Gardens of Grief

by Boston Teran

  “On the dock you said something to me. I don’t know if it was an Armenian phrase or—”

  “I will look for you on the banks of forever.”

  The night had closed around them, the fires now casting their mark through the shadows. He felt the weight of the physical world upon him. He leaned down and he whispered in her ear. “We are not finished, you and I. Not by circumstance, not by fate.”

  She nodded, but could not speak. He held her face and kissed her.

  “I am leaving now,” he said.

  t w e n t y - s e v e n

  OHN LOURDES LOGGED the outline of a pistol braced up inside the captain’s coat.

  “Citizen of Mexico.”

  “Captain.”

  “Lourdes . . . John Lourdes, yes? John, what would concern you more? A man who allows himself to be so easily discovered by an adversary? Or the adversary playing to that moment?”

  John Lourdes reached into his vest for a cigarette which gave him time to consider the answer, “I’d weigh confidence versus strategy.”

  “How much of one to regard, how much of the other to disregard.”

  John Lourdes offered the captain the pack. He declined. John Lourdes took his time lighting the cigarette. “When we were on the Tigris the pilot did not go back to notify you he’d discovered us. You either found a letter written to the missionary that he left in that room of his . . . or, you still had the compound under surveillance and you had been notified by telegraph that the girl and the dragoman were leaving for Baku. So the pilot was authorized to have at us, because your fallback position was knowing the priest’s destination.”

  “Those would be prudent military determinations.”

  Alev Temple approached the gate where the men stood. She passed between them without a word. She gave John Lourdes the briefest glance, her expression revealing both fear and longing.

  “Miss Temple,” said Rittmeister Franke, addressing her back. “I’m sorry to hear you have been reassigned and will be leaving us for France. But I’m sure you will find ample opportunity there to express your outrage.”

  She passed on through the portal. With the last of her footsteps, Rittmeister Franke turned his comments to the temple.

  “The land of eternal fire,” he said. “I’m told it’s part sham now. That the good monks sold the temple and shrine to the Baku Oil Company. And that they use jets to turn the fire on and off at will.” He paused. “I know a hotel within walking distance that has quite an elegant bar. At least it did the last time I was here. It seems a better place to talk about the priest.”

  John Lourdes and Rittmeister Franke walked the neighborhood streets of Surakhany as if they were well-acquainted gentleman, who quietly wished the other dead.

  “It seems two Turkish officers under my command disappeared. Can you shed any light on that?”

  “Rumor is, their bodies weren’t burned . . . like those trying to escape Van that night.”

  Rather disdainfully, the captain said, “There is much done here I am not in agreement with. But, like you, I am in the service of my government.”

  From the blocks ahead came the marshaled chorus of men’s voices. They were hard and gravellish and they had cadence of a mob. It could have been a song or some kind of slogan repeated over and over. There were no instruments, and to John Lourdes’ ear the voices were pitched with throaty anger and resentment.

  John Lourdes and Rittmeister Franke entered a square and found themselves confronted by a sea of torches on the move. There were hundreds and hundreds of men and they looked to be supporting a river of fire on their upheld arms. Their ranks spilled up onto the sidewalks and the front steps of apartments where they called out and shouted up at the windows with a fierce urgency.

  “Bolsheviks,” said Rittmeister Franke.

  To cross the square they had to press through the crowd, who forced on them leaflets. John Lourdes noted the men looked to be laborers and tradesmen, field workers and shopkeepers. There was an endless array of the poor and beaten down, and there were as many children as old men, and there were many of both. These were not some contingent of radicals. In Mexico they would have been defined as the campesinos—the people.

  When they made it through this flood of bodies John Lourdes’ companion looked back. “The country will fall, just as Mexico fell. You are of Mexican heritage?”

  “My mother was Mexican. My father, American. As a matter of fact he had German blood in him.”

  The lobby was elegant. With Persian rugs and handcarved chairs and wallpaper etched in gold. There was a bar for gentlemen, where the patrons drank quietly in candlelight from fine glasses dried and shined by white linens. There was a Victrola on a table where an attendant played recordings of classical music.

  The two men sat at the teak bar. Rittmeister Franke settled on brandy. John Lourdes ordered vodka from cornel berries.

  “I saw the priest in the prison courtyard,” said Rittmeister Franke. “I understand why men follow him. I would myself. But now . . . it is imperative, he hand himself over.”

  “You have no authority in this country.”

  “The bomb at the Erzurum prison was set off during the midday prayer. It was a moment of vulnerability. And a good tactical move.” He raised his snifter, then said, “That begs to be copied.”

  John Lourdes let the statement pass without comment.

  “I come from a long line of Junkers,” said Rittmeister Franke. “That is what they call aristocratic landowners in eastern Prussia. Even if those landowners are long since impoverished. My family is from the same region as Bismarck. The ‘blood and iron’ period of unification. In our family it was demanded the eldest son join the army. I was not the eldest.”

  John Lourdes tapped his cigarette on the bar to tighten up the tobacco. He lit it. He stared at the dark cabinetry where the liquor was shelved. “I was a railroad detective, and a member of the Bureau of Investigation. Domestic crime, border security. My mother crossed a desert on foot to reach the United States. My father was a criminal and a common assassin.” He then looked at the captain, “But biographies don’t count for much in a bloodletting, do they?”

  Rittmeister Franke studied his opponent openly.

  “He has at best a hundred men . . . possibly two hundred, who will follow him on his nation building journey. He is a cleric, and nothing more. North of here, in the mountains, there are over a thousand men. I brought Kurds from the prisons . . . and Turkish officers from the Special Organization . . . There are men from the Ukraine . . . and there are Tartars from Baku. Seven hundred, at least. These are all peoples who disdain each other. But they have one thing in common, hatred for the Armenian. He is like the Jew in that way. The Armenian-Tartar war was fought in Baku. I was here then in 1906, on a military scouting mission. There are photographs of the dead, of ruined oilfields, mosques burned, churches destroyed. The men in the hills lost fathers in that war, lost brothers, lost sons in that war. They have been sharpening their hearts for a moment like this. They know Russia will fall to the Bolsheviks. And that there will be chaos. It is clear the Armenian wants a homeland. But if one is to be created, the people living there now will not want to live under them. The priest is trying to defy realpolitik. Reports say the Americans wanted him to help support the British in their fight south of Baghdad. That would have been more pragmatic. Citizen of Mexico, understand . . . this region is nothing but hatreds. And those are the only eternal fires.”

  The two men stared at each other through a mirror behind the bar.

  “The munitions you needed didn’t arrive,” said Rittmeister Franke. “Did your superiors tell you they were intercepted? Intelligence suggests your government came to a political rationale not to support Malek in Russia. That the time may come when they need to have good relations with a Bolshevik regime. It’s possible that bringing Malek here was just a military diversion, a front to maintain influence with the Armenian people. Malek may have more value as a mar
tyr.” The captain then turned sympathetic. “I can’t believe you fought as hard as you did to cross Persia while knowing that. Which indicates, your superiors lied to you.”

  John Lourdes said nothing. He understood. The captain’s immediate purpose was to induce doubt—if you want to defeat the man, you must first poison the mind. John Lourdes thought back to a night in Mexico, near the end, when he and his father sat in a hotel bar, not unlike the bar he sat in now, and he told his father, “What is required . . . but to do justice.”

  John Lourdes turned to the captain. There was a quiet fierceness about him. “The priest and I are going to take the fight to you. And hard. And it’s not because of orders . . . or the will of a government.” He paused, then said, “But because women and children were left to suffer and die in a desert. Because horseshoes were hammered into a man’s feet. And because somewhere men sat together and willfully decided to rewrite the Ten Commandments.”

  Rittmeister Frank politely finished his brandy. He stood. He took money from his pocket. “Do you know the Armenikend?”

  “I do not.”

  “It is the Armenian quarter just outside of the Icheri Sheher. There is a bazaar there not unlike the one alongside the prison at Erzurum. If the priest does not give himself over tomorrow morning to me here, midday at the bazaar he will be taught a lesson.”

  For a brief moment he sat again. “You have been excellent at escaping and eluding . . . but eventually that must end.”

  At the ironworks John Lourdes sat with Malek and Mr. Ordina at a table with maps of Baku and the surrounding countryside spread out on the rough hewn planks. Mr. Ordina marked areas in the hills where he felt a large number of Tartars could be encamped.

  More critical, however, was the imminent threat at the Armenikend. Was it fact, or a means to lure Malek there for capture or assassination. The German knew the priest would not give himself over.

  Mr. Ordina made an appeal they approach Russian authorities and have Rittmeister Franke arrested as a spy and saboteur. John Lourdes was against it, as undoubtedly the captain’s replacement was already there on the ground.

  For Malek, the German seemed a smart and determined man and courageous enough to take acute risks. Still, better the devil you know, than the one you don’t. Another fact was becoming evidently clear: a confrontation was not only inevitable, it was imperative.

  When they heard the watchman call out and the gate swing open, they knew it to be the guide returning with what they hoped was good news. He had been in the darkness at the Fire Temple, guarding John Lourdes, and then it had been left to him to follow the German.

  He was exhausted and covered with a strange ashen dirt. He asked for liquor and one of the maps. He said he was lucky to have gotten back alive and he used his lit chibouk as a pointer. The German and two other Europeans had left the hotel and ridden out the peninsula. Their route had taken them past the oilfields and through a black and barren country Hain knew to be the land of the mud volcanoes. That was the cakey textured earth that clung to his flesh and clothes. The last glimpse he had of the three they were following a dry course up into the hills. There, for a brief moment, they flashed across the face of the moon.

  In the halflife of that kerosene lamp, the somber and determined faces of the men around the map, John Lourdes could only hope to himself this was a first step in scaling the mortal disadvantage that confronted them.

  In the outlying districts of Baku, many Armenian homes had been abandoned and left to grim decay. They had moved to a lower section of the Armenikend that was built on marshy and fever-plagued land near Black Town. Armenian shopkeepers and merchants had also shut down their businesses in the Icheri Sheher and moved to the Armenikend, for the hatred and violence the Tartar exacted against them was unrelenting. And the fact the Armenian was more well off only added to their fury. In a country where Armenians served faithfully in the army, they were despised.

  The bazaar was set up on a plaza where half a dozen narrow streets made entry. John Lourdes found a flat rooftop where he and the guide could survey the scene below. Hain was told to watch for the German or those with him the night before. When the guide asked John Lourdes what he thought the German had in mind, was it a trap, John Lourdes did not answer. His was a premonition he did not want to give voice to.

  As noon came upon them, the square was heavily trafficked. People of the quarter pressed past mule-drawn carts and camels strapped down with trade. The sun was cruelly hot upon the roof and no less so on the tents that covered the trading stalls.

  It was the guide who first saw something that aroused his suspicion, “Efendi!” He sat and pointed, “There, by the church. A wagon . . . tarped. One grey horse. The man in the box seat I recognize.”

  Field glasses swept the pavilion and the church. John Lourdes focused in on the wagon. A European sat on the box seat where men and women with trade made their slow way past. John Lourdes could make out a shadow inside the wagon on the tarp hooding. In the bed of that wagon he saw just the tops of wood and scrap piles where the shadow sat huddled over. The European on the box seat looked to his watch then intensely to the square. When he stepped down from the wagon and started away quickly John Lourdes knew his premonition was about to be proved true.

  John Lourdes leapt to his feet, he ordered the guide, “The men in the wagon. They are to be followed to whatever end.”

  He jumped from the roof to the one below and from there to the ground where he stumbled to his knees.

  “Efendi?” the guide yelled from the ledge above.

  “To whatever end,” John Lourdes shouted, before he was gone running towards the square.

  John Lourdes never heard the detonation, nor the wails of those taken apart by chain mail and blades of wood. When he came to, there was the taste of blood and iron in his mouth. He felt for the ground. He had no idea when and how he came to be on his hands and knees. He had all he could do to keep from keeling over. He managed to raise his head and there before him a scene of mass butchery. Men and beast alike, crying out or dead, the bodies smoldering and scattered across the square.

  t w e n t y - e i g h t

  E HAD GOTTEN to his feet, but was uncertain how. The terrible mayhem around him seemed miles away. He pieced together that he had been knocked unconscious by part of a wagon hull that cut a path through the crowd like a plough shovel. Upon returning to the ironworks he was still dazed. The gateman ran to the office to notify Mr. Ordina as foundrymen stared at this slumped and tottering figure riding past in bloodstained clothes.

  John Lourdes was alone in the barracks sitting at the table when Malek entered with Mr. Ordina and the dragoman. The blood told part of the story, John Lourdes’ notebook would tell the rest. He wanted Mr. Ordina to write down what he dictated, and what he dictated was the bombing in the square.

  The dragoman poured John Lourdes a drink, but his hands were too unsteady so it was left to the old one to hold the glass to his lips. He spoke haltingly at first, then an urgency took over until John Lourdes was finally possessed by outrage. When finished dictating he asked the dragoman to ride to the Europa Hotel and see to it those pages were delivered to either Alev Temple or the newspaperman who had come with them to Baku.

  The priest and John Lourdes sat by each other silently until long after the others had gone. At twilight John Lourdes leaned over and fingered the bandoleer the priest wore, until he came to the crucifix with its one broken cross beam.

  “I had one like this,” said John Lourdes, his voice a mere whisper. “My mother gave it to me. My father shot off part of a beam in a moment of contempt. She would say there was only two paths in life a person can take . . . That of the good thief, or that of the bad thief.” His voice fell away. “My father . . .”

  John Lourdes took a long and emptying breath, he stood and undid his shoulder holster. He removed his vest and washed the blood of others from his arms and throat and face. He changed shirts then went and stood in the open
doorway as evening descended. He spoke not another word until the guide returned.

  Hain called out from the saddle, “Efendi . . . was that a bomb I heard while running from the square?”

  “It was. Do you have news? Do you know where they have gone?”

  “I have been close enough to relieve myself on their slippers.”

  Hain leaned out from the saddle. He put a hand on John Lourdes’ shoulder and looked him over. “I worried for you today, efendi.”

  The guide led John Lourdes and the priest out the peninsula and through the land of mud volcanoes.

  At the Yanardagh—Fire Mountain—methane seeped from the earth, and a flame sawed violently out of the hillside a hundred meters high. They passed beneath its fury shadowing the trucks of wagons that scored the gravelly reef of the slopeface. Up along black and serrated ridgetops the guide pointed out campfires strung through a succession of valleys.

  They had found the enemy. They studied the circles of fire and dark clusters of horses picketed along the streams till the coming light rendered it unsafe.

  By dawn they had descended out of the hills and were passing through a landscape where the ground was cracked and dry like the skin of lizard. A slender road made its way through glacial pools of mud and past volcanic pyramids oozing a gruelish liquid that bubbled with toxic gases. The earth in that place bore craterish cysts that stank of methane and naphtha.

  They came to the beginnings of an oil field that ran to the sea on a slender isthmus. The road was deserted and the priest asked them to dismount. They stood together in a Caspian dawn.

  “We have seen,” he said. “And now?”

  The guide asked this of John Lourdes.

  “There’s a thousand men up there. Eight hundred anyway. Wouldn’t you say?”

  “At least eight hundred, efendi.”