by Franz Werfel
The sky was so scorchingly empty that the very notion of a cloud might have seemed a storyteller's fable. This inexorable blue seemed never to have known a drop of rain since the Deluge. The people crowded about the open grave to take leave of the bells of Yoghonoluk. In peaceful days their sound had scarcely been noticed. But this was like the silencing of their own lives. The mother bell and her daughter were lowered into earth amid breathless quiet. The muted ring of scattered clods upon the metal was like a prophecy to these people that now there could be no more going back home and no resurrection from the dead. After a short prayer said by Ter Haigasun, the communes dispersed among their graves, silently, and the separate families went to take a last look at their fathers' resting-place. Gabriel and Stephan did the same and wandered to the Bagradian mausoleum. It was a small, low house, under a cupola, shaped like the mounds in which Turks bury their worthies and saintly men. Grandfather Avetis had built it for himself and his old wife. The founder of all their splendor lay, by Armenian tradition, without a coffin, in his shroud, under stone slabs, slanted against each other like praying hands. Apart from him and his wife, there was only one other Bagradian buried here -- Avetis the brother, faithful to Yoghonoluk, not long a dead man. "There wouldn't have been room for any more of us," reflected Gabriel, who oddly did not feel in the least serious, but rather amused. Stephan, bored, shifted from foot to foot. He felt so many eons away from death.
Surrounded by a little knot of people Ter Haigasun stood at the top of the slope on the last outskirts of the dead land. Some diggers had shovelled out a wide spare pit, like a fosse commune . Five barrels were filled with the earth they dug, and when these were ready, Ter Haigasun went from one to the other and made the sign of the cross over each. He stopped before the last and bent down over it. This was not black loam, but poor and crumbling earth. Ter Haigasun dipped into the barrel and laid a handful of consecrated ground against his face, like a peasant testing the soil.
"May it suffice," he said to himself. Then in surprised cogitation he stood looking down over the graveyard, already almost deserted. Most of the villagers had long since set out for home. It was getting on towards midday. In the larger villages such as Bitias and Habibli, similar ceremonies were being performed. But the Council had appointed the hour after sunset for setting out.
Gabriel made the most considerate arrangements for Juliette. Drawn into this Armenian gulf, she should miss her own world as little as circumstances could possibly allow. True that this European world of hers was also engaged in a dogfight, compared to which all else of the kind seemed a pointless, haphazard brawl. But there the dogfight was being conducted with all modern conveniences, according to the most advanced scientific principles, not with the innocent blood-lust of the beast of passion, but with the mathematical thoroughness and precision of the beast of intellect. If we were still in Paris -- Gabriel might, for instance, have told himself -- we should not, it is true, have to sleep on the stony earth of a Syrian mountain, we should still have a bathroom and W.C. But, for all that, we should be liable at any hour of the day or night to leave these comforts for the dark cellar, to hide from aerial bombs. So that, even in Paris, Stephan and Juliette would still be exposed to a certain risk. None of which reflections occurred to Gabriel, for the simple reason that for months he had seen no European newspapers, and knew next to nothing about the war.
On the previous night he had sent Avakian and Kristaphor, with all his household servants, up to the Damlayik, so that Juliette's quarters might be got ready. They were prepared with the very greatest care. "Three-Tent Square" must have its own kitchen and scullery, with every usual arrangement. Gabriel had ordered that Juliette should have all three tents at her disposal. She was to say which she would like to live in. With endless labor, carpets, braziers, divans, tables, armchairs, had been dragged up the Damlayik, and an astonishing collection of smart luggage -- wardrobe trunks, shiny leather suitcases, baskets for crockery and silver, a whole collection of medicine bottles and toilet articles, hot-water bottles, thermos flasks. Gabriel wanted Juliette to take comfort from the sight of these European conveniences. She was to live like an adventurous princess, travelling for a whim, surrounded with toys. And for just this reason his own life, in the eyes of the people, must seem twice as Spartan. He had made up his mind not to sleep in a tent, nor eat food cooked in "Three-Tent Square."
Back from their graves the Yoghonoluk villagers took a last look at houses no longer theirs. Each of them had a huge corded bundle, heavier than his strength, to carry up with him. Dazed and unhappy, fidgeting and straying about their rooms, they awaited the night. Here was the mat one had had to leave, here stood a lamp, and there, Christ Saviour! stood the bed. The expensive bed, saved up for through hard working years, so that one might become a better man by the possession of this fortress of family life. And now the bed must be left standing, mere loot for Turk and Arab scum. The hours dragged on. And in these homes everything was unpacked and packed again, to see if room could not be made for this or that unnecessary object in the bundle. Even in the craziest tumble-down hovels there took place these poignant separations from the household gear that envelops the human being in his illusions and in his love.
Gabriel, like all the rest, went straying late that afternoon through the rooms of his house. They were dead and empty. Juliette, with Gonzague Maris and her establishment, had set out hours ago for the mountain. Since the day was intolerably hot, she had longed for the coolness she expected to find there. Nor had she wanted to be caught in crowds of villagers on the move. Gabriel, who could feel some passing regret at leaving the most casually slept-in hotel bedroom (since everywhere one leaves a bit of oneself, a beloved departed), was quite unmoved. This house of his fathers, the place where he had been a child, had lived through these last decisive months, had nothing to say to him. He marvelled at this lack of all emotion, but it was so. The only things he regretted even a little were his antiques, those collector's joys of the first happy weeks in Yoghonoluk. He kept turning from Artemis and Apollo to the glorious Mithras, stroking the faces of gods with a tender hand. Then, at the selamlik door, he turned sharply away and gave up the house, its lares and penates, for ever.
In an innyard, leftwards from the villa, an unusual scene was being played. Those dregs of Yoghonoluk not permitted to follow the others into camp had gathered together there. The keening women, the beggars with prophetic heads, a few stray brats escaped from their parents, formed an excited group. That Sato, the orphan of Zeitun, should have been with them is not to be wondered at. One personality stood out from them, whose impressive power even Gabriel could not manage to ignore. This was old Nunik, chieftainess of magic healers and conjuring women. The dark face of this female Wandering Jew, whose origins were lost in the grey of ages, was distinguished by more than a nose half eaten away. It was informed with the ferocious energy by which Nunik had raised herself to the invincible leadership of her caste. The story that she was well over a hundred might be mere fraud, a rumor set going by Nunik for advertisement, and yet her very appearance of timeless age seemed almost the indestructible guarantee of the worth of her cures and of the healing quality in the rough life she led. Nunik held between her hard, stringy thighs a black lamb, no doubt strayed from the herds, and she was slitting its throat open from underneath. It seemed a very workmanlike slit, done with the quietest of hands, while her lips parted under the horrible, lupus-eaten nose from over a gleaming set of magnificently youthful teeth. It gave her such a look of grinning relish that Bagradian lost his temper at the sight.
"What are you all doing here, you set of low thieves?"
A prophet tapped his way to the front, to inform him with unapproachable dignity: "It's the blood-test, Effendi, and it's being done on your behalf."
Bagradian nearly flung himself on the rabble. "Where did you steal that lamb from? Don't you know that anyone who touches the people's property can be shot or hanged?"
The prophet seemed not to
notice the base aspersions. "Better watch, Effendi, to see which way the blood will flow. Towards the mountain or towards the house."
Gabriel saw how the lamb's dark blood came throbbing out of it, collected on the flat, smooth place below it into a thick pool, which rose and rose in a growing circle until the last drops fell. Still the puddle seemed undecided, as though it had some secret injunction to obtain. At last, three little tongues edged charily forwards, but stopped at once, till suddenly an impetuous ril1 wound itself out, wriggling quickly on -- towards the house. The mob went mad with excitement.
"Koh yem! The blood goes to the house!"
Nunik bent down close over the blood-pool -- as though from its nature and the tempo of its course she could tell with the greatest precision something of importance. As she raised her head, Gabriel saw that the twisted grin which had so roused him was the usual look of her ravaged face. But she spoke in a curiously soft, old voice that did not seem to be her own: "Effendi, those on the mountain will be saved."
In that instant Gabriel remembered the coins given him by the Agha, and left forgotten in the villa. "I'll have those at least," he thought; "it'd be a pity . . ." He went back. At the door of the villa he hesitated. Should one ever turn back again from a journey? Then he hurried on, in long quick strides, to his bedroom, and took the coins from their case. He held the gold one up to the light; Ashod Bagrathuni's head stood out from it in the finest chiselling. The Greek inscription round the edge of the silver coin ran, without divisions into words, into an almost unreadable circle of letters:
"To the inexplicable, in us and above us."
Gabriel put them in his pocket. He left the garden through the west door in the park wall without turning back to look at the villa. A few steps farther, he stopped to look at his watch, still absurdly set to European time. The sun was already above the Damlayik. Gabriel Bagradian noted carefully the hour and minute at which his new life had begun.
Soon after sundown the people of the seven villages, heavily laden, had moved out in groups or families to toil up the steeps by all the most available paths.
A dense moon, incredibly metallic, rose behind the jagged grey peaks of the Amanus, in the northeast. It sailed on visibly through the sky, nearer and nearer. It was no longer something flat stuck against the vault of heaven. The black depths behind it grew more and more distinct. Nor was the earth, for Gabriel, the usual stable abiding place, but the little vehicle through the cosmos that it is in reality. And this stereoscopic cosmos not only extended beyond the plastic moon, but forced itself down into the valley to bathe in coolness every pore of Gabriel's resting body. The moon was already half-way over the sky, and the panting groups still toiled on past him. It was always the same silhouette. In front, grimly prodding the ground with his stick, the father, loaded with baggage. A gruff call, a lamenting answer. The women stumbled under loads which bowed them almost to the earth. In spite of these, they had to keep a sharp lookout, to see that the goats were not straying. And yet, now and again, under these burdens, there came a little spurt of young girl's laughter, an eye sparkling encouragement. Gabriel started out of a half-sleep. Innumerable children were lifting up their voices to weep. Hundreds of squalling children -- as though they had all at the same instant discovered that their parents had gone away. And in the midst of this the short grunting voices and shrill reproofs of many grandmothers. But no -- they were not abandoned infants, only the cats of Yoghonoluk, Azir and Bitias. Cats have seven lives and as many souls, and each soul its own voice. Therefore, to kill a cat, you must kill him seven times (Sato had long had this wisdom from Nunik). In real truth their masters' absence did not move the cats of Yoghonoluk, Azir and Bitias in the least, for cats serve only the house with their seven lives, not its human beings. Perhaps they were even squalling for joy in their new, unbridled lease of life. The dogs really suffered. Even the wild dog of Syrian villages never quite gets away from men. He can never find his way back to himself, to fox, jackal, wolf. He may have been wild for countless generations, he is, and remains, the dismissed employee of civilization. He snuffles longingly round houses, not merely for a bone, but to get himself taken back into slavery, to be set to the tasks he has forgotten. The wild dogs of the villages knew all this. Already they had nosed out the camp on the Damlayik. But they also knew that this camp, unlike the village street, was strictly forbidden them. Madly they scurried up the forbidden mountain, grovelled their way through brushwood, rustled like snakes under myrtle and arbutus bushes. Not one of them got the bright idea of going off to Moslem neighborhoods, to beg bones in Chalikhan or Ain Yerab. They still adored this faithless people which had now abandoned its common dwelling-place. Their souls seemed to perish in wild grief, yet few of them dared to utter their monosyllabic bark, which has long since lost the extensive, much inflected, civilized vocabulary of European house dogs. These dogs' whole grief was in their eyes. Everywhere round him in the dark Gabriel caught glints of the green fire of these eyes, rapturously curious, which dared not venture nearer forbidden ground.
The moon had vanished behind the back of Musa Dagh. A faint wind had come into being. "They're all up there by now," reflected Gabriel, past whom, over an hour before, the last group had plodded its way. And yet, either from weariness or the sheer need to be alone, he could still not tear himself loose from this dark observation post. How could he tell that this might not be the last time in his life at which he would be able to be alone? And had not this power to be alone always seemed to him God's best gift? He granted himself another half-hour of this extra-mundane peace -- then he would have to push on up to the north defences to superintend and hurry on the trench-digging. He leaned back against the oak behind him and smoked. Out of the darkness came a very tardy straggler indeed. Gabriel heard the clip-clop of hoofs, and stones rolling away. He saw a lantern, then a man with a donkey, both piled up with towering burdens. Each step the donkey took was almost a fall. Yet the man dragged a monstrous sack, which every few minutes he set down, panting and gasping. Gabriel recognized the apothecary only when Krikor's sack came thudding at his feet. Krikor's face looked distorted; the impassive mandarin's countenance had become the mask of some furious warrior divinity. Sweat streamed over the polished cheeks into the long goatee, which jerked up and down for want of breath. He seemed in great pain, and hunched his shoulders, bending far forward.
