The Second Achmed Abdullah Megapack
Page 15
Yes, yes, she’ll kill herself. But, captain, now’s your time to think of your former life, to think of all life meant to you, of all you’ve accomplished.
PLOTKINE (with a grim laugh)
What? I should think of what my life meant to me? Of my advancement in the army, I suppose, what? new uniforms parties given for Lisaveta an accolade by Tsar Ferdinand. Why, it’s all over, man and when I think of it, it seems all so horribly prosy, so horribly cheap and indifferent. Does it con sole you to think about your old life?
TOUATI
Yes. I think that I’ve always done my duty, in life and in death. Also I’ve obeyed my Faith. That’s enough.
PLOTKINE (sneering)
All for Turkey. All for the Crescent, what?
TOUATI (quietly)
No. All for myself. If I learned anything, it was for myself. If I achieved anything, it was for myself. And thus it was for Turkey and for my Faith, even thus. What more could I do?
PLOTKINE
And your wife?
TOUATI
The day I left for this war, I asked her to buy her widow-dress.
PLOTKINE
Do you think she’ll kill herself like Lisaveta?
TOUATI
No. She’ll marry again. You see, we have no children. And now so many of us Turks died in this war so we need more children, more sons to fight again a few years hence—to die again—perhaps to win—
PLOTKINE
Oh, you wish to reconquer what you have lost?
TOUATI
Of course.
PLOTKINE
Yes, I see; you love your country. And I love mine. But must we die on the battlefield to prove our love?
TOUATI
It’s the best proof.
PLOTKINE
No. It’s the last proof.
TOUATI
The last proof only for ourselves. There are others will come after us.
PLOTKINE (suddenly, with a loud, gurgling voice)
Oh, Mary, Mother of Jesus, pray (He dies.)
TOUATI (calls)
Oh, captain, captain (Pause.) Oh, he’s dead. I knew when he asked me, that he’d go out before I would. A shot through the chest of course. But why should I have told him? (Smiles.) And I don’t think Lisaveta will kill herself. (Pause.) After all, it’s quite indifferent one way or the other. (Laughs.) Queer people, these Christians.
(Lance-Corporal Nadj Haniech appears from the distance; Touati hears his footsteps, and calls to him.)
TOUATI
Ho, there!
HANIECH (running toward him)
Coming, coming!
TOUATI (looking up at him)
No use trying to get me to the hospital, corporal. But I am suffering. I also would like to smoke—got a cigarette about you?
HANIECH
Yes, captain. (He gives a cigarette to Touati and lights it.)
TOUATI (smoking)
Just wait until I’ve finished my smoke and then (points to Haniech’s revolver) you don’t mind, do you? You see, I am suffering and I can’t be saved…
(Haniech nods his head, squats on his heels near Touati, and loads his revolver, while Touati finishes his cigarette.)
CURTAIN
THE JESTER
Fate wrote the first chapter of this tale before either Zado Krelekian or Mohammed Yar came to New York; long before the transatlantic steamship lines, seeing their European immigration business dwindle, thanks to improved wage conditions, began to invade Asiatic Turkey with agents who spoke the many languages of that motley and illy patched empire, who gave untold promises and were guilty of untold lies, who plastered ancient walls, tumbledown mosques, and battered, crumbling bazaars with garish six-sheet posters that pictured the New World as an immense block of real estate, entirely paved with minted gold and especially protected by the blessed hand of Ali.
Fate wrote the tragedy of this tale when, shortly after Creation itself, it made a compromise with Al-Shaitan the Stoned, the Father of Lies, by planting the seed of hatred in two races, Armenian and Kurd, the first Christian, the second Moslem; a curse which in the swing of the centuries stretched beyond the western vilayets of the Ottoman Empire, across the ragged, frayed basalt frontiers into the Caucasus and Southern Russia, the plains of soft, lisping Persia, west into the yellow, purple-blotched glare of Egypt, and west again…even beyond the sea, following the churned lane of Cunarder and White Star boat, into New York, there to abut in the maze and reek and riot of half a dozen tired, melancholy old streets that, a few blocks away from the greasy drab of the river, cluster toward the Rector Street Elevated station, toward the pride of the Wall Street mart, as far even as busy, bartering, negligent Broadway.
Smelly, wheezy, threadbare old streets.
Gray, flat, dull. Powdered here and there with the mottled brick-red of a once patrician house, a stable or a garage that generations earlier had been a stately residence. Streets branching west, north, and south, in an irregular pattern of rays; rays of wretched, lumpy cobblestone and wretcheder gutters; rays paralleled by rickety frame dwellings that bring you straight back to the days when square-rigged clippers rode the waters and when men imported their liquor from Holland and called it genever.
Tragic streets, fit background for a tragic tale.
Not that this tale is entirely tragic.
For both tragedy and comedy are a matter of view point, perhaps of race and faith and prejudice (a wise Arab once said that prejudice is but another name for race and faith); and if your sense of humor be slightly crooked, slightly acrid, in other words Oriental, you will laugh at the thought of Zado Krelekian cooped up in the back room of his house, with windows nailed down and curtains and shutters tightly closed both summer and winter, the doors hermetically sealed, with fear forever stewing in his brain, in his very ears and eyes, as he imagines he can see or hear the approach of those whom he dreads, praying at times so as to be on the safe side of ultimate salvation, praying quite fervently to the God and the many saints of his ancient Armenian church, in whom he does not really believe.
You will also laugh at the picture of Aziza watering the starved geraniums in her window-box and looking from her balcony across Washington Street for the return of her lover; with her braided bluish-black hair that looks as if cigarette smoke had been blown through it, her immense, opaque eyes, her nar row, pleasurable hands, her tiny feet, the soles stained crimson with henna, the big toes and the ankles ablaze with gold and precious stones.
And finally you may smile tolerantly at the thought of Mohammed Yar, once a ragged, thin-mouthed, hook-nosed Kurd tribesman, but dressed today in swagger tweeds that bear the Fifth Avenue label, his brown, predatory fingers encircled by rings of great value, his shirt of silk and embroidered over the heart with an extravagant monogram in lavender and pale green, his shoes hand-stitched and bench-made; lording it gloriously and arrogantly over Krelekian’s Armenian clerks, spending Krelekian’s money, and at times kissing Aziza, Krelekian’s wife.
“There is no power nor strength save in Allah, the One!” he says with typical Moslem hypocrisy every time he kisses her pouting lips. Always he smiles when he kisses her. Always he snaps his fingers derisively in the direction of the closed shutters behind which Zado Krelekian shivers and prays.
Thus he had laughed and snapped his fingers that day, half a year earlier, when he had walked down the length of Washington Street, supple shoulders thrown back, great, hairy hands swinging up and down like flails, elbowing out of his path Armenian and Syrian as if he were back in his native Turkish village of Khinis, up in the hills, between Erzerum and Biltis.
There was angry murmuring at his back; curses; occasionally a fist furtively clenched. But none challenged his insolent progress. For the man was lean and thin-mouthed and hook-nosed: a Kurd of Kurds; and a dozen years of American freedom cannot wipe out the livid fear of the centuries.
“Out of my way, sons of burnt fathers!” snarled Mohammed Yar, studying the sign-boards above the stores, Armenian
all, Kabulian and Jamjotchian and Nasakian, and what-not, advertising all the world’s shopworn goods at a shopworn discount; and then, taking a sallow, raven-haired youth by the neck and twirling him like a top: “Where does Krelekian live—Zado Krelekian?”
The evening before, the youth had learned in the Washington Street Night School about all men’s being born free and equal, and so he mumbled something hectic and nervous as to this being a free country, and what did the other mean by—
“Answer me, dog!” came the Kurd’s even, passion less voice. “Where is the house of Zado Krelekian?” He tightened his grip.
The Armenian looked up and down the street, but no policeman was in sight. He deckled to fence for time, since he did not trust the stranger’s intention.
“What do you want with Zado Krelekian?” he asked.
Mohammed Yar slowly closed one eye.
“I want words with him. Honeyed words, brother of inquisitiveness. Words smooth as silk, straight as a lance, soft as a virgin’s kiss. Krelekian is a friend of mine, much beloved.”
“A friend of yours? Ahi!” sighed the Armenian, in memory of past happenings in his native vilayet.
“Was there ever friendship between your race and mine?”
“Indeed, there was not, goat of a smell most goatish!” came the pleasant rejoinder. “But this is America. A free land, say you! A land of brothers, say I! Therefore, tell me, or—” with a significant back sweep of his right hand “I may think too much of this being a land of brothers, and, being older than you, may feel morally forced to chasten your reckless spirit with many and painful beatings, as be comes an elder and loving brother solicitous of his younger brother’s welfare. Do you get me?” he wound up disconcertingly in plain American English.
“Yes, yes, yes!…Zado Krelekian lives at 84 West Street.”
“Is he rich?”
“Yes, yes!”
“Is he happy and honored and contented?”
“Yes. None more so.”
“Good! Good! And—is his wife still with him?”
“Yes.” The young Armenian essayed a lopsided smile. “She is with him, and she is beautiful and…”
“Silence, dog! Do not besmirch a woman with foul praise, or—”
But the Armenian twisted quickly away from his grip and ran down the street, rubbing his shoulder, while Mohammed Yar turned into West Street, looking at the numbers of the houses until he reached Eighty-Four.
Eighty-Four was a shop, swollen and bulbous with merchandise that tumbled across the counter and through the open door, spilling into the street itself in a motley, crazy avalanche. There were bolts of silk and linen and wool; wooden boxes filled with Syrian and Greek sweets; figs and dates, raisins from the isles of Greece, and brittle, yellow Persian tobacco tied up in bundles; pyramids of strange, high-colored vegetables; slippers of flimsy red and orange leather. Dried fish there was, and incense in crystals; oil of rose and jasmine and geranium in slim bottles picked out with leaf gold; carved walking-sticks from Smyrna; inlaid metal work from Damascus; black and white veils heavy with twisted silver and gold, rugs from many lands, coffee and tea and what-not.
The whole seemed prosperous, and prosperous, too, seemed the youngish, stout Armenian merchant—about a year Mohammed Yar’s junior—who stood in the doorway, hands in pockets, contentedly puffing at a fat, crimson-and-gold-banded cigar.
Peaceful he looked, and rosy, and well fed; pleased with himself, his neighbors, and the world in general. And then, quite suddenly, his knees began to tremble. An ashen pallor overspread his features. He dropped his cigar. Up went his right eyebrow and his upper lip in a curling, nervous twitch, and with a rapidity that belied his solid bulk he tried to rush into his shop.
But he was not quick enough.
For Mohammed Yar’s hairy hand fell on his shoulder, and he heard the Kurd’s raucous voice:
“Good morning, friend!”
“Go-goo—go-ood morning,” stammered Krelekian, feebly trying to twist away; and the Kurd broke into low laughter.
“Allah!” he said. “Is this the way in which you welcome the man who has traveled many miles for the pleasure of shaking your honest hand, of feasting his eyes on your honest face? Shame on you, Zado of my heart!”—and he slipped his arm through that of the other and begged him to lead the way where they could sip their coffee and smoke their pipes in peace—“and speak of our home in Turkey, of the olden days when you and I were even as twin brothers rocked in the same cradle!”
Krelekian sighed. He looked to right and left, at his clerks who were behind the counter attending to the wants of the half-dozen customers. But not a word did he utter in protest. He walked along by the side of the Kurd; for beneath the man’s ragged, shabby, hand-me-down coat he could feel the sharp angle of the crooked dagger-handle pressing into his side—like a message.
“Ah!” gently breathed Mohammed Yar as he sat down on a carved, inlaid Syrian chair in the back room of the shop, facing his host, who was still as livid as a dead man’s bones, still furtive-eyed, shaking in every limb. “This is good! Good, by mine own honor! It is as if we were back in our home village, in Khinis of the hills, friend of me!”
He made a great gesture with his hairy, high-veined hand, that cut through the clustered shadows of the little room like a dramatic incident, that brushed through the sudden, clogged stillness like a conjurer’s wand, sweeping away the drab grime and riot of West Street, and conjuring up the glare, the acrid sweet ness, the booming, dropping snow chill of the little hill village where both had lived—and loved.
* * * *
Clear across Zado Krelekian’s livid realization of the present slashed the picture of the little town, Khinis, on the way to Erzerum, and what had happened there between him, not then a well-fed, rosy, prosperous New York shop-keeper, Mohammed Yar, not then dressed in the slops of the New York water front, and Aziza, the blue-haired girl with the henna-stained feet and the anklets that tinkled, tinkled mockingly.
Three years ago. And one day. And he had tried to forget that day!
Three years rolled back like a curtain. And the happenings of that one day, popping back again into the cells of his remembrance, sitting in a solemn, graven row, and jeering at him because of the pitiful futility of it!
A cold, raw hill day it had been, with cottony snowflakes thudding softly and with the old mosque of Hajji Ali the Sweetmeat-Seller raised on its broad marble steps as on a base, lifting the apex of its wide horseshoe gate forty feet up in the air, and the gate way—how well he remembered it all, here in the flat, melancholy drab of West Street!—covered with arabesques of mosaic faience in green and peacock blue and deep rose and bearing its holy message in conventionalized mushakil Arabic characters.
“In the name of Allah, the One, the All-Merciful, the All-Knowing, the King of the Day of Judgment!” read the inscription, and always he had feared it, he and the others of his race, like something terribly pious and terribly ironic, since it expressed the arrogant, harsh faith of the Kurd masters who ruled them, and beat them, and robbed them, and at times killed them because of the sport of it.
Well he remembered how he had trembled—even as he was trembling now—when Mohammed Yar, dressed in sweeping woolen cloak, leather sandals, and tall, rakish fur cap, had come out of the mosque of Hajji the Sweetmeat-Seller, had whispered a rapid word to him, and had walked on by his side, towards the coffee-house of Malakian, where they had sat down.
He remembered his own brazen words.
Yes. Brazen.
For, careful man, he had taken with him that day Musa Lahada, the lean, sardonic Turkish Jew who was attached as dragoman to the British Consulate and thus protected by the Union Jack.
“I saw and heard the whole thing, Mohammed Yar,” he had said. “I was passing through Nahassim Street, and I heard the quarrel, the insults. I saw the blow—”
“He insulted me first!” the Kurd had cried. “That cursed Frankish infidel! He struck the first blow!”
“Armenian witnesses! Fathers of pigs, and sons of pigs! Liars…”
“Armenians? Yes! Fathers of pigs, and sons of pigs? Perhaps! But not liars, Mohammed Yar. They saw the thing which is true, and they will swear to it. And Armenians or not, pigs or not, they will be believed by the British consul. For the man whom you killed was an Englishman, and…”
“And—?” Mohammed Yar had asked with a side long glance.
“Death is bitter—bitter as the fruit which grows near the Bahretlut!”
“But—must there be death?”
“No, Mohammed Yar. I am willing to stuff my mouth with silence for a consideration, supplemented by an oath.”
“Name the oath first,” the Kurd had laughed. “It is cheaper than the consideration—when dealing with an Armenian, O Father of Compound Interest!”
“Possibly cheaper.” Krelekian had inclined his head. “Here it is, for you to take or leave, according to how you prefer life or death. You must swear on the Koran, by your own salvation and that of your parents, by the honor of your mother and your sisters, by the blood of the Prophet and the horns of the Arch angel Gabriel you must swear a most sacred oath that, as long as you live, there shall be no killing nor beating in revenge of what I shall ask of you, that never for what is happening today between you and me will you take toll with steel or bullet or whip or fist—with blood—nor with pain—neither you nor your tribesmen nor your friends! My life must be sacred to you, and inviolate.”
“Good! I swear it. Yes, yes, yes”—as the Armenian had insisted on the exact phraseology. “Never shall I take toll, neither I nor my friends nor my tribesmen, neither with steel nor bullet nor whip nor fist. I swear it on the Koran, by my own and my parents salvation, by the honor of my mother and my sisters, by the blood of the Prophet and the horns of the Archangel Gabriel! May my right hand dry on my body—may I eat dirt—may God strike me dumb and deaf and blind if I break this solemn oath! And now—what is the consideration for your silence in that little killing matter?”