Forty Days of Musa Dagh

by Franz Werfel

  Gabriel equably watched this desecration. Poor Juliette. But what was this by comparison with the next hours, days, weeks? He felt deeply troubled. He remembered Iskuhi, creeping away to hide in her bed. She was nothing to him -- and yet he pitied her most of all. These beasts had crippled her, and she had to face this horror a second time. Bagradian tried to think of a method for getting the muafin and saptiehs past Iskuhi's door.

  And, indeed, heaven seemed well disposed. Iskuhi, who had crept under the sheets, heard the trampling steps and rumbling voices of the worst of all deaths come closer and closer. She stretched herself out stiff and covered her lap with her right hand, while she ceased to breathe, and the ravaged, kaleidoscopic face bent nearer and nearer over hers. But this ravager only snuffled her for a second and vanished. Outside, the steps clumped on past her door, the voices rumbled farther and farther off; they seemed to be going downstairs again. Then she heard them dimly on the ground floor. Sudden, perfect quiet. Had they gone? Iskuhi sprang out of bed. To the door on her stocking feet. She pushed open a chink of it. Christ Saviour, were they really gone? She almost fell back into the room again as she heard the cracking of a lash. . . . Voices -- men's voices raised. She recognized Gabriel's among them. Holding her lame arm tight, that it might not hinder her, she dashed to the staircase. Below, the following had occurred.

  Thinking that now the worst was over, Gabriel had pointedly stopped in the hall. He had said to the müdir: "You see, we've got nothing hidden. Anything else?"

  That freckled political idealist had done his duty. He had seen to it that the Armenian effendi and his family should at least not escape the Turkish government. The Kaimakam's special instructions concerning Bagradian had been to the effect that he was to march with the first convoy, under drastic supervision, to Antakiya, where that district authority in person, as he himself put it, would "take a squint at them." In the müdir's view this ended official proceedings. Such illustrious victims ought not to be goaded too soon to desperation. Far better to give them a certain confidence in the government's inscrutable designs, while intensifying, little by little, the sharpness of what they would have to experience. Today ought to be mild -- preliminary. So again the müdir hesitated, trying to think out effective exits, scrutinizing his beautiful fingernails. Unluckily he had reckoned without the police chief. That troubled mind was still unreconciled to the fact that this insolent giaour should be strutting about in a padishah uniform, with padishah medals and sword. But he still did not quite know what to do about it. Nor had he managed to shake off his ignoble embarrassment. Since nothing more effective occurred to him, he tried to roll the staring eye. He planted himself, corpulent and challenging, before Bagradian.

  "We haven't seen everything yet. . . . Up there. . . . There were several doors we didn't open."

  If Gabriel had managed to control himself, all would no doubt have ended happily. But he sprang on to the lowest step of the staircase, spread his arms out wide, and shouted: "That's enough!"

  Now, at last, the muafin had his case. He bore down with obvious pleasure on Bagradian, to hold a fist up under his nose. "What's enough, you pig of an Armenian? Say that again. What's enough, you unclean swine?"

  That second, in Bagradian's mind, completed one of those highly complicated mental processes which engender our fates. It was an instant of sheerest reflection. Gabriel realized clearly that his life, and not only his, was now in the balance. "Give in," he thought, "and step aside. Let them go up again, and up there bribe the animal with ten pounds. . . ." While his reason debated all this with impressive clarity, he himself was shouting, as never before: "Step back, gendarme. I'm a front-line officer."

  This brought the muafin to the very center of his aim. "An officer, are you? For me you aren't even a stinking dead dog." And with a quick tug he wrenched the silver medals off Gabriel's tunic.

  Later Bagradian asserted that his hand had never touched his sword. The fact was that, in less than a second, he found himself sprawling on the ground. The sword splintered against the wall. One saptieh was kneeling on Gabriel's chest, the rest were tearing off his uniform. Gonzague and the women rushed out of the selamlik. Stephan's shouts mingled with the tugging grunts of his father. It was not a minute before Gabriel lay there stripped to his boots. He was bleeding from a few flesh wounds. His life would not have been worth a para, had Gonzague Maris not saved him from instant slaughter by turning all the attention to himself. Though his gesture was careless, it told with the sharpest effect. His voice had that impressive note in it which obtains the iciest quiet in the midst of commotion. He had pulled out his papers and stood holding them high above his head. This gesture caught everyone's eyes. The müdir stared at him, perturbed. The police chief turned in his direction; even the saptiehs let go of Gabriel.

  Gonzague unfolded his documents with all the calm of a secret agent sent by Ittihad to keep a sharp eye on the conduct of local authorities. "Here you are. Passport of the United States of America, with a visa from the General Consulate in Istanbul." He stressed these insignificant words in such an authoritative staccato that he might have been apprising them all of some secret diplomatic mission of decisive importance to Turkey. "Here -- teskeré for the interior, autographed by His Excellency in person. You understand me, Effendi?"

  It was not this empty flourish with a passport that had saved Bagradian's life -- it was the desperate trick which made them forget him. For some minutes it confused the müdir. In the various instructions issued for the guidance of deportation authorities, it was indicated over and over again that the methods of applying this measure must be kept as unobtrusive as possible in the presence of Allied and neutral consuls. For an instant the müdir really imagined that he must be dealing with a confidential agent of the American embassy. A glance at the papers, however, assured him that this person was harmless. But he was really glad that the foreigner's interference had prevented bloodshed. He returned Gonzague his papers, with mocking ceremony.

  "What do your passports matter to me? You'd better make yourself scarce as soon as possible -- or I'll have you arrested."

  The constable's confusion abated more slowly. Blood impressed him far less than paper. In the course of his career documents had often been inconvenient. You were never sure what they might not do to you in the end. He decided to let Bagradian go on living, at least for the present. The thing could be done just as well on a highroad, without witnesses who held American passports. The muafin put his revolver, already primed, back in its case, took another swollen and staring glance at this naked officer, spat a huge gobbet, and gave his saptiehs the curt order: "Get along now for those horses and mules."

  The müdir had missed his effective exit. He had to content himself by following the armed executive in as thoughtful and detached a manner as possible, leaving no resonant echo of personality.

  Gabriel, breathing hard, had scrambled up. Shame, and no other sensation, possessed his, mind. Juliette had had to witness this horror -- she and Stephan. His eyes sought his wife, who stood there rigid, her face averted. Gabriel tottered, then controlled himself. Behind his back he felt something tremble -- Iskuhi. Then his few scratches began to burn. They were not worth mentioning. Iskuhi, silent, on stocking feet, crept close. Her imploring eyes sought Samuel Avakian. The student came with a coat to cover Gabriel's sweat-streaked body.

  A favorable turn of events. The müdir, the police chief, and the saptiehs left the villages that same day to turn their attention to Armenians in Suedia and El Eskel. It was one of the best-considered nuances of the Turkish government's migration policy that it never specified the exact day and hour of a given march. Since the deportation was officially a wartime measure of military necessity, and since also it was semi-officially punitive, the "moment of surprise," which gave banishment its peculiar poignancy, must not be neglected in either of these interpretations. But Pastor Harutiun Nokhudian had managed by heavy bribes to elicit the fact that the first convoy had been fixed to leave on
July 31. Between then and now a hundred extra saptiehs would reinforce the first contingent. The thirty-first would be a Saturday. Counting today, Thursday, that was two days. The Council of Leaders decided on the night of Friday to Saturday to move their populations up to the Damlayik. They had good reasons for their decision. Friday was the Turkish day of rest. Past experience made it extremely probable that saptiehs in the Christian villages would vacate them on Friday for the Turkish and Arab villages in the plain, in which there were mosques, relations, amusements, and women. And, with the saptiehs, the plundering riff-raff would also probably vanish for the day, since they felt with a certain amount of justice that, once there was no saptieh to interfere, the Armenians, in spite of being unarmed, would make quick work of them with scythes, axes, and hammers.

  These special circumstances, therefore, exactly predetermined the choice of time. The Council of Leaders reckoned on the following developments: The returning saptiehs, arriving on the morning of Saturday, would find, instead of the whole people, only Pastor Nokhudian with his five hundred Protestants in Bitias. The pastor -- this ruse came from Gabriel -- was to tell the müdir a long story of how, notwithstanding his supplications, all the people had packed their belongings in the night and set out of their own accord into exile. Their reason for this had been their terror of the saptiehs, and of the police chief especially. He could not say exactly which roads they had taken, since people had set out in small groups in every conceivable direction: one group towards Arsus and Alexandretta, another southwards, but all with the intention of avoiding inhabited places. The largest group had certainly meant to find its way to Aleppo, to take shelter in the big town. Pastor Nokhudian, whose mildness and Christian spirit of obedience had caused many to mistake him for a coward, revealed his heroism. This deception which he undertook to practice meant at the least death, as far as he was concerned. The instant the Turks discovered the stratagem, it would be all over with him. He shrugged his shoulders. Where was there no danger of death? The fighters on the mountain had to gain time. This feint would postpone discovery several days and give them sufficient grace to complete the defences.

  The Council met in Ter Haigasun's presbytery. The priest was very disfigured from the blow of the constable's whip. His right eye and cheek were swollen; a violet weal striped his whole face and half-way up his forehead. He had lost two teeth, and it was easy to see he was in great pain. Gabriel's scratches, on the other hand, could scarcely be felt under Altouni's plaster. The physical brutality he had suffered -- the first, in all his sheltered, remote existence -- had drawn him even closer to all the rest. At this sitting the Council discussed a very disquieting, adverse circumstance, which unluckily it was already too late to remedy. In peaceful years the villagers had been in the habit of buying grain in July, after the harvest, from Turkish and Arab peasants in the plains. They themselves scarcely grew any grain. This year, dazed with the threat overhanging, they had put off buying their usual provisions against the winter. This delay was now a serious matter. The villagers had flour, potatoes and maize, but in very insufficient quantities. To hold out with these for any time would necessitate the greatest economy. And since Armenians were used to much bread and little meat, this lack of it was a terrible problem for the leaders. Added to which, for the first few days there would be no chance on the Damlayik of baking, since the brick ovens would have to be dug into the earth. Pastor Aram therefore decreed that, till Friday evening, every tonir must be kept alight in the villages, so that as many flat cakes as possible might be ready before they left the valley.

  Ter Haigasun concluded the session with the announcement of a solemn mass of petition for the following morning, Friday. After mass the bells were to be taken out of the church tower, carried to the churchyard in solemn procession, and buried. There the whole people should take leave of them, praying before the graves of its fathers. Ter Haigasun furLher announced that he intended to take several barrel-loads of consecrated earth up to the Damlayik. Those who died up there, in the camp or in battle, should not have to lie quite abandoned in the merciless wasteland, but should be given a handful of their ancient, consecrated ground on which, at least, to rest their heads.

  On the Friday morning the saptiehs did in fact take their departure, to the last man, into Mohammedan country. Müdir and muafin had ridden to Antioch. The Church of the Ever-Increasing Angelic Powers was fuller, long before the appointed time, than it ever had been since it was consecrated. The atrium and the square nave over which rose the tall central cupola, the two side aisles, and even the platform upon which rose the high altar could scarcely hold the congregation. Since the church, according to very old custom, had no windows, sharp amber blades of sunlight, like the eyes of the Trinity, pierced the oblong slits in the wall, shaped like arrow slits in a fortress. But these crossed shafts of light did not illuminate; they merely served to dim the candles and cast a network of curious shadows upon the crowd. Today there were not only hundreds of faithful, come to Yoghonoluk to mass from the smaller villages, but also all the priests and choir-singers, to assist at this last high mass "on solid ground." Never yet had the choir sung its choral, announcing at the foot of the altar the vesting of the priest in the sacristy, in so full a voice:

  "Deep secret, incomprehensible, without beginning! Thou hast adorned with glory The host of the beings of fire."

  Never had Ter Haigasun bowed more deeply, nor made more complete and shuddering an admission of sin before the people. Under his gold mitre the weal of the whip stood out on his face. And never before had the secret of the kiss of peace, the reunion of the community in Christ, bound the souls of these faithful in holier ties. At other masses, when after the sacrificial prayer the deacon, at the words: "Greet ye one another with the holy kiss," had held the thurible up to the lips of the chief singer (Teacher Asayan) -- when this singer had kissed the one next to him, so that the embrace might continue through the choir and from the choir through the people -- it had usually been in a series of quick little touches, mere slack formality. But today they held each other close and really kissed on cheeks or mouth. Many were in tears. When after the communion the assistant priests, at a sign from Ter Haigasun, began stripping the altar, a wild, unexpected pain flung the whole congregation on its knees. Uncontrollable grief, groans, wailings, rose above the glimmering play of shadows, above the crossed, flaming seraphim swords of the sun, up into the tall, dim cupola. Each of the holy vessels was held up high before it disappeared in a straw-plaited basket: chalice, paten, ciborium, and the great book of the Gospels. The sacristan packed the censers, the silver candlesticks and crucifixes, into another box. At last there was only the lace altar-cloth. Ter Haigasun crossed himself for the last time, let his hands -- their hue that of yellowish church tapers -- hover for a while over the altarcloth till, with a sudden jerk, he lifted it. The unveiled stone stood bare, which had once been hewn out of the grey rock of Musa Dagh. In the same instant old Tomasian's workmen were letting down the bells, the big one and the smaller one, by pulleys from the campanile. It needed all their strength to raise the heavy metal on to the two biers, each of which were to be carried by eight men.

  Acolytes bearing the tall Greek cross headed the procession. Then, with their bells, the stumbling coffin-bearers. After them, Ter Haigasun and the other priests. It took a considerable time for this funeral cortege to reach the graveyard of Yoghonoluk. The train of mourners really seemed to be escorting an honored body to the grave. The heat was deadening. Only at the rarest intervals did a breath from the Mediterranean find its way across Musa Dagh to mitigate the Syrian summer. Swirling dust-clouds ran before the procession, like spectral dancers before the Ark, a thin, degenerate variety of the sacred pillars of cloud which went before the Israelites in the wilderness. The churchyard lay far along the road to Habibli, the wood-carvers' village. Like most graveyards in the East, it crept up the slope of a hill and was not surrounded by any wall. This, together with its gravestones, either fallen or slanting
deep in the soil, their weatherbeaten limestone crudely chiselled with inscription and cross, gave it almost the look of a Turkish or Jewish burial ground in the Near East. As the procession turned into it, there was a grey, bat-like fluttering and scurrying, hither and thither, between cairns and monuments. These were old women, whose flimsy garments were held together only by their substratum of dirt and dust. Old women everywhere feel drawn to cemeteries. In the West also, we know these pensioners of death, tomb-dwellers, keening wives, guardians of corruption, whose begging is often only their second trade. But here in Yoghonoluk this was a recognized class, a close corporation of nestlers in churchyard mould, wailing women and helpers at a birth, who, according to the tradition of these villages, had to live on the outskirts of each community. One or two old beggar-men, with biblical, prophetic heads, were among them, and a few cripples, fantastically deformed, such as only the East engenders. The people protected itself against the dross of its own loins by banishing it, in the absence of any institutions or homes for the aged poor, into its cemetery, a place both sacred and unclean. So that now nobody felt scared when two mad women rushed to hide, with heart-rending shrieks, up the graveyard hill. This churchyard and its neighborhood formed the almshouse, hospital, and madhouse of Yoghonoluk. It was even more; it was the place to which sorcery had been relegated. The torch of enlightenment, in the hands of Altouni, Krikor, Shatakhian, and their predecessors, had driven magic beyond the confines of the villages and yet not killed it. These keening spey-wives, under the leadership of Nunik, Vartuk, Manushak, had fled so far before the hatred of the doctor, but no farther. Here they awaited their clients, to be summoned not only for death vigils and corpse-washings, but far more often to an ob- stinate illness or a childbirth, since many trusted less in Altouni's science than in the herb potions, magic formulas, and prayers for health of Nunik, Vartuk, Manushak. In this ancient quarrel science did not always come out best. That was undeniable. Superstition had an incalculable advantage in the variety of its potions and old wives' cures. And Altouni had no bedside manner. Once he had given up a case, he sharply refused to raise false hopes. A creature like Nunik, on the other hand, could never get to the end of her stored-up knowledge, nor would she bow before death. If a patient died on her, he had only himself to blame for having sent, in a moment of weakness, for Altouni, and so brought all her skill to naught. Nunik was the living emblem of her art. The village women told each other how, in the days of the first Avetis, she had been seventy, just as she was today. The enlightened persecuted these spey-wives, and chased them from among the living. But that did not prevent their creeping at night from their haunt of death to go about their secret business in all seven villages. Now, however, they were all collected in the churchyard, to take their share of alms with the blind and the halt. Sato had left the cortege and run on ahead. She had long had many cronies among the grave-folk. These border people attracted her borderline soul. They were so easy to live with! It was so hard to live with the Bagradians! Though gifts of clothes from the great hanum might feed Sato's vanity, in reality she felt as uncomfortable in them, in shoes, stockings, in a clean room, as a wild dog in a collar. With beggars and spey-wives, and with mad people, Sato could give free rein to her thoughts, in words that had no special meaning. Oh, how delightful to kick off the speech of the great, like a tight shoe, and talk with bare feet! Nunik, Vartuk, Manushak, had secrets to tell her which made her whole soul shiver in unison, as though she too had brought them into this world with her, from the life of her ancestors. Then she would sit still and listen for hours, while the blind beggars beside her fumbled over her thin child's body with alert, sensitive fingers. Had there been no Iskuhi, Sato might have let the others go up to the Damlayik, while she lived at ease among the grave-folk. These happy souls were not to be taken into the narrow confines of the mountain camp. The leaders had passed the resolution, with one dissentient, Bagradian. He, though as commander he saw clearly that every superfluous mouth would enfeeble resistance, had not wanted to exclude any Armenian. But these outcasts seemed neither unhappy at this decision nor especially scared. They stretched out hands and snouts to their compatriots with all the usual beggars' litany.