Forty Days of Musa Dagh (24 page)

 

 

Young Stephan naturally rejoiced at the very thought of this new arrangement.
Lately, as he admitted to his father, he had scarcely been able to fix
his mind on what the good Avakian was saying. He, the boy from the Paris
lycée, the Hellenist and Latinist, much preferred an Armenian village
school. Such complaisance was not due merely to the boredom of Stephan's
lessons with Avakian. His very soul had become confused, and yet alert,
ever since Iskuhi and Sato had been their guests. Sato had already got
him into mischief. One morning she and Stephan had suddenly vanished into
the wilds, not coming back till well after lunch. Since Sato seemed to be
threatened with dire consequences, Stephan had gallantly taken all the
blame, insisting that they had lost their way on the Damlayik. Juliette
had "made a scene" not only with Avakian, but also with Gabriel, and
had forbidden her son so much as to speak to Sato in future. The waif
had been banished from the drawing-room and told to stay in her room
when she was home. All the more frequently therefore had Stephan found
himself drawn to Iskuhi, who was still not cured, though she too had long
been out of bed. He would squat at her feet as she lay in a deck chair in
the garden. He had so many things to ask her. Iskuhi had to tell him all
about Zeitun. Yet whenever Maman came upon them, they were silent as a
pair of conspirators. "How they all draw him to them!" reflected Juliette.

 

 

The schoolhouse of Yoghonoluk was imposing. As the largest school of the
Musa Dagh district, it comprised four classes. Ter Haigasun had entrusted
their superintendence to Shatakhian. That teacher, on his own initiative,
had added continuation classes to those of the usual village school.
In these he taught French and history while Oskanian taught literature
and calligraphy. But even this was not enough. There were evening classes
for grown-ups. Here such a universal sage as Apothecary Krikor displayed
his light. He lectured on stars, flowers, beasts, on geology, and on
the nations, poets, and sages of antiquity. As his habit was, he drew
no clear distinctions between these things, but bathed them all in the
effulgence of one magnificent fairy-tale of science.

 

 

Shatakhian drew Gabriel aside. "I don't quite understand you, Effendi.
What can you expect your son to learn here? I should say he knew more
than I do about most subjects, though I did study for some time in
Switzerland. But I've vegetated here for years. Just look at all these
children. They're like Hottentots. I don't know whether they'll be a
good influence."

 

 

"It's just their influence that I don't want him to miss, Hapeth Shatakhian,"
Gabriel explained -- and the teacher wondered at this father who seemed
so stubbornly set on turning his son from a good European into a little
Oriental.

 

 

The room was full of children and of parents come to enter their names.
An old woman, pushing a little boy in front of her, approached Shatakhian.
"Well, Teacher, here he is. Don't thrash him too much."

 

 

"You hear?" Shatakhian turned to Gabriel, with a sigh over this wilderness
of superstition, medievalism, and darkness of the spirit, which he had to
spend such laborious days in combating.

 

 

It was arranged that Stephan should come to school three times a week.
His chief task would be to put the finishing touches to his written
and spoken Armenian. Sato was consigned to the infant's class, composed
mostly of girls and all much younger than the sorry orphan of Zeitun. Even
after his second day at school Stephan came home in a very bad temper.
He wasn't going to let them go on ragging him about these stupid English
clothes. He was going to wear exactly the same as all the others. In a
towering rage he insisted that the local tailor should be commissioned
to make him the usual entari-smock, with an aghil-belt, and the loose
shalwar-trousers. These demands entailed a long dispute with Maman.
It remained undecided for several days.

 

 

 

 

Now that he had no Stephan to teach, Samuel Avakian had another, entirely
different occupation. Gabriel passed him all the rough notes which he had
been collecting for many weeks and asked the student to reduce them to
one comprehensive, statistical statement. Avakian was not told why. His
first job was to classify under various headings the population of all the
villages, from Wakef, the lace village in the south, to Kebussiye, the
bee-keeping village in the north. The information gathered by Bagradian
from the village clerk of Yoghonoluk and the other six village elders
was to be arranged and checked. By next morning Avakian had the following
precise table for Gabriel:

 

 

Population of the seven villages, classified according to sex and age:

 

 

583 babes in aims and children ..... under 4 years of age
579 girls .......................... between 4 and 12
823 boys ........................... between 4 and 14
2074 females ........................ over 12
1556 males .......................... over 14

 

 

This census included the Bagradian family, with dependants. But, besides
such lists, more exact classifications were drawn up, giving the number
of families in each village according to occupation or craft, indeed
from every conceivable angle. But it was not only a matter of human
beings. Gabriel had tried to find out the number of head of cattle in
the district. That had been by no means an easy task, an only partially
successful one, since not even the mukhtars knew the exact figures. Only
one thing was certain. There were no big livestock, no oxen or horses.
On the other hand, every well-to-do family owned a couple of goats and a
donkey, or a riding and sumpter mule. The larger herds of sheep, owned
by individual breeders of communes, were driven, in the fashion of all
mountaineers, up on to the quiet meadow pasturage -- sheltered meadows
where they stayed from one shearing to the next in the care of shepherds
and shepherds' boys. It proved impossible to get any exact idea of these
herds. The industrious Avakian, to whom every task was a boon, went
zealously forth into the villages and had already transformed Bagradian's
study into a kind of statistics bureau. Secretly he rather scoffed at this
very elaborate hobby, by which a rich man was attempting to fill up the
days of an indefinite period of suspense. Nothing seemed too trifling for
this pedant, who had obviously conceived the idea of writing a scientific
memoir on the village life around Musa Dagh. He even wanted to know how
many tonirs, kneading-troughs walled into the ground, there were in the
villages. He investigated the harvests minutely and seemed to be worried
by the fact that the mountain folk imported their maize and the reddish
Syrian wheat from Mohammedans down in the plain. It seemed to annoy him
that there should be no Armenian mills, either in Yoghonoluk and Bitias or
elsewhere. He even ventured to trespass on Krikor's preserve and inquire
as to the state of the drug supplies. Krikor, who had expected to display
his library, not his pharmacy, traced the curve of the roof with a pair of
disillusioned fingers. On two small shelves bottles, jars, and crucibles
of all kinds were set out, painted with exotic inscriptions. It was all
there was to suggest a chemist's shop. Three big petroleum jars in a corner,
a sack of salt, a couple of bales of chibuk-tobacco, and some cheap
ironmongery indicated the more active side of the business.

 

 

Krikor proudly tapped one of the mystic jars with his long bony fingers.
"The whole pharmacopoeia, as St. John Chrysostom pointed out, can be reduced
to seven primary substances: lime, sulphur, saltpetre, iodine, poppy,
willow-resin, and bay-oil. It's always the same thing in hundreds of
different disguises."

 

 

After such a lesson in contemporary pharmaceutics Gabriel made no further
inquiries. Luckily he had a fairly extensive medicine chest of his own.
But, more significant than all this, was the incident of the small arms.
Chaush Nurhan had already dropped some dark hints on the subject.
Yet, the instant Gabriel tried to broach it with village notables,
they beat hasty retreat. One day, however, he assailed Mukhtar Kebussyan
of Yoghonoluk in his best parlor and pinned him down: "Be frank with me,
Thomas Kebussyan. How many rifles have you, and what pattern are they?"

 

 

The mukhtar began to squint horribly, and wagged his bald pate.
"Jesus Christ! Do you want to bring ill-luck on us all, Effendi?"

 

 

"Why should I, of all people, seem so unworthy of your confidence?"

 

 

"My wife doesn't know it, my sons don't know it, not even the schoolteachers
know it. Not a soul."

 

 

"Did my brother Avetis?"

 

 

"Your brother Avetis certainly did, God rest his soul. But he never
mentioned it to anyone."

 

 

"Do I look the sort of person who can't keep his mouth shut?"

 

 

"If it comes out, we shall all be slaughtered."

 

 

But since Kebussyan, for all his squintings and waggings of the head,
could not manage to get away from his guest, he ended at last by
double-bolting the parlor door. In a frightened hiss he told his story.
In 1908, when Ittihad had gone over to revolution against Abdul Hamid,
the Young Turkish agents had distributed weapons to all districts and
communes of the empire, especially to the Armenian districts, which were
regarded as the chief supporters of the revolt. Enver Pasha had of course
known all about it and, when war broke out, his instant order had been
to disarm the Armenian population. Naturally the character and methods
of the government officials concerned had made a great difference to the
way in which the order was carried out. In such vilayets as Erzerum or
Sivas, hotbeds of provincial zeal for Ittihad, unarmed people had been
forced to buy rifles from the gendarmes, simply to hand them back to the
government. To possess no arms in such a district was merely considered a
cunning attempt to evade the law. But here, under Djelal Bey, it naturally
had all gone far more smoothly. That admirable governor, whose humane
instincts were always in rebellion against the edicts of the pretty war
god in Istanbul, carried out such orders very negligently, where he could
not simply allow them to disappear in his wastepaper basket. This mildness
usually found its echo in the administrative methods of his subordinates,
with one harsh exception -- the Mutessarif of Marash. The red-haired
müdir of Antioch had arrived one day in January in Yoghonoluk, with the
chief of the Antioch police, to collect all weapons. He had gone away
again quite peacefully on receiving the smiling assurance that no such
weapons had been distributed. Luckily the mukhtar of those days had not
given the Committee's agents a written receipt.

 

 

"Very good" -- Gabriel was delighted with the mayor -- "and are these guns
worth anything?"

 

 

"Fifty Mauser rifles and two hundred and fifty Greek service-carbines.
Each has thirty magazines of cartridges, that is, about a hundred and
fifty shots."

 

 

Gabriel Bagradian stood reflecting. Really that was scarcely worth talking
about. Had the men in the villages no other firearms of any kind?

 

 

Kebussyan hesitated again. "That's their business. Lots of them hunt.
But what use are a few hundred old blunderbusses, with flint locks?"

 

 

Gabriel rose, and held out his hand to the mukhtar. "Thank you, Thomas
Kebussyan, for having trusted me. But, now that I know, I'd like you to
tell me where you've hidden them."

 

 

"Must you really know that, Effendi?"

 

 

"No. But I'm curious, and I don't see why you should keep that secret,
now that you've told me all the rest."

 

 

The mukhtar writhed in inner conflict. Apart from his brothers in office,
Ter Haigasun, and the sexton, there was not a soul who knew that secret.
Yet there was something in Gabriel against which Kebussyan could not
hold out. He unburdened himself, after desperate admonitions. The chests
containing these rifles and supplies were in the churchyard of Yoghonoluk,
buried in what seemed the usual graves, with false inscriptions on
the crosses.

 

 

"So now I've put my life in your hands, Effendi," the mukhtar moaned as
he opened the door again for his visitor. Gabriel answered him without
turning round:

 

 

"Perhaps you really have, Thomas Kebussyan."

 

 

 

 

Thoughts at which he himself began to tremble kept haunting Gabriel
Bagradian. They had such power to move his heart that he could not
escape them, day or night. Gabriel saw only the first steps, only the
parting of the ways. Five paces on from where they branched, and all
was darkness and uncertainty. But in every life, as it nears decision,
nothing seems more unreal than its own aim.

 

 

Yet was it easy to understand why Gabriel, with all his roused-up energy,
should have moved only about this narrow valley, avoiding any avenue
of escape that might still have been open to him? Why are you wasting
time, Bagradian? Why let day after day slip by? Your name is well known,
and you have a fortune. Why not throw both these into the scales? Even
though you are faced with danger and the greatest difficulties, why not
try to reach Aleppo, with Juliette and Stephan? After all, Aleppo is a
big town. You have connections there. At least you can put your wife and
son under consular protection. No doubt they've been arresting notables
everywhere, banishing them, torturing them, putting them to death. Such
a journey would certainly be a terrible risk. But is it any less of a
risk to stay here? Don't lose another minute, do something before it's
too late to save yourself!