Forty Days of Musa Dagh (2 page)

 

 

Twenty-three years of Europe, Paris! Years of complete assimilation.
They were as good as twice, or three times, that. They extinguished
everything. After the old man's death his family, absolved at last from
the local patriotism of its founder, had escaped this Oriental nook. The
firm's head office was, and remained, Istanbul. But Gabriel's parents
had lived with their two sons in Paris. Yet Gabriel's brother -- he,
too, had been called Avetis -- about fifteen years Gabriel's senior,
had soon disappeared. He went back to Turkey, as active partner in the
importing-house. Not unfittingly had he been given his grandfather's
name. With him, after some years of neglect, the villa in Yoghonoluk
reassumed its seigniorial status. His one amusement had been hunting,
and with Yoghonoluk as his base he set forth into the Taurus mountains
and to the Harun. Gabriel, who scarcely had known his brother, had been
sent to a Paris lycée and then to study at the Sorbonne. No one insisted
on putting him into the business, to which he, a miraculous exception in
his family, would not have been suited in the least. He had been allowed
to live as a scholar, a
bel esprit
, an archaeologist a historian of
art, a philosopher, and in addition had been allotted a yearly income
which made him a free, even a very well-to-do, man. Still quite young,
he had married Juliette. This marriage had worked a profound change in
him. The Frenchwoman had drawn him her way. At present he was more French
than ever. Armenian still, but only in a sense -- academically. Still,
he did not forget it altogether, and at times published a scientific
article in an Armenian paper. And, at ten years old, Stephan his son,
had been given an Armenian tutor, so that he might be taught the speech
of his fathers. At first all this had seemed entirely useless, harmful
even, to Juliette. But, since she happened to like young Samuel Avakian,
she had surrendered, after a few retreating skirmishes. Their tiffs had
always the same origin. Yet, no matter how hard Gabriel might try to
concern himself with the politics of foreigners, he was still sometimes
drawn back into those of his people. Since he bore a respected name,
Armenian leaders, whenever they were in Paris, would come to call
on him. He had even been offered the leadership of the Dashnakzagan
party. Though he retreated in terror from this suggestion, he at least
had taken part in that famous congress which, in 1907, united the Young
Turks with Armenian nationalists. An empire was to be grounded in which
the two races should live at peace side by side and not dishonor each
other. Such an object excited even an alienated enthusiasm. In those days
Turks had paid Armenians the most charming compliments, declaring their
love. Gabriel, as his habit was, took these compliments more seriously
than other people. That was why, when the Balkan war broke out, he had
volunteered. He had been hastily trained in the school for reservist
officers in Istanbul and had just had time to fight, as the officer of
a howitzer battery, at the battle of Bulair. This one long separation
from his family had lasted over six months. He had missed them greatly.
He may have feared that Juliette would slip away from him. Something
seemed imperilled in their relationship though he could not have given
a reason for any such feeling. He was a thinker, an abstract man,
an individual. What did the Turks matter, what the Armenians? He had
thoughts of taking French citizenship. That, above all, would have made
Juliette happy. But always, in the end, the same vague uneasiness had
prevented it. He had volunteered for the war. Even if he did not live in
his country, he could at least always re-evoke it. His fathers' country.

 

 

These fathers had suffered in it monstrously and still not given it
up. Gabriel had never suffered. Massacre and torture he only knew through
books and stories. It is not, he thought, a matter of indifference which
country even an abstract man belongs to. So he remained an Ottoman subject.
Two happy years in a charming flat in the Avenue Kléber. It really looked
as though all problems had been solved and his life taken on its final
definite shape. Gabriel was thirty-five; Juliette, thirty-four; Stephan,
thirteen. Their lives were untroubled, their work intellectual, they had
some very pleasant friends. Juliette was the decisive factor in choosing
them. This was chiefly evident in the fact that Gabriel's former Armenian
acquaintances -- his parents had been dead some time -- came less and less
frequently to the flat. Juliette, so to speak, insisted relentlessly on
her blood-stream. But she could not manage to change her son's eyes. Yet
Gabriel seemed to notice none of all this. An express letter from Avetis
Bagradian gave a new direction to fate. His elder brother urgently
begged Gabriel to come to Istanbul. He was a very sick man, he wrote,
and no longer able to manage the business. So that for some weeks he had
been making all preliminary arrangements to transform it into a limited
company. Gabriel must be there to defend his interests. Juliette, whose
habit it was to emphasize her knowledge of the world, had announced at
once that she would like to accompany Gabriel and back him up throughout
the negotiations. Matters of great importance would be involved. But he
was so simple by nature and certainly not up to the Armenian ruses of
all the others. June 1914. An incredible world. Gabriel decided to take
not only Juliette, but Stephan and Avakian his tutor. The school year
was nearly over. This business might prove long drawn out, and the ways
of the world are unpredictable. In the second week of July they had all
arrived in Constantinople.

 

 

But, even so, Avetis Bagradian had not been able to await them. He had
sailed in a small Italian boat for Beirut. The state of his lungs had been
going from bad to worse in the last weeks, with cruel celerity, and he
could no longer stand the air of Istanbul. (Remarkable that this brother
of Gabriel, the European should have chosen Syria, not Switzerland,
to die in.) So that Gabriel now, instead of dealing with Avetis, had
to deal with directors and solicitors. Still, he soon perceived that
this unknown brother had watched over his interests with the greatest
tenderness and foresight. For the first time he grew intensely conscious
of the fact that this ailing, elderly Avetis had been a worker on his
behalf, the brother to whom he owed his well-being. What an anomaly
that brothers should have been such strangers. Gabriel was appalled at
the pride in himself which he had never managed to stifle, his scorn of
"the Oriental," the "business man." Now he was seized with the wish --
a kind of longing even -- to repair an injustice while there was time.
The heat in Istanbul was really unbearable. It did not seem wise at present
to turn back westwards "Let us wait till the storm has blown over." On the
other hand the very thought of a short sea voyage was a tonic. One of the
newest boats of the Khedival Mail would touch Beirut on its way to
Alexandria. Modern villas were to let on the western slopes of Lebanon,
of a kind to fulfill the most exacting requirements. Connoisseurs know
that no landscape on earth has greater charms. But Gabriel had need of
no such persuasions since Juliette agreed at once. In her, for a long
time now, some vague impatience had been accumulating. The prospect of
something new enticed her. While they were still at sea, declarations
of war had come rattling down between state and state. When they stood
on the quay at Beirut, the fighting had already begun in Belgium,
in the Balkans, in Galicia. Impossible now to think of going back to
France. They stayed where they were. The newspapers announced that the
Sublime Porte would enter into alliance with the Central Powers. Paris
had become enemy country.

 

 

The real purpose of the journey proved unfulfillable. Avetis Bagradian
had missed his younger brother a second time. He had left Beirut a few
days before and undertaken the difficult journey, via Aleppo and Antioch,
to Yoghonoluk. Even Lebanon did not suffice him to die in. It had to be
Musa Dagh. But the letter in which his brother foretold his own death
did not reach Gabriel until the autumn. Meanwhile the Bagradians had
moved into a pleasant villa only a little way above the town. Juliette
found life in Beirut possible. There were crowds of French people. The
various consuls also came to call. Here, as everywhere else, she knew
how to gather many acquaintances. Gabriel rejoiced, since exile did
not seem to weigh too heavily on her. There was nothing to be done
against it. Beirut, in any case, was safer than European cities. For
the moment at least. But still Gabriel kept thinking of the house at
Yoghonoluk. Avetis, in his letter, had implored him not to neglect
it. Five days after the letter came Dr. Altouni's telegram, announcing
his death. And now Gabriel not only thought, but constantly spoke of,
the house of his childhood. Yet, when Juliette suddenly declared that she
wanted to move as soon as possible into the house in which he had been
a little boy and had now inherited, the thought scared him. Stubbornly
she dismissed his objections. Country solitude? Nothing could be more
welcome. Out of the world? Uncomfortable? She herself would see to all
that. It was just what so attracted her. Her parents had owned a country
house, in which she had grown up. One of her pet dreams had always been
to arrange a country house of her own, to manage it all
en châltelaine
-- it made not the least difference where, in what country, it happened
to be. In spite of all this vivacious eagerness Gabriel still opposed
her till after the rainy season. Wouldn't it be far more prudent to get
his family back to Switzerland? But Juliette held to her caprice. She
became almost challenging. Nor could he repress a strange uneasiness
mingled with longing. It was already December by the time they began
to make arrangements to return to the house of his fathers. The train
journey, in spite of the moving troops, was quite bearable as far as
Aleppo. In Aleppo they hired two indescribable cars. Through the thick
mud of district roads they arrived, as by a miracle, in Antioch. There,
at the Orontes bridge, Kristaphor, the steward, was awaiting them with
the hunting-trap of the house and two oxcarts for the luggage. Less
than two hours on, to Yoghonoluk. They passed hilariously. It hadn't
been half bad, declared Juliette. . . .

 

 

"How did I get here?" These surface combinations of events only seemed
to answer the question very imperfectly. Gabriel's solemn amazement
still remained. A vague restlessness vibrated through it. Antediluvian
things, buried under twenty-three years in Paris, must be re-established
in his mind. Only now did Gabriel turn his half-seeing eyes away from
his house. Juliette and Stephan must certainly still be asleep. Nor had
church bells in Yoghonoluk as yet proclaimed Sunday morning. His eyes
followed this valley of Armenian villages a certain way northwards. From
where he stood he could still see the village of the silkworms, Azir,
but Kebussiye, the last village in that direction, had disappeared. Azir
lay asleep in a dark bed of mulberry trees. Over there, on the little
hill which nestles against the flank of Musa Dagh, stood the ruins of a
cloister. Thomas the Apostle, in person, had founded that hermitage. The
scattered stones bore strange inscriptions. Once Antioch, the regent of
the world of those days, had extended as far as to the sea. Everywhere
the ground was strewn with antiques, or they rewarded the first turn of
the excavator's spade. Gabriel had already in these few weeks gathered
a whole collection of valuable trophies inside his house. The search
for them was his chief occupation here. Yet, till now, some reverence
had protected him from climbing the hill of St. Thomas's ruin. (It was
guarded by great copper-colored snakes, with crowns on their heads. Those
who came sacrilegiously pilfering holy stones to build their houses found,
as they carried them away, that the stones had grown into their backs, and
so had to carry the load to the grave with them.) Who had told him that
story? Once, in his mother's room (now Juliette's) old women had sat with
curiously painted faces. Or was that only an illusion? Was it possible --
had his mother in Yoghonoluk and his mother in Paris been the same?

 

 

Gabriel had long since entered the dark wood. A steep, wide gully,
which led on up to the summit, had been cut into the mountain slope. They
called it the ilex ravine. While Bagradian was climbing this sheep-track,
which forced itself painfully upwards, through thick undergrowth, he knew
suddenly: I have reached the end of the provisional. Something decisive
is going to happen.

 

 

 

 

Provisional? Gabriel Bagradian was an Ottoman officer in the reserve of
an artillery regiment. The Turkish armies were fighting for dear life on
four fronts. Against the Russians in the Caucasus. Against the English
and Indians in Mesopotamia. Australian divisions had been landed in
Gallipoli, to force the gates of the Bosporus in conjunction with the Allied
fleets. The fourth army, in Syria and Palestine, was preparing a fresh
onslaught on the Suez Canal. It needed superhuman efforts to keep
all these four fronts unbroken. Enver Pasha, that deified war-lord,
had sacrificed two whole army corps to his madly daring campaign
in Caucasian snows. Nowhere had the Turks enough officers. Their war
material was inadequate.

 

 

For Bagradian the hopes of 1908 and 1912 were extinguished. Ittihad,
the Young Turkish "Committee for Unity and Progress," had only made use
of the Armenians, and at once proceeded to break every oath. Gabriel had
certainly no reason to give especial proof of his Turkish patriotism. This
time things were different in every way. His wife was French. He would
therefore have to take up arms against a nation he loved, to which he
owed the deepest gratitude, to which he was allied by marriage. None the
less he had reported in Aleppo at the district headquarters of his former
regiment. It had been his duty. Any other course would have meant that
he could be treated as a deserter. But, strangely, the colonel in charge
had seemed in no need of officers. He had studied Bagradian's papers
very closely and sent him away again. He was to give his address and
await his orders. That had been in November. This was the end of March,
and still no orders had come from Antioch. Did that hide some impenetrable
intention or merely the impenetrable chaos of a Turkish military office?