Bone Ash Sky (16 page)

She sat on the dirt next to him for a long time. She made the sign of the cross, once, twice, three times, and her wrists were shaking so much she had to repeat the ritual a fourth, a fifth time before she did it properly. She gathered her strength and got up, drawing her scarf over her shoulders, mouth and nose, so only her eyes were visible. Her legs gave way, but she persisted. She was still laughing: a strange, low sound that seemed to come now from her stomach, not her throat. She tapped on the glass-paned door of the kitchen, trying to peer in. This habitual gesture of courtesy did not strike her as out of place at the time. A blurred figure sat at the table, head on arms, keening. Was it one of the servants? She could hear the thin, inhuman cry from the other side of the door. She turned the knob and entered, silent now. Her hysteria was crushed by the otherworldly sound coming from Yervan's mother.

The kitchen was in chaos. Bins of flour and grain had been overturned onto the floor, splashes of dark wine stained the walls. A half-dead farm dog – not Yervan's – lay under the table, whimpering in a child's voice. Yervan's mother stared up at her, uncomprehending, then put her head on her arms once more. Again the high, wailing cries began to fill the room. Her unbound hair was matted with men's urine, her bodice torn and filthy. Lilit tried not to follow the implications of her ripped skirt, the blood down her legs. She put her hand out as if to touch her, then drew it back again and ran out the door, leaving it swinging.

She ran to the town hall, making a high wail under the folds of her scarf. Maybe somebody there could tell her what had happened. When she saw a group of Turkish soldiers march past, she flattened herself against the walls of houses lining the road, trying to blend into the bricks like a moth. Furled wings, brown-grey. She convinced herself they couldn't see her this way, that she was safe. When they passed on, she made for the centre of town again, hiking up her stockings as she ran.

She hadn't been out of the house for months now. In her absence, the centre of Van had become unrecognisable. She felt strongly as she ran to the square that she was inhabiting a nightmare: her sleeping self wandering through the streets and laneways of her childhood home, yet a home that had now become strange to her, skewed, laid out wrong. The stately facades with their scrollwork and pediments were still there, the same trees and buildings and street signs, but the spirit of Van was gone. Shops hollowed out, with looted or destroyed stock and charred timber. Turkish graffiti. Old men – grandfathers she'd grown used to seeing with their chessboards at the cafes, under the shade of the square arguing – now lay silent under those same trees, their faces so haggard she could see the egg-cup shapes of their skulls. The children – she couldn't look at the children. Their faces were too crazed, or too accepting. All around her, a shuffling mass of the half-dead, begging and clinging to her skirt and sleeve. She batted at them in frantic misery, trying not to take in any more detail of the ravaged faces, making small sounds of protest between her closed mouth and nostrils, trying not to breathe in their stink.

She fled across the square, pounding on the doors of the town hall with both fists. From inside, a rise and fall of sound. It took her a while to register the sound as human screaming. Her legs turned to water and she crumpled against the steps, panting, overcome by blind fear.

‘Try to breathe.'

It was a man's face, a man's hot breath against her cheek. She stood up, swayed against the door.

‘Please,
effendim
– are you a soldier?'

A slight nod, the hint of a formal bow.

‘
Effendim
, can you tell me, what's happening in there?'

‘It's best for you to go home.'

‘But my father—'

‘Go home. Now.'

He came closer, put his arm out to her. He smelled of wet wool and dry sweat, a comforting, masculine presence.

‘If you would only check if my neighbour—'

‘Now. I'll take you.'

Minas arrived at the town hall to see a uniformed Turk leading his sister by the arm down the steps.

‘Lilit!'

She gave no appearance of hearing him. The man saw him, turned around.

‘Are you related to this woman?'

‘She's my sister.'

‘Well, take her home right now and don't let her out of the house again. How old are you?'

‘Thirteen.'

The gendarme looked him up and down. Suddenly Minas was ashamed of his homespun trousers, Papa's old jacket held together with pins used for babies' diapers.

‘You'll pass for eleven. Make sure that's what you say.'

Minas took hold of his sister as soon as the man had let her go. He watched him take the town hall steps three at a time and push the wide doors open with a crack of his cane. He seemed familiar. His carriage: that affected yet proud bearing. He turned around for a last moment and Minas saw his face. Gold flash of teeth as he smiled one last time at Lilit.

Minas had a vision of the Turk poking a limp body with his bayonet, turning it over to make sure it was really dead. He grabbed his sister's arm and propelled her down the street.

The Vali of Van, Djevet Bey, leaned back in his chair with an expansive yawn. All was going according to plan. Any males of the town above twelve had been apprehended and shot three abreast by the lake. Only last night, Turkish collaborators convicted of sheltering Armenians had been hanged in front of their houses, then the houses themselves burnt down. The ringleaders of the recent insurrection had already been beheaded in the town square, and the remaining women and children were terrified and starving, ripe for deportation. He would promise them new homes in the desert, on the banks of the Euphrates. Two-storey houses, more gold than they had ever managed to hoard and Arab servants.

Djevet was approaching middle age, yet still ambitious – he wasn't afraid to admit that. Ideal for promotion, but in a strictly limited sense. He knew he was a safe bet. He'd already been assured a post in Constantinople if he made up the numbers from the province of Van and its neighbouring
vilayets.
His mother – his ancient, cantankerous mother – would be so pleased. Or so he hoped.
Allah the merciful, make
her be pleased for once. Just this once.

She never thought he could do it, do anything; he was a disappointment from birth. Gangly, unformed, with a big nose to boot, for her he only seemed to intensify an already burning dislike of his father. Poor Father, who shuffled from bedroom to table, table to bedroom in down-at-heel slippers, for his whole life. Even if the slippers were new, worn for the first time, he managed to make them look battered. It was the shuffling that did it, drove Mother mad. Head down, shaking hands growing worse and worse until he couldn't even fasten his own trousers. Djevet would wake early and help him dress before school, so poor dear father wouldn't be too ashamed in front of Mother's vulpine stare.

‘You look just like him,' she would sniff.

As an adolescent, he grew weedy and retiring, like those indoor succulents Mother kept in her bedroom: insidious, with flat pale leaves that tended to droop with the addition of too much water. She would water them herself and then yell at him from her bed to do it once more, with a little blue-painted pitcher she had bought in Ephesus.

He married at fifteen, a rapacious girl his mother had chosen. Layla soon banded against him as well. They never had children. This could have been one of the reasons she, too, turned against him so soon. It was clear from the start: he was hopeless. He couldn't even give her a baby. Yet it was her elder brother, Enver Pasha, the Minister of War, who gave him this appointment in February, with the promise of a more salubrious position to come. He knew he was indebted to his wife, come what may. They were tied together by more than just the lack of babies. Policy. Propaganda. New laws. And still his mother considered him a failure on all counts, with no hope of retribution. Now at last he had his chance.

In the meantime he was biding his time here as a petty governor in the provinces, officiating over Armenian deaths and imprisonments, pleas and back-room bargains and the repossession of their assets by the few Turks and Kurds of the town who somehow found favour in his eyes. His spies told him he'd been dubbed ‘the horse-shoe master of Bashkale' throughout the country for his exploits in the previous province. Horseshoe master, he chuckled with satisfaction. He liked having this much power; it gave him an ice-dark thrill of accomplishment, made him wonder why he'd waited so long.

He leaned forward to cut a pomegranate in half from the platter at his elbow, fingering his pearl-handled knife with pride. A present from one of his beneficiaries. The platter had been an artful arrangement of Persian melons, Smyrna figs, tiny tomatoes and olives. His secretary was good for something. Now the figs lay mashed and blackened, olive pips scattered, pulp of tomatoes sucked so only the skins remained.

As he ate his pomegranate, Djevet was heedless of the seeds spilling onto his desk. His secretary, Mehmet, called for a plate but Djevet waved him away. He enjoyed the pretence of poverty, the frisson of being a peasant for a while. Just like those Armenians. He liked their folk dances, the girls' wide, smiling faces when he forced them to pretend they liked him. He enjoyed the aqua vitae of the region, drinking it secretly before bed so as not to offend his subordinates who were still devout Muslims, fundamentalist illiterates. He made sure the old men still continued to produce it, and among all the other privations there was always plenty.

He picked up one of the pomegranate kernels between his thumb and forefinger and put it in his mouth, savouring the tang of sweetsourness on his tongue. As he dictated his daily correspondence, he continued eating them one by one.

‘First a letter to my mother,' he told Mehmet. ‘She'll be worried about me. Write it on the good paper with my crest. And make sure you date it first.'

The secretary scribbled ‘April 1915', cocked his head and asked Djevet Bey which day it was.

‘We pay you to know these things, Mehmet! Look, just don't worry about it. All right. Ready?
Dearest Mother, I have no work and much fun.
The news from here is very heartening. We have killed 2100 Armenian
males already, all of them food for dogs.'

‘I'm sorry,
Bey effendim
,' Mehmet said. ‘My pen needs refilling.'

Djevet waited, tapping the desk with his ring finger, admiring the square-cut emerald.

‘Mother, I am safe and eating well. Our cook makes a superlative pilaf.
Ask Layla to send my summer underclothes and tell her I kiss her eyes. May
Allah bless her and you and Father.
That's all. Now turn to a new page,' he instructed Mehmet. ‘
Pay the butchers one gold lira per person.'

The boy hesitated, as if unsure of what the Bey wanted him to write, so Djevet got up from behind his desk and advanced toward him. Mehmet cowered, expecting a slap. Djevet seized the pen from him and scrawled on the paper, using Mehmet's bent-over back as support.

‘
Pay the halal butchers of the town one lira for each Armenian male
they slaughter before Tuesday. I will not leave a single one standing.'

He touched his knee with a short chopping motion.

‘Mehmet, make sure you tell them we will not leave even one so high.'

He stabbed into Mehmet's clean gabardine suit with a final flourish of his signature, threw the pen down and looked out the window. Outside his office in the town hall, some of the gendarmes were amusing themselves. They were cutting down branches from the plane trees lining the town square.
Are they making an outdoor shelter?
That would certainly be nice
, he wondered. They stripped boughs of their leaves with the points of bayonets.
A shady pavilion for hot afternoons.
Tea and music.

They were letting out the female prisoners locked in the basement: raucous women with loud voices who had come to the hall in the last few days demanding to know what had become of their men. He remembered being harsher than usual with his orders – they reminded him so of his wife. Nasty and ill-tempered, blaming everyone but themselves.

The gendarmes beckoned the women out of their prison. He saw them squint and cover their eyes, unused to such bright light.
Do they
want the women to help build it?

Some – the very old, lame, diseased – had already been shot at night in the courtyard; the others were being kept alive to make up the numbers of deportees. He knew it wouldn't do to have too many deaths in his
vilayet
. It could do his reputation more harm than good. He needed to appear efficient to his superiors, oh, yes, but Turkey itself also needed to appear not entirely ruthless to the world. The state needed to keep up the great pretence of the Armenian solution: women and children will all be spared. We're merely relocating them to somewhere better, for their own good, far away from the theatre of war.