Forty Days of Musa Dagh

by Franz Werfel

  It was not two hours before the guns, in spite of the incredibly difficult terrain, had been set up where Gabriel wanted them. He had been given a short account of Stephan's deed. But the fear still thudding in his heart would not let him speak of it. He could not praise his son. This scatter-brained daring, the escapade of a half-grown schoolboy, was, he felt, a dangerous example not only to the other boys, but to the decads as well. If everyone now began to want to be heroic, that would be the end, on the Damlayik, of the only power -- unified discipline -- which might, at least for a time, guarantee the survival of the camp. Deeper still was his anxiety for Stephan. So far his luck had been incredible. Really the boy must be off his head! And you couldn't lock him up, on Three-Tent Square. . . . But Gabriel did not follow out these thoughts, since now his whole mind was set on the howitzers. Their type was familiar to him; the battery he had served in the Balkan war had had guns of the same calibre. They were Austro-Hungarian 10 cm. howitzers, of the 1899 pattern, delivered to Turkey by the Skoda factory. The lockers in the gun-cart of the second still contained thirty shells. Gabriel found all he needed, and tried to remember exactly how to use it -- the aiming-apparatus for firing from behind cover, a box of firing instructions, and schedule, in the trail box. He began to remember all he had learned, reckoned out the distance to Bitias, strove to get the exact position of the Turkish encampment, screwed at the rear sights to determine the given field of direction, took stock of the elevation of his enplacement, raised the barrels, with the little wheel, to center the bubble, and only then pulled out the breech, set the fuses of two shells with the key ring, shoved the round projectiles into the bore, and pressed in the cartridges after them. His unpractised hand took very long to do all this, and Chaush Nurhan could do next to nothing to help him. As the sun came up, Bagradian, having retested all these aiming factors, knelt with Nurhan, as regulations directed, one on either side of the gun carriage, watch in hand. Two short, terrific cracks, bang upon bang, rent the air to shreds. The gun kicked, embedding itself deep in the ground. These shells had been badly aimed; they dropped far wide of Bagradian's target, somewhere in the valley. But this mere gesture was enough to apprise the whole Mohammedan countryside of the new victory of the Christians, the loss of Turkish artillery, the impregnability of the Damlayik, and the fact, now public property, that the Armenian swine had entered into a compact with the jinn, known of old as the evil spirits of Musa Dagh. The chettehs had all vanished in the night, and a section of saptiehs, not attached to this nahiyeh, along with them. Now the few survivors of the companies were convinced that even a full division would be routed, if it assailed this devil's mountain. The bimbashi could not have ordered a fresh attack without risking a mutiny from his young troops. Nor did he even consider such foolhardiness, occupied with a far more modest problem: how to get the long line of carts, full of dead and wounded, back to Antioch, unperceived, as he had given strict orders they should be. The old man's cheeks had no more color in them. It was all he could do to sit his horse, after two sleepless nights and the strain of battle. His fate was sealed. The bimbashi's very limited powers of reflection, which, even in peaceable times, were far too desultory, could conceive no method of pulling down to destruction along with him the cursed Kaimakam and his set of rascally, foxy civil servants who were really responsible for it all.

  The two thunderclaps, almost in their ears, seemed to those within the Town Enclosure like the menacing signs of divine assistance. The toughest, dourest among these peasants embraced, with tears in their eyes. "Perhaps Christ really means to save us, after all." Never before had their sunrise greetings sounded so heartfelt. As to the Bagradians, their kingly rank, doubly proved, seemed for ever established. Some of the peasants came to Gabriel, begging his permission to confer on Stephan the title "Elleon" -- "Lion." Gabriel rather sharply refused. His son was still only a child, without any real notion of danger. He didn't want him to get conceited, or stuff his head with a lot of foolery, which might only end in disaster. So that Stephan, through his father's severity, was balked of public recognition, and had to content himself with the flatteries which, for a few days, surrounded him on all sides. In after-years those Armenian chroniclers who described the battle on the Damlayik wrote only of "the heroic action of a young sharpshooter" without naming him. But of what use would even the most explicit praises have been then, to Bagradian's son?

  Gabriel had long been a different man, and Stephan too had changed completely. The gently nurtured cannot do butcher's work unpunished, though right may be a thousand times on their side. On this boy's delicate forehead some savage god of Musa Dagh was already setting his dark seal.

  This great night of August 14 witnessed yet another, though far less memorable, event. Sato had gone creeping dawn through the twilight, to her friends in the valley. They must hear the whole tale of battle, learn how sixteen corpses lay covered on the bare earth, how the shrieks of the wounded rose and rose -- loudest of all when the stupid hekim, Altouni, dabbled brown water on their wounds. Sato, that walking newspaper, alike of mountain- and of grave-dwellers, could, tonight, revel in sensationalism, earning her social keep for days ahead. When Sato could satisfy her clients, and feel herself a beloved child, her eyes seemed to change into slits of flickering light, and her throaty jargon proclaimed sensation with joyous zest. The churchyard folk rejoiced along with her -- old Manushak, old Wartuk, and Nunik, the oldest of them all, or so she said. They wagged knowing heads. Deep self-importance possessed them. No longer superfluous outcasts, they had an office to perform, incontestably theirs, through all human memory. The dead had need of them. Sixteen dead awaited them on the Damlayik. And, once they came about their business, their arch-enemy, Hekim Altouni, would have lost his power. No "enlightener" dared molest keening-women.

  So Nunik, Wartuk, Manushak, and a score of other beggar-women besides, set forth, with the slow, dignified tread of functionaries, for their dens, dug in the earth mounds of the graveyard. They dragged forth the crammed and filthy sacks upon which they laid their beggar-women's heads. What it was that rotted in these sacks, in dense and permanent corruption, passes description. The miscellaneous rubbish of fifty years' picking up off the ground. The collector's itch of all old, poor women in every land, the itch to save up moth-eaten remnants, scrape together mildewed garbage -- this usual, jealously guarded treasure-trove of rags and rottenness had taken on the dimensions of a veritable orgy of stinking uselessness. Yet behold, these old women's sacks seemed, besides their tatters, their cloth patches, empty boxes, stony crusts and cheese rinds, to contain the professional equipment of Nunik, Wartuk, Manushak. Each of them plunged in her hand, to draw the same out of her luckybag -- a long, grey veil, a pot of greasy salve. They squatted down, and began to smear their faces, like mimes. It was a dark purple face-stain, which they worked into their deep-cut wrinkles, changing their incredibly ancient faces into timeless and imposing masks. Nunik especially, with the lupous nose and strong white teeth gleaming out of her dark, lipless visage, quite justified her romantic reputation as the "eternally wandering" medicine-woman. It took her a long time to make up. Suddenly they broke off their preparations and puffed out their stump of candle end, the wick flame, in the rancid oil cup set up before them. Hoofs and voices came scurrying past. This was the instant when the bimbashi and his staff rode away to Suedia. When the sounds had petered out in Habibli, the wood village, the women rose, enveloped their grey, matted heads in the veils, took each a long stick in her hand, and their broken, clappering shoes set out. Their stringy, old women's legs seemed to manage surprisingly long strides. Sato came after, scared at their majesty. As, plying their staves, they went on in silence under the moon, these keening-women had almost the look of the masked leaders of a Greek chorus.

  What stored-up, inexhaustible vitality, what stout hearts, the Armenian women possessed! Not one, as they emerged from the steep ilex gully on to the burying-ground of the encampment, breathed a jot more quickly. These purple-faced
wailers had all the strength they needed to set to work. Nunik, Wartuk, Manushak, and the others crouched round the dead. Their dirty claws uncovered the already stiffened faces. And their song, older perhaps than the oldest song of all humanity, rose to the skies. Its text was no more than the ever-repeated names of these fresh corpses. Names, keened over and over, without a break, till the last stars faded in greenish ether. Poor though its text, the more richly varied was its melody. Sometimes it was a long groaning monotone, sometimes a chain of howling coloratura, sometimes the empty, drooping repetition, maimed with its grief, of the same two notes; sometimes it was a shrill, greedy demand -- yet none of this in free obedience to an impulse, but strictly conventionalized and handed down by a long tradition. Not all the singers had Nunik's voice or inherited technique. There were mediocre, and so vain, artists among them, whose thoughts as they worked were occupied with fees and inheritance. What use were all his pounds and piastres to the richest man, up here? Let him give lavish offerings to the beggar-folk, and he would do not only a deed pleasing to God, but a useful work. The keening-women, the blind, the outcasts, were able to lay out chinking piastres, even in Mohammedan villages, without risk. So that Armenian money would not be wasted on them, but be of use to poor Armenian bodies, and the benefactors thus acquire celestial merit at bargain prices. Between the chants, her colleagues admonished Nunik, with all their might, to insist on this common-sense standpoint, and raise the usual fee for a corpse-watching. Through the grey light came the relatives, bringing their long, fine-woven shrouds. These had been stored up by every family, and had to be taken with every house-moving. The shift in which a man stands up from the dead, his most festal garment, is a gift given by the members of each household to one another, on the most solemn occasions in their lives. The task of weaving such a shroud is accounted a particular honor. Only the worthiest women may perform it.

  These women's howls had died into a low, almost soundless, windy sigh. It went with the corpse-washing, the enshrouding, like cold comfort. Then the long shifts were tied under the feet in double knots. This was to keep the limbs from dispersal, so that the last storm, which shall drive all bones together, to be judged, might not find it hard to fit the right ones. Towards midday the graves stood open, and all men ready for the burials. On sixteen biers, made of strong branches lashed together, the fallen were carried twice round the altar, while Ter Haigasun chanted his funeral dirge. Afterwards, on the burial-ground, he addressed the people:

  "These, our dear brethren, have been snatched away by bloody death. And yet we must devoutly thank the Blessed Trinity that they have died in battle, in freedom, and are to rest here in this earth, among their own. Yes, we have still the grace of a free death, of our own choosing. And, therefore, to see aright the grace in which God lets us live, we must think again and again of the thousands from whom such grace had been withdrawn; of those who have died in the worst bondage, who lie out unburied on the plains, in ditches along the highroads, and are being devoured by vultures and hyenas. If we climb that knoll to our left, and look out eastwards, we shall see stretching away before us the endless fields of our dead, where there is no consecrated ground, no priest, no burial, and only the hope of the Last Judgment. So let us then, in this hour in which we lower these happy ones into earth, remember what real misfortune is, and that it is not here, but out yonder."

  This short sermon drew deep groans from the villagers encamped on Musa Dagh, who had all assembled. Ter Haigasun went to the tubs which contained their consecrated earth. Sixteen times he put in his hand, to open it over the head of a dead fighter. It moved with the slowest deliberation. They could see how sparing he was of that precious soil.

  3. THE PROCESSION OF FIRE

  Nunik, Wartuk, Manushak -- today they were in luck professionally. Before they so much as found time to wipe their faces clean with lettuce leaves, another engagement presented itself. It was one of an exactly opposite kind. If the woman's labor was prolonged, as they had every reason to hope it might be, they could count on three full meals at least. And, in the very just supposition that any human event may occur at any time in a population of five thousand, they had brought all the essentials of their craft, wrapped in the crumpled folds of their garments -- sevsamith, the black fennel seed, a little swallow dung, the tail hair of a chestnut horse, and other similar medicaments.

  Even before the earth of the Damlayik had closed over the last of the dead, Hovsannah's labor had begun. Only Iskuhi was with her in the tent, everyone else had gone to the burial. Iskuhi's lame arm prevented her being of much use to her sister-in-law. There was no seat with a back to it against which the laboring mother could bear down. Cushions gave her no leverage, and the bed had only a low iron frame. Iskuhi sat with her back to Hovsannah, so that the tortured woman might press firmly against her body. But Iskuhi was too frail to hold out against Hovsannah's heavy thrusts; cling as fast as she might to the bedframe, she always slipped. Hovsannah let out a short scream. It came as a signal to Nunik. That wailer's alert instinct had drawn her away from the burial. These mourners' work was done, their surprisingly high fees had been clawed together.

  Iskuhi was about to leave the tent in search of Mairik Antaram when the three fates, unbidden, thrust into the tent. Their rigid purple faces shone in the gloom. The two Tomasian women were speechless; not that the mourners themselves alarmed them -- who did not know them in Yoghonoluk? -- but at the sight of their funeral trappings, which they still wore. Nunik, who divined at once the superstitious reason of these fears, calmed them: "Little daughter, it's good we should come like this. It keeps death behind us."

  Nunik began her obstetric treatment by drawing the sis out of her garments, the thin iron poker to stir up the tonir fire. She began tracing out big crosses along the inner wall of the tent.

  "Why are you drawing crosses?" asked Iskuhi, spellbound. Nunik explained as she worked. All the powers of the air assemble round the beds of laboring women, the evil more numerous than the good. When the child pushes into the world, in the very instant when his head pushes into life, these evil spirits hurl themselves upon it, to possess and permeate. Every human born must, of necessity, take something of them. It is because of this that madness lies asleep at the bottom of all our hearts. So that the devil has his share of all men, and only Christ Saviour was never devil-ridden. In Nunik's view the highest art of the midwife lies in her knowledge of how to cut down the devil's share. These crosses served as prohibiting signals, as mystic quarantine. Iskuhi remembered her dream of the convoy, night after night. The face of kaleidoscopic evil, Satan and all his works, still hovered above her. And she, too, with her free hand, had tried to ban him by tracing a great cross in the air. Oh, for how much earthly terror must Christ Saviour at every instant not be in readiness! This was by no means the end of Nunik's wisdom. She explained to the startled women how all our entrails -- the lungs, the liver, the heart especially -- are in sympathy with a different devil, who will strive to get entire possession of them all. The whole act of birth is no more than a wrestling match of good and evil, for the full ownership of the child. So that a wise mother would use the old, well-tried feints and aid which Nunik gave her. If she did, her child was certain to get past its first, dangerous days.

  When sudden panic had abated, the presence of these three bedizened midwives was remarkably soothing -- lulling -- in its effect. Hovsannah even dozed, and seemed not to notice how Wartuk tied her wrists and ankles with thin, silk cords. But Nunik came close to the bed, and counselled her: "The longer your body remains closed, the longer your strength remains shut in. The later you open your body, the more strength will enter, and issue out of you.

  Meanwhile the little, sturdy Manushak had lighted a twig fire in front of the tent. Two smooth stones, like flat loaves, were put to heat in it. This was a far less occult remedy, since these warm stones, wrapped into cloths, would serve to warm the exhausted body of the mother. Even Bedros Hekim might have approved of this more practical p
art of magic obstetrics, and of the fennel-water, which Manushak heated over her fire. None the less his remaining hairs bristled with rage when he found his three arch-enemies with the patient. He swung his stick and, with all the nimbleness of youth, drove off the keeners. His sharp little voice pursued them with insults. "Carrion-crows" was perhaps the mildest.