The Second Achmed Abdullah Megapack by Achmed Abdullah

Author:Achmed Abdullah
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Mystery, China, Chinatown, Middle East, Short Stories
ISBN: 9781434442932
Publisher: Wildside Press
Published: 2013-10-23T04:00:00+00:00

THE SOUL OF A TURK

That night, with no hatred in his heart but with a Moslem’s implacable logic guiding his hand, he killed the Prussian drill sergeant who, scarlet tarbush on yellow-curled, flat-backed skull, was breveted as major to his regiment, the Seventeenth Turkish Infantry.

His comrades saw him creep into the tattered, bell-shaped tent where the Prussian was sleeping the sleep of utter exhaustion. They heard the tragic crack of the shot, and saw him come out again smoking revolver in his right hand. Calmly squatting on their haunches, they watched him go to the commissary, help himself to slabs of spongy, gray bread, dried apricot paste, and a bundle of yellow Latakia tobacco leaves, fill his water canteen, and take the road toward the giant breast of the Anatolian mountains, studded here and there with small, bistre-red farms, like brooches clasping a greenish-black garment.

“Allah’s Peace on you, brother Moslems!” he said piously, turning, the fingers of his left hand opening like the sticks of a fan, then closing them again, to show the inevitability of what he had done.

“And on you Peace, Mehmet el-Touati!” came their mumbled reply, tainted by just a shade of envy, because they told themselves that soon Mehmet el-Touati would be in his own country while their homes were far in the South and West, and they did not know the roads.

They were neither astonished, nor shocked. They understood him, as he understood them.

For, like himself, they were simple Turkish peas ants, bearded, middle-aged, patient, slightly rheumy, who had been drafted into the army and thrown into the frothy, blood-stained cauldron of European history in the making, by the time honored process of a green-turbaned priest rising one Friday morning in the mosque pulpit and declaring with melodious unction that the Russian was clamoring at the outer door of the Osmanli house, and that Islam was in danger.

The Russian—by Allah and by Allah, but they knew him of old!

He would ride over their fields, over the sown and the fallow. He would cut down the peach trees. He would pollute their mosques, their harems, and their wells. He would stable his horses in their cypress-shaded graveyards. He would enslave the women, kill the little children, and send the red flame licking over byre and barn thatch.

Therefore:

Jihad! Holy War! Kill for the Faith and the blessed Messenger Mohammed!

* * * *

Thus, uncomplaining, ox-eyed, they had pressed! their wives and their children to hairy, massive chests, had adjusted the rawhide straps of their sandals, had trooped to district military headquarters, had been fitted into nondescript, chafing, buckram-stiffened uniforms, had been given excellent German rifles, wretched food, brackish water; and had trudged along the tilting roads of stony, bleak Anatolia.

Moslems, peasants, pawns—they had gone forth, leaving their all behind, stabbed on the horns of Fate; with no Red Cross, no doctors, no ambulances, to look after their wounded or to ease the last agonies of their dying; with sleek, furtive-eyed Levantine government clerks stealing the pittance which the

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