Christ, you say? Yes he was there too. A small dark man younger than you see in the paintings. But the same beard and the same eyes. Carrying a revolver. He shot a man in the head. And the Holy Ghost was there carrying a sword. Weeping, half his body a deep purple. God himself? I didn’t see him but he must have been there carrying something. A body or a knife. Everybody was there in that garden.
Stern?
Yes, a garden. Now when was that exactly.
Stern?
There was an animal sound deep in his throat.
Right at the very beginning of the new century, that’s when it was. Right after the world of the Strongbows and the Wallensteins had died in the First World War. It couldn’t survive the anonymous machine guns, their world, and the faceless tanks and the skies of poison gas that killed brave men and cowards equally, the strong and the weak all the same, the good and the bad together so that it no longer mattered who you were, what you were. Yes their world died and we had to have a new one and we got it, we got our new century in 1918 and Smyrna was its very first act, the prelude to everything.
Stern?
When, you say. Only twenty years ago and forever, and what a garden lay waiting for us then.
20 Smyrna 1922
Stern picked up the knife, Joe watched him do it. He watched him take the little girl by her hair and pull back her head. He saw the thin white neck.
AN IONIAN COLONY SAID to have been the birthplace of Homer, one of the richest cities in Asia Minor under both the Romans and the Byzantines, second of the seven churches addressed in the Book of Revelations where John also called it rich and said that one day it would know terrible tribulation, which it did when Tamerlane destroyed it.
But now early in the twentieth century once again prosperous with nearly half a million Greeks and Armenians and Jews, Persians and Egyptians and Turks and Europeans in their various costumes industriously pursuing trade and love, their beautiful seaport surpassing all others in the Levant in the bewildering flow of life’s goods.
The Greeks and Jews and Armenians and Turks still given to living in their separate quarters, but the quarters having come to overlap in time and the rich of every race finding their way into the opulent villas of the European Quarter.
A city known for its fine wine and frankincense, its carpets and rhubarb and figs and opium, the banks of the streams thick with oleander and laurel and jasmine, with almond trees and mimosa. Famous for its devotion to music, its incessant musicales, particularly in love with the native orchestras that mixed zithers and mandolins and guitars.
A people renowned for their addiction to cafés and promenades, their fondness for the whispered dramas emanating from backstreets and courtyards, the secret dealings of love and commerce no less than the open acting of the stage.
Renowned as well for their vast consumption of wines and their insatiable desire to join more and more clubs of every description where they could play cards and gamble and eagerly devour the endless dizzying tales of pleasure and intrigue, forever delighted by the gossip that whirled an afternoon into evening and softly spun away the tipsy buzzing hours of night.
On the summit of the mountain the old Byzantine fortress with the Turkish Quarter on its slopes, a maze of alleys roofed by vines where men leisurely sucked their hookahs beside fountains while professional letter writers in the shadows composed rampant visions of love and hate.
From the West chandeliers and crystal, from the East caravans bringing spices and silks and dyes, bells jangling on the packs of the loping camels. The narrow waterfront was two miles long and lined by cafés and theaters and elegant villas with quiet courtyards. Strollers always knew when the train from Bournabat was arriving because the air was suddenly filled with jasmine, brought in great baskets by the passengers for their friends in town.
Here Stern came at the beginning of September for the meeting he had been planning since that spring, the meeting where O’Sullivan Beare would be introduced to Sivi so the two of them could work directly together.
On September 9 a creaking Greek caïque drew into the harbor with several passengers on board, one an elderly wizened Arab and another a small dark young man in a ragged oversized uniform from the Crimean War. The caïque tied up at dawn, a Saturday, and even at that early hour the city seemed strangely subdued. O’Sullivan Beare saw a sign facing him across the quay, its black letters two feet high, a new film that had come to Smyrna.
LE TANGO DE LA MORT.
He nudged Haj Harun and pointed but the old man had already seen it. Without a word he backed away from the railing and pulled up his cloak to look at the great purple birthmark that curved from his face down over his entire body.
O’Sullivan Beare watched him uneasily, never having known the old man to take any notice of his birthmark. Yet now he was gazing at it intensely as if a map could be divined in the contours of its shifting colors.
What is it? whispered Joe. What do you see?
But Haj Harun didn’t answer. Instead he straightened his rusting Crusader’s helmet and stared sadly at the sky.
Two weeks earlier the Greek army facing the Turks two hundred miles away to the east, fighting for an expanded Greece after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, had been thoroughly defeated. Yet at the end of August life was still going on as usual in the city. The cafés were crowded, the throngs moved slowly along the quays in the evening promenade. Porters bore loads of raisins and figs down to the docks. The opera house was sold out for the performances of an Italian company.
On September 1 the first wounded Greek soldiers began to arrive by train, the cars so packed men lay on the roofs. All morning and afternoon the trains kept coming, the slumped bodies on top outlined by the setting sun.
The next day came soldiers less seriously wounded in trucks and handcarts, on mules and camels and horses, in lumbering chariots unchanged since Assyrian times. And then on succeeding days soldiers on foot, dragging each other, silent dusty figures stumbling toward a headland west of the city where their army was to be evacuated.
Lastly the refugees from the interior, Armenians and Greeks shuffling under their burdens. They camped in cemeteries and churchyards and those who couldn’t find space camped in the streets, drawing their furniture around them. By September 5 thirty thousand refugees were arriving every day and now those who came were increasingly weary and humble, the very poor who limped with no possessions at all.
Finally the Greeks and Armenians in Smyrna began to understand. They boarded their shops and barricaded their doors. The crowds disappeared, the cafés closed.
The Greek general in command of the city had gone insane. He thought his legs were made of glass and refused to leave his bed lest they break. In any case he had no troops. The garrison had been evacuated along with the army. Kemal’s Turkish forces had triumphed absolutely in the interior.
On September 8 the Greek High Commissioner announced that Greek administration of the city would end at ten o’clock that night. The harbor was filled with British and French and Italian and American warships ready to evacuate their nationals.
The advance Turkish cavalry rode into the city the next morning, well-disciplined and orderly, followed by infantry units marching in formation. All that Saturday, the day O’Sullivan Beare and Haj Harun arrived in the city, the Turkish forces kept pouring into Smyrna in their confusing array of uniforms, some wearing American army uniforms captured from the Russians.
Looting began quietly at dusk. Turkish soldiers entered deserted shops and sorted through the wares.