Forty Days of Musa Dagh (35 page)

 

 

By Gabriel's reckoning there were thirteen different points at which
the Damlayik could be threatened. The most open point of attack was in
the north, that narrow indentation he called the North Saddle, which
separated the Damlayik from the other portions of Musa Dagh which lay
dispersed in the Beilan direction. The second, but far more vulnerable,
spot was the wide path above Yoghonoluk up through the ilex grove. Further
danger zones on the western extremities of the mountain resembled this
in a lesser degree, wherever, in fact, the slopes became less steep,
and where flocks and herdsmen had trodden out a natural track. The only
points of differentiation were the strong, towering rocks to the south,
the "South Bastion" of the map, which dominated the broad, stony slopes
rising out of the plain of the Orontes in abrupt, terraced ridges. Down
in the plain stood the remnants of a fallen human world, the fields
of Roman ruins of Seleucia. These stony leavings of a civilization
crashed to earth aped the southern flank of the mountain, with its
tier upon tier of heaps of stone. Under Samuel Avakian's supervision
and Bagradian's precise directions two fairly high walls composed of
great blocks of stone had been put up, not only on this rocky incline
itself, but right and left of it. The student marvelled that such
complete walls should be thought necessary for the mere purposes of
cover. His strategic insight was still very imperfect in those days,
and he seldom understood his master's intentions. But the hardest
work was that demanded in the north, the most vulnerable point of the
defence. Gabriel Bagradian himself worked at the long trench -- several
hundred paces long -- with all its chevrons and supports. In the west
it was backed by the rocky confusion of the side overlooking the sea,
which, with all its obstacles, natural entrenchments, caverns, formed a
labyrinthine fortress. Eastwards Bagradian strengthened his entrenchments
with outposts and tree-entanglements. It was lucky that the greater part
of this terrain should have been composed of soft soil. Yet the spades
kept jarring against big blocks of limestone and dolomites, which impeded
the progress of the work so that they could scarcely hope to complete
these trenches in less than four working days. While muscular diggers,
aided by a few peasant women, turned up the soil, boys with sickles and
knives felled the scrubby undergrowth at certain points in front of the
trench, that the fire-zones might be unimpeded. Bagradian stayed there
all day, supervising. He kept running up to the indentation and the
counter-slope of the saddle to make sure, from every conceivable angle,
that the trench was being properly dug. He gave orders that the thrown-up
earth was always to be flattened into the soil again. His whole aim was
to assure himself that this wide groove should be fully camouflaged,
that the thick-shrubbed slope along which it ran should seem to be
still untouched by human hands. When it is remembered that, aside from
the reserve trench in the next wave of ground, there were still to be
completed twelve smaller positions, Bagradian's stubborn concentration
here must have filled every intelligent observer with anxiety.

 

 

It was evening. Gabriel lay on the earth exhausted, staring at the
uncompleted altar-frame, which looked to him disproportionately high.
Then, in his half-sleep, he noticed that he himself was being stared at.
Sarkis Kilikian, the deserter! The man was probably his junior, perhaps
scarcely thirty years old. Yet he had the sharp, emaciated look of a
man of fifty. The skin of his face, livid for all its tan, seemed to he
tightly, thinly stretched over a sardonic skull. His features appeared
less to be hollowed out by endurance than by life itself, lived to its
very last dregs. Sated -- satiated with life, that was the word! Though
his uniform was just as tattered as those of the other deserters, it gave
an impression of elegance run wild, or of elegant wildness. This was mainly
due to the fact that he alone of them all was clean-shaven, and shaven
freshly and closely. Gabriel felt a chill and sat up. He thrust a cigarette
at the man. Kilikian took it without a word, pulled out some kind of
barbarous tinder-box, struck sparks which, after many vain attempts,
at last set light to a strip of tow, and began to smoke with a jaded
indifference which seemed to suggest that Bagradian's expensive cigarette
was his usual brand. Now they were both staring in silence again, Gabriel
with increasing discomfort. The Russian never turned his indifferent,
and yet scornful, eyes away from Bagradian's white hands.

 

 

Gabriel at last could bear it no longer. He stormed: "Well, what do
you want?"

 

 

Sarkis Kilikian blew out a thick cloud of smoke, not changing one nuance
of his expression. The worst of it was that he still kept his eyes on
Gabriel's hands. He seemed lost in profound reflections upon a world
in which such white, undamaged hands could exist. At last he opened his
lipless mouth, disclosing decayed, blackened teeth. His deep voice had
less hate in it than his words: "Not the thing for such a fine gentleman."

 

 

Bagradian sprang to his feet. He tried to think of a sharp, effective
answer. To his deep discomfort he could not find one. The Russian,
slowly turning his back on him, said, half to himself, with a fairly
good French accent: "On verra ce qu'on pourra durer."

 

 

That night, round the campfire, Gabriel made several inquiries about
Sarkis Kilikian. The man had been well known for several months in the
whole district round Musa Dagh. He was not one of the local deserters,
and yet the saptiehs seemed especially eager to track him down. In this
connection Shatakhian told Gabriel the Russian's history. Since, as a
general thing, the schoolmasters in the seven villages were a highly
imaginative set, Bagradian almost suspected that Shatakhian was piling
up horrors of his own invention to spice his story. But Chaush Nurhan
was sitting beside him, nodding grave assent to every detail. Chaush
Nurhan was in bad odor in the neighborhood, as a special patron of
deserters and the intimate knower of their ways. And he at least was
not suspiciously imaginative.

 

 

 

 

Sarkis Kilikian had been born in Dört Yol, a large village in the plain of
Issus, north of Alexandretta. Before he had quite completed his eleventh
year, massacres on the classic pattern arranged by Abdul Hamid had broken
out in Anatolia and Cilicia. They fell out of a cloudless sky. Kilikian's
father had been a watchmaker and goldsmith, a quiet little man who set
great store by civilized living and on having his five children well
brought up. Since he was well-to-do, he intended Sarkis, his eldest, for
a priest, and would have sent him to one of the seminaries. On that black
day for Dört Yol, Watchmaker Kilikian shut his shop early, at midday. But
that did not help him since, scarcely had he sat down to dinner, when a
band of roughs came thundering on the shop door. Madame Kilikian, a tall,
yellow-haired woman from the Caucasus, had just brought on the dishes when
her white-faced husband left the table to unlock his shop again. The few
minutes of timeless experience that followed this will still be part of
Sarkis Kilikian's being for as long as a created soul must remain itself
through all migrations and metamorphoses within the universe. He ran
out after his father into the shop, which by now was crowded with men. A
picturesque storm troop of His Majesty the Sultan's Hamidiyehs. The leader
of this band of storm troopers was a young man with a rosy face, the son
of a minor official. The most noticeable things about this rather portly
young Turk were the many strange medals and decorations strewn here and
there about his tunic. Whereas the solemn, matter-of-fact Kurds at once
proceeded to get down to business, carefully emptying out the contents of
drawers into their bags, this spruce and dauntless son of a petty official
seemed to view his mission in its purely political aspect. His loutishly
juvenile face glowed with conviction as he bellowed at the watchmaker:
"You are a usurer and a money-lender. All Armenian swine are usurers and
money-lenders. You unclean giaours are responsible for the wretchedness
of our people."

 

 

Master Kilikian pointed quietly to his work-table, with its magnifying-glass,
pincers, little wheels, and springs. "Why do you call me a money-lender?"

 

 

"All this here is lies which you use to hide your blood-sucking."

 

 

Their discussion did not get any further, since shots cracked out in the
low, narrow room. For the first time in his life little Sarkis smelt the
narcotic reek of gunpowder. He did not at first in the least understand
what had happened as he saw his father, bending over his table to his work,
pull it down on to the floor with him. Without a word Sarkis flitted back
to the parlor. His yellow-haired mother stood drawn up, with her back
to the wall, not daring to breathe. Her hands, right and left, were
clutching her small daughters, two and four years old. Her eyes were
fixed on the basket-cradle containing her baby. The seven-year-old Mesrop
was staring greedily at the appetizing mutton kebab, which still stood
peacefully smoking on the table. But when the armed men came crowding
in on them, Sarkis had already seized the dish and hurled it, steaming
in one desperate jerk, straight into the leader's plump, rosy face. That
dauntless youth ducked with a howl of pain, as though he had been hit by
a hand grenade. Brown gravy streamed all down his resplendent tunic. The
big, clay pitcher followed this first hit, with still better effect. The
leader's nose had begun to bleed, but this did not prevent his urging on
his men in an anguished bellow. Little Sarkis, armed with a carving-knife,
stood in front of his mother to protect her. This miserable weapon in the
hands of a boy of eleven was enough to decide the dauntless Hamidiyehs not
to let it get as far as a hand-to-hand battle. One of them flung himself,
swift and cowardly, on to the cradle, snatched out the screaming baby,
and cracked its skull against the wall. Sarkis pressed his face into his
mother's stiffening body. Strange, whispering sounds kept forcing their
way through her tight-pressed lips. And then began the deafening crack
and rattle of many revolver bullets, all emptied into a woman and four
children, a salvo which should have been enough to set a whole regiment
in retreat. The room was thick with fumes, the brutes aimed badly. It was
of course predestined that not one of these bullets should hit Sarkis.
The first to die was the seven-year-old Mesrop. The bodies of the two
little girls hung limp in the hands of their mother, who did not let go
of them. Her full, round face was rigid and motionless. A bullet hit her
right arm. Sarkis felt, through his back, the short, convulsive movement
which she gave. Two more shots pierced her shoulders. She stood erect,
still not letting go of her children. Only when two more had blown half
her face away, did she topple forwards, bend over Sarkis, who still
wanted to keep fast hold of her, pour out her mother's blood upon his
hair, and bury him under her body. He lay still, under the warm, heavily
breathing load of his mother, and never stirred. Only four more shots
bespattered the wall.

 

 

The pudgy-faced leader felt he had done his duty. "Turkey for the Turks!"
he crowed, though no one echoed his cry of victory.

 

 

While Sarkis lay protected, as in a womb, his senses were strangely alert.
He could hear voices which made him conclude that the leader was behaving
repulsively in a corner.

 

 

"Why are you doing that?" someone reproved. "There are dead people here."

 

 

But this fighter for the national principle refused to let himself be
so balked. "Even as corpses they've still got to know that we're the
masters, and they're dirt."

 

 

A profound quiet had been established before Sarkis, covered in blood,
dared to creep out from under his mother. This movement seemed to
bring Madame Kilikian back to consciousness. She had no recognizable
face left. But the voice was hers, and so quiet: "Fetch me water, my
child." The pitcher was broken. Sarkis stole out with a glass to the
courtyard fountain. When he got back, she was still breathing but could
neither drink nor speak again.

 

 

The boy was sent to live with some rich relations in Alexandretta.
In twelve months he seemed to have got over it all, though he scarcely
ate, and though nobody, not even these kindly foster parents, could get
him to say more than the most indispensable words. Teacher Shatakhian
had precise information about all this, because this same Alexandretta
family had paid for his own stay in Switzerland. Later they sent Sarkis
to Ejmiadzin, in Russia, the largest theological college of the Armenian
nation. Pupils of this famous establishment could aspire to the very
highest offices of the Gregorian church. The intellectual drill to which
these students had to submit was on the whole not so very rigorous. And
yet, before the end of his third school year, Sarkis Kilikian, in whom
a savage, a diseased, longing for freedom had slowly developed, ran away
from the seminary. He was almost eighteen when he wandered the dirty lanes
of Baku, possessed of only his shabby seminary cassock and the appetite
of several days. It did not occur to him to apply to his foster parents
for funds. From the day of his flight from Ejmiadzin, these good people
lost all track of their protégé. Sarkis Kilikian had now no choice but to
look for work. He got the only work of which there was plenty in Baku,
servitude in the huge oil fields along the bare coasts of the Caspian
Sea. There, in a very few months, through the effects of oil and natural
gases, his skin turned yellow and shrivelled-looking. His body dried up,
like a dead tree. Considering his nature and his book-learning, it is not
surprising that he should have become involved in the social-revolutionary
movement, which in those days was beginning to take hold of the workers
of the Russian Near East: Georgians, Armenians, Tatars, Turkomans, and
Persians. Though the Tsar's government did its best to egg on these
various peoples against each other, it did not succeed in breaking
their solidarity against the oil kings. From year to year strikes became
more widespread and successful. In one of them Cossack provocation led
to fearful bloodshed. The reply to this was the assassination of the
district governor, a Prince Galitzin, come on a tour of inspection. Among
those accused of conspiring this was Sarkis Kilikian. Almost nothing
could be proved against him judicially. He had neither made speeches
nor "worked underground." No one could give definite evidence against
him. But "escaped seminarists" were a class apart -- it bred the most
stubborn agitators. That alone was enough. Sarkis strayed, for life,
into the convict prison of Baku.