Bone Ash Sky (19 page)

‘It's nothing, not now. Here.'

She spoke without moving her mouth or looking at Lilit, passed her a handful of coins under cover of her clothes.

‘Hide these.'

Then she unclasped her wedding earrings in a swift movement and made to press them into Lilit's unwilling hand.

‘If I go—before you. Save yourself.'

Lilit gasped.

‘No, Mamma, I couldn't!'

She pushed them weakly away. Minas lunged out at her and grabbed the earrings.

‘What about me? Am I not to be saved?'

He ran further into the crowd, disappearing from his mother and sister as he clutched the earrings closer. He tried not to look back at them, desperate lambs bleating against the inevitable. The pet lamb he'd been allowed to keep now left behind, those trusting eyes consigned to ashes. Lilit's round eyes, growing wider by the second, as if only now had she begun to see. The glint of gold in her hand, a muffled movement and the money vanished somewhere among her skirts.

He strode further away. Where to hide the earrings? He thought of his tiny navel, his anus – so tight, impossible.
I could never do it.
The voice in his head whispered.
Pierce your nipples under your shirt.
He fingered the diminutive buds, pinched them between thumb and forefinger. He would have to do it tonight, under cover of darkness.
Heaven help me if they find the earrings before then.
He licked his lips, realised how hungry he was. His last meal had been at dawn, the coarse bread his mother had rationed after he saw his father die.
Don't—think
of Papa.
He busied himself with food fantasies.
I'm strolling through stalls
giving off the fumes of roast lamb, fried onions and herbs.

He scuffed his shoes on thorny undergrowth and rock, calf muscles seething with the strain of walking uphill, of walking so quickly. The gendarmes cracked their whips at anyone not walking fast enough. He forced himself to pick up pace, dragging Mamma and Lilit behind him. They came to a rise overlooking fields and valleys, where they could look down in all directions, even on Van itself, marred by those bright, random patches of fire. Smoke stung their throats and eyes even here, even up so high.

‘Look,' he said, pointing. ‘Our neighbourhood's not burning.'

His mother and sister stared at him, open-mouthed, but he didn't care anymore what they thought.
I don't care about anything. Other than
making the Turks angry.
From his new vantage point, he could gaze down as if drinking deep, upon Lake Van lying like an eye, gazing upward but seeing nothing. He could look upon the plain of sand stretching all the way to the horizon, marking what he assumed was the jagged boundary of northern Syria. They were being marched south-west, past Gevas, Mardin, Qamshile – places he'd only ever heard nomads speak of – then down into the blinding heart of Arabia. Ahead of him, the column of deportees trickled forward like a river toward the desert, sparkling in the afternoon sun, soon to be sucked up like water into sand.

He looked behind him. More people following, more than he could ever count. Gendarmes and soldiers rode on horses alongside, their bayonets pointed and shiny in the heat haze, lances of blinding light. Behind him, the mountains and grassy hills of Armenia beckoned. Before him, the desert lay still and sinister as a mirror at night.

He didn't feel the days pass so acutely any longer. He was too obsessed by survival. He walked in his sleep, watched his shoes fall off blistered feet as if they belonged to somebody else. He trudged alongside his mother and sister through a moonscape of white stone and parched animal bones, tufts of saltbush he learnt to fight over for its sparse liquid.
Bowls of cherries and cheese white as a sheep's coat, scrolls of bread
and peach brandy.
Sometimes he held the plant high above his head and wouldn't let Lilit or his mother share. Soon they stopped asking and let him walk ahead.

He made games of counting how many bloody footprints he could make each day. Lilit's cracked lips and burning face made him turn away. He didn't want to feel sorry for her. Yet at the same time he was amazed at her gritted calm. Only her hands betrayed her suffering; they twisted and pulled at each other as if she were trying to wrench them off, substitute one pain for another. Mamma's cut forehead turned septic in the heat and he told Lilit not to bother when she tried to clean it with her own saliva. He twisted the earrings in his nipples, regularly opening the wounds he had made. He thought the fresh flow of blood would stop them from infecting, so he continued to twist slowly each day, wincing at the pain. Some mornings he woke before dawn with the gendarmes, started off with them and walked alone at the head of the convoy, close to the horses.

Most times the Turks offered him a cigarette, which he took with a studied nonchalance and coughed over between cupped hands. Sometimes Afet, who seemed to be the leader, allowed him to walk ahead of the entire convoy, and on these rare times he felt as if he were exploring new territory he had only dreamed of before. He was a solitary figure in an empty landscape. He was now a man, the new man. Nobody before him in history had ever experienced this. It made him proud, yet ashamed at the same time.

Sometimes, if Afet was in a thoughtful mood, he would talk to Minas, slowing his horse to a walk. He would explain how this was a duty for him, just a job like any other, that he had no choice but to fulfil it to the best of his ability. The future of modern Turkey was at stake here, even in this benighted desert. Minas could understand that, what with the world war and unrest in the cities and villages and those starving Muslim children Afet described so elegantly. It was only when Afet painted the Armenians and Jews and Greeks as greedy obstacles to this shining future that Minas had to blink hard and smile up at the officer to stop the tears from forming in his sandpaper eyes.

He wouldn't let himself cry as the others did. That would blur the clarity of his vision, muddy his purpose. Observe. Remember. Record. Do not forget. He was now scribe and recording angel made flesh. He had flashes of the past and then his future as he walked: himself as an old man, sitting on a chair soothing a baby. A little girl who mewled constantly, screwing up her face in anger. A daughter, a granddaughter? In this half-dreaming state he knew the little girl had been abandoned by her mother, just as he had. He tickled her under the chin.
Little one,
you're not very pretty, are you?
And she made fists of her tiny red hands and punched at him as if in reproach, gulping in bubbles of air.

He blinked away the image, trying to keep his eyes open in the glare. There were no signs of life in the desert that he could see, except a solitary hawk high over the mirages of towers and plumed minarets, a stone seeming to take the shape of a djinn or an animal, a mythical beast out of a Crusader bestiary. Fine grains of sand through his fingers, falling, collecting in mounds, obscuring, so easy to hide any traces of killing in, as the blood simply welled up and disappeared.

So much blood. He let himself close his eyes for a moment and could almost believe they were walking through a sea of it, instead of sand. He was conscious of his own blood seeping at times from his pierced nipples, especially when a gendarme leaned over to speak to him; but among so much blood and dirt and so many people, he knew nobody would notice. He tried to calculate how many had died already, knowing he'd be asked at some point, when it was all over, when the Turks were called to account. He counted on his fingers, scratched figures of the marching dead on pearl-smooth pebbles. After two hundred, he gave up.

The fifteenth evening – or was it the sixteenth? Lilit had lost count – they were ordered to stop by a desert well. One acacia stood guard, its spindle branches their only shade. The gendarmes and Chettis – Muslim criminals, mercenaries Lilit feared the most – flopped beneath it. They brought water up in a rotting bucket, drank their fill and replenished their leather flasks. Lilit wanted to drink; she was going crazy from thirst. If only she could have a drop, one drop. If only she could lick the outside of the flask, glinting wetly in the sun. She could suck at it. She saw drops of water glisten on one of the gendarme's fingers, his mouth. But she didn't move.

In time the Turks washed their faces, feet and hands, shook out their prayer rugs and faced Mecca. As the sun set over the sandhills, they pared their nails with the daggers kept at their belts. They ate from provisions of hard rusks and dried meat, while the deportees watched their every movement with increasing intensity as the hours grew: greasy index finger to mouth, white tongue visible for only an instant to lick, gristle tossed into sand behind them, where prisoners would not dare to venture.

It had been days since any of them had been given rations. Lilit assumed the Turks wanted as many of them to die of starvation and heat and thirst as possible, to save bullets and perhaps their sense of guilt. It was only at night, if the Turks seemed in the mood, that they taunted and killed with impunity. As she tried to sleep, she could hear the cries of women being raped. The grunts, the sound of heavy flesh hitting flesh. The mechanical precision. She shut her eyes tightly and tried to sleep, tried not to think of what she would do, how she would still manage to be Lilit – her very self – if she too was raped. She pressed Mamma's hands to her stomach, pulled Minas's arms around her waist. Welded like this with her family, she listened. She'd passed the point where she cared anymore about other people's suffering. She was not shocked. Only the crying of the children continued to pain her, but only hazily, only in theory. She was so hungry, so tired she could hardly muster the energy to feel anymore.

Minas had managed to find a few snakes and spiny-tailed lizards, trapped some rodents, eaten them fur and all
.
He hadn't shared with her or Mamma. They had been following the course of the Euphrates for the last week, so at least there was enough water to drink, when they were allowed to. The river was sluggish and narrow in these parts, silted by the grey pall of desert sands. At intervals it was filled with corpses, and Lilit could feel her lips grow slick with the fat that came off the dead, the white jelly of decomposition. She forced herself to drink and helped her mother kneel on lacerated knees to also cup her hands in the water. She overheard the Turks saying the river widened further on, became fast-flowing and red with the flame of the setting sun. But she wasn't interested in words anymore, even when she drank enough to vomit. Her hunger remained.

Now she watched her brother salivating as he followed the swallowing mouths. She saw how his body echoed the gestures of the guards: spasmodic, exaggerated, parodying the motions of eating and involuntarily partaking in their meal. When they ingested a morsel of meat his throat worked too, as if forcing it down. When they burped their satisfaction or hiccupped, he jerked back and forth as though it had been him. She knew his hunger was growing out of control, puberty taking over, dictating his need for nourishment. She saw him try to eat sand many times already, she even saw him contemplate his own excrement yesterday when he finished squatting. One of the Chettis crouched near him, combing through with his bayonet to see if there were any coins in it. Minas was oblivious. His knee bones strained through the skin, his shoulders broadened, that once-gentle voice was thickening by the day. He needed food and was half-crazed from the lack of it.

He seemed to be blaming all the prisoners, all Armenians, anyone who dared to fall down or cry or speak out of turn. At times she thought he was becoming one of them: a Turk. Or perhaps pretending so well he could even fool his own sister. He seemed to have developed an anxious tic, constantly patting his chest through his shirt, looking down at it, as if afraid it would suddenly disintegrate into his flesh. She noticed little flecks of blood, sometimes fresh, sometimes dried, on his torso. He would mutter to himself, as if answering silent questions.

She shivered. All she wanted to do was lie down, close her eyes for a long time. It was agony to imagine getting up again, talking, even thinking complete thoughts. The sun exhaled on the rim of sand and disappeared. The women held their children up to the darkening sky in both hands, an insane parody of a baptism ceremony. Lilit's heart squeezed in her chest:
Could I and Yervan have had—?
The babies wriggled and cried in whimpers, limp legs and arms jerking in the air, scalps glistening under the new moon with sweat. Some seemed half-dead already, their heads lolling back. The women continued to wait, arms upraised and aching. They were pleading for food: not for themselves, but for their children. Lilit saw Afet nod only once to the gendarmes and they began to move, slow as cats, then suddenly faster, upon the babies. The women screamed, fought, kicked. One woman took a blow to the head and got up again, blood pouring from her temples, to attack the gendarmes. But they were too weak, even with the crazed strength that came from defending their babies. Soon enough, the children were all taken away, some already dead, others wailing and struggling, crying for their mothers.