Forty Days of Musa Dagh (45 page)

 

 

Both this and the tone in which he said it displeased Juliette.
This decisive biding of his time which Gonzague so often let her see in
him repelled her. But there were other moments at which he could seem
as lost as a stray child. Then a motherly pity would well up in her. And
it did her good.

 

 

Near Three-Tent Square, beyond the beeches, Kristaphor and Missak had set
up a table with benches. This nook was as charmingly peaceful as though
it had been the remote corner of a garden with alleys all round it, not
part of an inaccessible mountain camp. Here of an afternoon sat Juliette,
with Iskuhi and Hovsannah, receiving her guests.

 

 

Usually these callers were the same as those who had frequented Villa
Bagradian. Krikor was a regular visitor, and the teachers, whenever
they happened to be off duty. Hapeth Shatakhian did his uttermost,
as he expressed it, "to delight Madame by the purity of his French
conversation." But Oskanian had ceased to appear as the maestro of
poetry and calligraphy; he was now a fierce and impassioned warrior. For
"afternoon calls" he still always wore his grey "milord's" morning coat;
under it he had slung his trench knife to a belt, out of which the butt
of a saddle pistol fearsomely lowered. He would neither lay aside his
weapons nor remove his martial lambskin kepi.

 

 

Juliette "received" not only gentlemen; the wives of the notables also
frequented her. Mairik Antaram, the doctor's lady, came in whenever she
had the time; the mukhtar's wife, Madame Kebussyan, less frequently,
though when she did her alert curiosity was insatiable. Madame Kebussyan
insisted on seeing all there was to see. Almost with tears in her eyes
she begged Juliette to show her the inside of the sheikh's pavilion --
the rubber tubs, the dinner sets, the furniture which could be taken
to bits, the expensive cabin trunks. With the deepest, most prescient
emotion, she stuck her nose into chests of supplies, airing her opinions
on sardine tins, patent foods, soap, and sugar. Juliette could manage
to rid herself of this worthy lady, whose quick, mouse eyes ferreted in
and out of every corner, only by offering her gifts out of the stores,
a tin of food, a cake of chocolate. Then Madame Kebussyan's thanks,
and promises of fidelity to her friend, exceeded even her praise of all
these good things.

 

 

Mairik Antaram, on the other hand, never came without bringing a small
gift, a pot of honey, a cake of "apricot-leather," that reddish-brown
fruit preserve, indispensable to the Armenian breakfast table. She
bestowed her gift secretly. "When they're gone, djanik, little soul --
you eat this. It's good. You shan't have to go without things while
you're with us."

 

 

But often Mairik Antaram would look very sadly at Juliette, through her
fearless, and never self-pitying, eyes: "If only you'd stayed at home,
my pretty!"

 

 

 

 

Iskuhi Tomasian saw less of Juliette on the Damlayik than she had in the
villa in Yoghonoluk. She had asked Ter Haigasun to use her as assistant
schoolteacher, and the priest had welcomed the suggestion.

 

 

Juliette scorned this resolve: "Why, my dear, when we'd just begun to
make you really well again, do you want to go off and work yourself to
shreds? Whatever for? Placed as we are, it seems ridiculous."

 

 

Juliette was still in the strangest relationship to Iskuhi. She seemed,
by dint of the many acts of kindness which she had shown her from the very
first, to have conquered, one after the other, both that stubborn shyness
and eagerness to be of use, behind which the real Iskuhi was hiding.
Iskuhi had even shown signs of shyly returning this affection. When they
said good-morning or good-night, she would put her arms round this elder
friend. But Juliette could feel distinctly that these
tendresses
were
mere imitations, adjustments, just as in speaking a foreign language
we may often use its idioms without really knowing their shade of meaning.
Iskuhi's hardness, the center crystal of her being, that which was for ever
strange in her, remained untouched by all endearments. And it cannot be
denied that Juliette suffered at this soul's impregnability, since every
wound inflicted on her sense of power seemed to infect her whole estimate
of herself. Even this business of "teaching school" meant a defeat for her.

 

 

Now Iskuhi spent many hours a day on what was known as the "School Slope,"
far removed from Three-Tent Square. There was a big blackboard, an abacus,
a map of the Ottoman empire and quantities of spelling books and readers.
Several hundred benches. A whole army squatted, sat, or lay in the shade
of a clearing, filling the air with shrill sparrow chirrupings. Since
usually the whole male teaching staff was on duty in the trenches or in
camp, Iskuhi would often be left for hours at the mercy of rampaging
brats. To keep order, or even establish peace, among four- to twelve-year-old
savages was impossible. Iskuhi had not the strength to take up the struggle.
Soon she would cease to hear her own voice and wait, resigned, for the
arrival of some trusty male pedagogue, say Oskanian, to scare the little
devils to wan submission. That teacher, iron militarist that he was,
strode in among them rifle in hand, since by military law he had now the
right to shoot them all for insubordination in the field. The switch he
carried, in addition to all his other accoutrements, swished round the
shoulders of guilty and innocent indiscriminately. One unlucky group was
put to kneel on pointed stones, another to stand for fifteen minutes with
heavy objects held above its heads. After which Oskanian would leave
his female subordinate to enjoy the fruits of his pedagogic method --
a deathly silence.

 

 

Juliette saw at once that these strenuous efforts were very bad for
Iskuhi's looks. Her cheeks had begun to lose their color, her face was
peaked, her eyes as huge as when she had first emerged from the hell of
the convoy. And Juliette strove with all her might to rid Iskuhi's heart
of its zeal for duty. She only managed to shock and puzzle her. How,
in this crisis of her whole people, could she shirk so absurdly easy a
task? On the contrary! She wanted more work for the afternoons. Juliette
turned her back on her.

 

 

At present Juliette spent half the day lying on her bed. The narrow tent
stifled her. Two pestering sunbeams forced their way through chinks in
the canvas door. She had not the energy to get up and cover them. "I shall
be ill," she hoped. "Oh, if I were only ill already." Her pounding heart
threatened to burst, with unassuageable longings -- longings for Gabriel.
But not for the present Gabriel -- no! For Gabriel the -- Parisien,
that sensitive, gentle, and considerate Gabriel, whose tact had always
made her forget the things which are not to be bridged over. She longed
for the Gabriel of the Avenue Kléber, in their sunny flat, sitting down
good-temperedly to lunch. Her distant world enveloped her in its sounds:
its hooting cars, the subterranean rattle of the Metro, its delicious,
chattering bustle; the scents of its familiar shops. She buried her
face in the pillow, as though it were the one thing left, the one
handsbreadth of home that remained to her. She was seeking herself in
its odorous softness, striving with all her senses to hold fast to these
fugitive memories of Paris. But she did not succeed. Rotating splotches
of sunbeam forced themselves in, between closed lids. Colored disks
with, in the center of each, a piercing eye -- eyes that reproached and
suffered, forcing themselves in on her from all sides; Gabriel's and
Stephan's Armenian eyes, which would not let go of her. When she looked
up, the eyes were really bending over her, in the wildly bearded face
of a strange man. She stared in alarm at Gabriel. He seemed remote,
his nights all spent out of doors, the reek of damp earth clinging to
him. His voice was the hurried voice of a man between two urgent duties.

 

 

"Are you all right, chérie? Nothing you want? I've just looked in to
see how you're getting on."

 

 

"I'm all right -- thank you."

 

 

She offered him a dream-enveloped hand. For a while he sat next her,
saying nothing, as though there was nothing they could discuss. Then he
stood up.

 

 

But she sat up irritably. "Do you really think me so empty, so materialist,
that you only ever need worry about externals?"

 

 

He did not understand at once. She sobbed: "I can't go on living like this."

 

 

He turned back with a very serious face. "I quite see you can't live
like this, Juliette. One just can't live in a community, when one puts
oneself entirely apart from it. You ought to do something. Go into the
camp, try to help. Be human!"

 

 

"It's not my community."

 

 

"Nor mine as much as you seem to imagine, Juliette. We belong far less
to what we've come from than to what we're doing our best to reach."

 

 

"Or not to reach," she wept.

 

 

When he had gone, Juliette pulled herself together. Perhaps he was
right. It really couldn't go on like this. She begged Mairik Antaram
to ask the doctor to let her work in the hospital hut. The thought
that a thousand Frenchwomen were doing the same, at that very minute,
for their wounded, helped her to come to this decision. At first the
old doctor jibbed, then he accepted her. Juliette, that very same day,
made her first appearance in the hut (it was still in process of being
built) suitably attired in coif and apron. There were luckily very few
cases of serious illness on the Damlayik. One or two fever patients
swathed in rags lay on mats and cushions, still stiff with damp from
the recent storm. They were mostly very old people. Grey, mysterious
faces, already half out of the world. "Not my sort," felt Juliette,
with a certain pity, a vast repugnance. She could see how unsuited she
was to such works of mercy. It was as though she had been lifted above
herself. She had all the available bedding brought from the tents --
anything she could possibly spare.

 

 

 

 

Till midday, the fourth of August passed like the days that had preceded
it. When in the early morning Gabriel scanned the valley with his
field-glass, the villages looked quiet and deserted. It seemed almost a
permissible thought that everything would work out smoothly, world peace
be signed, and the return to normal life secured for them. So that he
left his observation post in quite a hopeful frame of mind, and went on
from sector to sector on a surprise inspection of the work and discipline
of the decads. Towards midday, entirely satisfied, he returned to his
own headquarters. A few minutes later scouts came running in from all
sides. Report: a big dust cloud on the road from Antioch to Suedia --
lots and lots of soldiers -- in four detachments -- behind them saptiehs
and a big crowd of people! . . . They were just turning into the valley
and already marching through Wakef, the first village. Gabriel dashed to
the nearest observation post and established the following: the column
of march of an infantry company at war strength was on its way down the
village street. He recognized them at once as regulars, from the mounted
captain who led them, and the fact that they were marching in four
platoons, which seemed almost able to keep in step. They came swaying
onwards. They must therefore be trained, and perhaps even front-line
troops, garrisoned in the barracks of Antakiya, part of Jemal Pasha's
newly conditioned army. About two hundred saptiehs dribbled along, far
behind the company, while the scum of the plains, the human dregs of
Antioch, raised its dust on either side of this column of march. The
advance of so warlike a contingent of nearly four hundred rifles,
including the saptiehs, was carried out in such God-forsaken indifference
to exposure through this open country that Gabriel was inclined for a time
to think that these troops had another objective. Only when the column,
after a short pause and officers' consultation, moved forward northwest,
behind Bitias, into the mountains, was it quite certain that this was a
campaign against the villagers. The Turks seemed to imagine that they
were doing policemen's work, less dangerous even than the usual hunt
for deserters -- that all they would have to do would be to surround an
unarmed encampment of miserable villagers, smoke them out, and herd them
into the valley. For such a task they must have felt superlatively strong,
as indeed they were, when one considers that the Armenians only had a
hundred good rifles, scarcely any munitions, and few trained men. By
the time they were in Yoghonoluk, Gabriel had sounded the major alarm,
practised daily with his decads and the camp. The münadirs, the drummers,
gathered together the Town Enclosure. The orderly group of the cohort
of youth went darting all over the mountain plateau with orders to the
section leaders. A few of these lads even ventured down into the valley,
to find out the formation and movements of the enemy. Ter Haigasun,
the seven mukhtars, the elder members of the council, stayed with the
people, in the center of the camp, as had been arranged. No one dared to
breathe. Even babes in arms seemed to stifle their wailings. Reservists,
armed with axes, mattocks, and spades, encircled the camp in a wide ring,
to be ready in case they were wanted. Gabriel stood with Chaush Nurhan
and the other leaders. The whole event had been foreseen.

 

 

But, since this was a first encounter, and no other point was directly
menaced, he emptied his supports of all but their most necessary defenders,
and threw every decad at his disposal into the trenches of the North Saddle.
The system had four lines. First and foremost the main trench, which blocked
the entrance to the Damlayik, on the uneven summit of the left slope of the
Saddle. A few hundred yards behind it the second trench, dug along very
uneven ground. On the frontal side of the slope, beyond the trenches,
flank protection, with thrust out sniping-posts. Finally, on the side
facing the sea, the barricades, luckily too high to see across, of jagged
limestone rock.