Forty Days of Musa Dagh Read online

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  The exciting modern classic about

  courage, love and survival -- and a man who

  helped save his people from extermination.

  THE FORTY DAYS OF

  Musa Dagh

  * * *

  Franz Werfel

  Cardinal Edition

  The Complete Book * Published by Pocket Books, Inc.

  A

  MODERN

  MASTERPIECE!

  "In number of words and pages this

  is a long novel, but in swiftness

  of movement it is all too short.

  Reading it, one hopes it might

  never end, and actually it does not

  end. Its implications cling to the

  heart and mind of the reader as

  some long forgotten and suddenly

  remembered experience in the story

  of all who once lived on the earth

  and somehow live yet. The novel

  is written with the ease which

  gives writing and life inevita-

  bility. Here, at last, is a con-

  temporary novel full of the breath,

  the flesh and blood and bone and

  spirit, of life."

  ---WILLIAM SAROYAN

  The Forty Days of Musa Dagh

  was originally published

  by The Viking Press, Inc.

  The Forty Days of Musa Dagh

  Translated from the German

  by Geoffrey Dunlop

  Other books by Franz Werfel

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  THE FORTY DAYS OF

  Musa Dagh

  Franz Werfel

  Cardinal

  Edition

  POCKET BOOKS, INC. * NEW YORK

  The Forty Days of Musa Dagh

  Viking Press edition published November, 1934

  GIANT CARDINAL edition published January, 1962

  1st printing .................. November, 1961

  This GIANT CARDINAL edition includes every word contained in

  the original, higher-priced edition. It is printed from brand-new

  plates made from completely reset, clear, easy-to-read type.

  GIANT CARDINAL editions are distributed in the

  U.S. by Affiliated Publishers, a division of Pocket

  Books, Inc., 630 Fifth Avenue, New York 20, N.Y.

  Notice: GIANT Cardinal editions are published by Pocket Books,

  Inc. Trademark registered in the United States and other countries.

  ===================================================================

  Copyright, 1934, by The Viking Press, Inc. All

  rights reserved. This GIANT CARDINAL is pub-

  lished by arrangement with The Viking Press, Inc.

  PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

  Note

  This book was conceived in March of 1929, in the course of

  a stay in Damascus. The miserable sight of some maimed and

  famished-looking refugee children, working in a carpet fac-

  tory, gave me the final impulse to snatch from the Hades of

  all that was, this incomprehensible destiny of the Armenian

  nation. The writing of the book followed between July, 1932,

  and March, 1933. Meanwhile, in November, on a lecture tour

  through German cities, the author selected Chapter 5 of Book

  One for public readings. It was read in its present form, based

  on the historic records of a conversation between Enver

  Pasha and Pastor Johannes Lepsius.

  Breitenstein

  Spring, 1933

  CONTENTS

  ==========================================================

  BOOK ONE: COMING EVENTS

  1. TESKERČ 3

  2. KONAK -- HAMAM -- SELAMLIK 18

  3. THE NOTABLES OF YOGHONOLUK 34

  4. THE FIRST INCIDENT 54

  5. INTERLUDE OF THE GODS 101

  6. THE GREAT ASSEMBLY 125

  7. THE FUNERAL OF THE BELLS 194

  BOOK TWO: THE STRUGGLE OF THE WEAK

  1. LIFE ON THE MOUNTAIN 245

  2. THE EXPLOITS OF THE BOYS 280

  3. THE PROCESSION OF FIRE 327

  4. SATO'S WAYS 400

  BOOK THREE: DISASTER, RESCUE, THE END

  1. INTERLUDE OF THE GODS 439

  2. STEPHAN SETS OUT AND RETURNS 469

  3. PAIN 507

  4. DECLINE AND TEMPTATION 527

  5. THE ALTAR FLAME 561

  6. THE SCRIPT IN THE FOG 623

  7. TO THE INEXPLICABLE IN US AND ABOVE US! 670

  LIST OF CHARACTERS 676

  GLOSSARY OF ARMENIAN AND TURKISH TERMS 678

  BOOK ONE

  COMING EVENTS

  "How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost

  thou not judge and avenge our blood on

  them that dwell on the earth?"

  REVELATION vi, 10

  1. TESKERĘ

  "How did I get here?"

  Gabriel Bagradian really spoke these solitary words without knowing it. Nor did they frame a question, but something indefinite, a kind of ceremonious amazement, which filled every inch of him. The clear glitter of this Sunday in March may have inspired it, in this Syrian spring, which shepherded flocks of giant anemones down along the flanks of Musa Dagh and far out across the irregular plain of Antioch. Everywhere their bright blood sprang from the meadow slopes, stifling the more reticent white of big narcissi, whose time had also come. A golden, invisible humming seemed to have encased the mountain. Were these the vagrant swarms of the hives of Kebussiye, or was it the surge of the Mediterranean, audible in the bright transparency of the hour, eroding the naked back of Musa Dagh? The uneven road wound upwards, in and out among fallen walls. Then, where it suddenly ended in heaps of stone, it narrowed out into a sheep-track. He had come to the top of the outer slope.

  Gabriel Bagradian turned. His shape, in rough European homespun, straightened itself, listening. He thrust the fez a little back off his damp forehead. His eyes were set wide apart. They were a shade lighter, but not in the least smaller than Armenian eyes usually are.

  Now Gabriel saw what he had come from. The house gleamed out, with its dazzling walls, its flat roof, between the eucalyptus trees of the park. The stables, too, and the outhouses glittered in this early morning sunshine. Although between Bagradian and his property there was now more than half an hour's walk, it still looked so close to him that it might have been following at his heels. And further along the valley the church of Yoghonoluk, with its big cupolas and pointed, gabled minarets at the sides, greeted him clearly. This solemn, massive church and Bagradian's villa formed an entity. Bagradian's grandfather, the fabled founder and benefactor, had built them both fifty years ago. It was the custom of Armenian peasants and craftsmen, after their journeys abroad -- to America even -- in search of profit, to return home, into the nest. But bourgeois grown rich had other notions. They built their luxury villas along the Riviera from Cannes, among the gardens of Heliopolis, or at least on the slopes of Lebanon, in the neighborhood of Beirut. Old Avetis Bagradian had drawn a definite line o
f demarcation between himself and such new-rich. He, the founder of that world-famous Istanbul business, which had offices in Paris, New York, and London, resided, in so far as his time and affairs allowed him to do so, year after year in his villa above the hamlet of Yoghonoluk, under Musa Dagh. But not only Yoghonoluk; the other six Armenian villages of the district of Suedia had basked in the rich blessing of his kingly presence in their midst. Quite apart from the schools and churches built by him -- from his summoning of American mission teachers -- let it suffice to indicate the gift which in spite of every other event remained, even today, fresh in the memory of his people: that shipload of Singer sewing machines which after a more than usually prosperous business year Avetis had distributed among fifty needy families in the villages.

  Gabriel -- he had still not turned his listening gaze away from the villa -- had known his grandfather. He had been born in the house down there and spent many long months of his childhood in it. Till his twelfth year. And yet this early life, which was, after all, his own life, seemed so unreal that it almost hurt to think of it. It seemed like a kind of life in the womb, the vague memories of which stir the soul to unwelcome shudderings. Had he really ever known his grandfather, or only read of him and seen his pictures in a story book? A little man with a white goatee, in a long black-and-yellow-striped silk gown. His gold eyeglass dangling from a chain upon his chest. In red shoes he had walked over the grass of the garden. Everyone bowed deeply. Tapered old man's fingers stroked the boy's cheeks. Had it all happened, or was it no more than empty dreaming? To Gabriel Bagradian his grandfather and Musa Dagh connoted the same. When a few weeks ago he had first beheld again that mount of his childhood, that darkening ridge against the sunset, he had been invaded by indescribable terrifying, and yet delightful sensations. Their depths had refused to reveal themselves. He had at once given up the attempt. Had it been the first breath of a presentiment? Or only these twenty-three years?

  Twenty-three years of Europe, Paris! Years of complete assimilation. They were as good as twice, or three times, that. They extinguished everything. After the old man's death his family, absolved at last from the local patriotism of its founder, had escaped this Oriental nook. The firm's head office was, and remained, Istanbul. But Gabriel's parents had lived with their two sons in Paris. Yet Gabriel's brother -- he, too, had been called Avetis -- about fifteen years Gabriel's senior, had soon disappeared. He went back to Turkey, as active partner in the importing-house. Not unfittingly had he been given his grandfather's name. With him, after some years of neglect, the villa in Yoghonoluk reassumed its seigniorial status. His one amusement had been hunting, and with Yoghonoluk as his base he set forth into the Taurus mountains and to the Harun. Gabriel, who scarcely had known his brother, had been sent to a Paris lycée and then to study at the Sorbonne. No one insisted on putting him into the business, to which he, a miraculous exception in his family, would not have been suited in the least. He had been allowed to live as a scholar, a bel esprit , an archaeologist a historian of art, a philosopher, and in addition had been allotted a yearly income which made him a free, even a very well-to-do, man. Still quite young, he had married Juliette. This marriage had worked a profound change in him. The Frenchwoman had drawn him her way. At present he was more French than ever. Armenian still, but only in a sense -- academically. Still, he did not forget it altogether, and at times published a scientific article in an Armenian paper. And, at ten years old, Stephan his son, had been given an Armenian tutor, so that he might be taught the speech of his fathers. At first all this had seemed entirely useless, harmful even, to Juliette. But, since she happened to like young Samuel Avakian, she had surrendered, after a few retreating skirmishes. Their tiffs had always the same origin. Yet, no matter how hard Gabriel might try to concern himself with the politics of foreigners, he was still sometimes drawn back into those of his people. Since he bore a respected name, Armenian leaders, whenever they were in Paris, would come to call on him. He had even been offered the leadership of the Dashnakzagan party. Though he retreated in terror from this suggestion, he at least had taken part in that famous congress which, in 1907, united the Young Turks with Armenian nationalists. An empire was to be grounded in which the two races should live at peace side by side and not dishonor each other. Such an object excited even an alienated enthusiasm. In those days Turks had paid Armenians the most charming compliments, declaring their love. Gabriel, as his habit was, took these compliments more seriously than other people. That was why, when the Balkan war broke out, he had volunteered. He had been hastily trained in the school for reservist officers in Istanbul and had just had time to fight, as the officer of a howitzer battery, at the battle of Bulair. This one long separation from his family had lasted over six months. He had missed them greatly. He may have feared that Juliette would slip away from him. Something seemed imperilled in their relationship though he could not have given a reason for any such feeling. He was a thinker, an abstract man, an individual. What did the Turks matter, what the Armenians? He had thoughts of taking French citizenship. That, above all, would have made Juliette happy. But always, in the end, the same vague uneasiness had prevented it. He had volunteered for the war. Even if he did not live in his country, he could at least always re-evoke it. His fathers' country.

  These fathers had suffered in it monstrously and still not given it up. Gabriel had never suffered. Massacre and torture he only knew through books and stories. It is not, he thought, a matter of indifference which country even an abstract man belongs to. So he remained an Ottoman subject. Two happy years in a charming flat in the Avenue Kléber. It really looked as though all problems had been solved and his life taken on its final definite shape. Gabriel was thirty-five; Juliette, thirty-four; Stephan, thirteen. Their lives were untroubled, their work intellectual, they had some very pleasant friends. Juliette was the decisive factor in choosing them. This was chiefly evident in the fact that Gabriel's former Armenian acquaintances -- his parents had been dead some time -- came less and less frequently to the flat. Juliette, so to speak, insisted relentlessly on her blood-stream. But she could not manage to change her son's eyes. Yet Gabriel seemed to notice none of all this. An express letter from Avetis Bagradian gave a new direction to fate. His elder brother urgently begged Gabriel to come to Istanbul. He was a very sick man, he wrote, and no longer able to manage the business. So that for some weeks he had been making all preliminary arrangements to transform it into a limited company. Gabriel must be there to defend his interests. Juliette, whose habit it was to emphasize her knowledge of the world, had announced at once that she would like to accompany Gabriel and back him up throughout the negotiations. Matters of great importance would be involved. But he was so simple by nature and certainly not up to the Armenian ruses of all the others. June 1914. An incredible world. Gabriel decided to take not only Juliette, but Stephan and Avakian his tutor. The school year was nearly over. This business might prove long drawn out, and the ways of the world are unpredictable. In the second week of July they had all arrived in Constantinople.

  But, even so, Avetis Bagradian had not been able to await them. He had sailed in a small Italian boat for Beirut. The state of his lungs had been going from bad to worse in the last weeks, with cruel celerity, and he could no longer stand the air of Istanbul. (Remarkable that this brother of Gabriel, the European should have chosen Syria, not Switzerland, to die in.) So that Gabriel now, instead of dealing with Avetis, had to deal with directors and solicitors. Still, he soon perceived that this unknown brother had watched over his interests with the greatest tenderness and foresight. For the first time he grew intensely conscious of the fact that this ailing, elderly Avetis had been a worker on his behalf, the brother to whom he owed his well-being. What an anomaly that brothers should have been such strangers. Gabriel was appalled at the pride in himself which he had never managed to stifle, his scorn of "the Oriental," the "business man." Now he was seized with the wish -- a kind of longing even -- to repair an injustice w
hile there was time. The heat in Istanbul was really unbearable. It did not seem wise at present to turn back westwards "Let us wait till the storm has blown over." On the other hand the very thought of a short sea voyage was a tonic. One of the newest boats of the Khedival Mail would touch Beirut on its way to Alexandria. Modern villas were to let on the western slopes of Lebanon, of a kind to fulfill the most exacting requirements. Connoisseurs know that no landscape on earth has greater charms. But Gabriel had need of no such persuasions since Juliette agreed at once. In her, for a long time now, some vague impatience had been accumulating. The prospect of something new enticed her. While they were still at sea, declarations of war had come rattling down between state and state. When they stood on the quay at Beirut, the fighting had already begun in Belgium, in the Balkans, in Galicia. Impossible now to think of going back to France. They stayed where they were. The newspapers announced that the Sublime Porte would enter into alliance with the Central Powers. Paris had become enemy country.