Children of War Read online

  To fully explain the twists and turns of our life, I need to repeat and stress some points. We didn’t have a school – school for us meant the mosque and Qur’an lessons from Imam Sherif Efendi. But there’s more to life than that and it was my father’s greatest wish for us to be able to write, do arithmetic, calculate accounts, learn about the world and be generally enlightened children. My brother had read the Qur’an from start to finish, but apart from that he couldn’t write a word or do the smallest calculation. When it came to gathering olives or tending to the vegetables, he was in his element and more than capable of amusing himself with the baglama he had begged and pleaded for, twanging the strings now and then to release a symphony of sounds. Along with this, he was in constant pursuit of girls and women; that’s my strongest memory of him from our childhood.

  Mahmut’s behaviour had a negative effect on our father, which resulted in him being even more insistent with me. He was continuously telling me that I should study and learn, repeating it as he ruffled his hands through my hair affectionately, or whenever I successfully completed a task for him. He said it with genuine kindness and affection, sometimes using successful local Greeks as an example. He held a particular admiration for those who were able to do bookkeeping. Inspired by what he had seen on his once-in-a-lifetime visit to Chania, he would say, “You need to study, son, because the time will come when those that can’t read or write won’t even be able to get work as goods porters.”

  In Chania, he had seen that some of the poor were forced to earn a living from carrying around heavy goods on their backs in the huge reed sacks usually used for food. For now, the porters knew how to get to the houses they were delivering to, but with the population rising, the number of streets and houses was also increasing. One day soon it would be so crowded that the porters would need to be given a piece of paper showing either a sketch or the written address of the customer. To my poor father, who was born and spent his life on the land, this alone was reason enough to learn how to read and write. It was beyond his imagination to consider anything beyond the calculations for the ten or fifty oka of olive oil he produced and sold, or the gruelling life of the goods porters.

  From the age of ten to thirteen, on days when I was excused from work, I would sling the bag made by my sister over my shoulder, place inside it the Qur’an that usually hung in an embroidered pouch on the wall of the room where my mother slept, and go off for lessons with Imam Sherif Efendi. I read the Qur’an from back to front, learned how to perform the Islamic rituals of ablution and prayer, and how to do calculations full of mistakes, but it was enough to keep my father happy. At least in one way he was satisfied. He took quite an interest as I did my work at night by the light of the oil lamp. In his opinion, I was already a “gentleman”, despite my young age.

  “Well done, son! Well done!” he would say.

  After all the years of his needling away at me, I developed a taste for study. One night as I worked away he said, “You’ve learned the Qur’an now. I was thinking of sending you to Evangeliki’s son, Manolis, to get more lessons so you can learn bookkeeping. What do you think?”

  Manolis was consulted the next day and it was decided he would give me maths lessons for half a day a week as well as teaching me a bit about the Greek alphabet. On the first Sunday after this conversation, I went off to Aunt Evangeliki’s in the afternoon. Manolis, who was the same age as my brother Mahmut, had studied for eight years. He was waiting for me when I arrived, and we got started straightaway. That day was the first time I saw the numbers we use today. We sat and wrote all of them during that first half-day lesson. I was to work on the numbers and alphabet on my own until the next lesson. By night, in the light of the oil lamp, I worked away at the homework Manolis gave me on the board my father had bought specifically for that purpose. As I wrote, my hand became more familiar with the shapes, the letters and numbers became clearer, and in the second lesson, surprised at what he saw, Manolis began to take great pleasure in his teaching. He got me to do small additions about chickpeas, apples, beans and olive trees, and as time passed the sums got bigger, growing into a host of subtractions and divisions. He taught me how to do bookkeeping from the smallest to the biggest sums. Using the skills I had learned from Manolis, I went over the old calculations I had done for my father and found my many mistakes. Once, when I pointed out one of my old mistakes, I noticed that my father, who was sitting next to me and seemed to be twisting his huge moustache, was actually wiping away the tears welling up in his eyes. I stared at him as if to say, “What’s up?” His eyes glistened and without revealing it to anyone else in the room, he pursed his lips as a sign to keep quiet. As we get older we think about the past. I still don’t know if the tears of my elderly father that night were because of the pride he took in my learning or his own sadness at the fact that he had not studied himself.

  It was my job to read the Qur’an on Fridays or holy days and to enter the income from our produce and all our outgoings in a large notebook. Although I was five years younger than my brother, the grown-ups of the family took a great interest in me and saw me as his equal. Manolis’s family were very touched when I gave him a colourful woollen blanket woven on my sister’s loom, because they wouldn’t accept any payment for the lessons, saying, “There is no money between neighbours.” This gift speeded up my education and I quickly learned to read and write Greek. By the time I was thirteen, I could write a short, albeit basic, piece, and somehow or other, syllable by syllable, read bits of newspapers I came across or paragraphs from Manolis’s lesson book. With great patience and tolerance, Manolis pointed out where I had made the wrong emphasis and made me repeat the phrase. Maybe the events I’ve described up until now aren’t that significant to you; but I’ll say this – the person who taught me all this was a young man from our town who had completed his education at the Greek school. I could only learn as much as the limit of his knowledge, but the benefit I gained from it went far beyond that.

  My father believed we needed to get on well with the Greeks because, as he said, that was what our Sultan wanted. We called the Sultan “Afendimas Padisahis” in our Cretan Greek rather than the Turkish “Padishah Efendi”. I didn’t know much about it, but there had been something called the “66 riot” and another disturbance three years before I was born. Some armed Greeks had attacked the houses and farms of Turks, burnt them down, committed murder and even burnt people alive. That was how my father explained it to me, but I was a child at the time and I didn’t know what politics was. Although, to be honest, my elderly father was no more aware than I was, thinking the violence was due to a few “ill-bred Greeks who had set their sights on other people’s property”.

  It was in the same period that I began to become aware of my brother Mahmut’s dalliances with the opposite sex. Naturally, a strapping, swarthy eighteen-year-old village boy couldn’t possibly stay single for long. My father was well aware of this fact, but Nazire still hadn’t married and that situation would have to be remedied before it was Mahmut’s turn. One month, when the pomegranates were in flower, I noticed certain developments regarding Mahmut. I often caught Photini, the widowed wife of Aristides, who had the neighbouring land, gazing at Mahmut. Initially, I was unable to attach any meaning to the looks. We children never referred to Aristides by his name, but always as uncle, until he was sent to his grave by a pain in the stomach. His widowed wife was a voluptuous, attractive woman who was not overly talkative – a woman with no children, who worked away on the land all day hoeing, watering and gathering fruit and vegetables. For some reason, my tanned brother, who had long since developed a fine moustache, was attracting her attention and whenever she got the opportunity she would find a place near the edge of our land to slip through and watch him. Tired and sweating, with her shirt half open, she would observe my brother working on the land from the corner of her eye. Eventually, growing fed up with Mahmut’s faint-heartedness, she poured out her feelings in a folk song and I have to say that t
he Cretans really knew how to make songs:

  You are tall, slim and tanned, my love

  No longer twelve but some years more

  It’s time that love came to your door

  Mahmut was bursting with excitement. I didn’t manage to catch his reply, but she carried on with the words:

  We’ll swap our hearts, so you take mine

  When you do, you’ll understand

  How much I love my little man…

  Afterwards, she took him by the hand, and to all intents and purposes dragged him into the garden hut. About half an hour passed. Then Mahmut appeared, looking around somewhat suspiciously, with one hand fastening the belt around his waist, and the other wiping the sweat dripping from his brow. In the weeks and months that followed, from a hideout in some or other fruit tree, I often observed Photini signalling to my brother, or grabbing his hand whenever the coast was clear, and leading him into the shed. I don’t know whether it was instinct, my body maturing or a hereditary urge, but whenever this happened, I felt a pulsing in my loins and pushed my hand down into my trousers in the excitement.

  When talking about my brother, other boys of our age simply said, “Mahmut is always chasing girls.” But as far as I knew, I was the only person to have seen Mahmut with our neighbour. Apart from that, Mahmut had two sweethearts – Aisha and Ariadne. Both were a few years younger than him: one Turk and one Greek. I had no idea what kind of relationship he had with either of them, but these two names circulated round the mouths of our friends as often as the ubiquitous chewing gum: “Your brother Mahmut was talking to Omer’s Aisha by the brook…” “You know your Mahmut? Well, yesterday at sunset he was leaving Ariadne’s by the back door.”

  They would tease me like this, before suddenly pulling the skullcap on my head down over my eyes, starting a frantic skirmish punctuated by our screams as we scampered around in short trousers that finished just below the knee – a poor excuse for shalvar. Those were the years! Years when money never cast a shadow over my childhood universe; prosperous years with plenty to eat and drink, full of merrymaking and playfulness.

  The first signs that the good days were coming to an end appeared in the face of my father. His brow became more furrowed and he was frequently lost in thought. I couldn’t understand why, nor could Nazire or my mother, and as a consequence my sister became concerned about her forthcoming marriage. “Don’t worry, my girl,” my mother would say, “It’ll happen sooner or later! I don’t know why he’s so distracted all the time. I only wish we knew.”

  One evening after dinner, without any prompting, my father revealed the reason for his preoccupation. As we were clearing the wooden table in front of the stove, he moved the oil lamp to one side and signalled to Mahmut to stay seated.

  “You’re the oldest in the family after me,” he said, “So make sure you listen to what I’m saying. There’s a Greek, called Venizelos, who’s stirring up trouble. He wants to get rid of us, throw us out of our homes and country!”

  Both my mother, who was clearing the stove, and my sister, busy cleaning the dishes, were shocked, quite apart from my brother who was the next male in line after my father. Where or who could he have got this idea from? This was our father! Our father who had never set foot in a taverna or café, whose life was spun between the boundaries of our house, our land and the olive grove. Our father, who urged us to get on well with the Greeks because it was “what the Sultan wants”. How could a man who only interacted with the other villagers to say hello, ask after their wellbeing or chit-chat about vegetables and the weather, who never took without giving something back, express such harsh views? Throw us out of our home and country? Our land, olive groves, our home – didn’t these all belong to us? We were all born here, and the land and property had been handed down to our father by our ancestors. Drying her hands quickly on her apron, my mother went and stood in front of my father.

  “For the love of God, Ali Agha, what are you on about?” she said. “Is this why you’ve hardly said a word for weeks? Have you ever heard of such a thing? Where would we go? What would we do for food and water?”

  “I’m worried about all that as well,” replied my father. “But I’ve overheard the Greeks talking on the way to the land and olive groves. That’s how I know. People who’ve been greeting and chatting to me for as long as I can remember don’t say anything now. Gradually there are fewer and fewer people that even say hello! The rumours aren’t pleasant. I can smell gunpowder and blood. Not everyone knows this, but years ago there was a lot of unrest, destruction and killing. In the end, the rebellion* was put down and in time we learned to live with each other again. We might have different religious beliefs, but you know yourselves – we get on pretty well living near each other or even next door.”

  I couldn’t stand it anymore and blurted, “It’ll be all right, won’t it, Dad?”

  “If you look at what’s going on, son, it won’t be all right. This Venizelos of theirs is provoking people to riot everywhere. This time it’s bigger than before. I think these troubles are going to shake the whole of Crete. That’s the feeling I get.”

  As I was asking the question, I thought of Uncle Aristidis’s widowed wife and Mahmut’s supposed girlfriends, Aisha and Ariadne. All I could think of was what would happen to all of them. Mahmut entered the conversation in a more practical way. “What can we do about it?” he asked.

  Nazire had left the dishes and was looking at our father, her eyes misted with tears.

  “I came into the world in this house,” he said, “in the same room by the entrance that you two sleep in now. This is where I grew up. I got to this age working in the olive groves and on the land. Twenty years ago your mother came into the household as my wife and supported me in every way. She brought you all up. Now there are people who want to spoil it and take everything we have. The reason I’m saying all this is because there’s nothing we can do. Nothing except protect ourselves and our property if they come under attack.”

  Becoming agitated, Mahmut asked, “If we get attacked, what are we going to defend ourselves with – sticks and stones?”

  Turning to my mother and looking at her with affection, my father said, “Sweetheart, can you get the rifle, revolver and bullets that my father left me from the chest? Mahmut can give you a hand.”

  When they went upstairs he explained, “These weapons have been in the chest for a long time. Every year, I get them out to clean and oil them then put them back in the chest. I always did it when you were out. I didn’t want you to know about things like that. Years ago, after one of the rebellions was put down, our Grand Vizier Ali Pasha said, ‘Turks, stow away your weapons,’ and so that’s what your granddad did. He passed them on to me as an heirloom from our ancestors.”

  I felt sure Nazire was thinking about my future brother-in-law, Arif the grocer, when she took advantage of a pause in the conversation to ask, “Where’s this all going to end?”

  “It’s turned into a big mess, everything’s tangled up in everything else,” my father replied. “It looks like we’re heading for a lot of trouble. Your late grandfather told me our ancestors took this island from the Venetians, not from the Greeks. Afterwards, a few Greeks came, then more and more, until in the end we were in the minority. This rebel, this Venizelos, is just a young man. He says, ‘Turks get out! Death to the Turks!’ I’m afraid the attacks and murders have already started.”

  In the meantime, my mother and brother had come back downstairs carrying two weapons and a pouch of bullets. They placed them on the table. It was the first time I had ever seen a gun. My father asked them to sit down and picked up the small gun he called a revolver. Pointing the barrel towards the ground, he carefully loaded the bullets one by one. Afterwards he took the gun and pushed it down into the huge sash round his waist.

  When he started to speak again, his voice seemed to shake. “From now on, whenever we go to the land, we’ll carry it in my sash, or maybe to make it less obvious we’ll put it in the
bag we carry our food and drink in. At night, it’ll be under the pillow. We’ll keep the rifle behind the entrance door at all times to protect the house with, and we’ll hang the bullets on the same nail.”

  My mother’s eyes had glistened with tears as she nervously watched him slip the gun into his sash. “What kind of life is this, Ali Agha?” she said. “How long will this go on?”

  “Of course, it’s no way to lead our lives. It won’t go on for long but, until we find another solution, we have to protect ourselves,” replied my father.

  “What kind of solution?”

  “How can I know that now, my love? If you ask me, the Greeks should catch that troublemaker Venizelos and punish him for coming between us all and making us fight. That’s the only way we can go back to our old peaceful life, living side by side. It’s not by chance that I hid the guns from you all these years. I wanted to keep the bad things from you. It’s not as if we don’t get on with the Greeks, is it? Who was it who taught Hassan to read, write and count – wasn’t it Evangeliki’s boy, Manolis? Is there any better example than that of how well we get on?”

  We were all shocked, and silent. My father carried on, “Anyway, we should let Mullah Mavruk and his family know. They need to be aware of what’s going on. What I’m trying to say is, there are people who want to throw us out and take our property. If the children of the Venetians had come and done the same, I’d say they were in the right because we threw them out of their homes when we came. But the Greeks came here after we did. They’re immigrants like us so it’s not right, but we need to get out of here before we get hurt.”