Forty Days of Musa Dagh (84 page)

 

 

Like a flash Haik's warning came back to Stephan. Imitate everything!
And so, in the place where he had fallen, he began to copy. He could not
manage more than a few feeble swayings and moans. But this man also saw
him at once.

 

 

Yet, not so pious, it seemed, as the Turkoman peasant, he stopped in
the middle of his prayer, stood up, and came across to Stephan. "Who
are you? Where do you come from? What do you want?"

 

 

Stephan made himself kneel up; he bowed and put his hand to his heart.
"Ben bir az hasta im, Effendi."

 

 

Having said it pat, he made a sign that he was thirsty. At first the
greybeard seemed to hesitate. Then he went to the well, dipped a pitcher,
and brought it back. Stephan drank avidly, though the water seemed to
cut him as he was drinking it. Meanwhile someone else had come out of
the house; not, as Stephan fully expected, helpful women, but another,
scowling, man with a black beard, who repeated the greybeard's questions,
word for word: "Who are you? Where do you come from? What do you want?"

 

 

The lost Stephan made two vague motions in different directions.
They might mean either Suedia or Antakiya.

 

 

The scowling blackbeard became angry. "Can't you speak? Are you dumb?"

 

 

Stephan smiled with big, vague eyes at him, as helpless as a child of three.
He was still on his knees before them. The greybeard walked round him twice,
like a craftsman sizing up a finished job. He took Stephan under the chin
and twisted his head towards the light. It was a test. The blackbeard also
seemed very interested. They went a few steps aside and began to talk
in quarrelsome voices, but still keeping an eye on Stephan. When they
had finished, their faces had the solemn look of men charged with a
difficult public duty.

 

 

The blackbeard began the interrogation: "Young man, are you circumcised
or uncircumcised?"

 

 

Stephan did not understand. Only then did his confiding smile become
a look of anxious questioning. His silence roused the Moslems to wrath.
Hard, chiding words beat down like hailstones. Stephan, for all their
shouts and flourishes, knew less and less what they were after.
The blackbeard's patience gave out. He grasped the kneeling Stephan under
the armpits and jerked him up. It was the greybeard who undid his clothes
and investigated. Now their worst suspicions were confirmed. This sly
Armenian, trying to pretend he was deaf and dumb, was an insolent spy,
sent out by the camp on Musa Dagh. No time to lose! They shoved the
tottering Stephan on before them, down the narrow valley path from Ain
Yerab, to the big highroad. Then they held up the first oxcart come from
the neighborhood of Antakiya, in the Suedia direction. The driver had
at once to change his direction, in the name of commonweal and public
service. The bailiffs lifted their prisoner into the cart. Next him
squatted the blackbeard; the greybeard walked excitedly with the owner,
explaining this danger, now averted.

 

 

Stephan's fate was sealed. But now some merciful power had made him
cease to know where he was. His head sank down across the knees of the
blackbeard, his mortal enemy. And behold! that grim-faced avenger did not
thrust away his victim. He sat as rigid as though he were doing his best
to ease the young man. That hectic face in his lap, with its open eyes,
staring up into his, and yet not seeing them, this feverish breath, those
red, dry lips, this whole surrendered childishness, leaning against him,
roused in the blackbeard's narrow mind the wildest bitterness. That was
what the world was like. You had to dash your fist in its face!

 

 

But Stephan had even forgotten Musa Dagh. He had even forgotten his
captured howitzers; he had forgotten those five sleepy peasants whom
he, the crack shot, had picked out so neatly. Haik was scarcely even
a name. Iskuhi was as faint as a breath. Stephan was wearing his own
European clothes again, his Norfolk jacket and laced shoes. They felt
very safe and comfortable, his feet marvellously clean. He was walking
with Maman down splendid boulevards, and then along the lakeside at
Montreux. He and Maman were living in the Palace Hotel. He sat with her
before white tablecloths, played in gravel beds, sat in whitewashed
classrooms with other, all equally well looked after, boys. He was
sometimes smaller, and sometimes bigger, but always he was safe and at
peace. Maman carried her red sunshade. It cast such a vivid red shadow
that at times her face was hard to recognize.

 

 

All this was perhaps uneventful, but so quietly pleasant that Stephan
did not notice the saptieh guardhouse on the edge of Wakef. One of its
two gendarmes reinforced the blackbeard in the cart and held Stephan's
ankles. And in Wakef itself they were joined by a whole detachment
of saptiehs. The more the commotion, the further they came into the
valley. This escort drew a small crowd after it, men, women, children.

 

 

It reached the church square in Yoghonoluk long before midday. And by
then there were about a thousand people, including many old soldiers and
recruits, at present garrisoned in the villages. Quickly the red-haired
müdir was sent for, out of Villa Bagradian. The saptiehs pushed Stephan
out of the cart. The müdir ordered him to strip; there might be some
writing hidden on his naked body. Stephan did it so quietly and
indifferently that the crowd mistook his peace for sullenness;
it enraged the onlookers.

 

 

Even before he was quite naked, someone had punched the back of his head.
But this blow was merciful. It left Stephan not quite stunned, but well
back in that delightful world in which he had been beginning to feel so
at home, and from which he might otherwise have emerged again.

 

 

Meanwhile the saptiehs had emptied his rucksack. In it they found
Stephan's kodak, and his copy of the letter to Jackson.

 

 

The müdir held Stephan's Christmas present up to the crowd, most of whom
had never seen a camera. "This is an instrument by which you can always
tell a spy."

 

 

He deciphered, and read out to the people, with loud bursts of triumph
in his voice, that highly treacherous letter to the consul. When he had
done, the whole square bellowed with hate.

 

 

The müdir caine close up to Stephan. His beautifully manicured hand
chucked him under the chin, as if to encourage. "Now, my boy, tell us
your name.

 

 

Stephan smiled and said nothing. The sea of reality was remote. He could
just hear its waves break in the distance.

 

 

But the müdir remembered the photograph of a boy which he had seen in
the selamlik of the villa. He turned back solemnly to the crowd. "If he
won't tell you, I will. This is the son of Bagradian."

 

 

The first knife was thrust into Stephan's back. But he could not feel
it. Because he and Maman were just on their way to fetch Dad, who was
due in Switzerland from Paris. Maman still had her red sunshade. Dad
was coming out of a very high door, all by himself. He was dressed in
a snow-white suit, without any hat. Maman beckoned to him. But, when
he saw his small son waiting, Gabriel opened his arms, in a movement of
unfathomable gentleness. And since Stephan was really such a little boy,
Dad could lift him close to his radiant face, and then high above his
head -- higher and higher.

 

 

 

 

Nunik found his body that night. It was a very mangled but not disfigured
corpse. Saptiehs had flung it naked into the churchyard. Nunik came only
just in time to get it away from the wild dogs. She sent off one of her
waifs to their camp in the ruins, to call all the other beggar-folk. Today
they must put off fear, since a mighty thing had come to pass. The line
of Avetis Bagradian, the founder, was now for ever extinguished. This
was the hour at which to do Ter Haigasun's bidding and carry Bagradian's
son back to the mountain. The reward could not be withheld. A life of
safety was in prospect. The shy beggar-folk came to the graveyard in
little groups. The corpse-washers set to work immediately. They cleaned
the blood and dirt off the scarred, beautiful body of the boy. And the
generous Nunik did even more for the last Bagradian. Out of her incredible
sack she drew a white shift, in which to wrap him. As she was doing this
ultimate service a blind beggar raised his singsong voice:

 

 

"The lamb's blood flowed towards their house."

 

 

When it was done, Nunik, Wartuk, Manushak, and the other keening-women
among the beggar-folk took up their heavy sacks. They walked, bent double,
under the load. In the second hour of this new day the procession,
noiseless, almost invisible, in spite of a crescent moon, crept up the
Damlayik, to reach the Town Enclosure by secret paths, unscathed by the
mountain conflagration. Nunik, with her long staff, led them. When they
were safe in the woods, they lit two torches to carry one on either side
of the bier, so that the corpse might not return unlit, unhonored.

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. PAIN

 

 

Gabriel was again spending his nights in his usual place in the north
trenches. Ter Haigasun had become alarmed at the slackness he noticed
among the men, the obvious relaxation of their discipline. It was at
his most urgent request that Gabriel, even on the night after Stephan's
disappearance from the Damlayik, consented to resume his command. To do
so was a clearer proof of his own steadiness and discipline than all
three battles. For, in these days, his hands kept trembling, he could
not swallow a bite, nor sleep a wink. Uncertainty as to Stephan's fate
was not his worst, most terrible suffering. The real anguish lay in
its being impossible to do anything to find him, rescue him. Could he
perhaps recondition his mobile guard and carry out a sortie with them,
even as far as the streets of Aleppo? Perhaps such a night expedition,
spreading its terrors all through the countryside, might end by overtaking
Stephan and Haik. Naturally he checked this romantic fantasy. What right
had he to risk the lives of a hundred people in a wild attempt to save
his son? Stephan, after all, had done on his own impulse what Haik did
as the messenger of the people. There was no general reason whatsoever
for moving heaven and earth to bring him back.

 

 

So Gabriel, as though gasping for air, flung himself back into his work.
Chaush Nurhan was given orders to put the decads through daily fighting
maneuvers. It was like the very first days. No one, not even in the rest
hours, was to leave his post. Leave for the Town Enclosure was granted
only in urgent cases. Hard tasks were imposed on the reserve. Against
the next great Turkish attack the trenches were not only to be improved,
but, to trick the enemy, partly shifted, and what was left of the old
ones rendered impregnable by high stone parapets. No one dared oppose
Bagradian's desperate activity. But his restless demands did not,
strangely enough, make people irritable or arouse their hate. They
rather invigorated and electrified, filling the camp with fresh desire
to do battle. Life, after a short relaxation, had again its object and
its content.

 

 

Gabriel felt no personal hostility, merely a growing sense of isolation.
It is true that, even before, there had never been any real cordiality,
either between him and the leaders, or between him and the rank-and-file.
Friendship was out of the question. They simply obeyed him, as their leader.
They respected him. They were even grateful. But he and the people of
Musa Dagh were two different sorts of human being.

 

 

Now, however, they actually shunned him; even Aram Tomasian, who until
now had seized on every chance of a talk. He noticed how, right and left
of his sleeping place, in the north trench, his neighbors moved their rugs
farther away. Their superficial reason for doing it was that Gabriel,
who every day spent an hour or more by Juliette's bed, might be infectious.
But far more complex feelings lay behind. Gabriel Bagradian was a man
struck by misfortune, a man for whom, they could feel instinctively, even
worse misfortune lay in store. It is a human instinct to shun the unlucky.

 

 

The camp epidemic had still not spread. This was mostly due to the weather,
and to a certain small extent to Bedros Hekim. Out of a hundred and three
cases of fever, only twenty-four had so far died. If any member of the
camp felt in the least feverish or unwell, he must pack up his rugs
and pillows at once and go straight along to the isolation-wood, the
fever hospital of the Damlavik. This shady wood was pleasant enough.
The patients did not mind having to be there. But a shower would certainly
have altered its conditions much for the worse.

 

 

Twice a day, riding on his donkey, Bedros Altouni came to see Juliette.
He was puzzled at the fact that, in her case, the fever seemed not to be
taking its normal course. The crisis seemed to take a long time coming.
After the first attack her temperature had fallen slightly, but without
the patient regaining consciousness. And Juliette, unlike the other
patients, was neither quite unconscious, nor delirious; she was in a
kind of deep, leaden sleep. Yet, in this sleep, without waking out of
it, she could turn her head, open her mouth, and swallow the milk which
Iskuhi gave her. Sometimes she stammered a few words from another life.

 

 

In the first days Iskuhi scarcely left her side. She had had her bed
moved into Juliette's tent. She saw nothing more of Hovsannah and the
baby. It had become impossible.

 

 

Juliette's maids were nowhere to be found. They were afraid of infection
and much disliked having to touch either the patient or her belongings.
What, after all, had they to do with this foreigner, who was in such bad
odor all round? So that, for the present, the whole burden lay on Iskuhi.