Forty Days of Musa Dagh (50 page)

 

 

The long August days were not long enough to get through all the work
that had to be done. It began at four in the morning, when the milkmaids
gathered in the square, where the shepherds had already herded the
ewes and she-goats of the flock. Then the milk was carried in big tubs
down to the northern side of the Town Enclosure, where already Mairik
Antaram awaited it, to dole it out to the mukhtars, the hospital, the
cheese-makers. At the same time a long line of women and girls were on
their way to the nearby streams to fill their tall clay pitchers with
fresh spring water, which remained cold as ice in these receptacles,
even in the grilling midday sun. The many springs of clear icy water on
Musa Dagh were one of its greatest natural benefits. The seven mukhtars,
as the lines of water-bearers returned, were already on their way to the
pasturage, to pick out the beasts for the next day's killing from among
the flocks. As to the supply it was now evident that the position would
soon have become threatening. A fat sheep in these parts, in spite of
its almost double weight when alive, gave less than thirty-six pounds of
eatable meat. But since five thousand people, many of whom had the hardest
manual labor to perform, had to live almost exclusively on this meat,
it was necessary to kill about sixty-five sheep a day, if the decads and
the reserve were to be fed properly. How long would life be possible on
the mountain if the stock diminished at this appalling rate? Everyone
could do the sum for himself. Ter Haigasun and Pastor Aram Tomasian, on
the very first Sunday, gave stringent orders that no part of the sheep,
not even the entrails, was to be wasted. At the same time the daily number
of victims was reduced to twenty-five sheep and twelve goats. And none of
this did anything to mitigate the many dangers besetting the herds. Much
pasturage had been used up in the Town Enclosure and the camp buildings
surrounding it, not least by the various entrenchments. In the very
first days on Musa Dagh these flocks were already beginning to lose
weight, yet no one dared to send out the herdsmen into the meadows,
beyond the North Saddle. The stockyard was near a little wood, a good
distance away from the Town Enclosure. This did not prevent terrified
bleatings from sounding every morning through the camp. At first the
slaughtermen suspended their disembowelled wethers on the trees, to hang
for two days. But this was the hottest time of year, and the meat was
very quickly spoiled. Therefore, after the first unpleasant experience,
they buried it, since it kept in the earth, and was better seasoned. As,
in the earliest morning, one detachment of slaughtermen finished its
work, to march straight back into the decads, the next began to get
busy. On long tables, fashioned of tree trunks slung together, the meat
was chopped into equal parts. From there the women on duty as cooks
carried it away to the campfires. There, on ten bricked open hearths,
the huge logs and brushwood crackled already. Gargantuan pots were
swinging on tall tripods above the flames. But the meat was roasted on
long spits, or poles, at the open fire. Food was distributed once a day,
by each mukhtar, to his commune under the supervision of Pastor Aram. The
portions assigned to the separate villages were again set out on the long
log tables, where each family's share was divided up. So that a hundred
and twelve housewives came marching, single file, to their village table,
and each, from the hands of her mukhtar, received her exactly proportioned
share. An official person, usually the village priest or teacher, checked
the number of recipients from his list, and ticked off each meal as it was
distributed. Naturally all this took time, and seldom happened without
recriminations, Nature had, alas, not designed her sheep, or indeed her
goats, with sufficient accuracy. The claims of absolute justice were
never satisfied. The more morose among the women saw in the injustice
of fate the evil machinations of hostile men, meanly directed against
themselves. It needed all Aram Tomasian's tact to appease and convince
these chiding matrons that, though Madame Yeranik or Madame Kohar had
been scurvily treated by fate today, yesterday she had been fortune's
favorite. Usually Madame Yeranik and Madame Kohar were quite incapable
of such logic.

 

 

Before this distribution to civilians, the army had already received the
best, carried down into its trenches by the young orderlies. But the whole
camp had to be satisfied with a meal a day, since in the evenings only
water boiled in the big cauldrons on the square. Some kind of roots had
been thrown into it and the net result christened "tea," for the sake
of calling it something.

 

 

Pastor Aram had also organized a police force. Twelve armed men kept order
in the Town Enclosure. They went on their rounds day and night with the
threatening tread of a constabulary. As they walked down the lines of
huts, they made the inhabitants feel that this was wartime and everyone
must be on his best behavior. They were responsible for the sanitary
measures on which Bagradian, Bedros Altouni, Shatakhian, and other
"European fanatics" had insisted as a major problem. Much that had been
usual in the villages was forbidden on Musa Dagh. No leavings to be thrown
outside the tents, no dirty water emptied into the "street"; above all the
dictates of nature to be obeyed only in the places designed for obedience
to them. One of Bagradian's first measures had been the digging out of
big latrines. Anyone caught infringing this law of hygiene was punished
with a day's fast; his daily ration was not served out to him.

 

 

 

 

That, in its broadest outlines, is the life this people led on Musa Dagh
for the first fortnight of its encampment. The germs of everything which
makes up the general life of humanity were already there. This people
dwelt in a wilderness, exposed to every peril of the void. Death so
inescapably surrounded them that only the most sentimental optimist
could still hope to avoid it altogether. The commune's short history
worked itself out according to the law of least resistance. This law had
imposed communal forms, to which it submitted with as good or ill grace
as it could muster, though all would far rather have felt free to fend
for themselves, just as they chose. But the rich especially, the owners
of expropriated herds, deeply resented this nationalization of private
property. Their clear perception that, in a convoy, they would by now most
probably have lost not only their property, but their lives, did not in
the least assuage the bitterness of having been "pauperized." Even now,
when what was left to them of life seemed likely to be a matter of days,
they did all they could to distinguish themselves from plebeians by at
least "keeping up appearances."

 

 

In the center of the camp rose the altar. When, at about the hour of the
last night watch, one hour before the greying of the skies, the Milky
Way, grown fainter, moved on above it, as though it were the center and
heart of all things, Ter Haigasun, the priest, would sometimes kneel
on the highest step, leaning his head on his open missal. Ter Haigasun
knew the world and was a sceptic. For that very reason he strove so
passionately to draw into himself the strength of prayer. When everyone
else had ceased to believe in any rescue, he, the last of them all, would
have to be permeated with the sure sense of impending miracle. Certainty
that they were not to be lost, the faith that can move mountains, raise
from the dead! Ter Haigasun's soul struggled, in shy, solitary petition,
after this mountain-removing faith in a paradox, which his mind refused
when confronted with surrounding realities.

 

 

 

 

Juliette had pulled herself together. She was leading an entirely different
life. Now she would be up just after sunrise, and dressed so quickly that
she managed to help Mairik Antaram with her morning distribution of milk.
From there, as fast as possible to the hospital. After all, it was the
only thing she could do. Gabriel had been perfectly right. No one can
go on living indefinitely as a "distinguished foreigner" -- in a void.

 

 

A superficial observer would find Juliette easy enough to criticize.
What did this snob really expect? What had she, who resisted her husband's
world after fifteen years of married life, really got of her own to be
so proud of? Were there not in Turkey, at that very minute, many other
European women heroically engaged in efforts to help the slaughtered,
outraged Armenian people? Was there not Karen Jeppe in Urfa, who hid
refugees and kept back the saptiehs, with her arms spread out across
her door, till they took themselves off, since after all they dared not
kill a Danish woman? Had not German and American missionaries found
their way with considerable hardship as far even as Deir ez-Zor, and
into the desert, bringing such help as they could muster to the lost and
famished children and widows of murdered men? None of these had married
an Armenian, none had borne an Armenian son. Such strictures might
sound extremely just, and yet they would be unjust to Juliette. She
alone on Musa Dagh suffered with far more than the general suffering;
she suffered worst of all from herself. Juliette was too miserable to
be snobbish. Being French, she had a certain natural rigidity. Latins,
for all their surface pliancy, are set and rigid within themselves. Their
form is a perfection. They have perfected it. Northerners may still have
something of the vagueness and infinite plasticity of cloud shapes;
the French as a rule hate nothing so much as to have to leave their
country, get out of their skin. Juliette shared in a high degree this
set quality of her race. She lacked that power of intuitive sympathy
which usually goes with formless uncertainties. Had Gabriel, from the
first days of their marriage, been firmly resolved to guide her gently
in the direction of his own people, perhaps it would all have worked out
differently. But Gabriel himself had been "Parisien" -- one of that race
of assimilators who, when they thought of Armenia, thought of her as a
classical exemplar, but as not quite real. What little he had managed to
see of Armenians, the excited political contacts he had made in the year
of the Turkish revolution, his engagement of Avakian to teach Stephan --
none of all that had been enough to give Juliette the right perspective,
far less to bring her over to his side. For fifteen years she had really
only been aware that she had married an Ottoman subject. What it really
means to be Armenian, the duties and destiny it entails, she had had
to discover a few weeks previously, with appalling suddenness. So that
really Gabriel himself was largely to blame for Juliette's attitude.

 

 

In these days she felt indescribably alone. She, the glittering,
the dominant, the eternally vivid, who had never once failed to
be admired, was now merely put up with -- worse still, not even
noticed! She was sure she was getting uglier every day, surrounded by
such general disapprobation. And out of all this was born a fresh agony
-- France! Whatever war news had managed to find its way to Musa Dagh
had its source only in Turkish newspapers. It was weeks -- months -- out
of date. Juliette knew only of French defeats, knew that foreign armies
were on French soil. She, who had never troubled her head with politics,
to whom the general fate had been a bore, whose own affairs had appeared
supreme to her, was now suddenly overwhelmed with devouring fears for
"la patrie." Her mother, with whom she did not get on, her sisters,
with whom she had almost quarrelled, came infinitely close to her in
her dreams. School friends appeared, who cut Juliette, although she
kept going down on her knees to them. Now and again she encountered her
dead father -- fin, frock-coated, and distinguished, with the little
red ribbon in his buttonhole. He stared in some amazement at Juliette,
and kept repeating his pet expression: "Ces choses ne se font pas.

 

 

But, though her nights got worse and worse, Juliette was always punctual
on duty. She had no desire to be "human," in the way Gabriel had advised.
All she wanted was to overcome her solitude, her lost dismay. She served
with the greatest devotion. Conquering her olfactory sense, Juliette
would kneel down beside the patients, those half-unconscious old people,
on the rough mats; strip their feverish bodies, wash off the dirt,
bathe their crumpled faces in toilet water, whatever was left of it.
In those days she sacrificed much. She gave up most of her own underwear,
let them use her sheets to make cradles for suckling babes, hammocks for
the sick. For herself she only kept "the strictly necessary." But, no matter
how Juliette might exert herself, there was no gratitude in the dull
fish-eyes of the fever patients, the hostile eyes of those in health;
they would acknowledge nothing from her -- the foreigner. Even Gabriel had
not a word of praise, he who ten days ago had seemed so chivalrous.
Was she a dead encumbrance even to him?

 

 

And Gabriel and Stephan, the only beings close to her in the world, were
near, and yet as far away from her as though an ocean lay between. They
scarcely bothered even to think of her. They eyed her with thinly veiled
animosity. Neither could manage to seem affectionate. They did not love her.

 

 

And all the rest? The people hated her. Juliette felt the hate in their
staring faces, their sudden silence, the instant she was seen in camp.
The women's dislike of her scorched her back as she went along past the
staring groups.

 

 

Here, forsaken of all, she would have to die, more alone and wretched
than the wretchedest person on Musa Dagh.

 

 

At such welling moments of self-pity Juliette was careful not to admit to
herself that perhaps she was not really so alone. Gonzague never left her
side, having perceived the misery in her eyes. When and wherever he could,
he redoubled his attentive services. Now more than ever he had become to
Juliette the son of a French mother, a "civilized being," akin to her,
almost her relation. But for the last few days something had seemed to
imperil their good understanding -- something not only from him, but from
her as well. He had not overstepped one limit. But for the first time,
without shedding an atom of his respect, he had made her perceive in
him a desire. This feeling of being on the brink, this close proximity
without contact, brought fresh confusion on Juliette. She had to think
often of Gonzague. Added to which, in spite of his French mother, he
still "made her feel queer." People who are always in perfect control
of themselves, who can wait for ever, are uncanny. Gonzague was one of
those who in anger turn white, but never crimson.