The Hunger

by Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch

Marta watched with fascination a certain man who would follow behind one of the soldier’s horses. When the horse defecated, he would fall to his knees and pick through the droppings for a stray kernel of undigested corn. The man lived, while others around him died.

  They were marched to Tel Abiad, a community on the banks of the Euphrates River, south of Urfa. Thousands upon thousands of men, women, and children, half-starved, with blistered feet and open sores showing through their rags, had been gathered together.

  The sight of the eerily still blue water made Marta gasp. This was the same river she had seen in her vision. She looked down at the clothes that she was wearing and nodded in understanding. Her shirt was now tattered and nondescript, as were her pants. She had come back to where she had started. There was one difference—on her feet were boots. The sand she had been walking on had worn the soles down to the thickness of a wafer, but they still protected her feet.

  “Water,” muttered Kevork, as he gazed longingly at the still blueness. He was about to break forward and run from the column, risking the whips and bayonets of the gendarmes, but Marta grasped his arm.

  “That water is death,” she warned.

  Kevork shrugged her hand off his arm and was about to step forward when they were both distracted by cries coming from the the river. On the banks were half a dozen Armenians who’d had the same idea as Kevork. They had drunk their fill of salt water. Stomachs distended with malnutrition and dehydration now burst like rotting fruit. They died an agonizing death as the gendarmes looked on, grateful that they didn’t have to waste more bullets.

  One day, Kevork pointed to a man in a tattered group of deportees resting on the side of the road, “Does he look familiar?”

  “No,” said Marta. “Who do you think it is?”

  “I am sure that is the Vartabed Garabed.”

  A “Vartabed” was an Armenian priest. And when Anna had first led her group of orphans back to Marash from Adana, her first stop had been to the Vartabed’s residence. In his kindness, he had arranged for Kevork, Marta, and Mariam to be admitted to the orphanage, and he had asked Miss Younger to hire Anna as a cook. Onnig, who had been very young at the time, had refused to leave his aunt and grandmother to go to the orphanage with his sisters, and thus the family had been further fragmented.

  “God Bless you, Very Reverend Father,” Kevork said, kneeling in front of the startled priest. Marta got on her knees beside Kevork and bent her head in humility.

  “You look familiar .... yes I know you two are Adana survivors,” exclaimed Vartabed Garabed. “You were living at the orphanage … correct?”

  “Yes,” Marta replied, trying hard not to show the pity she felt for the priest. While Marta and Kevork had been able to scavenge bits of food, it was obvious that the priest had not eaten for some time. He had wasted away so dramatically that it was a miracle he could still live. Marta had an urge to force him to eat. She felt around in her pocket and pulled out a few dried raisins, left over from her bag.

  “Vartabed Garebed, please take this.” She placed the raisins in the priest’s hand. Father Garabed looked down at the precious food as if he didn’t recognize what it was. Marta felt liking shaking him.

  “When were you deported?” asked Kevork.

  “My parish was one of the last groups to leave Marash,” replied the priest, still staring absently at the raisins.

  “Do you know what happened to the Hovsepian family?” asked Marta.

  “Your aunt … and her children … and your grandmother... correct?”

  “And my baby brother, Onnig,” added Marta.

  “Three children, that’s right.” The priest absent-mindedly picked up the raisins one by one, but didn’t eat them, and then said, “I heard that the three children were taken in by a Moslem family in Marash to be raised as Turks. Nobody knows what happened to your aunt or grandmother. They were not with the others when that area was rounded up.”

  “Do you think they might be in hiding?” Kevork asked.

  “Where would they hide?” asked the priest.

  Escape

  Every day, soldiers chose a group of deportees and took them away. Mr. Karellian was among the first of their friends to be dispatched. Nobody ever came back. And Marta and Kevork could only guess what happened to them. Each day, new deportees arrived to take their place.

  Now that they were no longer in transit, groups of Kurds congregated on the outskirts of the trans-shipment area, risking the wrath of the soldiers in hopes of making a bit of money by selling food to the deportees. Both Kevork and Marta still had coins sewn into their clothing. The Kurds were happy to exchange food and local currency for a piece of Kevork’s gold.

  Marta savoured every bite of mouldy bread and every shrivelled olive. She watched with dismay as her once strong and healthy body withered and contracted. But she would not let the Turks win. She was determined to live.

  Marta and Kevork 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, ensuring that they didn’t get lost. Nobody knew what she managed to eat, but she refused all the food that Marta and Kevork offered her. They kept the Vartabed Garabed with them, and shared with the priest any food they could find. But Marta saw him giving away every precious morsel.

  The three of them lay low, but they could only delay their fate for so long.

  One morning, Marta woke up with the sharp realization that her precious boots were gone. Kevork’s were also gone. As they had slept through the night, a band of Kurds had stealthily come by, removing all in sight that was of value.

  Marta watched as Kevork walked over to the corpse of an elderly Armenian who had died during the night. Gently, he removed the man’s shirt, and as he walked back to where Marta was sitting, he tore the shirt into strips and handed half of them to her. “Wrap these around your feet,” he said.

  When Marta was finished, she looked down at her feet as a well of apprehension rose up in her throat. With the dirty rags twisted round and round her feet, her outfit was now exactly as it had been in her dream. She looked around at the malnourished group of deportees who had somehow still managed to survive.

  Kevork still sat beside her, wrapping his feet in the rags, when a soldier came up to him and poked him with a bayonet.

  “You’re still here?” the gendarme remarked in surprise. “Get over with that group!”

  Kevork got to his feet and stumbled over to the newest doomed mass of humanity.

  Marta got up and followed him. “Go away!” Kevork hissed.

  “I go where you go.”

  “You! Get back with the others!” As the gendarme grabbed Marta by the shirt to pull her away, it tore, exposing creamy white skin.

  “Hey! You’re a girl! I thought all the girls were gone by now!” The soldier grabbed Marta’s arm and she cried out in pain. Kevork pushed away the restraining arms of the gendarme and ran toward Marta, but another gendarme noticed and stuck out his foot, tripping him. That man held a bayonet at Kevork’s back. “Move and you’re dead.”

  The soldier 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 soldier’s belt and lunged at the man who was holding Marta. He saw her coming and ducked in the nick of time. Then the guards and deportees watched in horror as Anna lunged again, this time stabbing Captain Mahmoud Sayyid in the neck. Time stood still. Soldiers and deportees alike stared as the man collapsed, blood soaking the white of his uniform. Anna stood defiantly beside him, the bayonet with its bloodied blade still gripped in her hands. The soldier who was holding on to 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 man’s attention was now directed at Anna. “Infidel!” And wi
th one swift movement he pierced Anna’s heart with his bayonet.

  Then the soldier turned to deal with Marta. But she had vanished. The other prisoners had quickly closed their ranks upon her, hiding her from the soldier’s sight. The soldier grabbed the Vartabed Garabed by his twig-thin arm and marched him over to Kevork’s doomed group. “You can pay for that girl’s insolence.”

  Marta watched helplessly from her hiding place as Kevork and the priest and ten other men were packed into a wooden dinghy and pushed out onto the Euphrates. They were being taken yet deeper into the desert.

  Marta choked back tears as she watched her beloved Kevork disappear over the horizon. For just one moment, she hesitated. What was the point of even trying to escape? They would catch up with her sooner or later and she would die like everyone else.

  But she had no illusions about what would happen to her if the soldiers found her. And she did not plan on letting that happen. She lay low, hiding among the deportees until night. The emaciated group had fallen into an exhausted sleep, but most of the soldiers stayed up to drink and play cards. Marta waited until the wee hours of the morning when the soldiers had drifted off to sleep too. Even the gendarme who was supposed to be keeping the night watch had fallen into a deep sleep. After all, where could these people possibly go?

  Marta gazed at the hilly areas in the distance.

  Quietly, she picked her way through the mass of inert bodies. Marta was at the very edge of the encampment. Just a few more steps ...

  “Halt! Who goes there?”

  It was the same young soldier who had started this journey with the orphanage contingent.

  “You’re the traitor Armenian,” Marta said boldly.

  “Don’t say that!” he responded, stepping back hesitantly. “I’ve become a Moslem.”

  “Hypocrite.”

  “I could kill you,” said the youth.

  “Go ahead.”

  The boy did nothing. The two Armenians glared at each other. Then Marta walked fearlessly out of the encampment in full view of the young soldier. She knew that he was watching her, but he did not shoot.

  She headed for the hills by the light of a new moon. She found several caves, all of good size. But there was a problem. Deportees before her had also found this hiding place, and the caves were full of death. Marta thought of her own parents rotting in a cave in Adana.

  But there was nowhere else to hide. She had to distance herself from exactly who it was that she was stepping over as she made her way to the mouth of one of the caves. As the stench of rotting bodies wafted around her, she looked up at the night sky and focused on the moon. She straightened her back and tried to breathe in a bit of the air above the stench. She took one huge last gulp, then ducked down, into the cave, amidst the corpses. A deep blackness enveloped her. Marta held her breath as long as she could and tried to use her hands as eyes as she entered ever deeper into the cave. Her hands touched paper-thin flesh cold on the bone. She tried not to think of the hands that had caressed babies, and the feet that had walked miles in the desert in hope of life, but ending up here. Through the blackness, she imagined hundreds of dead eyes staring up at her. Yet she wasn’t afraid. She crawled deeper into the cave, through openings so small that no well-fed soldier would be able to enter. No one else had penetrated the cave as deeply as she. Marta was alone. Her place of refuge was a cavity in which she could not sit up nor stretch out her legs. She curled herself like a baby in the womb and fell asleep.

  Marta dreamt that she was hovering above herself, watching the body of Marta sleep amidst the dead. She thrashed about, but kept on hitting her arms against the walls. She woke up to the sound of someone screaming. It took her a moment to realize that they were her own screams. She shuddered, and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  She woke again. Had hours passed? Or even days? Marta didn’t know. Her throat was parchment dry.

  Suddenly, she could hear screaming, and this time it wasn’t her own. She held her breath and listened. Not just screaming, but voices too. Coming from the mouth of the cave. She could hear one loud voice. It sounded like an auctioneer—

  “... who’ll give me a gold pound for this one? Two? Yes … you! How about three … anybody for three?”

  She recognized the voice. It was one of the gendarmes. Marta was paralyzed with fear. “But they can’t reach me all the way in here,” she reminded herself. Her heart was beating so hard that she was sure the people at the mouth of the cave could hear it.

  The “auction” went on for what seemed like an eternity. While Marta was safe in the womb of the cave, she listened in despair as other women suffered a fate that could be her own any day. When the auction finally ended and the crowd dispersed Marta was struck by the sudden thundering silence. The sounds of weeping and groaning had become the norm since the deportations. Now she was enveloped in a cold timeless death.

  It wasn’t the stench of the cave that made her finally leave. The smell of death had become all too common for that. It was that she would starve if she stayed any longer, but there was a slim chance of survival if she emerged. Marta crept towards the entrance of the cave, past the heaps of corpses. When she reached the entrance, she tried to stand up, but wobbled like a newborn. She sat back down and looked around.

  The black of night was almost bright compared to the darkness of the cave. Marta could see the outlines of the deportation encampment in the distance, and the shimmering seduction of the Euphrates just beyond.

  She looked longingly at the river, but she had seen what death by salt water looked like.

  Marta’s legs were so weak that she could not stand up. How could she get away from this place if she couldn’t even get onto her feet? She dragged herself along the ground and searched through the clothing of the bodies closest to the mouth of the cave. She didn’t quite know what she was looking for—there was so much she needed after all. Marta removed a tattered cloak from the corpse of an old man and wrapped it around her body for warmth, oblivious of its scent of death. What she needed more than anything was water. She found a cane under the body of a woman who was still clutching the remains of her newborn infant. And then a miracle! A tiny bit of brackish water in a skin container around the mother’s waist. Marta drank it up greedily. The sensation of the drops of water on her parched tongue brought untold joy to her heart. She would not let the Turks win. She was determined to live in spite of them. She fastened the empty skin at her waist, and slowly, painfully, hobbled on. As she carefully picked her way through the corpses, she spied a heel of dry bread on the ground. She picked it up and pressed it to her chest, so thankful was she for this tiny bit of nourishment. As she was about to bite into it, her eyes focused on the tiny tooth marks of its former owner. She looked down by the ground and realized that it had fallen from the hand of a boy who had died within his mother’s embrace. Mother and son both looked surprisingly peaceful in death. His shaggy black hair was grimed with dust, and in the moonlight, just for a moment, it reminded Marta of Erik’s sandy blonde hair. She gasped in sorrow.

  I will not let them win, she vowed. Then she broke off a small chunk of the bread and forced it onto her swollen tongue—as much a sacrament as nourishment.

  She needed to find another hiding place before dawn. The soldiers and neighbouring villagers were always on the lookout for runaways. And if Marta were found, death was the least of her worries.

  Leaning heavily on the cane, she hobbled along, keeping clear of the road. She would look ahead and determine a place to try for—a stray bale of hay, a bush, or a shack. Then she would shuffle quickly over to that object and collapse. This procedure was repeated again and again. Marta had managed to get a mile or so away from the cave and the deportation encampment when the first glimmers of dawn appeared over the horizon. She knew that she was far from safe. She spied a wagon about a quarter of a mile up ahead. It was filled with something, she didn’t know what. Should she try to get there before the dawn gave her away? What choice did she
have?

  It took all of her energy to get to the wagon. She looked inside. It was filled with a variety of personal items—clothing, baskets, worn boots, stolen from dead and not-so-dead Armenians. She awkwardly climbed into the cart, burrowing down under as far as she could, and promptly fell asleep.

  Saad

  Marta woke up with a start. The wagon was moving. Where it was going was not so important at this point—as long as it was away. Marta could hear the driver talking—an elderly man speaking Turkish. Every once in a while a youthful voice would answer. The rhythmic motion of the moving wagon, and the warmth of the items on top of her combined to make it impossible for her to stay awake. She drifted off, dreaming that Kevork was holding her in his arms, rocking her gently.

  When Marta finally did wake up, it was because the cart had stopped moving. Marta was chilly. She drew her cloak tightly around her shoulders. Did that mean it was night time? Maybe the driver had stopped somewhere for the night. Her mouth was dry like the desert sand. Her tongue had cracked, and her lips were covered with sores. Should she risk looking to see where she was? If she stayed hidden in the wagon too long she was bound to be discovered. Besides, she had to find food and water.

  Slowly, and quietly, Marta burrowed her way to the top of the items in the wagon. She looked around. They were in a tiny hamlet and it was dark. The horses had been stabled, but the cart had been left in the open in front of a public house just as it had been when she had crawled into it. As she took in her surroundings, Marta was startled by a pair of eyes staring in at her from the passenger seat of the wagon.

  “You’re one of those Armenians, aren’t you?” Her heart pounded in fear. The voice was that of the Turkish driver’s youthful companion.

  “What are you doing out so late at night?” Marta asked, surprised at her bravado.

  The boy was taken aback. “I... I... couldn’t sleep.” Then he said, “it isn’t me who has to explain anything. You’re the one hiding in somebody else’s wagon.”