by Franz Werfel
It was evening. Gabriel lay on the earth exhausted, staring at the uncompleted altar-frame, which looked to him disproportionately high. Then, in his half-sleep, he noticed that he himself was being stared at. Sarkis Kilikian, the deserter! The man was probably his junior, perhaps scarcely thirty years old. Yet he had the sharp, emaciated look of a man of fifty. The skin of his face, livid for all its tan, seemed to he tightly, thinly stretched over a sardonic skull. His features appeared less to be hollowed out by endurance than by life itself, lived to its very last dregs. Sated -- satiated with life, that was the word! Though his uniform was just as tattered as those of the other deserters, it gave an impression of elegance run wild, or of elegant wildness. This was mainly due to the fact that he alone of them all was clean-shaven, and shaven freshly and closely. Gabriel felt a chill and sat up. He thrust a cigarette at the man. Kilikian took it without a word, pulled out some kind of barbarous tinder-box, struck sparks which, after many vain attempts, at last set light to a strip of tow, and began to smoke with a jaded indifference which seemed to suggest that Bagradian's expensive cigarette was his usual brand. Now they were both staring in silence again, Gabriel with increasing discomfort. The Russian never turned his indifferent, and yet scornful, eyes away from Bagradian's white hands.
Gabriel at last could bear it no longer. He stormed: "Well, what do you want?"
Sarkis Kilikian blew out a thick cloud of smoke, not changing one nuance of his expression. The worst of it was that he still kept his eyes on Gabriel's hands. He seemed lost in profound reflections upon a world in which such white, undamaged hands could exist. At last he opened his lipless mouth, disclosing decayed, blackened teeth. His deep voice had less hate in it than his words: "Not the thing for such a fine gentleman."
Bagradian sprang to his feet. He tried to think of a sharp, effective answer. To his deep discomfort he could not find one. The Russian, slowly turning his back on him, said, half to himself, with a fairly good French accent: "On verra ce qu'on pourra durer."
That night, round the campfire, Gabriel made several inquiries about Sarkis Kilikian. The man had been well known for several months in the whole district round Musa Dagh. He was not one of the local deserters, and yet the saptiehs seemed especially eager to track him down. In this connection Shatakhian told Gabriel the Russian's history. Since, as a general thing, the schoolmasters in the seven villages were a highly imaginative set, Bagradian almost suspected that Shatakhian was piling up horrors of his own invention to spice his story. But Chaush Nurhan was sitting beside him, nodding grave assent to every detail. Chaush Nurhan was in bad odor in the neighborhood, as a special patron of deserters and the intimate knower of their ways. And he at least was not suspiciously imaginative.
Sarkis Kilikian had been born in Dört Yol, a large village in the plain of Issus, north of Alexandretta. Before he had quite completed his eleventh year, massacres on the classic pattern arranged by Abdul Hamid had broken out in Anatolia and Cilicia. They fell out of a cloudless sky. Kilikian's father had been a watchmaker and goldsmith, a quiet little man who set great store by civilized living and on having his five children well brought up. Since he was well-to-do, he intended Sarkis, his eldest, for a priest, and would have sent him to one of the seminaries. On that black day for Dört Yol, Watchmaker Kilikian shut his shop early, at midday. But that did not help him since, scarcely had he sat down to dinner, when a band of roughs came thundering on the shop door. Madame Kilikian, a tall, yellow-haired woman from the Caucasus, had just brought on the dishes when her white-faced husband left the table to unlock his shop again. The few minutes of timeless experience that followed this will still be part of Sarkis Kilikian's being for as long as a created soul must remain itself through all migrations and metamorphoses within the universe. He ran out after his father into the shop, which by now was crowded with men. A picturesque storm troop of His Majesty the Sultan's Hamidiyehs. The leader of this band of storm troopers was a young man with a rosy face, the son of a minor official. The most noticeable things about this rather portly young Turk were the many strange medals and decorations strewn here and there about his tunic. Whereas the solemn, matter-of-fact Kurds at once proceeded to get down to business, carefully emptying out the contents of drawers into their bags, this spruce and dauntless son of a petty official seemed to view his mission in its purely political aspect. His loutishly juvenile face glowed with conviction as he bellowed at the watchmaker: "You are a usurer and a money-lender. All Armenian swine are usurers and money-lenders. You unclean giaours are responsible for the wretchedness of our people."
Master Kilikian pointed quietly to his work-table, with its magnifying-glass, pincers, little wheels, and springs. "Why do you call me a money-lender?"
"All this here is lies which you use to hide your blood-sucking."
Their discussion did not get any further, since shots cracked out in the low, narrow room. For the first time in his life little Sarkis smelt the narcotic reek of gunpowder. He did not at first in the least understand what had happened as he saw his father, bending over his table to his work, pull it down on to the floor with him. Without a word Sarkis flitted back to the parlor. His yellow-haired mother stood drawn up, with her back to the wall, not daring to breathe. Her hands, right and left, were clutching her small daughters, two and four years old. Her eyes were fixed on the basket-cradle containing her baby. The seven-year-old Mesrop was staring greedily at the appetizing mutton kebab, which still stood peacefully smoking on the table. But when the armed men came crowding in on them, Sarkis had already seized the dish and hurled it, steaming in one desperate jerk, straight into the leader's plump, rosy face. That dauntless youth ducked with a howl of pain, as though he had been hit by a hand grenade. Brown gravy streamed all down his resplendent tunic. The big, clay pitcher followed this first hit, with still better effect. The leader's nose had begun to bleed, but this did not prevent his urging on his men in an anguished bellow. Little Sarkis, armed with a carving-knife, stood in front of his mother to protect her. This miserable weapon in the hands of a boy of eleven was enough to decide the dauntless Hamidiyehs not to let it get as far as a hand-to-hand battle. One of them flung himself, swift and cowardly, on to the cradle, snatched out the screaming baby, and cracked its skull against the wall. Sarkis pressed his face into his mother's stiffening body. Strange, whispering sounds kept forcing their way through her tight-pressed lips. And then began the deafening crack and rattle of many revolver bullets, all emptied into a woman and four children, a salvo which should have been enough to set a whole regiment in retreat. The room was thick with fumes, the brutes aimed badly. It was of course predestined that not one of these bullets should hit Sarkis. The first to die was the seven-year-old Mesrop. The bodies of the two little girls hung limp in the hands of their mother, who did not let go of them. Her full, round face was rigid and motionless. A bullet hit her right arm. Sarkis felt, through his back, the short, convulsive movement which she gave. Two more shots pierced her shoulders. She stood erect, still not letting go of her children. Only when two more had blown half her face away, did she topple forwards, bend over Sarkis, who still wanted to keep fast hold of her, pour out her mother's blood upon his hair, and bury him under her body. He lay still, under the warm, heavily breathing load of his mother, and never stirred. Only four more shots bespattered the wall.
The pudgy-faced leader felt he had done his duty. "Turkey for the Turks!" he crowed, though no one echoed his cry of victory.
While Sarkis lay protected, as in a womb, his senses were strangely alert. He could hear voices which made him conclude that the leader was behaving repulsively in a corner.
"Why are you doing that?" someone reproved. "There are dead people here."
But this fighter for the national principle refused to let himself be so balked. "Even as corpses they've still got to know that we're the masters, and they're dirt."
A profound quiet had been established before Sarkis, covered in blood, dared to creep out from und
er his mother. This movement seemed to bring Madame Kilikian back to consciousness. She had no recognizable face left. But the voice was hers, and so quiet: "Fetch me water, my child." The pitcher was broken. Sarkis stole out with a glass to the courtyard fountain. When he got back, she was still breathing but could neither drink nor speak again.
The boy was sent to live with some rich relations in Alexandretta. In twelve months he seemed to have got over it all, though he scarcely ate, and though nobody, not even these kindly foster parents, could get him to say more than the most indispensable words. Teacher Shatakhian had precise information about all this, because this same Alexandretta family had paid for his own stay in Switzerland. Later they sent Sarkis to Ejmiadzin, in Russia, the largest theological college of the Armenian nation. Pupils of this famous establishment could aspire to the very highest offices of the Gregorian church. The intellectual drill to which these students had to submit was on the whole not so very rigorous. And yet, before the end of his third school year, Sarkis Kilikian, in whom a savage, a diseased, longing for freedom had slowly developed, ran away from the seminary. He was almost eighteen when he wandered the dirty lanes of Baku, possessed of only his shabby seminary cassock and the appetite of several days. It did not occur to him to apply to his foster parents for funds. From the day of his flight from Ejmiadzin, these good people lost all track of their protégé. Sarkis Kilikian had now no choice but to look for work. He got the only work of which there was plenty in Baku, servitude in the huge oil fields along the bare coasts of the Caspian Sea. There, in a very few months, through the effects of oil and natural gases, his skin turned yellow and shrivelled-looking. His body dried up, like a dead tree. Considering his nature and his book-learning, it is not surprising that he should have become involved in the social-revolutionary movement, which in those days was beginning to take hold of the workers of the Russian Near East: Georgians, Armenians, Tatars, Turkomans, and Persians. Though the Tsar's government did its best to egg on these various peoples against each other, it did not succeed in breaking their solidarity against the oil kings. From year to year strikes became more widespread and successful. In one of them Cossack provocation led to fearful bloodshed. The reply to this was the assassination of the district governor, a Prince Galitzin, come on a tour of inspection. Among those accused of conspiring this was Sarkis Kilikian. Almost nothing could be proved against him judicially. He had neither made speeches nor "worked underground." No one could give definite evidence against him. But "escaped seminarists" were a class apart -- it bred the most stubborn agitators. That alone was enough. Sarkis strayed, for life, into the convict prison of Baku.
He would certainly have died off soon enough in that den of filth and disease, had fate not had more cunning benefits in store for him. The murdered Galitzin was succeeded by a Prince Vorontsov. This new, unmarried governor was later joined by his sister, also celibate, in the government residence at Baku. Princess Vorontsova bore her virginity with iron self-abnegation. Energetic and full of the best intentions, she was in the habit of instituting in every government district to which her brother was appointed a unique mission of reform. Those who are relentless with themselves are apt to be equally so with others, and so in time this exalted lady had developed into a veritable sadist of neighborly love. Her devout eye, wherever she might happen to be, was first directed upon the prisons. The greatest poets of the Russian land had taught that the nearest thing to the kingdom of God is often a den of thieves. In the prisons it was usually the young "intellectuals" and "politicals" who aroused her zeal. Along with other selected convicts Sarkis Kilikian was now marched off every morning to au empty barracks where, in accordance with Irene Vorontsova s curriculum, and under her active co-operation, his spiritual healing was briskly attempted. Partly it consisted in strenuous gymnastic exercises, partly in a series of moral lectures. The princess saw in this young Armenian the attractive child of Satan himself. It was worth while fighting for such a soul! So that she herself took a hand in disciplining him. When that dried-up satanic body had been broken in by several hours of exhausting drill to the bridle-rein of salvation, the soul was led out to grass. To her great delight she was soon able to note the amazing pace at which Kilikian came cantering down the paths of virtue. Her hours with this taciturn Lucifer produced in her, too, a feeling of divine illumination. At nights she dreamed of the next few pages of the catechism. And, of course, so apt a pupil must be rewarded. She procured him more and more special privileges. It began by their taking him out of irons and ended by his being moved from prison into a small, empty room in barracks. Unfortunately he did not long make use of his privileges. By the third morning after his removal he had disappeared -- and so, by one more bitter experience, enriched Princess Vorontsova's knowledge of how hard it is to fight the devil.
But where can one escape to from the Russian Caucasus? To the Turkish Caucasus. It was not a month before Kilikian had to admit that he had acted rashly in exchanging Paradise for hell. When, half famished, he tried to find a job in Erzerum, the police soon had him in charge. Since he had neither come up for inspection nor paid his bedel, the local magistrate soon condemned him to three years' hard labor as a deserter. Scarcely had a Russian jail released him when a Turkish one offered him hospitality. In the jail of Erzerum the inscrutable moulder of our destinies put his last touch upon Kilikian. He was invested there with that enigmatic indifference, sensed by Bagradian in the ghost outside "Three-Tent Square," an "indifference" which the word itself can only suggest, without expressing it. They let him out in the last months before the war was declared. Though the army doctor marked him unfit for service, Kilikian was promptly enrolled among the recruits of an Erzerum infantry regiment. The life he led in it bore some remote resemblance to a human life. It also proved that his outwardly weedy body had reserves of inexhaustible toughness. And army life, in spite of all its restraints, seemed in a way to suit Kilikian. His regiment in that first winter of the war did its share in Enver Pasha's memorable Caucasus campaign, in the course of which that pretty war god not only used up a whole army corps, but was himself almost taken by the Russians. The division which covered the staff's retreat, and so saved Enver's liberty and life, was composed almost entirely of Armenians. It was an Armenian who bore that Supreme Commander on his back out of the line. (When Shatakhian placed Sarkis among these Armenians, Gabriel, who suspected him of embellishment, glanced inquiringly at Chaush Nurhan; but the old man nodded with measured seriousness.) But, whether or no Kilikian fought with these brave men, Enver Pasha's gratitude, at least to the whole nation to which Kilikian belonged, had soon expressed itself. Scarcely had Private Kilikian's frost-bites begun to heal -- scarcely, that is to say, had he moved his army blanket from the brick floor of a very congested hospital to the brick floor of an equally congested barrack-room -- when the War Minister's order was read out to them. It thrust all Armenians out of their companies in disgrace, disarmed them, degraded them to the rank of inshaat taburi, the despised labor battalions. They were herded together from every hole and corner, their rifles taken, and they themselves sent in wretched droves southwest, to the hilly neighborhood of Urfa. There, starved, and threatened at every turn with the bastinado, they were set to work heaving blocks of stones for a road that was being built in the Aleppo direction. A special order forbade them to protect themselves with carrying-wads against the jagged edges of their loads, though in the very first grilling hours of work their necks and shoulders streamed with blood. Whereas all the rest groaned and complained, Sarkis went stumbling in silence from quarry to road, road to quarry, as though his body had long ago forgotten what pain meant. One day the captain summoned all the men of the inshaat taburi, among whom, by chance or as a punishment, there happened to be a few Mohammedans. They were told off from the rest. But this unarmed herd of Armenians was marched under the escort of an officer about an hour's distance from its quarters into a pleasant valley, tapering between two low hills. "Those are the hills of Charmelik," an
innocent happened to remark, who came from these parts and was thankful for the day's freedom. But on the gentle slopes of this valley more awaited them than thyme and rosemary, orchids and pimpernels and melissa -- strangely enough, they found themselves facing an armed platoon. They suspected nothing. They were ordered to form up in one long rank along the hillside -- and still did not suspect. Then, suddenly, without ceremony or preparation of any kind, the platoon on their right wing opened fire. Cries filled the air, less of fear than boundless amazement. (A woman among the listeners here interrupted Teacher Shatakhian: "Can God, among His angels, forget those screams?" She began to sob and only with difficulty controlled herself.) Sarkis Kilikian was clever enough to fall with the others. The bullets zipped over him. For the second time he escaped a Turkish death. He lay on, among corpses and helplessly dying men, till it should be dark. But, long before dusk this flowery valley, consecrated to the practical application of Enver Pasha's national policy, was visited a second time. The corpse dismantlers of the neighborhood were anxious not to waste any government property still worn by these "executed" men. They had a special eye on sound pairs of army boots. As they quietly worked they kept grunting out one of those songs inspired by the recent decree of banishment. It began with the onomatopoeic line: "Kessé kessé sürür yarlara." -- "Killing, killing, we rout them out." They came to Kilikian's boots. He kept his legs stiff, almost to cracking point, to imitate rigor mortis. The pilferers tugged -- cursed -- if it had been a little harder than it was, they might easily have hacked off his feet to save themselves trouble. But at last even these industrious fellows departed, with another song on their lips: "Hep gitdi, hep bitdi!" -- "All away, all away!" In that night Kilildan began his monstrous wanderings. His days were spent in many hiding places; at night he strayed along unknown paths, over steppes and marshy ground. He lived on nothing, that is to say, on what grew everywhere out of the earth. Very seldom did he venture into a hamlet to knock in the dark at the door of an Armenian house. Truly it was proved beyond doubt that Sarkis had a devil's body, superhumanly strong. The skeleton cased in leather that he was managed not to perish on the roads but reached Dört Yol in the first days of April. Without caring about the danger Kilikian went straight to his father's house, out of which weeping people had led him twenty years ago. The house had remained faithful to his father's trade; a watchmaker and goldsmith was living in it. The well-known sounds of filing and tapping came from the shop. Sarkis went in. The frightened watchmaker was already trying to hustle him out when he gave his name, whereupon the new owner consulted his family. The deserter got a bed in the same parlor where the horror had been. After twenty years there were still bullet marks on the wall. Kilikian stayed two days in this place of refuge. Meanwhile the watchmaker had procured him a rifle and some cartridges. When they asked if there was anything else they could do for him, he begged only to be given a razor, before vanishing through the dark again. A few nights later he met two other deserters, in the village of Gomaidan. They seemed reliable and experienced in the ways of life. They recommended Musa Dagh as a good and safe place on which to hide.
