Forty Days of Musa Dagh (12 page)

 

 

Gabriel's state of mind was one he had never before experienced. He could
not think of anything quite like it. He felt insipid. His tongue was dry
and heavy in his mouth. His hands and feet were cold. All the blood seemed
to have left his head. But these were the mere outward signs of some
change at the very centre of his being. "I don't feel ill," he reflected,
having waited some time to see what would happen. "All I feel is that
I'd like to get out of my skin, strip off my body." At the same instant
came the senseless longing to run away, far away from this, no matter where.
"Let's go for a short walk together," he decided. He did not want to be
left alone. If they left him, he would have to walk on and on in short,
quick steps, farther and farther, and never turn round till he had walked
right out of the world.

 

 

Avakian undertook to carry the rifles back to the house. The son and father
left the park and went down the road to Yoghonoluk, not ten minutes' walk.
Suddenly Gabriel felt like a very old man, his body so heavy that he leant
on Stephan. They could hear the noisy buzz of voices even before they came
into the church square.

 

 

Armenians, in contrast to Arabs and the other clamorous races of the East,
are quietly reticent in public. Their ancient destiny in itself is enough
to inhibit their taking part in noisy gatherings, or themselves producing
them. But here and now about three hundred villagers had collected in
a wide half-circle, besieging the church. Among these men and women,
peasants and craftsmen, there were several who emitted long, hoarse
objurgations and shook their fists. No doubt these curses were aimed
at the saptiehs, whose shabby lambskin busbies rose above the heads of
the crowd. Apparently these protectors of law and order were trying to
clear a space before the church, so as to leave the steps and entrance
free. Gabriel seized Stephan's hand and forced a way through the shoal
of people. At first they saw only a tall, ragged fellow, who had crowned
his black cap with a straw wreath, and whose right hand waved the head of
a sunflower, broken off short. This apparition, obeying some rhythm of
its own, executed with deathly seriousness a dance of wearily thudding
steps. But this was in no sense the dance of a drunkard; that was at
once plain.

 

 

The crowd did not even notice this dancer, waving his sunflower-head.
Their eyes were set on another picture.

 

 

On the steps of the church four people squatted. A man, two young women,
a little girl of twelve or thirteen. All four were staring out into the
distance with a dazed expression -- their eyes seemed unaware of their
surroundings, of the excited crowd, the apothecary's house immediately
opposite.

 

 

The man, still young, with a thin, crazed-looking, unshaven face,
wore a long, grey alpaca cassock, of the kind worn here by Protestant
pastors. His soft straw hat had rolled down the steps. The ends of
his trouser-legs were tattered. His broken boots, the thick coating
of dust on his face and cloak, showed that he must have trudged for
several days. The women, too, wore European dress, and not by any means
the cheapest, as far as could be judged by their present state. The one
sitting beside the pastor -- doubtless his wife -- looked as though she
might faint or go into convulsions at any minute, since suddenly she
fell backwards on to the steps and would have bumped her head against
the stone had her husband not put out an arm to support her. This was
the first, still strangely jerky movement of the group.

 

 

The other woman, still in her earliest youth, looked beautiful, even in
such a plight. Her little face was thin and livid, but the eyes had in
them a feverish shimmer of vitality; the full, soft lips were parted,
gasping for air. She was in obvious pain, must be wounded or have met
with an accident, since her left arm, which looked contorted, hung in
a sling. Finally the child, a perky, sparrow-like little creature, had
on the striped smock worn by children in orphanages. This little girl
stretched her feet convulsively out from under her frock, obviously
concerned to touch nothing with them.

 

 

"Like a hurt animal," Gabriel thought, "stretching its wounded paws away
from its body." And indeed the poor child's feet looked very swollen, purple,
and covered with open wounds. Only the dancer with the sunflower-head seemed
sound of limb and full of strength.

 

 

An older man came running across the square. Apparently he had been called
away from his work, since he still had on a blue apron. Stephan recognized
Tomasian the builder, who had supervised the improvements in the villa.
Young Stephan had often loitered round him inquisitively, and Tomasian
had proudly told him of Aram his son, a very respected man in the town
of Zeitun, a pastor, and the head of the orphanage there. So this must
be the son, thought Stephan. Old Tomasian stopped, with raised inquiring
arms, in front of the group.

 

 

Pastor Aram came back to his surroundings with difficulty, sprang to his
feet with forced agility, and did his best to wear an appeasing smile,
as though nothing very serious had happened. The women, too, stood up, but
not so easily, since one had a broken arm and the other, it was apparent,
expected a child. Only the little girl, in her striped orphanage smock,
sat on, squinting suspiciously up at her fellow sufferers. Impossible to
make out the sense of their sudden questions and sounds of woe. But for
an instant, as Pastor Aram embraced his father, he lost control. His head
sagged on to the old man's shoulder, and a short, hoarse sob of grief
became fully audible. It came and went, and still the women did not speak.
But it spread, like an electric shock, through the crowd. Whimperings,
sobs, loud clearings of the throat. Only oppressed and persecuted peoples
are such good pain-conductors. What has befallen one has been done to
all. Here, in the church square of Yoghonoluk, three hundred Armenians
were shaken by a grief, the story of which they had not yet heard. Even
Gabriel, the stranger, the Parisian, the cosmopolitan, who had long since
overcome his origins -- even he had to force down something which throttled
him. He glanced surreptitiously at Stephan. The last tinge of color had
faded out of that crack marksman's face. Juliette would have been startled,
not only at her son's pallor, but at the wild look of uncomprehending horror
in his eyes. She would have been scared to see her child look so Armenian.

 

 

Meanwhile Dr. Altouni had joined the group, as well as Antaram Altouni,
the two schoolmasters, who had been called away from their classes,
the mukhtar Kebussyan, and, last of all, Ter Haigasun, just back from
a visit to Bitias, on his donkey. The priest called out a few words
in Turkish to the saptieh, Ali Nassif. None of the crowd were to be
let into the church. He, however, bundled the Tomasian family and the
little orphan through the door. The doctor and his wife, the teachers,
and the mukhtar followed. The crowd and the sunflower-dancer, who sank
down on the steps and went to sleep, remained in the square.

 

 

Ter Haigasun led the exhausted people into the sacristy, a big, light room
containing a divan and some church benches. The sacristan was sent for wine
and hot water. The doctor and his wife got to work at once. The girl with
the broken arm -- Iskuhi Tomasian, the pastor's sister -- was examined.
So were the wounded feet of Sato, the little orphan whom Pastor Aram had
brought from Zeitun.

 

 

Gabriel Bagradian stood apart, holding Stephan's hand, a stranger --
for the present at least. He listened to the confused questions, the
broken answers. Thus, bit by bit, he heard the disordered tale of Zeitun,
the tragic history of this town, of Pastor Aram, and of his flock.

 

 

 

 

Zeitun is the name of an ancient hill town on the northern slopes of the
Cilician Taurus range. Like the villages around Musa Dagh, it was almost
entirely inhabited by its original Armenian population. Since, however,
it was a town of some importance, of about thirty thousand inhabitants,
the Turkish government had garrisoned it with considerable numbers of
troops and saptiehs, officers and officials, with their families --
as they did wherever it seemed necessary to keep non-Turks under
surveillance. Only such people as Bagradian, whose lives had been spent
in Paris or some other capital in the West, could still have hoped for
any reconciliation of opposites, any stilling of a hatred in the blood,
or "triumph of Justice," under the Young Turkish banner. Gabriel had once
been friends with a certain number of journalists and lawyers whom the
revolution had helped into the saddle. In the days of conspiracy he had
sat up all night, arguing with them till dawn in Montmartre cafés, with
assurances of eternal friendship, messianic prophecies of the future,
exchanged between Turks and Armenians. In defense of a fatherland with
which he had had very little to do, he, a married man, went to the war --
a notion which had not even occurred to most of the Turkish patriots in
Paris. And now? Their faces were still in his mind; some flame, still
not quite extinguished, of reminiscent friendship made him ask himself:
"What? Can such old friends be my mortal enemies?"

 

 

Zeitun was the crude answer. It should be pictured as a high, many-creviced
rock, crowned by a savage-looking citadel, honeycombed with the streets
of an ancient town. A haughtily repelling pyramid of ways piled one above
the other, only its modern quarters spreading their tentacles a little
way out into the plain. Zeitun had been a perpetual thorn in Turkish
flesh. For the earth has both its holy places, its sites of pilgrimage,
which frame the human mind to devotion, and its natural fortresses,
redolent of hate and defiance, whose spirit is such as to rouse to
seething point the blood of an opposing racial fanaticism. In Zeitun
such hate had its definite reasons. First, until far into the nineteenth
century the city had governed itself. But more unpardonable still was
the memory of its astounding conduct in the year 1898.

 

 

In those days the good Sultan Abdul Hamid had called into being the
Hamidiyehs -- predatory bands of nomads, robbers, convicts, let out
of jail for the purpose -- with their sole object the formation of a
troop of valiants restlessly bent on provoking "incidents," with which
he hoped to stop the mouths of the Armenian reformers. Everywhere else
these bands were distinguished for their successes -- in Zeitun only did
they encounter bloody defeat instead of achieving what had been promised
them, an enjoyable and remunerative massacre. Worse still, even the
battalion of regulars hurried to their assistance was driven back with
heavy losses out of the narrow streets. Not even the siege with full
armament following this rout brought the least success. Zeitun remained
impregnably rebellious. When at last European diplomacy intervened on
behalf of these brave Armenians, and ambassadors to the Sublime Porte,
which, spattered with dishonor, had no alternative, achieved full amnesty
for Zeitun -- the Turk set his teeth, abysmally humbled.

 

 

All military races, not only the Ottoman, have encountered defeat at the
hands of their own kind and forgotten it. But to have been beaten by
a race of merchants and craftsmen, people whose ideal had never been
military -- a race of bookworms -- it was more than any soldierly people
can forget. So that the new government, now that the old had been disposed
of, still had old scores to pay off in Zeitun.

 

 

And what better chance of paying off old scores than the Great War?
Martial law and a state of emergency were proclaimed. Most young men of
Zeitun were at the front or in distant barracks. Repeated house-to-house
searches, in the earliest days of the war, had entirely disarmed such
inhabitants as remained.

 

 

Only one thing was lacking: a pretext.

 

 

The mayor of Zeitun was a man named Nazareth Chaush. He was a typical
Armenian mountaineer -- haggard, bent, sallow, with a drooping bushy
moustache and a hooked nose. But he was ailing, no longer young, and
had long done his best to avoid election. He could scent the reek
of future holocausts. The lines from his nostrils sharpened daily
as he toiled up the steep hill to the Hükümet, to receive the latest
orders of the Kaimakam. His hand, round a rough stick, was deformed by
rheumatic knots. Nazareth Chaush was highly intelligent. He had seen at
once that in future there could be only one policy -- that of being on
guard against provocation. Nothing should be allowed to cast any slur
on the patriotic integrity of Armenians. All traps must be skilfully
avoided. One was, and remained, a thoroughgoing Ottoman patriot. Not
that Nazareth Chaush really bore any grudge against Turkey, nor did any
other inhabitant of Zeitun. Turkey was the destiny of the race. It is
futile to bicker with the earth on which one has to live, with the air
one breathes. He cherished no childish dream of emancipation, since,
after all, the choice lay between Tsar and Sultan and it was as hard
to make as it was superfluous. He remained in agreement with the words
which had achieved a certain celebrity with Armenians. "Better perish
physically in Turkey than spiritually in Russia." There was no third way.

 

 

A clearly defined line of conduct towards Turkish authorities was therefore
laid down. The living example of their leader, Nazareth Chaush, forged
iron discipline among the inhabitants of Zeitun. So far no longed-for
"incident" had assuaged the secret itch of the High Command. A medical
board, eager for blood-letting, passed cripples and invalids for the
army. Good! They reported for duty without a murmur. The Kaimakam imposed
illegal taxes and war levies. Good! They were punctually supplied. This
same Kaimakam used the most foolish pretexts for arranging victory
celebrations and mass demonstrations of patriotism. The townsfolk
mustered in full force, their faces aglow with honest loyalty, to bawl
the prescribed hymns and victorious anthems to the braying of Turkish
army bands.