God of Hunger Page 12

  Theo did not want to say anything. He looked across the garden and caught sight of the ocean. He turned to the Doctor: ‘I say I want another swim. And when I return I will give you a reply to your question. Please excuse me.’

  “But Theo it is night you must not go to the sea. It is dangerous! You must have heard about the boy, one your school friends, who was taken by a shark?’

  ‘Dangerous? No. I am not afraid of the sea nor of the night. Yes, I know about the boy.

  … Anyway I won’t be long.’ He went directly toward the beach, not bothering to find his costume and towel. Who was bothered any way? The thought of him influencing his father was a joke. He walked into the sea to be pounded into freshness by the rollers. Then hunger over took his thoughts.

  He returned to the house to look for a snack. The family had waited up for him. There was concern on their faces but no awkwardness. Theo asked Mrs. Faramdoula if he could have a snack. She immediately went into the kitchen while he went into his room to change out of his damp clothes. When he emerged the Doctor called out to him from the verandah, ‘Ah, young Kokopoulos, come, sit. Drink? Try the Moussaka.’ Theo felt replete and refreshed and after another coffee he took the initiative and asked to speak to the Doctor in private.

  ‘Doctor, I have been thinking about our discussions and about the things I have heard you say. You have been very kind to me and I want to return that kindness by asking you to define at greater length your ideas on Ujamaa. Set them down on a paper which I will give to my father. But that is all I will do for you. My father and I are not close. Not at all like you and your children. There is no peacefulness in our family. I so appreciated being amongst you all in such calmness. But I must return to my madhouse. At least I have my own place to go to, but my head is in turmoil knowing that at any moment my parents can change my situation. I really must find independence for myself! And maybe I have. While I have been in Dar-es-Salaam I have made contact with my people. I have met many of them at the Greek Club and have been to the homes of one or two. I will tell you, in confidence, because I do trust you not to make trouble for me, we are about to launch a party in opposition to TANU.’

  ‘We Greeks are men of business. And we want to form a party that will promote business. TANU, as we understand it wants to establish common ownership. This is not how money is made. So our party, to be launched very soon, is dedicated to private enterprise. There is money to be made in Tanganyika and we Greeks are good at making money. Concerns such as yours and my father’s do not really interest us. They interest me as ideas, as history. I am in love with it. But it will not make a living for me. I want to become as wealthy as Arnaoutoglou and co. I have seen their houses and cars and yachts. I have seen how it can be. So. Thank you, Doctor. I cannot be part of what you seek to achieve. Nor of what my father wishes to achieve. But thank you for your kindness. Nooshin and I will remain friends for all time. And now it is time for me to go.’

  *

  Theo left the Faramdoula’s house and moved in with the Damaras brothers who offered him a place to stay in Dar-es-Salaam while an alternative future was further plotted.

  The new party was announced in the Tanganyika Standard. It was featured inauspiciously on the same inside page which carried news of the conviction for the buggery of minors by a Levantine by the name of John Bohaya; kids in school had long talked of being bohayad. Theo was rather impressed that the link to a real person had finally being made. Another of life’s little mysteries solved. And another seeking resolution: the fate of the United Tanganyika Party, the UTP.

  “We stand for a prosperous Tanganyika, the right of private ownership to exploit our nation’s vast resources. All welcome to join.”

  For the UTP to stand any chance against TANU in the forthcoming elections it had to enlist mass support. Theo had decided on a course of action hoping to attract attention to his party; if only to distinguish himself from his father. He did not want to return to his farm without something to show for his sojourn in Dar-es-Salaam. It had opened his eyes to a number of possibilities which he hoped to explore further when he returned north where the great mountain stood proud of the plains like some giant’s iced pudding.

  Armenis

  Theo enjoyed talking and when at the Greek Club he talked with anyone not at the card tables. These were always busy in the evenings. An English MP on a visit to the Northern Province recounted how he was astounded by the amount of money changing hands in poker at the Greek Club in Arusha. The game was played with the fervour of a Sirtaki, Zorba’s dance to you and me.

  The same fervour characterised conversation, It started determinedly controlled, point by dialectic point and built up gradually to a crescendo with all claiming to have scored the direct hit, rather like Masai warriors under the influence of kaloriti, the drug taken before a lion hunt. Crazy is a good word for it. As when Theo asked his cronies how best to become rich quickly.

  ‘Listen Theo, what you must do is go and talk to the Armenian. Armenis knows more about making money than anyone in town. Bulldass, returned Miniotis. No one is shrewder than Misha at making bucks; you cannot beat a Jew at his own game. Rubbish, said Sarikas. Go and talk to Horne. He is the richest Greek around here and he will put you right.’

  The discussion raced ahead and climaxed with the quaint arithmetic doing the rounds in the Club whenever the subject of money came up: ‘One Greek is equal to two Jews; one Armenian is equal to two Greeks. Oppa!’

  After a long pause, the clinching argument, for Theo, came from Miniotis: “I must concede that our Armenian is very clever. Late one night, after cards, we were discussing Socratic philosophy when he came in for a drink. I said to him: ‘Socrates tells us to live each day by practicing death. Would you agree?’

  ‘No. I would say “live each day practicing life”.’

  And so Theo went, next morning, to see the Armenian.

  He was not known by any other name. Just O Armenis. Not much was known about him. He was noted for his wealth and his way with women; kissing hands and that sort of thing. Some said he was a spy. A Communist Agent. FBI etc. But no one really knew more than that he lived alone in a castle built by an English eccentric on the slopes of the mountain and surrounded by huge lush gardens enveloped in an impenetrable wall along which armed guards patrolled with their dogs.

  Theo knew Armenis well as they had often taken hunting trips together along the rift valley; Armenis trusted no one with a gun more than Theo. So when he arrived at the castle, the gates were automatically opened with calls from the guards of Jambo Bwana, Karibu. And welcome he was.

  ‘Ay Theo, where have you been? I’ve missed you. It’s time for another buffalo.’

  ‘I was in Dar for a while and I have come to ask your advice on how to become rich.’

  Armenis cocked his head high and screeched in delight at the boy’s effrontery, which he admired. The two were like father and son ever since Theo had first hunted with Armenis soon after his expulsion from school in Kongwa. Theo was then fifteen and Armenis older than old man Kokopoulos by about ten years. Armenis had no family, at least not as far as it was known, in Tanganyika and he immediately took to the boy as a substitute son on a part time basis. And now was one of those times.

  They walked into the enormous house and made for the library: “Sit and tell me.”

  Theo recounted his stay in Dar-es-Salaam and conveyed his anxieties about the future, emphasizing his wish to act independently of others and of their plans. Armenis understood immediately.

  ‘At your age I felt exactly the same. Before they were killed by the Turks my parents had plans for me to join my cousins in America and, like them, to study medicine. I hated the idea of more academic study. I disliked school and wanted no more of books. I was ready to strike out on my own and when alone in the world, my life spared by a stay in Baku with my aunt, my mother’s sister, I took the opportunity to take care of myself. Or, rather, to see the world and some action! What a world it was! T
here was war everywhere. Everything was in chaos. How exciting! I understood very clearly that here was history in the making and wherever there was a fluid situation, there lay opportunities. And where better than further up the Caspian Sea into Russia. Reports from there were coming in of shortages of almost everything and of hunger.’

  ‘My aunt had inherited my grandfather’s caique, anchored at Baku. So, without her permission, and with a group of like-minded friends, we loaded her up with goats and set sail for the mouth of the Volga, to Astrakhan. For the Black Market. We made three such return trips, each time making a greater profit than the last. Then my aunt found out and we had to stop. But with the money we made we went into the Azeri country around us and bought animals, goats, and sheep, and brought them to the outskirts of town to fields that belonged to the father of one of the gang.’

  ‘The father was too old to care about our operation. And so we became goatherds and shepherds, caring for the animals day and night, taking it in turns, in pairs, to stay with them. We had dogs and we were armed. We did this for a little over a year and saw an increase in our flocks. Then came news of the Revolution. We followed events in the Empire very closely because our future was at stake. Even now I could tell you how things went, but that would take too long.’

  ‘The important thing for you to remember is that history, viewed from the Kremlin gives an early start to the Cold War; Stalin, in particular, wanted to retrieve territories that no Russian Czar would ever have voluntarily given up; territories that were taken from Russia whilst a great question mark hung over the future of the Revolution.’

  ‘So to in Turkey where an earlier revolution was still in its formative stages and where territorial adjustments at her expense were as much resented; the Turkey of Kemal Ataturk posed as great a problem to the victors as Lenin's Soviet Union. Resentment became a driving force of global politics early in the history of our century.’

  ‘Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister, hoped to solve the Turkish question by encouraging Greek control in Anatolia. But as the Greek advance in exercise of their "Great Idea" gathered momentum, so the position of Ataturk strengthened. In 1919 he proclaimed the Turkish Republic and was busy in expanding outwards from Ankara. However Ataturk had many enemies; in addition to the Greek threat in the south the allies had occupied Istanbul in March 1920 and were co-operating with a puppet government established there.’

  ‘It was only with the Soviets that Ataturk could ally and this proved possible after Commissar Chicherin's arrival in Ankara when a joint Turko-Soviet Army smashed Armenian hopes for self-determination.’

  ‘The Ataturk-Chicherin relationship culminated in the Soviet-Turkish Alliance of 1921.

  The ring was now securely held for a long and bloody bout.’

  ‘By the end of the first round the Greek advances faltered. I am not sure how your friends at the Greek club will take my views. But I think your tribe were made to look foolish.’

  ‘On the home front a plebiscite removed Prime Minister Venizelos from power and returned King Constantine to political pre-eminence. The King's known pro-German sympathies during the war were used by the French and Italians to extricate themselves from the morass in Anatolia and they announced the repudiation of their obligations towards Greece. The British government however made no such move - even when the Greeks suffered their first defeat in January 1921. It was then that France displayed an independent diplomacy. Having dropped the Greeks, she courted the Turks. An agreement came in October 1921.

  ‘The Soviets were unhappy about the Turko-French rapprochement. Intent on building up their own security area they reacted by sending a strong military mission to Ankara, which resulted in a new plan for joint action against the Greeks.’

  ‘By this time the Greeks were well and truly in the imperialist trap of their own making. Withdrawal was impossible; militarily the Greeks were surrounded and diplomatically Britain insisted on Greek perseverance. In their despair the Greeks advanced on Constantinople, thus provoking a fresh Turkish offensive which ended at Smyrna amidst the worst scenes of carnage from which your people escaped to this country.’

  *

  Theo, who was beginning to wish for some sort of diversion from the mass of information he was being fed lurched his upper body forward of the plump cushion into which it had sunk and said: “I am finding all this a lot to take in but do you have just mentioned something I know about. Do you know that we call it Ee Katastrophee? (The Catastrophe.)

  “Yes, of course, my boy. This is your catastrophe. We had ours five years earlier, in 1915 when well over a million of us were destroyed by the Ottomans.”

  Theo sat looking at the bookshelves behind the Armenian’s armchair when he said:

  “What you do not state is that the Turks threw us into the sea. Those who were not slaughtered by sword or bullet, or raped to death, or burned alive in their houses took to boats in the harbour or jumped into the sea burning bright with flames reflected from the city. They made for the Allied ships anchored in the bay to seek help none would give. Those with the strength to clamber up the sides had their hands smashed by British and French sailors. Only the Americans showed some compassion. Surely in all the books you have, this terror is described?”

  “Yes and no Theo. Five years before, in 1915 our catastrophe occurred but you will not find a book which tells you the full horror of what happened. All seem intent on not mentioning it. Certainly not the figures which are imprinted on our minds. And that is the point Theo. Let us keep our horrors only to ourselves. There is no point in bringing to the surface matters which will result in argument or worse. The past is the past. Let it be.”

  “So is Misha wrong in telling me about the Holocaust?”

  “To be told once is an education. To hear it over and over again is to witness an obsession. Some Jews are obsessed by the destruction of their people in the war. But Misha is not one of them. He told me of your visit to him. And I am so pleased he spoke to you. I know Misha of old and he would have told the Jewish horror story in its historical perspective. When he and I spoke of it he did not speak of Jewish blood as different from that of others. He spoke of it within the ocean of blood spilt during the war. Moreover we, he and I, agree that it is not healthy to keep repeating the story of the horror of the gas chambers with their millions of victims. That it happened no one should deny. It was absolutely dreadful. But too make such horror the foundation upon which the present is constructed is sad. And harmful. What you must realize Theo, is that history records horrors which affected every people, every nation. Few have been spared. Certainly not in the last hundred years. From the American Civil War to the present war in Vietnam, horror upon horror. But that we, you and me, are alive … that is everything. Forget the past as reason for hatred or, worse still, for vengeance. See it only as a source of knowledge in your thinking about the present. And of your future. And, sure, in that context the past has its relevance but it must not provide the dominant motive for life. Otherwise you will always be living with the dead. Live with the living Theo. Now let us get back to your education. Where were we?”

  “With the Turks”

  “Well done Theo. Bravo pedee moo.”

  “Softer. Say it softly, Pethee mou.”

  “Pethee mou.”

  “Bravo, Armeni.”

  The Armenian continued: ‘Ataturk next turned his attention on Istanbul, as Constantinople was now being called. And also toward Mosul. Rich in oil, this vilayet was contested also by Iraq and the dispute gave the Soviet Union the opportunity to revive her former standing with Turkey by concluding with her a new Treaty of Friendship and Neutrality.’

  ‘This marked the beginning of a period of truce between the Great Powers over the Middle East. However, this was not to last. The future of Azerbaijan, where we were, was now contested. It was partitioned, with the northern half, including Baku, going to Russia, and the southern half, with its capital at Tabriz, remaining in Iran. When Soviet forces re-
established control of Baku in 1920, they chose its opera house as the site for a gathering of Asian revolutionaries to promote revolution throughout the Islamic, and colonial worlds; trying to harness Islamic radicalism, the Bolshevik leader Zinoviev called for jihad against British colonialism.’

  Recalling the Doctor’s lectures in Dar-es-Salaam, Theo asked, ‘Was this Zivnoviev a Muslim?’

  ‘Bravo Theo. You are on the ball. Good question. Good boy. Z-i-n-o-v-i-e-v was certainly not a Muslim. He was a leading communist who saw an opportunity to turn the millions of Muslim subjects of the British against their masters and offered leadership in the cause of Muslim freedom. Mussolini did the same. He set up a radio station at Bari to preach jihad to Muslim subjects of the British Empire. Crazy.’

  ‘Nothing much came of such appeals from the Baku congress, but it made my first fortune. The delegates had to eat and I had the meat. With the money I made, I left Azerbaijan for Persia with the Soviet delegation who adopted me as their quartermaster, so successful was I in Baku.’

  ‘Things in Persia went well for me at first, but in response to the entry of Soviet troops in 1921 a military coup produced an Iranian regime which was sympathetic to the West. So I switched sides and became a broker between the new regime and western oil companies. Very quickly I bought into their operations and the rest is history. Which repeated itself in Iraq. There, in return for a stake in Iraqi oil, the French and the USA recognised the British military occupation and supported her Mandate of Iraq; this agreement was confirmed at the San Remo conference in April, 1920.’