Free Birds Without Wings by Louis De Bernières

upon the shoulders of the pot on either side of the neck, so that they resembled wings. “I’ve made you some musical birds,” he said. “Give them back to me, and I’ll show you. You half fill them with water, like this, and then you blow down the whistle.” Iskander tried some experimental puffs, emptied a little water out of each, and then blew again, placing one at each corner of his mouth. To the amazement and delight of the little boys, a torrent of birdsong cascaded out of the terracotta birds, liquid, warbling and utterly enchanting. They jumped up and down with pleasure, and, forgetting their manners, reached out their hands, impatient to receive them. “This one,” said Iskander, “sounds exactly like a karatavuk.” He gave it to his son, asking, “You know the karatavuk? The one which is completely black and has the yellow beak? It goes vuk vuk vuk in the oleander to warn you away, and then it praises God at the top of the tree in the evening.” Iskander gave the other to Nicos, saying, “and this one sounds like a mehmetçik, which some people call kizilgerdan and some call the fire-nightingale.”
    “It’s the little one with the red breast,” said Nicos, excited, but at the same time a little resentful that Abdul’s produced the song of a larger bird than his.
    The boys blew hard into their clay birds, and Iskander laughed. “Gently, gently, you’re blowing out the water.”
    In the months that elapsed afterwards the two boys became maestros at imitating the songs of the karatavuk and mehmetçik, using the clay birds to call each other across the valleys and rocks. From time to time they became carried away, running about the hibiscus shrubs and wild pomegranates with the whistles in their mouths, flapping their arms, and wondering whether or not it might be possible to fly if only they flapped their arms enough. “Man is a bird without wings,” Iskander told them, “and a bird is a man without sorrows.”
    Abdul begged his mother for a black shirt and waistcoat, embroideredwith golden thread, and he had them before a year was out. Thereafter, because of the natural process whereby everyone in a small community ends up with a nickname, it was not long before even his mother was referring to him as Karatavuk.
    Nicos, soon to become Mehmetçik, interrupted his mother’s labours with similar requests, until finally he obtained the red shirt and waistcoat for which he had pestered her, kissing her hand and pressing it to his cheeks. She had raised her eyes to heaven, saying, “She who has children has torments,” but she had bought the cloth from a pedlar and made the garments in the few days before the hoeing season.
    Iskander lost count of the number of times that the boys came to him, holding back their tears because they had lost their clay birds, either in a fight, or by dropping or misplacing them. He made entire batches, to sell to indulgent parents in the market at Telmessos, so that one day he would be able to afford a beautiful gun, and every time that he gave a new one to the boys he would ask, “And who is second only to God?” withholding the toy until he had heard the correct and satisfactory answer, “The potter, the potter, the potter.”

CHAPTER 11

    Ibrahim Gives Philothei a Goldfinch
    When Ibrahim was six years old he found a dead goldfinch in an orchard near the Letoun, where Mohammed the Leech Gatherer was wont to spend hours in the water, waiting patiently for the leeches to attach themselves to his legs. Ibrahim had been amusing himself by trying to catch lizards in his hands, a project which is altogether impossible to achieve, but is a pastime to which every child necessarily commits many oblivious hours. Catching tortoises is somewhat less of a challenge, and for this reason those creatures quickly lose their interest, unless one is simply waiting to see how long it takes a tortoise to put out its head after having been poked with a stick.
    Ibrahim found the