. We are all starving. There are no young men any more, and the old ones are too poor. Some of us use opium to take away the cramps and the faintness.”

“Is that what this heavy smell is?”

She nodded. “Yes.”

“But you don’t use it?”

“They do it mostly to forget, but I don’t want to forget. I want to remember. And in any case it either kills them or sends them mad.” She smiled wryly and continued, almost to herself alone, as if she were merely voicing a repetitive old thought, “But that’s how you leave this place anyway, I suppose. You go to the asylum or you go to the earth. I might as well smoke opium, but I just don’t. I am going to the earth in my own time, and I am sure that it won’t be long.”

“I can bring you food,” he said.

“Why should you do that.?”

“I have the desire, that’s all.”

“I would like food,” she said.

“I heard that you were all starving,” he said. “I brought you this.” He reached into his sash and brought out a package wrapped in a cloth. He handed it to her and she took it. “I’ll eat it when you’ve gone,” she said.

“It has a lot of good things in it,” he said.

“May giving it do you as much good as I will get from receiving it,” she said, very formally. After another long pause she said, “I sometimes hear news of you from Leyla Hanim.”

“She tells me news of you,” said Rustem Bey. “She told me you were ill.”

“The respectable women won’t sit with her in the hamam, and so she comes and sits with us,” said Tamara scornfully. “I hate those women. If I was a man who was married to one of them, I would wade out into the sea and drown. They are as sour as wild cherries and as dry as leather, and their hearts and bellies are full of grave dust and ground glass. They say that Leyla Hanim is just a concubine, and so they don’t sit with her.”

“I have heard Leyla Hanim’s complaints,” he said.

Tamara wanted to reply “And so have we heard them,” but she restrained herself for Leyla’s sake.

“I have heard from Leyla Hanim that you have had children,” he said, with obvious pain in his voice.

“They are all dead. I had four, but now they’re dead. I buried them under the stones, among the tombs where the Dog lives, and near the tomb of the saint. I don’t think I’ll have any more.” She fell silent, and then she demanded suddenly, “Why haven’t you divorced me?”

He was much taken aback by the directness of the question, and he hung his head to ponder it. At last he replied, “It was for the sake of something that I can’t explain. Well, perhaps I can explain it, but to most people the explanation would make very little sense.” He glanced up. “I don’t talk to anyone about these things. I am not practised in this kind of talk.”

“I am glad to see you,” she replied. “Try to explain it anyway.”

“Do you remember when I discovered you with Selim, and I killed him, and I dragged you out to be stoned, and the people started to stone you?”

“You dragged me out by the hair, and turned your back whilst they attacked me in the meydan, and started to kill me. Your hands had been bleeding, and you had Selim’s blood on you, and your blood and his blood were on me, and I was thinking when they attacked me that your blood and his blood were mixing up with mine.”

“I did it because I thought it was right, and for the sake of my honour. I not only thought it was right, but I knew it. It says in the Holy Koran that adulterers shall be stoned. It’s the custom, and it’s the sharia. I knew it was right. I did it because there was no question.

“But even then the certainty was too uncertain. When I had my back to you, it was only shame that prevented me from rising up and whipping away those vermin that surrounded you. I was wishing that I had not dragged you out. The longing for justice and vengeance became less than my longing to save you and take you away. The revenge tasted like copper and vinegar in my mouth, and all the sweetness and satisfaction of it vanished away. It was only the shame that stopped me … and then when Abdulhamid Hodja arrived and saved you, my heart was singing with relief even at the same time as I should have killed him for taking away my just revenge. If I had killed him, no one would have found me guilty.”

“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.