Forty Days of Musa Dagh (40 page)

 

 

"Deep secret, incomprehensible, without beginning!
Thou hast adorned with glory
The host of the beings of fire."

 

 

Never had Ter Haigasun bowed more deeply, nor made more complete and
shuddering an admission of sin before the people. Under his gold mitre the
weal of the whip stood out on his face. And never before had the secret
of the kiss of peace, the reunion of the community in Christ, bound the
souls of these faithful in holier ties. At other masses, when after the
sacrificial prayer the deacon, at the words: "Greet ye one another with
the holy kiss," had held the thurible up to the lips of the chief singer
(Teacher Asayan) -- when this singer had kissed the one next to him,
so that the embrace might continue through the choir and from the choir
through the people -- it had usually been in a series of quick little
touches, mere slack formality. But today they held each other close
and really kissed on cheeks or mouth. Many were in tears. When after
the communion the assistant priests, at a sign from Ter Haigasun, began
stripping the altar, a wild, unexpected pain flung the whole congregation
on its knees. Uncontrollable grief, groans, wailings, rose above the
glimmering play of shadows, above the crossed, flaming seraphim swords
of the sun, up into the tall, dim cupola. Each of the holy vessels was
held up high before it disappeared in a straw-plaited basket: chalice,
paten, ciborium, and the great book of the Gospels. The sacristan packed
the censers, the silver candlesticks and crucifixes, into another box.
At last there was only the lace altar-cloth. Ter Haigasun crossed himself
for the last time, let his hands -- their hue that of yellowish church
tapers -- hover for a while over the altarcloth till, with a sudden jerk,
he lifted it. The unveiled stone stood bare, which had once been hewn
out of the grey rock of Musa Dagh. In the same instant old Tomasian's
workmen were letting down the bells, the big one and the smaller one,
by pulleys from the campanile. It needed all their strength to raise
the heavy metal on to the two biers, each of which were to be carried
by eight men.

 

 

Acolytes bearing the tall Greek cross headed the procession. Then, with
their bells, the stumbling coffin-bearers. After them, Ter Haigasun and
the other priests. It took a considerable time for this funeral cortege to
reach the graveyard of Yoghonoluk. The train of mourners really seemed to
be escorting an honored body to the grave. The heat was deadening. Only
at the rarest intervals did a breath from the Mediterranean find its way
across Musa Dagh to mitigate the Syrian summer. Swirling dust-clouds ran
before the procession, like spectral dancers before the Ark, a thin,
degenerate variety of the sacred pillars of cloud which went before the
Israelites in the wilderness. The churchyard lay far along the road to
Habibli, the wood-carvers' village. Like most graveyards in the East,
it crept up the slope of a hill and was not surrounded by any wall.
This, together with its gravestones, either fallen or slanting deep in the
soil, their weatherbeaten limestone crudely chiselled with inscription
and cross, gave it almost the look of a Turkish or Jewish burial ground
in the Near East. As the procession turned into it, there was a grey,
bat-like fluttering and scurrying, hither and thither, between cairns
and monuments. These were old women, whose flimsy garments were held
together only by their substratum of dirt and dust. Old women everywhere
feel drawn to cemeteries. In the West also, we know these pensioners
of death, tomb-dwellers, keening wives, guardians of corruption, whose
begging is often only their second trade. But here in Yoghonoluk this was
a recognized class, a close corporation of nestlers in churchyard mould,
wailing women and helpers at a birth, who, according to the tradition of
these villages, had to live on the outskirts of each community. One or two
old beggar-men, with biblical, prophetic heads, were among them, and a few
cripples, fantastically deformed, such as only the East engenders.
The people protected itself against the dross of its own loins by banishing
it, in the absence of any institutions or homes for the aged poor, into its
cemetery, a place both sacred and unclean. So that now nobody felt scared
when two mad women rushed to hide, with heart-rending shrieks, up the
graveyard hill. This churchyard and its neighborhood formed the almshouse,
hospital, and madhouse of Yoghonoluk. It was even more; it was the place
to which sorcery had been relegated. The torch of enlightenment, in the
hands of Altouni, Krikor, Shatakhian, and their predecessors, had driven
magic beyond the confines of the villages and yet not killed it. These
keening spey-wives, under the leadership of Nunik, Vartuk, Manushak,
had fled so far before the hatred of the doctor, but no farther. Here
they awaited their clients, to be summoned not only for death vigils
and corpse-washings, but far more often to an ob- stinate illness or
a childbirth, since many trusted less in Altouni's science than in the
herb potions, magic formulas, and prayers for health of Nunik, Vartuk,
Manushak. In this ancient quarrel science did not always come out best.
That was undeniable. Superstition had an incalculable advantage in the
variety of its potions and old wives' cures. And Altouni had no bedside
manner. Once he had given up a case, he sharply refused to raise false
hopes. A creature like Nunik, on the other hand, could never get to
the end of her stored-up knowledge, nor would she bow before death.
If a patient died on her, he had only himself to blame for having sent,
in a moment of weakness, for Altouni, and so brought all her skill to
naught. Nunik was the living emblem of her art. The village women told
each other how, in the days of the first Avetis, she had been seventy,
just as she was today. The enlightened persecuted these spey-wives,
and chased them from among the living. But that did not prevent their
creeping at night from their haunt of death to go about their secret
business in all seven villages. Now, however, they were all collected
in the churchyard, to take their share of alms with the blind and the
halt. Sato had left the cortege and run on ahead. She had long had many
cronies among the grave-folk. These border people attracted her borderline
soul. They were so easy to live with! It was so hard to live with the
Bagradians! Though gifts of clothes from the great hanum might feed Sato's
vanity, in reality she felt as uncomfortable in them, in shoes, stockings,
in a clean room, as a wild dog in a collar. With beggars and spey-wives,
and with mad people, Sato could give free rein to her thoughts, in words
that had no special meaning. Oh, how delightful to kick off the speech
of the great, like a tight shoe, and talk with bare feet! Nunik, Vartuk,
Manushak, had secrets to tell her which made her whole soul shiver in
unison, as though she too had brought them into this world with her,
from the life of her ancestors. Then she would sit still and listen for
hours, while the blind beggars beside her fumbled over her thin child's
body with alert, sensitive fingers. Had there been no Iskuhi, Sato might
have let the others go up to the Damlayik, while she lived at ease among
the grave-folk. These happy souls were not to be taken into the narrow
confines of the mountain camp. The leaders had passed the resolution,
with one dissentient, Bagradian. He, though as commander he saw clearly
that every superfluous mouth would enfeeble resistance, had not wanted
to exclude any Armenian. But these outcasts seemed neither unhappy at
this decision nor especially scared. They stretched out hands and snouts
to their compatriots with all the usual beggars' litany.

 

 

The sky was so scorchingly empty that the very notion of a cloud might
have seemed a storyteller's fable. This inexorable blue seemed never to
have known a drop of rain since the Deluge. The people crowded about the
open grave to take leave of the bells of Yoghonoluk. In peaceful days
their sound had scarcely been noticed. But this was like the silencing
of their own lives. The mother bell and her daughter were lowered into
earth amid breathless quiet. The muted ring of scattered clods upon the
metal was like a prophecy to these people that now there could be no
more going back home and no resurrection from the dead. After a short
prayer said by Ter Haigasun, the communes dispersed among their graves,
silently, and the separate families went to take a last look at their
fathers' resting-place. Gabriel and Stephan did the same and wandered
to the Bagradian mausoleum. It was a small, low house, under a cupola,
shaped like the mounds in which Turks bury their worthies and saintly men.
Grandfather Avetis had built it for himself and his old wife. The founder
of all their splendor lay, by Armenian tradition, without a coffin,
in his shroud, under stone slabs, slanted against each other like
praying hands. Apart from him and his wife, there was only one other
Bagradian buried here -- Avetis the brother, faithful to Yoghonoluk,
not long a dead man. "There wouldn't have been room for any more of
us," reflected Gabriel, who oddly did not feel in the least serious,
but rather amused. Stephan, bored, shifted from foot to foot. He felt
so many eons away from death.

 

 

Surrounded by a little knot of people Ter Haigasun stood at the top
of the slope on the last outskirts of the dead land. Some diggers had
shovelled out a wide spare pit, like a
fosse commune
. Five barrels were
filled with the earth they dug, and when these were ready, Ter Haigasun
went from one to the other and made the sign of the cross over each. He
stopped before the last and bent down over it. This was not black loam,
but poor and crumbling earth. Ter Haigasun dipped into the barrel and
laid a handful of consecrated ground against his face, like a peasant
testing the soil.

 

 

"May it suffice," he said to himself. Then in surprised cogitation
he stood looking down over the graveyard, already almost deserted.
Most of the villagers had long since set out for home. It was getting on
towards midday. In the larger villages such as Bitias and Habibli,
similar ceremonies were being performed. But the Council had appointed
the hour after sunset for setting out.

 

 

 

 

Gabriel made the most considerate arrangements for Juliette. Drawn into
this Armenian gulf, she should miss her own world as little as circumstances
could possibly allow. True that this European world of hers was also
engaged in a dogfight, compared to which all else of the kind seemed a
pointless, haphazard brawl. But there the dogfight was being conducted
with all modern conveniences, according to the most advanced scientific
principles, not with the innocent blood-lust of the beast of passion,
but with the mathematical thoroughness and precision of the beast of
intellect. If we were still in Paris -- Gabriel might, for instance,
have told himself -- we should not, it is true, have to sleep on the
stony earth of a Syrian mountain, we should still have a bathroom and
W.C. But, for all that, we should be liable at any hour of the day or
night to leave these comforts for the dark cellar, to hide from aerial
bombs. So that, even in Paris, Stephan and Juliette would still be exposed
to a certain risk. None of which reflections occurred to Gabriel, for
the simple reason that for months he had seen no European newspapers,
and knew next to nothing about the war.

 

 

On the previous night he had sent Avakian and Kristaphor, with all his
household servants, up to the Damlayik, so that Juliette's quarters might
be got ready. They were prepared with the very greatest care. "Three-Tent
Square" must have its own kitchen and scullery, with every usual arrangement.
Gabriel had ordered that Juliette should have all three tents at her
disposal. She was to say which she would like to live in. With endless
labor, carpets, braziers, divans, tables, armchairs, had been dragged up
the Damlayik, and an astonishing collection of smart luggage -- wardrobe
trunks, shiny leather suitcases, baskets for crockery and silver, a whole
collection of medicine bottles and toilet articles, hot-water bottles,
thermos flasks. Gabriel wanted Juliette to take comfort from the sight of
these European conveniences. She was to live like an adventurous princess,
travelling for a whim, surrounded with toys. And for just this reason
his own life, in the eyes of the people, must seem twice as Spartan. He
had made up his mind not to sleep in a tent, nor eat food cooked in
"Three-Tent Square."

 

 

Back from their graves the Yoghonoluk villagers took a last look at
houses no longer theirs. Each of them had a huge corded bundle, heavier
than his strength, to carry up with him. Dazed and unhappy, fidgeting
and straying about their rooms, they awaited the night. Here was the mat
one had had to leave, here stood a lamp, and there, Christ Saviour! stood
the bed. The expensive bed, saved up for through hard working years, so that
one might become a better man by the possession of this fortress of family
life. And now the bed must be left standing, mere loot for Turk and Arab
scum. The hours dragged on. And in these homes everything was unpacked and
packed again, to see if room could not be made for this or that unnecessary
object in the bundle. Even in the craziest tumble-down hovels there took
place these poignant separations from the household gear that envelops
the human being in his illusions and in his love.

 

 

Gabriel, like all the rest, went straying late that afternoon through
the rooms of his house. They were dead and empty. Juliette, with Gonzague
Maris and her establishment, had set out hours ago for the mountain. Since
the day was intolerably hot, she had longed for the coolness she expected
to find there. Nor had she wanted to be caught in crowds of villagers
on the move. Gabriel, who could feel some passing regret at leaving the
most casually slept-in hotel bedroom (since everywhere one leaves a bit
of oneself, a beloved departed), was quite unmoved. This house of his
fathers, the place where he had been a child, had lived through these
last decisive months, had nothing to say to him. He marvelled at this
lack of all emotion, but it was so. The only things he regretted even
a little were his antiques, those collector's joys of the first happy
weeks in Yoghonoluk. He kept turning from Artemis and Apollo to the
glorious Mithras, stroking the faces of gods with a tender hand. Then,
at the selamlik door, he turned sharply away and gave up the house,
its lares and penates, for ever.