Gardens of Grief

by Boston Teran

  Mr. Zadian continued, “We are members of the Dashnaktsutyun—”

  “This is about the man who came to see me today at the Mission compound, isn’t it?” said John Lourdes.

  Again Mr. Zadian translated and the priest said, “Ask him about the American.”

  “This Mr. Frost . . . is with your government,” said Mr. Zadian.

  John Lourdes lit his cigarette. “Yes. He requested—”

  Malek interrupted Mr. Zadian, who stopped talking and listened then questioned John Lourdes. “You are very different from this official. How is it you were chosen to come here?”

  There was a brutal economy to the priest that John Lourdes had experienced in only one other man. He finished his drink, poured more. He smoked. He never once during all that took his eyes from Malek. “I know what you’re doing,” he said to the priest. “I understand you very, very well. And you don’t need me to answer that question. Do you?”

  He then raised his glass and drank. Mr. Zadian translated, and the men glanced at the priest. Malek sat in the chair with his arms folded across his lap, and Mr. Zadian said, “Shall I ask him the question again?”

  The priest said, “No. He’s answered it.”

  “Mr. Lourdes,” said Mr. Zadian, “we want to know if we can . . . work with him.”

  John Lourdes looked into his near empty cup of vodka. “Where have I heard that before?”

  “Excuse me?”

  He shook his head. He drank the vodka down. “What kind of berries made this?”

  “Cornel.”

  “It isn’t tequila . . . but it’s a horserace.” He paused. “You want to know . . . what does he want to support your cause?”

  “Yes.”

  “And does he mean what he says?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what can you get?”

  “Yes.”

  “You have more urgent issues. I listen. I hear the Turks fire ten shots, I hear you answer with one. If the Entente can’t send a relief column, Van will fall. Maybe not this week . . . but not long after. And you’ll be nothing but . . . the deported and the exterminated.”

  “Where is America in all this? And I’m not speaking of the ambassadors and missionaries. What do we mean here? As people. Do we mean anything?”

  How does he explain—resource control. How does he tell men whose families have been thrown into the ocean, tossed from clifftops then shot, whose heads were used for target practice about—resource control.

  “I don’t know why you’re asking me. When he knows.” He pointed toward the priest with his cup, which he went and filled again. “You know,” he said, staring squarely at Malek, “With a man like you it’s almost instinctive.” He paused momentarily. “I knew another man like that once. But he’s dead.”

  The priest listened, the priest stood. The priest walked up to John Lourdes. The priest poured a cup of vodka. He drank. He looked into the empty cup, his face was weary. He spoke to the others. “If it wasn’t for the oil . . . we would not be worth a single grave. They want oil, we a nation. We’ll see if either gets what they want.”

  n i n e t e e n

  HERE WAS INTENSE street fighting that night within blocks of the American Mission compound. The Turks tried to raze a barricade, but the return fire from a teerk crippled the assault. Soldiers were left wounded and dead in the street.

  The compound itself was quiet and dark. John Lourdes walked the grounds smoking. He was in conference with himself over cold hard realities. The priest obviously had a plan, and the odds were it would almost certainly be in conflict with whatever Frost had in mind. John Lourdes also understood, he was done. Frost would replace him because he could not be trusted to negotiate veracity.

  He passed the church. He glanced in the windows. The moon left soft spill marks upon the floor where children lay bundled up around their mothers like litter pups. Yet, they all slept. Even with the artillery and rifle fire, they slept. For a little while those small, softly breathing bodies were beyond grief and fear and hunger.

  He walked up the porch steps. Hain had yet to return. He was almost to the door of his room when the floor boards creaked and a shadow quietly rose up from the darkness.

  “Alev?”

  She had been sitting on a porch bench.

  “I was waiting. To make sure you were all right. You are all right?”

  “I’m all right.”

  “I saw you down by the church.”

  He looked back. The crown of the roof stood out in the moonlight. “They sleep through the bombing.”

  “They learn how quickly.”

  They looked at each other in the bare light of a burning cigarette. She handed him his notebook.

  “You have everything?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  He put it back in his vest pocket.

  “You write a lot about your father. And why they picked you to send here. I hope it wasn’t wrong of me to read that.”

  “No, Alev. It was not wrong. In fact, I knew you would.”

  They shared an unspoken moment. He wondered, what thoughts were passing through her mind. She leaned up and without a word put a hand to his cheek, kissing him there. He closed his eyes momentarily. Her presence felt inexhaustible and true.

  She told him, “My father used to say . . . every man carries the history of the world in his soul. And, what it means to lose your soul is to lose the world. To lose the world means the poor and the broken and the suffering are nothing to you. They are just an unseemly weight, and the wrongs afflicted against them should be left to others. Your notebook. It tells me you still carry the world in your soul. And I know how difficult that can be.”

  She went to leave him, but something more came to mind. “In your notebook . . . you wrote ‘Harmon Frost’ and then . . . ‘resource control’?”

  John Lourdes ground his cigarette out on the porch post.

  “What is . . . resource control?”

  “The future,” he said.

  The next day John Lourdes was notified Harmon Frost wanted him at a meeting with the priest. The guide returned with news. He had been on the street the night before and had seen John Lourdes enter the teerk. Later, he had followed the priest and a number of men to the southeastern-most section of the Gardens. There was a small home and barn virtually hidden in a grove of old and bent willows. Hain watched the men squatting around a map on the ground, their faces lit by a kerosene lamp. They were discussing plans for the priest to leave Van.

  “Do you know where? Did you hear?” said John Lourdes.

  “Russia,” said the guide.

  About a block from the American consulate, Harmon Frost had set up offices in what was once a tavern. The ground floor was empty and in a miserable state of disrepair. The small rooms on the second floor he had turned into offices. There was an enclosed courtyard at the rear, but a shell had taken down a tall poplar along with part of the wall, and now the tree stretched across the rubbled space and was braced against the building.

  A balcony ran along the front of the building from where John Lourdes watched the street and waited on the priest. Members of the Armenian boy scouts, in uniform and under the supervision of their troop leader, searched for the remains of bullets fired the night before. And from the balcony he could look over the roof of a mud shell where crowds of people collected around a public oven in the desperate hope for food.

  John Lourdes had been asked to wait alone while Harmon Frost consulted with two field operatives. They were named Van Duyn and Moss. They were about the same age as John Lourdes, well educated and politically savvy. They had questioned him intensely about Malek. He told them much, but he did not offer information about the guide, the meeting at the teerk, nor about Russia.

  Malek arrived with Mr. Zadian and the dragoman. He still wore the gunbelt. From the balcony John Lourdes raised a hand as a hello. Malek glanced up at him and smiled. He then said something to the others, and they nodded.

 
All were gathered together in one office. It was bare but for a desk and an assortment of chairs and a table with a samovar from which tea was served. They shared courtesies and tobacco and idle talk. Van Duyn spoke Russian and Turkish, Moss neither. John Lourdes found himself relegated to a station in the doorway, and while he watched the men drink tea and discuss matters of war, he saw Malek move off alone and stare through the open window to the mountains beyond.

  For a few secret moments an expression passed over the priest’s face that John Lourdes remembered from when Malek stood chained in the prison yard at Erzurum.

  Harmon Frost casually called the meeting to order. “Let’s discuss our interest and aims.”

  Mr. Zadian now served as interpreter.

  “Your goal,” said the priest, “is to help win the war against the Turks. Our goal goes well beyond that.

  “Our goals,” said Harmon Frost, “are political. We are set upon the sponsoring and spreading of democracy. But our goals are also humanitarian. We are a humanitarian nation. Your survival is important to us.”

  “It is important, but to be honest, not mandatory.”

  “Oh, I disagree.”

  “There are many Armenians in America, in Bulgaria, Greece, in half a dozen other nations, that have pled with the British to form a special unit. To bring them here, train them, arm them. So that they may serve. His Majesty’s government has been against that.”

  “I don’t speak for the British.”

  Mr. Zadian interjected, “Where is the American government in all this?”

  “I cannot discuss that.”

  “Influential Americans have approached your government about helping influence the British to create such a fighting force.”

  “I cannot discuss that, rather, let’s focus on what we can do now.”

  Mr. Zadian translated for Malek, who waved an arm and went on, “The British are only interested in us in so far as it pertains to the safety of the Suez Canal . . . And the oil fields of Basra. Which the government has control of through companies like British-Persian Petroleum and Dutch Shell, which they clandestinely own and operate.”

  Mr. Zadian told all this to Harmon Frost, as the priest continued on. “We also know that the British have a secret accord in place with the Entente to divide up Turkey after the war. And that the British intend to take three vilayets . . . Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra . . . and create some kind of country out of that. Which is to serve not only as a buffer zone, but a station, where they can politically and militarily keep control of the oil. Where is the American government? What does the American government think of such a plan?”

  “Whatever they think,” said Harmon Frost, “has not been shared with me. And understand . . . We are not at war with Turkey. We are not one of the allies. We are not privy to all private discussions. So I cannot validate what you said.”

  “But you do not dispute it?”

  “I am neither in a position to validate nor dispute it.”

  “Yet you want the oil as badly as they do.”

  Mr. Frost leaned forward and folded his hands on the desk and unflinchingly said, “As badly as we all will.”

  Frost stood. “Let me summarize. You want to survive. You want to defeat the Turks. You want to build a nation. We can help in certain ways. We can get you weapons . . . food . . . money. Through important business connections, banking channels, charitable organizations, foreign exporters of materials.”

  “What do you want from us?”

  “Create resistance in the south at Mosul. The Turks are intent upon driving to Basra. The British will march north to confront them. We assume they will meet somewhere around Baghdad.”

  “Is this your plan, or the British?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Through our actions,” said the priest, “you will buy good will you hope gives you access to the oil fields of Basra from which the British have excluded you.”

  “The same good will you need to build a nation.”

  There followed a calculated silence in the room. Then Harmon Frost spoke again, “Mr. Van Duyn and Mr. Moss will work closely with you. They are able men who have the complete confidence of our government. One speaks your language, they understand the cultures.”

  The priest looked the two young men over. “What about that one?” said the priest, pointing at John Lourdes in the doorway.

  “We feel there are other areas where Mr. Lourdes may more ably serve us.”

  The priest made a slight grunt. He walked up to the two young men and asked about them. Van Duyn explained they were from Harvard and Yale. They had experience in Washington. Their families were diplomats and successful businessmen. With that Malek turned to John Lourdes.

  The grim course of an artillery shell gripped the room. It exploded in a nearby street. The building shuddered, the fallen tree scored a few inches down the wall from the quake. The men waited. People could be heard running to the scene. Through the windows smoke began to measure up against the sky.

  The priest still stood before Van Duyn and Moss. He turned his attention back to them. “Show me your wounds,” he said.

  “Excuse me?” said Van Duyn.

  “Your wounds . . . show them to me.”

  Van Duyn explained to Harmon Frost what the priest was asking.

  “Show me where you’ve bled,” the priest then said. He ran his hands along the man’s suit. “Show me where you’ve bled for something. For anything.”

  The two young Americans were at a loss to answer. Malek sat and took off one of his slippers. He showed them the black and dead flesh on the soles of his feet where the nails had been hammered into the bone. He told them in detail the harrowing blow by blow. He then put the slipper back on and stood.

  “I need men who speak another kind of language, who understand a far different culture. This one,” he aimed a closed fist at John Lourdes, “I know his wounds. I have seen where he bled.

  “I do not know you,” Malek said to Harmon Frost. “And I do not know these two young men of yours.” Again he pointed that fist toward John Lourdes. “That young man. He is the America I know. The America I would put my faith in.” He paused, “And I don’t want him with me either.”

  Malek then sat. He spoke privately to the dragoman, and it was the dragoman who continued, “We have people working with us in Constantinople. And we have received word that influential Russians . . . men who are Bolsheviks have met with the German consulate. Men such as yourself, efendi,” he said to Harmon Frost, “who are . . . unofficially with their government. And their aim is to let the Germans know that if they back the Bolshevik overthrow of the government, when they attain power, they will immediately sue for peace. Which will remove the Russian from the Turkish flank.”

  “It would also,” said Mr. Zadian, “allow the Turkish army and the German army to sweep across the Middle East. Then they would be able to finish the Berlin to Batum to Baku Railway and the pipeline and so control half the oil in the world. It would ensure the deportation and extermination of every Armenian, every Assyrian, every Christian from here to the Mediterranean.” He took a moment. “Are you aware of such meetings?”

  “That is something I cannot discuss.”

  The dragoman translated for the priest. John Lourdes watched as the back of Malek’s fingers brushed against the mementoes that hung from the gunbelt. He privately spoke to Mr. Zadian, who asked Harmon Frost, “Might a thinking man, a man such as yourself, see a reason why a country, or a vast company, might prefer Russia to fall? Most of the oil coming to the war is by tanker from the United States. Standard Oil and Shell. Who has wanted to gain control of the Baku oilfields and has not been able to with the present regime? Is it not Standard Oil?”

  “Your reasoning is sound, but the facts are incorrect.”

  The priest stood. He was joined by the dragoman and Mr. Zadian. “Prove me wrong,” said Malek. “Send money to Baku. I am going there to organize Armenians to fight the Germans and Tartars and t
he Turks who are intent on taking back those oil fields. Help us with that. We will earn each other’s good will . . . while these good men around me go about the business of creating a nation.”

  When they had left the office, Harmon Frost sat back and reflected upon a conversation that had not gone well.

  “He’s politically astute,” said Van Duyn. “I give him that much.”

  “His reasoning is sound,” said Harmon Frost.

  “And the facts?” said John Lourdes.

  Harmon Frost glared at him, “I know what you’re insinuating.”

  “It seems,” said John Lourdes, “the priest understands resource control as well as you.”

  t w e n t y

  HE GUNFIRE HAD intensified dramatically. The guide was sitting by a wall near the public oven bundled up like a tramp so as not to be recognized when the priest left the building. He looked up at the balcony and John Lourdes pointed at both his eyes then clasped his hands together. The guide nodded and was up and working the edges of the crowd to follow Malek.

  Harmon Frost called to John Lourdes, and when he returned to the office, Van Duyn and Moss were heading down the stairs.

  “Sit,” said Harmon Frost. When he heard the tavern door shut he said, “We can’t have such things being suggested about us.”

  “He scared you, didn’t he?”

  “Being uncertain is one thing, pure distrust quite another.”

  “Was it his distrust, or his accuracy?”

  Harmon Frost sat there, just staring at nothing really. He was unusually subdued.

  “The seas of political expediency are about to part.”

  Harmon Frost turned now his full attention to John Lourdes. Anger flared in his eyes at the remark.

  “Resource control,” said John Lourdes. “You want me to persuade the priest about Van Duyn and Moss. And Basra.”

  “Something like that.”

  John Lourdes told him, “That’s not going to happen.” He then stood. He took out a cigarette and lit it. “I learned a few things from this meeting.” He folded his arms. He let the smoke drift out his nostrils. “Malek is going to Russia. And you know what else.” He used the cigarette as a pointer. “Even though the very thought will not be to your liking . . . I’m the one going with him.”