Children of War Read online

Page 6


  The money we got from the trays of snacks that I balanced on my shoulders or head were essential for the survival of our household and my work required the utmost diligence and discipline. This didn’t go unnoticed in the area. Among my regular customers were the workers at Yusuf Kenan Printing House, Baha Bey, the photographic studio owner, and the Greek printer, Vladimiros. Sometimes it was just one and sometimes more, but every day without fail they bought whatever I was selling. They knew that we had been forced to leave our village in the south, that we had been under blockade for forty-five days and that my father had been killed in the shelling. I sensed that they had great sympathy for us.

  The typesetters at Yusuf Kenan showed me some huge letters of the alphabet. After I told them what they were, they asked me to read some text. But I couldn’t manage it. I had learned how to read the Qur’an, because that was just a matter of memorising the meaning. When it came to anything else, it was impossible. The other thing I knew was how to count. I watched Baha Bey as he photographed the Greeks, with hats poised on their heads, or the Turks dressed in a turban or fez. With a mixture of wonder and embarrassment, I saw the pictures on the walls of the studio showing voluptuous women with their laced ankle boots and legs naked to the knee, their breasts half-revealed and heads uncovered. It was a world that we Cretan villagers had never seen and were totally unaware of.

  Some days, when I sold my goods early, I would go and watch the intricate work of the typesetters, often taking the composing stick and passing the rest of the day trying to assemble a written text out of the huge letters that were put in front of me. For a long time, I continued with this exercise, which increased my knowledge and experience. At the start, I was all over the place and made a myriad of mistakes. I grew weary from the effort of trying to match each letter in the writing with one of the letters from the typecase, and my fingers turned black from the printing ink. It all earned me a scolding from my poor mother, not only because I was late home, but also because it was important for food-sellers to have clean hands. After attempting to clean them with kerosene at the print house, the process continued at home with endless rounds of soap being deployed in an effort to blanch my blackened fingers.

  My interest in printing continued for some considerable time, after which I made myself useful at Baha Bey’s photographic studio, sweeping the floor, emptying out buckets of chemicals from the darkroom and watching out for customers at the door whenever Baha Bey had to go out. I also learned to use a mirror to refract light from the outside door on to the individuals or couples coming to be photographed, observed how the special glass used in filming was bathed in the dark room and how the photos themselves were printed.

  The orchard summerhouse that was now our home had two quarters and I stayed with my mother in one side while my sister and brother-in-law lived in the other. One year after our arrival, Nazire gave birth to her first child, who she named Mustafa. Arif worked as a farmer for three years and for extra money hired himself out to plough fields with the mules that had drawn our carts to Chania. In his free time, he went into the city in search of a shop. He was a grocer by profession and that’s what he hoped to carry on doing.

  Mullah Mavruk and Aunt Cemile hadn’t been able to find a place to live immediately. After camping out in their cart for months after we arrived in Varusi, they eventually moved into a tiny house, just five hundred metres from ours. They had set off from the village with us, pretty much on the spur of the moment, and hadn’t been able to sell any of their possessions. In our home village, working on their own land had afforded them a comfortable life, but now the husband and wife worked as casual farm hands for others in and around Varusi.

  As for Daggerlad, two or three years after we settled in Varusi, I bumped into him in a coffeehouse in the Splantzia district of Chania. I gave him one of the sesame halva from my tray, and he ordered me a sumada syrup made from almonds and sprinkled with cinnamon. “Look at us, my boy,” he began. “The Greeks chased us from our homes and fields, and it looks like they’ve calmed down for now, but because of all that here you are selling sesame halva. How’s it going? Are you at least managing to get by?”

  “It’s not bad, I suppose, but we were much better off on our land in our own village,” I replied.

  As he was leaving, Daggerlad again offered his support: “If you ever have any problems, leave a message for me at one of the coffeehouses here. Helping out good people whenever it’s needed is something that makes me a happy man.”

  The life of a travelling seller had become my school: and what things I learned at that school, what things… It seemed the violence that had gripped the island, even as far as our little village, stripping us of our home, had first broken out here in the capital city. Yet it was in this very city, the cradle from which the barbarity had first sprung, that I was trying to lay down roots. In the meantime, I witnessed our Ottoman soldiers leaving the island. At the first New Year celebrations immediately after their departure, I heard the Greek brass band playing a Greek march with the words, “Kill the Turks, slay the tyrants!” It was so loud, it seemed they were trying to burst our eardrums. Then came the appointment of Prince George of Greece* as High Commissioner of the island under the oversight of Russia, Britain, France and Italy, following which I painfully watched Constantine,† who arrived on a warship, raising the Greek flag over the island. I saw the elections for the National Assembly of Crete,‡ whose objective was to make Crete part of Greece, and the efforts of the few elected Turks to defend the rights of the island Turks and the Ottoman state.

  They were hoping to melt us into their own national identity and destroy us by replacing the word Turk with Muslim. In short, they wanted to convert any of us that they hadn’t manage to chase away or kill into Christians. One day, while I was in Splantzia Square buying cheese at the shop of Shaban Agha, a grocer and dairy farmer, his neighbour, the cheese wholesaler Nikola Kokoloyannis, called out from the pavement, “Shaban, you know there’s an election tomorrow. Don’t forget to use your vote for Captain Kaloyeris.”

  Shaban Agha was a Turk and a Muslim. As if he would ever vote for the Venizelos crew, the very people who were trying to throw him from his home and country! His response was as dignified and direct as the man himself: “Neighbour,” he said, “any Turk who’s planning to vote for Venizelos needs their arm cutting off! And the same goes for any Greek that doesn’t vote for him!”

  Nodding, and in a barely audible voice, Kokoloyannis replied: “You’re right, Shaban,” and withdrew to his own shop.

  My sister and her husband finally left us. With Arif’s earnings from ploughing and the money he got for selling their animals and carts, they were able to move to an area closer to the city centre, called Tabyalar, and open a small shop. Sometime later, we followed them, using much the same means; with the money from the sale of our animals and cart, money we had brought with us from the village and our savings put away drop by tiny drop, we were able to move into the city and rent a house in the Veneti Kastana district. It had been seven years since we arrived in Varusi and I was now twenty-one years old. We were to spend over fifteen more years in Chania. The real, great migration didn’t happen until the 1920s. That’s when we had to swallow the poison of leaving our homeland behind us.

  __________

  * Prince George of Greece and Denmark, Son of George I of Greece and Olga Konstantinovna of Russia, served as high commissioner of the Cretan State during its transition towards independence.

  † Constantine was the commander-in-chief in the Greco-Turkish War of 1897. He was King of Greece from 1913 to 1917 and from 1920 to 1922.

  ‡ A joint Muslim-Christian assembly including Eleftherios Venizelos was part-elected, part-appointed.

  6

  Splantzia was famous for its square – a colourful hub of large grocers, dairies, assorted shops and spacious coffeehouses arranged around the huge central fountain. The traders’ produce spilled out across the ground and every space was filled by a
mass of bobbing heads – some with and some without a fez – both Christians and Muslims. Dyed-in-the-wool Venizelos supporters like Kokoloyannis the cheese trader, anti-Venizelos Greek royalists, Turks hounded from their villages to the city, born-and-bred Chania locals, rich and poor, people with bare feet, people in simple rawhide sandals, people in boots – they were all occupants of this bustling square. But the vast majority of the people among the crowds were Turks. Just as an example, all of the nine large coffeehouses there were run by Turks, but the owner of a shop that sold all kinds of sea fish, from strips of dried salted whiting to sardines, chub mackerel and tuna in brine, was a royalist Greek from the island. Nearby was Kokoloyannis, also from the island, but a supporter of Venizelos, who was leading the campaign to expel us from our homes and country. In the same square, the taverna owner Voleonitis and grocer Manusos both appeared to be neutral but actually supported the Greek king.

  Once we had moved to a house inside Chania, I became fed up with the life of a travelling seller wandering the streets with a tray balanced on my head or shoulders. I moved on to selling boiled chestnuts and then endless tiny bowls of the dessert called Ashure, “Noah’s Pudding”. But the time had come to turn my back on such trivial jobs and find something more suited to my maturity. All the time I had spent roving around every place of work and play in the city trying to sell my wares had significantly expanded my horizons and experience. At the Yusuf Kenan Printing House I had learned something of print setting and printing, at Baha Bey’s studio I had gleaned a superficial knowledge of photography, and at the many shops I visited time and time again I picked up the basics of the retail trade. That’s not to mention the tavernas I went in and out of, evening after evening; there, I learned the rules of nightlife and drinking, which would stand me in good stead later on when I became one of their best customers.

  One day, as I was passing in front of Kiri Vladimiros’s printing house on the road to Kastel, my mind as usual tangled with ideas and indecisiveness, I heard his deep voice calling after me: “Hassan, come in, my boy. There’s something I want to talk to you about.”

  He was a fair-skinned man with a white beard and huge mouth. His dark bespectacled eyes peered out from heavy lenses clipped in a delicate frame. The stains of printing ink looked even blacker against his fair complexion and hands. He always wore a black apron to prevent the ink stains ruining his shirts.

  “Look, my lad, you’ve made an impression on me since the first day you came to Chania. Come day or night, winter or summer, you’ve been up and down with that tray, keeping your family in house and home. And now look at you, you’ve grown into a man.”

  “I didn’t have any choice, Kiri Vladimiros,” I replied. “When you’re chased out of your village and even worse, lose your father, you have to work your fingers to the bone whether you like it or not. There’ve been days, weeks when things went well, and I was so happy and excited that I ran all the way home. But when things didn’t go so well, I tried not to think of the words of that folk song that I’m sure you know as well as me: ‘I throw straw into the sea, it’s heavy and it sinks, Others fire bullets, they fly with open wings!’”

  “I know, my boy, I know. Although I can’t say I know anything about being thrown from my village, when I was in Constantinople, I learned what it meant to be fatherless. My saviour was my Uncle Stavros. He was a printer and took me under his wing at his huge printing house in Tahtakale in Constantinople. Everything I have today, what I’ve become, my wealth and the way I think – I owe it all to him.”

  “So you’re from Constantinople, Kiri Vladimiros?”

  “Yes, born and bred, Hassanaki. I moved here years ago, thinking I’d be able to earn a better living. It wasn’t such a bad decision. Come on, let’s go inside and I’ll tell you what I want.” He led me into the room that he called his “study”, immediately to the left of the entrance. Sitting down at the head of a table covered in notebooks and papers, he asked Nikolaki, the errand boy, to bring us a sumada syrup with a generous sprinkling of cinnamon.

  “Bring over that chair and sit down, my lad,” he said, before making me the best proposition I had received in my life. “Hassan, I want to take you on. Altogether there are six people working in this print shop. I want you to take care of the bills for the businesses that use our services. Some of them come here to collect their print orders, so you can give them the bill and take the money in the shop; for the others, I want you to go out and deliver the bill and collect the money from them. You’ll bring us new customers and take care of the stocks we need to keep the place running. Basically, you’ll be responsible for all our outside business and take care of it for us.”

  “Of course, I’d be happy to try but…”

  “Don’t worry at all about wages, Hassan. But we Christians have our weekend holiday on a Sunday, I’m sure you know that. I don’t want you to say that you can’t work on Fridays. You’ll get your weekly wages on Saturday night like the other workers and rest on Sunday, like us. Is that all right?”

  I had been looking for a regular job more suited to my age. Now, here with Kiri Vladimiros, I would be protected at least to some degree from the fanatical Greeks, and I would earn enough to be able to look after our household comfortably until another opportunity arose. That’s no small thing for someone who’s been torn away from their own home and land…

  “Kiri Vladimiros, I accept. I’ll take care of your customers and I won’t let you down.”

  “I want to give you a book, Hassanaki, as a memory of the day you joined us.” He stood up and handed me a bound book from the shelf behind him, saying, “Open it and have a look. It’s a Turkish–Greek dictionary that was printed at my uncle’s print house. I worked on it too.”

  I opened it and looked. It was dated 1876. Printed on fine paper, the dictionary had been put together with the help of Maliaka, a teacher from the Imperial Lycée in Galatasaray, Istanbul, and Hafz Refi, who was an Arabic, Persian and Turkish teacher at the same school. It was written in both Hellenic and Arabic alphabets. I was thrilled to receive it. It would be slow going, letter by letter, but, combined with the lessons I had received from Manolis and the village imam, Sherif Efendi, the dictionary would be invaluable to me.

  7

  My long-suffering mother was elated at seeing her young son taken into regular employment. She prayed and made devotions to the saints. I would now be able to provide a much better living for our household and, if conditions allowed, might bring her a bride and grandchild as well! Of course, she already had a grandchild from my older sister, Nazire, but she said that it was a different feeling to get a grandchild from a son. The murder of my brother, and then losing my father when the mosque was shelled, increased my mother’s affection for me and meant she fussed over me even more. Overcome with happiness, she hung on to me for what seemed like an eternity, saying, “My Hassan, my son!”

  Around dusk, we wanted to go and pass on the good news to my sister and brother-in-law in Tabyalar, but my mother was apprehensive about going there: “There’ve been some bad rumours; they say the Greeks have brought trouble into the city. Nothing’s going to happen to us, is it?”

  “Don’t worry,” I replied. “I’ll be next to you! All these years I’ve spent on the streets, in and out of the crowds, even after dusk, I’ve learned a lot about people – the good and the bad. We’ll get there, and we’ll get back again.”

  When I arrived in Tabyalar with my mother, covered in her black abaya, my brother-in-law was in the middle of closing up the shop. He too was concerned about the rumours and, worried that something might happen to him, he had taken to closing the shop early to give him enough time to get home in the early evening.

  Nazire and Arif were thrilled that I had been saved from the life of a street-hawker, but they were also apprehensive. My brother-in-law voiced their fears. “There’s just one thing – this man you’re talking about is one of the educated Greeks, who can read and write. I hope he’s not going to try an
d make you one of them.”

  My mother agreed. “I’m happy you’ve found a job, but it makes me sick to the stomach to think about what Arif said. God forbid!”

  Although the joy of landing a decent job had brought with it some anxieties, I trusted myself to remain true to my ancestors. “Thanks to the way you brought me up, I know my traditions and my religion. I know about my Turkish roots. I learned our Qur’an as well. I know more than I don’t know. I’ve learned how they write and I’ve got to know a lot of people over all the years I’ve been out and about selling. I’ve earned my stripes now. It’s not that easy to push me around. Come on, all of you, stop worrying!”

  Nazire threw her support behind me saying, “You’re worrying for nothing. The Hassan I know wouldn’t let anyone try to make him something he’s not. He knows what he’s doing!”

  “I know Hassan as well,” Arif insisted, “but I’m worried and I need to speak my mind. All of us that escaped here to Chania, we don’t get much news from outside, so we don’t always notice what’s really going on. I’ll tell you what I heard yesterday about a massacre in Floria village on the way to Kandanos. Some brigands arrived and told the people there were Greek mobs on the way and that they should come with them to escape to safety. About fifteen Turks believed them and followed them out of the village. The brigands shot them all dead.”