Yalo (39 page)

The story begins with a child named Abel Gabriel Abyad, born in the village of Ain Ward, near Tur Abdin, in a country with no name, because it was the country of a people who did not yet exist. There, at the onset of the twentieth century, the Turks committed a dreadful massacre, killing about a million and a half Armenians. This was the massacre that our brothers the Armenians commemorate every year. My grandfather's massacre, however, no one remembers it because it was a minor massacre incidental to a major one. Woe unto a people butchered in a peripheral massacre, because the butcher will not even find it necessary to wipe the blood from his knives. And this is what happened early in the century, when the small Syriac population was massacred.

The armed hosts attacked a small village called Ain Ward, the Spring of Roses because of the red damask rose that grows on the banks of its stream, from which sprang water turned golden by the sun. (That is how my grandfather described his village to his daughter, before adding that he spoke like the poets, and that he had wasted his life by neglecting his poetic gifts.) There the massacre was committed that killed all the inhabitants of the village. Sensing the imminent danger, the villagers took refuge in the Monastery of St. John, about three kilometers from their village, but the attackers, who surrounded the monastery, settled for nothing less than the surrender of all of them. After negotiations led by Cohno Danho, the villagers were promised safety. They came out with their hands raised after throwing
their rifles to the ground, and the massacre began. The attackers used swords on every neck, both women and men without distinction, and only a tiny band of villagers survived, who slipped through the valleys and fled in the direction of the city of Al-Qamishli.

My grandfather didn't remember the massacre, because he was less than three years old. He told the story of the massacre as he heard it from the uncle he hated. So I am not compelled to believe the story, not the story of fleeing to the abbey nor the story of the villagers being massacred and buried in a mass grave dug under the willow trees. What can be believed is that the children under the age of three were not harmed, and that the attackers pillaged the houses in the village before deciding to move into them. So the image of blood that became my great-grandmother's
kokina
might be merely a metaphor by which my grandfather wanted to prove his poetic gifts.

The children wandered the streets of their village, begging. Their terror and hunger left them no time to weep over their murdered families.

Then Mullah Mustafa issued a decision.

I know only his first name, because my grandfather refused to talk about him. The mullah decreed that children should not be left wandering in the streets and issued orders to distribute them among the Kurdish families who had taken over the houses in the village. It was my grandfather's great luck to be taken to the house of Mullah Mustafa. The boy's name was changed from Abel to Ahmad, and he became a Kurdish boy, speaking Kurdish, Arabic, and Turkish, and living in the bosom of the mullah's family, as if it had always been so. The willow forest was the only remaining witness that remembered what had been. The children were forbidden from playing in it because of the moans that seeped from among the branches of the trees that grew so remarkably after the massacre.

The story might have ended here, with Abel Abyad forgetting his
origins, or even becoming an officer in the Turkish army like so many children who were snatched from the arms of their mothers and raised by the Ottoman Army, becoming pillars of the Janissary corps whose very name evoked terror.

But destiny had a different view.

Ten years after the massacre, and after the Ottoman defeat in World War I, with the dissolution of the state, some of the Syriacs in the regions of Tur Abdin, who had fled to Al-Qamishli in northern Syria, began to look for their children. Here my grandfather's uncle, named Abd al-Masih Abyad, appeared.

Abd al-Masih arrived in Ain Ward, went to Mullah Mustafa's house, and said that he would buy the boy for any amount they named. The mullah swore that he would return the boy to his family, community, and tribe. The mullah said that he was ready to give the boy Ahmad back to his uncle without compensation if that was what the boy wished.

The mullah called over Ahmad, who stood between his Kurdish father and his Syriac uncle. He heard his story from his father's mouth and understood that the mullah was making him choose between going with Abd al-Masih Abyad and staying here.

When my grandfather got to this part of the story, his tears used to stream down and his voice would choke up, and he began to stutter and stammer. He would fall silent for a long time and ask for a glass of tea before relating how he went away with his uncle without looking back.

Instead of the story ending here, it took a new turn in Al-Qamishli, because the lad felt redoubled banishment. He did not speak Syriac, and he hated the job his uncle found him as a bakery worker. He felt that people treated him as a Kurd.

In Al-Qamishli, my grandfather regained his original name but lost his identity, because in people's eyes he had become a Kurd. He felt banished.
The world had closed in his face, and he had lost the smell of the trees that had filled his life in Ain Ward. And in this house he had to contend with his uncle's spates of madness. When his uncle drank arak, he turned on his wife and three daughters and beat them, then he'd start in on his sister's son, whom he had wanted to be a son to him, as God had not granted him a son, and beat him savagely.

Abel did not know what to do. He could not go back to Ain Ward, nor could he stay in this small, dark house. Nor could he leave the exhausting job in the bakery because that would mean dying of hunger. So the only salvation he could see was in the Church of St. Ephraim. He attended Sunday mass assiduously, and took part in cleaning the church after mass, which brought him to the attention of the deacon Shimon, who assigned him to the Sunday school he held in the church's vault to teach his pupils the religious rituals.

Here, my grandfather said, God saved him. A love of learning blossomed in his heart, and he excelled among his peers, memorizing all of the Syriac prayers without understanding a word.

Once again fate intervened because the deacon Shimon advised Abel to go to Beirut, where the world would open before him. The boy made his decision right away, collected his weekly pay from the bakery, and instead of going home, took the bus from Al-Qamishli to Aleppo and onward to Tripoli and then Beirut. Abel arrived in Beirut carrying nothing with him but the address of the St. Severus Church in Mseitbeh. He searched for the church for a long time before finding himself before its locked door, where he spent the night.

In the morning, a new chapter of the story began. Cohno Hanna al-Dinohi arrived at the church and saw the boy sleeping on the sidewalk. He woke him gently and asked who he was, and Abel gave him Deacon Shimon's letter. The
cohno
read the letter carefully, took the lad into the church, and
led him to a side room where he could stay until they decided how to handle him. The next day he gave him a letter of introduction for Mr. Mitri, who ran the Yazbek Tile Factory, suggesting that he not talk much because his dialect might seem too strange to the Lebanese ear.

Here, sir, was the beginning of the grandfather I knew. That is, he became Abel Abyad. He worked in the tile factory and helped in the church. He studied Syriac and religion, and the
malfono
marveled at his ability to memorize his lessons with record speed. My grandfather was the best student in Cohno Hanna's night school, in which a number of Syriac tile workers, who had come from Syria, studied. Then the
cohno
married him to his sister's daughter, according to the official family narrative. The truth is that the
cohno
's niece fell in love with my grandfather and went on a hunger strike for his sake. This forced her family to consent to her marriage to the young Kurd who became, with this marriage, a legitimate son of the sect in Beirut. Eventually the
cohno
asked Abel to quit his tile work and help him manage the affairs of his parish, as he was growing old. My grandfather had grown in stature and knowledge, and had turned to glorifying the Creator, which had elevated him in the eyes of the three times regretted Bishop Daoud Karjo, to become an assistant
cohno
in the Church of St. Severus, and later was bequeathed the position after the death of Cohno Hanna.

My grandfather studied a great deal. My mother said that he studied Syriac at fifteen and was fascinated with theology and the debate over the One Nature versus Dual Nature of Christ. He went to study in Damascus, to return with the highest theological degree. His ambition then emerged because he felt that God had chosen him from the netherworld, and just as Christ had chosen his disciples from among fishermen, the Lord had chosen his disciple Ephraim from among the children of the massacres.

The story has to end here. My grandfather's story ends, like all stories, with the death of the hero. My grandfather died, ages ago. The story truly
ends here, because all the events that would occur after the death of his wife were expected. The man aged all at once and discovered that his life was futile. He began to invent books that he had not written and to impose strange rituals on his daughter and grandson.

Gaby, however, believed that the story did not end entirely with the death of her mother. My grandfather had begun to change before his wife's death; her death had been just an additional factor in a transformation that had begun with that strange visit Mullah Mustafa had made to the
cohno
's house in Mseitbeh. What a strange story! Why did the Kurdish mullah come to the house of the Syriac
cohno
? Was it true that he asked him to go back with him to Ain Ward, and that he promised him his inheritance, offering to marry him to his cousin after he repented to his Lord and returned to his true faith?

My mother said that had she been told that story, she would not have believed it; but she saw it with her own eyes and heard it with her own ears. She heard a rapping at the door, and saw the old man with his white beard and black cloak speak to her mother in strange Arabic, asking for Abel. The woman asked him to come in and sit down, and she called her husband, who was in his room putting on his priestly robe in preparation to go out. My mother and her sister, Sara, went into the living room to look at the strange man who had hugged and kissed them.

My grandfather came into the living room and saw the old man fidgeting in his armchair, about to get up. The
cohno
ran toward him like a little boy, took his hand and kissed it, and put it against his head. He kissed both the top and the palm, and the old man kissed him on the shoulder and sat down again. The
cohno
remained standing, head bowed, before the old man. The mullah ordered him to sit, so Abel sat down on the side of the couch, as if ready to get up again at any moment. The men had a strange conversation
in a strange tongue. They drank tea and smoked rolled cigarettes the mullah brought in the pocket of his cloak. The
cohno
, whose lips had not touched a cigarette since he joined the clergy, smoked like a practiced smoker. The
cohno
wept and the mullah wept. Then when the mullah stood up to depart, the
cohno
bowed over again and kissed his hand.

My mother said that the mullah proposed that his son return to Ain Ward because he wanted to bequeath him land and also proposed that he marry the mullah's niece. But my grandfather refused the offer and said he could not.

They did not speak much, for a man such as the mullah, whose authority extended over the whole region of Tur Abdin, was not used to talking much. It was enough that he took the trouble to come. His honoring you with his presence could hardly be repaid. That's what my grandfather said, yet even so he told him that he could not.

The
cohno
cried bitterly, my mother said. The mullah cried quietly. The two men's tears ran into their beards, then the mullah left and the
cohno
stayed, dazed, as if he were blind and deaf.

My mother said that her father remained practically mute for seven days, and that on the Sunday after his visit, he did not go to church on the pretext that he was ill. And that he refused to receive any member of his parish. He spent a week in bed eating nothing but bread and water.

My mother said she discovered that day that her father was a Kurd, and that when she saw him speaking Kurdish with the mullah, she saw his true face, which she never saw again until the moment of his death.

The
cohno
was very changed after that visit, as if a strange spirit had entered his body, as if the Syriac language had possessed him and he had become dazzled by all the names of the Lebanese, Syrian, and Palestinian villages that started with the word
kafr
. He would interrupt conversations
countless times in order to trace the Arabic words to their Syriac roots. He said that the very air spoke Syriac, and he stood before an icon of Christ and spoke to it in the language only the two of them understood.

Only once did my grandfather relate his conversation with his Kurdish father to his wife. He said it was a test. “Just as Satan tested Christ, the mullah was sent to me so that my faith might be tested.” He said that he was afraid of himself, especially when his Kurdish father told him about the torments the Kurds experienced in Turkey and the oppression they felt and how their villages were violated every day. The mullah, whose mere footfall made everyone shudder, seemed hesitant and sad, as if he had come to be rescued by his son. Both men cried a great deal, laughing only when the mullah reminded his son how he had memorized the Holy Koran at the age of seven, which in Ain Ward was considered a virtual miracle.