Forty Days of Musa Dagh

by Franz Werfel

  But how had the "Our Father" changed? Each word was a gulf deeper than the eye could measure. Even at the words "us," "ours," his head swirled. Who dare still say "us," since Christ, who first bound the "us" together, created it, went to heaven on the third day? Without Him it is all no more than a stinking heap of shards and bones, as high as half the universe. Lepsius thought of his mother, of the words which, after his baptism, she had written fifty-six years ago in her diary: "May his name, Johannes, for ever remind me that it is my sacred duty to bring him up a true Johannes, one who really loves his Lord and walks in His footsteps. . . ." Had he become a real Johannes? Was he really full to the brim of that deep trust in God which cannot be named? Alas, such trust threatens to crumble as the body declines. His diabetes had come back again. He would have to be careful what he ate. Above all, nothing sweet, no bread or potatoes. Perhaps Enver, by forbidding his journey to Anatolia, had prevented his becoming any worse. But what was the hotel porter of the Tokatlyan doing here? And since when had he worn that lambskin officer's kepi? Had Enver sent him? Politely the porter handed him a teskeré for the interior. It was an autographed photo of Napoleon. And yes, of course, the first convoy of exiles must be waiting for him outside the hotel. All his friends would be there, Davidian and all the others. They were smiling and beckoning to him. "They all look jolly well," thought the pastor. And indeed the worst, most horrible reality has always a compensation at the heart of it, if only one can look at it steadily. On the banks of a river they halted, under wildly overhanging rocks. Why, they even had tents with them. Perhaps, sub rosa, Enver had made a few small concessions. When they had all lain down to rest, a tall Armenian man, his clothes thickly caked with slime, came over to him. He spoke queer, ceremonious, broken German: "See -- this charming river is the Euphrates, and these are my children. But you are to stretch your body across it, from bank to bank, so that my children may have a bridge to cross by."

  Lepsius pretended this was a joke, and retorted: "Well, you and your children'll have to wait a bit, till I've grown a little." But at once he began to grow, with delightful celerity. His hands and feet spread endlessly far away from him. Now he could fulfil the Armenian man's request with pleasant nonchalance. And yet, in the end, it didn't work, because Johannes Lepsius lost his balance and almost slipped down off his bench.

  "This is really terrible," he said to himself, for the second time that day. But actually, more than anything else, what he meant was the thirst that tormented him. He shook himself, hurried to the first drink-shop, and, without any thought of medical warnings, greedily swallowed down a sweet iced drink. With his enhanced sense of well-being new and courageous plans began to invade him. "I'll never let go," he laughed absent-mindedly to himself. And this vague laugh was a declaration of war on Enver Pasha.

  In that same instant Talaat Bey's private secretary was handing the representative on duty at the Ministry of Post and Telegraph an official dispatch concerning Aleppo, Alexandretta, Antioch, and the coast.

  6. THE GREAT ASSEMBLY

  Ever since the day on which Djelal Bey, the estimable Wali of Aleppo, had refused to carry out in his province the government decrees of banishment -- since that spring day there had been no further hindrances, no annoying recalcitrance.

  Apart from those directly affected by it, the heaviest burden of this tragic measure lay on the müdirs. Their nahiyehs, the districts they administered, comprised wide stretches of territory, with scarcely a railway line, with little telegraphic communication, where even carriage driving along the cruellest highroads and tracks was an agony. So that really the müdirs had no choice but to sit all day and half the night in the saddle, till every Armenian village over every square mile of country had been sent packing at the proper time. This "proper time" was often the midnight before the morning of setting out. It had been easy enough for the Wali, the Mutessarif, the Kaimakam, to give their orders and "hold responsible." In the towns it was child's play. But when one had ninety-seven small districts, villages, hamlets, parishes, to control, it looked very different. So that many a müdir, who was both unable to work miracles and not scrupulous as to the letter of the law, decided without much hesitation to "forget" this or that remote village. Many müdirs were inspired by good-natured indolence. In others such easygoing mildness had in it a dash of cunning. These "overlookings" might prove remunerative, since the small Armenian, even the peasant, is not unprosperous. Indulgence was only perilous in districts in which there was a standing gendarmerie post. The saptiehs wanted to make a little themselves, and what better, more fruitful method than legalized plunder, at which the authorities winked both eyes? To be sure, the possessions of exiles were legally the property of the state. But the state was well aware that it had not the means rigidly to enforce its just claims and could see the advantage of not allowing the zeal of its executives to flag.

  Whereas in all provincial selamliks, cafés, baths, places of assembly, the progressives -- all, that is to say, who read a newspaper, who had been to Smyrna or Istanbul and there seen, instead of karagös, the old-Turkish shadow-theater, a couple of French comedies, and who had heard the names "Sarah Bernhardt" and "Bismarck" -- whereas these cultured ones, the highly progressive urban middle class, stood to a man behind Enver Pasha's Armenian policy, the simple Turk, peasant or town proletarian, felt differently. Often, as he rode about his district, a surprised müdir would pull up in the village street, where he had just read out his decree of banishment, to watch Turks and Armenians mingle their tears. He would marvel as, before an Armenian house, its Turkish neighbors stood and wailed, calling after its dazed and tearless inhabitants, who without looking back were leaving the doors of their old home: "May God pity you!" And more, loading them with provisions for the road, with costly presents, a goat, or even a mule. The amazed müdir might even have to see these Turks accompany their wretched neighbors for several leagues. He might even behold his own compatriots casting themselves down before his feet, to beseech him: "Let them stay with us. They haven't the true faith, but they are good. They are our brothers. Let them stay with us."

  But what use was that? The very best-natured of müdirs could overlook no more than a few unnamed desert villages, where secretly he tolerated the presence of some remnant of the accursed race, cowering into the shelter of its own terror of extinction. Otherwise it went stumbling along field-paths, turned off on to cart-tracks, mingled and jostled along the roads, to come at last, after days, to the great highway which leads south-west over Aleppo into the desert. A hesitant, million-footed rhythm, such as the earth had not yet known. The route-march of this army had been sketched out and was being followed with real strategic foresight. Only one department had been neglected by its invisible commanders -- the commissariat. In the first few days there was still a little bread and bulgur, dried wheat, available, when most had still not exhausted their own supplies. In these early days every adult had still the right to draw from the onbashi, the paymaster-sergeant of the convoy, legal pay amounting to twelve paras, less than a penny. But most were wise enough not to make the demand, which could only have drawn down the hatred of the all-powerful upon their heads; and then, for twelve paras, with the cost of living risen to what it was, the most one could hope to buy would be a couple of oranges or one hen's egg. So that with every hour the faces became more hollow, the million-footed steps unsteadier. Soon no other sounds forced their way out of this dragging throng along the roads than groanings, pantings, whimperings, with sometimes a wild, convulsive scream. With time this being shed more and more component parts; they sank to earth, were bundled into the ditches, and there perished. The saptiehs' clubs came thudding down on the backs of hesitant throngs. For these saptiehs foamed with irritation. They themselves were having to live like dogs till such time as they could hand over their convoys at the frontiers of the next kazah, the next gendarmerie district. At first, roll calls were still taken. But, as death and sickness gained the upper hand, as more and more half-dead and c
orpses, especially children's corpses, were flung into the ditches, this keeping of lists seemed highly onerous, and the onbashi relinquished superfluous scribbling. Who cared to know that Sarkis, Astik, or Hapeth, that Anush, Vartuhi, or Koren, were rotting somewhere in the open? These saptiehs were not all brutes. It is even probable that most of them were good, plain, middling sort of people. But what can a saptieh do? He is under stringent orders to reach such and such a point with his whole convoy by such and such a scheduled hour. His heart may be in perfect sympathy with the screaming mother who tries to snatch her child out of a ditch, flings herself down on the road, and claws the earth. No use to talk to her. She's wasted minutes already, and it's still six miles to the next halt. A convoy held up. All the faces in it twisted with hate. A mad scream from a thousand throats. Why did not these crowds, weak as they were, hurl themselves on the saptieh and his mates, disarm them, and tear them into shreds? Perhaps the policemen were in constant terror of such assault, which would have finished them. And so -- one of them fires a shot. The rest whip out their swords to beat the defenceless cruelly with the blades. Thirty or forty men and women lie bleeding. And, with this blood, another emotion comes to life in the excited saptiehs -- their old itch for the women of the accursed race. In these helpless women you possess more than a human being -- in very truth you possess the God of your enemy. Afterwards, the saptiehs scarcely know how it all had happened.

  A shifting carpet woven with the threads of blood-stained destinies. It is always the same. After the first few days on the roads all the young men and the men in the prime of life get separated off from the rest of the convoy. Here, for instance, a man of forty-six, in good clothes, an engineer. It needs many cudgel blows to get him away from his wife and children. His youngest is about one and a half. This man is to be enrolled in a labor battalion, for road making. He stumbles in the long line of men and shuffles, gibbering like a half-wit: "I never missed paying my bedel . . . paying my bedel." Suddenly he grips hold of his neighbor. "You've never seen such a lovely baby." . . . A torrent of sentimental agony. "Why, the girl had eyes as big as plates. If only I could, I'd crawl after them on my belly like a snake." And he shuffles on, enveloped in his grief, completely isolated. That evening they lie down to rest on a hillside. Long after midnight he shakes the same neighbor out of his sleep. "They're all dead now." He is perfectly calm.

  In another convoy a husband and wife. Both still quite young. The bridegroom's upper lip has scarcely a trace of down on it. Their hour is approaching, since all the active men are to be separated. The bride gets an inspiration to disguise her young husband in women's clothes. These two children have already begun to laugh, delighted at the happy disguise. But the others warn them against any premature triumph. On the outskirts of a big town some strange chettehs, armed roughs, come out to meet them. They are out on a woman-hunt. Among several others, they choose the bride. She clings fast to her husband. "For God's sake, leave me with her. My sister is deaf-mute. She needs me." "That's no reason, janum, little soul! The fair one shall come with you." The couple get taken off to a filthy hut. And there the truth is soon made manifest. The chettehs kill the young man instantly, and mutilate his corpse in a fiendish mockery of the disguise which he had assumed. Then, after the most horrible abuse, the girl is tied naked to her groom -- face to face with his mutilated corpse.

  A shifting carpet, woven of lives which none can unravel. . . . There, again and again, the mother who for days carries her child, dead of starvation, in a sack on her shoulders, until at last, unable any longer to bear the stench, her own people complain to the saptiehs. There, too, the crazed mothers of Kemakh, who, bawling hymns and with sparkling eyes, as though this were a blessed work in the sight of God, cast their children down from a rock into the Euphrates. Again and again some bishop, some vartabed, approaches. He gathers up and spreads out his robes, casts himself down before the müdir, sobs: "Have pity, Effendi, on these innocent." And the müdir has to give the official answer: "Priest, do not meddle in politics! The government respects the church. I am only concerned with you in ecclesiastical matters."

  In many convoys nothing in particular seems to be happening, no apparent suffering, only hunger, thirst, wounded feet and disease. And yet one day a German deaconess stood outside the hospital of Marash, at which she had just arrived to go on duty. An endless, mute convoy of Armenians came dragging onwards past the hospital, and she stood waiting to let them pass. She could not manage to stir till the last had vanished. Something which she herself could not understand had begun to stir in this nursing-sister -- not pity, no, and not horror either; something vast and unknown, almost exultation. That evening she wrote home to her people: "I ran into a long convoy of exiles, who had only just been turned out of their villages and were still in quite a good state. I had to wait a long time to let them get past me, and I never shall forget what they looked like. Only a sprinkling of men, the rest all women and children. A lot of them had light hair and great blue eyes, which stared at me with such deathly solemnnity, such unconscious grandeur in them, that they might have been the angels of the Last Judgment." These poor avenging angels had come from Zeitun, Marash, Aintab, and the vilayet of Adana. They came plodding down from the north, from the provinces of Sivas, Trebizond, Erzerum. They came out of the east, from Kharput and the Kurd-infested Diarbekr, from Urfa and Bitlis. Before the Taurus, before Aleppo had been reached, they all mingled in the one endless, shifting carpet of lives. And yet in Aleppo itself nothing had happened, nor in the teeming sanjaks and kazahs of its vilayet. The coast lay peaceful and untouched. Musa Dagh was at peace. The mountain seemed not to notice this gruesome pilgrimage which passed not so very far away.

  Gabriel Bagradian pursued his investigations in the villages. He even extended their scope. Southwards he often got as far as Suedia, and northwards, after several hours' ride, he once even touched Beilan, that deserted villa-pleasance of rich Armenians from Alexandretta. He only dared one other journey to Antioch. Gabriel found the ancient doors of the Agha Rifaat Bereket's mansion closed. He pounded the knocker several times against the copper-inlaid wood, but nobody answered. So the Agha was not back yet from Aleppo. Though Gabriel knew he was travelling in aid of the Armenians, the absence of this friend of his father depressed him.

  On his return he decided that henceforth in all his journeyings he would not go beyond the farthest precincts of Musa Dagh. Some compelling magic emanating from the mountain of his fathers, becoming stronger and stronger the longer he stayed here, forced him to this. The same solemn amazement still descended on him as each morning he opened his window wide to greet the mountain. He could not understand. The huge mass of Musa Dagh, changing its aspect every hour, now firmly compressed, now almost on the point of evaporation into downy sunlight -- the very essence of this mountain, eternal amid all this mutability, seemed to renew Gabriel's strength and give him courage for the torturing hither and thither of thoughts which had robbed him of sleep ever since the arrival of Pastor Tomasian. But the instant he left the shadow of Musa Dagh the courage to think such thoughts ebbed out of him. Meanwhile, his industrious excursions through the villages had borne good fruit. He got what he was after -- not only a fairly consistent general notion of the day-to-day lives of the peasants, fruit-growers, silk-spinners, weavers, beekeepers, and wood-carvers, but many glimpses into the more closed circles of their minds, into the nature of their family relationships. Not that it was easy. At first many of these country folk could only see a wealthy foreigner, no matter how much he might be bound to them by racial ties and common ownership. But with time their trust in him grew, and even a secret hope they had of him. The effendi was, to be sure, a powerful man, who knew foreign parts and was feared by the Turks because of his influence. As long as he stayed on in Yoghonoluk, the worst might perhaps be spared the villages. No one scrutinized the real worth of such hopes. But another instinct helped to feed them. Though Gabriel spoke as little of the future as they themselves, many could s
ense, in his eyes, his restlessness, his gestures -- in the notes which he kept taking -- some purposeful thought, a special activity, which distinguished him from everyone else. All their eyes were on him when he came among them. He was asked into many houses. Though the rooms were bare, according to Eastern custom, their clean comfort always surprised him. The clay floors were strewn with clean carpets. Divans covered with pleasant rugs took the place of chairs. Only in the poorest houses were the stables anywhere near the living-room. The walls were by no means bare. Old illustrations and little pictures saved from calendars were pinned up beside the pictures of the saints. Many housewives decorated their rooms with cut flowers -- a very unusual habit in the East -- laid out as a rule in flat dishes. When the guest was seated, a big wooden stand would be set before him, on which were placed the wide tin dishes of cakes, honey-fingers, and sweet cheese biscuits. Gabriel could remember their taste from his childhood. In those days they had been forbidden luxuries, since his parents were not supposed to know that the servants took young Master Gabriel into village houses. But, now that they were being heaped upon him, Gabriel's digestion began to protest, especially when they insisted on bringing melon slices and sugared fruit into the bargain. To have refused would have been an outrageous breach of hospitality, so he, the guest, in self-defence, had to keep giving dainties to the children whom they always brought in to be introduced, and occasionally munching a sweet himself. It moved him to see how clean and well looked-after these children were, the smallest especially. The mothers took their greatest pride in the cleanness of the little white smocks, tiny coats and aprons. Later, as these children grew up, even they, it is true, could not keep their boys from running wild, on warlike expeditions after booty, over Musa Dagh and into the gorges of the Damlayik.