Читать книгу A Child of the Orient - Demetra Vaka - Страница 5

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MY uncle was now gone—gone, let us hope, to where he was to find rest from racial hatred, rest from national ambition.

Gone though he was, his influence over my life was never to go entirely—in spite of radical modifications. He had enriched my childhood with things beyond my age, yet things which I would not give up for the most normal and sweetest of childhoods. He had taught me the Greek Revolution as no book could ever have done; and he had given me an idea of the big things expected of men. He had given me a worship for my race amounting to superstition, and bequeathed to me a hatred for the Turks which would have warped my intelligence, had I not been blessed almost from my infancy with a power of observing for myself, and also had not good fortune given me little Turkish Kiamelé as a constant companion.

In the abstract, the Turks, from the deeds they had done, had taken their place in my mind as the cruellest of races; yet in the concrete that race was represented by dark-eyed, pretty little Kiamelé, the sweetest and brightest memory of an otherwise bleak infancy.

Alongside the deeds of the Greeks, and the bloodshed of the Greek Revolution, I had from her “The Arabian Nights.” She told them to me in her picturesque, dramatic way, becoming a horse when a horse had to come into the tale, and any other animal when that animal appeared; and she imitated them with so great an ingenuity that she suggested the very presence of the animal, with little tax on my imagination. She talked with a thick voice, when a fat man spoke, and a terribly funny piping voice when a thin one spoke. She draped herself exquisitely with her veil, when a princess came into the tale; and her face assumed the queerest look when the ev-sahibs, or supernatural sprites, appeared. Had it not been for her and her “Arabian Nights,” I should never have laughed, or known there was a funny side to life; for I had little enough occasion for laughter with my uncle. Even to this day, when I am amused, I laugh in the oriental way of my little Kiamelé.

After the death of my uncle, the course of my life was changed. I made the acquaintance of my own family, who now came to live on the island, in the same old house where he and I had lived. It took me a long time to adjust myself to the new life, so different from the old, and especially to meet children, and to try to talk with them. I had known that other children existed, but I thought that each one was brought up alone on an island with a grand-uncle, who taught it the history of its race.

My father and I quickly became friends, and I soon began to talk with him in the grown-up way I had talked with my uncle, much to his amusement, I could see.

One day when I was sitting in his lap, with my arms encircling his neck, I said to him:

“Father, do you feel the Turkish yoke?”

He gave a start. “What are you talking about, child?”

It was then I told him what I knew of our past, and of our obligations toward the future; how some day we must rise and throw off that yoke, and hear the holy liturgy again chanted in St Sophia.

He listened, interested, yet a flush of anger overspread his face. He patted me, and murmured to himself: “And we thought she would grow stronger living in the country.”

He bent down and kissed me. “I would not bother much, just now, about these things,” he said. “I’d play and grow strong.”

“But, father,” I protested, “uncle told me never to forget those things—not even for a day; to remember them constantly, and to bring up my sons to carry forward the flag.”

“You see,” my father replied, very seriously, “you are not eight yet, and I do not believe in early marriages; so you have twelve years before you are married and thirteen before you have a son. During those years there are a lot of nice and funny things to think about—and, above all, you must grow strong physically.”

I must say I was quite disappointed at the way he took things. I was quite miserable about it, and might have become morbid—for I liked to cling to the big dreams of the future—had it not been for my half-brother. He was fourteen years older than I, and he, too, like my uncle lived in the past. His past, however, went beyond my uncle’s past; and from him I was to learn, not of the woes of Greece, but of the glory of Greece, of her golden age, and of the time when she, Queen of the World, was first in civilization.

My horizon was gilded also by the Greek mythology—that wonderful Greek mythology, which to my brother was living, not dead. He spoke one day in such a way of Olympus that I exclaimed:

“You talk as if Olympus really existed, and were not only mythology.”

“Of course, it exists,” he replied. “I used to live there myself, until they punished me by sending me down here. I cannot tell you all the particulars, because, when Zeus is about to exile one, one is given a potion which puts him to sleep, and while asleep he is carried beyond the limits of the Olympian realm, and is left outside to live the life of a man. But though he forgets a great deal—as, for example, how to find his way back—he is left with the memory of his former existence. That is his punishment. After his death, however, he is forgiven and returns to Olympus again.”

I stared at my brother, but his calm assurance, and the faith I had in him, made me implicitly believe him—and to-day I think he really more than half believed it himself.

After this I was not surprised to have him tell me that the gods of Greece were not dead, but forced to retire on the mountains of Olympus, because Christianity had to come first. “You see, little one, you will presently learn the Old Testament, as you are now being taught the New—and as I am teaching you Mythology. You will find out, as you grow older, that you need all three to balance things up.”

From him I heard not only the names of the great Greek writers, but he read to me by the hour from them. At first they were very hard to understand, since the Greek we speak is so much simpler than the Greek of Aristophanes and Sophocles; but since, after all, it is the same language, I learned to recite it pretty well before even I knew how to read and write.

It was from my brother, too, that I learned to know the Greek Revolution as our great modern poets sang of it; and before the year was over I could recite the “Chani of Gravia” and other celebrated poems, as American children recite “Mother Goose.”

One day there came into our garden, where my brother and I sat, a handsome young man, saying: “They told me you were in the garden, so I came to find you.” He sat down by us and plunged into a conversation about a certain game they were getting up, and of which my brother was the captain. We escorted him to the gate, when he left us, and after he was out of ear-shot I asked my brother who he was, as he had forgotten to introduce us.

“It is Arif Bey,” he replied rather curtly.

“You don’t mean a real Turk?” I cried.

“Why, yes.”

“But you seemed so friendly with him!”

“Why not? I like him first rate.”

“How can you be friends with a Turk?”

“He’s an awfully good fellow.”

“But ought we to like them, and treat them as if they were our equals?”

“Well, what can we do, sister? They are the masters here, and we belong to the Turkish officialdom. We have got to be friendly with them.”

“But we ought to hate them just the same, since we must kill them. Wouldn’t you kill him, if you could?”

“I don’t think I hate Arif Bey—and as for killing him, I hope I shall never have to.”

“But if we are not to kill them, how are we going to be free again, and how can the Greek flag fly over the Galata Tower?”

“Look here, baby, what you need is to play more and not think so much. Now come, and I’ll teach you to climb trees, and for every tree you climb yourself I’ll tell you a tale about the time when I lived on Mount Olympus.”

I was agile by nature, in spite of being frail, and in no time I learned to climb even the tallest trees on our place, an occupation which delighted me as much as anything I had ever done.

Arif Bey I saw again and again, for I became the constant companion of either my father or my brother, and I could not find it in my heart to hate him. A few years older than my brother, he was taller and his shoulders were broader, and he carried himself with a dash worthy of the old demi-gods of Greece. As for his eyes they were as kind and good to look into as those of my brother. What is more I was never afraid in his presence, and one day he spoke so tenderly of his sick mother that I pretty much changed my mind about the delight of seeing him killed. It was then that I talked very eulogistically about him to my brother; but one never can tell what grown-ups will do—they are the most inconsistent of human beings.

“Look here, baby”—he interrupted my praises of Arif Bey—“Arif is handsome and a nice chap, and I can trust him up to a certain point; but don’t get to thinking he is as good as we are. A Turk never is. They have enough Greek blood in them to look decent, but they have enough Turkish left to be Asiatics, and don’t forget that. An Asiatic is something inferior at best. Look at Arif Bey himself, for example. He is about the best of them, and yet, barely twenty-seven, he has two wives already. There is Asia for you!”

I was quite perplexed in regard to the proper attitude of mind toward the Turks. The only girl I knew was Kiamelé—and I adored her. The only man was Arif Bey—and he got so mixed up in my mind with the demi-gods that I did not even mind his two wives. My uncle had been dead for almost a year, and I had no one to incite me against them. The old Greek writers and the beautiful mythology was beginning to make me tolerant toward everybody. I began to lose the feeling of the yoke, since Greece had once been the greatest of great countries. When one has a past achievement to be proud of, one bears a temporary humiliation better—and there was so much in the Greek past that the weight of the yoke lifted perceptibly from my neck. It is true I kept the little flag nailed under the iconostasis, before which I said my prayers every night, and when I felt that I was not quite as loyal to it as I ought to be, I used to pray to the Christian gods to help me to remember it. I say “gods,” because to my mind God and Christ, and St Nicholas, and St George, and the rest of the saints were much the same sort of a group as the old Greek gods, now in seclusion on Mount Olympus.