Orhan's Inheritance (19 page)

Mairig sits with her back against a tree, her legs spread wider than Lucine has ever seen them. Aram lies squirming beside her, his swaddling clothes loosened. Mairig is holding something tight in her two hands, but Lucine cannot see what. Lucine stands before Mairig in the darkness, taking in her matted hair and sunken eyes. She shudders at the sight of this stranger who has replaced her mother.

“Did they take our water?” asks Mairig, pushing the words past her parched lips.

Lucine does not know how to respond. They have had no water since the incident with Firat and the broken jug. Bedros runs before her and wraps his arms around Mairig’s shoulders.

“Listen,” says Mairig, pushing Bedros away from her. “You should leave now. Let me rest. Take good care of the baby. I will catch up later.”

“Catch up? When?” asks Lucine.

“In a little while. Or you can return for me when you find some water. That would be better.”

Bedros looks to Lucine. They both know she isn’t making any sense.

Mairig reaches into her bosom where a few gold coins are hidden. “Here. Take it. The rest is with the baby.”

“We should stay together,” Lucine insists.

Mairig shakes her head. Then she does something she’s done before. She closes her mind to the world and to her children who remain in it.

“What will you eat?” Lucine whimpers.

“This,” says Mairig, looking down at her hands. In the moonlight, Bedros sees the New Testament open in her palms. Mairig’s delicate fingers lift a page and rip it loose, releasing a sound like a slap in God’s face. She crumples the page into a tiny ball and, lifting it up to her lips, presses it into her mouth.

“What are you staring at?” she snaps. “If God will not eat his words, then I will do it for him. Now go. And take Aram with you.”

CHAPTER 21

God’s Will,
Inşallah

LUCINE LEAVES MAIRIG
on the open road, under the eye of a merciless god. She leaves her own heart there too. It lies beating in the cradle of Mairig’s cupped palms. She tells herself that the heart is a burdensome organ and leaving it behind is the best thing to do. The rest of her body moves forward, following the hunched backs of other deportees but her thoughts are like a whirlwind, circular and fierce. She’s glad
The Missionary Herald
is gone. She was stupid to take it in the first place. What good did she think it would do her on the march? For that matter, what good will Kemal’s drawing do, still tucked inside her dress? Where would Aram and Bedros be now if she had listened to him?

She carries herself, head heavy, reluctant lids lowered.

When she does look around, Lucine sees everything differently now. Everywhere she looks, in every face and every pebble, is an opportunity for death or survival. Bedros and Aram are no exception. She sees hope’s ghost circling around their shrunken faces. Every now and then, Bedros tries to pry his hand from hers, but she only squeezes harder. Aram is fastened to her back now, wrapped and propped up by their only blanket. Two long sticks protrude from the blanket, parallel to the ground. She plans to use them to hold up the blanket, transforming it into a shield against the biting desert wind. Two largish leaves are pressed flat against her belly. She can use them to clean the baby when they finally rest. Eyes shrunken, lips dry, she isn’t sure if he will survive.

Bedros does not ask for water. He does not ask her when they will go back for Mairig. He does not ask her anything and for this she is most grateful. His silence is so merciful that if she had a heart left, there would be tenderness in it.

One of the old women from Tokat walks beside them. Lucine keeps her eyes fastened to the earth and does her best to discourage conversation. “Daughter, water,” the woman says, extending an open palm.

Lucine shakes her head and looks away.
I am no one’s daughter now
.

A man she does not recognize, one of the few male deportees left, turns around.

“There is no water yet, Auntie,” he says. “But we are soon approaching the Tokma Su River. There will be water there.”

“Eh,
Inşallah,
” she responds with a sigh. “May God will it.”

God’s will.
Inşallah
. The phrase rings in Lucine’s ears like a familiar and angry bell. This mysterious and vengeful god and his unpredictable will have been evoked every day of her life. In moments of grief and exaltation, in casual comments exchanged without much thought, and in solemn whispers uttered every evening in the Lord’s Prayer. Lucine hears it whispered to her as an infant.
May she be a lucky child, Inşallah.
And it continues from there, every day, until this dirty miserable day when she is walking hungry and desperate with no parents and two younger siblings, the sun at her back and dust at her feet. Suddenly she is swollen with anger. If God’s will materialized as a pitcher of water, she would throw it back up to the sky. Wasn’t it his will that placed her here? His will that killed Hairig? His will that took Anush, broke Mairig’s spirit, and caused her to give up? No, Lucine will no longer pay any attention to him or his will. She discards his will, exhaling it out of her body in the form of her breath. She drops it to the earth and steps over it, feeling lighter and more in control.

The caravan from Sivas follows a narrow bend in the road that widens suddenly, revealing the bridge at Tokma Su and the vast plain beyond. A slow-moving line of oxcarts as far as the eye can see proceeds before them. Lucine thinks longingly of their own dumb animal, whose burden she now carries herself. The people with oxcarts are members of an earlier flock, deportees from some other province of Turkey who share the same fate. As they approach the bridge, Lucine begins to see the bodies of those who came before them, who succumbed to hunger or thirst and now lie dying or dead on the side of the road.

To her immediate right, a pair of vultures pulls at the intestines of a woman’s body. The larger one is perched on the woman’s chest, his black tail feathers batting at what was once her chin. Lucine places a hand over Bedros’s eyes.

Neither one of them mentions Mairig, but the image of her is there before them, perched under a tree, an open invitation to friend and foe alike.
Perhaps Hairig’s ghost will hide her
. It is a comforting thought and one Lucine holds on to. His words drift back to her now:
Sometimes we have to be like a riverbank, twisting and turning along with the earth, withstanding swells and currents. Enduring.

The plain on either side of the bridge is dotted with villagers, their white
şalvar
pants blowing in the wind. Some launch insults and stones. The more ambitious pick at the bodies of those not yet dead. Two village women, their heads covered in piety, think nothing of stripping a fallen deportee of her clothing. The younger of the two does the stripping, while the older one checks for hidden seams and pockets filled with loot.

Lucine removes Aram from his place on her back and presses him to her chest, her arms forming a makeshift fence around him.

Miss Graffam runs up and down the bridge, trying to make sure no one is badly hurt. She looks and behaves so differently than she did in Lucine’s classroom; gone are her pressed skirts and even more pressed manners. The calm authority of her once-serene face is replaced by wild eyes. The only thing familiar about her now is the big hat on her head. It impresses a handful of Kurdish villagers enough to sell her some water, which she offers to her former students. Lucine accepts without a word. Putting the wet ladle to her lips brings forth a kind of anticipation akin to joy, but her swollen tongue lets in only a mouthful of water at a time. It’s as if her throat forgot how to swallow. Lucine does her best to drink what she can, taking care not to make eye contact. The days when she strove to catch her teacher’s eye are gone. Now she wishes only to be invisible.

She dips the corner of Aram’s swaddling cloth in the water and puts it in his mouth. Aram’s chapped lips suck urgently at the wet cloth for a few moments but his face, full of anticipation, goes red when there is no milk to be had. He turns left, then right, his head thrashing, lips searching for sustenance. Within seconds, he moves from a state of anxiety to anger. He cries with his mouth wide open, exposing the flashing red ball hanging at the back of his throat. There are no tears, no snot. Not a drop of liquid from his body. Lucine doesn’t bother rocking him or singing a lullaby, as Anush would have done. She simply moves forward, one foot in front of the other, eyes scanning the road ahead. Her body stays true to this linear trajectory while her mind turns around and around in her skull, like a whirling dervish.

Arsineh, the butcher’s wife, doubles over in pain. Her water broke this morning, but no one seems to care. She is squatting down now and wailing between breaths. Butcher Berberian is stooping at her side, minus his sack of dried meat, which disappeared in the night along with almost everything else. The years of severing animal limbs have not prepared him for this, a woman’s job. The deportees stop marching. Standing, Berberian looks around in vain for Iola or Mairig or any woman willing to help. Lucine averts her eyes from him.

The gendarme closest to them approaches. He nudges the butcher with the butt of his rifle to keep moving. Without a word, Berberian refuses. He stands with his body facing the gendarme and his eyes still on the crouching Arsineh. The gendarme whistles to his companion who is walking on the other side of the caravan.

“Hey, girl or boy?” he asks.

“Who the fuck cares?” his friend answers.

“I’ll give you three
para
s if you guess right.”

His companion smiles broadly. “A wager then,” he says. “Boy.”

The two gendarmes stand above Arsineh, who is breathing harder than ever. She grunts long and hard. She grasps her knees and then gets on all fours, like an animal. Berberian runs to the back of the caravan, toward Miss Graffam, to get some help.

The gendarme leans against his rifle and waits for the results.

“What is the hold up back there?” the commander on horseback yells from the front of the line.

The gendarme does not respond.

“Hurry up, you bitch,” his companion says to Arsineh.

She lets out a long wail, raking the dry earth with the fingernails of her left hand. Then silence as she keeps pushing. Five minutes go by, then ten. Intervals of grunting and silence, all while the entire world waits. In the distance, the commander’s horse neighs as he makes a sharp turn toward the commotion.

The gendarme places the flat part of his foot on Arsineh’s shoulder and pushes her onto her back. She pulls her knees up in defense, but it is not enough to stop his bayonet from piercing her stomach and slicing it like a ripe piece of fruit.

Though there is blood everywhere, no sound escapes from Arsineh’s lips. Her eyes remain open as the blood seeps out of her.

“You owe me three
paras
,” says the gendarme.

Just then Berberian arrives with Miss Graffam at his heels. He screams and rushes toward the gendarme, knocking him on his back, not far away from the dying Arsineh and her unborn son. Berberian’s meaty fists pound into the gendarme’s face. Over and over again, until a single bullet, launched from the gun of the commander on horseback, plunges into the butcher’s neck.

Lucine presses Bedros and Aram’s faces to her chest and squeezes her own eyes shut. She doesn’t want to see where Berberian will land when he falls. She doesn’t want to see anything ever again.

“WE ARE GOING
to be flies, Bedros,” Lucine whispers to Bedros. “Do you want to be a fly?”

“A fly?” asks Bedros.

“Yes. We’re going to pretend that this long line of marchers is a slow-moving serpent and we three are flies on its back. Soon we will fly away. Do you think you can do that?”

“Yes,” he says simply. It is all she needs.

They come to the end of the bridge, where the rest of the company of Sivas is gathered near the river. Groups of people from Amasia and Samsun are also waiting there. A young woman with one long, unruly braid rushes toward the river only to be intercepted by a gendarme.

“Keep away. All of you,” he shouts to the deportees.

Miss Graffam, who has been bandaging someone’s leg, stands up to confront him. He sees her quick steps and points his bayonet in her direction.

“You, no more,” he says.

“The river is only a few meters away,” she insists. “We will go single file.” She says the last two words in English, holding up her finger to signify one person.

The gendarme interprets the gesture as an insult to his manhood. He says something about not being one of her students. He curses with gusto, stopping only when his commanding officer approaches.

“What’s the problem here?” the commander asks.

“Your man won’t let us drink,” Miss Graffam says. Her hands do not rest on her hips the way they did when children disobeyed her at the school. They hang low at her sides in what Lucine interprets as exhaustion and defeat.

“I believe your pitcher is full, madam.”

“Yes, but one pitcher is hardly enough for everyone.”

“It is for their own protection,” the commander says.

“For their protection,” repeats Miss Graffam.

“Young ladies in the previous caravan were deliberately drowning themselves in the river,” he says. “We can’t have that, can we? Our job is to protect you, all of you.”

“
Protection
is not the word I’d use to describe what has been happening here,” she says. Her teacher’s hands are at her hips again. It is a mistake and Lucine wishes she could warn her.

“I do not condone what happened earlier,” he says, pointing back to where Arsineh and her family now lie. “But the truth is, they would have died eventually anyway.”

“You do not condone?” Miss Graffam raises her voice.

“We are doing our best, madam,” the commander says, his face reddening. “I have one man for every five hundred deportees.”

“Yes, and why is that?”

“Why?” The commander raises his voice above hers. “Because we are at war, that is why. We are soldiers, not mother hens.” He steps closer, his face centimeters away from Miss Graffam.