Forty Days of Musa Dagh (68 page)

 

 

About thirty young men waited as volunteers for the Council of Leaders
to choose among them. Five of them were still in their teens. The eldest
among the cohort of youth had been allowed to give in their names.
Gabriel, with a start of fear and anger, saw his son Stephan beside Haik.
After a brief consultation with the other members of the Council,
Ter Haigasun announced his choice. It was he who always gave the final
decision in any estimate of the people's capacities and strength.

 

 

The swimmers had been easy enough to pick out. In Wakef, the southernmost
village, on the edge of the Orontes plain, and hence nearly on the coast,
there were two famous divers and swimmers, one nineteen, the other twenty.
Ter Haigasun handed out the leather belt, with its appeal, sewn up inside,
to the possible commander of any English, American, French, Russian or
Italian gunboat. The swimmers were to set out that night after sunset,
over the North Saddle, having spent their last afternoon with their
families.

 

 

The question of the runners to Aleppo took a few minutes longer to settle.
They had decided that only one young man should go out on that dangerous
mission. But no Armenian adult, Pastor Aram Tomasian was convinced, would
have the same chance as would a boy of getting to Aleppo alive. Armenian
boys wore almost the same dress as Turkish. A boy would have twice the
chance of slipping through. The justice of this was admitted. And one
name occurred to them all: "Haik." That dour, resolute lad, with the
fabulous swiftness, his body as hard as polished stone, was the right
messenger, or nobody. Not another peasant in all that countryside had
Haik's sightless adaptability to the earth over which he moved, that
omniscient eye, as of some great bird, that setter's nose, the ears of
a rat, the slippery nimbleness of an otter. If anyone here could succeed
in evading death on the road to Aleppo, it must be Haik, and only he.

 

 

But, when Ter Haigasun gave out Haik's name from the altar steps, there
was a most unseemly protest from Stephan. Gabriel's face twitched with
anger as he saw his son come impudently forth from his place in the line
of volunteers and plant himself there under his nose. Never before had
the crude precocity, the mental and physical untidiness, of his own son
seemed so apparent.

 

 

Stephan bared his teeth, like an angry dog. "Why only Haik? I want to go
to Aleppo, too, Father."

 

 

His mutinous voice shrilled out over the whole square. Such words,
from a son to a father, were never heard among Armenians. Not even the
unusual circumstance, this zeal in their defence, could excuse them.

 

 

Ter Haigasun looked up impatiently. "Tell your son to behave himself,
Gabriel Bagradian."

 

 

Pastor Aram Tomasian, used at Zeitun to dealing with difficult boys,
tried to pacify Stephan. "The Council of Leaders has decided that only
one is to go to Aleppo. A big, intelligent fellow like you ought to
know what the Council's orders mean to all of us. Absolute obedience --
isn't that it?"

 

 

But the conqueror of Turkish howitzers was not to be fobbed off with
legalities. Having no distinct notion of this duty, nor of how unfit
he was to perform it,he could only feel he was being snubbed, set below
the great competitor. The presence of so many assembled worthies did not
deter in the least his touchy impudence. He still glared boldly at his
father. "Haik's only about three months older than me! He can't even speak
French. Mr. Jackson won't understand him. And what Haik can do, I can -- "

 

 

Now Gabriel lost his temper. He came one quick step nearer Stephan.
"Do? You can't do anything. You're a soft European -- that's all you are.
A spoiled city child! Why, they'd snap you up like a blind cat. Get out!
Go to your mother. If you stay another minute, I'll -- "

 

 

Such harshness was most unwise. It hit Stephan's most tender
susceptibilities. He was being publicly kicked down from the place he
had found it so hard to win. Now all his deeds had been done in vain:
his fruit-stealing, his heroic capture of the guns, which had nearly
earned him the title "Lion." In a flash Stephan grasped the fact that no
deed is done once and for all, that we always have to begin again at the
beginning. He became suddenly very quiet. His sunburnt skin flushed darker
than ever. He stared at Iskuhi with big eyes as though he were only just
discovering her. It seemed to him that she answered his look severely,
in a frigid stare. Iskuhi as the hostile witness of his defeat! It was
too much! Suddenly Stephan began to bellow, not like an almost grown-up
hero, a crack shot, the captor of enemy artillery, but like an unjustly
punished schoolboy. Yet these childish sobs evoked no sympathy in the
others, rather a kind of unholy glee. It was a fairly complex state of
mind that invaded not only Stephan's comrades, but the grown-ups, and
concerned not only the son but, for some obscure reason, Gabriel. "You
don't belong here." It needed only a pretext for that sensation, and
there it was! Stephan at once suppressed his howling grief. But its
brief display had been quite enough to arouse contempt, not only among
his comrades, but in all the other groups of the cohort of youth. Only
Haik stood lost in serious thought. All this had nothing to do with him.

 

 

Now the only thing left to Stephan was to slink away, with suspiciously
heaving shoulders. Gabriel watched him go, in silence. He had ceased to be
angry, having remembered the little boy in Montreux -- Stephan, charmingly
dressed, his head bent sideways over the notepaper, forming big, round
letters. He thought: "Stephan's getting to be a big boy. He'll be fourteen
in November." . . . And this "he'll be" . . . "in November" . . . what
idiotically Utopian thought was this? A chill presentiment stole over him.
. . . Something that can no longer be prevented! . . . Gabriel went to
Three-Tent Square for another talk with his son.

 

 

But neither Stephan nor Juliette was to be found there. In the sheikh's
tent he changed his underclothes. As he did so, he missed one of the
coins given him by the Agha Rifaat Bereket. It was the gold coin,
with the head in sharp half-relief of the great Armenian king, Aschod
Bagrathuni. He turned out the pockets of every suit. The gold coin was
nowhere to be found.

 

 

 

 

It was most unlucky that this new incursion of Turks and Arabs should
have put an end to Sato's vagrant double life. And her status among the
children was lower than ever. Ter Haigasun, a few days ago, in spite
of all the teachers' recalcitrance, had insisted that school must
be properly kept. But now, not even that martinet, Hrand Oskanian,
could enforce discipline in class if Sato were sitting among the
rest. "Stinker! Stinker!" chirruped the whole merciless flock, the instant
that vagrant entered the school enclosure. Even up here, in this last
refuge of the persecuted, Sato, that lousy orphan, supplied these children
with a welcome pretext for feeling distinguished and nobly born. During
one such class, taken by Iskuhi, their derision howled so loud that even
the teacher, without concealing her own repugnance, drove the hated Sato
out of class. "Go away, Sato; and don't let me see you again, ever!"

 

 

So far, in stolid indifference, ignorant alike of honor and shame,
Sato had managed to hold her own. But now that her admired Iskuhi,
her küchük hanum, had joined the enemy, thrusting her forth, Sato had
to obey. In her short European frock with the butterfly sleeves, which,
ragged and caked with mud, made her look grotesque, she went trailing
off. But only as far as the nearest bush, under which she lay down
quietly, like a jackal watching a caravan camp with ravenous eyes.

 

 

Sato was not so poor as she seemed. She, too, had a world. For instance,
she could understand the animals which strayed across her vagrant way.
Iskuhi and all the others would no doubt have said without hesitation that
Sato was a cruel little beast to them. Everything about her suggested
it. But -- on the contrary! This bastard waif vented none of her spite
on beasts, which she handled with a protective, whispering sympathy. Her
insensitive hands would pick up a hedgehog, and she would whisper so long
that at last the ball began to unroll, the pointed snout darted forth,
the alert, businesslike eyes of a small bazaar-shopkeeper sized her
up quickly. Sato, who could only speak to grown-ups as though she had
a gag in her mouth, was expert in every shade of bird-cry. Such gifts,
which would no doubt have commanded respect, she diligently hid, fearing
they might do her social damage. And, as with beasts, so could she talk
with the old madwomen, crouching in their holes round the Yoghonoluk
churchyard. Sato never noticed that these breathless, disconnected
gabblers used their tongues in any way differently from other, sanely
gossiping matrons. In any case it was very pleasant to take one's share
in such friendly talks, which made no fatiguing demands on one's choice
of expression. The smaller beasts, these female halfwits, and sometimes
even a blind beggar, formed a realm apart, in which Sato found herself
respected, as every human being must needs feel respected, in order to
live. Though, to be sure, with Nunik, Wartuk, Manushak, Sato was still
a respectful underling.

 

 

But now this communion was shattered. It was dull. There was really
no point in straying about within camp bounds. Little by little, this
idle restlessness got diverted into channels of its own: spying on
grown-ups. With the sharp instinct which mocked all that unintelligible
book-learning, Sato perceived whatever was animal in these grown-ups,
all that might have escaped their control, all cravings, their mad
self-seekings. Of those emotions of whose dangerous existence in the
world she was scarcely consciously aware, she could nonetheless hear
the grass grow. The avid little spy, like a magnet, drew all that was
not in order towards herself.

 

 

It is therefore not in the least surprising that Sato soon realized how
things were between Gonzague and Juliette. The pricking, ominous sense
of a major catastrophe invaded her. All disinherited people know this
delightful prescience of catastrophe, the delicious hope that the world
is about to crash, which forms one of the strongest impulses both to
minor scandals and revolution. Sato kept close behind these two. Next
to Bagradian himself, Juliette and Monsieur Gonzague were the most
resplendent apparitions in Sato's world. She did not hate them in the
least, in the way bad servants hate their masters. She felt a primitive's
curiosity for something which seems almost superhuman.

 

 

She had soon spied out their hiding place, the secret place of myrtle
and rhododendron. With delight trickling down her spine, she forced her
muzzle slowly through the thicket. Her glittering eyes were avid for this
sight sent by the gods. The august, resplendent hanum, from France, the
giantess, the ever-perfumed . . . now her hair hung in wisps over a face
which advanced its almost lifeless surfaces, its wide, dolorous mouth,
towards the steady features of the man who, with drooping lids, still
seemed acutely on the alert as, first, he savored the gift, before drawing
it close. Sato, shaking with excitement, watched the play of Gonzague's
long, narrow hands, like the knowing hands of a blind tar-player, come
and go across the hanum's white shoulders, and cup her breasts.

 

 

Sato saw all there was to see. Also, what was not to be seen. The
schoolteachers had given her up long ago. Not even "twice two's four,"
not even the alphabet, could be hammered into this creature's stuttering
mind, occupied with its own aimless images. Sato could make no progress,
since her overdeveloped sense of tracks and clues engulfed all mental
possibilities. Hidden among myrtle and rhododendron, she could taste
the delicious ardors of this interlude, and yet, all the time, be well
aware how lost and bewildered Juliette was, how resolved, Gonzague. Her
mind was nothing, her instinct everything. Sato would have had no reason
to curtail the raptures of the voyeuse, had there not been a certain
complication, wounding to her most vulnerable emotion. Another couple
had not long escaped her setter's nose. They offered no spectacle,
had found no refuge for their desire. These two did not steal away
together into labyrinthine bushes along the coast; they preferred the
barren knolls and empty reaches of the high plateau. It was hard to
spy them out without being seen. But Sato, luckily, or unluckily, had
the faculty for making herself invisible. At this she was even better
than Master Haik. This second pair kept drawing her off the scent of her
sweet absorbing espionage on the first. True, she scarcely managed to see
them kiss. But, between Iskuhi and Gabriel, this never-kissing passion
burned far deeper, into Sato's heart, than all the embraces between
Gonzague and Juliette. These two had only to touch hands, and glance
briefly at each other; then, as though shattered, avert their eyes,
to assure Sato that their union was far more maddeningly complete than
all the close proximity of the others. Above all the communion between
Iskuhi and Gabriel was detestable, and made Sato sad.

 

 

Her memory had imagined a golden age. Had the orphanage teacher in Zeitun
not always been good and gentle with Sato? Had she not often expressly
said: "My Sato"? Had she not even allowed her Sato to squat on the grass
at her feet, and pat these feet, and stroke them even? Who but the effendi
was to blame for the fact that this happy relationship, this mutual esteem,
and their caresses, had ended harshly? Who but the effendi was responsible
for the fact that, when Iskuhi's Sato approached her, with a loving and
open heart, she only snapped: "Go away, Sato, and don't let me see you
again, ever"? Sadly the waif sought out a place to think in. But planning
and reflection were never her strong points. Either she evoked transient
images, or would start at the sudden flash of a perception. These perceptions
and images had no need at all of the assistance of anything like conscious
understanding. They worked blindly towards an aim: just as they could join
up threads, let them drop, take them up again, and so spread a web of
planned revenge, of which their mistress was almost unaware.