by Boston Teran
She was weary and frightened, and she cried into the covers so no one would hear. She prayed, but she did not ask God for strength or will, but rather he keep her human so that she might embrace every hurt for the promise of beauty and goodness.
Alev woke to the sound of screaming.
It was not until a bedlam of children rushed past and crowded up into the windows to look out that she understood it was not her who had been screaming.
In the cool hours before dawn a group of young Armenian women had started off from an outlying district for the marketplace. To be careful, they flocked together for protection. But, as long sleek traces of light made their way up through the dusty thoroughfares, the young women were approached by two Turkish soldiers. In the confrontation that followed one of the girls was dragged off to be violated. The others took to pleading in the street, calling out in desperation toward the sleepy buildings for someone, anyone, to come to their friend’s aid.
This encounter had taken place within sight of the orphanage, and by the time Alev Temple and Herr Sporri were running toward the scene, two young Armenian men had angrily approached the soldiers.
The young men demanded answers. What began as a verbal altercation escalated quickly. The Armenians were adamant with their recriminations for what the soldiers had done. Alev Temple tried to use her credentials to keep the conflict from descending into immediate violence until higher authorities could take control of the moment and see that justice prevailed.
The murder of the two young men was executed by the soldiers there in the street with swift efficiency. There followed moments of mortal silence and fear. Alev stared in anguish as she leaned over one of the dead. Blood on his white shirt, on his black coat. He wore an amulet on his collar. Everything about her parents’ murder flooded up in ways that were unimaginable. She looked up at the soldiers. They were cool and brazen and beyond her reach. A wave of rage went through her. She wanted to see them dead. Dead there in the gutter and spit upon, and she understood how a sea of violence begins with a drop of hate.
Alev Temple helped load the bodies into a cart. And all that day she could not help but think . . . Such a tragic and pointless incident . . . It was not militarily important, it was not historically significant or manifestly strategic. But, it perfectly symbolized the nature of the antagonists’ conflict. It was the ageless story of violation and epithet, recrimination and gunshot. And so, on the morning of April 20, 1915, shortly after dawn, in the city of Van, the war there had been served up on a street corner.
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N THE EVENING of the twentieth, four riders ascended the hills above Lake Van. Dark silhouettes against the even darker escarpment they climbed. For the last two days they had circumvented villages being put to the sword, and peasants under guard being herded along dusty roads to their demise. There were endless patrols and mercenaries, and even upon reaching that gunblack and silent crest they could not be sure for their safety.
The men dismounted. Van was a small island of light in the distance. They could hear the faint concussion of artillery carrying across the waters below. Pockets of fire in one quadrant of the city seemed to be burning out of control.
The dragoman told John Lourdes, “The fires are coming from the Armenian quarter.”
John Lourdes got the field glasses from his pack and went to the edge of the bluff. There were orderly fires along the lakeshore and stations of torchlight on what he suspected were the roads in and out of Van. He handed the field glasses to the dragoman.
“If we’re going in, we should try it tonight.”
The old one handed the field glasses to Malek. The two men spoke briefly. The dragoman told John Lourdes, “We go tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow?”
“That is his wish.”
John Lourdes glanced at the priest who was now scrupulously looking over the valley floor. “Does he know what comes with tomorrow?”
“How do you mean?”
“Daylight.”
“Ah. I understand.”
“We’ve beat the hell out of these mounts getting here. Look at them. Van is about eight, ten kilometers. We could buy most of that ground in the dark. Maybe . . . If we’re lucky . . . all of it. But in daylight—”
“Tomorrow,” said the dragoman as he went and exhausted sat.
The priest had seen enough. He handed the glasses to John Lourdes.
The priest walked up to Hain. He had been squatting by the horses and thumbing tobacco into his chibouk. He quickly stood when the priest was before him.
“Can you cut me a staff?”
The guide, unsure, said, “A walking staff?”
“A staff. As tall as I am and then half again.”
“That high . . . Yes.”
“And when you shave it, it must be as wide as a lira. But no wider.”
“As wide as a lira?”
“But no wider.”
“I understand.” He paused, “What is it for?”
“Can you make the staff?”
“I can.”
“Will you make the staff?”
“I will.”
“Make the staff, and you will find out what it is for.”
Each man took a short watch while the others slept. Cannon fire ceased after midnight, but for the occasional shell lobbed into the quarter to keep the Armenians under the constant strain of threat. If what John Lourdes saw from the bluffs did not mean what it did, the lights and the fires in that unrecorded void would stand as a beautiful sight. Easily majestic and mysterious. Like the country itself. The priest came and sat quietly beside John Lourdes. He washed his wounded and painful feet.
“You will be shown appreciation in Van.” Knowing he was not understood the priest pointed to the city, “And due respect.”
“We should have tried to get in tonight.”
The two men turned their attention to the frontier.
The dragoman awoke. The priest began talking and motioned to John Lourdes. The dragoman listened and translated, “Malek wants you to know . . . this was the country of the Uratu. And the cradle of Armenia. In the lake is an island . . . Akdamar. The remains of a great church are there. It is all that is left of a palace and orchards and parks built by the Prince Gagik. They say the palace had golden cupolas and the Prince was sent from Samara a gold crown with gems and pearls . . . and a robe and belt and sword also of gold that glittered so it made the lake appear on fire.” Malek paused and grew reflective and what he said finally, the dragoman told John Lourdes. “Malek knows these are just stories, but he said to me wishfully, ‘Ah . . . what tales, my son.’”
Malek looked now at John Lourdes’ face and he reached toward that face and John Lourdes’ head angled slightly, and the priest rubbed the skin along the cheek with his thumb. He then did the same to the skin along his own cheek.
Dawn came upon them. A fan of light creeping over the mountains. The windswept crags of Akdamar Island and the ruins of the domed church there took on a golden hue. The guide walked past John Lourdes and pointed the staff he had finally finished preparing toward the snowy peak of a mountain at the eastern rim of the world.
“Ararat,” he said. “The ark of history resides there.” He spat. “Noah should have taken more women and fewer sons.”
He went over to the priest and the old one, who were sitting against the rockface and planning privately.
“It is done,” he said, holding out the staff.
“I see,” said Malek. “And I see the branch you chose is straighter than your conscience.”
The priest took the staff. As he ran his hand along the smooth shaft the dragoman removed from his shirt a small bundle. He handed it to the priest as John Lourdes walked up and stood with the guide.
The bundle was of fine red cloth and the dragoman bowed and kissed it. Malek set the staff aside as the packet was placed in his hands. The priest too lifted the bundle and he kissed it and then he stood. In each hand he took an edge and then
carefully he let the cloth fall loose.
It was a flag of three vertical stripes seamed together. One red, one green, one blue. “This is one of the flags created by the good Father Alishan,” said the dragoman. He looked toward Mount Ararat and told John Lourdes, “The colors are of the rainbow over the ark when the flood had ended.”
The dragoman had been carrying rope, as well, for this moment. He handed it to Malek who began slipping the heavy twine through knotted loops along the flag’s edge and lashing them to the staff.
The priest went about this task in a precise and ceremonial manner and John Lourdes could not help but remember the factory in the barrio where his mother worked as an immigrant from Mexico sewing American flags. With its tarred roof and stifling air filled with specks of cloth from the cutters’ work. And the ear- numbing endless drone of the machines the women sat crouched over in that windowless brick shell, sweating so badly their skin was like drenched brown earth.
And there was that first summer his mother had taken him downtown to San Jacinto Park for the Fourth of July celebration. Flags hung everywhere. From lampposts and office buildings and rooftops and children waving them and women, and a dog wore one as a bandana and it shot past him at a full-out run. They even were draped over the legs of broken men confined to wheelchairs who had served their country well, only to be forgotten except on such days of remembrance.
“Look,” his mother had told him. “We helped make all of this.”
The way she had said, “We helped make all of this.” Her words had such authenticity of soul and legitimate pride. She had crossed a pumice wasteland on foot to reach that moment, and it was exactly what he saw on the faces of the priest and the dragoman.
Then, inexplicably, John Lourdes’ father came to him in the last moments of his life. On that sidewalk with his back to a church wall dying in the Mexican sun and holding up John Lourdes’ notebook with the last few words he had written to amend his failure of a life: “Son—forgive me.”
“Efendi.”
The thought had came upon John Lourdes with the same overwhelming surprise that was exactly his father.
“Efendi.”
The page from his notebook—that page—had been in his wallet ever since. “What,” he said to the guide.
The guide was looking at the flag. “The priest is not the journey, is he?”
“No,” said John Lourdes. “He is not the journey.”
They stripped the mounts down to bare essentials. They cut the pack horses loose. Anything they did not need to carry was cast aside. With field glasses John Lourdes and the dragoman went about surveying the flats for their run to Van.
There was sporadic gunfire in the city. The occasional volley shells of artillery. There were soldiers along the lake, and others taking sailboats up the further shore. It was the guard stations along the road that had to be considered. And a canal known as the Shamiram that needed to be crossed.
There was one isolated wooden bridge with just three guards who seemed intent on firing at something poking up out of the ground. It was too distant to tell what it might be, but puffs of dirt constantly pricked up from the earth around it.
“They’re not very good shots,” said the dragoman.
“Let’s hope we’re seeing them at their best.”
John Lourdes, unlike the dragoman, thought he knew what they were shooting at, but said nothing.
The priest had climbed into the saddle and was reaching for the flag staff, which he had spiked into the ground when the guide approached. He was holding what appeared to be a chalice of burnished gold. He offered it to the priest.
“And what is this?”
“It’s a chalice,” said the guide.
“That is not what I meant.”
“I thought you might like to have it.”
Malek studied it carefully. “Was this also willed to you?”
“It was willed. Yes.”
“You seem to be one of those souls who is constantly being willed things.”
“In all fairness. Your company seems to assure it.”
“I see,” said the priest.
“It’s not a bad chalice. As far as chalices go.”
“As far as they go. What would you have me do with it?”
Hain shrugged. “Whatever priests do with chalices.”
This small company started down the crest keeping to a breaker of trees. Once on the plain they maneuvered the landscape descending into long swales for cover, only to rise again into the bleached sunlight.
There was still breakfast smoke from the camps along the shore. To the south, cavalry headed to Van at a slow walk. The riders crossed through a broad swath of trampled grass where the march of foot soldiers led toward Persia and then, breaching a stand of willows, descended into a river where women washed clothes upon the rocks. When they saw these haggard men and their weapons and that flag whose colors rippled along the water’s surface they rose up screaming and ran.
Out of the trees the women scattered like a flock of wild birds. The riders reorganized in the shallows, and John Lourdes separated from them, coming up out of the trace straight for the guard station at the plank bridge that crossed the canal.
He saw the women come to a road where there was a cart laden with barrels and crates, followed by men making their way from Van. The women shrieked and they pointed and the men gathered around them. They listened and they looked and then one took off running for the same guard station John Lourdes approached. He was shouting but too far off to be heard.
John Lourdes drew near the bridge. The guards were still shooting at the target, but they stopped when they saw a rider trotting toward them. They raised their arms to halt and as John Lourdes got close enough he could see they had been passing the time firing at the desiccated head of a man.
John Lourdes played the innocent traveler from Mexico, offering papers written in Turkish for them to inspect. Each took a turn going line by line and they eyed him and they eyed the horse and the weapons in his scabbard. He couldn’t understand a word they were saying, but it wouldn’t surprise him if they were sizing up his head to play bookend to the one there in the brush.
Their strange chatter began to subside, and the one with John Lourdes’ papers had even gone so far as to stretch out an arm to return them, when the man sprinting toward the guards could finally be heard.
The soldiers were trying to make sense of what was being shouted when one of their number spotted three riders dash from the trees bunched up along the river. Their mounts were kicking up great clots of earth and the flag rippled and snapped and what the soldiers saw they could not quite believe.
John Lourdes booted his horse forward and with one sweep grabbed his papers. By the time the soldier’s head turned John Lourdes’ other arm rose with his automatic aimed and ready. The soldier stood there rigid without understanding.
The impact at that range shot blood out his back about a dozen meters. The Arabian jolted and the soldiers drew their weapons and scattered toward John Lourdes’ flanks. His horse reared and backpedaled and John Lourdes’ shots went wild.
The guide was leaning into the neck of his mount with a rifle. He fired and one of the soldiers was hit in the thigh and the bone went clear through the pant leg. He was left on the ground snaked up in agony while the other soldier made it to the edge of the canal beside the bridge. He fired from a prone position at John Lourdes who leaned against the Arabian’s shoulder and ran him up onto the bridge and shot down through the slatted boarding.
When the soldier ran out of ammunition John Lourdes saw him take a metallic cylinder from his belt and strike its fuse against a rock. John Lourdes kicked the Arabian forward to clear the bridge as the soldier went to fling what was a grenade. A volley of shots from the riders approaching took him apart and the grenade rolled beneath the bridge supports and blew.
Planking pocked the water. Smoke curled and drifted and the concussion of the grenade reached well into the plain. The r
iders reined in at the water’s edge. John Lourdes shouted for them to come on. Their mounts had to be maneuvered one at a time, and the remaining plankboard shuddered and creaked under their weight as they crossed.
Along the lakeshore and from Van, John Lourdes could see sunlight winking off field glasses. To the south the cavalry patrol had turned and were after them at a hard gallop and it was three kilometers to safety.
They were a slender arrow upon that ancient plain aimed for Van. Troops were on the move to intercept them. Riflefire dotted the sky but too far for an accounting.
They were like something imagined coming out of a long sleep to cross a road then push on through windtwisting grass where lay forgotten khatchkars like great boats of stone, their inscriptions steeped in history and salvation.
Along the rooftops of the Armenian quarter men pointed toward the flag and waved their hats, shouting the riders on. From the barricades armed citizens charged out on foot followed by a coterie on horseback that set a perimeter and lay down coverfire.
Everywhere there was shooting. Another discharge of artillery and the arcing rain of a shell landed before the riders and their mounts skittered and bolted sideways. The men separated and re-formed past a vapor of smoke and dust. John Lourdes could see the Armenians along the quarter rooftops and manning the barricades. For the most part they did not wear kaftans and loose-fitting trousers but rather European suitcoats and dark pants and square-cut vests. These were not trained soldiers but shopkeepers and cobblers, bankers and tradesmen, whose forebears and kinsmen were being carried home to them in the body of that flag. The priest and his vanguard of riders cleared the perimeter and ascending the earthen battlements in a torrent of hooves and dust leapt the trench and entered Van.
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