by M. J. Rose
Since the end of April this year, she had read almost daily yet another story in The New York Times about the butchery—race killing, some reporters were calling it, an attempt to exterminate the Armenian race—that was occurring in places in her homeland most Americans had never heard of and needed the maps the newspaper provided to pinpoint on the globe. Places like Bitlis. Erzurum. Kharpert.
Her beloved Adana.
Someone banged a pair of cymbals together and a small band—all men, in this case—began to gather. A French horn and a tuba glistened in the early afternoon sun. The men wore red-and-blue uniforms and stood out like flowers against the sea of women in white.
“This will be fun,” Catherine was saying. “Besides, you should have the same rights as those men. We should have the same rights. We’re smarter—at least you are.” She was giggling when she finished.
“I understand,” Ani murmured. “I do.”
“Come on, then, let’s find the others. They’re about to start.”
Two policemen on horseback were watching them. Watching all of them. Ani couldn’t meet their gaze, and so she looked down at her boots. Pigeons were clamoring about her feet. Then she looked Catherine in the eye, wondering how in the name of God her friend wasn’t terrified.
* * *
Ani hadn’t planned on marching. She had thought she might attend as a spectator: she imagined herself standing on the sidewalk somewhere on Fifth Avenue and watching the women in white and the floats and the bands as they marched north. But she would be sure to be near a corner with a cross street, so she could run if it ever became necessary. So she could flee if they started shooting.
But Catherine had talked her into it. Catherine taught history at the girls’ school on Forty-Eighth Street, while Ani taught French. Without exception, the students in their classes came from the city’s most prestigious families, and at least six of their mothers were going to march in the parade that coming Saturday, as well as three of the teachers—including Catherine. The mothers and the teachers would not be marching together: the mothers represented one class of society and the teachers another, and they all understood this unspoken distinction. But if Catherine was going to do this and wanted Ani to join her, then, in the end, she would. Catherine had taken Ani under her wing when they’d met at a speech in Boston soon after Ani had arrived in America in 1909.
She was also inspired by these suffragettes, because she would always associate them with the women and men in this country who cared about her people back home. Ani had cousins in Boston who had immigrated to Massachusetts soon after the Hamidian Massacres began in 1894, and they were her sponsors and took her in when she arrived. A woman named Julia Ward Howe was at the speech in Boston that night, though she was ninety years old, as was Clara Barton, who was about to turn eighty-eight. Barton had traveled to Constantinople after the Hamidian Massacres, helped to found the Friends of Armenia, and—along with Ani and her cousins—was one of the only people in the hall who’d ever set foot in the Ottoman Empire. The two old women didn’t speak at the event, but their presence had inspired the other Americans who were there.
When Catherine learned that Ani spoke French as well as English, needed work, and had survived the savagery in Adana, she brought her to Manhattan and lobbied for months to get her a job at the school. Ani understood that the woman who had opened the school and her board viewed her as an exotic curiosity, but the founder also saw that she was well-mannered and pretty—if a bit darker-skinned than the headmistress might have preferred, her eyes shaped too much like almonds. And she was (in the founder’s words) “a clever girl.” No one was going to need her to speak Armenian or Turkish at the school, but the fact that Ani could had impressed the founder, and so she’d been given a chance and now, five years later, was still there. Her timidity, born after a massacre had sent her as a refugee into a new country on the other side of the globe, was deemed an asset by the school’s board. She was well behaved and demure. Unlike some of those other young teachers—or, dear Lord, unlike some of the students’ mothers—she wasn’t ever going to cause any trouble.
* * *
It was striking how most of the women and men and children lining the streets seemed to be dressed in dark clothing; it was such a stark contrast to the suffragettes in white. There were women who were very old walking with canes—in some cases, still moving at a pace that was brisk—and babies in prams and, walking beside their mothers, some of their own school’s girls. There were women who had their dogs beside them on leashes, including a massive Great Dane with a sash that read Leading My Lady to Vote.
She had been marching fifteen minutes, and Catherine and the teacher who taught domestic science, a woman named Rose, nearing fifty, who was much harder on the girls than the younger faculty, were pointing at two little boys atop their fathers’ shoulders who were clapping. The other women speculated that their mothers must be somewhere in the throng that stretched on forever: the group from the school was somewhere in the first quarter of the march, Ani guessed, and she presumed that there were still marchers assembling back at the park by the arch, even now. The crowds along the sidewalks were extraordinary: mostly they were cheering or smiling, rather like those two boys and their fathers. There were people watching from the windows and balconies. This was a parade. Yes, it was a parade with a purpose. But it was still just a parade. Ani was beginning to think this would all be fine. The sun was high, and the biggest problem (and it was a small one, it really was) was the havoc that the wind was causing: it swelled their skirts, it pulled at their hats, and it caused the banners to billow like sails.
It was then, however, that she heard the thud, followed by the—and here was that word—scream. A scream. She turned and saw Catherine falling to her knees and bringing her hand to her cheek. But it wasn’t Catherine who had screamed: it was a woman behind them. Had there been a gunshot and she hadn’t heard it over the sound of the bands and the cheering and the applause from the spectators along the sidewalk? That was her first thought. A gunshot. It was all about to begin, the violence, the slaughter.
And yet when she turned to aid Catherine, the woman was pulling her fingers from her cheek and Rose was lifting a piece of fruit off the street.
“One of those rascals threw an apple at me,” Catherine was saying to Rose. She sounded more surprised than alarmed.
“I should paddle him,” Rose said, and she pointed at a pair of teenage boys trying to work their way through the crowd to the escape of a side street. “You’re going to have a bruise, my dear.”
Ani could feel the women marching ahead, streaming beyond her and her friends as if the three of them were but rocks in a river, when she realized that Catherine was fine. It was just a scallywag, someone was saying. Just a scamp.
“Why, Ani, you’re shaking,” Rose said. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” she replied. “I should have worn gloves.”
“Yes, you really should have.”
Catherine stopped rubbing her cheek and took the apple from Rose. A side of the apple had caved in, either from Catherine’s cheekbone or from where it had bounced on the ground. She showed it to Ani and said, “It’s nothing, Ani. It’s silly. A couple of—”
“Rotten apples,” Rose said, finishing the sentence for her. “Just a couple of rotten apples.”
Catherine laughed and locked her arm through Ani’s, their elbows linked Vs. “Come,” she said. “It’s a parade, which means we march!”
* * *
Ani might have stayed in Adana after the slaughter if her mother hadn’t died four weeks later. Typhus. Ani had nursed her in the ruins of their home—a mob of Turks and Kurds had set all the houses in that part of the Armenian Quarter on fire, using the kerosene the military had given them—but only half of their home had burned. The second story had collapsed, but a part of the living room remained livable, if you could endure the stink of the accelerant and the smell of the ash. Ani used the divan as her mother’s b
ed. She took the latticework from the upstairs windows that had fallen into the rubble but hadn’t been part of the conflagration, and burned it in a pit she dug in the small courtyard in the back so she could boil water for tea, but soon there was neither wood nor tea. She honestly couldn’t recall anymore which had run out first. Then she had scrounged among the wreckage of her neighbors’ abandoned homes, burning the legs of tables and whatever brush she could find so she could have hot water for the sponge baths she gave her mother and so they would both have clean water to drink, but soon the quarter was nothing but the sooty rubble of timbers and crumbling white brick and stone, and there was nothing left to feed the small fire.
By then the children were gone. Long gone. Her students. They were in the orphanage with the missionaries or wandering aimlessly like packs of wolves in the night, invisible during the day. They, too, were going to starve.
Her mother did die, and so Ani emerged from the house and might have walked into the desert to die, too. Didn’t other animals do that? But instead, as she wandered aimlessly amid the ruins, looking for a familiar face among the living who hadn’t fled, she was spotted by a small group of well-dressed women and men from Constantinople, Armenians who had journeyed to Adana specifically to assess the carnage and see how they could help—what could be done. One of them was a writer, and when the woman learned that the only family Ani had left lived in America, she paid for her passage there. The writer’s parting words to Ani before she left Constantinople for Boston and the writer left for Paris? “Our people have no future here, none at all, so don’t look back. It’s only going to get worse.” Then she embraced Ani and sent her up the sloping gangway of the ship.
* * *
It was when she was a block west of that magnificent Metropolitan Life Insurance Company building with its numinous tower, at Twenty-Fourth Street, that the three men barged into the parade from the park on the east side of Fifth Avenue and grabbed Catherine. It happened with such speed that the violence was almost secondary. One second, Catherine was on her right, Rose on her left, and then the men were whisking Catherine from the parade and toward the trees, and she was yelling at them to stop, to let her go. She was not wailing; Ani had heard wails. She could parse the fine distinctions between the wails of the terrified and the wails of the grieving, and this was neither. Catherine was furious, not fearful. She was indignant. And it was then that Ani realized that one of the men was William. The woman’s fiancé, the bakery foreman. He and another fellow had each taken one of Catherine’s arms and hoisted her off the ground as they pulled her from the parade, her feet bicycling above the earth like a toddler’s, the third man walking behind them and scowling, daring any woman to follow. But William was laughing. He had been almost howling, he thought this was so funny.
“Let me go, William! Have you lost your mind?” her friend was saying, and it was the last thing Ani heard before Catherine was gone, separated from her by the marchers and the crowds. And all the while the bands played on, a horse whinnied, and the crowd continued to cheer. The spectators on the east side of the street parted for the men with their prey, some of them laughing, too, and William and his two accomplices pushed through them with his struggling fiancée. It was, to them, comical. Utterly comical. The woman’s outrage was a source of merriment, the most uproarious thing they had seen today. Ani turned toward Rose, but it had happened so quickly that the older teacher hadn’t even noticed: she was chatting with the woman to her left and waving to the people on the west side of the broad avenue.
“They’ve taken Catherine,” Ani told her. “William—her fiancé.”
“I know who William is,” Rose chastised her, as if that were the element of her news that mattered.
“She’s gone!”
“She’s not gone if she’s with William,” the older teacher said, and now they were nearing Twenty-Fifth Street. The parade was proceeding, and it was moving on without Catherine, and no one seemed to have noticed other than Ani. No one seemed to care.
“She didn’t want to go,” Ani continued. “They just took her away!”
Rose thought about this a moment, and then shook her head. “That’s disappointing and I expected better of him. But Catherine knew the risks. Some men are more enlightened than others.”
“He’s not her husband. He’s only her—”
“He’s going to be her husband,” Rose said, cutting her off.
“But she wants to be here.”
The woman beside Rose leaned over. She was tall, an English teacher at another elite girls’ school, who, Ani had learned as they started to march, only graduated from college last May. “Then go get her,” she said, her eyes playful and wide. “Retrieve her!”
Rose scowled at the younger woman and then at Ani, but Ani saw the logic in what this English teacher a good seven or eight years her junior had proposed. But she knew also there was a soundness to Rose’s reasoning: William was going to marry Catherine. Would she herself have disobeyed her husband, had she lived in Adana long enough to marry there? Of course not. It would have been unthinkable. And even here in America, Catherine was unlikely to teach once this school year was finished, especially if she were with child.
More important, Ani knew better than most of these women around them—maybe all of them—how quickly violence could escalate. A few minutes ago, Catherine was hit with an apple; now three men had forcibly taken her from the parade. What was next? The gendarmes, the army, the guns?
As they reached the corner of Twenty-Fifth Street, in a reflex born of protectiveness—an impulse that trumped her natural inclination to lower her eyes and listen to Rose—she turned from the parade and ran southeast into Madison Square Park. Catherine had always looked out for her; now it was her turn to look out for her friend.
* * *
The past week, there had been another story in The New York Times. The headline, all capital letters, had taken Ani’s breath away for a moment when she first read it on the way to the school:
MASSACRES RENEWED, MORGENTHAU REPORTS
The very last sentence of the article was even worse: “The writer says that the American Consul was told that the Turkish Government intended to exterminate the Armenians.” And in between that headline and that sentence? The stories of, among others, the thirty thousand Armenian exiles dying or already dead by the train station at Merkedjle.
Thirty thousand. That was roughly how many people were supposed to be marching right now on this very avenue. A number so vast it stretched for miles. It was also the same number of Armenians massacred six years ago in the city where she grew up and expected as a child to live her whole life. (She recalled how so much of the Turkish and Kurdish mob, when they had joined the military to murder the Armenians back in Adana, had been dressed in white, too. They appeared wielding hatchets and axes and swords, with white scarves around their heads or wrapped like swaddling around their fezzes.)
Just politics? This is where “just politics” led. To the destruction of Adana, to the dead beside the railroad at Merkedjle. This was what men did. Not women—men.
She would never know whether the extermination of her people back home—the murder of her father and her brothers, the death of her mother as the city’s Armenian survivors one by one succumbed to disease within the rubble that had once been their houses—was in fact born of just politics or a deeper loathing. Religion was obviously a factor, but so long as the Armenians—as well as the Assyrians and the Greeks—had stayed in their place, mostly no one cared all that much. The Armenian school where she’d been teaching almost a year when the slaughter began was at the edge of the quarter, close enough to the mosque that she’d hear the beautiful call of the muezzin during classes, and some months she would stare up at the building’s magnificent minaret as she was walking home and the sun was setting.
The week before last, there had been an article in The New York Times that was even worse than this one. That headline?
800,000 ARMENIANS COUNTED DE
STROYED
Lord Viscount Bryce, the former British ambassador to the United States, told the House of Lords that “virtually the whole nation had been wiped out,” and that it had been “the deliberate and premeditated policy” of the Turkish government.
She had nearly fainted when she had read that story. She’d heard the reports. Everyone had. But a crime this hideous—a crime of this magnitude? How did one even begin to conjure the death of a nation?
She sighed. The idea of voting was an act that seemed at once so vast and so small. All the men she had met since landing in Boston could do it. If they wanted. Fifteen million men had voted in the country’s presidential election three years earlier. Did any one of those votes on its own matter? It honestly wouldn’t have occurred to Ani to vote if she were still living in Adana. But here? It seemed absurd to her that she couldn’t. (Perhaps it would have seemed absurd to her back home, as well, since only men could vote there, too. But how could one worry about suffrage when it was proving hard enough as an Armenian woman simply to survive in 1915, as the slaughter spread like plague across an empire, as their men were shot and their children starved?)
If William could vote, shouldn’t Catherine? Although their school taught only girls, the city was filled with schools in which women just like her taught boys, or girls and boys together. If she were smart enough to teach, didn’t that, by logic, make her smart enough to vote?