Forty Days of Musa Dagh (18 page)

 

 

 

 

Later that evening Gabriel Bagradian had invited the priest Ter Haigasun,
Bedros Altouni the doctor, and Apothecary Krikor to come to see him.
They sat together, in the dimly lighted selamlik, over chibuks and
cigarettes. Gabriel wanted to know how these highly educated and very
worthy notables of Yoghonoluk really viewed the position, how they
intended to act in the event of an order of banishment, and what means
the commune of Musa Dagh had at its disposal to avert the worst.

 

 

He could get nothing out of them. Ter Haigasun stubbornly kept his
mouth shut. The doctor announced that, since he was already sixty-eight,
the three or four short years he had still to live would be got through
somehow. If anything happened to bring the end a little sooner, then so
much the better as far as he was concerned. Ridiculous to trouble one's
head for the sake of a few scurvy months. Was the whole of life really
worth a single worry? The main thing was to save people anxiety as much,
and for as long as, one possibly could. That he considered his chief
duty, which he meant to fulfill, whatever happened. All the rest was
no business of his. Krikor smoked his nargileh, profoundly at peace --
he had very prudently brought it with him. He selected, with an air of
profundity, from among the glowing coals those which appealed to him most
and pressed them down with his naked fingers on a roll of tobacco in the
hubble-bubble. Perhaps he wanted to symbolize to the others that he could
grasp fire without being burned by it. Thought alone gives any right to
reality -- not vice versa. Why want to do anything? All action is already
in vain, and only thought thinks on forever. He cited a Turkish proverb,
which might equally well have issued from the lips of the Agha Rifaat
Bereket: "Kismetdén zyadé olmass." Nothing happens unless predestined.

 

 

These words afforded the opportunity of evading the troublesome problems
of the hour. And Krikor's hollow voice became eloquent on the various
theories of predestination, the relationship of Christendom to Islam,
the Council of Chalcedony. The very words inebriated. The priest should
be made to hear with amazement how much theology Apothecary Krikor
had acquired.

 

 

It was too much. Gabriel rudely sprang to his feet. All the European
in him was up in arms against these sleepers, these gossips, who would
sink down into death without a protest, as they rotted their lives away
in filth. He interrupted Krikor, with a contemptuous wave of his hand:
"I want most urgently to submit an idea of mine to you gentlemen. It came
to me today as I talked to the saptieh, Ali Nassif. I'm still, after all,
a Turkish officer, a front-line soldier, decorated in the last Balkan
war. Now suppose I get into uniform and go to Aleppo? How would that
be? Years ago I happened to make myself useful to General Jemal Pasha -- "

 

 

The old doctor almost gleefully interrupted: "Jemal Pasha moved his
headquarters some time ago to Jerusalem."

 

 

But Bagradian was not to be put off. "It makes no difference. Djelal Bey,
the Wali, is even more important than Jemal Pasha. I don't know him
personally, but we all know about him, who he is, and that he'll do
whatever he can for us. Well, now, suppose I go to him and remind him
that Musa Dagh is right out of the world, and that therefore we can't
possibly have had anything to do with politics, perhaps . . ."

 

 

Gabriel said no more and listened to the imperturbable silence. Only the
bubbling water in Krikor's nargileh broke it at irregular intervals. It was
some time before Ter Haigasun laid down his chibuk.

 

 

"The Wali, Djelal Bey" -- he thought it over, staring out in front of him
-- "is certainly a great friend of our nation. He has shown us repeated
kindness. And under his government we never needed to fear the worst. . . .
Unfortunately his friendship for us has done him very little good. . . ."
Out of his wide sleeves Ter Haigasun drew a folded newspaper. "Today
is Friday. This is Tuesday's
Tanin
. It's a paragraph in very small
print, pushed away into the corner of the paper." He held up the sheet,
far from his eyes.

 

 

"'According to information received from the Ministry of the Interior,
His Excellency the Wali of Aleppo, Djelal Bey, has been permanently placed
on the retired list.' . . . That's all it says."

 

 

 

 

 

 

5. INTERLUDE OF THE GODS

 

 

At the very instant when, urging his cabman to greater speed, Dr. Johannes
Lepsius reached the great bridge across from Pera, the garden suburb,
to Istanbul, the automatic signal started to ring, the barrier sank, the
bridge trembled like a live thing, broke groaning in two, and its rusty
halves, this side and that, rose slowly up, to allow a warship to proceed
into the innermost harbor of the Golden Horn. "This is really dreadful,"
Dr. Lepsius said, aloud and in German, closing his eyes and sinking back
on to the frayed upholstery of his araba, as though he had given up the
struggle. Yet he was out of the cab in the next instant, had thrust a
few uncounted piastres on the driver, had run (nearly slipping up on
a fruit skin) down the steps and on to the quay, where a few kayiks,
little ferryboats, plied for hire. There was not much choice; only two
phlegmatic old ferrytnen drowsed in their boats, not seeming in the
least to want a fare. Lepsius jumped into a ferryboat and waved across,
in sheer, scurrying desperation, to the Istanbul side. He had still six
minutes till his appointment at the Seraskeriat, the War Ministry. Even
if his boatman rowed with a will, he would need a whole ten to cross
the sound. On the other quay -- so reckoned the impatient Dr. Lepsius --
there could not fail to be a cab-rank. So that from there it need only
take another five minutes to the Ministry. Six from fifteen minutes,
if all went smoothly -- nine minutes late. Very unfortunate, but still
not so bad as all that. . . . And, of course, everything went wrong. The
boatman, pushing like a gondolier, was not to be roused by admonitions,
nor by imploring prayers, from his calm meditation. The boat danced up and
down but would not go forward. "It's the tide, Effendi. The sea's coming
in." Thus did the weatherbeaten Turk define fate, against which there can
be no striving. To make bad worse, a fishing cutter crossed their bows
-- which meant the loss of two more minutes. Dully resigned, impotent
as only a man can feel who finds himself tossed on waves, the German
sank into reflections. He had, for the sake of this one appointment,
undertaken all the fatigue of this journey, come to Constantinople
from Potsdam, besieged the German ambassador day after day, and not
him alone, but every neutral representative. This one appointment had
sent him hurrying to meet every German or American in from the interior,
in every possible quarter of the town, to get further details. This one
appointment had kept him sitting for whole days in the American Bible
Society's offices, had caused him to make himself a nuisance to the
people of the various orders, had sent him, by carefully thought-out
routes, avoiding spies, to meet Armenians in secret rooms. All so as to
be prepared for the great encounter. And now fate played this practical
joke of making him late for it. It was almost enough to inspire belief
in some direct, Satanic intervention. How hard that very pleasant German
naval commander attached to the military mission had worked to get this
conversation arranged! Three times it had been conceded, three times
postponed. Enver Pasha is the Ottoman war god. He does not care to be
ceremonious with such an insignificant antagonist as Dr. Johannes Lepsius.

 

 

So -- the ten minutes had slipped away. Enver would by now have given
orders not to admit this querulous German on any pretext. The game was
lost. Let it be lost! "My own country is fighting for dear life. The dark
rider with the scales flies above us also. What do Armenians really matter
to me?" Johannes Lepsius discarded these spurious consolations with a
short, dry little gasp. No! These Armenians meant a great deal to him --
even more if he dared rigorously to examine his heart -- more perhaps than
even his own countrymen, mad and sinful as that no doubt might be. Ever
since Abdul Hamid's butcheries, since the massacres of '96, since that
mission to the interior, his first days of missionary experience, he had
felt himself especially sent to these unfortunates. They were his task
on earth. And at once he could see a few of their faces. Such faces as
only those beings have who must empty the chalice to its dregs. Christ
on the cross may well have had just such eyes. It was perhaps for them
that Lepsius loved these people so dearly. An hour ago, in the eyes of
the Patriarch, the Armenian chief priest of Turkey, Monsignor Saven,
he had seen, or rather had had to keep turning his face away from,
an ardent hopelessness. And this visit to the Patriarch had made him
late. It had of course been stupid to go back to Pera after calling on
him, to the Hotel Tokatlyan, to change. Yes, but -- he had had to call
on the Patriarch in the long black cassock suitable to a Protestant
clergyman. And, with Enver, he did not want to stress his position,
was most anxious, in that fateful interview, to avoid any appearance of
formality. He knew these Ittihad people, his opponents. A casual tone,
a grey lounge suit, certainty of manner, the hint of powers behind --
that was the proper way to deal with adventurers. And now, the grey
lounge suit had caused all this.

 

 

He ought not to have stopped so long with the Patriarch, could have
got away in a few minutes. Unluckily Dr. Lepsius' forte had never been
systematic concentration. Even his success in helping Armenians at the
time of the Abdul Hamid massacres had been less a matter of thought-out
policy than of passionate insistence on being received. He was still far
too much at the mercy of that youthful vice, of thinking graphically --
"dances of death," "the eternal Jew," "John Bull," etc. Improvisation,
a tendency to rely on the minute -- these, as he knew, were his worst
faults. So that today he had not been able to free himself from the aspect
of that piteous cleric. "You'll be with Enver in an hour." The faintness
of Monsignor Saven's voice told its own story of sleepless nights; it
seemed to be dying, along with his people. "You'll stand before that
man. God bless you! But not even you will be able to do anything."

 

 

"I'm not so pessimistic, Monsignor," Lepsius had striven to reassure.

 

 

But his words had been stopped by a gesture of agonized submission.
"We've just heard today that, after Zeitun, Aintab, Marash, the same
threat of deportation is to be suspended over the East Anatolian vilayets.
So that up to now, apart from the west of Asia Minor, only Aleppo and
the strip of coast from Alexandretta have been spared. You know better
than anyone that deportation is a more painful, more long-drawn-out
kind of death by torture. They say that not one inhabitant of Zeitun
has survived." And the Patriarch's eyes had forbidden Lepsius any
protest. "Leave the impossible and concentrate on the possible. You may
succeed -- I don't suppose you will -- in getting a respite for Aleppo and
the country along the coast. Stress German public opinion, the newspapers
you intend to inform. Above all, don't moralize. It merely provokes him to
contempt. Stick to political facts. Threaten him economically -- that's
your most likely way to make an impression on him. And now, my dear son,
you have my blessing for your noble work. Christ be with you." Lepsius had
bent his head, but the Patriarch had signed his chest, with a wide cross.

 

 

So that here he sat in this heavy boat, ploughing its way through the waters
of the Golden Horn, under its stolid, meditative oarsman. And when at last
they arrived, it was more than twenty minutes late. With one glance
Dr. Lepsius was aware that no arabas waited along the quayside. He broke
into a wry little laugh -- since more than hazard must conceal itself
somewhere within this chain of hindrances. Some opposing power had
taken a hand in the Armenian business, which no doubt must be left to
go on unopposed, and was thrusting a stave in between his legs. He made
no further attempt to find a cab, but began to run, stout, elderly,
conspicuous-looking as he was.

 

 

He did not get far. The squares and alleys of old Istanbul were
thick with holiday-keeping crowds. Along past shops and cafés,
gay with bunting, under befiagged windows, thousands in fez and
tarbush jostled and shoved. What was it? The Allies driven out of the
Dardanelles? Lepsius thought of the distant gunfire which he heard
so often in the night. The big guns of the British fleet, hammering
on the gates of Constantinople. But he remembered that this was the
anniversary of some triumph of the Young Turkish revolution -- perhaps
of that glorious day on which the Committee had killed off all its
political opponents, to seize power at last. Not that it mattered what
they were celebrating; any crowd shouts and brawls. A solid mass of
people in front of a shop. Boys, hoisted on ready shoulders, clambering
up along the shop-front. Next minute a big sign-board came clattering
down. Lepsius, wedged in the crowd, asked his neighbor, who wore no fez,
what all this was about. "No more foreign signs," he was told. "Turkey
for the Turks. All sign-boards, names of streets, and advertisements to
be written exclusively in Turkish from this day on." And this neighbor
(a Greek or Levantine) giggled spitefully. "This time they've demolished
an ally. It's a German business-house."

 

 

A long line of halted trains crawled on. "Really it doesn't matter,"
Lepsius thought, "when I get there now. It's all over." None the less
he put on a spurt, thrusting into the crowd, shoving relentlessly. One
more side-alley, and the square opened out before him. The vast palace
of the Seraskeriat. High rose the tower of Mahmut the Second. And now
the pastor took his time. He walked slowly, so as not to come breathless
into the lion's den. When, fagged out with endless stairs and corridors,
he whipped out his card at the offices of the Ministry of War, it was
only to be informed by a smartly uniformed and very amiable aide-de-camp
that His Excellency Enver Pasha deeply regretted that he had found it
impossible to wait and begged the Herr Doktor to do him the honor of
calling at the Ministry of the Interior within the Seraglio.