by Pete Ayrton
Through the latticed window would be heard her gentle laugh and suppressed scream of delight.
It was the mullah’s third wife, a youthful girl, imprisoned inside a cage.
A longing would be set ablaze within me. I would develop an urge to see her, to speak to her.
I would pick up the flower she had thrown down. I would take it home, and smell it incessantly. An unfamiliar tremor, a shudder filled with ecstasy would flow from that flower into my soul.
The mullah was over sixty years of age, with a bent back and yellow, evil eyes. He used to shave his prominent cheek-bones, trim his beard to a rounded shape, and dye it with henna.
Every time he went out of the house he would give strict orders to the other two women to keep guard over Bahrié and not to allow her to go near a window; not a fly was to enter the house!
But Bahrié, fired by the spring, found ways not only of approaching the window but of sliding her hand out, throwing a flower, and sighing.
‘Come into the garden tomorrow; the old witches will be out,’ I heard her say from behind the window one day.
That voice chirruped in my ears, and it awakened within me… woman.
I heard her and went on my way, but she seemed to have struck at my heart and dragged it inside through the closely-latticed meshes of the window.
I moved away, but her voice continued to ring in my soul, louder and louder.
I stopped in the shadow of a tree. The sun had woven a pattern of flowers on the ground, and I could see Bahrié in that pattern. The wind whispered in the leaves – it was Bahrié saying:
‘Come into the garden tomorrow…’
At night I stood on the roof: the branches of the acacia-tree are bent down; the moon is immediately above our roof. I can see Bahrié’s face on it, with large, black eyes; her hair, cut short, is strewn across her forehead. She is smiling.
In the morning, I climbed on to our garden wall and jumped down into our neighbour’s garden. My clothes were moistened by the morning dew. I had to cross three gardens before I came to Bahrié’s.
I stood on her garden wall. I was shivering, but it seemed to me that I could have flown into the air.
Bahrié saw me. She ran down.
I am inside, under the blossoming pomegranate-tree. A little beyond, a lilac-tree is hiding me. Bahrié appears. She stops. She is panting, shivering, with her hand on her swollen breast. I embrace her. I become drunk with her scent; my lips are aflame…
‘Let’s go,’ she whispers. ‘Let’s go inside!’
The mullah had gone to the old town by night with his two other wives – in connexion with some hereditary lawsuit. They had locked the front door on Bahrié, and there was no way of her leaving the house.
Bahrié took me by the hand and led me inside, into the bedroom.
She threw her arms round me; she cried; she laughed; she kissed me. The bed was not yet made, she had only just flown out of it. I embraced the fresh, youthful girl, and we rolled on to the bed. A woman’s scent is intoxicating…
I was set aflame by a woman for the first time in my life…
I was surrounded by a sense of fear and the first happiness.
Everything was in song; every object cried out with ecstasy:
‘Bahrié!’
She is lying there motionless. Silently, within a few minutes, she is living the joy of centuries.
‘Go quickly, go!’
She begins to cry.
‘They will be back in the evening,’ she adds.
Her tears mingle with the azure drops of her happiness.
She seems to be seeing the old man, with his yellow eyes.
She accompanies me to the blossoming pomegranate-tree. I pick a red flower and put it on her bosom. I take her hand and kiss it…
I climb the wall; I can hear the sound of her crying and her gasp of happiness. She stands under the dark-green shelter of the lilac-tree, casting a longing look.
I jump down into the next garden and part for ever from the first woman.
*
The following day, I met Veronica – Christina’s cousin. Veronica was an ethereal being, as feathery as a fawn; she had pale-chestnut eyes and the complexion of a rose. I used to bare my soul to her every time we met; but on this occasion it was covered with a pink veil of shame. I could not look into her eyes. I took hold of her hand, kissed it, and cried. I wanted to confess, but I could not expose my soul to her, instead I stood firmly before its sealed doors.
‘Is your mother ill?’Veronica inquired innocently.
‘No, she isn’t.’
She could not possibly have guessed the truth. She was probably roaming in the blue hills of innocence. No doubt some bewitching, enchanting song of nature was also whispering within her bosom, but she was far from suspecting my sin. Veronica could never, never have imagined that a woman, a blossoming woman had displayed the hidden treasures of her body before me without shame.
We go to the bottom of the garden together, crushing flowers under our feet. The fruit is hanging from the trees. I decide to confess my sin when we reach the mulberry-tree; but once we are there, Veronica begins to run about and cry: ‘Catch me!’ I run after her, but I am reluctant to catch her quickly. In the end, I do. And our lips cling to each other through some unknown urge. All the leaves seem to applaud, and the fruit seems to sing, whilst the garden vibrates like a cymbal.
‘Veronica!’ a voice is heard to say quietly.
We turn round. It is Christina. We go to her. She is shaking with all her body. She can hardly breathe:
‘Benon is coming.’
‘Let him,’ says Veronica, and lifting up her arms she picks a fruit. Her bosom seems to want to fly skywards with emotion.
Benon was Veronica’s brother and my school-friend. Christina was not shaking because of him, but because of our kiss.
Benon arrives. Together we climb the mulberry-tree. Its fruit has been scorched by the sun; it has dried and sweetened it.
The turquoise of the sky crumbled on to Veronica’s head, too. The deadly, parching winds blew from the desert and covered her body under the sands…
Only the morning star shed a few tears upon her, after which, evening fell with blood-stained eyes…
*
It is morning. The sky is grey and dark. But the snow has fallen all night and the countryside seems to be covered with lilies.
I have come out of the house to run to school, with my satchel on my back. The dogs are there to greet my morning.
I can see men walking with hurried steps, silently, their minds preoccupied. A woman is standing at the corner of the first street. There is a silence as deep as a chasm in her eyes.
A general stillness reigns everywhere, as if the snow were the gigantic shroud of a coffin. Instinctively, I sense that there is something amiss in the air, which fills me with awe – a fear which grows with every step I take.
Someone draws a curtain mysteriously from behind a window, as if they do not want the daylight to penetrate inside. Another opens a front door, looks up and down the street with frightened eyes, and shuts it.
I meet Krikor Agha, who is normally a man with slow movements, but he is hurrying.
‘Where are you going?’ he asks.
‘To school,’ I reply.
He wants to say something, but he clasps his hands together and continues on his way. This leisurely man is running like an ox, as if fleeing from some impending danger.
A group of people, cowered, but with hurried steps, are coming away from the square of the town. I want to ask them something, but none of them lifts up his head. They go past hurriedly.
The shops are shut: it is neither Sunday nor Friday. There are one or two half-opened ones here and there. I look inside through the shutters.
The people there are sitting curled up in corners, without uttering a word; they are merely smoking.
No one speaks to me – no one. Each one looks at me, and smiles painfully.
The near
er I approach the square, the more profound the silence becomes.
A woman emerges; her hair is uncombed and she is almost in her night-attire; she takes hold of a ten-year-old child by the shoulder and hastily drags him inside. The door shuts.
I reach the square.
In the middle of the square, in the overall whiteness of the snow, there is a black mass. Four soldiers with gleaming bayonets stand round this black mass. One by one the huddled-up and terrified men approach it; they look; they shut their eyes and hurry past silently.
I go near.
I see a body without a head!
The blood has congealed on the snow and turned black… The head is lying on one side, as if asleep.
I look back again: the body without a head has its arms thrust into the snow…
I am rooted to the ground – petrified! My feet refuse to move.
One of the soldiers orders:
‘Go away!’
I go away.
In the twilight of the morning, the Sultan’s tyranny had cut off the heads of two revolutionaries.
The other was in the upper square of the town.
For the first time, I see the picture, the horrifying picture of the cruel tyranny.
My childhood soul is saddened.
I want to go back home, but a noise rises from another part of the square. A crowd gathers. I too run there.
‘It’s Fouad Bey, Fouad Bey!’
Fouad Bey is a handsome Turk, with dreamy, tawny eyes and a wide forehead. He is young, slightly built, but virile. He is dressed in Circassian clothes, and walks slowly and proudly. He is one of the Turkish revolutionaries, exiled from Constantinople, who had raised his voice in protest against the beheading of the two revolutionaries.
He climbs the stone steps of one of the shops and speaks to the crowd gathered before him. His eyes are no longer dreamy; they have assumed a look of fierceness, sublimely savage. With his fur cap in hand, his tawny hair is scattered across his wide forehead. I can hardly catch and understand a few words here and there. The faithful soldiers of tyranny arrive and surround Fouad Bey. They push him about and tie up his hands and drag him away.
Horrified and frightened, the crowd disperses.
The silence descends once more, heavy and deep.
I return home. The curtains of all the windows are drawn.
I go in.
No one speaks.
I throw my arms round my mother.
She strokes my head silently.
The silence chokes me.
I want to scream, but I am chained by the very silence. The whole town has turned into a cemetery.
Every now and then a pounding is heard in my heart. It echoes dully, and dies down.
A head cut off… Do they not only cut off sheep’s heads?
Who had done it?
‘Ahmed Tchavoush! Ahmed Tchavoush!…’ they whisper.
To my eyes, Ahmed Tchavoush becomes that fabulous monster about which I had heard so much, but which I had never seen and could not visualize.
*
One rainy night the headmaster of our school, Hagop Simonian, was stabbed to death under the thorny tree in front of his house.
In the morning, the news spread like lightning: the Turks had stabbed Hagop Simonian to death. The Turks, the curs…!
The more the news spread, the deeper the hatred grew and frothed.
There had already been some clashes between the Armenians and the Turks in some of the streets. As the latter had gone by the Armenians had insulted them, their religion, and Mohammed, and fighting had broken out.
Meetings were held at the premises of the Armenian Prelacy. They had wanted to send a telegram to the Patriarch in Constantinople to protest against the murder which had taken place. The town was surrounded by troops and at every street-corner stood armed policemen, who would not allow people to go about, arresting those who were already out in the streets.
But they only arrested the Armenians. To evade this, many of them bound white scarves round their fezes and went out that way. Seeing the white scarves, the soldiers took them for mullahs and let them pass. By the evening the town was filled with ‘mullahs’.
This state of affairs continued for three days and turned into a grim nightmare. The body remained in the house, surrounded by relatives.
There was no way of burying it.
The funeral took place at the end of the three days, and those who had been arrested were released in order to take part in it. Several thousand people were present at the funeral. They had even come from distant villages. The burial took place without any disturbances. Everyone had sobered down. They hung their heads almost as if in shame.
Why?
It had been revealed that Hagop Simonian’s murderer had not been a Turk, after all, but a young Armenian. Furthermore, he had been one of the headmaster’s pupils, who had finished school two years earlier and had become a teacher.
Why had this Hagop killed Hagop Simonian?
The murderer’s name was also Hagop.
There was a pretty young girl who was related to the headmaster and with whom the murderer had fallen in love.
The girl’s parents had sought the headmaster’s opinion about his pupil, in order to make a final decision about the girl’s future.
‘He is a mad, stupid boy!’ the headmaster had replied.
To persuade their daughter the parents had told her what their relative had said, as he was one of the most intellectual people in the town. In her turn the girl had disclosed the headmaster’s views to Hagop, to explain the difficulties which weighed down against her marrying him.
And so the mad and stupid Hagop had waylaid the headmaster in the middle of the night and had stabbed him there and then.
Not a single Turk had taken the slightest part in this murder. Ashamed, the Armenians kept quiet about it, but the Turks tried not to forget it.
*
A month after this incident, the wife of one of the fiercest Turks in the town, Ahmed Tchavoush by name, was found strangled in her own bed.
Ahmed Tchavoush was a town-crier, with a hoarse, stentorian voice.
Whenever there was an occasion for the Government to make an announcement they would call Ahmed Tchavoush, and they would enjoin him with the task. Suddenly, his voice would be heard to ring out: ‘…all defaulters will be hanged…’ His declarations always ended with the pronouncement of this supreme punishment.
And suddenly, in the dead of night, Ahmed Tchavoush’s voice was heard in our district: ‘The Armenians have strangled my wife and have escaped!’ A violent bellowing followed these words; it was as if a wild animal was wailing. The voice came from his roof. He had gone up there and, marching up and down along the edge, with his upraised hands shaking in the air, he was roaring: ‘The Armenians have strangled my wife and have escaped!’
Everyone sat up in their beds in the middle of the night, awakened from their sleep and terrified, they crossed themselves and remained silent, waiting for whatever disaster might follow in the morning.
But the disaster did not wait until the morning; it came in the middle of the night.
Ahmed Tchavoush’s house was filled with policemen and Turks.
The Armenians had entered Ahmed Tchavoush’s house. They had tied him up, gagged him with cotton wool, and when he had tried to free himself, they had beaten him up, had strangled his wife in bed and had run away – this was the story Ahmed Tchavoush told the police and the Turks.
Even the Armenians believed this story, taking it for an act of revenge. It was Tchavoush who, some months earlier, had cut off the heads of two Armenian revolutionaries in public with a butcher’s yataghan. He was the only man to have agreed to act as executioner. After this horrible deed, he had scooped up some of the blood with the palm of his hand, rubbed it into his beard, and had knelt down a few paces away from the severed heads and prayed to Allah.
The arrests began in the middle of the night and lasted until the morning. The pri
son was filled with Armenians. On the way there, they were beaten, wounded, spat at, and insulted.
On the evening of the incident, Tchavoush had told his wife that he was going to the village, which he often visited. He had gone to the market-place to hire a horse. There he had been promised one; but having waited in vain until late at night he had returned home, and had found his wife in the arms of a Turkish youth. Enraged, Tchavoush had strangled the young man and had thrown him into the well. Then he had strangled his wife and, leaving her in bed, had climbed up to the roof and had begun to roar: ‘The Armenians have murdered my wife and have escaped!’
This was what had really happened.
They brought out the Turkish youth’s body from the well, and arrested Ahmed Tchavoush. The young Turk’s parents were wealthy and influential. They pursued the case closely, and had Ahmed Tchavoush exiled to Konia and forbidden to return.
The arrested Armenians were not all released together, but one at a time, in gradual stages. Even the last one, on the very last day, was cross-examined in connexion with Ahmed Tchavoush.
*
A Turk had gone to an Armenian shopkeeper, and after choosing some material, he had asked the price.
‘Ten kouroush an arsheen,’ the shopkeeper had replied.
‘Make it five,’ the Turk had suggested.
‘I can’t; it cost me eight, in the first place.’
The Turk had demanded that he sold it for five. The Armenian had refused. The Turk had left full of hatred, gnashing his teeth together.
A day or two had gone by, and an uproar had broken out in the street – the Turks were beating up an Armenian.
It was the shopkeeper who had refused to sell the material at five kouroush an arsheen. The Turk had met him again in the street, and had asked:
‘Well, will you sell it at five kouroush, you infidel?’
‘No!’
And the Turk had started to shout:
‘Help! Help! He insulted my religion! I was walking by quietly and he insulted Mohammed and our holy religion!’
And so the crowd had set upon the Armenian and had broken his nose and cut his lip. Whilst at every blow the shopkeeper had shouted: