by Franz Werfel
"You must keep on making her drink," he instructed Gabriel, "even if she doesn't come to herself."
Juliette's husband only nodded.
The doctor peered about, round the narrow tent. "Somebody'll have to stay up with her."
Since by now it was fairly dark, he lit the oil lamp. Then he took Bagradian's hand. "Well, it'd be something, wouldn't it, if the Turks attacked again tonight?"
Gabriel did his best to smile. "We've set Musa Dagh on fire. They won't."
"No." Altouni's sharp little voice had a note in it of profound disappointment. "Pity!"
He went, bowed with years and inhuman labors, without one word of direct sympathy to this man whom he had helped bring into the world. All words, the good and the bad, had long seemed worn out and useless. Gabriel meant to go some of the way with him, to get fresh air. But he turned back at the curtain of the tent. Had the Turks chosen that minute to begin an attack on all his trenches, Gabriel could scarcely have managed to force himself to come out of the dark. He lay down, opposite Juliette's bed, on the divan. Never, he supposed, in all his life had he been tired until today. These three battles, with all their bloodshed, all the sleepless nights, the eternal backwards and forwards, from observation post to trench -- each of these monstrous days on Musa Dagh hung on him, like a gnome with a clay face, stupidly heavier, heavier, every second. It was the tiredness which feels too tired to care about the horror of reality. A dull, unrefreshing sleep invited him to fall into its pit. Gabriel grew aware of Iskuhi's presence as he lay there, deep within this hollow. He tugged himself out of it with great difficulty, and sprang to his feet.
"You can't stay here, Iskuhi! Not one second. We can't see each other any more."
Her eyes were wide and angry. "And if you get ill -- am I not to be ill, too?"
"But what about Hovsannah and the baby?"
She went to the bed and laid the palms of her hands on Juliette's shoulders. In this position she turned to Gabriel. There! Now I can't go back into our tent. I can't touch Hovsannah again, or the baby either."
He tried to draw her away. "What will Aram Tomasian say to that? No! I can't answer to him for it, Iskuhi. Go along, Iskuhi, for your brother's sake."
She bent over the patient's unconscious face. It was becoming more restless every instant. "Why do you send me away? If it's to happen, it has already! My brother? None of that matters to me now."
He stole up, uncertainly, behind her. "You oughtn't to have done that, Iskuhi."
Her face seemed, almost avidly, to mock. "I? Who am I? You're the leader. If you get ill, that's the end of all of us."
She wiped the patient's lips with her handkerchief. "When we first came from Zeitun, Juliette was so kind, so wonderful to me. I have a duty towards her, if I'm able to do it. Can't you see that?"
He buried his lips in her hair. But she caught him to her, with all her strength. "It'll all soon be over. And I'm not going to lose you; I want to have been with you!"
It was the first open expression of Iskuhi's love. They held each other as close as though a corpse had lain beside them, who knew no more. But the corpse was not dead. She was breathing heavily. Sometimes a little moan forced its way out of her swollen throat. Was her voice seeking someone forever lost to her? Iskuhi let go of Gabriel. But his hands seemed still to be crying out for her. They had begun to talk the briefest commonplaces, for the sake of the unconscious Juliette.
During the night Juliette had a spell of consciousness. She babbled wildly, and tried to sit up. What a long way she had had to come back! Even so, she had not managed to reach the Damlayik, only the flat in the Avenue Kléber. "Suzanne . . . . What is it? . . . Am I ill? . . . I'm ill. . . . I can't get up. . . . Why aren't you helping me?"
She was demanding a service of her maid. Gabriel and Iskuhi helped the invalid, still in her Parisian bedroom. Juliette shivered all over. She moaned: "C'est bien. . . Now perhaps I shall get to sleep. . . . It's my angina again, Suzanne. . . . I don't think it'll be very much. . . . When my husband comes back, wake . . ."
This mention of the former Bagradian, living so secure in Juliette's world, had its shattering effect on the present one. He dipped another cloth in water and renewed the compress round Juliette's throat. He covered her up with the greatest care, whispering: "Yes, you must try to go to sleep, Juliette."
She answered something unintelligible. It sounded like the tiredest thanks, the most childish promise to be good, and get to sleep. Gabriel and Iskuhi sat in silence, hand in hand, very close, on the divan. But he never took his eyes off the patient. Life had developed a curious pattern. The unfaithful husband served his faithless wife -- while he deceived her. Now Juliette seemed really asleep.
Time was up. Gonzague Maris had made up his mind to wait no longer. He shook himself. The past's the past! And yet it was not so easy as he had imagined to slip clear of this, the strangest week in his life. He was forced, in astonishment, to admit that a definite longing kept him back in it. Did he love Juliette more than he thought? Was it some guilty sensation clouding his freedom? In the last few days the woman had behaved unaccountably. Again and again her agony had stirred his pity, roused a wish to help and protect her. And besides, it had ended so disastrously. As he thought of that ghastly minute, he set his teeth, his controlled face became distorted. Must he, like any other seedy adventurer, submit to this end -- this horrible breaking off? More than once he had left his hiding-place and come in the direction of Three-Tent Square -- to see Bagradian, to fight for Juliette. And yet, each time, he had turned back. Not because he had been a coward, but rather, unaccountably uneasy. It was a feeling he had never experienced.
"I've ceased to belong here." Some strong, although invisible rampart had, since those devastating minutes, built itself up between Gonzague and the whole world of Musa Dagh. It was scarcely possible any longer to force a way through the aerial ramparts that protected the Armenian mountain. And Juliette was on the other side. Added to which came the exquisitely phrased suggestions of Apothecary Krikor, his former host. Krikor had not once directly alluded to the painful subject of his mission. He had congratulated Gonzague on having an American passport; expressed regret at the fact that every earthly sojourn should be, of necessity, so transient. Declared it to be the privilege of youth to keep on setting out with a light heart. Life does not become really depressing, till only one good-bye remains to be said. Maris had listened, with due attention, to the old gentleman's practical philosophy, having grasped the casually hinted fact that every further minute spent on the Damlayik contained its perils for Krikor's guest. And this consciousness of lurking danger intensified as the night wore on. The waning crescent moon stood directly over him. He had waited a full hour past the time arranged. He had lost Juliette. He went back again a few steps in the direction of the camp. He turned, his mind made up.
Perhaps it was better this way. Slowly, with lingering care, he drew on his gloves. This finicking gesture, in the midst of a dark, oriental wilderness, might have struck a superior watcher as somewhat grotesque. But Gonzague only put on his gloves to protect his hands as he climbed down. He buckled his small suitcase on his back. As his habit was, whenever he left a house, he drew out a pocket comb and arranged his hair. The consciousness of having forgotten nothing, of not having left one unnoticed fragment of himself -- his fresh and pleasant sensation of being "all right" -- began to invade him, in spite of all. Slowly he sauntered on, among rhododendrons, myrtles and wild magnolia, into the moonlight, as though not a wilderness lay before him, but a charming promenade. He remembered having said to Juliette: "I've got a good memory because I find it so easy to forget." And indeed, with every fresh step southwards, his memories became fainter, his heart more free. He was already quickening his pace, inquisitively turning towards a future which his passport and temperament made secure. The chalk cliffs along the coast, hollowed out with incredibly black shadows, glittered like sharp snow fields in the moon. The surf beat dully below him. As his pat
h became harder to negotiate, Gonzague's feet relished each step. He enjoyed the controlled play of his muscles. . . . How incomprehensible people were! All this pain and slaughter, merely because they refused to let the impartial light have power in them, preferring their stupid, untidy obscurity. So simple, so easily mastered -- these black-and-white regions of the moon. To feel oneself nothing; in the void. It was simply that! Gonzague frowned. He felt some vague sympathy for Krikor. Krikor of Yoghonoluk, whom no one had ever quoted, or ever would quote! He had to clamber along the edge of a bare surface of rock, to surmount two crevices. Already he had in view the jutting ledge, behind which his descent would begin. He stopped to rest. The unfathomable gulf lay open beneath him. "Shall I get to Suedia? It's all the same. Lose my foothold? It's all the same. First you fall hard," it occurred to him, "then you fall soft." How far behind he had left Juliette, even now! . . . As Gonzague thrust his way on, among shrubs and bushes, four shots rang out in quick succession, and spattered past him. He threw himself down, pulled back the catch of his revolver. His heart thumped. Krikor's warning! . . . It was not, after all, a matter of such indifference whether or not he got to Suedia. The erring feet of avengers pattered by, but Gonzague jumped up, seized a big stone, and hurled it down, at a wide tangent. A noisy scurry below. The pursuers thought they had tracked their victim, and sent several bullets pinging after him, while Gonzague sped away from them, almost on wings, to the point where the mountain slopes to the village of Habaste.
He stopped, panting for breath. Better this way! These Armenian bullets had tidied out of his mind whatever sense of guilt still clouded it. He smiled. His eyes, under the short, slanting brows, moved alertly, scanning the way in front of him.
At this minute Juliette still hovered uneasily between half-consciousness and oblivion. Hadn't someone said: "Yes, sleep. Get to sleep, Juliette"? And whose voice? Well? Had they kept on saying it? Or just said it . . . ? "Yes, sleep. Get to sleep, Juliette."
She opened her eyes. In thirty seconds, she knew that this was the tent . . . and Gabriel and Iskuhi. It was very hard to move her tongue. Her gums, her mouth, had no sensation in them. These people were encroaching on her solitude. Why wouldn't they leave her in peace? She turned her head, heavy as a mountain, on one side. "What do you leave the lamp burning for? . . . Do put it out! . . . The oil's smelling -- so unpleasant."
Juliette's eyes saw nothing. She had been looking for what wasn't there to find. But something really terrible became clear to her. She seemed to have got back all her strength, to be well again. She flung off the blanket. She swung both legs out of bed. She shrieked: "Stephan! Where's Stephan? Stephan's to come to me!"
Iskuhi and Gabriel forced Juliette, who struggled hard, back into bed. Gabriel stroked and pacified; he talked to her: "You're ill, Juliette. Stephan mustn't see you. It'd be dangerous for him. . . . Be reasonable."
But her whole life, hearing, comprehension, were centered in the screams which kept coming out of her: "Stephan? Stephan? Where?"
This super-conscious terror which shrieked in the patient communicated itself suddenly to Gabriel. He pulled back the canvas door and rushed out, into bright moonlight, to the sheikh-tent, where Stephan slept. It was empty. Bagradian struck a light. Dead lay the couch of Monsieur Gonzague. Its occupant had left it painfully tidy. It looked as smooth and undisturbed as though it had not been slept in for weeks. Not so Stephan's, over which there writhed a wild, disordered vitality. The sheets hung down. On the mattress stood the boy's open suitcase, out of which underclothes, suits, pairs of socks, welled, in many-colored profusion. The food chest in the corner had been forced open and plundered carelessly. Stephan's rucksack, acquired in Switzerland, had gone. And, of Gabriel's things, the thermos flask, which only yesterday he remembered having placed on that little table, was not to be found. Having looked again carefully, all round the tent, in search of clues, he went slowly out into the night again, stood outside, with his head bent slightly, and thought it out. What did it mean? "Probably up to some new idiotic trick, which those damned boys have hatched out among them." But everything hopeful and good in this explanation was contradicted by some sardonic, deeper knowledge. He was very calm, as he always was at decisive moments. In the servants' sleeping quarters he found only Kristaphor, whom he roused. "Get up, Kristaphor, quick! We must wake Avakian. He may know something. Stephan's missing."
These words were said without excitement. The worried steward wondered how his master could be so calm, after all that had happened. They went towards the North Saddle to find Avakian. For a second Gabriel turned back indecisively to Juliette's tent. There, it was all quiet again. He went on so quickly that Kristaphor could scarcely keep beside him.
BOOK THREE
DISASTER, RESCUE, THE END
"To him that overcometh will I give to
eat of the hidden manna, and will give
him a white stone, and in the stone a new
name written, which no man knoweth
saving he that receiveth it."
REVELATION ii, 17
1. INTERLUDE OF THE GODS
"Here, my dear Dr. Lepsius, you have only a very small part of our dossier on the Armenian question."
And so this affable privy councillor laid his white, nobly veined hand on the dusty heap which towered so high above the desk that his equine, aristocratic features kept disappearing behind the pile. The tall windows of the noticeably empty little room stood open wide. A lazy breath of summer found its way in from the Foreign Office garden. Johannes Lepsius sat a little stiff on the visitor's chair, his hat on his knees. Scarcely more than a month had passed since his memorable talk with Enver Pasha, yet the pastor looked alarmingly changed. His hair seemed sparser, his beard looked greyer than it had, his nose seemed to have shrunk and become more pointed. His eyes no longer beamed. The dreamy distances had gone out of him, replaced by an expectant, mocking suspiciousness. Could the sickness in his blood have made ominous progress in these few weeks? Or was it the curse on all Armenians which, in secret affinity, was devouring him, the German? Was it the unheard-of amount of work he had managed to do in so short a time? A new campaign against death and the devil was fully organized. There was even money at hand; the most influential people had been won over. And now all that remained was to force an answer from the sphinx-like countenance of the State. The pastor's eyes, from behind their twinkling glasses, scornfully viewed these piles of documents. The affable privy councillor raised his eyebrows, not from surprise, but to let his gold-rimmed monocle fall.
"Believe me, not a day passes without some instructions going out from here to the Embassy in Constantinople. And there isn't an hour at which our ambassador isn't doing his best to influence Talaat and Enver in the dreadful Armenian business. In spite of the most pressing cares of state, the Chancellor himself is most emphatically behind us, in all this. You know him -- a man like Marcus Aurelius. Oh, and by the by, Dr. Lepsius, Herr Bethmann-Hollweg asks me to apologize. It was unluckily quite impossible for him to see you today."
Lepsius leaned far back. Even his sonorous voice had become uneasier and sharper. "And what successes have our diplomats to report, Herr Geheimrat?"
The white marmoreal hand fished at documents. "Look here, all this is from Scheubner-Richter in Erzerum. All these are from Hoffmann in Alexandretta, and Rössler, the chief consul in Aleppo. Why, they do nothing else but send reports! They're working themselves to the bone for the Armenians. Heaven knows how many of these poor people Rössler alone hasn't managed to save. And what thanks does he get for all their humanity? The English press describes him as a bloodhound who stirred up the Turks to massacre in Marash. What's one to do?"
Lepsius was now doing his best to meet and fix the affable eyes which came and went behind paper clouds, like a somewhat capricious moon. "I know what I'd do, Herr Geheimrat. Rössler and the others are very fine men, I know them -- Rössler especially is a very fine fellow indeed. But what can a poor, unimportant consul manage, if
he isn't properly supported?"
"Really, Herr Pastor, I don't understand. Not properly supported? That's more than unjust."
A slight nervous gesture from Dr. Lepsius implied that this matter was far too serious, and time too short, to beat about the official bush. "I know perfectly well, Herr Geheimrat, that all kinds of things are being attempted. I know all about the daily interventions and démarches of our ambassadors. But we aren't dealing with statesmen who've grown up in the diplomatic game, we're dealing with people like Enver and Talaat. Every conceivable démarche is far too mild for people of that kind, and not even the unheard-of would be enough. The extermination of Armenians is the keystone of their whole national policy. I've convinced myself of that in a long talk with Enver Pasha himself. A whole barrage of German démarches would at best only be a nuisance to them -- a strain on their hypocritical politeness."
