Forty Days of Musa Dagh (86 page)

 

 

Aram felt his way slowly: "Hovsannah misses you very much. She's always
been so used to having you help her. . . . And now there's this poor little
child, and so much work to do."

 

 

Iskuhi interrupted impatiently: "But surely, Aram, you must know that
just because of the child this is about the last time I ought to go in
to see Hovsannah. . . ."

 

 

"I know you've undertaken to nurse here. That's very good of you. . . .
But perhaps now, your own family needs you even more."

 

 

Iskuhi seemed very surprised. "The hanum in there hasn't got anyone. . . .
But Hovsannah's up out of bed and has all the people she wants to look
after her."

 

 

Pastor Aram swallowed hard several times, as though he had a pain in his
throat. "You know me, Iskuhi, how I hate beating about the bush. Will you
be perfectly frank with me? Placed as we are, anything else would be
ridiculous. . . ."

 

 

She let her eyes rest with vague hostility on her brother. "I am being
quite frank with you."

 

 

Now he began to get uncomfortable and strove to build a bridge above her
innocence. If it were only a question of a companion, a friend, someone
with whom she sympathized -- of anything not desperately serious. He felt
hotly anxious that she should tell him so, sternly reprove, and inform
him sharply that her sister-in-law's suspicions were all a lie.

 

 

"Hovsannah's very worried about you, Iskuhi. She keeps saying she's been
noticing certain things. We quarrelled half the night about it. That's
why I ask you, so please forgive me. Is there anything between you and
Gabriel Bagradian?"

 

 

Iskuhi did not blush, nor did she display the least embarrassment.
Her voice was quiet and steady: "Nothing has happened yet between me
and Gabriel. . . . But I love him, and I mean to stay with him to the end."

 

 

Aram Tomasian sprang up, horrified. He was a jealous brother. Any news
that she was in love would have been unwelcome. This blow, so calmly
delivered, hurt all the more. "And you dare say that so calmly, to me --
to my face!"

 

 

"You asked for it, Aram."

 

 

"Are you like that, Iskuhi, you? I just can't realize. And what about
your honor, your family? Don't you, in Jesus Christ's name, remember
he's a married man?"

 

 

She raised her head suddenly to look at him. The conviction in her face
was irremovable. "I'm nineteen -- and shall never be twenty."

 

 

Pastor Aram blazed out at her indignantly: "In God you'll grow older,
since in Him your soul is immortal and responsible."

 

 

The louder Aram became, the softer Iskuhi: "I'm not afraid of God."

 

 

The pastor struck his palm against his forehead. I'm not afraid of God!
He mistook for the most hardened defiance words that had really expressed
the deepest certainty.

 

 

"Do you know what it is you're doing? Can't you feel the stench in which
you live? In there, there's that woman lying unconscious, sick to death.
A shameless adulteress! But you're betraying her a thousand times worse
than she ever betrayed. You're leading a worse, more brutish life than the
lowest Moslem women. . . . No, I'm doing the Moslems an injustice. . . ."

 

 

Iskuhi clutched at the rope with her right hand and held it tight. Her eyes
grew bigger and bigger. Tomasian thought his words were taking effect. God
be praised, he had still some influence over his sister.

 

 

He began to moderate his just wrath: "Let's be reasonable, Iskuhi. Think
of the consequences -- not only to you and me, but to Bagradian and the
whole camp. You must rectify this terrible disorder. You must finish at
once -- make a clean sweep. At once. Father shall come along and take
you home."

 

 

A deep breath forced its way out of Iskuhi. She leaned far back. Only now
did the pastor perceive that her dolorous movement was not the result of
his objurgations, but that something which had happened behind his back
was filling Iskuhi with horror. When he turned, it was to see Samuel Avakian,
breathlessly in search of Bagradian. The student could scarcely stand
upright. His face had become a twitching mask, tears were streaming down it.
Iskuhi pointed feebly towards the North Saddle. He would find Bagradian
there. Then, without noticing Aram, she hid her face. She knew everything.

 

 

 

 

It was one of Sato's peculiarities never to sleep two nights in the same
place. She was entirely lacking in that sense which most of us have, that
we can always go back to the same place to sleep in, a secure shelter in
a community, even for the half of life we spend in the dark. Not only
did she refuse to sleep two nights on the same ground, but would often
change her bed in the course of one.

 

 

She slept curled up, without rugs or pillow. Her dreams, though they were
like superimposed photographic images, were not always merely illusory.
Now and again they kept pointing like stubborn fingers, informing Sato
of events in her immediate neighborhood or beyond it. That happened tonight.
Sato had gone to sleep among those clumps of arbutus and myrtle from which
she had watched Gonzague and Juliette. Something told her Nunik was near,
and indeed at the head of a long procession.

 

 

So Sato jumped up and went racing off to find Nunik, guided by the instinct
of her dream. It was still dark when, leaving behind her the many-folded
plateau of the Damlayik, she struck off south of the burning woods and
crossed the mountain ridge. At this place, apart from many red-berried
shrubs and clumps of isolated trees, the ground becomes more barren and
stonier. The flames had darted so far on spread wings. Charred trees and
single islands of glittering shrubs bore witness to the great conflagration.
But the fire itself had withdrawn its outposts. The springs and streams
which ran to the valley, though not dried up, had begun to force new
channels for themselves and bubbled up like medicinal springs, steaming
on the frontiers of the kingdom of flames.

 

 

Sato encountered Stephan's funeral train in a little, treed-in gully which
led on upwards to the last defense posts on the south side. More than this
fire, and the consequent necessity to come by the longest way round, had
forced Nunik and her train to ascend so slowly. The real hindrance lay in
the age and decrepitude of her followers themselves. Nor did the fact that
four blind beggars, with wild, prophetic heads, carried the bier increase
the speed of the cortege. Nunik had appointed them coffin-bearers, since
they were the only men available whose arms and legs still had some vestiges
of strength. She strode on ahead of them. Wartuk and Manushak guided them,
past bushes, tree trunks, and blocks of stone, as one guides a team of
slowly nodding buffaloes. Stephan's white-shrouded body had been laid
out on one of the ancient, richly carved biers, half a dozen of which
still stood unlooted in a corner of the churchyard of Yoghonoluk.

 

 

Sato darted across the train like a puppy, scampering on ahead, not caring
how many times she did the journey. She came back again and again to the
bier as, with the tappings and lurchings of the blind, it swayed along.

 

 

Her pitiless, greedy eyes took in every detail of this young body,
lying under its sheet. She would have given anything to have lifted
the cloth off its face, to have seen how Stephan looked, now he was
dead. Then, when they were almost at the top, she left them and ran on
into camp. She wanted to he the first to wake Kristaphor and Avakian and
herald young Bagradian's death. Shortly before sunrise the dead arrived
in the big square, followed by the tapping, limping cortege. The bier was
set down before the altar. The keening-wives with their rabble squatted
around it. Nunik uncovered the boy's face. She had done Ter Haigasun's
bidding as well as she could. The reward was earned, and could not be
contested. Already there arose, scarcely audible, the tremulous hum of
the dirge.

 

 

Stephan had now become completely that Persian prince whom his mother
had been so startled to perceive, the first time he had worn Armenian
dress. Though Nunik had counted forty wounds, knife thrusts, bruises,
contusions, all over the body, though his back was broken, and his throat
gaped with a horrible slit in it -- they had not touched his face.
Stephan, behind closed lids, could still see the father for whom he longed,
coming through the high door of the station at Montreux. Not forty murderers
had managed to efface his smile of delight that Dad should be lifting him
in his arms again. He had died without being present at his own death.
This bestial martyrdom had, by God's grace, only assailed him as a
far-off odor might. Now he seemed at perfect peace with himself, the
dreamy prince.

 

 

The first to come into the altar square, to step back appalled from the
bier and the crowd surrounding the altar, was Krikor of Yoghonoluk.

 

 

 

 

Ter Haigasun on the previous evening had come in person to release
Kilikian from bondage and send him back to his trench in the South
Bastion. Krikor had been sorry to lose this Russian, whose disgrace had
kept him there a few days and nights. Now he was sick, nobody came to
see the apothecary. The teachers, his disciples, had all abandoned him,
not only because their war service left them no spare time, but because,
since now they were men of action, they rather scorned their wordy past.
And gone, too, was Gonzague Maris, whose talk Krikor had enjoyed.

 

 

His loneliness was twice as long as a normal loneliness, since, out of
the whole twenty-four hours, Krikor scarcely slept more than one or two,
always towards midday. Night, on the other hand, as it is with many
eager and great minds, was the time of Krikor's clearest perceptions,
when life beat in him at its highest. For the first two nights of
Kilikian's imprisonment Krikor had felt the presence of a human being
in the other kennel as an unbearable encroachment on his peace. On the
third his irritation at being disturbed changed into a curious need to
see the prisoner and converse with him. Only scruples about undermining
the Council's authority, since Krikor was himself a leader, had prevented
him from yielding to this impulse. In the fourth night it became so
overpowering in his solitude, that Krikor could control it no more.
Gasping with pain, he managed to haul himself out of bed and drag to the
door which led into the lock-up, take down the key from the niche, and
laboriously, with his knotted, swollen hand, unlock it. Sarkis Kilikian
was lying on his mat with open eyes. The apothecary had not waked him,
nor was he in the least surprised at this visit. Kilikian's hands and
feet were tied, but so mercifully that he could move with ease. Krikor
put his oil lamp down on the floor and sat beside him. Kilikian's bonds
shamed Krikor's soul. To put them on an equal footing, he held out his
own poor hands.

 

 

"We're both manacled, Sarkis Kilikian. But my bonds hurt me worse than
yours do, and tomorrow I shall still be wearing them -- so don't complain."

 

 

"I'm not complaining."

 

 

"But perhaps it might be better if you did."

 

 

Krikor passed his raki flask to the Russian, who took a long, reflective
swig. The old man drank with equal care. Then he looked at Kililkian.
"I know you're an educated man. . . . Perhaps, in the last few days, you'd
have liked a book to read."

 

 

"You've come too late with that, Apothecary."

 

 

"Which languages can you read in, Kilikian?"

 

 

"French and Russian, if I must."

 

 

Krikor's smooth mandarin's head, with the jumping goatee, nodded
disconsolately. "Well -- you see what a man you are, Kilikian!"

 

 

The deserter slowly gurgled out a laugh, that long, slow laugh of his,
for no reason, that laugh which had so startled Bagradian, on the night
they tried out the tents.

 

 

But Krikor would not let himself be put off. "You've had an unhappy life,
I know. . . . But why? Didn't you live at Ejmiadzin, next door to the
finest library in the world? I was only there a day, but I should have
liked to stay on to the end of my life, among all those books. . . .
And you ran away . . ."

 

 

Sarkis propped himself half up. "I say, Apothecary, you used to smoke. . . .
I haven't had a whiff for five days."

 

 

The groaning Krikor dragged himself off again, to bring this prisoner
back his chibuk, with the last box of his tobacco.

 

 

"Take this, Kilikian. I've had to give up that pleasure, since I can't
manage to hold a pipe."

 

 

Sarkis Kilikian enveloped himself at once in a smoke cloud. Krikor held up
the lamp, to give him a light.

 

 

"And yet, Kilikian, you brought your misfortunes on yourself. . . . I can
see from your face that you're a monk; I don't mean anything parsonic,
I mean the kind of man who possesses the whole world in his cell. And
that's why things have gone so badly with you. Why did you run away? What
did you think you'd find in the world?"

 

 

Sarkis Kilikian gave himself up so exclusively to smoking that it was still
not certain whether he heard Krikor and understood him.

 

 

"I'll tell you something, my friend Sarkis. . . . There are two sorts of
men. That is to say there are the human animals, billions of them! . . .
The others, the human angels, count by the thousand, or, at most, by the
ten thousand. Among the human animals also belong the world's great men --
the kings, the politicians, the ministers, the generals, the pashas --
just as much as the peasants, the craftsmen, and laborers. Take Mukhtar
Kebussyan, for instance. And, as he is, so are they all. Under thousands
of different forms, they all have only one activity -- the fabrication
of dung. Since politics, industry, agriculture, military science --
what is all that but the fabrication of dung, even though perhaps the
dung may be necessary. If you take his dung away from a human animal,
what remains in his soul is the worst possible agony, boredom! He can't
stand himself. And that boredom produces everything bad in the world,
political hatred, mass murder! But delight lives in the heart of the
human angels. Aren't you, for instance, delighted, Kilikian, when you
see the stars? The human angel's delight is what the real angel's song
of praise is, of which the great Agathangelos declares that it is the
highest activity in the universe. . . . But where was I -- ah, yes,
I was going to say, that there are human angels who betray themselves,
who fall away from themselves. And for them there can he no mercy and
no grace. Every hour revenges itself on them . . ."