Children of War Read online

  Daggerlad went off, leaving behind him a mass of anxieties.

  After the ordered and busy life we were used to, living in a tent was soul-destroying. The bitter loss of my brother rubbed salt into the wound. Our animals were left unattended by the trees as we huddled in frightened anticipation inside the small tent, forced to rush off to the ditch to meet our basic needs. It was unbearable.

  Daggerlad’s words came to fruition one night, five miserable days later, when an armed Greek force in their thousands completely surrounded Kandanos. They even had cannons. How quickly the news spread. The gun barrels of the Turks protruded from house windows, doorways, rooftops, street corners, the edges of chimneys and from the carts guarding the roads. But not a trigger was pulled – neither by the Greeks nor us.

  During the night, not one gaslight or oil lamp was lit; a dense blackness fell on the town. The silence was so intense, it seemed to shatter our eardrums. Terrified of weapons, our family and friends were completely drained by this nervous anticipation. Mullah Mavruk and his wife, dressed in black, were barely distinguishable from the thick blackness of the night. My father pointed his rifle out into the darkness from between the wheels of our cart – a giant of a man with eyes full of tears. My brother-in-law, Arif, held his gun more resolutely and with more care. My sister, Nazire, stayed at his side.

  The fear and apprehension of night passed into morning without the firing of a single weapon. The heat of the rising sun dissipated the deathly silence and a hum began to sound from one end of the town to another. People were sharing their fears and unravelling the consternation of the tense night. But the hum of chatting was interrupted by the ear-splitting metallic explosion of a howitzer shell. Two people were killed instantly on the spot, the leg of one of them blown apart from the knee down. The panic caused by the proximity of death turned into insurrection. Our people had already endured random attacks, mass murders and expulsions; to come face to face with death in the place they had sought refuge drove them into a frenzy. Some entreated God to deal with the perpetrators, while others like my father, muttered, “Our great Padishah’s soldiers will come and punish them,” dreaming that at any moment, the Ottoman soldiers would appear dressed in red fezzes with bayonets strapped to their rifles. Others trusted in their own fists and guns, bawling, “We’ll show you, you Greek scum!”

  The enemy was delivering us a message. The only problem was interpreting what the message was. It might have meant, “You can’t run away now, we’re going to kill you all,” or “As you can see, we’ve surrounded you on all sides. Eventually you’ll run out of food and water and die!”

  The bellows of those baying for blood mingled in with the cries and screams of the relatives of the victims. As for me, still only part way down the road to becoming a man, I left the family and wandered through the crowds to see what was happening. Suddenly, I bumped into Daggerlad.

  “My little namesake,” he said, “you shouldn’t be hanging around this sad place, you’d be better to stay at your dad’s side. This isn’t a sight for your eyes.”

  “After my big brother was killed, something happened to me, Uncle. I know I’m sad, but I don’t feel much right now.”

  Daggerlad looked disturbed by my reply. “Look, my boy,” he said, “don’t become hardened so quickly. When you’ve done and seen more, when you’re older, then maybe it won’t seem out of place. But not now.”

  I was forced to go back to my family without watching the burial of the dead. I was worried that Daggerlad might become even sterner with me or tell my parents what I’d said. I didn’t want my father to be any more upset or to risk losing his respect.

  The Greek blockade was in place a considerable distance from the village. Peering into the distance, you could just make out the brigands on the horizon. Emboldened by the space between us and them, my mother took me and Nazire with her to pick leaves and herbs in the fields around the village. Our insides were parched from eating nothing but dried fruit and nuts for the past two days. At breakneck speed, we filled a huge bag with a mixture of winter plants, expecting to hear more gunfire at any moment.

  At dusk, we once more heard the metallic roar, just as we had in the morning. This time it was the courtyard of the mosque that exploded. As everyone had taken cover at home, or bedded down somewhere to point weapons at the enemy, this time there was no injury or calamity. Afterwards, from our shelter we saw a group of people knocking on doors and passing on some news. They muttered to the men pointing rifle barrels out from behind the corners of buildings, to the children keeping guard in the ditches and to the families holding the roads with their carts. The bustle of communication spread from one end of the village to another, eventually reaching us: someone called Daggerlad was going to seek revenge for those who had been killed in the morning. Taking just one person with him, he would make his way behind enemy lines and knife the enemy. We were told to be ready for the enemy’s swift retaliation.

  After two shells, two deaths, one seriously injured victim and the news that Daggerlad would try to breach the Greek lines, a terrible sense of foreboding mingled into the chill winter air of the second night of the blockade. We struggled to stop our bodies from shivering. Now and again, someone dashed to the bushes to empty their stomach from one end of the body or the other. Not that they could go far; the Greeks would see to any solitary Turks they caught by severing their heads. The men committing these chilling murders were the brigand leaders, referred to as “captains”. I can still recall the names of the bloodthirsty thugs who were talked about during the blockade: Captain Frangiskoz and Captain Kamaryanos. As if butchering people was an honourable deed! After the tranquillity and good relations of our village, no one in my family could comprehend the savagery that had suddenly surrounded us.

  “We were all getting on fine together only yesterday; where did all this violence come from?” said Mullah Mavruk. He and his wife Cemile, who was like an aunt to us, thought exactly the same. Was it something to do with both of them being black? Who knows? What we did know was their affectionate nature, their fear of guns and that they were the gentlest type of people, who couldn’t even bear to crush an ant.

  Here we were, about 800 people facing the massed guns of an unknown number of Greek brigands. The tension rose to a climax after midnight, when gunshots sounded far off in the distance, then a metallic boom that shattered the night, followed by the crash of tumbling walls from the nearby mosque! It all happened in a flash. Then another shell! The crash of walls, the explosion and heart-wrenching screams all seemed to merge into one. People were running to the rescue. This time, one person had been blown apart and there were three injured from one house. Towards morning, Daggerlad came to our tent. Our faces were ghostly white from fear of the shells and the strain of clutching weapons for hours on end with no sleep.

  “I’m tired,” said Daggerlad, “and hungry.”

  “Aren’t you going to tell us what’s going on?” replied my father. “We’re desperate to know. We heard you were going to the enemy lines. Did you do it? What happened?”

  My mother placed a bowl of food and a piece of bread starting to go stale in front of Daggerlad. She had mustered the broth up from the various plants we had gathered. The small man, sitting cross-legged on the bare earth, tucked into it ravenously. Afterwards, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he said, “Agha, don’t let me say too much in front of your child and the women. We visited the Greeks. I took one man so he could be my witness when I returned. We made good use of the knives we were given, even in the dark of night. I said ‘we’, but really, I mean ‘me’. The man I took with me almost died of the jitters on the way. That’s all I’m going to say. I think it’s enough. Five knives right on target. Five less enemies. On our way back, when we got on to the flat, they saw us and opened fire. They sent a couple of shells, but they were wasting their time. We called it a day after that.”

  My father spoke in earnest. “Look, Daggerlad,” he began, “none of this
is good. They came to us, they killed our people with shells. You went to them to get revenge, to get even. Then, you killed. Next time, they fired more shells and killed more of us. Lots of people are badly hurt. But remember how it was before? We respected each other, we got along fine. Now they’re kicking us out and killing us along the way. And in return we kill them back. Where’s all this going to end? Have you ever thought about that?”

  “Maybe we’re paying the price for sins that others have committed?” Arif said.

  “That’s what I’m thinking, son,” replied my father. “Me – who’s never been to school and knows nothing but growing olives and vegetables. Me – Ali Agha, what can I say? We’re ordinary people. I don’t know anything, but the way we’re being treated now makes me ask the same question: what kind of sin is it that we’re paying for?”

  Mullah Mavruk joined in: “Maybe it was the Turks who sinned when they went off to the place called Europe, where all the people are non-believers. Who knows? I mean, it happens doesn’t it? They did something bad and now we’re being punished.”

  “I’m not accepting any excuses,” Daggerlad retorted. “I don’t really know what you’re talking about. In this world, what goes around comes around. I can say that much because I know it’s true. We’ll give as good as we get!”

  My father insisted in the face of this stubbornness, “Daggerlad, Efendi, everything you’re saying makes sense. What we’re saying is that, no matter who started it, it needs to be stopped. Let’s draw a line under the past and live in peace. Whatever pain and tragedy there is in the past, both sides should forget it for the sake of peace. That’s what we’re trying to say.”

  Daggerlad was unswayed: “You keep thinking that if you like. The Russians, British, French and Italians have had enough of Greece and the island Greeks doing what they want and they are fed up with our Padishah Efendi being asleep. That’s why they’ve sent warships to Chania. The island Greeks started a rebellion in Chania that’s spread across the whole island with the help of Greece. This blockade is the upshot of all that. Supposedly, the battleships of the four great powers are going to stop the Greeks. Words! The only thing that can stop the rebellion is us, fighting back.”

  __________

  * Location of an Ottoman garrison.

  † Location of an Ottoman garrison.

  * The Sultan of the Ottoman Empire (Istanbul).

  4

  Hours turned to days, days to months, filled with the hiss of bullets that sometimes found their victim, or sometimes passed by and exploded as if the brigands were saying, “Watch out, we’re here!”, and filled with corpses hit by unpredictable shellfire that sometimes rained day after day, only to stop for a day and start again…

  The blockade stayed in place. The food we had prepared for the journey was long since finished. There was no way in or out of the town. No one could get out to their fields or vegetable plots. To try leaving the town required fearless bravado. At the beginning of the blockade we were able to find food from the shops or various other sources, but as the blockade stretched into a month, food became scarce. We finally understood the message: they would starve us to death. Any who were brave enough to try and escape would be finished off on the road out or before they even got that far.

  The dried foods the townspeople customarily stored away over the summer and that were meant to last the winter had also run out. The edible winter plants growing in any wasteland out of the view of the blockaders were also just about exhausted. In the dark of night, some reckless madcaps tried to bring back vegetables from the closest plots, wriggling along the ground to avoid the eyes of the enemy. Instead of three meals a day, we had only one plate of herbs or vegetables stewed in olive oil and instead of a fresh loaf, a hunk of hard, dried bread. We lived on this – alongside the dead and the wounded – for forty days. The forty-third day of the blockade fell on a Friday. The Friday that took my father.

  Our people, the Turks, had been heartened by the fact that although the shellfire had reached the mosque courtyard, the interior remained undamaged. Assuming this to be the absolute limit of the shells’ reach and believing the roof could not be hit, my father and Mullah Mavruk went off to Friday prayers. Then, right at prayer time, came the sound of three shells one after the other… followed by shouting, screams and frenzied villagers running to and fro. Arif and I ran towards the mosque. People were bringing out the dead and wounded. There was no point in cursing the enemy now. Ten people had been killed and one was my father. There were seven wounded, all of them old men.

  I was a teenager and I had lost the father who had showered me with unconditional love and supported me in everything I strived towards. Stunned by the momentous loss, too great to put into words, my mother and Nazire pulled their yashmaks across their mouths, their bodies convulsed with sobs, and took my father off to his grave. The mounting number of deaths had by now exhausted the town’s supply of the cloth used to make death shrouds. From in amongst the pile of possessions on our carts, my mother managed to extract her husband’s long nightshirt so it could be used to wrap him in. The civil war had even denied my peace-loving father a death shroud. Neither could a coffin be found. His body was laid on a four-handle wooden stretcher and covered with a rug in place of a proper shroud.

  The forty-sixth day of the siege fell on a Monday. As the sun rose in the early hours, the sound of trumpets and horns broke the usual silence of the morning’s armed standoff. The sudden clamour of panicked voices rose to a crescendo:

  “What’s that? What’s going on?”

  “Wake up! The enemies have got into the town!”

  “Get up! They’re going to riddle us with bullets!’

  Daggerlad, who had taken us under his wing since my father’s death, suddenly appeared at the side of our carts. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “That’s the Italian and French soldiers coming to rescue us from the Greeks.”

  “Maybe so,” responded Arif, “But they’re non-believers too! What are they doing here?”

  “They’re from the armies of the four great powers,” said Daggerlad. “Their ships are anchored at the Port of Souda in Chania.* They’d hardly arrived when the news reached here. I told Ali Agha, God rest his soul. Come on, there’s no need to panic now.”

  The “pasta-munching” Italians and “wine-swilling” French, as Daggerlad described them, came with bayonets on their rifles, formed a pocket to protect us against attack and in a convoy took away the remaining 700 or so Turks, some on foot, some together with their horses, donkeys and carts. On the way we learned that there was trouble in Chania, so they were taking us to Kastelli, on the Bay of Kissamos, to the west of Chania. We were to stay there for a while until the situation calmed down. Our journey lasted two days and two nights. On the way, two of the old folk died of exhaustion and were buried in graves made at the side of the road. This delayed the convoy by a couple of hours. We were suffering from horrific hunger and tiredness. The deaths in Kandanos, the fear and hunger and, to crown it all, the physical fatigue of the journey, had separated these two poor wretches from their souls in an alien place, rather than in their own beds. The feelings of hate and revenge were sharpened by the exhaustion of being hounded from home and surrounded by death. But I was my father’s son, and his conciliatory nature was part of me too; I couldn’t find a place in my heart for the way the others felt, for their hate and revenge. This pointless fight had to be brought to an end; this was no remedy. But could a teenager like me have said anything? And if I had opened my mouth, could I have got them to listen? Even if I had caught their attention for one minute, wouldn’t it have been seen as speaking against the interests of this community of Turks? The Greeks didn’t know when to stop; they were expelling and killing without mercy.

  At Kissamos, if you had money it was possible to find food. The district of Kastelli on the fertile gulf was a prosperous place with plenty of fish. Filling our stomachs with plates of boiled chicory, wild radish, cauliflower and mustard green
s accompanied by a few pieces of fried sea bream, sardines or whiting gave us enough comfort to see the days ahead with more hope. Would the expulsions, murders and exhaustion come to an end in Chania? We hoped so, but we had no real idea.

  A week later, after walking from dawn until dusk once again under the protection of the French and Italian soldiers, we arrived in the suburbs of Chania, in a place they called Varusi. They said we could stay and settle if we found a job and house in the city. The French and Italian soldiers who had accompanied us returned to their ships of wine and pasta, and my twenty-six-year life in Chania began. I stayed from 1897 to 1923. It was here they gave me the nickname Aynakis, meaning “little mirror”, a mixture of the Turkish word for mirror and the Greek ending meaning “little”, and it was here I learned the rough and tumble of adult life.

  __________

  * In March,1897, Russian, Italian, British, French and Austro-Hungarian troops completed the evacuation of over 1,500 Cretan Muslims and several hundred Ottoman soldiers from the village of Kandanos in south-west Crete, then under siege by Christian Cretans supported by Greek manned artillery.

  5

  My mother used to select the best large dried figs and fill them with walnuts. The figs, which we called sikula, were packed on to a clean tray which was then thrust into my hands. I would lift the tray up to shoulder height, steady it there with both hands and set off along the road from Varusi to the city centre. Shops, coffeehouse, tavernas – I visited every one of them until the tray of figs was empty and I could drag my weary feet back to the small summerhouse that was now our home. No sooner had I handed over my earnings than my mother would send me back to the grocer again to buy more walnuts and the fattest figs I could find, so she could begin to prepare the next day’s wares. The few coins remaining after the walnuts and figs had been bought went towards our household expenses. When the fig season was over, my mother made sesame halva. When that was finished, there would be pumpkin seeds, early plums, early green almonds or other seasonal varieties of the snacks we called “pasatempos”. I sold most of the snacks made from these freshly harvested fruit and nuts in the tavernas of Chania.