“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.
CHAPTER IV
DJIMLAH
ON the day of Beiram my father was about to set out for a call on a Turkish pasha.
“Take me with you, father,” I begged, thinking of the pleasure of being with him more than of going into a Turkish home. He acceded to my request, actuated by the same motive as mine.