Bone Ash Sky (4 page)

The men milling in the porch narrowed their eyes to survey the barren peaks ringing their town. Rocks no different than before, skyedged and veiled by inevitable mists, shy as a virgin bride – not that there were many of those now. What with Kurds carrying girls away as fourth wives after they'd already been spoilt. The tribesmen had begun acting like lords lately, requisitioning houses when they passed through these valleys for their wintering. Of course they had been here for centuries too, as the Turks had. It was an uneasy relationship: nomad Muslims, farming Christians, Ottoman overlords. Much as the Armenians wished to believe they were autonomous, they had always been subject to the Turks.

The Kurds had begun moving into Armenian houses with their pack animals, exhausting provisions then turning their attention to the women of the household. No Armenian man would protest when they carried off his daughter. She was soiled now, indistinguishable from the wild-bearded men who claimed her. Lilit hoped this wouldn't happen to her. She was old enough, now, for these violations. She peered sideways at the men, at their sunburnt cheeks, wondering how brutal they really were under those colourful silks and tassels, their wide-throated laughter. Surely they couldn't be so bad, with smiles like that. They even came to her church on holy days, Muslims venerating the same Orthodox saints.

‘Look at the Kurds,' the Armenians told the widow. ‘They respect us, we respect them. We even go to a mosque on their feast days to show our solidarity. Look at our mountains, our fields, our orchards. Nothing has changed. Look at our houses, our churches, our schools. They are still standing. Nothing has changed here for thousands of years. When have Armenians been killed by Muslims? Never. Not in our recollection or in our grandfathers' or great-grandfathers'. Nothing is amiss. Everything is the same.'

Minas knew the men were wrong. Or lying, to keep their women quiet. They hadn't read all the books he had. Most of them were afraid of the Kurds, bowing and smiling on the street, yet calling them the Turks' butchers under their breath. They did all the dirty work. The Turks paid them to crucify Armenians a long time ago, for being Christian. The old men swapped these ancient stories between breaths, wheezing in the high air as they cut wood for winter.

‘We Armenians got our own back,' they joked.

Minas piped up – they didn't realise he'd been listening. Lilit sat aside under the trees, watching her wilful sheep, and thankfully out of earshot.

‘How?'

‘Ah, Minas,' one man sighed. ‘You always want to know everything.'

Minas's teacher began to speak, now his tongue had been loosened by the recollections of the older men. ‘Remember the Kurds in the 1870s?' He was shivering and sweating as he brought down his axe to the soft white wood. ‘Remember what they did to us?'

The other men ignored him. Minas watched, his heart pulsing with a new understanding.

‘Remember the Turks moving in and pushing us out? Remember the atrocities twenty years ago? Two hundred thousand killed.' He pointed at an old man. ‘You? You must have lived through it. And you. You.'

The men muttered, looked down at the blades in their hands, wouldn't catch his eye.

‘We're under occupation, I tell you. They're calling it a holy war.'

The men continued to evade him, shaking their heads and spitting on the ground.

‘What about the massacre of 1908? Don't tell me you've forgotten that as well?'

One of the older men cleared his throat, spoke without looking up at the teacher.

‘Enough,
effendim
. Enough now. We have constitutional rights again, after the end of that scoundrel Abdul Hamid may-he-burn-inthe-fires-of-hell.'

Another man chuckled.

‘You know his mother was an Armenian dancing girl? Neglected him in the harem. Maybe that's why the bastard hated us so much.'

The older man frowned, deciding to ignore such levity.

The teacher cut in. ‘She was Circassian. A blonde slave from the Trebizond markets.'

The man pressed on. He continued to address the teacher, laying a grimy hand on his shoulder. ‘The Young Turk party are fine men, they are … they are … I don't have the words for it.'

‘You mean liberals, intellectuals, reformists? In the lies they've been feeding us in newspapers and on posters?'

‘They can't be liars. They're civilised. We can carry arms now, own property, even emigrate. What's there to worry about anymore?'

The teacher flung his axe down, threw up his hands. ‘I'm going. I'm getting out of here before they start killing us again, even if none of you are.'

When a breathless youth came running into Van with stories of hanging and looting in Constantinople, only a thousand miles to the west, all the men turned away.

At any rate, by day they didn't smell the burning.

They still went to church each Sunday. They tied scraps of fabric to holy trees on the way and prayed guiltily to other, older gods, nature gods, fire gods:
Hope nothing like that happens to us.
Rag ribbons faded in sun and rain. The men fed their frightened beasts, or what was left of them. All pack animals had been seized by the Turkish army in the last few days, but the Armenians accepted this. After all, this was a time of war.

A night like any other, and Lilit's hair a shiny black hole in the light of the dying fire. Her father's seamed hands at rest on the blanket; her brother's profile, sharp, waxen, childlike; her mother's bridal earrings heavy on the pillow – all gilded by the last burning coals. She woke. Sobs wracked her whole body but she didn't make a sound. Tears welled deep inside, a formal, adult sadness that seemed to tear her stomach and lungs apart. She stayed very still, as if to move an inch would cause her to sever completely, to forget the dream she had the very moment before she opened her eyes: fires in the mountains, mossy boughs of oak and birch burnt black, charred in the shapes of men's bodies. She lay frozen in her bed, panting, while her brother, father and mother circled her and slept.

In the morning, she heard her mother wake before she saw her. It was just before dawn, the room they slept in still dark and fusty with lambs' breath and herbs, too cold for late spring. She opened one eye, worried she'd be called to help gather kindling and stoke the fire. A sliver of morning light picked out the pinkness of objects: rose-cheeked icon above the window, earthenware plates and bowls from last night's dinner, the brass coffee kettle on its side.

She watched Mamma sit up in her mound of blankets and don a heavy scarf, kiss Minas on the forehead, before she closed the door. He murmured sleepily and turned over. Even on a Sunday before church Mamma had to work. She cleaned the homes of rich Turks, most of them officers on leave with their families, or the feared gendarmes who patrolled the streets, neither police nor army, with no rules anyone could see. At night she hurried home with tales of cruelty, how the lady of the house had called Armenians bloodsucking parasites, an infection in the neighbourhood that should be eradicated now. But Papa urged her not to be so easily offended. Thus they could pay the infidel taxes imposed on them and still afford to send Minas to the missionary school, where he was taught the glory of the Ottomans and what his American teacher termed ‘their passive brutality called justice'. But that was all in the past. The Young Turks were different. Secular, modern, pro-Western. And they believed this. They had to.

Now Mamma was away most of the time, Lilit learnt to cook, clean, string rows of walnuts in front of the house to preserve them in the sun. She watched how neighbouring women painted them with plum syrup each day until they were purple and fragrant, a faint wine-rich whiff of death. When she'd left them there a few more months they were packed in jars to lie unopened until autumn.

They all planned in this small way for the future, averting their eyes from the whispers and sighs across their mountains and lakes. They tried not to dwell on stories of their brethren in Constantinople: dangling from gibbets in city squares, stripped of clothes and jewellery. Mansions, townhouses, chapels burned. Tokatlians, the city's most famous Armenian restaurant, destroyed one night by a Turkish mob. Poets and merchants arrested and deported to the wild interior. City folk were different anyway; who knew what subversive behaviour they indulged in? Bringing retribution upon themselves. Artists and intellectuals, proud men with proud ideas.
Self-defence in the face of
violence. Self-determination. Self-rule.
Self. Self. Count on city dwellers to be selfish. Writers of fantasies and lies. Setting up printing presses, talking of freedom and sovereignty from empire. That composer Komitas always big-noted himself; well of course they'd send him to a labour camp just to shut him up. They laughed at the paltry joke that did the rounds of town, shook their heads, went on with their patient work, the daily caress of the familiar.

Nothing much had changed in Van. The Pakradounians lived on the outskirts, to the east of the walled citadel. It was cleaner, Mamma said.
And safer too
, Minas mouthed, but didn't dare speak aloud. They lived in Aykesdan, the Garden City of fields and farms, where there was a great deal of space to run and hide. It had once been the granary and pleasure quarter of the old town, now reduced to a hamlet of huts and orchards clinging to the slopes. Nothing had changed there since the war began, except for the shape and colour of their worries. Minas still fed their pet lamb – the runt of the flock – with warm milk each evening, taking comfort in the small round head resting against his knee. Mamma continued to bake holy bread every Saturday night to be carried under Papa's none-too-clean jacket, and Lilit still put the sacrificial hen to roast slowly on the coals before they left for church. She twisted her hair in curl papers the night before, at her mother's insistence, and had angry, vengeful dreams from sleeping on her stomach with her face buried deep in the pillow.

Mamma was always pale from the early morning's work, her lips shut tight on her secrets. Papa strode well ahead, calling formal greetings to all his friends. Lilit halted every few paces to pull up her summer stockings, surreptitiously, under cover of her voluminous skirts. The stockings were old and thin, much darned, too loose for her now. She'd grown since last summer, cast off baby fat, and her legs were longer, trim-ankled, shapely. Minas trailed behind his parents, stepping on his sister's heels deliberately each time she stopped: a small diversion from the boredom of the long walk from home.

She uttered whispered yelps of protest each time but never looked behind or raised a hand to her brother. Yervan sauntered behind them with his parents, whistling his secret signal so she'd know he was there. She could feel his gaze burning into the flesh of her buttocks, hidden by her lawn tunic and layers of undergarments. She wore a linked belt her papa had made, embossed with inscriptions promising a good future and many children. She knew that if she married Yervan the belt would widen then diminish as she became pregnant, gave birth, whittled down to her girlish shape again. It would be her fortune: the only record of her life, years written in silver and underlined in gold.

In church she contrived to stand opposite Yervan, able to see across the thicket of heads to where he lounged against a wall among all the other men and boys, avoiding her eyes. A frescoed Christ rose behind him, robed in cloth of gold, pomegranate buds twined in his unruly hair. Woven designs of flowers and fruit, constellations of earth. Black skin from so many burning candles. His three fingers were raised in benediction, touching the top of Yervan's perfect head. She breathed a prayer:
Please let nothing happen to him.
In the next heartbeat, halfashamed of herself for such frivolous appeals:
Forgive me, Jesus. But I
meant it.

She mingled with the other women at the end of the service, eating her morsel of blessed bread, careful not to scatter crumbs, when all she wanted to do was fling away those trappings, bread and all, stride across the courtyard to Yervan and kiss his half-open lips. The sun shone on snowy scarves and upraised faces, where whispered gossip bred darker each year. He loitered past her, head down, hands in his pockets. She turned to listen to what another girl was saying about dried meal being good for the pigs, and he was gone.