Anyush (31 page)

How do I write of the things I have witnessed? How to make sense of events that defy reason, compassion and justice? Do I pass judgement when my understanding of morality does not apply?

Mahmoud Agha and I made it to Sivas in four days of uninterrupted journeying. It was easier to keep moving, not to look at the growing numbers of starving and dying on the roads. I knew many of them. Some held out their arms to me and others wept as I rode by. I kept my eyes on the way ahead and my hopes on the man I was about to meet.

Colonel Abdul-Khan extended us a courteous welcome. He insisted Mahmoud Agha and I dine with him in his quarters after we had washed and refreshed ourselves. Everything about the man seemed sensible and reasonable and I began to believe there was hope.

After the meal I brought the conversation round to matters in the village. I told the colonel about the importance of the hospital and that it could not be run without my Armenian staff. I described the mission farm and how we were feeding most of the villagers from that one small enterprise. I begged immunity for Trebizond’s Armenians, even as I felt helpless to protect all the others.

The colonel gave me a full hearing, nodding sympathetically from time to time. When I had finished he leaned back in his chair and called for an aide. Taking a pen and paper, Abdul-Khan wrote a letter of immunity and stamped it with the official letterhead of the National Guard. My relief was immense. I thanked him sincerely, suppressing the urge to snatch the paper and run. But before I could leave, the colonel had a favour to ask in return. Both surgeons at the local hospital had been conscripted and the patients were being looked after by student doctors
and nurses, he told me. He would greatly appreciate if I were to give them the benefit of my experience before I left for home. Railing inwardly against this delay, I smiled and said it would be a pleasure.

Three days, six operations and four clinics later, Mahmoud Agha and I were finally on our way. Arriving back in the village seven days after we left, it was to the realisation that it was all too late. Only the sound of our horses’ hooves broke the silence as we rode through the streets. Every Armenian house was empty, looted or burned. Broken glass, discarded furniture and children’s clothes littered the cobbles. We stopped at the Armenian church and went inside. The doors had been wrenched from their hinges and the interior gutted. The pews in the choir had been piled one on top of the other and set on fire. Smoke still rose from the embers, illuminated by light coming through a hole in the roof. There, amongst the ruins, I was overcome by a terrible fear. My family. Leaving Mahmoud standing in what remained of the church, I ran through the backstreets to our home.

They were all gathered in the kitchen, the silence in the room echoing the stillness of the streets outside. Eleanor ran over and wrapped her arms around me, sobbing disconsolately. The other children stood motionless around the walls saying nothing. It was so quiet, unnaturally quiet. Only then did I notice that the babies were gone and that Hetty was nursing Lottie in her arms. The colour had drained from my wife’s face, and her eyes, when they looked into mine, were rimmed with fear.

Lottie’s illness took our minds temporarily from the loss of our charges. After the soldiers had left, and Paul had gone to the hospital to find Manon, Millie finally succeeded in catching Hetty’s attention. She took her by the hand and pointed to where Lottie lay in a fever under the kitchen table. Shortly after came the first tell-tale bout of diarrhoea and stomach cramps. We moved her to the cool room where the other cholera babies had been, wrapping her in cold, wet towels to bring down the fever as she asked in her weakening voice for water. Our youngest daughter was never out of her mother’s arms and Hetty put her down only when I suggested she
would be cooler and easier away from the heat of her mother’s body. At intervals we dipped her in a pail of cold water, but the fever raged unabated. Lottie’s refusal to take watered goat’s milk was a worry, but my worst fears were realised when she refused any liquids whatsoever. By this time she had lost so much fluid through her bowel that she didn’t have the strength to lift her head.

‘I’m going to the hospital,’ I told Hetty. ‘We need to set up a Murphy drip.’

Coming across the yard I saw that the door to the room I used as a laboratory was open. I stepped inside and heard glass crack beneath my shoes. Every slide was smashed on the floor, every shelf emptied of files. My microscope lay broken beneath the window, and the notebooks I kept of my trachoma research were shredded in a sea of paper around me. I bent to pick up a page near the door. It bore the name of Mahmoud Agha’s youngest son, Biktash, my first trachoma patient. It fell from my hands - the work of a lifetime in ruins.

Next door, the dispensary was in a similar state, and as I looked in from the doorway I began to fear the worst. Turning left into the hospital proper, I walked the long corridor of the women’s and men’s wards. Either side of me I saw overturned beds, glass on the floor, something dripping on metal close by. The sound was unnaturally loud, amplified by the emptiness of the rooms. On a chair to my right an arm cast lay shattered in powder and plaster pieces. A curtain flapped at a broken window. Slashed mattresses spilled their contents onto the floor. All except one. In the last bed near the end of the corridor somebody lay beneath a blanket. My nurse was sitting on a chair beside him.

‘Manon?’

Above the covers the patient’s face stared at the ceiling. It was old man Tufenkian, father of the Tufenkian sisters who ran the shop in the village, who had come to the hospital a month before with liver disease.

‘He died before they came,’ she said.

Tufenkian’s lips were lightly closed and his eyes turned to the ceiling. I looked from the old man to my nurse. Her hair had come undone and blood stained her uniform. She appeared strangely calm.

‘Where are the others? The staff?’

‘Gone.’

‘But … where’s Paul?’

‘They took him.’

‘Who did?’

‘Gendarmes.’

‘They can’t do that. He’s been released to me. Into my custody.’

Manon reached out and closed Tufenkian’s eyes.

‘He was arrested for the murder of Kazbek Tashjian.’

‘That’s impossible!’

Pulling the sheet over the old man’s face, Manon stood up and smoothed down the bedcovers. She ran her fingers through her hair and straightened her skirt as though expecting the family of the deceased at any moment. A glass bottle hit against her shoe and I remembered why I had come.

‘I need you to help me, Manon. Lottie has cholera. I’m going to give her a Murphy drip and I need you to mix the solution for me.’

I thought she hadn’t heard because she seemed to be looking for something among the debris and shards of glass on the floor.

‘Broken … everything is broken.’

‘Manon, please.’

My nurse turned to me as though she had only just come to realise I was there.

‘We have to find an infusion set,’ she said. ‘You must help me look.’

Between us we administered the infusion to Lottie, watching the salty water flow out of her little body as soon as it went in. But I wouldn’t give up. Between the infusions Hetty and I slept little, taking turns to watch over our daughter while Bayan Efendi and Manon took on the role of nanny and cook for our other children.

‘Go rest, Hetty,’ I said. ‘Lottie’s settled for the moment.’

But Hetty was exhausted. So tired she couldn’t sleep.

‘I’m going to the beach, Charles. I have to get away.’

‘You can’t go alone. It’s not safe.’

‘I have to get out of here.’

‘Then go into the garden.’

‘I need to walk, Charles. By the sea.’

‘I will stay with Lottie,’ Manon said. ‘Go with her, Dr Stewart.’

A strong onshore wind pushed against us, as though the sea and its dreadful secrets didn’t want us there. Hetty indicated that she wished to walk as far as the cliff and that she would prefer to walk alone.

Leaving her at the shoreline, I went over to the nearby promontory of rocks where I could sit in its lee out of the wind. The imprint of my boots sank into the wet sand and the turning tide threw seaweed and stones at my feet. I didn’t blame Hetty for being angry. Or Paul or Manon or any of them. I should never have gone to Sivas. Never left my family alone. Abdul-Khan had been very devious and I had been blind to his manipulations. I lifted my gaze to the horizon where the sea met the sky in a thin, grey line. Out of that line, they said, the Russians would come, bringing war and devastation and horror, but some sort of inversion had taken place. The horror was happening on land behind me and out to sea was silence and simplicity.

In the shallows Hetty was walking with her boots on, head bent as though she were praying. The breeze blew her hair around her shoulders and flapped against the silky fabric of her blouse. Something knocked against her boot, a hessian cloth or sack moving over and back with every wave. She bent down to investigate, and I noticed there were more of them dotted along the high-tide line and one or two washed up between the rocks. I got to my feet and started towards her. The loose sand pulled at my shoes as though trying to hold me there, and a terrible feeling of dread came over me. I could see one of the objects clearly now, a weighted sack tied with crude bits of string. A bag with heavy, rounded shapes bulging against the sides.

Dear God! Sweet Jesus, no!

I began to run, but Hetty’s raw red fingers had prised the wet ties apart.

‘Hetty! Hetty, no!’

I watched her bend and look inside the sack, and for a moment it felt as though the wind had stopped blowing and the waves refused to break on the sand. Her head snapped back on her neck and she opened her mouth to the sky but no sound came.

Hetty had no words to speak when I managed to get her back to the house. No words when, by sunset the following day, Thomas and I had buried all the babies’ bodies in the graveyard of the ruined church. And no words when our youngest daughter, Charlotte Emily Stewart, was buried next to them.