Forty Days of Musa Dagh

by Franz Werfel

  Sato darted across the train like a puppy, scampering on ahead, not caring how many times she did the journey. She came back again and again to the bier as, with the tappings and lurchings of the blind, it swayed along.

  Her pitiless, greedy eyes took in every detail of this young body, lying under its sheet. She would have given anything to have lifted the cloth off its face, to have seen how Stephan looked, now he was dead. Then, when they were almost at the top, she left them and ran on into camp. She wanted to he the first to wake Kristaphor and Avakian and herald young Bagradian's death. Shortly before sunrise the dead arrived in the big square, followed by the tapping, limping cortege. The bier was set down before the altar. The keening-wives with their rabble squatted around it. Nunik uncovered the boy's face. She had done Ter Haigasun's bidding as well as she could. The reward was earned, and could not be contested. Already there arose, scarcely audible, the tremulous hum of the dirge.

  Stephan had now become completely that Persian prince whom his mother had been so startled to perceive, the first time he had worn Armenian dress. Though Nunik had counted forty wounds, knife thrusts, bruises, contusions, all over the body, though his back was broken, and his throat gaped with a horrible slit in it -- they had not touched his face. Stephan, behind closed lids, could still see the father for whom he longed, coming through the high door of the station at Montreux. Not forty murderers had managed to efface his smile of delight that Dad should be lifting him in his arms again. He had died without being present at his own death. This bestial martyrdom had, by God's grace, only assailed him as a far-off odor might. Now he seemed at perfect peace with himself, the dreamy prince.

  The first to come into the altar square, to step back appalled from the bier and the crowd surrounding the altar, was Krikor of Yoghonoluk.

  Ter Haigasun on the previous evening had come in person to release Kilikian from bondage and send him back to his trench in the South Bastion. Krikor had been sorry to lose this Russian, whose disgrace had kept him there a few days and nights. Now he was sick, nobody came to see the apothecary. The teachers, his disciples, had all abandoned him, not only because their war service left them no spare time, but because, since now they were men of action, they rather scorned their wordy past. And gone, too, was Gonzague Maris, whose talk Krikor had enjoyed.

  His loneliness was twice as long as a normal loneliness, since, out of the whole twenty-four hours, Krikor scarcely slept more than one or two, always towards midday. Night, on the other hand, as it is with many eager and great minds, was the time of Krikor's clearest perceptions, when life beat in him at its highest. For the first two nights of Kilikian's imprisonment Krikor had felt the presence of a human being in the other kennel as an unbearable encroachment on his peace. On the third his irritation at being disturbed changed into a curious need to see the prisoner and converse with him. Only scruples about undermining the Council's authority, since Krikor was himself a leader, had prevented him from yielding to this impulse. In the fourth night it became so overpowering in his solitude, that Krikor could control it no more. Gasping with pain, he managed to haul himself out of bed and drag to the door which led into the lock-up, take down the key from the niche, and laboriously, with his knotted, swollen hand, unlock it. Sarkis Kilikian was lying on his mat with open eyes. The apothecary had not waked him, nor was he in the least surprised at this visit. Kilikian's hands and feet were tied, but so mercifully that he could move with ease. Krikor put his oil lamp down on the floor and sat beside him. Kilikian's bonds shamed Krikor's soul. To put them on an equal footing, he held out his own poor hands.

  "We're both manacled, Sarkis Kilikian. But my bonds hurt me worse than yours do, and tomorrow I shall still be wearing them -- so don't complain."

  "I'm not complaining."

  "But perhaps it might be better if you did."

  Krikor passed his raki flask to the Russian, who took a long, reflective swig. The old man drank with equal care. Then he looked at Kililkian. "I know you're an educated man. . . . Perhaps, in the last few days, you'd have liked a book to read."

  "You've come too late with that, Apothecary."

  "Which languages can you read in, Kilikian?"

  "French and Russian, if I must."

  Krikor's smooth mandarin's head, with the jumping goatee, nodded disconsolately. "Well -- you see what a man you are, Kilikian!"

  The deserter slowly gurgled out a laugh, that long, slow laugh of his, for no reason, that laugh which had so startled Bagradian, on the night they tried out the tents.

  But Krikor would not let himself be put off. "You've had an unhappy life, I know. . . . But why? Didn't you live at Ejmiadzin, next door to the finest library in the world? I was only there a day, but I should have liked to stay on to the end of my life, among all those books. . . . And you ran away . . ."

  Sarkis propped himself half up. "I say, Apothecary, you used to smoke. . . . I haven't had a whiff for five days."

  The groaning Krikor dragged himself off again, to bring this prisoner back his chibuk, with the last box of his tobacco.

  "Take this, Kilikian. I've had to give up that pleasure, since I can't manage to hold a pipe."

  Sarkis Kilikian enveloped himself at once in a smoke cloud. Krikor held up the lamp, to give him a light.

  "And yet, Kilikian, you brought your misfortunes on yourself. . . . I can see from your face that you're a monk; I don't mean anything parsonic, I mean the kind of man who possesses the whole world in his cell. And that's why things have gone so badly with you. Why did you run away? What did you think you'd find in the world?"

  Sarkis Kilikian gave himself up so exclusively to smoking that it was still not certain whether he heard Krikor and understood him.

  "I'll tell you something, my friend Sarkis. . . . There are two sorts of men. That is to say there are the human animals, billions of them! . . . The others, the human angels, count by the thousand, or, at most, by the ten thousand. Among the human animals also belong the world's great men -- the kings, the politicians, the ministers, the generals, the pashas -- just as much as the peasants, the craftsmen, and laborers. Take Mukhtar Kebussyan, for instance. And, as he is, so are they all. Under thousands of different forms, they all have only one activity -- the fabrication of dung. Since politics, industry, agriculture, military science -- what is all that but the fabrication of dung, even though perhaps the dung may be necessary. If you take his dung away from a human animal, what remains in his soul is the worst possible agony, boredom! He can't stand himself. And that boredom produces everything bad in the world, political hatred, mass murder! But delight lives in the heart of the human angels. Aren't you, for instance, delighted, Kilikian, when you see the stars? The human angel's delight is what the real angel's song of praise is, of which the great Agathangelos declares that it is the highest activity in the universe. . . . But where was I -- ah, yes, I was going to say, that there are human angels who betray themselves, who fall away from themselves. And for them there can he no mercy and no grace. Every hour revenges itself on them . . ."

  Here that master of words, Krikor of Yoghonoluk, lost his thread and was silent. Sarkis Kilikian seemed to have understood nothing of all this. But suddenly he put aside the chibuk. "There are all kinds of souls," he said, "some get snuffed out in their childhood, and nobody asks what kind of souls they were."

  With his fettered hands he found a razor in his pocket and took it out. "Look here, Apothecary! Do you suppose I couldn't cut these ropes with that? Do you think I couldn't smash up this whole shack with a few kicks, if I wanted to? And yet I don't."

  Krikor's voice came hollow and indifferent, as of yore: "We all have such a knife, Kilikian. But what use is it to you? Even if you got out of here, you wouldn't get past the camp bounds. All we can do is break the prison within ourselves."

  The deserter said nothing, and he lay still. But Krikor fetched a book from his kennel, and, with his metal-rimmed glasses on his nose, began to read from it in a lulling voice. Kiliki
an, with unmoved agate eyes, lay listening to long-drawn periods, which confusedly told of the being and influence of the stars. It was the last time that Apothecary Kri.kor ever shared his treasure with a young man. It seemed to him for some unknown reason to be worth taking the greatest trouble to get a new disciple, in the person of this escaped seminarist. Vain labor! The next night, the one just ending, the fisher of men was as lonely -- lonelier -- than ever.

  Krikor, on two sticks, drew slowly nearer the dead Stephan. His yellow face remained bent over the dead face of the young Bagradian. Soundlessly, then for minutes together, he shook his bald, domed, pointed head. But these were more than the usual dithering head shakes which came whenever he was ill. These jerks and tremblings of his denoted his utter inability to make any sense out of a world in which beings born to the Spirit spend their time in fanatical throat-slitting, not in the many delights of definitions, formulas, and couplets. How few human angels walked the earth! And even these few betrayed their angelhood, fell below themselves. Krikor searched his unique treasures of quotations for a saying which might furnish support. But now his heart had too much grief in it to find the right one. Bent double, he limped back to the hut.

  Among his tinctures the apothecary still kept a tiny, thin glass phial, sealed with a drop of wax. Decades ago, by the recipe of a medieval Persian mystic, he had tried to distill the authentic attar of roses, long lost to the world. Here, in this tiny pellet of glass, he kept his one drop of this essence, gained with the labors of many days. Krikor dragged his way back to the bier and crushed the thin glass ball over Stephan's dead forehead. A heady perfume darted up; it spread strong wings and remained hovering above the forehead of the victim. This perfume was in effect that of the genius whose invisible body, in the words of Krikor's authority, is composed of the essential being of three and thirty thousand roses.

  Meanwhile Ter Haigasun and Bedros Hekim caine into the square. At the head of the bier the priest stood rigid, his frosty hands hiding in the sleeves of his robe. The bony, searching fingers of the old doctor uncovered, only for an instant, the stiffened body of the boy. Then mildly and soothingly he smoothed down the coverlet again. The light grew brighter. From the streets of huts, the nearest trenches, people came crowding in, and pressed round the altar.

  Only the widow Shushik tore at the quiet, with long, ugly screams. Haik's mother roared like a wild animal, even before she had seen Stephan's body. For, to her, Haik's fate and Stephan's were one and the same. It made no difference at all that her son was not lying on this bier. If one had been caught and slain, how should the other not have been slaughtered? But Nunik, Wartuk, Manushak, had left her son's carcass to the wild dogs, since he was only a poor peasant lad, about whom no one cared to trouble. Shushik did not sound like a mother. She sounded like a dying beast, which shatters its own life with monstrous bellowings. A few women came towards her, she who, even up here, lived by herself, apart from all, refusing as obstinately as ever to have truck with any of her neighbors. But now they came whispering round her. She must keep up her courage. What had happened could only mean one thing -- that Haik had managed to get away and would be safe in Jackson's protection within a few days. Surely if they'd killed him too, he'd be lying here! Young Bagradian had not the strength or slippery cleverness which, by Christ's help, would bring Haik safe to Aleppo.

  Shushik heard nothing of it all. She stood crouched forwards, pressing her hands against her breasts, and bellowed dully at the earth. They called Nunik to witness. That ancient threw back her veil from her lupous face. She had still, in spite of their present dangerous life, secret sources, in the valley, of information, which had not dried up. She took her oath that young Bagradian had been caught alone, without a companion, in the neighborhood of the village, Ain Yerab, by two of the newly installed inhabitants, who had taken him to Yoghonoluk, to the müdir. But the truth did nothing for Shushik. She did not believe it. The others scarcely dared approach the giantess, whose huge limbs struck fabulous terror into them all. Then suddenly the widow Shushik allowed them to do with her what they would. The women redoubled their whispering comfort. And, indeed, Haik's mother seemed to be pacified, seemed to take hope, the further away she came from the corpse. A great longing for human warmth expressed itself in her narrow head, which fell, powerless, on to her right shoulder -- in her huge body, which bent low down, to the daintily frail Armenian women. She put her arms round the shoulders of two of these women, and let them lead her where they would.

  But when, with the sobbing Avakian after him, Gabriel Bagradian reached the altar square, not a soul came near him. Indeed the crowd drew off a fairly long way, so that between him and the altar there was a space. Even the beggars and the keening women scrambled up and vanished among the people. Only Ter Haigasun and Bedros Altouni stayed where they were. But Gabriel did not hurry his steps; he slowed them. Here it was! He had thought of it for five days and nights, in every gruesome facet of possibility. He had no strength left to taste the reality. He dawdled on, step by step, across the space leading him to his son, as though, by walking very slowly, to put off the last shock a few seconds longer. His whole body seemed to dry up. It began with his eyes. They burned with that dryness that no winking lids can mitigate. Then came the inside of his mouth. Like a strip of dried, crinkling leather, his tongue lay between raw gums. Gabriel tried to swallow up some saliva, and spit it out of him. All he could do was to gulp at repulsive air bubbles, bursting in his fiery throat. The most horrible thing was that every effort at self-control ended convulsively in nothing. Every power in him ebbed away from his grief, which gaped like an empty hole, in the midst of his being. And he himself was unaware that this hole, this nothing, this void within him, was pain's reality. Slyly he tested himself. How does this happen? Why can't I suffer now? Why don't I shout? Why don't I feel any tears? Even his grudge against Stephan was not quite dead. And here lay the child he had loved! But Gabriel had not the power to keep a clear sight of this dead face. His dry eyes saw only a long white streak, and a little yellow one. He wanted to keep his thoughts on quite definite things, on the guilt that burdened him. He had neglected the boy, driven him to flight with scornful words. That he had come to perceive in the last few days. But his thoughts did not manage to get far; images, useless details, most of which had nothing to do with Stephan, kept rising out of the empty hole to break in on them. At the same time, out of the same void, there came a craving which, he thought, he had fully conquered weeks ago -- for a cigarette! If he had had any left, who knows that, to the horror of all the people, he might not have put it between his lips. He fingered unconsciously in his pockets. In this second he suffered for his child because, even now, he would have to part from him. Why was he so far away from Stephan that he could not even manage to see his face? Once, in the villa at Yoghonoluk -- on the table Stephan's clumsy sketch of the Damlayik -- he had sat by Stephan's bed and watched him asleep. Now surely, now for the last time, he must get very close indeed to his son who was taking away, for good and all, everything that had been himself. Gabriel knelt by the body, that his blinded eyes might seize the tarrying image of that small face before it left him.

  Ter Haigasun, Altouni, and the others watched the leader of their defense come slowly up, swaying a little, to the bier. They saw how then he stood forsaken, opened his lips, for snapping breaths, as though too little air were available; and how his hands kept moving in irresolute gestures. They saw how impossible it seemed to him to keep on looking at his son, so that now he stood with his head averted. When at last he crouched on his knees in silence, an eon had run its course in the hearts of the thousand silent people. But now Gabriel's face lay on Stephan's face. He might have fallen asleep or, on his knees, himself have died there. No tears had forced a way out of his shut eyes.

  Yet all the women round him, and many of the men, were shedding them. Stephan's death seemed to bring the stranger near his people again. When another age had fulfilled itself in the hearts of the crowd,
Ter Haigasun and Bedros Hekim took the kneeling man under his arms and raised him. They led him away, without a word to him, and he, obedient, gave himself over to them.

  Not till they were far from the Town Enclosure, till already the three tents were in sight, did Ter Haigasun, on Gabriel's right hand, speak the brief words: "Gabriel Bagradian, my son, think that he's only gone one or two empty days ahead of you."