by Boston Teran
The men stopped momentarily as the pilot started straight down the Tigris. So close to the river’s surface was he, the water flumed up white. The fuselage lifted suddenly, then dropped as thin runnels of fire shot out from the lifts.
The warplane had been hit. The pilot was doing all he could to keep from having to ditch. John Lourdes swung the Enfield from his shoulder and passed it to the priest. Smoke began to billow out from the tail. The pilot was engulfed in smoke, the plane was near touching the river.
The men fired into the heat of that engine. The flare John Lourdes shot off strafed the wing, then continued out over the Tigris in a blaze line of sparks. The plane was about eighty meters out when the tail snapped and boomeranged into the marshes shredding a pathway of silt. The engine whined, the front end hit the water.
It was a catastrophe of collapsing wood and metal and wire. One set of wings cut the waterline and tore loose. The frame and remaining set of wings skimmed the Tigris like a stone toward that turning raft.
The men threw themselves on the deck as the other wings ripped from the frame and the fuselage rose up with the engine in flames and the propeller still at full throttle. The engine began to burn and black smoke poured forth, and the wings hit the kalek and took the helmsman and part of the rudder right on into the river.
The propeller broke loose from its mounting and carried like a pinwheel toward shore hacking through marsh grass and bracken then was gone up over the embankment. The frame flipped past the raft, then flipped again, and the rimpled water in its wake steamed from the burning engine, and the frame speared bottom and came upright like a pylon and the kalek hit it with the full measure of force.
The frame came apart. A section from the engine to the remains of the cockpit slammed down on the deck and the sheer weight of it along the stern caused water to pour up over the gunwale by the shattered helm. As the bow lifted, the horses kicked and cried out in confusion, and a stall gate broke loose. One of the mounts went skittering backwards and toppled over the stern and into the Tigris.
The propeller mount was still winding out and scorching the deck beams and the priest took hold of the frame at the far end. He got his hands up under the belly of it, and clasping them together, began to lift.
He managed a few tortured inches, then John Lourdes had the guide slip his rifle under the wreckage. Taking hold of the barrel, they used the weapon as a brace. Water slopped up over their ankles. The men began to exhaust, their muscles weaken. But when they got the frame high enough the priest turned and took the weight of it upon his back. John Lourdes had the guide let loose of the rifle and the men got themselves stationed on the priest’s flanks. With what was left of their strength they started to lift again. Their chests heaved, their mouths hung open. But when they had the frame lifted high enough, when the angle was right enough, the weight of the engine dragged the rest of the fuselage down into the gunwale. It cracked apart and the engine took the rest over the side, and as the water closed up over the remains of that warplane the raft settled.
PART III
The Land of Eternal Fire
t w e n t y - f o u r
HE NIGHT OF the escape from Van, Alev Temple and a hospital aide took a wagon across the Gardens to the Zadian home. It was there the priest had been hidden, and from there the men left from that evening. She anticipated finding wounded and dead, hence the wagon.
The dragoman had news to report, and it was not good. It was his mount that had been shot during the surprise attack. Alone and on foot, with only a pistol, he had managed to make his way along myriad gullies back to the safety of the Quarter.
He had seen and heard much hiding in the darkness. A number of men had been killed or quickly captured. The prisoners taken to a place in the road where they were beaten mercilessly with trench clubs, then repeatedly bayoneted. When these violations were completed, the soldiers doused the bodies with kerosene and set them on fire. All except for Mr. Zadian.
He had been slightly wounded and taken alive. When his wife heard this she began to wail and tear at her clothes, for she knew that by now he would be in a stone and windowless cell waiting to face his interrogators.
About the fate of Malek and the American with him, the dragoman was not certain. He only knew they were not among the wounded and dead that were lying out there on the road.
Even with her credentials, and having a mission aide along, Alev Temple was not permitted to retrieve the dead. They were to be left there as a punitive reminder.
Van was under a heightened security. Many more troops, and more gendarmerie than she had ever seen. There were even roving gangs of Kurdish bandits on patrol. It was now virtually impossible to enter or exit the city, which is why the dragoman approached her the next day at the compound.
He sat on the hospital steps and explained to Alev that Mr. Zadian had been the one assigned to go to Baku and meet with the Armenian resistance in the hills coordinating them, the priest, and the shipments of arms and money. If Mr. Zadian were to be taken or killed, that responsibility fell to the dragoman.
Alev Temple understood why he had come to her. Escaping Van would require considerable and determined planning, and her involvement in this clandestine effort was imperative.
Behind the American consulate was a barn that had been turned into a bar. It was a place for Americans and other foreigners to dull the brutality that constantly besieged them.
Carson Ammons, the newspaperman who had been with her at the death scene on the Bashkale Road, was well into his whiskey when Alev Temple arrived. She asked to sit somewhere where no one could eavesdrop.
“I think I can offer you a very promising story.”
“I still have unprintable photographs from your last promising story.”
“You’ll get to use them . . . The world will see to it.”
“I can’t cash the future. What do you have for now?
“Malek,” she said.
“The priest?”
“Yes.”
“Word is he escaped Van.”
“He did.”
“And so?”
“I have put together papers for a relief mission. With authorization to take a photographer with me. A third man will be coming who will serve as a porter. I have his papers also. This man is to be a conduit . . . between Armenian insurrectionists . . . Malek . . . and a foreign citizen who is delivering to them weapons and money.”
Carson Ammons considered this information while he studied the source.
“Would I have the right to do this story? I mean the written story?”
“Who else will be there, but you?”
“This is not the usual province of relief workers.”
She answered with her silence.
“Where are we going?”
“Baku.”
“Russia?”
Why hadn’t the pilot returned to report sighting the priest on the Tigris before embarking upon his assault. It would have been the right military procedure, under the circumstances.
John Lourdes kept trying to make sense of it all, as they worked to dock the kalek on a sandbar so as to make repairs. The current had carried Zacharias into the marsh grass where they found him unconscious. He had suffered two fractured legs that needed splinting. The mount that had gone overboard the guide retrieved from the Tigris, unhurt.
By dusk, they resumed their journey downriver. The boy and the guide at the oars, Malek at a mended helm. Silent and grave over questions that plagued him, John Lourdes maintained watch. But it proved unnecessary. The hours downriver went without incident, which only magnified a pervasive sense of dread.
There is too much calm—he wrote in his notebook. Could it speak not to our success at eluding the captain, but rather to some unaccounted for failure on my part, in planning.
They came within sight of Mosul in the evening hours. The fading light portrayed a formal pattern of streets far into the desert on both sides of the river. There were many raft
s upon the shore, many boats with their triangular sails buoyed in the shallows. Men congregated around fires, and women filled great jugs from the river. They came to shore near a bridge. It was, in fact, a roadway built on a trusswork of boats with arced prows. Under torchlight soldiers marched to the eastern shore. The bridge was glutted with men and wagons, with caravans and traders, even at that hour. From the raft they could hear people along the bridge speaking Arabic dialects so they were careful to remain quiet and inconspicuous as possible, for they were in the heart of a place that would show them no mercy.
Zacharias had composed a letter to a missionary by the name of von Ludendorf. He was a distant cousin by marriage of a prominent officer in the German high command.
Bearing this letter, John Lourdes and the guide were led from the mission compound to an Arab coffee house where von Ludendorf passed the hours. He was a thick-faced, thick-bodied man who looked much older than his forty years. He had come to missionary work by way of his failure at the seminary, his failure at business, his failure at marriage, and his failure at life. Of all this he spoke freely and often, as he took the three by wagon to Persia.
He was loud, well-liked, and held his liquor admirably, and among the Arabs, Turks, or Germans his heritage and status made him one of them, and so he could traverse everywhere easily. He admitted his work in the underground movement was less of a cause than a means to settle a grievance with a world that knew him as a failure.
In the back of the wagon John Lourdes wrote in his notebook—the virtueless intentions that drive men to virtuous acts. Was that not, he thought, his own reaction to a comment from a State Department official as to why he was sent to this place.
He looked out through the canvas opening, past their mounts, which were tethered to the rear of the wagon. All the passing miles could not kill the feeling he had somehow failed in the planning of their escape. Flicking the pages of his notebook indiscriminately with his thumb, he noticed the last vestige of a page that had been torn off. On that page Zacharias had written his note to the missionary von Ludendorf.
Suddenly, his mind went through a succession of phantom steps that took him to the answer: The letter . . . The one Mrs. Ulster had written to Zacharias . . . The one he’d read in his room, sitting at the table and holding it near the kerosene lamp. Had Zacharias taken it? Had he left it on the table? John Lourdes could not remember. But if it had been left on the table . . . And there was no way of asking him now, if he had . . . If Rittmeister Franke entered that room . . . If he walked that room . . . searched that room . . . read that letter . . . He would know their destination.
From a ridge above the desert floor they looked out upon the road that marked the passage into Persia. From that promontory they were on their own. The missionary was turning north toward the town of Amadia. He had received correspondence detailing persecutions there of the Christian and Jew alike, and of rumors Armenians had been left to die in the desert.
They camped that night in the ruins of a palace with a view to the world below. The wind brought with it great veils of sand and the battlements were as nothing against it. The three sat around a fire with their mounts close by in what had once been a grand hall. But its high and expansive archways now shouldered a roofless dome, and the columns that lined the walls were decorated with epochs lost to time.
A troubled John Lourdes revealed his concerns about the letter and what he presumed was a failure on his part that could be endangering them all. The guide translated and the priest listened, glancing occasionally at the bare pieces of brush that burned there in a firepit.
“Tigziz,” he said. “Look where you are. Then speak to me of failure.”
That next day, by any calculation, John Lourdes would have sworn what he was staring at was some trick of nature being played out upon an anonymous landscape. The others took their turn with the field glasses, and they too could not explain what seemed some immense carpet stitched together from myriad sections of cloth stretching across a sunburned and sand basin.
It took a few kilometers for them to realize it was a tent city in a quarter of the world where no tent city belonged. They passed broken carts hacked down for wood and abandoned valuables still bound up in shawls, they passed the bones of mules that had been skinned and eaten, and other bones yet that belonged in graves. What they rode into was the final solution as underwritten by man.
The emaciated stares that watched the riders belonged to women, and the starved and sickly eyes their children. None moved from the shadow of their tents as the horseman passed. They had so little strength to fight the sun, and how could they be sure these men did not mean them ill or harm. Until the priest dismounted, and praying aloud, walked among them.
These were souls resigned to death, for whom the final moment would be a mercy. Condemned to this place they came forth and reached out to touch the hem of his garment as if some measure of peace and salvation resided there. A woman must have known Malek, for she called out his name and began to pass his story from person to person. The commotion brought other women from other tents with children who were just packages of bone that saw and breathed but did not speak.
John Lourdes watched all this from the saddle as Malek walked the camp with the guide following along behind him and leading both their mounts. The priest clasped the hands of the women who reached out to him, who stood by their tents, who walked the sun alongside his shadow. For those too broken or old, for those who were only husks of paper flesh, he went to them and kneeled, and he held them and he prayed with them, and this too he did with the children. Children who did not understand their plight, who did not deserve this fate, who had been cheated of the barest hours and now had hardly a ghost left in them. He stroked their faces and he kissed their cheeks and he held their frail hands as he whispered in their ears, and he had the guide bring a skin of water, and with this he washed their faces and he wet their tongues. John Lourdes saw the priest allowed neither agony nor rage to have at his features. He was resolve and compassion, moral order and solace. He embodied, thought John Lourdes, the strengths of eternity. And unlike most men, he was unafraid of suffering.
There in the middle of that forsaken camp the priest undid the gunbelt. He held the holster high for all to see. He kept it so, and turned as he began to speak.
“Do you see what this is? I took it from a soldier who meant to see us dead. A soldier to whom we are nothing. Do you see what hangs from this gunbelt? Do you recognize what hangs from this gunbelt?” He turned slowly and he raised his other hand and held the gunbelt between them. “Our ceremonies hang from this belt. Our rituals hang from this belt. Dreams hang from this belt. Joys hang from this belt. Beliefs . . . hopes . . . memories . . . birthdays . . . marriages . . . memorials . . . our religion . . . What hangs from this belt is our history. Can you see? Can you?”
He looked into faces for whom there was no earthly reward. “We are not finished as a people . . . I promise you. You will not be forsaken . . . I promise you. I will bear witness . . . These men with me will bear witness . . . There are others now who will bear witness. A nation will be built on our dying. Our dying. A future will bear your name. A nation will be born of your suffering. Those who come later will know they owe you for your courage. And it will be you who will stand together at Abraham’s Tent to greet generations.” He took the gunbelt in one hand, and he shook it. “I promise . . . I, and others with me, will put thunder to your rain.”
A hobbling woman emerged from the crowd to offer her prayer beads. She asked the priest if he would please add them to the belt. It caught him by surprise, and so momentarily he just stood there before putting out his hand. She set this possession in his palm. He gripped it and he kissed the woman and another woman walked forward with a cameo, and so it was that another moved from the shadows of a tent and in no time there were women all around the priest for him to take something of the life that offered it.
Hain saw the priest was being overwhelmed, and he went to
the sack that hung from Malek’s saddle and retrieved the stolen chalice. He hurried over and the priest saw what the guide was carrying and he thanked him and he poured a handful of peoples’ lives into that cup then he walked the camp with the vessel ever filling.
Women, in their desperation, began to crowd the guide and John Lourdes, who were following behind Malek. They began handing over to these strangers something of themselves.
They spoke to John Lourdes. What they said he did not understand, but this event was beyond the boundary of words. He took off his hat and leaned from the saddle holding it out. It began to fill . . . A handmade rosary . . . A mass card on a string . . . The portrait of a family in a tiny glass bauble . . .
A woman carried her dying son to John Lourdes. The boy had in his hand something he wanted to pass on, but was too weak. John Lourdes leaned out further from the saddle and put out his hand by the boy’s. The hand opened and from it fell a tiny crucifix of carved wood, with one cross beam that was in part broken off.
It rested there in his palm. This cross so like one John Lourdes had worn with its own partly broken beam. He looked into a stare at the edge of the abyss resting upon a mother’s breast. Here was a boy John Lourdes had never seen before and never would again. A boy who he could not share a word with, in a death camp, in the desert, somewhere within the Ottoman Empire, who on that day, in that place, had handed John Lourdes back what felt like a part of his own life. A life that had, in part, been lost to him.
John Lourdes closed his fist, and he held that fist to his heart so the boy could see, and the boy’s eyes moved ever so slightly as John Lourdes placed the cross in his hat.
t w e n t y - f i v e
HE PRIEST DID not speak, he did not eat. He sat alone in the sand before the Caspian Sea. Beside him on a blanket were those keepsakes that had been passed over to him at the tent camp. In his hands was a scarred bandoleer. John Lourdes and the guide watched as he emptied the bullet rings and then, one by one, he strung and tied then hung each momento from the leather loops. When done he slipped this creation over his head and then slung an arm through the opening so it draped across his chest. He stood and removed his slippers letting the white sand lap around his bare feet.