The supervisor’s voice, chastising the workers in the Carding Cave, brought the two to their feet.
With no further ado, Dikran slung the bag on his back and departed.
Garina’s gaze followed him, and gradually an invisible veil dulled her eyes. Her sad eyes lingered on his departing figure as he dropped the white bag at the bakery area. Her gaze chased his silhouette until the huge entry door of the orphanage closed behind him. She then plopped down to resume pushing the handle and pouring the grain with her free hand. “Do this,” she said, louder than the hissing grain being pulverized into flour and faster than the white powder running from between the stones. She poured a second handful and regurgitated the phrase, “Do that.”
More than the granular sensation in her palm, the golden kernels cascading through her fingers attracted Mannig’s attention. “It’s beautiful.”
“Beautiful?” Garina grunted through tightened lips. “Boring!” She looked at the door again. “Where did he go?”
“Who? Dikran?” Mannig said, without taking her eyes from the speckling flour dust.
“Is he called Dikran?” Garina squealed. “What a sweet name. Is he from your town?”
“He never told me,” Mannig said, still spellbound by the bewitching, fine particles.
“How old is he? Come, tell me.”
“I don’t know,” Mannig said, puzzled at Garina’s flashing eyes.
“What is his family name?”
“I have no idea,” she said, giving her an incredulous look. How would I know when I don’t even know my own?
Garina stopped pushing the handle. “I want to know everything about him, and thou must tell me,” she insisted, looking at the entry door again. “I wish I knew where that peece Sup sent him.”
“To Mosul,” Mannig mumbled, pulling the handle and focusing on her task.
Flour for bread.
Being linked to the chain of food preparation exhilarated her. Baba. The memory of her father’s flour mills in Adapazar vaguely surfaced in her consciousness, yet his complaints shortly before the deportation echoed clearly in her head. “The gendarmes confiscated my oxen,” he seethed in their parlor in Adapazar. “We’ve had to resort to using donkey-power to turn the millstones.” His image faded, and Mama’s words clung in Mannig’s memory: “At least you didn’t have to hand-crank the mill.”
Might Mama suffer if she knew my own fate?
The drone of the grinding stones and its hypnotic hum, like the smell of life, lulled her to relax. She closed her eyes.
“Wake up!” Garina yelled. “Idle hands are useless. Pull. This job requires cooperation. You ought to sweat, too. I refuse to do a man’s work by myself.”
Sometimes Garina yelled louder than the supervisor, echoing across the courtyard. Mannig promptly alternated pushing and pulling the handle.
A woman’s work? What about Mama? She baked her specialty baklava for Easter; otherwise, Nazlu, the maid, prepared the meals, and Baba’s handyman ran errands. Haji-doo resented even soiled hands. Mannig remembered her grandmother’s scorn at seeing her pick green walnuts off the tree in their orchard. “Shame on you! Ladies never stain their hands.”
She had depended on her childish wits to survive starvation and loneliness in Mosul; at the vorpanotz, not only was she told to ‘do this or that,’ but every effort required specific techniques. “What is a woman’s work?” she asked, searching Garina’s eyes for hidden clues.
“To stay in the courtyard! NOT to be entrusted with errands like Dikran is!” Garina fumed. “That peece Sup could have sent me along. No-o-o-o! She controls us females in this confined space, keeps us separated from the boys every chance she gets. Thou hast seen her gather the boys by her skirt when we eat our meals; she chastises stowaway girls in the boys’ quarter and segregates us during rest time. What is a woman’s work, you ask? Just look around …”
She then listed the spots in the courtyards, beginning with the make-shift station of basket weavers. “Dikran’s fingers are as nimble as the girls’ in the cluster; but that peece Sup won’t let Dikran lace the palm leaves. Instead, she sends him on errands. Men do exciting things; whatever it is, their work is never boring. I wish he sat in the Weaver’s Web, next to us. I’d be having a tête-à-tête with him.”
Garina’s sweeping odaar vocabulary often tantalized Mannig. Before she could ask about one unfamiliar word, another one trickled from between Garina’s lips. Often, their assigned chores separated them—not necessarily due to the supervisor’s dictates; Mannig suspected Garina sent herself on contrived errands, even when claiming, “The peece Sup told me to “do this” and “do that.”
“Same thing at the Teaser Gazebo,” Garina continued, pointing to another station she tagged. There, the girls separated grit from a lock of wool using an iron comb—a womanly chore according to Garina. Farther across the courtyard was the Carding Cave. Mannig had attempted to fluff the wool, but nicked her fingers on the spiky wire-toothed brush, bloodying the pale wool.
When Mannig had been assigned to the Spindle Dingle to twirl the small wooden instrument to make yarn, she had become exasperated. The craft demanded patience and quick fingers, neither of which Mannig possessed.
Managing the spindle proved a complete disaster, prompting suggestions from experts in the Dingle. “Dance your arms,” one said, flailing skinny limbs. “Twirl the spindle up in the air and drag it down,” added another. Mannig failed to simultaneously move her upper extremities and loop her fingers on the spindle. The thread broke, and the wool never transformed into lovely ivory-hued thread.
“Some spindle-dingle, thou art,” Garina snickered. “I dislike it, too. I prefer the Sheep Flip.”
Mannig knew why—flipping sheep and shearing the wool required manly strength. The supervisor assigned the task to the boys, designating a location just outside the orphanage door.
Once Garina sneaked past the courtyard door and slipped inside the station. Seeing Dikran flipping the sheep flat on its side, she grabbed the rusty shears and scurried to him, preparing to clip the wool.
“That’s not a woman’s work.” The supervisor shooed her off. “Get out of here!”
To avoid confrontation, Garina retreated—but only after she rubbed shoulders with Dikran and flashed white teeth at him.
Startled, he lost his grip, and the sheep scampered away. Under the stern gaze of the supervisor, he started the process again from the beginning—grabbing a sheep, forcing it to the ground, tying its legs, then picking up the clippers to shear its wool.
“She hates me!” Garina seethed in the courtyard. “I am bigger than most of the boys. The woman is determined to keep me apart from Dikran. I’m sure about it … she is saving him for herself. She is jealous. Just watch me show her—I am destined to be with Dikran.” She retreated into the courtyard and plopped down by the Spindle Dingle. She spun the wool violently—grimacing, scowling and sulking.
Mannig picked up a spindle, too. Her elbows undulated like a swan’s neck but, instead of in a smooth wave, the instrument swayed in and out in a jagged arc. The jerky swings broke the thread. The spindle dropped to the ground. Mannig halted the twirling momentarily and then resumed rippling her fingers on an imaginary tool, swaying her arms in a surf-like motion. Without the demands of string tension at the tip of a spindle, she moved about with greater ease—elevating arms, lowering them, her body flowing in synchronicity. The whirring of the other spindles sent a rhythm to her feet. Completely oblivious to her surroundings, she felt transported to a higher domain. Mannig twirled and whirled, her hips replicating the soothing motions of a spindle; her legs and feet, the stance for shearing wool. She added arm movements, imitating carding and fluffing wool, hands and fingers spinning yarn on a spindle, pantomiming the chores conducted in various stations within the confines of the Spindle Dingle.
A roaring applause awakened her to reality.
“Mannig is dancing. Look at her!” the girls cheered. “Again. Do it again! Yes, yes
. You entertain us with your Spindle Dance, and we will do the spinning for you.”
“That’s a good solution for boredom,” Garina said. “Dance for them.” She used the distraction to sneak away.
Garina’s erratic nocturnal habits piqued Mannig’s curiosity most. Even though the two shared the same bedding, Mannig often fell asleep without her bed-partner, only to wake up in the morning just as Garina slipped under the quilt.
Several weeks later, Mannig caught Garina crawling into bed at sunrise. “My stomach hurts,” she murmured. She wiggled her body under the quilt without apparent pain and, raising her eyebrows, added, “I’ll stay in bed … do not tell that peece Sup. You cover for me at the Teaser Gazebo or wherever the Sup commands.”
What is really the matter with Garina?
13—Weeping Meeting
Unable to understand Garina’s behavior, Mannig focused on improvising dance routines at the Spindle Dingle. She created wiggles and mastered footsteps to music in her head, twirling and spinning at the cost of improving her clumsy spinning skills. When the supervisor checked the progress of each orphan’s handiwork, one of the spinners snuck a refined ball of yarn into Mannig’s hand and whispered, “It’ll prevent the anger of the supervisor. You keep on entertaining us, and we’ll do the spinning for you.”
Mannig felt flattered. All this, and no one has ever shown me how to dance.
As one week rolled into another without schooling, the onslaught of winter storms froze her shattered hopes for education. Could I read and write without a teacher? No one owned books at the orphanage. She neither saw a pencil nor heard the rustle of paper anywhere, even while blasts of air-borne debris from the earth-packed neighborhood roofs floated into the courtyard and the doors of the rooms flapped and squeaked with the racing winds.
The rain beat as assuredly as Mannig’s heart had pounded when she first heard of the orphanage. Her head spun, and her mind replayed fantasies of a classroom. An occasional wish for the Barone’s appearance flickered in and out of her thoughts; his speech and stance hinted at mentoring, and his mere presence promised formal lessons. Where is he? No one spoke of him.
Visions of studying, which had once set her aflame, now filled her with apathy. Her enthusiasm had been dampened little by little, without her realizing it. Staying alive did not require tasting life, just swallowing it. Her current dwelling was not her choice. She no longer enjoyed the simplest things as if they were gold or treated gold as if it were a simple thing. Mere subsistence dulled her enthusiasm. The orphanage had become a purgatory, providing food, shelter, and security, but no excitement or inspiration. She was going through the motions of being alive, like a twig drifting down the Tigris.
A havoc-threatening sky of black and weighty clouds gathered over Mosul. Darkness fell, and a terrible clamor arose. Squalls screamed across the open sky. The girls rolled up their bedding and rushed off the veranda for safety, crowding as many as twenty to each room, upstairs or down.
Mannig peered through the wood-latticed window at the idle Spindle Dingle, the deserted Teaser Gazebo, and the dormant Mystic Bath used for dyeing yarn. Courtyard ramblings had ceased, but not Dikran’s chores.
He herded the sheep from the Sheep Flip without much goading, sending them scampering into the courtyard. But he struggled with the lofty oak gate. The wind assailed him from every side. Garina dashed downstairs and pushed at the gate he was approaching, only to be suddenly shoved aside by the supervisor. After exchanging a few words, the two women rushed out and pushed the gate against the blustery weather. Dikran bolted the metal latch; one sheep “baa’d” nearby, and others echoed it, responding to the sounds of the storm. The supervisor hurried to her quarters, and Garina, back up to the veranda.
The branches of the myrtle tree by the fountain staged a dance of their own. They twisted in the erratic gusts of wind, relaxed, and then intertwined, competing for attention like clowns. Protected in her niche, Mannig enjoyed the entertainment provided by the natural phenomena.
“Amahn! Amahn!” Her roommates screeched and leaped with excitement when Garina brought in the brazier. El-manqqala, the portable metal pan with burning coal, traveled to a different room each night. “It is our turn. I can’t wait to tell my story.”
Mannig, unaffected, glanced at the girls dashing to surround the heater. They sat on their feet beside Garina and raised their arms like a steeple to catch the rising heat.
The steady glow in the manqqala stirred her emotions. Why is my throat throbbing?
She crouched with the smaller girls in the back, behind a tight circle of the bigger ones who blocked out the glow with their bodies and the rising warmth with their stretched hands.
Lala, a recent enrollee at the orphanage, sprinkled a few crystals of incense into the flames. A clean scent of pine cones dissolved the pungent odors of many bodies confined in a small room. This was part of the ritual in front of the brazier.
Wisps of smoke from the burning dung-ambers soared above their heads.
A girl stirred the coals with a twig.
“Stop poking up the fire!” Lala yelled, stunning everyone. Her voice crackled as her sunken jet-black eyes blazed with fury. “We must end our insane Armenian obsession with fire!”
Silence sank into darkness—the smoke-grimed walls, the glowing coals, the crackling flames, the blowing wind outside—every sound faded out of Mannig’s surroundings. She scanned the faces of her companions—unbroken stillness, uninterrupted melancholy, lifeless expressions. She choked, tongue anchored to the roof of her mouth. Why does no one speak? Pressure in her temples signaled a command coming from within. She forced a tiny voice. “What ‘insane obsession’?” she murmured with a camouflaged cough.
“You are scaring us,” another gasped.
“Is not the thunder frightening enough?” a perturbed voice echoed within the flickering shadows of the damp room.
Lala inhaled deeply. “My father, my poor father, God bless his soul,” she said, an unshed tear glinting in her eye. “He … he … he unwittingly betrayed his own Armenianness when he poked up the coals in the brazier. He died for it.”
“Stirring the fire?”
“We must stop doing that,” she shouted. “It’s a clue to identify Armenians.”
The circle of girls stared at her.
“Don’t you know it is an Armenian trait that the Turks use against us?”
Turks? The mere utterance of the word stopped all breaths, transforming the room to a tomb. Deathly stillness veneered horrifying images. As intense as the thunder rolled outside, the silence inside sank deeper. Lightning cut through the shadow-dimmed courtyard, while Lala’s voice patched bits of memories with pieces of pain.
“When the gendarmes ChaBOOKed us out of Erzerum,” she said, “they goaded the doctors outside the town walls on the pretense of needing their services at the Russian front. They shot them all—except my father. His perfect Turkish accent hid his ethnicity. They held him in a cell to observe him for many days. Then one night a brazier was brought into his cell—very much like this one, only filled with burning coal. Real coal, not dung. My father found a stick and, being a good but naïve Armenian, could not keep his hands from poking up the ashes—just as you did, a moment ago. He stirred and swerved the ambers throughout the night. When morning came, they hung him … by his feet … from the arch of a bridge.”
“But everyone pokes up cinders.”
“Not according to the Turks,” Lala whispered. “They know Armenians do because, once upon a time, we used to worship fire, like the Zoroastrians – stir the fire and say a prayer. That was before we became Christians. The Turks believe that sooner or later, the true nature of people surfaces under duress. They caught my father in the act.”
“They took my brother, too,” a lonely voice drifted from a girl, glaring pityingly into space. Dark circles under her eyes showed age beyond her years. “He was only fourteen,” she lamented. “They separated him from us … tied his feet to his hand
s, then raced their horses over his body. They crushed his skull. My mother buried him. We wept. Everyone moaned to no end. So many bodies were crushed …”
Lamentations rose and tears flowed while the wind whined and the rain crashed against the door. The gushing water on the veranda plunged onto the bricks of the courtyard floor. The sky loosed a torrent outdoors, streams of tears indoors.
“The gendarmes made us walk to Diyarbekir,” Garina’s voice rang above rising sobs. She gathered the folds of her tunic between her legs preparing to squat for a long session. Unlike her hasty speech, her expression matched her grieving posture. “They shot the men in our group,” her phrases chimed like a tolling bell. “They accused them of swallowing gold coins … forced my mother to cut open my father’s stomach … I was petrified. She stabbed my father’s chest. I screamed. She handed over the golden pieces. I howled. The gendarme forced me to hold a knife. ‘Open him up!’ He kicked me while pointing to my brother.
‘Noooooooo!’ I yelled.
“My mother blocked my mouth. ‘They’ll kill thee, if you don’t.’ I got down on my knees; my brother was not dead yet! He murmured my name … his voice tore at me. I threw away the knife. Before it hit the ground, a slash from a scimitar hit my chest.”
Garina tore open her tunic to show the horrible scar.
“I was forced to open him; my own blood flowing from my breast.” Garina’s tears drenched her face. She covered her chest, eyes squeezed shut in shame.
Shivering seized Mannig’s back; fear pierced her cold body. She trembled, held her breath in disbelief. The torture, death, and torment her family had suffered paled in comparison to the atrocities inflicted upon the families of her roommates. Do they hurt more than I? Mannig hid her pain in the recesses of her brain, a feat she assumed would make her capable of leading a normal life. These girls, too, endured their pain, conquered their suffering, and strove for regular lives, even though the deep furrows on their faces were revealed by the glow from the coals. How could they speak of such tragedy?
Between the Two Rivers: A Story of the Armenian Genocide Page 11
