Birds Without Wings Read Online Free PDF Page B

couldn’t even see the pupils because the iris was so dark a brown as to be black, and consequently no one ever really knew what Philothei was feeling. Normally you glean more from someone’s eyes than you do from their speech, but I could read nothing at all from hers. If Philothei said something, then I just had to take her at her word, because it was impossible to look into that darkness and discover whether or not she was lying, whether or not she liked or disliked me at that moment, or whether or not she was sad. Once I pointed this out to her, I think we were about fifteen years old at the time—it was the second yearof the war against the Franks, and all the boys were at Gallipoli or in the labour battalions—and she ran inside to gaze into herself in the mirror. She came back out about half an hour later, and she was quite distressed, and she said, with a tone of wonder in her voice, “Drosoulaki, what you said is true. I can’t see myself in the eyes.” Sometimes it was difficult to commune with her because of this, because words are just the vapour of the heart.
    She had lovely hair too. I don’t know if this is true, but it was said that she was born with a full head of hair, so black and thick and plentiful that it was like the fishing nets draped over the harbour wall in Argostoli harbour, or a flock of goats on a hill, or the tails of horses gathered and bound together. When it was first washed, so they say, her grandmother braided her hair and wound it three times about her head. This sort of thing does happen, I suppose.
    I do remember her skin. It was so fine and delicate that even when she was six years old she could raise her hand against the light, and one could see the bones and veins. Mehmetçik and Karatavuk—I don’t suppose I told you about them—and Ibrahim as well, they used to say, “Philothei, Philothei, hold your hands up to the sun, we want to see, we want to see,” and she would put her hands right up to their faces so that the sun was blocked out, and they would feel sick, which is odd if you remember that in those days you could see all our ancestors’ bones in the little ossuary behind the church, because there was no land for burial, and we needed the land, and in any case that was the custom. I suppose it’s more horrible when you see the bones of someone who is still alive, because you don’t expect it. I often think about those bones in the ossuary, and what we did with them when we left Anatolia that we loved so much and will probably mourn for ever.
    But it was more than a question of hair and skin and eyes, because what one saw was more than just her beauty. You see, my father, drunkard though he was, was right when he said that she reminded you of death. When you looked at Philothei, you were reminded of a terrible truth, which is that everything decays away and is lost. Beauty is precious, you see, and the more beautiful something is, the more precious it is; and the more precious something is, the more it hurts us that it will fade away; and the more we are hurt by beauty, the more we love the world; and the more we love it, the more we are saddened that it is like finely powdered salt that runs away through the fingers, or is puffed away by the wind, or is washed away by the rain. You see, I am ugly. I have always been ugly. If I had diedin my youth no one would have said, “Look how much poorer is the world,” but to be entranced by Philothei was to receive a lesson in fate.
    I was, as I have said, born hideous, and before I married I would have been better off as a goat. There was a blessing in those days which went “May all your children be sons, and all your sheep be ewes,” and the curse was “May all your children be daughters, and all your sheep be rams.” My mother once told me that when I was born my father flew into a rage, and spat on her even as she lay exhausted on the divan, because she had inflicted another daughter upon him, who would one day