Forty Days of Musa Dagh

by Franz Werfel

  "I can't make out why people must be forever eyeing their neighbors. War, government orders, Wali, Kaimakam -- let the Turks do as they please. If you don't worry about them, they won't worry about you. We have our own earth here. And it has distinguished admirers. If you please . . ."

  With this Krikor introduced a young man to his host, a foreigner, who had either been hidden by all the others or whom Gabriel had failed to notice. Krikor rolled out the young man's sonorous name: "Gonzague Maris."

  This young man, to judge by his appearance, was a European, or at least a distinctly Europeanized Levantine. His small black moustache, on a pale, highly alert face, looked as French as his name sounded. His most distinctive trait was the eyebrows, which forked upwards in a blunt angle. Krikor played herald to the foreigner: "Monsieur Gonzague Maris is a Greek."

  At once he improved on this, as though he were afraid of demeaning his guest: "Not a Turkish Greek, but a European."

  This stranger had very long eyelashes. He was smiling, and these feminine lashes were lowered almost over his eyes. "My father was Greek, my mother's French. I'm an American."

  The quiet, almost shy approach of this young stranger favorably impressed Bagradian. He shook his hand. "What extraordinary combination of circumstances -- if you don't mind my calling it that -- brings an American with a French mother here -- of all places?"

  Gonzague smiled again, lowering his eyes. "It's quite simple. I had business for a few weeks in Alexandretta and got ill there. The doctor sent me up to the hills, to Beilan. Beilan didn't suit me. . . . In Alexandretta they told me so much about Musa Dagh that I felt inquisitive. It was a great surprise to me, in the God-forsaken East, to find such beauty, such cultured people, and such comfort as I'm enjoying with my host, Monsieur Krikor. I like everything strange. If Musa Dagh were in Europe, it'd be famous. Well, I'm glad it belongs only to you."

  The apothecary announced, in the hollow, indifferent voice which he used for giving important information: "He's a writer, and he's going to work in my house."

  But Gonzague Maris seemed embarrassed. "I'm not a writer. I send an occasional article to an American newspaper. That's all I do. I'm not even a real journalist." Vaguely, with a gesture, he indicated that his scribbling was no more than an attempt to make money.

  But Krikor would not let go of his victim, who must be used as an asset. "But you're also an artist, a musician, a virtuoso. Haven't you given concerts?"

  The young man's hand was raised in self-defence: 'That's not quite right. Among other things I've been an accompanist. One must try all kinds of things." His eyes sought Juliette's assistance.

  She marvelled: "How small the world really is. How strange that I should have met a compatriot here. You're half French."

  Thanks to Juliette's verve the evening was a very successful one, not to be compared with former gatherings in Villa Bagradian. Most of these rustic Armenians lived Orientally, that is to say they foregathered only in church or in the street. Visits were for state occasions. This cloistered domesticity was the true cause of the women's uneasiness. But this evening they thawed, little by little. The pastor's wife forgot to warn her husband, whose life she devoted her energies to prolonging, and whose sleep must therefore never be encroached upon, that it was time to go home. The mukhtar's wife had come close up to Juliette, to finger the silk of her dress. Mairik Antaram, however, had suddenly vanished. Her husband had sent a small boy to fetch her, since he needed her help in a difficult delivery. It was one of her duties to chase away the old spey-women, who at every childbirth besieged a house to sell magic potions to the mother. In the course of decades Madame Altouni had become the doctor's valued assistant and had ended by taking over most of his practice. "She's better at it than I am," he always said.

  The host took longest to unbend. But little by little he grew convivial. He eyed discontentedly the long table laid with plates of cake, tea and coffee cups, and two carafes of raki. He sprang to his feet. "My friends, we must have something better than this to drink." He went down to the cellar with Kristaphor and Missak to fetch up wine. The younger Avetis had laid down an ample store of the best years vintages. The steward had charge of them. It is true that the heady wines of Musa Dagh did not keep long. This may have been because they were not bottled, but kept, in accordance with old tradition, in big sealed jars. It was a dark golden drink, very heady, similar to the wines which flourish at Xara on Lebanon.

  When they had filled their glasses, Bagradian rose to give a toast. It came out as uncertainly and ominously as everything else he had said that evening: It was good that they should all be sitting here, happy, tonight. Who could tell whether next time, or the time after that, they would still be so carefree! But nobody must let such thoughts spoil his evening. They brought no good with them. . . .

  This toast, or rather this veiled warning, Gabriel had given in Armenian. Juliette raised her glass and looked across at him. "I could understand every word you said. But why so gloomy, my dear?"

  "I'm such a bad speaker," he excused himself. "I should never have made a leader of the people."

  "Rafael Patkanian," the apothecary interjected, turning to Juliette, "Patkanian was one of our greatest popular leaders, a real inspirer of the Armenian people -- and he was the worst speaker you could imagine. He stuttered worse than the young Demosthenes. As a young man I had the honor of knowing and hearing him speak. In Erivan."

  "You mean," Gabriel laughed, "that everything's possible."

  The heavy wine was producing its effect. Tongues wagged. Only the schoolteacher Oskanian still kept the embittered, dignified silence due to himself and his importance. Nokhudian, the man of God, who carried his liquor poorly, defended his glass against the onslaughts of his spouse as she tried to take it away from him. He kept saying: "Why, woman, this is a feast day, isn't it?"

  As Gabriel opened a window for a glance at the night, he felt Juliette behind his back.

  "Are you having a nice time?" she whispered.

  He put his arm about her waist. "Whom have I to thank for it, if not you?" But his strained voice was unsuited to the loving words.

  Wine brought the desire for song. Several people pointed out a young man, one of the teachers -- a disciple of Krikor. His name was Asayan. This wisp of a man was known to have an excellent voice and memory for Armenian songs. Asayan showed all the diffidence of amateurs. He couldn't possibly sing without accompaniment, and his house was too far away to fetch a tar. Juliette had already thought of sending upstairs for her gramophone; to be sure most of the natives of Yoghonoluk already knew this triumph of technical skill. But it was Krikor who settled the matter, with a significant glance at his foreign guest: "We have a professional among us."

  It did not need too much persuasion to make Gonzague Maris sit down to the piano. "One of the twelve pianos in Syria," announced Gabriel. "It was sent from Vienna for my mother a quarter of a century ago. But Kristaphor tells me that my brother Avetis had an expert in from Aleppo to tune it and put it to rights. In the last weeks of his life he played a good deal. And I never even knew he was musical."

  Gonzague struck a few chords. But, as often happens, the professional could not find the right tune for this late hour, the unusual relaxation, the need these people felt to be amused. Carelessly, his head bent forward over the keys, he sat there, cigarette in mouth -- but his fingers became more and more involved in macabre sounds. "Out of tune," he murmured, "horribly out of tune," and was perhaps for that reason unable to disentangle himself from howling discords. A veil of boredom and fatigue descended upon his face, which had looked so handsome. Bagradian quietly observed this face; it seemed no longer boyishly shy, but dissipated and disingenuous. He looked round for Juliette, who had pulled her chair nearer the piano. Her face was suddenly sagging and middle-aged. Softly she answered his questioning expression: "Headache -- It comes from this wine.

  Gonzague suddenly stopped, and shut down the piano-lid. "Please excuse me."

  Alth
ough, to let the others see he was musical, Shatakhian began in highly technical language to praise the foreigner's playing, the evening was really at an end. Pastor Nokhudian's wife a few minutes later set the example for breaking up. To be sure they were to stay the night with friends in Yoghonoluk, but they must set out for Bitias at sunrise. The silent Oskanian stayed on longest. When the others were already in the park, he turned back, to approach Juliette on his short legs, so resolutely, so severely, that she felt a little scared. But he had only come to present her with a big and imposing manuscript roll, written in different colored inks, in Armenian letters, before he vanished.

  It was a passionate rhymed declaration of love.

  Juliette awoke in the night to find Gabriel sitting bolt upright at her bedside. He had lighted his candle and for some time must have been watching her asleep. She could distinctly feel that his eyes, not the candlelight, had awakened her.

  He touched her arm. "I didn't mean to wake you. But I wanted you to wake up."

  She shook back her hair. Her face was amiable and refreshed. "I shouldn't have minded your waking me. You know that. You know I always like to talk in the night."

  "I've been thinking things out . . ." His voice was hesitant.

  "And I've been having a simply marvellous sleep. So my headache can't have come from your Armenian wine. It must have been brought on by the playing of my -- comment dire? -- my semi-compatriot. What a coincidence! Fancy using Yoghonoluk as a spa, and Monsieur Krikor's house as a hotel. But the funniest one of all was that little black-haired schoolteacher who gave me his rolled-up poem. And that other teacher, drawling through his nose. He seemed to think he was speaking such good French -- and it sounded like a mixture of stones being ground and whining dogs. You Armenians have such a funny accent. Even you, mon ami, have it slightly. Oh, well, I mustn't be too critical! They're really such nice people."

  "Poor people. Poor, poor people."

  Juliette had never observed the least sentimentality in Gabriel. All the greater, therefore, her astonishment. She looked across at him in silence. The candle behind his head made her unable to study his face; she could see only the upper half of his body, like a dark mass of carved stone. But Gabriel -- since now, not only candlelight, but the first starry dawnlight fell upon Juliette -- was in the presence of a tenderly radiant being. "Fourteen years in October. The greatest happiness in my life. And yet it was a bad mistake. I ought never to have dragged you away . . . thrust you into a foreign destiny."

  She felt for matches to light her own candle. But he snatched her hand and prevented it. So that again she heard him speak through the formless dark. "It would be best if you could escape. . . . We ought to divorce."

  A long silence. It simply did not occur to Juliette that this mad, incomprehensible suggestion had any serious reality. She shifted nearer him. "Have I hurt you, wounded your feelings, made you jealous?"

  "You've never been so kind as you were tonight. It's years since I've felt so much in love. . . . That makes it all the more horrible."

  He sat up more stiffly, so that the dark mass of his body looked stranger still. "Juliette, you must take what I'm going to say seriously. Ter Haigasun will do whatever he can to get a divorce put through as fast as possible. And the Turkish authorities don't put many obstacles in the way of that sort of thing. Then you'd be free, you'd have ceased to be an Armenian, you could get away from the ghastly fate of my people, in which I've involved you. We could go to Aleppo. There you can place yourself under the protection of a European consul, the American, or the Swiss, it doesn't matter. And you'll be safe, whatever happens here -- or there. Stephan'll go with you. You'll be able to leave Turkey without diffculty. Of course I'll make over my property and the income to you. . . ."

  He had said all this with difficulty, but quickly, so that she should not interrupt. But Juliette's face came close to his. "And are you really taking this madness seriously?"

  "If I'm still alive when it's all over, I'll come back to you."

  "But yesterday we were quietly discussing what was to happen when you got called up. . . ."

  "Yesterday? Yesterday was all an illusion. The world's changed since."

  "What's changed? This business with the passports? We shall be given new ones. Why, you yourself said that in Antioch you heard nothing terrible."

  "I heard all kinds of disturbing things -- but that's not the point. Perhaps, really, very little may have changed. But it always comes suddenly, like a desert storm. It's in my bones. My ancestors in me, who suffered incredible things, can feel it. My whole body feels it. No, Juliette, you can't understand! Nobody could understand who hasn't been hated because of his race."

  Juliette jumped out of bed, sat down beside him, and took his hands. "You're just like Stephan. Whenever he's had a bad dream, he only half wakes up and can't shake it off for the next hour. Why should we ourselves be in danger? What about all your Turkish friends, those charming, sensitive people we knew in Paris, who called so often? Have they suddenly changed into cunning wild beasts? No. You Armenians have always been unjust to the Turks."

  "I'm not being unjust to them. There are some very fine people among them. After all, in the war I got to know the poor people, how good and patient they are. It isn't their fault and it isn't ours. But what difference does that make?"

  The dawnlight had kept increasing; the crest of Musa Dagh, beyond the windows, had begun to sharpen. Gabriel stared up at the mountain. "I've been thinking how odd it is that we should have come here in pursuit of Avetis, who kept escaping us. As though he'd meant to lure me to Yoghonoluk by his death. . . . But no -- really it was you who insisted on coming here."

  It was getting chilly. Juliette's bare feet were freezing. She did not want to argue. "Well -- you see! It was just my obstinacy. That ought to calm you."

  But Gabriel's thoughts were pursuing another object. "Yesterday, for an instant, I felt unshakably convinced that I'd been brought here by some supernatural power, that God has something or other in store for me. My feeling really was unshakable, though it only lasted an instant. The life I've been leading so far can't have been right. It's so pleasant to imagine oneself an exceptional personage -- the only grain in a wheat sheaf, not subject to the law of gravity, but free to wander, without obligations. . . . And so, by His will, through Avetis, God brought me back here. . . ."

  He stopped. For some time she had been peering into his indistinct face. "This is the first time I've seen you afraid."

  Still he did not turn away his eyes from the sharpening crest of Musa Dagh. "Afraid? As I should be of anything supernatural. As a child I used sometimes to imagine a tiny star in the sky growing bigger and bigger, swelling up, coming nearer and nearer, and crushing the earth."

  He shook himself to regain his self-control. "Juliette. It's not for me. It's for you and Stephan."

  Then at last she got very angry. "I simply don't believe in all your bogies. This is 1915. I've never met with anything in Turkey, or anywhere else, but friendship and civility. I'm not frightened of people. But, even suppose there should be danger, do you really think I'd be such a low-down coward as to run away and leave you here to face it? . . . I couldn't even do that if I'd stopped loving you."

  He said no more and shut his eyes. Juliette already wanted to get up quietly. But Gabriel let his head sink into her lap. His forehead was damp and cold. In a sudden burst the birds struck up their shrill dawn twitterings.

  4. THE FIRST INCIDENT

  This sudden weakness and surrender passed as quickly as it had come. Yet Gabriel was transformed since that day in Antioch. He, who for hours together had worked in his room, had now begun only to sleep at home. But then he was so tired out that he slept like a corpse. He did not say another word of the menace which had shaken him so profoundly that Sunday night. Juliette, too, avoided the subject. She was convinced that there was really nothing to fear. Already, in the course of their marriage, she had been through three or four such crises with Gabri
el -- days of depressed, apparently causeless brooding, of heavy silences, which no affection served to dissipate. She knew it of old. At such times a wall grew up between them, and they were strangers, so unapproachable to each other that Juliette felt appalled at the childish recklessness which had let her join her destiny to this strange blood.