Anyush (38 page)
Authors: Martine Madden
J
ahan willed himself to keep moving, to distance himself from his daughter and the woman he still loved. But his body felt uncoordinated, hampered by his leg and the weight of what he was about to do. And he would do this, no matter what the cost. The pain that squeezed his heart and whipped the breath from his lungs was evidence enough of his contrition. A first drop in an ocean of years. He drew in his shoulders and stiffened his spine against the wind blowing up from the sea. Heading towards the harbour and the port, he thought he heard his daughter’s voice calling to him … ‘Papa’ … but he didn’t turn around. Beyrouth was fixed in his mind. The light and cold and desolation of it. The broken hopes and misery of it. And the sea and the waves and the wind whispering of atonement.
Diary of Dr Charles Stewart
Springfield
Illinois
March 29th, 1922
I found my old journal in a trunk this morning and spent some time reading over everything I had written. As it was one of those wintry Illinois mornings, a fire was burning in the study and I thought I would throw the journal onto the flames. For whatever reason, I couldn’t burn it. Instead, I find myself writing one last entry, a few words in the hope of ending what should never have been started.
We are back in Springfield, Hetty’s home town, and I am discovering what it is to work as a city doctor. People have been so kind and welcoming that it’s easy to forget why we left in the first place. My days are fully taken up with the practice now that the Armenian Relief Fund has folded and finally closed its doors. I wrote to Henry to tell him, and he wrote back that it was inevitable after the donations dried up. Still, it rankles with me. How soon we forget. Hetty believes it was only to be expected, that people’s hearts and minds are drawn to other causes, other tragedies, and she’s probably right. In my lifetime, Armenians and their story will be forgotten. On this side of the world, at least, it will only be amongst those of us who lived through that terrible time that anything of it will be remembered. That is the great irony. Those of us who might wish to, can never forget.
In my own family the legacy of our years in the Empire lives on. Thomas is an angry young man who intends to change the political world, and Robert is studying medicine and hopes to work abroad. The girls may marry or not as the case
may be, but Milly, who is quieter and more reflective of late, is studying law. They all miss their sister and talk about her sometimes which I suppose is a good thing. Of course it is.
Sometimes I try and imagine how life might have turned out if we had never gone to Trebizond, had never left Illinois. I wonder what I really hoped to achieve. As a young man I wanted to show Hetty the world, but a world as I had experienced it. Where right and wrong, good and evil conformed to my understanding of them. It was only after our return to America, when I became ill with a debilitating depression that left me unable to get out of bed or to eat or even to communicate with my children, that Hetty brought the world to me. I never doubted that I loved my wife, but it was during those long weeks and months of my illness that I came to understand the meaning of the words. My lovely wife, who lost her daughter, her innocence and her youth and who never blamed me. Who has forgiven me. I am trying, God knows, to forgive myself. Does she marvel, I wonder, at the arrogance of a man who believed he knew best? A man who thought his influence alone could save Trebizond’s Armenians when, in fact, he could do nothing? Nothing that mattered.
We hear from Manon occasionally, a card at Christmas or on the children’s birthdays. She is still living in Turkey, in our old house in the village, and claims she’s too old to uproot herself and has nowhere else to go. The hospital lies in ruins and is unlikely to function as a hospital ever again, but Manon holds clinics at the house and does her best. I think she’s happy, if Manon could ever be described as such.
Paul’s body washed up on a beach ten miles west of Trebizond. It was too long in the water to know exactly how he died, but the authorities claimed that his injuries and broken bones were due to battering against the rocks. Manon buried him in the old graveyard next to Lottie, which seems fitting somehow.
In the years since our return, work has been a great comfort and distraction for Hetty and myself. I thank God for honest endeavour and for the people of Springfield who keep me busy enough that I don’t think of the Empire for long stretches
at a time. There are days when I’m convinced I’m done with it, even if Trebizond does not appear to be done with me.
I have a recurring dream where I’m in the village again. It is springtime and the lemon trees are in blossom. The square is crowded, full of people singing and dancing, much as it was on the day of Vardan Aykanian’s wedding. There is music playing, the oud and the doumbek. People are happy and everything is as it should be. I am standing among them smiling and clapping when I notice the music grow quiet. To my right, I see the band players, all the old men, put their instruments at their feet and disappear into the lanes and side streets. They are followed by the women, and then the young girls in their summer aprons and scarves.
I am weeping now because I know they will come for the children next.
And even as the thought takes shape I see a child walk into a darkened alley.
All the children.
I call out but they cannot hear.
Try to hold them back but I cannot reach.
And there is silence.
Terrible silence.
I stand in the square alone, watching until the last child has gone.
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love.
But the greatest of these is love.
1 Corinthians 13:13.
On 24 April 1915, the Armenian intellectual elite of Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, or modern-day Turkey, was rounded up by order of the government and shot.
Known as the Three Young Turks, the men who governed Turkey through the Committee of Union and Progress proceeded to oversee the systematic obliteration of the Armenian people from the Empire. From then until the end of the First World War it is estimated that between 1.5 and 2 million Armenians were killed in what is believed to be the first genocide of the twentieth century. The twenty-fourth of April is commemorated by Armenians worldwide as Armenian Genocide Day.
Although
Anyush
is a work of fiction, several of the individuals in the story are based on real-life characters or are a composite of several characters I came across during my research. What follows is a brief resumé of their actual life stories. I should also add that the village of Mushar is fictitious and that some dates in the novel were changed to make the historical events fit the timeline of the story, and so apologies to all historians. Finally, the American nurse, Ellen Mary Norton-Gerard, who undertook wonderful work for Armenian children orphaned in the genocide, ran the orphanage in Aleppo in Syria and not Beyrouth (Beirut) as in my book.
The characters of Dr Charles Stewart and Hetty Stewart are based upon Rev. Dr Lyndon Smith Crawford and his wife who worked as missionaries in the Trebizond area of north-eastern Turkey, and Dr Fred Douglas Shepard and his wife who were missionaries in Ayntab in southern Turkey.
Rev. Crawford wrote extensively to the American Consulates in Trebizond and Constantinople about the plight of local Armenians and Christians which he witnessed at first-hand. Mrs Crawford ran the American
School for Christian Children and was allowed take Armenian orphans and babies into her care when their parents were taken to the concentration camps of Deir al-Zor in the Syrian desert, among others. As happened in the story, all her charges were eventually removed by the authorities. In an account given by an officer in the Turkish army, the infants were taken out in boats, stabbed and thrown into the sea in sacks. Considerably older than the character of Charles Stewart, sixty-four years of age at the time of the genocide, Rev. Crawford died in Trebizond on 22 September 1918.
The details about the life and work of a missionary doctor came from Alice Riggs’ book about her father, Dr Fred Shepard. Charles Stewart’s building of the hospital and his dealings with local people are based on accounts in this book. Fred Shepard was a religious man, much loved by the local population, who was deeply affected by the events he witnessed during the genocide. He contracted typhoid following the first wave of Armenian deportations and died shortly after.
Armin Theophil Wegner was born on 16 October 1886 in Elberfeld, Wuppertal in Germany. In 1914, at the outbreak of the First World War, he volunteered as a nurse in Poland and was decorated with the Iron Cross for assisting the wounded under fire. Following the military alliance of Germany and Turkey, he was sent with the German Sanitary Corps to the Middle East in 1915. Later that year, with the rank of second-lieutenant in the retinue of Field Marshal von der Goltz, he travelled through the Ottoman Empire where he witnessed the Armenian Genocide. A keen photographer, he disobeyed the orders of von der Goltz and the Turkish government by taking hundreds of photographs of Armenians on the roads
and in the concentration camps, along with notes, documents and letters. Wegner was eventually arrested and sent to work in the cholera wards, where he became ill. In December 1916 he was recalled to Germany and smuggled his photographic plates and notes out of the country. Von der Goltz died from typhus in Baghdad that same year.
At the Peace Conference of 1919, Wegner submitted an open letter to President Woodrow Wilson, outlining the atrocities perpetrated by the Turkish government against Armenians and appealing for the creation of an independent Armenian state.
Between the First and Second World Wars, Wegner’s success as a writer grew, reaching its peak in the 1920s with the publication of
Five Fingers Over You
, which foresaw the advent of Stalinism.
As the Nazis extended their grip across Germany, he wrote an open letter to Hitler, protesting the state-organised boycott against German Jews. He was arrested by the Gestapo in 1933 and spent the war in seven different concentration camps and prisons.
In 1956, the federal German government awarded Wegner the Highest Order of Merit, and the city of Wuppertal decorated him with the Eduard von der Heydt prize in 1962. Because of his advocacy for the rights of Jews as well as Armenians, he was awarded the title of ‘Righteous among the Nations’ by Yad Veshem in Israel and the Order of Saint Gregory the Illuminator by the Catholicos of All Armenians. A street in the Armenian capital, Yerevan, was named in his honour.
Armin Wegner, intellectual, doctor of law, photographer, writer, poet, humanitarian and defender of civil rights, died in Rome at the age of ninety-two on 17 May 1978.
After his death, some of his ashes were taken to Armenia, where a posthumous state funeral took place near the perpetual flame of the Armenian Genocide Monument.
