Gardens of Grief

by Boston Teran

  “Worse.”

  “You know what I think?”

  Hain rubbed at his lower lip, then he began to tap at it while he thought, “You think they are out there.”

  “I think something is out there.”

  While they conferred, the priest spoke with the dragoman, then started down the rise at a walk. The guide saw and told John Lourdes who swung his mount and cut the priest off before he got a dozen yards.

  “What in the hell are you doing?”

  The meaning was clear, and the priest answered, “Van.” He jabbed an arm in the direction where he meant go. “Van,” he said again.

  John Lourdes shook his head. “No! Tell him there’s something out there.”

  The dragoman said, “He means to go. No matter what’s—”

  “God damn him.”

  Malek tried to force his horse past John Lourdes.

  “I’m here to get you to Van. And I’m telling you—”

  “Van,” ordered the priest.

  John Lourdes reined in his mount. He made a sweeping gesture with an arm, “The path is yours . . . you obstinate bastard.”

  Malek pressed forward, and as he passed, John Lourdes grabbed the priest’s gunbelt. He got a hand through and around it, jerking hard. The two horses sided each other, the riders momentarily locked together and struggling, the horses near stumbled.

  The dragoman, exhausted as he was with age and the pain of that broken wrist, pleaded with the priest to heed John Lourdes. But Malek would have none of it. He was determined to go on at any cost and kept pointing as he repeated, “Van . . . Van.”

  A gunshot cut the argument short.

  It was the guide. He had fired his revolver, which now hung down at his side, smoke drifted up from the barrel. He grinned like someone who had succeeded at his purpose

  The priest had been startled. The dispute silenced. John Lourdes now turned his attention to the matter at hand. He told Hain, “Get your rifle. Follow me. But keep back enough to lay down cover.”

  John Lourdes swung the Enfield up on his shoulder and started down the incline at a slow walk. From a pack on his saddle he took the flare gun and loaded it. He tucked extra flares into his vest pocket. They proceeded with caution. The long blades brushed against his saddle near soundlessly. The way before them was steeped in calm sunlight. John Lourdes was far out into that wild thicket when he brought the Arabian to a halt and ordered the guide to do the same.

  He looked to the banks of the river where they’d seen the first tracks. He then sighted inland. In his mind he had been thinking—would it be possible for a rider to walk his mount slow enough, carefully brushing aside those long and willowy reeds so he might make a path that was near undiscoverable? And doing that, lay a snare.

  He aimed the gun, but not skyward. He pulled the trigger. A hissing flare went like a runner just above the tips of all that long green silence. When it exploded stars of white fire burst and burnt and the air singed and small raw-hot tracers rained down into the tall savannah leaving tails of smoke. John Lourdes quickly followed with a second volley that topped the first in a wonder of reddish glare that made that small patch of the world look to be on fire.

  Then, as if by alchemy, a horse came lurching up out of the reeds, its great head arching and snapping as it tried to shake off the hot spurs. A Kurd forked over the saddle and urged his mount toward them at a gallop. From that ocean of grass another half dozen bandits struck up into the sunlight baring muskets and scimitars and charged toward the riders.

  By the time John Lourdes shouldered his Enfield the guide had wounded the first Kurd who now spun his horse about. The priest instructed the dragoman to take up a position and protect the pack animals. Then pulling his revolver from its holster, he started down the slope at a full run.

  The fight took place at long range. The Kurds were badly outgunned. John Lourdes shot the horse from under one bandit trying to cross the river and outflank them. The short white pony he had been riding collapsed in the shoals and spilled the bandit, who came up soaking. He tried to make a run for the safety of the breaks but was hit, then hit again. He dropped down in the mud in a sitting position, his head tilted forward as if resting and there he died.

  There were pockets of smoke everywhere. Two of the Kurds fled toward the far hills. Another, whose mount had been crippled, tried to escape on foot. One of the bandits was bearing down on John Lourdes, who had turned the Arabian toward the river to parry any threat the riders fleeing there might still present. The priest kicked his mount in pursuit to intercept the Kurd, who now shouldered a scimitar.

  The guide yelled to John Lourdes, who leaned around. The priest had emptied his revolver, yet the Kurd came on. He was an enormous man with flowing hair, crouched over the long neck of his warhorse.

  The priest was now between both men, trampling down the grass full out. Before John Lourdes could take aim and fire, the two horseman met head on. The Kurd slashed with his blade, the priest did not try to avoid it. Rather, he drove his horse straight into the full force of the enemy.

  The two beasts crushed against each other. In their cries, the wrack of agony. The horse the Kurd rode toppled back over on itself, the one the priest sat atop dropped like a stone. The blood grunts of the two men could be heard tearing at each other and there was nothing but vast green waves and the sky until a scimitar rose up and the steel shined for an instant before it scythed down with a hellish whoosh. Then all was still.

  The dragoman called to the priest, the priest did not answer. Behind the advance of a blade a path appeared. It was Malek. He hobbled past John Lourdes to the river. The naked hardness of his stare revealed nothing.

  John Lourdes followed him. The priest stood on the shore and threw the scimitar into the water. Blood steamed from the blade as it sank. He kneeled and washed his hands. John Lourdes climbed out of the saddle and stood not far from him.

  The priest looked at the water dripping from his hands. “I am a failure. As a priest.” he said. “At the calling I was born for. If only we could pick and choose what god was watching. What men we would be. What heavens would open for us. Maybe we require lost paradises as an excuse.”

  Malek grew quiet. He looked up at the young foreigner. “You were right before.” He pointed to one of the dead.

  “You know,” said John Lourdes, “I’ve got about ten thousand questions I’d like to ask you.”

  The priest scooped up more water and washed his face. Beads dripped from his matted beard.

  Hain and the dragoman canted up through the reeds. The guide told John Lourdes, “The priest’s horse is dead. But one of the Kurds has been gracious enough to will him a mount.”

  The priest and the dragoman began to talk amongst themselves. The old one turned to John Lourdes. “Malek says you think quick and well. And you are crafty. He wonders. How did you come by this? Are you trained for the military?”

  John Lourdes considered the question. “The truth is, I try to think like my father.”

  The dragoman explained to the priest who asked, “Your father then, what was he?”

  John Lourdes pulled himself up into the saddle. He sat there looking out over the river then answered without shame or guilt. “He was a criminal . . . and a common assassin.”

  PART II

  Van

  f i f t e e n

  REEDOM DEMANDS RESISTENCE.

  Van was to be the flashpoint of that resistance. It was there the first true fight of what the future was to look like would be waged by the Armenian people.

  Even as the military and civil authorities of Van went about their draconian measures against the Armenian community, the resistance clandestinely exercised its determination of will. Foot soldiers and artillery would be confronted by well-planned and cunning countermeasures.

  In the Armenian quarter youths lounged at street corners watching silently for the gendarmes. When spotted they passed the word to women who stood sentry at windows and on rooftops
beside alleys where members of the Dashnaktsutyun—the Freedom Party—prepared the tactics of battle. At night, old men sat in lamplit doorways smoking their chibouks and playing with the little ones as they kept guard for those who carried buckets of dirt from a honeycomb of tunnels that ran for blocks connecting homes and warehouses to be used as—teerks—manned fighting stations.

  The morning after Alev Temple returned from Constantinople, she commandeered a wagon from the American Hospital to carry home a patient recovering from surgery. She was to drive him out to the suburb of Aikesden, which was part of the Armenian quarter in Van known as the Gardens. It was a place of orchards and enclosures hidden beneath the reach of the willows grown up around them. In the courtyard where she arrived with the patient was a caravan of camels burdened with heavy wood casks of kerosene. One broke loose as they were unroped. Falling to the earth it cracked open. It was filled not with paraffin, but heavy black Mauser pistols wrapped in cloth. German weapons sold by Turkish smugglers to Armenian fedayeen. The guns were grabbed up by the women and children who hid them in their garments then ran away.

  That night in Van, Alev Temple dined at the home of Doctor Charles Ulster. He ran the hospital in the American compound, which also made him a representative of the American government.

  At the table with Ulster and his wife, were Edwin Blake, attaché to the British Consulate and a man named Harmon Frost. Frost was a character all to himself. He looked much like the former president Theodore Roosevelt, a comparison that delighted him. His business card read Import and Export, but that meant almost anything in these times. He was a decidedly political creature, and it had been hinted that he was with the American State Department, running clandestine operations in alliance with the Entente.

  There was gunfire in the streets that night. More than usual. There had been a steady escalation over the last few weeks so that each new nightfall brought with it a rising sense of terror.

  Dinner conversation tended toward the political, or any immediate threat to survival. That night one subject dominated—the priest. Edwin Blake had been at the German Consulate when word arrived that a small handful of Armenian fedayeen had bombed their way into the prison at Erzurum and freed Malek. They had even managed his escape from the city.

  The Turkish government in Van was on high alert, for it was understood Malek meant to make for Van. From the Citadel, which the Turkish government controlled, cavalry had been seen making their way into the frontier to intercept this band of anarchists.

  News of the priest’s escape had already reached the streets of Van. Even refugees streaming in from the outlying districts who had evaded the massacres knew the priest was free. It was as if a telepathic communication was carrying word that riders were coming to overthrow the order.

  “On my way here,” said Edwin Blake, “I heard some refugees talking. They said the Cyclops had fallen.”

  The doctor’s wife did not understand.

  “That’s what they call the prison at Erzurum,” said Alev. “The Cyclops.”

  The name was born from the lone guard tower, with its great wheel of gas lanterns always turning that could be seen in all quarters of the city and far into the darkness of the plain. This ever- burning eye had become a symbol of repression and torture.

  “The Cyclops,” repeated Edwin Blake. “They have rural imaginations, don’t they. Folkloric, anyway.”

  “At least they’re up on their mythology,” said Frost. He took a drink of beer that he had shipped in from the States especially. “They’re a superstitious lot. With their nazar and all the other nonsense.”

  “Don’t forget their religion,” said Alev, “which I believe is the same as yours.”

  “And yours,” said Frost.

  “Yes . . . and I have respect for both.”

  “I’m sure there is an adage for the moment, but the outcome to such a conversation does not interest me.”

  There was an increase of gunfire and Alev excused herself and stood and went to the veranda where she could look out over the city.

  Van was built in two sections. There was the fortress with its walled city that towered over Lake Van, and there were the Gardens. Between the two stood the Turkish quarters. The American compound was in the Gardens, just blocks from Turkish homes and shops. It was on a slight rise so it commanded a view and could, in turn, be seen from quite a distance.

  The night was unusually warm. There was much activity in the streets. Armenian music was being played on Victorolas throughout their quarter as an act of defiance. Alev looked toward the walled city and the fortress, with its dusty battlements and cuneiform inscriptions from when this land belonged to the children of Noah. There was an assembly of torchlights at the gate, which usually meant troops were on the move.

  Alev’s thoughts were with Malek. When he was just out of the novitiate he had worked beside her parents in the hostels and infirmaries. He had baptized her, he had been priest at her first communion and confirmation. He had been family friend and confidant. And his face was the face of holidays and holy days, and it fell to him to perform the mass at the funeral for the murdered Temples.

  Mrs. Ulster joined her.

  “To some,” Alev said, “This is all just political chess.”

  “Ahh,” said her hostess. “Why is it that the most far-reaching proclamations come from the most shortsighted people?”

  Alev looked at this nurse, with her wispy hair and glasses behind which were eyes touched with just a tint of resignation.

  “Why?”

  “Because those people can’t see far enough to even know they are shortsighted.”

  From the porch the doctor called urgently to the women. They joined him and the other men on the far side of the wood-frame house. Between the Armenian quarter and the Turkish quarter defensive positions had been clearly established. Trenches dug, shooting holes bored into mud walls, makeshift breastworks across streets and open fields. A fire had begun at the southern end of that perimeter in the neighborhood of Arak. A block of Armenian homes and shops were being consumed by flames that rose on the wind and yawed violently against a black sky. The wind drove embers across rooftops and down streets and they looked from the compound like an army of forged locust on the move. Units from the Fireman’s College rushed past in wagons and arabas and whatever else they could conscript to reach the fire before the neighborhood was turned to ash.

  The doctor pointed to Toprak-Kala Hill. From the Turkish barracks there came the flash of rifle fire, then the sharp crack of the shots. The Armenian barricades that fronted it returned fire. The shooting intensified. The dim voices of the men shouting in confusion or giving orders could be heard through the fraying wind.

  From the Citadel hill near the military school, there came the thunder of artillery and the shrill flight of shells. A building beyond the breastworks was lifted in a quake of dust and brick, then crumbled down upon itself. In the smoking crater of its rubble appeared a thin wick of fire.

  “Why all this tonight? Why?” said the doctor’s wife.

  “Retribution,” said Frost.

  “For what?” said Alev.

  “Because the Armenian favors death over his own government,” said Frost. “Because the Armenian is for the Entente. Because the Armenian won’t die quickly or gracefully. Because the Turk can’t kill him, even when they outnumber him. Miss Temple . . . is that the kind of answer most suited to your sensibilities?”

  “There is, though, a reason for tonight,” said Edwin Blake. He turned to Frost, so he might finish.

  “Yes, there is a reason,” said Frost. “Miss Temple . . . earlier this evening it seems some daring citizen from the Gardens went to the Police and Telegraph Station of Khatch Pogotz and painted on the wall there—Malek is coming.”

  Alev Temple had been told by two women working for the Danish Red Cross to look for tall, strangely made crucifixes standing about three kilometers south of Van and visible from the road to Bashkale. The women had come up
the Tigris from Mosul. They had worked the desert camps with their displaced and starving Armenians, but nothing in their training or experience had prepared them for what they saw on the Bashkale Road.

  Alev had gone to the site of the fire the following morning. Smoke from the rubble greyed an otherwise sunny and clear street. Humanitarian workers were on the scene helping the homeless and the shopkeepers deal with the tragedy. This is where Alev met the women with the Danish Red Cross.

  Carson Ammons, a newspaperman with the New York Herald, was also there taking pictures. He recognized Miss Temple from that night in Constantinople at the Pera Palas Hotel and her speech on the front steps. She told him about her conversation with the horrified Danish women to convince him there might be something to photograph south of the city.

  The crucifixes stood upright against the clean blue light of day. The face of the landscape was rock strewn with broken swales of thicket. Tall, slender crosses marked the silence with their long shadows. The bodies were in a shallow decline. They were infested with flies and creatures that scurried through the weeds at their approach. Even the wolves had had their hour of feeding. But it was the crucifixes, with their sharpened and bloody tips, that stood out in the shimmery light before them.

  “No one in the world would print a photograph of this,” said the newspaperman.

  Alev sat upon a rock. She made herself look at the bodies of the young girls, with legs spread where the crosses had speared them. “Someone will,” she said.

  Alev Temple spent the night at the German missionary orphanage with the director Herr Sporri, writing letters to ambassadors and influential Turkish men of good will who stood against these ongoing and ever-worsening atrocities, describing for them the devolving situation in Van and what she herself had witnessed that day along the road to Bashkale.

  She lay that night in the hallway of the orphanage but sleep did not come. The road and the crosses held fast in her mind and moved from place to place inside her like a ghostly poison. The din of gunfire was nothing as it dawned on her for the first time she was truly an orphan. A child of this tragedy as much as the children who called the mission their home.