Orhan's Inheritance (18 page)

The sun dips down behind the mountains and the road seems more endless than it did before. It slopes upward moderately, but enough for Lucine to see the apothecary’s father fall behind, his wife and daughter-in-law too busy with the infant to notice. He trails farther and farther behind, until there are a good ten meters between him and the last of the deportees from Sivas. The gendarme assigned to the end of the line marches behind him. He is shorter than the rest, with a narrow protruding nose that reminds Lucine of a parrot’s beak. He’s wrapped a big white cloth around his head to shelter himself from the sun. It makes him look less official, more like an Arab than a Turkish soldier. The officer on horseback is farther behind him. He rides a good distance away, his job to protect the flock from raiding Kurds and villagers.

Lucine watches the turbaned gendarme nudge the old man with the butt of his rifle. The apothecary’s father is old and frail. He has endured more misery in the last few days than in all his other days combined. Still, he has his grandchild to consider. The old man picks up his pace, but this only heightens his exhaustion. He collapses onto his palms and knees, a four-legged animal wheezing and gulping in air.

The gendarme looks impatient. He too is on foot, enduring the heat and exhaustion, far away from the glory of battle, doing shepherd’s work.

“Get up.” His voice is angrier than before. He takes this opportunity to adjust the makeshift turban, unfolding and refolding it tighter around his head. This is when Lucine realizes that it is not a shirt at all but the coveted apothecary’s coat.

The old man stays down, still wheezing.

“Fine, stay then,” he says. He picks up his weapon and lodges a single bullet into the old man’s back. The sound stops everyone. The old man’s wife screams in protest. “
Aman Asdvaz eem!
My God.” She hobbles back toward him, but the officer on horseback gets there first.

“
Mee nayeek,
don’t look,” orders Mairig, but Lucine climbs out of the wagon anyway. It is the first time she has witnessed a murder. Her eyes go from the old man’s splayed body, to the assassin’s face, above which the crumpled white coat of the apothecary sits like a crown.

The officer dismounts his horse, calling the turbaned gendarme to attention. He stands erect, just like he did in his saddle, a full head taller than his subordinate.

“You idiot,” he barks. Spit flies out of his neat mustache and lands on the nose of the turbaned one. “Who told you to waste a bullet on this dog when we have so few? Next time use this,” the officer says, grabbing the gendarme’s bayonet and shoving him with it.

The old man lies facedown, staining the grass with his blood. The apothecary’s mother falls to her knees beside her husband. The officer ignores her and remounts his horse.

“Keep walking, all of you,” he shouts to the spectators.

They leave the old man face down in his open grave, his left ear and cheek pressed to the earth, listening for God’s apology.

“Where is your Christian god now?” the turbaned assassin shouts. Lucine thinks it is a good question. Not one person answers him. Not Mairig and not the missionary. Perhaps they sense what Lucine already knows, that if God is indeed anywhere, he is not here.

Farther down the road, with the memory of the old man’s murder festering like an open wound, the deportees come to a company of old women, from the town of Tokat. They say they have been without food or water for three days. Robbed of everything, their bare feet weeping pus, they beg to join the caravan from Sivas. The gendarmes agree, but only after a bribe is conferred by the butcher Berberian, who seems to be carrying more than just sausages in those sacks. But after what they have just witnessed with the old man, the group sees that the price of an Armenian life is not negotiable. The Tokat women speak of a valley nearby filled entirely with corpses and point to a flock of birds circling above. They think nothing of crouching before a pile of ox excrement and picking at the visible grains. Lucine wonders if the bread they are given is an act of charity or just a clever way of stopping their mouths.

She walks slowly, keeping her eyes lowered to the dry earth. Determined to ignore the moaning and shuffling sounds of the company, Lucine focuses on her shoes instead. They are sturdy shoes, with leather soles she knows will take her far. She can depend on them like she can depend on little else. Her eyes rest on the scuff of her right toe, where the soft brown leather is stripped, exposing a lighter, more vulnerable layer.

But the shoes, her own and everyone else’s, are a comfort. Brown, black, heeled, and flat with an occasional sturdy boot—all proceed before her. Constant, tangible and oh so reassuring, less worn than their spirits and limbs. If she keeps her vision focused on just this one article of clothing, Lucine can pretend to ignore the fear that creeps up and overwhelms her.

Anush’s shoes, in particular, are a lovely sight. She wears a brilliant pair of dark blue suede shoes with a large silver buckle that gleams in the sun. As she walks, the sunlight kisses the sweet little buckle now and then, shooting sparks of light into the dusty air. Lucine’s eyes chase these sparks, irregular and unexpected as they are, and her spirit soars with each whimsical, short-lived dance. Her attention is so fixed that at first she does not hear the sound of galloping hooves. But the sound crescendos until both Anush and Lucine are engulfed in a dust.

“
Asdvaz!
Dear God!” Mairig wields her voice like a sword through the air, but the sisters are hidden in a dirt chamber. Lucine sees nothing but a uniformed arm reach down. Thick fingers clamp down on Anush’s braids, pulling at them like ropes. Anush screams, holding the side of her head where the hair is being torn out. Before Lucine can react, the great arm scoops Anush’s tiny waist up. Lucine catches a glimpse of the man’s face. She sees the hard eyes and familiar mustache of the captain who doesn’t believe in wasting bullets. Anush lunges forward, arms stretching toward Lucine, but the uniformed arm cinches like a tight belt at her waist. Lucine holds her sister’s terrified gaze for a fleeting moment before it recedes with the sound of the hooves. She is left standing only a few feet from where Anush was a moment ago, a cloud of dust settling back at her feet.

When she looks down, one dark blue shoe lies on its side, its shiny silver buckle hiding from the sun. Mairig runs up behind her with such force that they both tumble to the ground. “
Aman aman
. . .” Mairig screams, tearing at her hair, wailing at her deaf mute god. Lucine swallows her tears. She turns around, staring ahead back toward the road that brought them here. It is empty and nondescript. Nothing about it, not the few discarded articles on the ground nor the absence of the gendarme on horseback, hints at what has happened here.

“Get up! Keep moving!” The turbaned gendarme is yelling again. He kicks the ground and a fresh batch of dust circles the air. Lucine looks ahead for the horse-backed officer, but he has vanished.

Bedros comes running from behind, carrying baby Aram. He has left the oxcart with all their remaining provisions behind.

“Mairig, Mairig,” he calls, holding the baby out to her.

Mairig stands but does not reach for the bundled infant. She drags her feet forward in a stupor. It is Lucine who must take the baby from Bedros. She places Aram into the crook of one arm and squeezes Bedros’s hand.

“You stay close to me,” she says, looking him in the face. “Do you understand?” Her voice is louder and angrier than she intends it to be and Bedros whimpers. But Lucine is too broken to apologize or comfort him. She keeps her grip tight and wills herself to walk on.

CHAPTER 20

Empty Prayers

LUCINE TURNS HER
head back again and again, scanning the line of deportees for Anush. She reminds herself repeatedly that girls who are violated in the night are sometimes returned. They weep and hide their faces in shame, but they return. The thought of Anush’s thick brown braids and warm embrace make Lucine’s insides weak. If only Uncle Nazareth or Hairig were here, things would be different. They would find Anush and get them all out of this misery. They would show that gendarme where to stick his bayonet.

Mairig, who insists on walking, shows no interest in taking Aram from Lucine. Tucked under the soft folds of her brother’s swaddling clothes, below the faint scent of breast milk, is a velvet pouch containing Mairig’s hidden treasures: two gold bangles, meant for her daughters when they marry; an emerald brooch in the shape of a cross that belonged to their grandmother; and the ruby ring Hairig had recently given her. Local merchants keep approaching the caravan, selling a handful of almonds for a gold ring or six dried figs for a silver spoon. So far Mairig has kept her treasure to herself. She didn’t reach into it, even when the old women from Tokat needed to bribe the gendarmes. And it’s a good thing, because they may need Mairig’s treasure to rescue Anush.

Now and then, Lucine can hear Mairig catapulting a prayer or two to the heavens in a low angry voice. She uses words that she’s never used before, words that curse and damn things, words that she would have pulled Lucine’s ear for, if she ever used them. Mairig’s eyes have lost their focus; Lucine wishes she would stop looking past them. Not even Aram’s crying can claim her attention.

Yesterday the gendarmes led supervised trips to a public well, but by the time their turn came the soldiers had grown tired of the task. Lucine wonders if the others are as thirsty as she. If only she were bigger and less afraid, she would swallow her beating heart, which seems to be lodged in her swollen tongue. She would put it back in her breast where it belongs and find a way to protect the people she loves. That is what Hairig would have wanted. But swallowing anything, much less the lead ball lodged in the middle of her mouth, is impossible. Sometimes, if she locates her fear somewhere specific, like in the face of the thick-lipped gendarme or the uniformed arm of the man who took Anush, her fear grows smaller but more potent. It transforms into something else entirely: a hate so pure that it sustains, even nourishes, her.

When the sun starts to set, the gendarmes order the deportees to stop marching. The relief at the prospect of a few hours of rest is short-lived, for a cold desert wind begins to whip at their backs. Lucine huddles close to Bedros and Mairig in their makeshift tent. Mairig doesn’t say a word. She turns her back to them and falls asleep. Perhaps she’s right to do it. A rescue plan is better executed after a good night’s sleep.

Lucine vows to stay awake in case Anush returns in the night. She peeks at Bedros, who is also still awake.

“How can it be so cold at night when we are boiling in the day?” he asks, picking at the tear-shaped scab on his left cheek.

“The weather is fickle,” Lucine says. “Stop picking. You don’t want another scar on your face, do you?”

Bedros shrugs. “Girls worry about the strangest things.”

“Get some rest,” Lucine tells him.

Despite her fatigue, Lucine finds it easy to stay awake. Thirst attacks the remainder of her body, traveling down from her throat to cramp her abdomen and legs. Her mind drifts back to the night Uncle Nazareth was taken. She sees herself standing before Governor Muammer, like David before Goliath, aiming Bedros’s slingshot straight for the man’s forehead. Next, she strangles the potbellied fool with those yellow-and-brown marble prayer beads he’s always carrying around. Numerous versions of this heroic vignette play over and over in Lucine’s mind until her lids grow heavy with satisfaction and sleep.

She awakens in the middle of the night to screaming women and the furious pounding of hooves. There is so much dust and so little moonlight that she wonders if this too could be a dream. In the faint orange glow of the moon, four expert horsemen ride toward the caravan. They are dressed in large fringed turbans and tribal
şalvar,
pants so baggy and wide they look like inflated balloons. The horsemen open their mouths and let out a piercing tribal scream in a language that’s neither Turkish nor Armenian. They swarm like hornets toward the caravan.

“Bastards!” she hears someone shout in the darkness.

The few remaining oxcarts are plundered. One of the horsemen is dragging a young girl by the hair. Lucine runs in the opposite direction. She cannot see the totality of what is happening but recognizes the backside of a lumbering ox and runs toward it. The animal moves quicker than it ever did when Bedros was driving it.
Damn ox.
In her haste, she trips over something or someone. It is Bedros, kneeling next to a broken wooden crate, desperately trying to put something back in it.

“Are you all right?” she asks him, forgetting about the ox.

He shakes his head in response. “Our oxcart is gone.”

“I know.”

“They’ve taken our pot and the ladle but left all our grain,” he says.

“Kurds,” says Lucine, her eyes searching the ground. “It is against their custom to take our food.”

Lucine stares into the wooden crate where Bedros has managed to collect two sackcloths of bulgur grain and one plum.
What kind of custom allows you to take a girl but not her bulgur?

That is when she remembers Mairig. Only after she has surveyed the remaining food supply.

“Mairig!” she yells, ignoring her burning throat. “Mairig!” Lucine runs toward bodies rising from their crouched positions. She scans their grimy, stunned faces. Tearless, because their bodies are just as parched as their souls.

She finds Stepan the sheepherder flat on his back, his hands still folded together in sleep. Lucine touches his peaceful face with the lids sealed shut and decides to wake him before seeing the wound at the side of his skull where an animal has trampled him. Lucine remembers the heavy-footed ox clamoring for safety and feels strangely responsible for Stepan’s fate. This thought and the blood, so dark and sweet smelling, make her fall to her hands and knees, heaving.

This is how Bedros finds her. “Come, she’s here,” he says, leading her by the elbow to a wooded area. “She’s over here.”