by Boston Teran
Along the length of the Gardens there was firing. The Turkish strategy was to turn the streets into a turmoil. A shell had landed in the trenches just below the Mission compound wall, and the casualties were being carried on blankets and stretchers up to the hospital. This was in clear violation of Turkish law. The compound could no longer be guaranteed neutrality from enemy fire, and it might well warrant seizure by troops.
Making his way through grey rivers of smoke, John Lourdes found Alev Temple amidst the chaos of the wounded being taken to a place of surgery. Children, swept up with fear, crowded the corridors. For John Lourdes she had only moments to offer.
He took care not to be overheard. “I have been told,” he said, “there is a clandestine network of missionaries who plan and execute escapes for those hunted by the government.”
She looked around, she was fearful. He took her measure. What he’d asked would put her and others at risk.
John Lourdes waited in the dining room of the doctor’s cottage. He had a map spread out on the table he studied. When Alev Temple returned with the doctor’s wife, her nurse’s smock was stained with blood. She was exceedingly nervous.
“I need to get the priest out of Van,” said John Lourdes. He looked down at the map and ran his fingers along the route he hoped to travel. “Can you get us down the Tigris? Possibly to Mosul. Or where we can strike east to the Caspain Sea?”
Mrs. Ulster took a long breath, “Russia.”
“Russia,” he said.
“Baku. The oil fields,” said Alev Temple.
“Can you arrange it?” said John Lourdes.
The doctor’s wife covered her mouth and jaw with a hand while she considered, “Alev . . . letter paper and pen, please.”
Alev left the room. Mrs. Ulster suddenly remembered, “John . . . a letter was delivered for you last night. Through the British consulate. I hadn’t seen you—”
It was on a sideboard and she retrieved it for him.
He was expecting no letter, especially coming through the British consulate. He looked at the envelope. Written there:
John Lourdes
Citizen of Mexico
American Mission compound
He felt something strike at the space in his throat. He opened the envelope. He removed the letter and read:
I have followed you to Van. Saw you through field glasses from Toprak—Kala. I had assumed you would eventually be there at the mission compound.
I await our next meeting. The roads are watched, for I know the priest must be on the move. He spoke to many in the prison about his plans for a nation.
I have one question. Was the araba part of the original plan to escape the city? Or was it a stroke of ingenuity during dire circumstances? Either way, I have taken notice.
The British Consul’s office was kind enough to deliver this. I will be on the hill at sunset with field glasses, so that we may salute our mutual efforts.
Rittmeister Franke
John Lourdes packed his belongings and waited for the guide to return. At end of day he climbed to the hospital roof. The air was hazy with ash and the streets below a wasteland of bomb craters and smoky plots of brick. The quarter was being taken down piece by piece.
He found the hill with the last of the sun red upon its slopes. The movement of the men could be marked by their long black silhouettes.
He was there, as promised: Rittmeister Franke. By a breastwork where riflemen fired into the Gardens. This time, it was he who tipped his hat.
Why had the captain done this? Was it a vain impulse? Had he meant it as challenge or threat? His father had always cautioned him—keep your eyes at gunsight level. Yet John Lourdes had been caught off guard.
Later that evening the guide returned to the compound and reported to John Lourdes, “Efendi . . . the priest will be on the move tonight.”
They prepared for the leaving in John Lourdes’ room. He tossed an envelope of lira across the bed. Hain’s mercenary wage.
“After you take me to him, our business is done. He and I will go alone.”
“But you are not part of his plan.”
“I will be.”
The mounts were stabled well back in the Gardens. As John Lourdes and the guide walked to the compound gate, John Lourdes unexpectedly stopped.
“Efendi?”
He stared past the entry lamps, the wind tossing their light about the compound walls.
“How difficult would it be,” said John Lourdes, “for a Turkish soldier, or a Kurd bandit to disguise himself as an Armenian and wander about the quarter, or watch the compound here, from just outside the gate?”
Hain looked toward the gate, “As easy as the doing.”
John Lourdes thought about the captain, the letter. The compound could well be under surveillance.
They removed the dead from the compound in carts. Wrapped in shrouds, and stacked like so much baggage. A canvas tarp was thrown over their remains. The wooden vessel trundled along, pulled by sorry horses from the compound to a place of burial.
By a quiet grove well beyond the range of artillery the cart pulled off the road and two men rose from the dead and stood in the cool night air. John Lourdes looked to make sure they were not followed.
Hain could not free himself from the shroud fast enough. “Efendi?”
“What?”
“I hope to do this only once . . . When it counts.”
At a farmhouse the priest sat alone on a stone wall smoking. Framed by windowlight he seemed to John Lourdes a study in conflict. His horse stood nearby at the ready.
The guide had brought John Lourdes to a cluster of trees along an irrigation ditch close enough to where the priest sat. They spoke in hushed voices.
“You have done well,” said John Lourdes.
“Efendi. Russia . . . It will be a hard journey.”
“I would believe so.”
“I have never taken such a journey,” said the guide. “And I have cause to wonder.”
The priest heard the slight packing of brush and turned and moving toward him from shadow to shadow was John Lourdes leading his mount. He had the reins in one hand and in the other a bottle of vodka and a tin cup.
The priest bore a look of pure surprise. John Lourdes slipped over the wall and joined him. He set the cup down on the wall. “You’ll see, after a drink or two we’ll be like . . . old cellmates.”
He poured out some vodka.
“I have a map. I’ll show you a plan.”
He forced the cup into the priest’s hand. Some vodka spilled. He apologized and poured more, then carefully touched the tin cup with the bottle. “To the journey.”
He drank, the priest could still only stare. John Lourdes took a folded-up map from inside his vest.
“You have no idea,” said the priest, “do you, son?”
The priest, of course, knew this young man did not understand. And yet—
John Lourdes set the map on the stone wall. He used the bottle to hold down one end so the breeze could not have at it. He ran his fingers along a route he’d drawn. “You . . . Me . . . Baku.”
“I didn’t want the others,” said the priest, “because I did not trust them.”
John Lourdes pointed, “The Tigris . . . We follow the river . . .”
“I didn’t want you because . . .” The priest was angry. But not at the young man before him. “I don’t want to see you dead.”
John Lourdes kept pointing to the map. “Alev says if we get to Mosul from there it’s a dead run east to the Caspian Sea, then to Baku.”
The priest drank the cup empty, he then tossed the cup aside. He stood. He grabbed John Lourdes’ arm. He shoved him away. “You’ve done enough. You’ve given enough. Go home!”
John Lourdes pulled loose. He reached out to touch the priest’s gunbelt and the lives that hung there. “I understand. Believe me . . . I . . . of all people . . . understand.”
The priest took the map forcibly from John Lourdes. He folded it, then s
tuffed it into the young man’s vest and in no uncertain terms demanded he be gone. He spoke angrily, he nearly shouted.
John Lourdes would not be ordered, he would not be overruled, he would not be outmatched. There were men in the house who could now be seen in the windowlight and framed in the doorway as it swung open. They bore arms and came forward quickly. Mr. Zadian and the dragoman among them.
There was movement in the brush behind Malek. He turned. Light sparely reflected off that narrow course of water, and there stood the guide. The priest addressed him.
“What have you heard?”
Hain stood with eyes downcast.
“What have you heard?”
“Everything.”
“You will tell your friend here nothing of what I have said. Do you understand?”
He nodded.
“Let there be no mistake.”
t w e n t y - o n e
HE PRIEST WAS overruled. There in the garden beside an irrigation ditch by a committee of men whose futures also hung in the balance.
John Lourdes asked the dragoman for a dozen riders to help him effect Malek’s escape from the city. He ordered the mounts’ hooves be bound in heavy cloth, the same was to be done to their muzzles. They would leave immediately from the easternmost portal of the city, where there were no barricades, and few guard stations.
The roofs of the town were dark along the streets where they walked their horses. The bindings made them a near silent and ghostlike presence. Where they took to their saddles, the guide pinned an amulet to his blouse. It was a small eye made of brass, painted blue and white, with a black pupil to ward off the nazar.
The dragoman saw this and he winked at Malek. He told the guide, “You will need more than one to keep away all the evil that looks down on you. Many more. A treefull, at least.”
They emerged from the city single file and following the threadline of a dried and forgotten irrigation channel. The guide rode at the front of the column. With the moon clouded as it was, it would take more than a watchful eye to pick up the slight dust made by their soundless ponies. But when the guide’s hose sniffed at the air uneasily he signaled for the men to halt. John Lourdes came up alongside him. The fires indicating guard stations were few and far between on that plain. The two men watched and listened, stilling even their breath to pick up the slightest hint of a sound.
From across the darkness came the rattle of shots. Flashings just above the reach of the earth. A horse screeched out and reeled into the channel wall. The riders swept up out of that dried waterway. There came a wild and erratic flurry of firing along the plain. Errant flashes everywhere.
The riders were already scattering when a flair rocketed toward the hills and the plain around them burst with light. They and their dust was luminescent as they raced into the landscape.
The escaping horsemen were making for the horizon in groups of two and three. Some toward the Entente armies with letters begging for the relief of Van. Others to Constantinople and Trebizond. It was also a means by which, if the Germans knew the priest would attempt to escape the city, they would have to hunt down each pack to have him.
Three of the riders came to a stone ridge and halted. John Lourdes scanned the country they had just traversed with field glasses. The priest and the guide waited beside him.
The city was under heavy bombardment and on the plain he could make out sallies of gunfire chasing down riders, or closing in on men who must have lost their mounts and were fighting it out on foot.
“I heard German being shouted, did you?” said John Lourdes.
“I heard, efendi.”
There was something of arguable substance moving in their direction upon the broken terrain. John Lourdes kept watching. It was either the wind taking up the dust along the slopes, or they were being hunted.
They pressed on into the indifferent darkness, halting every few miles and looking back. While the horses rested, another flare took to the heavens.
The priest spoke, and the guide asked, “What does that mean, efendi?”
He had seen this before, he had made this fight once before, with his father. In another country, yes. But its meaning was the same.
“It’s a marker,” he said. “Either one of the men has been taken and made to talk . . . or we were discovered.”
They climbed back into their saddles and prepared for a long and exhausting night. Within an hour another flare burned above the low black hills behind them.
“I have not seen this,” said the priest. “Can they hunt that well at night?”
The guide asked, and John Lourdes answered.
“What you are witnessing is a plan. Most of the men on the hunt, are resting somewhere. But they send a small party ahead. They track as best they can. They don’t have to get far. Come morning, the ones resting will catch up quickly with the advance party. Then they will take up the pursuit. The ones that hunted during the night will take their turn resting. This way, they are forever on the move. One group resting, one hunting. Pressing. Forcing us to keep on the move. The flares mean to frighten. So we don’t sleep. To keep reminding us they are out there.”
“Efendi,” said Hain, “you know this kind of pursuit?”
“I have been hunted like this before.”
Miles later, they watered their horses at a stream. There came the first twitter of birds before the dawn. The earth was cool, and silent. There were no flares, no signs of men. Malek walked up alongside John Lourdes, and together they watched.
“It’s not the flares,” said John Lourdes, “it’s the telegraph. Have they telegraphed on ahead? The German officer. The one in Erzurum. He was also in Van. They interrogated men at the prison in Erzurum. They know what your aims are. That same officer contacted me in Van . . . at the mission.” John Lourdes cursed privately. “He is that kind of smart. He will telegraph ahead.”
The priest listened soberly as Hain translated and the priest then shook his head, “They will never have us, and how do I know?”
He walked to the guide. He reached out and tugged his blouse below the amulet with its blue and white eye staring imperiously out upon the world. “We are safe from evil. Prince Hain and his magic amulet will protect us.”
They pressed on into the Mesopotamian plain toward the headwaters of the Tigris. It was a shadowless country, hard and sweeping save for windswept rock that rose like battlements from nothing. This was country John Lourdes understood. That smelled and tasted and breathed of his home and birth.
They passed a nameless village chiseled into the volcanic flesh of a mountain. Flight upon flight of terraced dwellings such as the pueblos of the west John Lourdes knew from photographs. Their black doorways like empty, dead eyes.
Through the haze a huge crucifix stood guard over the landscape. John Lourdes took out his field glasses. It was a church with a low compound wall squared around it. The building itself was a two-story and windowless structure of mud brick. The cross was of darker stone architected into one of the building walls. But it was the tall stakes bound together that he could not understand. Not until the wind settled some and the images sharpened. They were gallows from which hung children and women and men. Corpses obscured by wind blowing dust through their clothes and bones.
“Efendi,” said the guide. “What is there?”
He did not answer. The priest asked for the glasses. John Lourdes did not offer them over.
They rode on, and sometime in the afternoon heard the din of an aeroplane. They pulled up their mounts and looked out upon the wilderness as they waited.
Suddenly a set of pale wings and a propeller brushed over the tips of a far escarpment. It was approaching from the west, from the valley of the Euphrates River. It descended, and as it did, its flight path altered and it set on a course right toward them.
Its shadow struck past so close above, the horses reared and shuddered and dust was pulled up from the earth around them.
“Turkish,” said the p
riest.
“Efendi,” said the guide. “I have heard the Germans and the Turks are bringing in planes to scout the British advance up from Basra to Baghdad. And that these aeroplanes are being stationed somewhere along the Euphrates.” He pointed to where the aeroplane had first been spotted.
They watched and soon the wings banked and the plane came back toward them. It flew so low now it seemed they could reach up and touch it. When it passed overhead the wind of it blew hard against the men’s faces and they could see the pilot clearly, his goggles and great moustache.
Then the aeroplane rose and started away, but not toward where they had first seen it. Now it was traveling in the direction from where the horsemen had come.
“You say they have a military station along the Euphrates?”
“That is what I heard,” said the guide.
“Troops?”
“I don’t know, efendi.”
“If they have a station . . . they may have troops . . . and a telegraph.”
In the light of afternoon they ascended a vast plateau. From that height John Lourdes could assess the country before them. While the horses rested, each man took a turn with the field glasses.
As the priest was handed the glasses he said to the guide, “Ask him how he ended up being the one ordered to Russia.”
The guide conveyed the question and John Lourdes answered, “I volunteered. So it was decided.”
The guide explained.
“Decided how?” said the priest. “The man from the State Department had no intention of ever sending him. That was apparent. What happened after I left?”
The guide asked John Lourdes.
“Upon reflection, he thought I was best equipped.”
The guide explained.
The priest set the glasses aside. He studied John Lourdes. “He would not have chosen him, if he were the only one in the world to choose from. So . . . there is another reason. Which means he is lying.”