Forty Days of Musa Dagh

by Franz Werfel

  "Fifty Mauser rifles and two hundred and fifty Greek service-carbines. Each has thirty magazines of cartridges, that is, about a hundred and fifty shots."

  Gabriel Bagradian stood reflecting. Really that was scarcely worth talking about. Had the men in the villages no other firearms of any kind?

  Kebussyan hesitated again. "That's their business. Lots of them hunt. But what use are a few hundred old blunderbusses, with flint locks?"

  Gabriel rose, and held out his hand to the mukhtar. "Thank you, Thomas Kebussyan, for having trusted me. But, now that I know, I'd like you to tell me where you've hidden them."

  "Must you really know that, Effendi?"

  "No. But I'm curious, and I don't see why you should keep that secret, now that you've told me all the rest."

  The mukhtar writhed in inner conflict. Apart from his brothers in office, Ter Haigasun, and the sexton, there was not a soul who knew that secret. Yet there was something in Gabriel against which Kebussyan could not hold out. He unburdened himself, after desperate admonitions. The chests containing these rifles and supplies were in the churchyard of Yoghonoluk, buried in what seemed the usual graves, with false inscriptions on the crosses.

  "So now I've put my life in your hands, Effendi," the mukhtar moaned as he opened the door again for his visitor. Gabriel answered him without turning round:

  "Perhaps you really have, Thomas Kebussyan."

  Thoughts at which he himself began to tremble kept haunting Gabriel Bagradian. They had such power to move his heart that he could not escape them, day or night. Gabriel saw only the first steps, only the parting of the ways. Five paces on from where they branched, and all was darkness and uncertainty. But in every life, as it nears decision, nothing seems more unreal than its own aim.

  Yet was it easy to understand why Gabriel, with all his roused-up energy, should have moved only about this narrow valley, avoiding any avenue of escape that might still have been open to him? Why are you wasting time, Bagradian? Why let day after day slip by? Your name is well known, and you have a fortune. Why not throw both these into the scales? Even though you are faced with danger and the greatest difficulties, why not try to reach Aleppo, with Juliette and Stephan? After all, Aleppo is a big town. You have connections there. At least you can put your wife and son under consular protection. No doubt they've been arresting notables everywhere, banishing them, torturing them, putting them to death. Such a journey would certainly be a terrible risk. But is it any less of a risk to stay here? Don't lose another minute, do something before it's too late to save yourself!

  This voice was not always silent. But its cries came muted. Musa Dagh stood serene. Nothing changed. The world around seemed to show that the Agha Rifaat Bereket had been right. Not a breath of outside trouble reached the village. His home, which even now he could still sometimes mistake for a vanished fairy-tale, kept fast hold of Gabriel Bagradian. Juliette lost reality in his eyes. Perhaps, even if he had tried, he might not have freed himself now from Musa Dagh.

  He kept his solemn promise not to say a word of the hidden small arms. Even Avakian had learned nothing. On the other hand that tutor was suddenly given a fresh task. He was appointed cartographer. That map of the Damlayik which Stephan, with clumsy markings, had begun early in March, to please his father, gained fresh significance. Avakian was instructed to make an exact, large-scale map of the mountain in three copies. "So he's come to the end of the valley, with all its livestock and people," thought the student, "and now he has to go to the hills." The Damlayik is, of course, the real heart of Musa Dagh. That spur of mountain disperses itself in many ridges towards the north, where they peter out in the vale of Beilan in dream-like natural citadels and terraces, while southwards it suddenly descends, disordered, embryonic, into the plains around the mouth of the Orontes. In its center, Damlayik, it gathers all its strength, its concentrated purpose. Here, with mighty fists of rock, it drags the vale of the seven villages, like a many-folded coverlet, to its breast. Here its two crests rise almost sheer over Yoghonoluk and Hadji Habibli -- the only treeless points, grown over with short crop-grass. The back of the Damlayik forms a fairly wide mountain plateau; at its widest point, between the ilex gorge and the steep, shelving rocks along the coast, it is, as the crow flies (by Avakian's reckoning), more than three and a half miles across. But what most of all preoccupied Avakian were the curiously sharp demarcation lines which nature seemed to have set round this mountain plateau. There was, first, the indentation towards the north, a narrow defile laced to a ridge between two peaks, even directly approachable from the valley by an old mule-track, which, however, lost itself in undergrowth, since here there was no possibility of reaching the sea across walls of rock. In the south, where the mountain broke off suddenly, there rose, above a sparse, almost arid half-circle of rocky banks, a towering mass of rock fifty feet high. The view from this natural bastion dominated a sweep of sea and the whole plain of the Orontes with its Turkish villages as far as away beyond the heights of the barren Jebel Akra. One could see the massive ruin of the temple and aqueduct of Seleucia, bent under the load of its green creepers; one could see every cart-rut on the important highroad from Antioch to El Eskel and Suedia. The white domino-houses of these towns gleamed, and the big spirit factory on the right bank of the Orontes, in nearest proximity to the sea, stood livid in sunlight. Every strategic intelligence must perceive at once what an ideal place of defense the Damlayik was. Apart from the arduous climb up the side facing the valley, which exhausted even leisurely sightseers by its rough, uncompromising ascent, there was only one real point of attack -- the narrow ridge towards the north. But it was just here that the terrain offered defenders a thousand advantages, and not least the circumstance that the treeless declivities, strewn about with knee-pine, dwarf shrubs, tussock grass, and wild bush growths of every kind, provided a difficult series of obstacles.

  Avakian's map-drawing efforts took a long time to satisfy Gabriel. Again and again he discovered fresh mistakes and inadequacies. The student began to be afraid that his employer's hobby had little by little become a mania. He had still no inkling. Now they spent whole days on the Damlayik. Bagradian, the artillery officer of the Balkan war, still possessed field-glasses, a measuring-gauge, a magnetic compass, and other, similar surveying-instruments. They came in very useful now. With stubborn insistence he made certain that the course of every stream, each tall tree, big block of granite, was being marked. And red, green, and blue markings did not suffice him. Strange words and signs were added. Between the dome-shaped peaks and the northern saddle there was a very extensive gentle declivity. Since it was overgrown with lush and excellent grass, it was here that they always found themselves in the midst of herds of sheep, black and white, with shepherds who, like the shepherds of antiquity, drowsed above their flocks in sheepskins, summer and winter. Gabriel and Avakian, counting their steps, got the exact boundaries of this pasturage. Gabriel pointed out two streams which, above, on the verge of the meadow, forced their way through thick growths of fern. "That's very lucky," he said; "write above that, in red pencil: 'town enclosure.'" There was no end of such secret terminology. Gabriel seemed to be looking with particular zest for some spot which he would choose for its quiet, sheltered beauty. He found it. And it, too, was near a well-spring, but nearer the sea, in a place between high plateaus of sheer rock, where a dark-green girdle of myrtles and rhododendron bushes extended.

  "Pick that out, Avakian, and write over it, in red: 'Three-Tent Square.'"

  Avakian could not manage not to ask: "What do you mean by 'Three-Tent Square'?"

  But Gabriel had already gone on and did not hear him.

  "Must I help him dream his dreams?" the student thought. Yet only two days later he was to learn exactly what was meant by "Three-Tent Square."

  When Dr. Altouni took the bandages off Iskuhi's arm and shoulder, he sounded morose: "Just as I thought. Now, if we were in a big town, it could still be set right. You ought to have stayed in Aleppo, li
ght of my eyes, and gone into a hospital there. Still, perhaps you were right to come on here. Who can predict, in times like these? Now, my soul, you mustn't get depressed -- we'll see what else we can do."

  Iskuhi pacified the old gentleman. "I'm not worrying. It's lucky it should be my left arm." But she did not believe the doctor's feeble reassurances. She glanced down swiftly at herself. Her arm hung limp, distorted, too short for the shoulder. She could not move it. At least she was glad it no longer hurt her. So that now, she supposed, she would be a cripple all her life. But what did that matter, when she considered the fate of most of the convoy? And she had only been with them two short days! (She, too, like all those people, was now deeply aware that she had no future.) In the night she was still in the midst of horrible sounds and terrifying images. The shuffling, scraping, creeping, tapping of thousands of feet. Exhausted, whimpering children fell to the ground, and she with her broken arm had to snatch up two or three of them at a time. Crazy shrieks from the end of the column, and already saptiehs with bloodshot eyes, brandishing cudgels, came dashing furiously. Everywhere the face of the man who had tried to rape her. It was not made of one, but thirty different faces; many of them she knew by sight, and they were of people who had not even seemed repugnant. But mostly it was a filthy, stubbled face, spotted with blood, that kept bending over her. Bubbles of spittle broke on the tumid lips. . . . In such detailed clarity could she see that kaleidoscopic surface larger than life. It bent above her and enveloped her in an anesthetic vapor of oniony breath. She fought, fleshed her teeth in hairy, simian hands, which closed on her breasts. I've only got one arm, she reflected, as though it were a kind of extenuation to the fact that she surrendered to this horror, and so lost consciousness.

  The days that followed such nights were like those of a malaria patient, whose temperature runs down without transitions from high fever to well below normal. Then there would be a veil upon her senses, and perhaps that was the reason why she took her misfortune so easily. Her lame arm hung at her side like an impediment. But her body, young and full of sap, surmounted its hurt more skilfully, day by day. Without quite knowing how she managed it, she accustomed herself to doing everything with her right hand. It pacified her deeply to think she needed no help from anyone.

  Iskuhi had by now been living some time with the Bagradians. A short while back, Pastor Aram Tomasian had called, thanked them for all their kindness to his sister, and announced that he had come to take her away. He had furnished an empty house near his father's. The suggestion deeply wounded Gabriel. "But why, Pastor Aram, do you want to deprive us of Iskuhi? We're all so fond of her -- my wife more than anyone."

  "Visitors who stay too long end by becoming a nuisance."

  "Please don't be so proud. You know yourself that Mademoiselle Iskuhi is the kind of person whom, unfortunately, one notices all too little in the house, she's so quiet and reserved. And then, aren't we all sharing the same fate here . . . ?"

  Aram glanced slowly at Gabriel. "I hope you don't imagine our fate to be rosier than it is in reality." These carping words had in them a kind of suspicion of the foreigner, of this rich man, who seemed to have no idea of the horrors by which he lived surrounded.

  But this very mistrustful reserve made Bagradian feel intensely friendly. His voice sounded cordial: "I only wish you were staying with us, too, Pastor Aram Tomasian. But I beg that, whenever you feel like it, you'll come in and see us. I'll give orders that from today they always lay two extra places for you and your wife. Please don't let my invitation annoy you, and come here to meals if it isn't too much exertion for her."

  Juliette showed even more reluctance to let Iskuhi move into other quarters. A very curious relationship had arisen between these two women, nor can it be denied that Juliette sought the favors of the Armenian girl. Iskuhi, for a girl of nineteen, was still strangely unawakened, especially for the East, where women ripen so early. In Madame Bagradian this young girl saw only a grande dame, infinitely above her in beauty, background and knowledge of life. When they sat together in Juliette's room upstairs, Iskuhi, even in such intimacy, seemed unable to conquer her shyness. Perhaps, at such moments, she also suffered from the idleness to which she was condemned. Juliette, on her side, seeking Isknhi, never felt quite certain of herself when they were together. This seems absurd, and yet it was so. There are people who need in no way be distinguished, either by position or personality, and who yet infect us with a feeling of timidity in their presence. Perhaps that constraint which always seemed to get hold of Juliette in Mademoiselle Tomasian's society had its origins in some such source as this.

  She would watch Iskuhi for some time and then burst forth more or less as follows: "Ma chčre, do you know, as a rule I detest Oriental women, their laziness, their languid movements? I can't even bear brunettes at home. But you're not an Oriental, Iskuhi. Right now, sitting there against the light, your eyes look quite blue."

  "You say that, Madame!" Iskuhi was startled. "You, with your eyes, and your blond hair? . . ."

  "How often am I to ask you, chérie, to tutoyer me and not to call me 'Madame'? Call me 'Juliette.' Must you always keep rubbing it in that I'm so much older than you?"

  "Oh, no -- really I wasn't. . . . Forgive me, please." Juliette had to laugh at so much guilelessness, which answered a coquettish little joke with startled, almost terrified eyes.

  Iskuhi had had to leave nearly everything in Zeitun and the rest along the road. Juliette fitted her out with a whole new wardrobe. It was a process she thoroughly enjoyed. At last that cabin-trunk packed with garments, the trusty fellow traveller from Paris via Istanbul and Beirut to this wilderness (you could never be certain), justified the trouble it had given. True that women's clothes are like summer leaves and wither in the autumn of fashion, no matter how good and expensive the silks and materials may have been. Juliette knew nothing at all of the present fashions in Paris. She invented a few of her own "by sheer intuition" and began to remodel all her apparel for her own as well as Iskuhi's benefit. This occupation, eagerly embraced, pleasantly filled up the afternoons after a morning's work in house or garden. Juliette had really scarcely the chance to come to herself. The modiste's workshop was set up in an empty room. She chose two skilful girls from the village as her seamstresses.

  Poor Iskuhi could only sit looking on. But she made an admirable fairylike mannequin for the display of Juliette's handiwork. Dull shades suited her especially. She was for ever having to try on this or that, let down her hair and put it up again, twist and turn round. She did not mind doing it. Her zest for life, shaken by the Zeitun experiences, began to revive, her cheeks to flush a little.

  "You really are a fraud, ma petite," Juliette remarked. "One might have imagined you'd never worn anything all your life but your smock, and perhaps a Turkish veil in front of your face. And yet you put on your clothes and move about in them as though you could think of nothing but fashions. You didn't come out unscathed from your stay at Lausanne and your contact with French culture."

  One evening Juliette asked her to put on one of her "grandes toilettes," a very low-necked frock without sleeves. Iskuhi flushed. "But it's impossible. I can't -- with my arm. . . ."

  Juliette looked immeasurably concerned. "It's true. . . . But how much longer will all this business last? Two -- three months. Then we shall all be back in Europe. And I'll take you with me, Iskuhi. I give you my word. In Paris and Switzerland there are clinics that will soon put you right."

  Almost at the same hour in which Gabriel Bagradian's wife was expressing so audacious a hope the remnants of the first convoy reached their journey's end at Deir ez Zor, on the edge of Mesopotamian sands.

  Juliette was again full of a theme which had caused her husband many bitter hours. Strangely enough, Iskuhi, in Gabriel's absence, seemed particularly to inspire her to dwell on it. It took the form of a series of depreciatory remarks on the Armenians, viewed in that brilliant light of Gallic culture, which Juliette turned on their obscurity.r />
  "You may be an ancient people," she kept insisting, "c'est bien. A civilized people. No doubt. But in what precisely do you prove it? Oh, of course, I've been told all the names -- again and again. Abovian, Raffi, Siamanto. But who's ever heard of them? No one in the world except Armenians. No European can ever really understand or speak your language. You've never had a Racine or a Voltaire. And you have no Catulle Mendčs, no Pierre Loti. Have you read anything of Pierre Loti's, ma petite?"

  Iskuhi, hit by these shafts, looked up intently. "No, Mad -- No. I've never read anything."

  "Well, they're all about distant countries." Juliette seemed scornfully to suppose that this in itself was a good enough recommendation for Iskuhi. It was not precisely magnanimous of Juliette to work with such overwhelming comparisons. But she was now in the position of having to defend her own against the superior forces of her environment, so it was not unnatural.