Forty Days of Musa Dagh (23 page)

 

 

A shifting carpet, woven of lives which none can unravel. . . .
There, again and again, the mother who for days carries her child, dead of
starvation, in a sack on her shoulders, until at last, unable any longer
to bear the stench, her own people complain to the saptiehs. There, too,
the crazed mothers of Kemakh, who, bawling hymns and with sparkling eyes,
as though this were a blessed work in the sight of God, cast their
children down from a rock into the Euphrates. Again and again some
bishop, some vartabed, approaches. He gathers up and spreads out his
robes, casts himself down before the müdir, sobs: "Have pity, Effendi, on
these innocent." And the müdir has to give the official answer: "Priest,
do not meddle in politics! The government respects the church. I am only
concerned with you in ecclesiastical matters."

 

 

In many convoys nothing in particular seems to be happening, no
apparent suffering, only hunger, thirst, wounded feet and disease. And
yet one day a German deaconess stood outside the hospital of Marash,
at which she had just arrived to go on duty. An endless, mute convoy
of Armenians came dragging onwards past the hospital, and she stood
waiting to let them pass. She could not manage to stir till the last
had vanished. Something which she herself could not understand had begun
to stir in this nursing-sister -- not pity, no, and not horror either;
something vast and unknown, almost exultation. That evening she wrote
home to her people: "I ran into a long convoy of exiles, who had only just
been turned out of their villages and were still in quite a good state.
I had to wait a long time to let them get past me, and I never shall forget
what they looked like. Only a sprinkling of men, the rest all women and
children. A lot of them had light hair and great blue eyes, which stared
at me with such deathly solemnnity, such unconscious grandeur in them,
that they might have been the angels of the Last Judgment." These poor
avenging angels had come from Zeitun, Marash, Aintab, and the vilayet
of Adana. They came plodding down from the north, from the provinces of
Sivas, Trebizond, Erzerum. They came out of the east, from Kharput and
the Kurd-infested Diarbekr, from Urfa and Bitlis. Before the Taurus,
before Aleppo had been reached, they all mingled in the one endless,
shifting carpet of lives. And yet in Aleppo itself nothing had happened,
nor in the teeming sanjaks and kazahs of its vilayet. The coast lay
peaceful and untouched. Musa Dagh was at peace. The mountain seemed not
to notice this gruesome pilgrimage which passed not so very far away.

 

 

 

 

Gabriel Bagradian pursued his investigations in the villages. He even
extended their scope. Southwards he often got as far as Suedia, and
northwards, after several hours' ride, he once even touched Beilan, that
deserted villa-pleasance of rich Armenians from Alexandretta. He only
dared one other journey to Antioch. Gabriel found the ancient doors of
the Agha Rifaat Bereket's mansion closed. He pounded the knocker several
times against the copper-inlaid wood, but nobody answered. So the Agha
was not back yet from Aleppo. Though Gabriel knew he was travelling in aid
of the Armenians, the absence of this friend of his father depressed him.

 

 

On his return he decided that henceforth in all his journeyings he would
not go beyond the farthest precincts of Musa Dagh. Some compelling magic
emanating from the mountain of his fathers, becoming stronger and stronger
the longer he stayed here, forced him to this. The same solemn amazement
still descended on him as each morning he opened his window wide to greet
the mountain. He could not understand. The huge mass of Musa Dagh,
changing its aspect every hour, now firmly compressed, now almost on the
point of evaporation into downy sunlight -- the very essence of this
mountain, eternal amid all this mutability, seemed to renew Gabriel's
strength and give him courage for the torturing hither and thither of
thoughts which had robbed him of sleep ever since the arrival of Pastor
Tomasian. But the instant he left the shadow of Musa Dagh the courage
to think such thoughts ebbed out of him. Meanwhile, his industrious
excursions through the villages had borne good fruit. He got what he was
after -- not only a fairly consistent general notion of the day-to-day
lives of the peasants, fruit-growers, silk-spinners, weavers, beekeepers,
and wood-carvers, but many glimpses into the more closed circles of
their minds, into the nature of their family relationships. Not that it
was easy. At first many of these country folk could only see a wealthy
foreigner, no matter how much he might be bound to them by racial ties
and common ownership. But with time their trust in him grew, and even
a secret hope they had of him. The effendi was, to be sure, a powerful
man, who knew foreign parts and was feared by the Turks because of
his influence. As long as he stayed on in Yoghonoluk, the worst might
perhaps be spared the villages. No one scrutinized the real worth of such
hopes. But another instinct helped to feed them. Though Gabriel spoke as
little of the future as they themselves, many could sense, in his eyes,
his restlessness, his gestures -- in the notes which he kept taking --
some purposeful thought, a special activity, which distinguished him from
everyone else. All their eyes were on him when he came among them. He was
asked into many houses. Though the rooms were bare, according to Eastern
custom, their clean comfort always surprised him. The clay floors were
strewn with clean carpets. Divans covered with pleasant rugs took the
place of chairs. Only in the poorest houses were the stables anywhere
near the living-room. The walls were by no means bare. Old illustrations
and little pictures saved from calendars were pinned up beside the
pictures of the saints. Many housewives decorated their rooms with
cut flowers -- a very unusual habit in the East -- laid out as a rule
in flat dishes. When the guest was seated, a big wooden stand would
be set before him, on which were placed the wide tin dishes of cakes,
honey-fingers, and sweet cheese biscuits. Gabriel could remember their
taste from his childhood. In those days they had been forbidden luxuries,
since his parents were not supposed to know that the servants took young
Master Gabriel into village houses. But, now that they were being heaped
upon him, Gabriel's digestion began to protest, especially when they
insisted on bringing melon slices and sugared fruit into the bargain.
To have refused would have been an outrageous breach of hospitality, so he,
the guest, in self-defence, had to keep giving dainties to the children whom
they always brought in to be introduced, and occasionally munching a sweet
himself. It moved him to see how clean and well looked-after these children
were, the smallest especially. The mothers took their greatest pride in
the cleanness of the little white smocks, tiny coats and aprons. Later,
as these children grew up, even they, it is true, could not keep their
boys from running wild, on warlike expeditions after booty, over Musa
Dagh and into the gorges of the Damlayik.

 

 

Gabriel made many friends in these frequent excursions into the villages.
The closest of them all was the staid, respectable Chaush Nurhan, or,
more correctly, Sergeant Nurhan. Next to the elder Tomasian, this Chaush
Nurhan owned the best craftsman's business south of Yoghonoluk -- he was
a smith and locksmith and besides owned a saddlery, a carriage-building
establishment in which he built the kangnis used in these parts, and
finally, a holy of holies, a shop where he worked alone, without any
witnesses. Initiates knew that in secret he repaired hunting rifles and
made the cartridges for them. But his occupation was best kept secret
from Ali Nassif's inquisitive eyes.

 

 

Chaush Nurhan was an ex-regular. He had served seven years in the Turkish
army, which he had spent in the war and in an Anatolian infantry regiment
in the huge barracks at Brussa. He looked the hardened regular that he
was, with his straight, iron-grey moustache twisted into very long points,
his continual, forceful use of army expletives, and above all his stiff
respectfulness with Bagradian, whom he greeted only as his superior officer.
He may perhaps have sensed certain qualities in Gabriel, who did not
himself know he possessed them. Chaush Nurhan, who had already worked
for the younger Avetis, agreed to inspect the extensive gun-room of the
villa and make sure that everything was shipshape. He took away the
guns to dismember and oil them in his secret workshop. Gabriel often
came to see him at work. Sometimes he would bring Stephan with him. They
reminisced about the army like keen professionals. The chaush was full of
coarse barrack-room stories and quirks, of which the bel esprit Gabriel
never wearied. So that, incredibly, in these months of banishment, two
Armenian men became engrossed in their memories of Turkish army life as
though they had been in a Turkish barracks. Chaush Nurhan was a widower,
like old Tomasian. But he had a promising brood of half-grown children,
whom he himself seemed to find it hard to distinguish. He scarcely ever
troubled his head with his progeny. This erstwhile tyrant of recruits,
with the awe-inspiring, iron-grey moustache, was placid good nature itself
when it came to his own flesh and blood, and he let them run wild without
a qualm. In the evenings, when his only journeyman had handed over the
workshop keys, he neither entered his own house, full of children, nor
knocked at any neighbor's door. With a pitcher of wine in one hand, in the
other an infantry cornet, pilfered from a quartermaster's store, he would
go into his apricot orchard. There, in the dusk, unsteady howlings rent
the air. They were well known to the other villagers. Turkish bugle-calls,
halting and kicking, would rattle forth, as though, before night came,
Chaush Nurhan meant to rally the folk in all the villages.

 

 

 

 

There had been some slight disagreement on educational policy in the
villages. The scholastic program of the Miazial Engerutiunk Hayoz, the
General Armenian Schools Association, that recognized scholastic authority
for the whole Armenian people, had laid it down that the school year was
to end in the first days of early summer -- that is to say, in the first
week of May. But Ter Haigasun, as district head-superintendent of schools,
gave sudden orders that this year teaching was to begin again after only
one short week of holidays. The priest's decision sprang from the same
motives as did the dully frantic industry of the whole population in
these days. The deluge was at hand. This approaching dissolution of all
order must be opposed by twice the normal regularity; utter helplessness,
which all awaited as something inevitable, should be countered by the
severest order and discipline. And besides, in these harassed days,
the wild, unconscious clamor of children on holiday would have been
an unbearable nuisance about the land. And clearly every grown-up in
the district would have sided with Ter Haigasim, had the teachers not
bitterly opposed him. These teachers, above all Hrand Oskanian, did not
want to be robbed of their free time, guaranteed them by contract. They
appealed to the mukhtars, they warned the parents -- the poor little
mites would be getting brain-fever if they had to work on in this grilling
heat. Oskanian, the ever-silent, vented a perfect torrent of spite against
Ter Haigasun. It was all no good. The priest was inflexible. He called
a meeting of the seven mukhtars of the villages and convinced them in
a few short words. So that the new school year, in spite of the heat,
began more or less where the old had ended. The teachers, as a last
resource, tried to bring in Bagradian on their side. Shatakhian and
Oskanian, serious and formal, called at the villa. But Gabriel plainly
and ruthlessly declared for the continuation of studies. He welcomed it,
not only as a matter of general policy, but in his own interests, since
he meant to send his son Stephan to school with Monsieur Shatakhian. He
should at last be able to mix with boys of his race and age.

 

 

On the first day of term Gabriel arrived at the schoolhouse of Yoghonoluk
with Stephan. Sato came, too; her wounded feet were already healed. It had
meant a tiff with Juliette. She was worried about Stephan, she told him.
Why should he have to squat on the same benches as these unwashed boys
in an Oriental stable? Even in Paris, Stephan had never had to go to
the public primary school, where after all there had been less danger
of infectious disease and lice. Gabriel had stuck to his decision. If
one looked at things as they really were, such dangers as that, which
any day now might give way to real ones, were certainly not worth taking
seriously. As a father he considered it far more important that Stephan
should at last get to know the life of his people from its beginnings. In
former days, in another atmosphere, Juliette could have raised a hundred
objections. As it was, she gave in at once and said no more. It was a
silent acquiescence which she herself could understand least of all. Ever
since that talk in the night, when Gabriel had seemed so very upset,
something incomprehensible had been happening. Life on a basis of mutual
confidence -- the gathered harvest of a marriage that had gone on now
for fourteen years -- seemed to evaporate more and more. At present,
when Juliette woke in the night, she felt as though she and the sleeper
beside her were no longer sharing the same past. Their marriage had been
left behind in Paris, in glittering towns all over Europe; they had lost
it, were cut off, it was theirs no longer. What was this thing that had
been happening? Had Gabriel altered, or had she? She could still not
take the future possibility really seriously. It seemed to her almost
absurd that a deluge should not gallantly retire from before her feet
-- the Frenchwoman. Surely it was simply a question of getting through
the next few weeks. And then -- back home! Whatever might or might not
happen in these weeks was trivial child's play. So she said no more about
Gabriel's decision that Stephan should go to the village school. Yet when
in her most secret soul she suddenly was aware of that tepid sensation --
"Oh, well, what business is it of mine?" -- she felt startled and stirred
to an unknown grief, not only for herself but for Stephan.