CHAPTER 85

I Am Georgio P. Theodorou

Yes, it’s me again, Georgio P. Theodorou, at your service, merchant and philanthropist. Should you have forgotten, it was me who erected the pump house at the entrance of Eskibahçe, and it was me who regaled you with a somewhat overlong description of the town, and related to you the events surrounding the humiliation of Daskalos Leonidas, when he was made to wear a pack saddle. I wonder what happened to him; in fact, I wonder if he is even still alive. He certainly got what he was agitating for, and no doubt he was jumping up and down with glee when the Old Greeks turned up. I don’t suppose he’s so gleeful now, though, now that the Old Greeks have buggered off and left us all neck-deep in the proverbial excrement, with vengeful Turks beating down our doors.

You catch me at an awkward moment, my friends, and you may find my thoughts a little disconnected, but if you find me a little incoherent, if you detect that my discourse has come adrift, you will surely find me blameless, for I am at this very moment sinking slowly through the oily waters down to the harbour floor of this very lovely city that was Smyrna. I am, so to speak, neck-deep in the proverbial excrement only in a most metaphorical sense, as I am in reality considerably over my head in brine.

When you are not a strong swimmer, my friends, you are even less of a strong swimmer when fully dressed. This is a law of nature that no one can deny. I have been proving it empirically for the last hour or so. Sooner or later one has to give up the struggle, and the weight of one’s sodden garments, combined with the extreme exhaustion brought about by panic and physical exertion, causes one to make peace with death at last, and then begins the long, slow descent to the murky realm of crabs and flatfish, seaweed, abandoned anchors encrusted with mussels and limpets, and inexplicable offcuts of thick rope and rusty hawser.

I can’t convey to you the relief, the sheer pleasure, of abandoning the impossible struggle, the moment when one realises that it is less horrifying to die than to continue to struggle for life. It is nice, so very nice, to breathe the cold water deeply in and let it fill the lungs. One feels comfortable and clean, and a curious wavering solidity establishes itself in the head. I have just seen a large fish, and for the first time in my life have felt a pang of envy for the fishy lot.

Not far off I can see someone else sinking to the bottom, but her skirts have floated up around her face, and I wonder if she is concerned about dying in a state of immodesty, with her white camiknickers exposed for every drowning man to see. I would say that she has excellent legs, but I don’t recognise them, so they probably don’t belong to any of my little favourites.

All the canals of my nose have filled up, but my ears are hurting, and above me I can see the hull of a boat, and I have already become accustomed to the taste of salt. There are knocking noises reverberating through the water, and the sound of engines. They must be from the Allied warships that are watching with principled neutrality and cautious apathy as we struggle and drown. At first the water was stinging the burns on my face and hands, but now they are quite cool, I am pleased to say, and I can hardly feel the wound where the Turkish soldier shot me as I tried to swim away from the jetty.

I was very bitter about this death until I started to die it properly. I had envisaged a more ideal death, such as being shot at the age of ninety by a jealous lover of twenty-one whilst in the arms of her nineteen-year-old rival. Better still, and thoroughly ideal indeed, would have been never to die at all. I loved my life. Who could have had a more wonderful time? And the only price to pay for it was the occasional trip to the clapquack, and the occasional worry about rates of interest and whether or not the raisin harvest was any good. I had such a wonderful life that I was even inspired by my serene mood to commit unwise acts of philanthropy, such as erecting the little pump house at Eskibahçe, and not collecting debts from my friends.

What bothers me is that I am dying (albeit quite pleasantly) because of the most gigantic fuck-up, brought about by domnoddies, nincompoops and ninnyhammers of the first order who happened to find themselves in charge of fucking everything up. Excuse the strong expression of my feelings. I would not normally use strong language in the presence of ladies, but as a drowning man who has lost everything because of the antics of addlepates, I feel entitled to express myself picturesquely. (I have just been cursorily examined in the face by a harbour mullet, and it has swum away, presumably unoffended.)

Let’s get one thing clear; I am not and never have been a dumbbunny. If I were a dumbbunny, I would not have made my substantial fortune, would not have paid almost no taxes, and I would not have made good connections at every possible level of society. Nothing, my friends, is as innocent as the pursuit of cash, the avaricious but honest exchange of goods and labour. I am a capitalist, and no good capitalist can afford to be a dunderpate. I have made money out of every commodity, and even out of thin air, and I have spent it liberally on both necessities and frivolities. I have generated so much employment that when I get to Heaven God should give me a medal and my own private whorehouse. Without me many a fig grower would be poorer, and many a little tart less well dressed.

I will tell you who the rattlebrains are, beginning at the top. Actually, there is not a top, because there are so many contestants for the lackwit championships that all come in equal first. Before nominations begin, let me make it quite clear that I am not an Old Greek. I don’t come from Athens or any other poky little hole like that, where they don’t even speak Greek properly. I am a rayah Greek, a twenty-four-carat Asia Minor Greek, and my family have thrived here in Smyrna for generations, and I will hobnob with any old Turk or Jew or Armenian or Levantine as long as they are inclined to strike a mutually beneficial deal. I make no distinctions of race and religion as long as there’s some lovable cash in it or a good night out at Rosa’s, which I fear has now been burned to the ground in this very conflagration which, from Bella-Vista Street to the Custom House, from the Custom House to Basma-Khane, and northwards to Haji-Pasha and Massurdi, is reducing the prettiest little playground in the Levant to a heap of ash composed in equal parts of bones and timber.

Here are some of the lackbrains in random order: the Greek people for electing to office a romantic, His Romantic Adventureness, Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos, who honestly thought he could annex the nicest half of Turkey and tack it on to Old Greece, even though no one had given him permission, even though most people here are Turks, and no one with any sense pisses off the Turks, because the one thing the Turks are very good at is overreacting when pissed off. Clodpoll number two, the Greek people again for being just as romantic as the aforementioned romantic, for thinking that just because the civilisation here used to be approximately Greek in the distant past and is now partially Greek, it should be forced into political union with Old Greece. Timbernonce number three, the aforementioned elected romantic, Eleftherios Venizelos, Prime Minister of Greece, prodigiously overendowed with Big Ideas.

Talking of which, what about the positive plague of firebrand priests we’ve been inundated with? All these men of God who want us to go out and kill Turks in the name of Holy this and Holy that? What about all this talk of rebuilding Byzantium? What on earth for? And some of them even talking with all seriousness about the imminent return of the Marble Emperor! What are we supposed to make of it when Archbishop Chrysostomos himself puts on his mitre and blesses our troops when they land at the quay, and strikes at Turkish gendarmes with his pastoral staff, and encourages his entourage to spit on them? I tell you what it looked like to everybody, without a shadow of a doubt. It looked not like an Allied occupation but another stupid Crusade, several hundred years too late. I admit I am sorry about what happened to Chrysostomos when the Turks took the town back. I don’t think he deserved to be torn up by a mob, any more than I deserve to drown, but he was still a troublemaker and a Holy Fool, and I am only sorry that becoming a martyr will make people forget what a troublemaker he was.

And look what the Old Greeks did to the chief of police when they took over! He waited for them in his office so that he could hand over his authority, and they beat him and cut off his ears and gouged out his eyes, and everyone thought it a very fine thing and was pleased when he died that night in hospital, and you can bet that the same people who are horrified about the dismemberment of the archbishop were symmetrically gratified by the ditto of the police chief.

Rabbitbrains number four, all the Allied presidents and prime ministers for thinking it would be a good idea to let the Old Greeks occupy any bit of Turkey, because there’s nothing like an Old Greek for harbouring grudges and grievances. How they nurse them and caress them and murmur endearments to them! An Old Greek nurtures historical hatreds like a botanist does a rare and exotic orchid. When an Old Greek turns senile he forgets everything except a grudge. If they were plants, these antique resentments would overwhelm the entire Levant and turn it into a jungle! And ninety-nine per cent of their most cherished and beloved grudges happen to be against the Turks. Did the British and the French and the Italians honestly think that Greek soldiers were going to be nice to the Turks after the landing?

Biggest fuckwit of all, now I come to think of it, must be that British Prime Minister, the Right Honourable Jobbernowl David Lloyd George, for encouraging the Old Greeks and the plausible Venizelos. I wrote to Lloyd George myself. I didn’t address him as “Dear Fuckwit,” though I should have done. I said “Honoured Sir.” I told him that this region can’t be self-supporting because even though it might be pretty it doesn’t have good land. I told him that all the trade comes from the hinterland, and this Greek occupation has cut us off from it. On top of that you had Greek soldiers and chettas and Bashi-Bazouks causing mayhem in all the rural areas, and on top of that we had Armenian bands and Circassian bands, and Turkish bands, and the net result was that the farmers couldn’t work their land. I said in my letter that this city had been ruined and impoverished, there was no trade any more, I said that the rue Franque was virtually closed down, and that I personally was going to move my money to Alexandria. I didn’t get a reply. I wrote the letter in French. I wonder what language the dead speak.

I nearly forgot King Constantine, coming here and landing at the very spot where the Crusaders landed, instead of landing at the port like a sensible and responsible monarch. And I nearly forgot General Hazianestis, Supreme Commander, rumoured to be mad, and sincerely convinced on one day that his legs were made of sugar, and on another that they were made of glass. This was his reason for not rising when one entered the room, in case they broke. I was once strolling with him along a corridor after a good dinner, and was just thinking about going to Rosa’s, when I was startled by the General, who had just caught sight of himself in a mirror. He sprang to attention and saluted himself, his hand quivering with disciplined admiration. When he had finished, he said to me, as if it were perfectly obvious, “One should always salute the commander-in-chief.” I heard that once he confined himself to barracks for walking on the grass when it was against regulations. Madman or noodle? Who knows? Whoever appointed him must have been both.

Please note that I don’t place our dear High Commissioner, Mr. Stergiadis, very high in my pantheon of nincompoops. The stupidest thing he did was to take on the job in the first place. He should have stayed in Epirus.

I’ll tell you what I liked about Stergiadis; he was bad-tempered and he cultivated the noble art of alienating everybody quite impartially. When the notables invited him to a party, he didn’t go, and neither did he have any parties and invite the notables. That’s what annoyed them more than anything else. In fact, he just went home like everybody else after a day’s work. It didn’t bother me much, because I’d rather have gone to Rosa’s than gossip with bigwigs.

He didn’t take bribes either, and that was deeply annoying. That was the one way he annoyed me, in fact. “How am I supposed to get things done, then?” I asked him, and I can tell you I was genuinely perplexed, and he looked at me as if I were mad and said, “Mr. Theodorou, you will have to go through the proper channels.”

I said, “Proper channels? What proper channels? Round here there have never been any proper channels. I wouldn’t know a proper channel if it came up and spoke to me in the street. I wouldn’t know a proper channel if it introduced itself to me and handed over a calling card!”

He just shrugged and said, “I sincerely hope that you and the proper channels become better acquainted during my period as High Commissioner.”

The other thing that annoyed everyone was that he was so scrupulously fair to the Turks that all the Greeks thought that he was anti-Greek. They thought it outrageous that he set the police on them when they got caught out, innocently and magnanimously inflicting atrocities on Turks. They thought it displayed a lamentable lack of Hellenic ideals, because what they really wanted was to clear the Turks out altogether. To be fair, in 1914 the Turks tried to clear all of us out as well, and God knows how many thousands of rayah Greeks got frogmarched to the interior and never came back. It was probably half a million. So don’t misunderstand me, it isn’t that I think the Old Greeks are worse than the Turks, what irritates me is that they think they’re so much better when really they’re exactly the same. God made them Cain and Abel, and whichever one happens to have the upper hand takes his turn as Cain. Whoever is unfortunate enough to be playing the role of Abel seizes the opportunity to bemoan the barbarism of the other. If I ever get to meet God In Person I shall suggest quite forcefully that He impartially abolish their religions, and then they will be friends for ever.

I went to see Stergiadis about something once, to complain about the murder of one of my Turkish customers who happened to owe me a lot of money, and by that time we were almost friends, and he confided something to me. He said that the Allies were getting very twitchy, and thinking that they had made a terrible mistake. There was a British general called Milne who had laid out the borders that would limit the occupation, but of course it was ignored. And then the British started getting inundated with reports from all quarters, about the antics of the Greek chettas and the Old Greek troops, and they started to put pressure on Prime Minister Venizelos, and he put pressure on Stergiadis, who tried to put pressure on the military, and didn’t get anywhere at all. The fact is that the military were out of control and more often than not the high command didn’t even know what the soldiers were up to. It was driving Stergiadis crazy. “Mr. Theodorou,” he said to me very gloomily, “the sad thing is that I have to listen to so many people talking about our civilising mission.” He didn’t say any more, he just left it at that.

As for me, I knew it was going to be a fiasco from the first day. Like everyone else I came down to the harbour when the evzones landed, and for a while I even felt like cheering and waving a Greek flag. It was certainly an exciting occasion, for a few minutes. Then some idiot fired a shot, and the soldiers opened fire on the Turkish barracks, and it went downhill from there. Excitement is only a good thing within certain limits, I would say, and that was a little too exciting. I prefer the more innocent excitements of the bawdy house. I think they killed three hundred Turks on the first day, and what’s worse, the rayah rabble started looting the Turkish shops and stamping on fezzes and tearing off veils and committing the usual unimaginative horrors and bestialities. Thank God that Stergiadis turned up and re-established order. Even so, the soldiers and the rayah rabble continued to engage themselves in their exhilarating spree of self-congratulation, with their stupid flag-waving processions, and their ubiquitous portraits of Venizelos, and their thoughtless patriotic songs. There was one in particular that was going through my mind just now when I began drowning, and it was annoying me beyond measure, because when you are dying the last thing you want is a stupid song going round and round in your mind like the gibbering of a lunatic. Actually, I wish I had never mentioned it. The damn thing’s coming back.

You know what annoyed me most about this song? It was the line about the fez disappearing. I watched a jaunty company of evzones marching up the rue Franque, and they were singing their hearts out, and it was this very song they were singing, and I thought to myself, “And what exactly are those evzones wearing on their heads? Ladies and gentlemen, the headgear of an evzone is unmistakably a fez.” Of course the result of all this jubilant and thoroughly public crusading imperialism was that every self-respecting Turk hid his money, got his gun out of the cupboard and disappeared. The wind got sown, and here we all are, grimly reaping the whirlwind.

When Stergiadis turned up, that was all very well, and it was good to have Smyrna at peace again. But I am a merchant; I had to travel a great deal throughout the vilayet of Aidin and the sanjak of Smyrna. Things got desperate for me almost immediately. We had bandits coming over from Mytilene, whole villages wiped out in reprisal for the murder of one gendarme, a massacre at Menemem, where the rayahs painted white crosses on their doors so that the troops would know which households to exterminate, officials going round forcing Turks to sign documents stating their delight about being occupied, soldiers taking away hunting rifles that were held under legitimate licence, the whole population of Karatepe getting locked into the mosque and burned to ash, soldiers parading about with fezzes and kalpaks on their bayonets, stealing everything, including the dirty handkerchiefs of Turks, gathering menfolk into mosques on the pretext of delivering a proclamation, whilst their valiant comrades raided their homes and molested the women, setting fire to houses to burn out snipers, imposing frequent roll-calls that made agriculture impossible, setting fire to the Turkish quarter at Aidin and putting machine guns in the minarets so that they could get anyone who preferred not to burn, the 8th Cretan Regiment embellishing daily its reputation for hooliganism, a tidy massacre at Ahmetli, rayah civilians being armed with weapons taken from Turkish barracks, Turks being charged fifteen piastres for the privilege of being compelled to buy rosettes and shout “Zito Venizelos!,” looting the office of the Italian Major Carrossi, who happened to be the Allied inspector of the gendarmerie, the usual impromptu Caesarean operations upon pregnant women, the usual amputation of body parts, the breaking of teeth, the ransoming of horses, the use of villagers as draught animals, the usual violation and defenestration of girls, the entertaining of idle troops by letting them take potshots at muezzins calling the azan from the balconies of minarets, the beating up of Turks who failed to go into mourning on the solemn occasion of King Alexander’s death from a monkey bite, the shooting of tradesmen who insisted upon piastres instead of drachmas, the knocking down of a man and the putting of a foot in his crotch in order to expedite the removal of his boots, the burning of every town and village on the army’s precipitate and humiliating retreat … Oh, indeed, an infinity of errors great and small, constituting the bitter reality of the glittering redemption of Constantinople and the Asia Minor Greeks from the cruel and barbarous infidel Turk.

And then the triumphant and vengeful troops of Mustafa Kemal turn up, hordes of chettas mixed up with smart regulars, and they crucify priests or garrotte them with knotted cord, and they violate and defenestrate even the sweetest virgins, and they pour petrol on to those trying to flee in boats, and they seal off the Armenian quarter in the interests of their own entertainment, and then the city goes up in flames, and the identical catalogue of atrocity happens all over again, but now it’s Turkey for the Turks, and it’s let’s redeem Asia Minor from the cruel and barbarous infidel Greek. Well, what can I do, except doff my hat, make my salaams, and say, “Gentlemen, fuck you all!”? I am at the bottom of the harbour, my house and warehouses and Rosa’s whorehouse have all burned down, my money is in Alexandria, and there is a wall of flame two miles long and a throng of desperate humanity on the waterfront, waiting for the Allies to bring their ships in and rescue them, which they gallantly show no sign of doing.

I will tell you the one cruelty that offended me the most, since time is short, even though time seems to stretch to infinity when one is drowning, and I am indeed scarcely aware of my body now that I am bumping gently up and down on the seabed.

I had a client in Yeniçiftlik. His name was Kara Osman Zade Halid Pasha. He was a very important man, a man with dignity, and, if this means anything to you at all, the very best kind of Turk. It was a long journey, but I had to go out to see him on account of a shipment of figs. I found him dead at his house, with thirty-seven bayonet wounds, and without his nose, lips, eyes and ears. These items were removed from his head, which was in turn removed from his body. I had known Kara Osman for a very long time, but even I had trouble recognising him. I was only sure it was him when I saw that he was wearing his favourite silk shirt.

I looked down on his remains for some time, and I couldn’t help the tears coming to my eyes, even though I did manage to conquer the urge to be sick. I did in fact owe him some money, but despite this I felt no relief about his death whatsoever. I was stunned by it, and I didn’t understand it. I went to an officer nearby, and I could hardly speak, but I said to him, “You’ve killed Kara Osman Pasha.”

This officer had a cutesy military moustache to which I took an instant and unconquerable dislike. He looked at me and raised an eyebrow, and in response to my observation replied coolly, “So?”

I felt rage coming over me, and I couldn’t restrain myself. I said, “You’re a cunt.” And then I turned and walked away, back to my horse, and I didn’t see his reaction at all. I was expecting to get a bullet in my back, but nothing happened, and now, when I think of it, I realise it was the bravest thing I ever did.

I wish I’d had the sense to scamper off to Eskibahçe. I could have had a little holiday in the Italian sector. I could have built a neoclassical archway to go with the pump house. I could have repaved the meydan. I could have paid for a clapquack to look after the girls in the cathouse. But it’s all dreaming now. My sight is fading, but it’s dark anyway. I didn’t know there were crayfish here in the harbour. I prefer the Atlantic lobster, really. I have become unaware of my body. I am already too dead to be worried about dying.

Georgio P. Theodorou, merchant and philanthropist, wishes you all a watery farewell. I would give you a wave but I don’t know where my hand is, and more than likely you’re not even there, whoever you are or aren’t. Farewell Smyrna, farewell Rosa’s, farewell my friends, farewell Lloyd George and Venizelos and all the other fuckwits, farewell my worldly goods, farewell even to myself. I just wish I didn’t have to die with that stupid song about the fez going round and round in my head.