by Franz Werfel
"Fear," he said, "is the surest way of exciting our enemy to slaughter us. But isn't it rather sinful, and perhaps even more dangerous, to keep the people ignorant of their fate? How long can the secret be kept?"
Ter Haigasun seemed to be listening into the distance. "The papers are still not allowed to report these things, so that foreign countries may not know anything of them. And in the spring there's so much work to do that our people have no time and scarcely go anywhere. So that, with God's help, we can be spared anxiety for some little while. But one day it will come. Sooner or later . . ."
"Will come? How do you see it coming?"
"I don't see anything."
"Our soldiers disarmed? Our leaders arrested?"
Ter Haigasun, in the same quiet voice, as though it gave him secret pleasure to torment both himself and his listener, concluded his story. "They have even arrested Vartkes, the bosom friend of Talaat and Enver. Some of them have been deported. They may be dead by now. All Armenian newspapers have been shut down, all Armenian shops and businesses closed. And, as we sit here, there are fifteen innocent Armenian men hanging on fifteen gallows on the square before the Seraskeriat."
Bagradian rose so excitedly that he overturned the straw-seated chair. "What's the real meaning of all this madness? Can you make it out?"
"I can only see that the government is planning such a stroke against our whole people as even Abdul Hamid never dared."
Gabriel glared as angrily at Ter Haigasun, as though he had been faced with an enemy, a member of Ittihad. "Are we really so helpless? Must we really hold out our heads to the noose in silence?"
"We are helpless. We must bow our heads. We may perhaps be allowed to cry out."
This damned East, with its kismet, Bagradian thought in a flash of rage. At the same instant his consciousness was invaded by a thousand names, connections, possibilities -- politicians, diplomats, his personal friends, Frenchmen, Englishmen, Germans, Scandinavians. They must arouse the whole world! But how? The trap had closed. The mists returned. His words came out very subdued. "Europe won't stand for it."
"You see it through foreign eyes." Ter Haigasun's passive calm was unendurable. "These are two Europes. The Germans need the Turkish government more than it needs them. And the others can't help us."
Gabriel stared at the priest, whose alert cameo-like face nothing could disturb. "You are the spiritual father of thousands of souls" -- Bagradian's voice had almost a military sharpness -- "and your whole skill consists in the ability to withhold the truth from people, just as we hide it from children, or the old, to spare them. Is that all you can do for your flock? What else can you do?"
The attack seemed to have pierced the priest to the quick. His hands on the table slowly clenched. His chin sank on to his chest.
"I pray . . ." Ter Haigasun whispered, as though ashamed of letting be seen by a stranger the spiritual struggle which day by day he waged with God for the safety of his flock. Perhaps this grandson of Avetis Bagradian was a freethinker, a scoffer. But Gabriel paced the room, breathing heavily. He struck the wall with the flat of his hand, suddenly, so hard that plaster came flaking down. "Pray then, Ter Haigasun" -- and still like an officer giving an order -- "pray . . . But God helps those who help themselves."
The first incident which revealed these secret happenings to Yoghonoluk occurred that very same day. It was a warm, cloudy day in April.
Gabriel, at Stephan's request, had had a few roughly carpentered gymnasium fittings set up in the park. Stephan was naturally athletic. His father often joined his exercises. Shooting at the target was their favorite, though Juliette, to be sure, preferred croquet. Today, immediately after lunch, at which Gabriel had still not said a word, Avakian, Stephan, and his father went out to the range set up outside the park enclosure on a little woody hillock of Musa Dagh. There Gabriel had had a transverse gully, about fifty feet long, cleared of its undergrowth. Under a high oak there was a lying-board wedged down into the soil, from which to aim at the target fixed to a tree at the farther end of the gully. Avetis had left his brother well supplied with arms -- a box of eight hunting rifles of various patterns, two Mauser infantry rifles, and a full supply of ammunition.
Gabriel was a fairly good shot, but for five cartridges he got only one bull's-eye. The very short-sighted Avakian kept clear of the contest, so as not to put too hard a strain on his pupil's respect. But Stephan proved a crack shot, since, of seven cartridges fired out of the smallest of the hunting rifles, six pierced the playing card which served as bull's-eye to the target, and four hit the face of the figure. It excited Stephan greatly to beat his father. He would have liked to go on shooting till the evening, had Gabriel not suddenly broken off: "That's enough."
Gabriel's state of mind was one he had never before experienced. He could not think of anything quite like it. He felt insipid. His tongue was dry and heavy in his mouth. His hands and feet were cold. All the blood seemed to have left his head. But these were the mere outward signs of some change at the very centre of his being. "I don't feel ill," he reflected, having waited some time to see what would happen. "All I feel is that I'd like to get out of my skin, strip off my body." At the same instant came the senseless longing to run away, far away from this, no matter where. "Let's go for a short walk together," he decided. He did not want to be left alone. If they left him, he would have to walk on and on in short, quick steps, farther and farther, and never turn round till he had walked right out of the world.
Avakian undertook to carry the rifles back to the house. The son and father left the park and went down the road to Yoghonoluk, not ten minutes' walk. Suddenly Gabriel felt like a very old man, his body so heavy that he leant on Stephan. They could hear the noisy buzz of voices even before they came into the church square.
Armenians, in contrast to Arabs and the other clamorous races of the East, are quietly reticent in public. Their ancient destiny in itself is enough to inhibit their taking part in noisy gatherings, or themselves producing them. But here and now about three hundred villagers had collected in a wide half-circle, besieging the church. Among these men and women, peasants and craftsmen, there were several who emitted long, hoarse objurgations and shook their fists. No doubt these curses were aimed at the saptiehs, whose shabby lambskin busbies rose above the heads of the crowd. Apparently these protectors of law and order were trying to clear a space before the church, so as to leave the steps and entrance free. Gabriel seized Stephan's hand and forced a way through the shoal of people. At first they saw only a tall, ragged fellow, who had crowned his black cap with a straw wreath, and whose right hand waved the head of a sunflower, broken off short. This apparition, obeying some rhythm of its own, executed with deathly seriousness a dance of wearily thudding steps. But this was in no sense the dance of a drunkard; that was at once plain.
The crowd did not even notice this dancer, waving his sunflower-head. Their eyes were set on another picture.
On the steps of the church four people squatted. A man, two young women, a little girl of twelve or thirteen. All four were staring out into the distance with a dazed expression -- their eyes seemed unaware of their surroundings, of the excited crowd, the apothecary's house immediately opposite.
The man, still young, with a thin, crazed-looking, unshaven face, wore a long, grey alpaca cassock, of the kind worn here by Protestant pastors. His soft straw hat had rolled down the steps. The ends of his trouser-legs were tattered. His broken boots, the thick coating of dust on his face and cloak, showed that he must have trudged for several days. The women, too, wore European dress, and not by any means the cheapest, as far as could be judged by their present state. The one sitting beside the pastor -- doubtless his wife -- looked as though she might faint or go into convulsions at any minute, since suddenly she fell backwards on to the steps and would have bumped her head against the stone had her husband not put out an arm to support her. This was the first, still strangely jerky movement of the group.
The other
woman, still in her earliest youth, looked beautiful, even in such a plight. Her little face was thin and livid, but the eyes had in them a feverish shimmer of vitality; the full, soft lips were parted, gasping for air. She was in obvious pain, must be wounded or have met with an accident, since her left arm, which looked contorted, hung in a sling. Finally the child, a perky, sparrow-like little creature, had on the striped smock worn by children in orphanages. This little girl stretched her feet convulsively out from under her frock, obviously concerned to touch nothing with them.
"Like a hurt animal," Gabriel thought, "stretching its wounded paws away from its body." And indeed the poor child's feet looked very swollen, purple, and covered with open wounds. Only the dancer with the sunflower-head seemed sound of limb and full of strength.
An older man came running across the square. Apparently he had been called away from his work, since he still had on a blue apron. Stephan recognized Tomasian the builder, who had supervised the improvements in the villa. Young Stephan had often loitered round him inquisitively, and Tomasian had proudly told him of Aram his son, a very respected man in the town of Zeitun, a pastor, and the head of the orphanage there. So this must be the son, thought Stephan. Old Tomasian stopped, with raised inquiring arms, in front of the group.
Pastor Aram came back to his surroundings with difficulty, sprang to his feet with forced agility, and did his best to wear an appeasing smile, as though nothing very serious had happened. The women, too, stood up, but not so easily, since one had a broken arm and the other, it was apparent, expected a child. Only the little girl, in her striped orphanage smock, sat on, squinting suspiciously up at her fellow sufferers. Impossible to make out the sense of their sudden questions and sounds of woe. But for an instant, as Pastor Aram embraced his father, he lost control. His head sagged on to the old man's shoulder, and a short, hoarse sob of grief became fully audible. It came and went, and still the women did not speak. But it spread, like an electric shock, through the crowd. Whimperings, sobs, loud clearings of the throat. Only oppressed and persecuted peoples are such good pain-conductors. What has befallen one has been done to all. Here, in the church square of Yoghonoluk, three hundred Armenians were shaken by a grief, the story of which they had not yet heard. Even Gabriel, the stranger, the Parisian, the cosmopolitan, who had long since overcome his origins -- even he had to force down something which throttled him. He glanced surreptitiously at Stephan. The last tinge of color had faded out of that crack marksman's face. Juliette would have been startled, not only at her son's pallor, but at the wild look of uncomprehending horror in his eyes. She would have been scared to see her child look so Armenian.
Meanwhile Dr. Altouni had joined the group, as well as Antaram Altouni, the two schoolmasters, who had been called away from their classes, the mukhtar Kebussyan, and, last of all, Ter Haigasun, just back from a visit to Bitias, on his donkey. The priest called out a few words in Turkish to the saptieh, Ali Nassif. None of the crowd were to be let into the church. He, however, bundled the Tomasian family and the little orphan through the door. The doctor and his wife, the teachers, and the mukhtar followed. The crowd and the sunflower-dancer, who sank down on the steps and went to sleep, remained in the square.
Ter Haigasun led the exhausted people into the sacristy, a big, light room containing a divan and some church benches. The sacristan was sent for wine and hot water. The doctor and his wife got to work at once. The girl with the broken arm -- Iskuhi Tomasian, the pastor's sister -- was examined. So were the wounded feet of Sato, the little orphan whom Pastor Aram had brought from Zeitun.
Gabriel Bagradian stood apart, holding Stephan's hand, a stranger -- for the present at least. He listened to the confused questions, the broken answers. Thus, bit by bit, he heard the disordered tale of Zeitun, the tragic history of this town, of Pastor Aram, and of his flock.
Zeitun is the name of an ancient hill town on the northern slopes of the Cilician Taurus range. Like the villages around Musa Dagh, it was almost entirely inhabited by its original Armenian population. Since, however, it was a town of some importance, of about thirty thousand inhabitants, the Turkish government had garrisoned it with considerable numbers of troops and saptiehs, officers and officials, with their families -- as they did wherever it seemed necessary to keep non-Turks under surveillance. Only such people as Bagradian, whose lives had been spent in Paris or some other capital in the West, could still have hoped for any reconciliation of opposites, any stilling of a hatred in the blood, or "triumph of Justice," under the Young Turkish banner. Gabriel had once been friends with a certain number of journalists and lawyers whom the revolution had helped into the saddle. In the days of conspiracy he had sat up all night, arguing with them till dawn in Montmartre cafés, with assurances of eternal friendship, messianic prophecies of the future, exchanged between Turks and Armenians. In defense of a fatherland with which he had had very little to do, he, a married man, went to the war -- a notion which had not even occurred to most of the Turkish patriots in Paris. And now? Their faces were still in his mind; some flame, still not quite extinguished, of reminiscent friendship made him ask himself: "What? Can such old friends be my mortal enemies?"
Zeitun was the crude answer. It should be pictured as a high, many-creviced rock, crowned by a savage-looking citadel, honeycombed with the streets of an ancient town. A haughtily repelling pyramid of ways piled one above the other, only its modern quarters spreading their tentacles a little way out into the plain. Zeitun had been a perpetual thorn in Turkish flesh. For the earth has both its holy places, its sites of pilgrimage, which frame the human mind to devotion, and its natural fortresses, redolent of hate and defiance, whose spirit is such as to rouse to seething point the blood of an opposing racial fanaticism. In Zeitun such hate had its definite reasons. First, until far into the nineteenth century the city had governed itself. But more unpardonable still was the memory of its astounding conduct in the year 1898.
In those days the good Sultan Abdul Hamid had called into being the Hamidiyehs -- predatory bands of nomads, robbers, convicts, let out of jail for the purpose -- with their sole object the formation of a troop of valiants restlessly bent on provoking "incidents," with which he hoped to stop the mouths of the Armenian reformers. Everywhere else these bands were distinguished for their successes -- in Zeitun only did they encounter bloody defeat instead of achieving what had been promised them, an enjoyable and remunerative massacre. Worse still, even the battalion of regulars hurried to their assistance was driven back with heavy losses out of the narrow streets. Not even the siege with full armament following this rout brought the least success. Zeitun remained impregnably rebellious. When at last European diplomacy intervened on behalf of these brave Armenians, and ambassadors to the Sublime Porte, which, spattered with dishonor, had no alternative, achieved full amnesty for Zeitun -- the Turk set his teeth, abysmally humbled.
All military races, not only the Ottoman, have encountered defeat at the hands of their own kind and forgotten it. But to have been beaten by a race of merchants and craftsmen, people whose ideal had never been military -- a race of bookworms -- it was more than any soldierly people can forget. So that the new government, now that the old had been disposed of, still had old scores to pay off in Zeitun.
And what better chance of paying off old scores than the Great War? Martial law and a state of emergency were proclaimed. Most young men of Zeitun were at the front or in distant barracks. Repeated house-to-house searches, in the earliest days of the war, had entirely disarmed such inhabitants as remained.
Only one thing was lacking: a pretext.
The mayor of Zeitun was a man named Nazareth Chaush. He was a typical Armenian mountaineer -- haggard, bent, sallow, with a drooping bushy moustache and a hooked nose. But he was ailing, no longer young, and had long done his best to avoid election. He could scent the reek of future holocausts. The lines from his nostrils sharpened daily as he toiled up the steep hill to the Hükümet, to receive the latest orders of th
e Kaimakam. His hand, round a rough stick, was deformed by rheumatic knots. Nazareth Chaush was highly intelligent. He had seen at once that in future there could be only one policy -- that of being on guard against provocation. Nothing should be allowed to cast any slur on the patriotic integrity of Armenians. All traps must be skilfully avoided. One was, and remained, a thoroughgoing Ottoman patriot. Not that Nazareth Chaush really bore any grudge against Turkey, nor did any other inhabitant of Zeitun. Turkey was the destiny of the race. It is futile to bicker with the earth on which one has to live, with the air one breathes. He cherished no childish dream of emancipation, since, after all, the choice lay between Tsar and Sultan and it was as hard to make as it was superfluous. He remained in agreement with the words which had achieved a certain celebrity with Armenians. "Better perish physically in Turkey than spiritually in Russia." There was no third way.
