Forty Days of Musa Dagh (14 page)

 

 

But the surprising, the miraculous, thing was that they lived. For scarcely
had the siege artillery dropped its fourth superfluous shell against
half-ruined walls when the order came from some mysterious quarter to
cease fire. Were the few Moslems among the besieged a sufficient reason
for such misplaced humanity? The townsfolk of Zeitun did not suppose it --
they saw in this constricting truce the omen of some more than usually
gruesome evil. They had reason to do so. And in their terror they sent
a deputation to the Kaimakam, begging him that the valiant troops might
free them of these cursed rebels as soon as possible. They had nothing to
do with them. The Kaimakam moaned and sighed. It was too late now to see
reason. All future decisions were in the hands of the commander of the
occupying regiments. He himself was now no more than a tolerated cipher.

 

 

One radiant morning in March a terrifying rumor spread through the
town. The besieged deserters, leaving their dead, whom they had however
disfigured past recognition, had escaped from the fortress and disappeared
into the mountains. Those Zeitunlis who did not believe in miracles asked:
How could a hundred tattered, highly suspicious-looking men have got through
lines of over four thousand trained soldiers? And the questioners knew well
what their question meant. The blow had already fallen by midday. The
commandant and the Kaimakam called the whole town of Zeitun to account for
the disappearance of this hundred. The profoundly treacherous Zeitunlis
had, in some devilish fashion, contrived to spirit the besieged garrison
past sentries, through lines of peacefully slumbering Turkish troops. News
of this crime had brought the Mutessarif in person, in his carriage, all
the way from Marash. The münadirs, the drummers-up, passed with a dull
rattle down all the streets. Strings of official messengers followed them,
whose business it was to summon the elders and notables of Zeitun to
"a conference on the situation with the Mutessarif and the commanding
officer." The summoned, fifty of the town's most respected inhabitants,
doctors, schoolteachers, priests, large shopkeepers, business men,
appeared without delay at the place appointed, most of them still in
their working clothes. Only a few of the most far-seeing had hidden any
money about them. The "conference" consisted in this -- that these elderly
and highly respected citizens were brutally herded together on a barrack
square by sergeants and counted like cattle. This had ended the matter,
they were informed, and the very next day they were to set out along
the Marash-Aleppo road, on their way to the Mesopotamian desert, to Deir
ez Zor, to which they were to be "migrated." They stared at one another
without a word. Not one of them had a stroke, not one of them wept. Half
an hour ago they had been the chief citizens of a town; now, at one blow,
they were degraded to almost inanimate lumps of clay, livid of face,
half bereft of will. The new mukhtar, their spokesman, begged almost
voicelessly for one favor: that their families, in the name of divine
compassion, might at least be left in peace in Zeitun. Then they would
meet their fate quietly. The answer came with a cruel sneer. Certainly
not -- the Armenians were already sufficiently known, and nobody had
any desire to separate the respected fathers of families from their
nearest relatives. On the contrary, the order was that all present
should by tomorrow, an hour before sunrise, have handed in a written
declaration of readiness to march, with all their relatives, their goods
and chattels, wives, sons, daughters, children of every age. Orders from
Istanbul explicitly stated that the whole Armenian population, to the
last baby in arms, was to be evacuated. Zeitun had ceased to exist. From
now on its name was to be Sultanieh, so that no memory might remain of a
township which had dared open rebellion against the heroic Turkish people.

 

 

Next day, at the hour assigned, the first piteous convoy did in fact
set out, beginning one of the cruellest tragedies that ever in recorded
history has overwhelmed a whole people. Military guards followed the
emigrants -- it was suddenly evident now that this vast force, summoned to
reduce a hundred fugitives, had other minor, but all the more treacherous,
duties assigned it. Every morning now the same heart-rending pageant was
staged. Those fifty chief families of the town were followed by fifty
others, less well-to-do, and, as the exiles sank in the social scale,
their numbers increased. To be sure the vast war zones along every
European front were equally crowded with refugees. But, hard as was
the fate of these homeless people, it was nothing compared with that of
these poor townsfolk.

 

 

For many people it is depressing even to move house. A lost fragment
of life always remains. To move to another town, settle in a foreign
country, is for everyone a major decision. But, to be suddenly driven
forth, within twenty-four hours, from one's home, one's work, the reward
of years of steady industry. To become the helpless prey of hate. To
be sent defenceless out on to Asiatic highroads, with several thousand
miles of dust, stones, and morass before one. To know that one will never
again find a decently human habitation, never again sit down to a proper
table. Yet all this is nothing. To be more shackled than any convict. To
be counted as outside the law, a vagabond, whom anyone has the right to
kill unpunished. To be confined within a crawling herd of sick people,
a moving concentration camp, in which no one is so much as allowed to
ease his body without permission. Who shall dare say he can measure the
depths of anguish which invaded the minds of these people of Zeitun,
in that long week between the setting out of the first transport and
the last! Even so young a man as the pastor Aram Tomasian, who, since
he was not a native of Zeitun, had better prospects than all the others,
became almost a wraith in those seven days.

 

 

Pastor Aram -- he was called only by his Christian name -- had for over
a year been the pastor of the Protestant congregation of Zeitun and
head of the big orphanage. His appointment, at scarcely thirty, to the
directorship of that institution was due to the fact that the American
missionaries in Marash had considered Aram their most promising pupil
and hoped great things of him. They had even sent him with a stipend for
three years to Geneva, to finish his studies there. His French, therefore,
was fluent, his German and English both very good. The orphanage of the
American missionaries was one of the most pleasing results of their
civilizing work of fifty years. Its large, bright rooms gave shelter
to over a hundred children. There was a school attached to it, also
open to children from the town. A small farm surrounded the institute,
so that the orphanage supplied its own goat's milk, vegetables and other
provisions. Therefore, to be director of this orphanage required not only
scholastic ability, but sound, business-like common sense. Pastor Aram,
attracted like most other young men by the thought of being independent,
had embraced his new duties with enthusiasm. He had spent a very happy
and active year and was full of projects. He had married, in the previous
spring, shortly before beginning his new duties, Hovsannah, an old flame,
a girl from Marash, the daughter of a pastor of the first generation of
the seminary there. Whereas most Armenian women are soft-limbed and not
very tall, Hovsannah was tall and well-developed. She moved slowly, never
had much to say, and often gave the impression of complete detachment from
her surroundings. Iskuhi, however, had once suggested to her brother that
Hovsannah's quietness had sometimes a dash of malice and stubbornness in
it. It was said as a joke, and seemed to be an unjustified observation,
since what really malicious and obstinate married woman would ever have
had her sister-in-law to live with her? The relationship was peculiar
in the case of the nineteen-year-old Iskuhi. Aram worshipped his young
sister. In her ninth year, after their mother's death, he had already
fetched her away from Yoghonoluk to place her in the missionary school
in Marash. Later he sent her to Lausanne, where she spent a year in
a finishing school. The cost of this select ambition on his younger
sister's behalf he had paid by many cleverly contrived economies. He
could not imagine life without Iskuhi. Hovsannah knew it and had herself
proposed this ménage a trois. The girl had been given a post as assistant
teacher in the orphanage. She taught French. It was not surprising that
Iskuhi should have inspired love, and not only in her brother. Apart
from her magnificent eyes, the most beautiful thing about her was her
mouth. Her deeply tinged lips had always a glistening, smiling sheen
upon them, like her eyes, as though her mouth could see. The three had
contrived a pleasant life together, quite unlike the usual life around
them. The pastor's quarters were in the orphanage. Their bare look had
soon vanished under Hovsannah's hands, for she had a gift for decoration
and a sharp instinct for beautiful things. She made excursions into the
town and surrounding villages to bargain with the Zeitun women for fine
tapestries, wood-carvings, household gear, with which to enliven these
rooms -- a pursuit which took up weeks of her time. Iskuhi was fonder of
books. Aram, Hovsannah and Iskuhi lived for each other. This orphanage
and its school were such worlds away from the rest of the town that the
three flourishing people had scarcely noticed the oppressive atmosphere
of Zeitun. The pastor's Sunday sermons had expressed, until well on
into March, a heartening cheerfulness, more redolent of the peaceful
joys of his own existence than of any clear-sighted estimate of what
the government might intend.

 

 

The blow almost stunned him. He saw his work all gone for nothing.
But then he was seized with frenzied hope that the government would not
dare close down the orphanage. Aram had soon pulled himself together.
A word from Hovsannah, in the very first days of banishment, gave him
back his strength. Only at such a moment as this did the full meaning
of the Christian priesthood become evident. Thus spoke the pastor's
daughter. Heartened by her admonishment, Pastor Aram began to put forth
superhuman energy. He not only kept his church open day and night, to
give spiritual comfort to groups of exiles as they departed -- he went
from house to house among his flock, from family to family, mingled
with the sobbing people, helped them with every penny he possessed,
organized a certain order in the convoys, wrote cries for help to all
the missions which lay along their route into exile, and carefully worded
petitions to Turkish officials, wherever he considered them well disposed,
begging letters and testimonials; attempted to obtain delays, haggled
with Turkish muleteers -- in short did everything he could possibly have
done in these grievous circumstances. Then, when he could do no more,
could no longer console with the sufferings of the gospel, he would
sit in silence, beside these people, dazed with grief, shut his eyes,
close convulsive fingers, and cry aloud in his soul to Christ.

 

 

The town emptied from day to day. The roads to Marash filled with long
serpentine convoys, whose marchers seemed unable to advance. A watcher
from the citadel of Zeitun might have seen them far into the mountains,
and nothing could have aroused more horror in him than the creeping quiet
of these lines of death, rendered more piteous still by the shouts and
laughter of the armed escort. Meanwhile the dying streets of Zeitun were
reanimated by carrion birds, pilferers, professional thieves, the dregs
of the town, and robbers from the country round it. They infested the
deserted houses and began in them a vigorous search for plunder. Carts
and barrows trundled through the streets, sumpter mules came clattering
in. Carpets, clothes, bedsteads, heaps of linen, furniture, mirrors were
all piled up, in leisurely, undisturbed tranquillity, as though it were
an ordinary, lawful house-moving. The authorities did nothing to prevent
it. They even seemed to look upon such plunder as the natural reward
of Turkish scum -- always providing that the Armenians were made to go
peacefully into exile. The order that, of every craft, six representatives
should remain in "Sultanieh," so that the drifting wreck of daily
life might not be left entirely without its crew, had the ring of some
barbaric fairy-tale. These lucky ones were not chosen by the authorities;
the commune was ordered to elect them, a cunning intensification of
punishment, since it inflicted a new, acute, mental agony.

 

 

The fifth day had already dawned, and Pastor Aram had still received
no summons. All that had so far happened was the visit of a Mohammedan
mullah, a stranger, moreover, to Zeitun, who had come to demand the keys
of the church. This Protestant church, as he courteously informed its pastor,
was to be reconsecrated as a mosque, before evening prayer. Yet Tomasian
still clung to the hope that his orphanage would be left in peace. He ordered
that, from now onwards, everyone was to keep indoors, neither teacher nor
child to show himself at the windows, and no loud word was to be spoken.
The shutters were to be kept bolted all day, no lights were to be shown in
the evening. A strained, death-like rigidity descended on this house, as
a rule so alive. But it is just such mockeries of fate which provoke its
onslaught. On the next day, the sixth, one of those official messengers
who sped, like angels of destruction, gruesomely up and down the streets
of Zeitun summoned the pastor instantly before the town commandant.

 

 

Aram set forth in his priestly gown. His prayer had been heard. Not a trace
of fear or excitement ruffled his dignity. He came, quietly erect,
into the staff officer's presence. In the present case, unluckily, this
bearing of his was a great mistake, since the bimbashi enjoyed the sight
of tearful cringers. Then he was sometimes ready to wink, ameliorate,
show himself kindly and humane. But Aram's certainty of manner stifled
this benevolence at its source, since it was born of the contrast between
his greatness and the miserable writhings of worms.