Forty Days of Musa Dagh

by Franz Werfel

  Even then fate gave young Bagradian one more chance. Nunik had sensed something. Leaving her little fire, she had caught a glimpse of a scurrying shape, which could not have been the shadow of a man. There were a few waifs and strays among the beggar-folk. One of those children, a little boy of not more than eight, was sent out to find who the shadow was. But when Stephan heard a patter and scurry behind him, he did not turn round, but went racing onwards, like a mad horse. He used every ounce of his strength in his desperate run. Noises kept hammering in his ears. Was his father calling him? Was it Haik hissing: "Quick march"? He ran, not as though a child were after him, but the whole infantry company whose clutches he had escaped that night. Here these aqueduct ruins ceased abruptly, the road broadened out. The first dark ridges towered over the road. Stephan ran for dear life. A malicious panic drove him down the first side valley, which he mistook for his own, of the seven villages. His flight was giving him such wings that it felt as though he were actually hovering high over the stone-strewn heath as he ran. Stephan turned into the valley, without knowing that he was yelling with all his might. But he did not get far. He tripped over the first real obstacle, a tree trunk flung across his way; and then lay still.

  When he came to himself, the day was upon him in misty twilight. Stephan firmly believed that it was still the day before yesterday, the very same hour at which he had come out of the swamp El Amk -- he and Haik -- into pleasant hill-country, to the Turkoman's house. He had forgotten all that had happened since, or could only remember it as a dream. His diseased sense of time was reinforced by the fact that there was a house in front of him, though to be sure not a white limestone house, but a wrinkled clay hut, an ugly one at that, without any windows. But out of this house, too, there came a man, in a turban, with a grey beard, perhaps not the Turkoman guardian angel, but at least an old man. And lo! -- this old man too snuffled the wind, looked up at the sky, turned to the four quarters of the hemisphere, spread out a little carpet, squatted, and began to pray, with many bobbings and duckings.

  Like a flash Haik's warning came back to Stephan. Imitate everything! And so, in the place where he had fallen, he began to copy. He could not manage more than a few feeble swayings and moans. But this man also saw him at once.

  Yet, not so pious, it seemed, as the Turkoman peasant, he stopped in the middle of his prayer, stood up, and came across to Stephan. "Who are you? Where do you come from? What do you want?"

  Stephan made himself kneel up; he bowed and put his hand to his heart. "Ben bir az hasta im, Effendi."

  Having said it pat, he made a sign that he was thirsty. At first the greybeard seemed to hesitate. Then he went to the well, dipped a pitcher, and brought it back. Stephan drank avidly, though the water seemed to cut him as he was drinking it. Meanwhile someone else had come out of the house; not, as Stephan fully expected, helpful women, but another, scowling, man with a black beard, who repeated the greybeard's questions, word for word: "Who are you? Where do you come from? What do you want?"

  The lost Stephan made two vague motions in different directions. They might mean either Suedia or Antakiya.

  The scowling blackbeard became angry. "Can't you speak? Are you dumb?"

  Stephan smiled with big, vague eyes at him, as helpless as a child of three. He was still on his knees before them. The greybeard walked round him twice, like a craftsman sizing up a finished job. He took Stephan under the chin and twisted his head towards the light. It was a test. The blackbeard also seemed very interested. They went a few steps aside and began to talk in quarrelsome voices, but still keeping an eye on Stephan. When they had finished, their faces had the solemn look of men charged with a difficult public duty.

  The blackbeard began the interrogation: "Young man, are you circumcised or uncircumcised?"

  Stephan did not understand. Only then did his confiding smile become a look of anxious questioning. His silence roused the Moslems to wrath. Hard, chiding words beat down like hailstones. Stephan, for all their shouts and flourishes, knew less and less what they were after. The blackbeard's patience gave out. He grasped the kneeling Stephan under the armpits and jerked him up. It was the greybeard who undid his clothes and investigated. Now their worst suspicions were confirmed. This sly Armenian, trying to pretend he was deaf and dumb, was an insolent spy, sent out by the camp on Musa Dagh. No time to lose! They shoved the tottering Stephan on before them, down the narrow valley path from Ain Yerab, to the big highroad. Then they held up the first oxcart come from the neighborhood of Antakiya, in the Suedia direction. The driver had at once to change his direction, in the name of commonweal and public service. The bailiffs lifted their prisoner into the cart. Next him squatted the blackbeard; the greybeard walked excitedly with the owner, explaining this danger, now averted.

  Stephan's fate was sealed. But now some merciful power had made him cease to know where he was. His head sank down across the knees of the blackbeard, his mortal enemy. And behold! that grim-faced avenger did not thrust away his victim. He sat as rigid as though he were doing his best to ease the young man. That hectic face in his lap, with its open eyes, staring up into his, and yet not seeing them, this feverish breath, those red, dry lips, this whole surrendered childishness, leaning against him, roused in the blackbeard's narrow mind the wildest bitterness. That was what the world was like. You had to dash your fist in its face!

  But Stephan had even forgotten Musa Dagh. He had even forgotten his captured howitzers; he had forgotten those five sleepy peasants whom he, the crack shot, had picked out so neatly. Haik was scarcely even a name. Iskuhi was as faint as a breath. Stephan was wearing his own European clothes again, his Norfolk jacket and laced shoes. They felt very safe and comfortable, his feet marvellously clean. He was walking with Maman down splendid boulevards, and then along the lakeside at Montreux. He and Maman were living in the Palace Hotel. He sat with her before white tablecloths, played in gravel beds, sat in whitewashed classrooms with other, all equally well looked after, boys. He was sometimes smaller, and sometimes bigger, but always he was safe and at peace. Maman carried her red sunshade. It cast such a vivid red shadow that at times her face was hard to recognize.

  All this was perhaps uneventful, but so quietly pleasant that Stephan did not notice the saptieh guardhouse on the edge of Wakef. One of its two gendarmes reinforced the blackbeard in the cart and held Stephan's ankles. And in Wakef itself they were joined by a whole detachment of saptiehs. The more the commotion, the further they came into the valley. This escort drew a small crowd after it, men, women, children.

  It reached the church square in Yoghonoluk long before midday. And by then there were about a thousand people, including many old soldiers and recruits, at present garrisoned in the villages. Quickly the red-haired müdir was sent for, out of Villa Bagradian. The saptiehs pushed Stephan out of the cart. The müdir ordered him to strip; there might be some writing hidden on his naked body. Stephan did it so quietly and indifferently that the crowd mistook his peace for sullenness; it enraged the onlookers.

  Even before he was quite naked, someone had punched the back of his head. But this blow was merciful. It left Stephan not quite stunned, but well back in that delightful world in which he had been beginning to feel so at home, and from which he might otherwise have emerged again.

  Meanwhile the saptiehs had emptied his rucksack. In it they found Stephan's kodak, and his copy of the letter to Jackson.

  The müdir held Stephan's Christmas present up to the crowd, most of whom had never seen a camera. "This is an instrument by which you can always tell a spy."

  He deciphered, and read out to the people, with loud bursts of triumph in his voice, that highly treacherous letter to the consul. When he had done, the whole square bellowed with hate.

  The müdir caine close up to Stephan. His beautifully manicured hand chucked him under the chin, as if to encourage. "Now, my boy, tell us your name.

  Stephan smiled and said nothing. The sea of reality was remote. He could just hear i
ts waves break in the distance.

  But the müdir remembered the photograph of a boy which he had seen in the selamlik of the villa. He turned back solemnly to the crowd. "If he won't tell you, I will. This is the son of Bagradian."

  The first knife was thrust into Stephan's back. But he could not feel it. Because he and Maman were just on their way to fetch Dad, who was due in Switzerland from Paris. Maman still had her red sunshade. Dad was coming out of a very high door, all by himself. He was dressed in a snow-white suit, without any hat. Maman beckoned to him. But, when he saw his small son waiting, Gabriel opened his arms, in a movement of unfathomable gentleness. And since Stephan was really such a little boy, Dad could lift him close to his radiant face, and then high above his head -- higher and higher.

  Nunik found his body that night. It was a very mangled but not disfigured corpse. Saptiehs had flung it naked into the churchyard. Nunik came only just in time to get it away from the wild dogs. She sent off one of her waifs to their camp in the ruins, to call all the other beggar-folk. Today they must put off fear, since a mighty thing had come to pass. The line of Avetis Bagradian, the founder, was now for ever extinguished. This was the hour at which to do Ter Haigasun's bidding and carry Bagradian's son back to the mountain. The reward could not be withheld. A life of safety was in prospect. The shy beggar-folk came to the graveyard in little groups. The corpse-washers set to work immediately. They cleaned the blood and dirt off the scarred, beautiful body of the boy. And the generous Nunik did even more for the last Bagradian. Out of her incredible sack she drew a white shift, in which to wrap him. As she was doing this ultimate service a blind beggar raised his singsong voice:

  "The lamb's blood flowed towards their house."

  When it was done, Nunik, Wartuk, Manushak, and the other keening-women among the beggar-folk took up their heavy sacks. They walked, bent double, under the load. In the second hour of this new day the procession, noiseless, almost invisible, in spite of a crescent moon, crept up the Damlayik, to reach the Town Enclosure by secret paths, unscathed by the mountain conflagration. Nunik, with her long staff, led them. When they were safe in the woods, they lit two torches to carry one on either side of the bier, so that the corpse might not return unlit, unhonored.

  3. PAIN

  Gabriel was again spending his nights in his usual place in the north trenches. Ter Haigasun had become alarmed at the slackness he noticed among the men, the obvious relaxation of their discipline. It was at his most urgent request that Gabriel, even on the night after Stephan's disappearance from the Damlayik, consented to resume his command. To do so was a clearer proof of his own steadiness and discipline than all three battles. For, in these days, his hands kept trembling, he could not swallow a bite, nor sleep a wink. Uncertainty as to Stephan's fate was not his worst, most terrible suffering. The real anguish lay in its being impossible to do anything to find him, rescue him. Could he perhaps recondition his mobile guard and carry out a sortie with them, even as far as the streets of Aleppo? Perhaps such a night expedition, spreading its terrors all through the countryside, might end by overtaking Stephan and Haik. Naturally he checked this romantic fantasy. What right had he to risk the lives of a hundred people in a wild attempt to save his son? Stephan, after all, had done on his own impulse what Haik did as the messenger of the people. There was no general reason whatsoever for moving heaven and earth to bring him back.

  So Gabriel, as though gasping for air, flung himself back into his work. Chaush Nurhan was given orders to put the decads through daily fighting maneuvers. It was like the very first days. No one, not even in the rest hours, was to leave his post. Leave for the Town Enclosure was granted only in urgent cases. Hard tasks were imposed on the reserve. Against the next great Turkish attack the trenches were not only to be improved, but, to trick the enemy, partly shifted, and what was left of the old ones rendered impregnable by high stone parapets. No one dared oppose Bagradian's desperate activity. But his restless demands did not, strangely enough, make people irritable or arouse their hate. They rather invigorated and electrified, filling the camp with fresh desire to do battle. Life, after a short relaxation, had again its object and its content.

  Gabriel felt no personal hostility, merely a growing sense of isolation. It is true that, even before, there had never been any real cordiality, either between him and the leaders, or between him and the rank-and-file. Friendship was out of the question. They simply obeyed him, as their leader. They respected him. They were even grateful. But he and the people of Musa Dagh were two different sorts of human being.

  Now, however, they actually shunned him; even Aram Tomasian, who until now had seized on every chance of a talk. He noticed how, right and left of his sleeping place, in the north trench, his neighbors moved their rugs farther away. Their superficial reason for doing it was that Gabriel, who every day spent an hour or more by Juliette's bed, might be infectious. But far more complex feelings lay behind. Gabriel Bagradian was a man struck by misfortune, a man for whom, they could feel instinctively, even worse misfortune lay in store. It is a human instinct to shun the unlucky.

  The camp epidemic had still not spread. This was mostly due to the weather, and to a certain small extent to Bedros Hekim. Out of a hundred and three cases of fever, only twenty-four had so far died. If any member of the camp felt in the least feverish or unwell, he must pack up his rugs and pillows at once and go straight along to the isolation-wood, the fever hospital of the Damlavik. This shady wood was pleasant enough. The patients did not mind having to be there. But a shower would certainly have altered its conditions much for the worse.

  Twice a day, riding on his donkey, Bedros Altouni came to see Juliette. He was puzzled at the fact that, in her case, the fever seemed not to be taking its normal course. The crisis seemed to take a long time coming. After the first attack her temperature had fallen slightly, but without the patient regaining consciousness. And Juliette, unlike the other patients, was neither quite unconscious, nor delirious; she was in a kind of deep, leaden sleep. Yet, in this sleep, without waking out of it, she could turn her head, open her mouth, and swallow the milk which Iskuhi gave her. Sometimes she stammered a few words from another life.

  In the first days Iskuhi scarcely left her side. She had had her bed moved into Juliette's tent. She saw nothing more of Hovsannah and the baby. It had become impossible.

  Juliette's maids were nowhere to be found. They were afraid of infection and much disliked having to touch either the patient or her belongings. What, after all, had they to do with this foreigner, who was in such bad odor all round? So that, for the present, the whole burden lay on Iskuhi.

  But when the doctor's wife came to relieve her, she had literally to force her out of the tent for a few hours' rest, and even then Iskuhi refused to sleep. She sat on the ground not far off and never stirred. If she heard any voice or caught any footfall, she started in panic and tried to hide herself. The thought of meeting her brother or father appalled her. Her best hour was the last before sunrise, when she sat, as now she was sitting, in front of the tent, to wait for Gabriel. He usually came to her then, at this, the stillest of all hours, since as a rule a whole night in the trenches proved more than he could manage to endure. Gabriel, followed by Iskuhi, went in, to Juliette's bedside. The oil lamp on the little dressing table cast its full light on to the patient's face. Altouni had asked that Juliette might never be left unwatched. She might come to herself, or her heart might begin to fail. Gabriel bent over his wife and forced back her eyelids. He might have been trying to force her spirit back into the light. Juliette became rather restless; she moved a little and breathed heavily, but she did not wake. Iskuhi's voice began relating the day's incidents. Inside the tent their talk was always matter of fact. But, even outside it, their love was not safe. Recently, as they walked at about this hour in Three-Tent Square, Iskuhi had caught sight of Hovsannah's tent curtain moving, and she felt Hovsannah's eyes watching them. So that now they crept out of the tent on tiptoe an
d went to the "garden" -- that bank dotted about with myrtle bushes where Juliette once had received admirers. Tonight at least they were concealed. Yet, for all the utter loneliness of the place, they spoke in a half-whisper and never touched.

  "You know, Iskuhi, I thought at first I might go mad. But the moment I felt you near me, the horror passed. I'm free of it now. Quiet! It's beautiful here. We haven't much longer."

  He leaned far back like a man in pain who at last has managed to find a painless attitude, and wants to keep it. "I used to love Juliette, and perhaps I do still. At least as a memory. But this between you and me, what is it, Iskului? I was fated to find you now, at the end of my life, just as I was fated to come here -- not by chance, but . . . well, how shall I put it? All my life I'd only sought for what was foreign to me. I loved the exotic. It enticed me, but it never made me happy. And I attracted it, too, but I couldn't make it happy either. One lives with a woman, Iskuhi, and then meets you, the only sister one can ever have in the world, and it's too late."