Nobody's Child

by Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch

  “The two boys were taken into a Muslim home,” said the Vartabed. “A good family. They will be raised Turkish, but they will live.”

  Kevork clenched his teeth in anger. The thought of Onnig and Aram being raised as Turks was almost more than he could stand. He hoped they were old enough to remember their past.

  “What about Gadar?” asked Marta, a tremble in her voice. Ovsanna’s little daughter had grown into a beautiful young girl.

  The Vartabed sighed. “She lives,” he said. “She is probably in Smyrna by now. She was bought by a white slave trader.”

  Marta’s hand flew to her mouth in horror.

  Kevork turned to her. “Perhaps she can escape. Smyrna is a trading centre on the sea.” He knew that the possibility was remote, but he was desperate to say something encouraging to Marta.

  Each day, the zaptiehs gathered together groups of deportees and took them in a different direction. Mr. Karellian was among the first of the orphanage group to be dispatched. Nobody ever came back. Each day, new deportees arrived to take their place.

  Kevork and Marta separated themselves from the Marash deportees and made a point of blending in with the newest set of arrivals each day. Anna still walked behind the last stragglers in the column, urging them on, ensuring that they didn’t get lost. Kevork had no idea what she managed to eat, but she refused all the food that he and Marta tried to give her. They kept the Vartabed Garabed with them, and he accepted the food they shared with him, but Kevork knew that he didn’t eat it himself.

  They tried to blend in, but they could delay their fate for only so long.

  One morning, Kevork woke up with the sharp realization that his boots had been stolen. He looked over and saw that Marta’s were gone, too. Bands of Kurds came through each night, stealing what they could, but it amazed Kevork that both he and Marta could have slept through such a key theft.

  Kevork walked over to the body of an elderly Armenian man who had died through the night. He said a prayer for the man’s soul, and then he crouched down and gently removed the man’s shirt. He brought it back to where Marta was sitting, then tore it into strips. He handed her half of them. “Wrap your feet in these,” he said.

  As they wrapped their feet, one of the original zaptiehs from Marash approached them. “You’re still here?” he said, poking Kevork in the ribs with his bayonet. “Get over with that group.”

  Kevork tied the last knot in his rag shoes and then got to his feet. He gave Marta one longing look, then walked over to the other group.

  Kevork was alarmed to see Marta get up and walk over to him. Doing such a thing without being ordered to was like asking to be shot.

  “Go away,” Kevork whispered urgently.

  “No,” Marta whispered back. “I would rather die with you than alone.”

  Captain Mahmoud Sayyid happened to be walking past, and he overheard the last bit of the conversation. “You,” he said, pointing to Marta. “Get back with the others.”

  She didn’t move.

  Kevork watched with dismay as the Captain ordered a zaptieh to restrain Marta. The man grabbed Marta by the shirt to pull her away. Her shirt tore open, exposing the fact that she wasn’t a boy.

  “I’ve found a girl!” cried the zaptieh.

  The Captain watched with a satisfied smile on his face.

  Kevork ran toward her, but the Captain drew out the sabre from his belt and struck Kevork’s cloth-bound feet with the broad side. Kevork fell. The Captain held the point of the sabre to Kevork’s back. “Move and you’re dead.”

  The zaptieh who held Marta called out, “Friends, I’ve got a girl here!”

  Just then, Anna came from out of nowhere. She grabbed a bayonet from a nearby zaptieh’s hands and lunged at the man who was holding Marta. He saw her coming and ducked in the nick of time. Then the deportees and zaptiehs watched in horror as Anna lunged again, missing the zaptieh completely, but stabbing Captain Mahmoud Sayyid in the neck.

  “That is for Mariam,” she said fiercely.

  Time stood still. Zaptiehs and deportees alike stared as the man collapsed, blood soaking his uniform. The zaptieh who was holding onto Marta was as mesmerized by the scene as everyone else.

  “Run!” shouted Anna, breaking the spell. Marta pulled away from her captor just as his grip was regaining its strength. She dashed into the crowd.

  The zaptieh’s attention was now directed at Anna. “Infidel!” he cried. And with one swift movement, he pierced Anna’s heart with his bayonet.

  Then the zaptieh turned to deal with Marta. But she had vanished.

  Kevork knew exactly where in the crowd she was hiding, but he didn’t look. He willed himself to keep his eyes on his dying aunt. He said a silent prayer for her soul as she took her last breath. The zaptieh grabbed the Vartabed Garabed and marched him over to Kevork’s group. “You can pay for that girl’s insolence,” he said.

  Kevork and the priest and ten other men were led to the banks of the Euphrates River. As they stood on the rocky shore of the wide river in the middle of the desert, Kevork wondered what would happen next. He looked down into the water and it looked cool and inviting in the desert heat. Should he just jump in and end the torture? But then he thought of Marta. What if she lived and he didn’t? What would that do to her? He thought of Anna and what she had sacrificed so Marta could live. Kevork decided that if he had to die, it would be to save someone else, not just to end his own pain.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Guluzar Hanim walked out of Mariam and Ani’s room and closed the door behind her.

  “We cannot stay here,” said Mariam. “I don’t like that woman.”

  Ani sat down on the bed beside Mariam. “Where would we go?”

  Mariam was silent.

  “Rustem Bey is trustworthy,” said Ani.

  “Is he?” said Mariam.

  “He has put his family in danger by bringing us here,” said Ani. “We owe him our lives.”

  Mariam had been in such a haze of pain and shock that she had lost details about the auction and its implications. She shuddered at the thought of where she might be right now if it hadn’t been for Rustem Bey.

  “You are right,” said Mariam. The whole situation was confusing, but she was beginning to feel guiltily grateful that she had been saved from the worst.

  “Let us go to the garden,” said Ani. And then she stood up and held out her hand to Mariam.

  Mariam’s stomach still hurt, but she willed herself to stand up straight. She did not want to appear weak in front of strangers.

  “I was in the garden before,” said Ani. “With my … my mother …” her eyes filled with tears.

  The image of Herminé’s bloodied corpse filled Mariam’s mind. It seemed obscene that she and Ani were standing in this place — filled with luxuries and personally safe — while Ani’s mother lay dead in a room across the city.

  “We need to be strong,” said Mariam, hugging Ani fiercely and trying to hide her own tears.

  Ani took a deep breath. “Yes,” she said.

  When she stepped through the beaded curtains at the end of the hallway and entered the garden, Mariam was enveloped in the heady scent of flowers. It was as if she had walked into the Garden of Eden. There were lemon trees and grapevines, flowering shrubs and plants of every description and colour. Her first impression was that this garden was a place of relaxation and reflection.

  There was a round pool with a fountain in the centre of the garden, and Mariam squeezed Ani’s hand with sympathy when the girl gasped in sadness at the sight of it.

  The fountain bubbled fresh, clean water, but Mariam’s imagination was filled with the sight of three bloated corpses bobbing in another fountain across town. Ani’s family.

  In front of this fountain, there were three little girls sitting in a circle on the grass, playing with a kitten. One young woman in a long, blue tunic similar to the green one of Guluzar Hanim’s sat on a bench close to the children. She balanced on her lap a small ci
rcular wooden frame that held a cloth of half-finished embroidery. Part of her attention was on her work, and the other was on the children.

  Guluzar Hanim sat in a high-backed chair across from the younger woman, with a good view of the children. A servant girl stood behind her, waving a silk fan in rhythmic motion.

  Mariam saw her turn her face towards her as she and Ani entered the garden.

  Guluzar Hanim flicked her hand with an impatient motion at the servant, and the servant stopped fanning. She stood up and walked over to Mariam and Ani.

  “Let me introduce you.” She reached out and enveloped Mariam’s hand in her own cool and firm one.

  “Ede,” said Guluzar Hanim. The young woman who had been watching the children looked up. “Come and meet our guests, dear,” she said.

  The younger woman set down her embroidery and stood up.

  “This is my daughter, Ede Kadin,” said Guluzar Hanim. “She is Rustem Bey’s only full sibling.”

  Mariam bowed in greeting, as did Ani.

  “This is Mariam,” said Guluzar Hanim dryly. “The girl your brother keeps on talking about.”

  Ede grinned. “I’m glad to finally meet you,” she said. The girl’s honey-coloured skin and kind brown eyes made her look strikingly similar to Rustem. She wore her long, straight hair parted in the middle and flowing down her back.

  It gave Mariam a start to think that Rustem Bey talked about her to his mother and sister. She had barely thought of him from one day to the next, and yet all of these people here knew about her.

  Mariam bowed to Ede.

  Guluzar Hanim motioned towards the three children playing with the kitten. “Two of those children are Rustem’s half sisters: Ayesha and Leyla,” she said dismissively. “Nura Hanim — Rustem Agha’s third wife — is their mother. The other girl is Taline: an Armenian orphan Ede picked up.”

  Mariam was taken aback by the way she said it. “Picked up” like a stray cat? she wondered. She regarded the three girls. They were all dressed with equal richness. There was much she had to learn.

  A light jingling announced that someone else had entered the garden. Mariam turned. A young, breathlessly beautiful Turkish woman entered. This woman also wore a sumptuous silk brocade tunic with high slits in the side and matching trousers underneath. Like Guluzar Hanim, this woman wore green. But it was a deeper, richer green. Her hair had been hennaed red and was wrapped in a coil on the top of her head. Mariam had thought that Guluzar Hanim was beautiful and elegant, but this woman was even more so.

  Mariam looked over to Guluzar Hanim and saw that her lips were smiling, but her eyes were flashing with unmasked hate. “Nura Hanim,” she said in a controlled and pleasant voice. “How nice of you to join us. This is Mariam, the Armenian girl.”

  Mariam bowed to her.

  “And of course you know Ani.”

  Ani bowed.

  Nura Hanim smiled. “Why don’t you two take a walk around the garden with me while Guluzar Hanim rests her weary legs?”

  The interchange between the two women seemed so petty to Mariam. Her imagination was consumed with the possible fates of Marta and Kevork, her grandmother, brother, and others. Did these women not know what was happening outside?

  “Come,” said Nura Hanim, looping one hand through Mariam’s arm and the other through Ani’s. “I want to check my roses.”

  Mariam pasted a smile on her face. It was so hard to pretend that the state of this woman’s roses was of any interest to her, yet she didn’t need any more enemies. As they walked through the garden, Mariam noticed the high walls on all four sides. This might be the Garden of Eden, but it wasn’t a garden that could be easily escaped. The happy sound of children laughing and the woman’s inane chatter didn’t fully muffle the sounds of the deportation operations beyond the walls. Mariam knew that she was somewhat safe, but she felt just as much a prisoner as the people beyond the walls.

  After the walk around the garden, the ladies sat together on deep cushions and a low table was placed before them. A sumptuous array of cakes and preserved fruits was laid out by two servant girls who Mariam suspected were Armenian. Mariam sipped her glass of sherbet, but she didn’t have the stomach to eat. Her stomach still hurt from the Captain’s punch, and her heart ached for the people outside. She looked across the table at Ani and noticed that she too was putting on an act of contentment, but she hadn’t touched her food.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  There was a sound in the water and Kevork looked up. A wooden dinghy navigated with a long pole by an elderly man approached the shore. The dinghy was made of planks of wood lashed together with rope, then tied onto twenty or more inflated goat skins for buoyancy. Kevork was amazed that the craft didn’t capsize.

  The boatman was Kurdish. Kevork knew this by the man’s salvar — trousers tight from ankle to knee and then billowing out to enormous fullness above the knee. The man wore a tunic with a wide blue sash and a tasselled fez on his head.

  The elderly Kurd guided his craft to the shore, then waited with a bored expression on his face while the zaptiehs prodded with bayonets the dozen men onto the planks of wood. Once they were all on, the man dipped his long wooden pole into the rocks at the bottom of the river and pushed out.

  Kevork squinted his eyes and looked at the shore as long as he could, but he didn’t get a last glimpse of Marta.

  The Vartabed and the other men sat down on the dinghy, and so Kevork stepped gingerly to where they were and sat next to the priest. Kevork stared out at the water, mesmerized by its coolness. Others before him must have been seduced by the water as well, because as they travelled deeper into the desert, the Euphrates was studded with bobbing corpses, bloating in the heat of the sun. Kevork shuddered, then turned his head and looked at the Vartabed instead. The priest’s face was serene, and his lips moved in prayer.

  Before he knew it, the dinghy bumped into the other side of the Euphrates.

  The boatman lifted his long stick from the water and prodded the men to make them hurry off his dinghy. Once they had all stumbled onto dry, rocky ground, he stuck the stick back in the water and manoeuvred his craft back over to the other side. Kevork marvelled at the man’s industry. To the boatman, this was just a job: get as many people over to Deir-Ez-Zor, a city in the middle of the Syrian desert, as quickly as possible. Kevork wondered if he was paid by the head.

  There was a different group of zaptiehs on this side of the Euphrates, and they herded the group from the dinghy over to one side, and then stood and waited for more people to arrive. Kevork watched as a woman with a baby and two children, an elderly woman, and a handful of men stepped off the next dinghy. Marta was not in the group. He didn’t know whether to be happy or sad about that. Perhaps she had a chance to escape? The possibility was remote, but he clung to it.

  The zaptiehs waited for several more dinghies to arrive, and Kevork watched, but still no Marta.

  “It’s time to go,” yelled a zaptieh. Kevork stood up, then helped the Vartabed to his feet. And they marched in the direction the bayonets prodded.

  They marched into the depths of the desert. When it got dark, they slept in the sand. When Kevork woke the next morning, his shirt with its coin had been stolen. He walked for that whole day in nothing but trousers and the tattered rags around his feet. The sun beat down on his head and back and his skin reddened and blistered.

  That night, he was too sore to lie down and sleep, and so he sat, hands on knees. He dreamt that Marta was with him. He thought he could hear her whispering in the dark. But when he woke up the next morning, he was lying on his side. His trousers and his last gold coin had been stolen. The other deportees were in the same situation as he. Kurds would come in the night and steal whatever they could, whether from corpses or soon-to-be corpses.

  They arrived at the town of Aneh in the Syrian desert and rested a day. There they met up with other walking skeletons. Then they were driven like a herd of animals all the way back to Deir-Ez-Zor.

  Th
ey were being marched in circles.

  Every death affected the Vartabed as if it were the only one he had ever witnessed. At night, the priest would sprinkle a bit of desert sand on each new corpse and whisper a prayer. The zaptiehs laughed at him. And while the Vartabed became more sensitive, Kevork’s emotions shut down. When he thought about it, Kevork could trace back this change of heart to the day he lost Marta. It hurt too much to think of her, and when he saw others die, it made him think of her. The only way he could function was to not think.

  Once, he walked past the corpse of a mother whose baby still whimpered feebly in her arms. The Vartabed wanted to save the child, but Kevork didn’t. Save her for how long? Wasn’t it better that the baby die with her mother’s arms wrapped around her in love? How many grandmothers had he walked past who had simply given up — sitting at the side of the road waiting to die? Sometimes wraithlike children would sit listlessly beside the old women. Kevork knew what had become of their parents.

  No matter how many Armenians died, it seemed that there were always more to kill. The roads were littered with corpses, yet more deportees arrived each day. Kevork couldn’t understand why the Turks didn’t just shoot them all and be done with it.

  These wretched walking skeletons were herded up again and made to walk all the way north to el-Jezireh, in the very heart of the desert wasteland.

  Hunger and thirst, combined with burning days and freezing nights, felled the deportees one by one. Kevork noted with detachment the effect of sun and heat on the bodies of the dead. During the first day or so after death, a body would swell and puff up. After that, it would deflate, then cook in the sun. Bodies that had been exposed for several days would ooze oil that would leach into the sand as the body decomposed. As time went on, the skin dried like leather and shrunk from the bone. Kevork had plenty of opportunity to observe this process as he and the other survivors were forced to step over the bodies of the dead.