Forty Days of Musa Dagh Read online

  The real purpose of the journey proved unfulfillable. Avetis Bagradian had missed his younger brother a second time. He had left Beirut a few days before and undertaken the difficult journey, via Aleppo and Antioch, to Yoghonoluk. Even Lebanon did not suffice him to die in. It had to be Musa Dagh. But the letter in which his brother foretold his own death did not reach Gabriel until the autumn. Meanwhile the Bagradians had moved into a pleasant villa only a little way above the town. Juliette found life in Beirut possible. There were crowds of French people. The various consuls also came to call. Here, as everywhere else, she knew how to gather many acquaintances. Gabriel rejoiced, since exile did not seem to weigh too heavily on her. There was nothing to be done against it. Beirut, in any case, was safer than European cities. For the moment at least. But still Gabriel kept thinking of the house at Yoghonoluk. Avetis, in his letter, had implored him not to neglect it. Five days after the letter came Dr. Altouni's telegram, announcing his death. And now Gabriel not only thought, but constantly spoke of, the house of his childhood. Yet, when Juliette suddenly declared that she wanted to move as soon as possible into the house in which he had been a little boy and had now inherited, the thought scared him. Stubbornly she dismissed his objections. Country solitude? Nothing could be more welcome. Out of the world? Uncomfortable? She herself would see to all that. It was just what so attracted her. Her parents had owned a country house, in which she had grown up. One of her pet dreams had always been to arrange a country house of her own, to manage it all en châltelaine -- it made not the least difference where, in what country, it happened to be. In spite of all this vivacious eagerness Gabriel still opposed her till after the rainy season. Wouldn't it be far more prudent to get his family back to Switzerland? But Juliette held to her caprice. She became almost challenging. Nor could he repress a strange uneasiness mingled with longing. It was already December by the time they began to make arrangements to return to the house of his fathers. The train journey, in spite of the moving troops, was quite bearable as far as Aleppo. In Aleppo they hired two indescribable cars. Through the thick mud of district roads they arrived, as by a miracle, in Antioch. There, at the Orontes bridge, Kristaphor, the steward, was awaiting them with the hunting-trap of the house and two oxcarts for the luggage. Less than two hours on, to Yoghonoluk. They passed hilariously. It hadn't been half bad, declared Juliette. . . .

  "How did I get here?" These surface combinations of events only seemed to answer the question very imperfectly. Gabriel's solemn amazement still remained. A vague restlessness vibrated through it. Antediluvian things, buried under twenty-three years in Paris, must be re-established in his mind. Only now did Gabriel turn his half-seeing eyes away from his house. Juliette and Stephan must certainly still be asleep. Nor had church bells in Yoghonoluk as yet proclaimed Sunday morning. His eyes followed this valley of Armenian villages a certain way northwards. From where he stood he could still see the village of the silkworms, Azir, but Kebussiye, the last village in that direction, had disappeared. Azir lay asleep in a dark bed of mulberry trees. Over there, on the little hill which nestles against the flank of Musa Dagh, stood the ruins of a cloister. Thomas the Apostle, in person, had founded that hermitage. The scattered stones bore strange inscriptions. Once Antioch, the regent of the world of those days, had extended as far as to the sea. Everywhere the ground was strewn with antiques, or they rewarded the first turn of the excavator's spade. Gabriel had already in these few weeks gathered a whole collection of valuable trophies inside his house. The search for them was his chief occupation here. Yet, till now, some reverence had protected him from climbing the hill of St. Thomas's ruin. (It was guarded by great copper-colored snakes, with crowns on their heads. Those who came sacrilegiously pilfering holy stones to build their houses found, as they carried them away, that the stones had grown into their backs, and so had to carry the load to the grave with them.) Who had told him that story? Once, in his mother's room (now Juliette's) old women had sat with curiously painted faces. Or was that only an illusion? Was it possible -- had his mother in Yoghonoluk and his mother in Paris been the same?

  Gabriel had long since entered the dark wood. A steep, wide gully, which led on up to the summit, had been cut into the mountain slope. They called it the ilex ravine. While Bagradian was climbing this sheep-track, which forced itself painfully upwards, through thick undergrowth, he knew suddenly: I have reached the end of the provisional. Something decisive is going to happen.

  Provisional? Gabriel Bagradian was an Ottoman officer in the reserve of an artillery regiment. The Turkish armies were fighting for dear life on four fronts. Against the Russians in the Caucasus. Against the English and Indians in Mesopotamia. Australian divisions had been landed in Gallipoli, to force the gates of the Bosporus in conjunction with the Allied fleets. The fourth army, in Syria and Palestine, was preparing a fresh onslaught on the Suez Canal. It needed superhuman efforts to keep all these four fronts unbroken. Enver Pasha, that deified war-lord, had sacrificed two whole army corps to his madly daring campaign in Caucasian snows. Nowhere had the Turks enough officers. Their war material was inadequate.

  For Bagradian the hopes of 1908 and 1912 were extinguished. Ittihad, the Young Turkish "Committee for Unity and Progress," had only made use of the Armenians, and at once proceeded to break every oath. Gabriel had certainly no reason to give especial proof of his Turkish patriotism. This time things were different in every way. His wife was French. He would therefore have to take up arms against a nation he loved, to which he owed the deepest gratitude, to which he was allied by marriage. None the less he had reported in Aleppo at the district headquarters of his former regiment. It had been his duty. Any other course would have meant that he could be treated as a deserter. But, strangely, the colonel in charge had seemed in no need of officers. He had studied Bagradian's papers very closely and sent him away again. He was to give his address and await his orders. That had been in November. This was the end of March, and still no orders had come from Antioch. Did that hide some impenetrable intention or merely the impenetrable chaos of a Turkish military office?

  But, in that moment, Gabriel knew for certain that today would bring him a decision. On Sundays the post arrived from Antioch -- not only newspapers and letters, but government orders from the Kaimakam to commoners and subjects.

  Gabriel Bagradian was thinking solely of his family. The position was complicated. What was to happen to Juliette and Stephan while he was serving? Gabriel was delighted with Juliette's leniency. But not all her indulgence prevented the fact that his wife and son, if they stayed on alone here, would be cut off from the rest of the world.

  The ilex grove was behind Bagradian before he had reached any further clarity on this point. The stampedout path led northwards, losing itself on the mountain in a tangle of arbutus and wild rhododendron. This part of Musa Dagh was called the Damlayik by the hill-folk. The two peaks to the south rose to about eight hundred metres. The Damlayik did not reach any considerable height. These two peaks formed the last ridges of the central mass, which then, unexpectedly without regular gradations, fell sheer, as though broken off sharp, in huge stony cliffs, into the plain of the Orontes. Here in the north, where the wanderer was beginning to feel his way, the Damlayik was lower. Then it fell in a saddle-notch. This was the narrowest part of the whole mountainside along the coast -- the waist of Musa Dagh. The plateau at the summit narrowed down to a few hundred yards, and the confusion of rocks on this steeply jutting side was thrust far out. Gabriel believed he knew every bush and rock. Of all the pictures of his childhood this place had imprinted itself most vividly. The same wide umbrella-pines forming a grove. The same creeping gorse, which struggles over the stony ground. Ivy and other clinging plants embrace a circle of white stones, which, like the giant members of a senate of nature, break off their deliberations the instant an intruder's step is heard. A departing tribe of swallows twitters in the midst of the quiet. Excitement ripples the greenish, land-locked sea of air. As of leap
ing trout. The sudden spread and beat of wings is like the flicker of many eyelids.

  Gabriel lay down in a grassy place, joining his hands behind his head. Twice already he had climbed Musa Dagh in search of these pines, these blocks of stone, but had lost his way. So they don't really exist, had been his thought. Now he closed tired eyes. When a human being comes back to any former place of contemplation and inner life, those spirits which he, the returned, once cherished and left there return and eagerly possess him. The ghosts of Bagradian's childhood rushed upon him, as though for twenty-three years they had waited faithfully under pines and rocks, in this charming wilderness, for him to return. They are warlike ghosts. The mad dreams of every Armenian boy. (Could they be otherwise?) . . . Abdul Hamid, the blood-stained Sultan, had issued a ferman against Christians. The hounds of the Prophet, Turks, Kurds, Circassians, rally to the green banners, to burn and plunder, to massacre Armenian folk. But they had reckoned without Gabriel Bagradian. He assembles his own. He leads them into the mountains. With indescribable valor he fights off this overwhelming power and beats it back.

  Gabriel could not shake off these childish fantasies. He, the Parisian, Juliette's husband, the savant, the officer minded to do his duty as a Turkish subject, and who knew the realities of modern warfare, was also, simultaneously, a boy who with primitive blood-hate flung himself on the arch-enemy of his race. The dream of every Armenian boy. To be sure it only lasted an instant. But Gabriel marvelled and smiled ironically before falling asleep.

  Bagradian started up with a certain fear. Someone had watched him closely as he slept. Apparently he had been asleep some time. He looked up, into the quietly glowing eyes of Stephan his son. Some distinctly unpleasant, even if vague, sensation invaded him. It is not for a son to come upon his father as he sleeps. Some profound law of custom had been violated. His voice was rather sharp as he asked: "What are you doing here? Where's Monsieur Avakian?"

  Now Stephan, too, seemed embarrassed at having found his father asleep. He did not quite know what to do with his hands. His full lips opened. He was wearing schoolboy clothes, a Norfolk jacket, short stockings, a wide collar out over the coat. He tugged at his jacket as he answered: "Maman said I could go for a walk by myself. This is Monsieur Avakian's free day. We don't do any work on Sundays."

  "We're not in France now, but in Syria, Stephan," his father somewhat ominously explained. "Next time you mustn't come straying about the hills alone."

  Stephan eyed his father eagerly, as though in addition to this mild scolding he were expecting more important directions. But Gabriel said no more. An absurd embarrassment had possession of him. He felt as though this were the first time he had ever been alone with his son. He had not taken very much notice of him since their arrival here in Yoghonoluk and had usually only seen him at meals. True that in Paris or in the holidays in Switzerland he had often taken Stephan for walks. But is one ever alone in Paris? In Montreux, or Chamonix? In any case the limpid air of Musa Dagh contained a releasing element which seemed to bring them close together, in a proximity neither had ever known. Gabriel went onwards like a guide, familiar with all the important landmarks. Stephan came after, Still expectantly silent.

  Father and son in the East! Their relationship can scarcely be compared with the superficial contact of European parents and children. Whoso sees his father sees God. For that father is the last link in a long, unbroken chain of ancestors, binding all men to Adam, and hence to the origin of creation. And yet whoso sees his son sees God. For this son is the next link, binding humans to the Last Judgment the end of all things, the consummation. Must not so holy a relationship be timid and sparing of words?

  This father, as beseemed him, gave a serious turn to the conversation. "What subjects is Monsieur Avakian teaching you now?"

  "We started reading Greek a little while ago, Father. And we do physics, history, and geography."

  Bagradian raised his head. Stephan had said it in Armenian. But had he asked his question in Armenian? Usually they spoke French to one another. His son's Armenian words stirred the father strangely. He was conscious that in Stephan he had far more often seen a French than an Armenian boy.

  "Geography?" he repeated. "And what continent are you on now?"

  "Asia Minor and Syria," Stephan rather zealously announced.

  Gabriel nodded approval as though it was the best thing he could have said. Then, still a little absent-minded he tried to round off their talk pedagogically: "Think you could draw a map of Musa Dagh?"

  Stephan was pleased at so much paternal confidence. "Oh, yes, Dad. In your room there's one of Uncle Avetis's maps, you know. Antioch and the coast. You've only got to enlarge the scale and put in all that they leave out."

  Quite right. For an instant Gabriel rejoiced in Stephan's intelligence. But then his thoughts strayed back to marching-orders, perhaps already on their way, or perhaps still buried on a Turkish office desk in Aleppo, in Istanbul even. A silent digression.

  Stephan's expectant soul awaited another remark. This is Dad's country. He longed to be told stories of Dad's childhood, that secret time, of which they had so seldom told him anything. His father seemed to make for a definite point. And already they were near that peculiar terrace he had in mind. It extended, jutting straight out from the mountain, into a void. A mighty arm of rock upheld it on spread fingers, like a dish. It is a flat spur of granite strewn with stones, so wide that two houses could have been built on it. Sea storms, to be sure, which have here free play, scarcely tolerate a few shrubs on this rock, and a clump of Mexican grass, tough as leather. This overhanging, freely jutting terrace springs so far out that any suicide who had plunged to destruction from its edge into salt water, twelve hundred feet beneath, could have vanished unwounded by any rock. Young Stephan tried, of course, to run to the edge. His father pulled him sharply back and held his hand clasped very tight. His free right hand pointed out the four quarters of the globe.

  "There to the north we could see the Gulf of Alexandretta if Ras el-Khanzir, the Swine cape, weren't in the way. And south there's the mouth of the Orontes, but the mountain takes a curve. . . ."

  Stephan attentively followed the movements of his father's forefinger as it traced its half-circle of ruffled sea. But what he asked had nothing to do with the geography of Musa Dagh. "Dad -- will you really go to the war?"

  Gabriel did not even notice that he was still keeping tight hold of Stephan's hand. "Yes. I expect my orders any day."

  "Have you got to?"

  "Must, Stephan. All Turkish reserve officers are being called up.

  "But we aren't Turks. And why didn't they call you up at once?"

  "They say the artillery hasn't enough big guns at present. When the new batteries are set up, they'll be calling all the reservist officers."

  "And where'll they send you?"

  "I belong to the fourth army, in Syria and Palestine."

  It consoled Bagradian to think that he might be sent for a certain time to Aleppo, Damascus, or Jerusalem. Perhaps there would be a chance of taking Juliette and Stephan. Stephan seemed to divine these fatherly cares.

  "And what about us, Dad?"

  "That's just it. . . ."

  The boy fervently interrupted: "Leave us here, Dad -- please leave us here. Maman likes our house as much as I do." Stephan was trying to pacify his father as to Maman's feelings here in a foreign country. His delicate alertness was well aware of the two opposing currents in their marriage.

  But Bagradian reflected. "It would be best if I tried to send you both to Switzerland, via Istanbul. But unluckily that's also in the war zone.

  Stephan clenched his fists across his heart. "No -- not to Switzerland. Do let's stay, Dad!"

  Gabriel looked at the pleading eyes of his son in some astonishment. Mysterious! That this boy, who never had known his father's home, should feel, none the less, so deeply bound to it. The emotion had lived in him, this affinity with the mountain of the Bagradians; Stephan, born in Paris, had inh
erited it with his very blood. He put his arm round the boy's shoulder, but only said: "We'll see.

  When they got back to the flat plateau of the Damlayik, morning sounds from Yoghonoluk assailed them. It did not take more than another hour to reach the valley. They had to hurry to be in time for at least the second half of mass.

  In Azir, the silkworm village, the Bagradians only met a few people, who passed them with morning greetings: "Bari luis" -- "Good light." The inhabitants of Azir usually went to church in Yoghonoluk. In front of many houses there were tables with wide boards laid out on them. The silkworms' eggs were spread upon these boards, whitish masses hatching in the sun. Stephan learned from his father that old Avetis had been the son of a silk-spinner and had begun his career very early, at fifteen, by going to Baghdad to buy spawn.