Melmoth

by Sarah Perry

  “Don’t be afraid,” said Hassan. “Perhaps a dog has been hit by a tram. It will be over soon.” But the howling went on and after a time they heard in the howling the words of a boy crying for his mother. Hassan put down the knife he held, and said, “Stay here. Let me see what has happened.” When he came back, he had become pale with rage.

  “It’s Asil next door,” he said. “Come back injured from the war. You can see his jawbone, like an animal that died in the desert. Pray to Allah he dies soon.”

  “It is a tragedy,” said their father Altan. “Every day I pray you will be kept at your desks in your departments.” Nameless watched as his father, who was mild and even-tempered—who, so far as they knew, had led a life of quiet civility—spat upon the floor. “I have seen it,” he said. “The mess a gunshot makes. I have heard the weeping of the women. I pray you will be spared it.”

  Nameless and Hassan grew anxious and mistrustful. When, for the Easter festival, Anoush Agopian, who lived five doors down, brought plaited Armenian chorek bread and painted eggs as a neighborly gift, Nameless turned her away at the door. “Better that way, I think,” he said to his father, who was stitching buttons on a white linen shirt. “If you lie down with the blind, you get up cross-eyed.” When Loys Gregorian stumbled and broke his ankle against a kerbstone, Nameless and Hassan—who really had never by either mischance or misdeed caused a moment’s pain to anyone—laughed and jostled the fallen man and went on their way.

  Soon it seemed this anxiety and this mistrust had entered the waters of the Bosphorus and was drunk by the gallon. On the tram in the mornings Hassan said to Nameless, “It is important you see that to be a Turk is to inherit the kingdom. And there can be no false heirs, or the kingdom will be divided.” Young men gathered in city cafés and beneath the trees in small town squares and formed societies dedicated to the promotion of the Ottoman ideal. Hassan joined Turkish Hearth. Nameless joined Turkish Strength. In the evenings they laughed and played chess and fought over which was the superior society. Each walked a little more briskly in the evenings, when it was warm, and they strolled on Galata Bridge over Golden Horn, greeting their neighbors and friends, eating pastry soaked in honey. “Do not neglect your studies,” said their father, presenting them with a volume of The Divan of Nejati, “For though every leaf of every tree is verily a book, for those who understanding lack doth earth no leaf contain. The battle of the mind is the war which can never be won.”

  Those young men with their ardor and their societies and their pamphlets became in time the nation’s ruling party. Sultan Abdul Hamid II, who was called Sultan the Damned, was dislodged from his throne, and took up residence in the Palace of the Lord of Lords on the Bosphorus, where he turned his hand to carpentry. “Union and Progress!” said Hassan to Nameless, standing straighter than he’d ever done before. “It cannot be achieved without a degree of unpleasantness I suppose, but think of the end and not the means!” Then: “Keep it from our father. He is old. There are things he need not know.”

  The time came when neither Nameless nor Hassan walked so often on Galata Bridge over Golden Horn. It seemed the skills of the humble civil servant were no less essential to the pursuit of unity and progress than those of the secret militias said to roam the villages out in the east (“I heard there’s a revolt among the Armenians,” said Nameless to Hassan. “I heard they are making weapons that could destroy whole masses of Turkish women and children! So we need these militias, to keep our borders safe!”) In the spring of 1915, Nameless—in a fresh suit his father had made: double-breasted, gray flannel, with a white silk handkerchief in the left breast pocket—was instructed to compile, in the precise and unambiguous language for which he was so admired, a memorandum relating to the movement of certain elements of the population from one place to another. This he drafted five times, mindful as never before that with every syllable he contributed personally to the dawning of a new age: of Turkish men and women living in unity beneath the sickle moon on the scarlet flag. Never did he allow himself to grow grandiose. Nobody could have been more humble than Nameless, none more modest. “I am just a cog turning in a big machine,” he said. And after all what had changed? Flowers still bloomed in their beds in Taksim Square. Everything he did seemed both momentous and inconsequential.

  The memorandum was drafted, and approved, and signed in triplicate; it was signed by his superiors, and by his superiors’ superiors. By morning it awaited attention on desks further afield than Nameless himself had ever traveled; within the week those black marks on that white paper became deeds, not words, and 235 Armenian intellectuals were deported from Constantinople to Ankara.

  “It is only a precautionary measure,” said Nameless to Hassan at breakfast. They ate lavash bread with sour cherry jam and sheep’s milk cheese. “It is only the troublesome sort. Intellectuals, you know? The writers of pamphlets and papers. If you had an infection in your toe, would you not rather lose your foot than your whole leg?” On the windowsill three tomato plants were coming into flower.

  “I suppose,” said Hassan, warming his hands on the silver coffee pot which his mother had been given by her mother on the morning of her wedding, “further orders might be made, to preserve the peace of the population. But after all it is not their land, is it? It is yours, and mine, and our father’s, and our father’s father’s.”

  Altan Sakir, who always woke early to work, stopped the movement of his foot on the pedal of the sewing machine and said, “My sons, beware the pride of nations. There were those whose land this was before your ancestors were born, and there will be those who claim it when your name has passed from memory. A bird may as well make its nest in a tree and say: no other bird shall nest here, for these branches are mine alone.”

  Later that same year Nameless and Hassan Sakir—whose diligence, humility, good nature and rather frail appearance endeared them to all their colleagues—were posted together to the coastal town of Trebizond. They were twenty-five and twenty-six years old.

  (MUST I GO ON?)

  They were neither pleased nor displeased with their new positions. There was no advancement in wage or status, and it meant leaving behind their home—the treadle of the sewing machine which had attended them all their lives, the tomatoes on the windowsill they’d never eat now, the perfectly matched games of chess with their father—but it was a change of air, and Trebizond offered a view of the Black Sea, and of a monastery set high up within the cliff. What was more, Trebizond was a little nearer to what each had come to think of as the heat of battle: sometimes at night it was possible to hear gunshot and the screams of men. These troubled Nameless, who was peaceable by nature and breeding, but allowed him to feel that at his life’s end he would feel that at least he had counted for something: that his diligence and exactitude, if dull, had been part of a glittering whole.

  Nameless found his work in Trebizond arduous. It was necessary to devise a practical means of moving ten thousand Armenians into the interior, where they could do no mischief. “The trouble is,” said Nameless to his brother in the small apartment they shared not far from the Black Sea shore, “that a strong laboring man can do more than a mother who has just given birth. Besides, mothers fuss, don’t they? They fuss about the children and so on, and grow emotional, when really it is only a question of moving house. Didn’t we move house, without complaint? Sometimes life is not as easy as one might like, but the noble thing is to keep going.”

  In the end, it was decided (Nameless, at a table with seven other men, in the suit his father had made, dipped his pen in ink and continued taking minutes) that the men should be despatched first, to be put to some useful purpose. The women and the children, meanwhile, would be sent to Mosul Vilayet: a long walk, certainly, but no harm would befall them there. (“Mosul,” said a senior official to Nameless, knowing he was not well traveled, “is not unpleasant, and they can swim in the Tigris.”)

  “And what of the children too young to walk?” said Nameless, and put down hi
s pen. He’d often thought he might one day have a son of his own, and the longing made him tender. “Might we give them to good Muslim families?”

  The senior official surveyed Nameless for a time. Then he smiled, and said, “You have a tender heart, Sakir! It is a good solution. The infants will be kept here in Trebizond.”

  Emboldened by praise, Nameless said, “I understand the American consulate has been poking about. Let them take children, too. Let them bear the burden. Why should it be carried by the Turks alone?” Then he returned to his desk (it was spring, and the scent of wildflowers under the open window was like that of a perfume bottle broken on the path) and with all his usual diligence set out the required minutes and memoranda.

  That night, four hours before dawn, he was woken by an undulating cry. The air was still, but the sound seemed carried on a wind which rose and receded and rose again; now it was so loud it dwelt there in the room, on the carpet—now it faded, and could not be heard no matter how hard he strained into the dark. It was voices, he supposed, and many of them, though whether of men or of women he couldn’t say; then on a single report from a firearm it stopped and the silence that came after was absolute. He could not sleep again. In the morning, eating eggs and bread, his brother told him that a column of Armenian men bound for Gumush-Karna had been set upon by a band of militia, who’d cut their throats and left their bodies for the wild dogs. “It’s highly regrettable,” said Hassan. He put salt on the yolk. “It’s really very regrettable indeed. But what can we do, brother? Are you and I responsible for villains and fanatics coming down from the mountains with knives in their belts?”

  Nonetheless in the weeks that followed both Nameless and Hassan were altered. They were made of that material most essential to government machinery: soft enough to be pliable, hard enough not to break. But there in Trebizond it became necessary to grow harder, and harder still. How else could they continue to sign and countersign, to prepare agendas and correspondence, when in the midday heat there came into the room the scent of a butcher’s floor which has not been properly washed?

  When they spoke it was only to recall, as if from the distance of many years, not many months, how they’d played chess with their father Altan Sakir, and how it had been Nameless the younger and not Hassan the elder who’d first beaten him. Of the work which each undertook, they never spoke at all.

  One evening towards the end of July Nameless prepared the final document of his career. It was brief. It related to the movement of Armenian children from the care of the American Consulate to an institution some distance from Trebizond, where they would join many other children of their heritage. It’s better for them this way, he thought. Better to be with their own kind. Who knows what they eat, or what stories they tell, or which God they worship? This document he signed, and folded, as he had been taught, very neatly, matching corner to corner, and placed in a tray to be sent to its recipient. Returning to his rooms, he slept well, as men do when their work is done.

  Then he fell ill with a sickness that had come to the town. Three days passed and he did nothing but vomit green froth into a bowl his brother held. In the night he dreamed a woman watched him. In the dream he saw first nothing but a column of black smoke rising as if from a great distance away. Then each time there would come a sudden sharp shift in perspective, and he would see that it was not far but near—very near—and coming closer; and not smoke, but many layers of fine black fabric moving as if in the wind. Dreaming, he knew that inside the garments was a woman’s body, which he could not see, but which he somehow desired; and above it a face, which he could not see, but which he somehow feared. When he woke he would find he had risen as if to greet her, and would always fall back whining against the wall. “It is her!” he said to his brother, who brought him water on a tray. “It is Melmat, the woman who watches! All along she has been at my shoulder—behind me—watching me then, and watching me now! Hassan, if you love me do not leave me here alone!” So Hassan brought a chair into the room and watched his sleeping brother, marvelling at what vivid and material dreams shook his body, then in the heat of the night, and the weight of his own weariness, he too fell asleep, but dreamlessly.

  Hassan Sakir and his brother who is now Nameless—young men of modest gift and modest ambition; who admired and respected their father Altan Sakir, and had been the pride of their mother Aysel Sakir; who all their lives had undertaken their work with diligence and skill, and would have shrunk at harming even a mad dog—were woken at the same moment by the ringing of bells. It echoed from the Black Mountains above the Black Sea and shook the glass in the window frames. First Nameless and then Hassan woke, and stood amid the sound which entered the room like water and washed up against the walls. “It is the monastery!” said Hassan.

  “How can it be?” said Nameless. “They said it was abandoned, and all the Christian monks gone home to Greece!”

  Drearily they stood in that small room halfway between sleeping and waking. “It will wake the whole town,” said Nameless; but when he stood at the open door he saw not one lighted window, and heard not one raised voice.

  “We should go,” said Hassan.

  “Does it ring for us?” said Nameless.

  “I think so,” said Hassan. “We should go.” But they did not go yet, only stood hand in hand as they had when they were very young, before their mother died, when they’d followed her through the market with their eyes fixed on the scarlet scarf that covered her hair. The bells tolled louder, enough to wake the deepest sleeper in the deepest bed, but there was no sound of men waking or women throwing open windows, or dogs and children running in the street.

  “We should go,” said Nameless, and they went. Overhead each star was extinguished one by one, like flames pinched out at the wick. The temperature of the air was the temperature of their blood. The bells tolled and drew them down through the town towards the Black Sea. Nameless held his brother’s hand and said, “Look, do you see it! Allah be merciful—you must see her!” What Hassan saw then was this: not a woman, but the mere shadow of one, moving up ahead. It paused when they paused—moved on, as they moved on—then hurried on to a street corner, between places of business and worship, and seemed somehow to lay in wait. Sometimes it sank against the wall as if weary, and sometimes pulsed and throbbed and grew darker as if it were a cavity into which all the wickedness of the world had been poured. “It is her,” said Nameless, very calmly and quietly, and on they went.

  The town ended—the path went down to the shore—the black cliffs of the Black Mountains rose up from the black water and there was no moon. The monastery high up on the cliff was a coat of white paint on the rock. Then the bells stopped ringing and there was the silence of a storm that has blown itself out. “It is Melmat, I tell you!” said Nameless. “She had been watching—all along she has been watching, when we thought her just one of Father’s tales—we must go down! How can I stand here knowing she is waiting for me?”

  They went on. “What is this I see?” said Hassan. “Has a ship gone down and lost its cargo, and it’s all washed up on the shore?” Sacks were scattered all across the bay. They lay there singly or in groups of two or three; some were large, and well-stuffed, others lay flat against the sand. Hassan bent to look and saw they were hessian, and tightly tied with rope. “A merchant ship, perhaps,” he said: “And here are sacks of wheat or bolts of cloth.”

  “Do you hear her?” said Nameless, and Hassan heard: a deep low keening without hope of consolation that struck each man silent. Then the largest of these sacks moved, or seemed to move—it shifted against the sand, then altered its shape, very slowly; stretched upward, expanded, until they saw clearly against the low sky a woman standing there. She wore a long dress of such fine dark stuff that it lifted and fell all about her as if she were submerged in water. Her hair was dark and heavy and it covered her face. She held something soft and dark in her arms and sometimes she lifted it to her breast like a mother nursing a child. “I can hear her,
” said Hassan. Then, quickly as an indrawn breath, the woman crossed the twenty feet between them and stood very close by. The fine black cloth across her breast rose and fell as she breathed; she bent to the bundle in her arms and keened and crooned at it. Then with a swift hard motion she raised her head and the brothers saw her face. Nameless could not speak. It was the face he had sought and dreaded in equal measure as he dreamed in his bed: shadows shifted across the skin, which was now dark and now pallid as wax; the lips were full and drawn back from her teeth. Her eyes were like upturned bowls of glass within which coils of bluish smoke were moving. Under them the bones were visible and cast gray shadows on the skin. When she spoke, her voice was sibilant and soft.

  “Brothers,” she said. She lifted the bundle she held and crooned to it. “Brothers, didn’t you expect to find me here? Don’t you know me? Don’t you know my name? I, who saw your mother’s pain as she gave birth? Didn’t you see my shadow on the page as you went about your work? Didn’t you feel me at your shoulder as you sharpened your pens into knives?”

  It had always been Hassan’s way to grow angry at false accusations. He said: “What is it you say we have done? Why have you brought us here? We have nothing to do with you.”

  “If you have nothing to do with me,” said the woman, “how do you know my name?”

  The wet sacks at the water’s edge lifted and moved. “We have nothing to do with you,” said Hassan. The woman lifted the bundle she held. She patted it and crooned at it and pressed her lips to it and Nameless saw that her mouth was stained with red. Then she tugged at the cord that tied the sack and moved aside the fabric and the brothers saw the face of an infant. Her cheeks were soft and flushed and her hair curled against her forehead. Her eyes were open and they were the color of the cap of a mushroom. She was naked, and somebody had cut her throat. The woman held out her arms—“See what you have done?”