Anyush

by Martine Madden

  Let me say again that I understand, as does she, that it may not be possible to commence a correspondence with you, but any information you may have regarding the child can safely and discreetly be passed on through me. If it happens that you have had no contact with the Americans, then all I ask is that you write and tell me. For kindness’s sake, I would like Anyush to know the truth. Hope can be a cruel master.

  With every good wish,

  I remain yours sincerely,

  Armin Wegner

  For a long time Jahan sat in the chair beside the bureau. The clock in the hall struck the quarter hour and then the half. After a while, he folded Armin’s letter and put it back in the envelope. Taking the next letter from the bundle, he began to read:

  Dear Jahan,

  Forgive my writing to you again, but I am desperate for news of my daughter and you are the only connection I have with her. Believe me when I say that I have no expectations for myself. I wish only to know if you have had contact with the Stewarts or any information that might lead to my finding Lale. It is not in my nature to beg, but I will gladly do so for even the smallest crumb of news of her. I want only to know that she is safe and well and to hold to the hope that I might one day see her again.

  Respectfully,

  Anyush Charcoudian

  Dear Jahan,

  I was wondering if perhaps your family no longer lived at this address …

  Dear Jahan,

  I am writing to let you know that I am living in Beyrouth …

  Jahan picked up the next envelope. It was older, the writing faded and the corners torn.

  Dear Jahan,

  If you receive this and if it is within your power to do so I urge you to write …

  Dear Jahan,

  It is becoming difficult for me to post letters from the village. It is overrun with gendarmes and soldiers, but there is something I need to tell you which will not keep …

  Dear Jahan,

  I am writing this from our ruined church because it is where I feel closest to you …

  A board creaked and the light in the room dimmed. Jahan looked up to see his mother standing in the doorway.

  ‘You knew,’ he whispered.

  ‘Jahan–’

  ‘You knew all along. I thought it was only Papa who had betrayed me. I would have staked my life on it.’

  He held out the letters clenched in his fist.

  ‘Some of these were written after he died. The last one only two months ago. You kept them from me.’

  His mother sighed and removed her hatpin. Carefully she lifted the hat from her head and placed it on the chest beside the door.

  ‘Yes, Jahan, I did. I hid them along with all the other letters that woman wrote to you.’

  ‘That woman is Lale’s mother.’

  ‘She’s an Armenian! What did you expect me to do? Send Lale back to her? A stranger? This is Lale’s home. Here with us. We’re the only family she has ever known. Would you take her away from it?’

  ‘It wasn’t your decision to make.’

  ‘Whose was it? Yours? I don’t think so! You came back from the war like some impostor wearing my son’s clothes. Have you any idea what we went through? The worry you caused? You weren’t capable of making decisions. You weren’t even capable of looking after yourself. I spent nights pacing the floors waiting for some gendarme to tell me you had thrown yourself under a train or drowned yourself in the Bosphorus. Did you really think I would let you decide my granddaughter’s future?’

  Jahan looked at his mother’s still beautiful face. ‘I thought better of you.’

  She smiled sadly. ‘You’re a dreamer, Jahan. Intelligent like your father but a dreamer. Look around you. Everyone has changed. Everybody who survived the war is altered by it. It is the price we pay.’

  She went and stood at the window looking down onto the street.

  ‘You’ll learn, Jahan, that certain things in life are beyond our control. The war … the death of your father … losing the business. Events greater than personal resolve decide our fate. There is a period of adjustment, and then you carry on as best you can. I was never surprised you fell for an Armenian. It was almost inevitable. No doubt she was young and pretty and you needed a cause to champion, but it’s over now. There are harsh realities facing all of us. Your sisters depend on you, Jahan. They are your responsibility until the day they marry.’

  Turning from the window, Jahan’s mother walked back to the room and picked up the deeds from the floor.

  ‘You have obligations, especially where Lale and Hanife are concerned. What happened with the Armenian is finished. It’s over.’

  She held out the documents and when Jahan didn’t take them she placed them in his hand. Slowly, he got to his feet. ‘This is not over. This is only the beginning.’

  The baths looked more like the foundations of a building site than a swimming pool. Two enormous holes had been carved out of the ground, the sides squared by large blocks of stone. A huge water-wheel and sluice in the middle pumped water from a well. Some of the older boys pivoted the sluice first into the bath where the girls were swimming and then over to the boys who they pushed and jostled to stand under the flow. The younger children splashed around naked while all the others bathed in their underclothes. Anyush stood in the girls’ pool, her skirt tucked in at the waist and her hair bound up in a scarf. It was still warm but not so hot that pale skin would redden and burn. In her arms she carried two-year-old Dikkran, left on the hospital steps when his mother died of puerperal fever. Dipping him in the water, she swung him high in the air as he kicked his thin little legs and laughed with delight. Around her the girls shrieked and the boys shouted.

  ‘Andranik, try not to drown your brother. And leave some water in the well … eh?’

  The early autumn wind blew across the pools, cutting through the heat and whipping around gates and walls. Anyush looked over to the group of children sitting on chairs in the shadow thrown by the main building. These were the TB orphans, the infectious children who were confined to their own wing and couldn’t swim with the others. A lonely group whose number varied from week to week and whose hopes of a cure were slim. When Anyush had first come to work at the orphanage, these were the children she was drawn to, but in recent weeks Matron had forbidden her to have anything to do with them.

  ‘You won’t get into America if you have TB.’

  America. It seemed she was going one way or another.

  A sudden quiet had fallen over the baths. The girls were huddled together in a group and the boys stood silently beside the dripping water-pipe. They were staring over towards the main building at the path leading to the front door. Anyush followed their gaze and saw a stranger approaching, a man whose face was shaded by the sun at his back. Cautiously, he stepped into the sunlight. He was not that tall, wore a light grey summer suit and walked with a pronounced limp. A small girl tugged at Anyush’s skirt, but she didn’t notice.

  The person who walked towards her looked like an older brother or uncle of the man she remembered. He made slow progress, without the aid of a stick but as if every step took an effort. His thick black hair had thinned at the temples, and his skin was the colour of someone who spent too much time indoors. Jahan had aged, the years of the war written on his face.

  ‘Take Dikkran, Houry,’ Anyush said, handing the child in her arms to an older girl. ‘Ask the boys to empty the pools.’

  Tugging her skirt down, she waded over to the edge of the bath where Jahan extended a hand to help her out.

  ‘Can we go somewhere?’

  They walked around towards the back of the hospital, followed by the children’s curious stares. The formal garden of the original convent had fallen into decay but for the newly-dug vegetable patch which led down towards a disused side-gate. They kept to the path, stopping at a garden seat half hidden beside a bolted door.

  ‘You haven’t changed,’ he said, as they sat on either end of it.

  ‘I have
. As have you.’

  ‘Not for the better,’ he smiled. ‘I’m going to be bald like my father. Oh and of course there’s this.’ He pulled up his trousers to reveal a prosthetic leg. The metal was the colour of old soap and gleamed dully in the sunlight.

  ‘From your fall?’

  ‘With a little help from Murzabey.’

  The name hung in the air between them.

  ‘I never knew you were here,’ he said. ‘One of the men from my regiment told me no one survived.’

  ‘Your friend knew. The lieutenant.’

  ‘Ahmet was killed at Gallipoli.’

  The sun slipped behind the buildings and they were thrown into deep shade. The children’s laughter carried to them from the pools and the sound of water splashing from the pipe.

  ‘I suppose I should say I’m sorry,’ Anyush said quietly.

  Jahan looked at her.

  ‘His uncle took me in. I wouldn’t be here without him,’ she added.

  Jahan nodded, leaning his elbows on his knees and staring at the ground between his feet.

  ‘You forgot your shoes,’ he said.

  Anyush glanced at her feet, dirt and leaves clinging to her wet soles. She drew them under the bench as the wind picked up again, whistling through the gate and rattling the rusty iron on its hinges. Anyush shivered.

  ‘Here,’ Jahan said. He took off his jacket and put it around her. For a moment, his hands lingered on her shoulders and her face came very close to his. He began to say something, and then changed his mind.

  ‘You’re out of uniform.’

  ‘Yes. I’ve left the army.’

  ‘What have you been doing?’

  He sat back against the seat, mossy verdigris staining his white shirt green. ‘I’m running my father’s tannery. Badly, but there’s no one else to do it.’

  ‘You’re a businessman, then?’

  ‘Not much of one. Not like my father was.’ He looked at her. ‘What about you? They told me at the camp you work as a nurse.’

  ‘I help with the refugees. And the children here.’

  He looked over at the hospital buildings and the lines of clothes flapping between. The paint had peeled from some of the walls and two of the top-storey windows were broken. Anyush watched him, his profile just as she remembered.

  ‘Why didn’t you answer my letters?’ she asked.

  ‘Believe me, Anyush … I never got them.’

  ‘Then how did you find me?’

  ‘Armin. I wrote to him and he told me you were still in Beyrouth. When I got off the boat I went to the refugee camp and they directed me to the orphanage.’ He smiled at her. ‘It didn’t surprise me to find you by the sea.’

  She thought of Trebizond then, and the blue-green waters of the Black Sea. She thought of the cove, and the two people it had once belonged to.

  ‘Anyush,’ Jahan was saying, ‘I met Matron Norton and I’ve made certain arrangements–’

  ‘I don’t want your money.’

  ‘That’s not what–’

  ‘If you had read my letters you would know that I don’t want anything from you. I’ve got my papers for America and I’m leaving as soon as I get my ticket.’

  ‘If you would just–’

  ‘The only thing I want is to find my daughter, so if you could tell me where the Stewart’s are living–’

  ‘I haven’t heard from the Stewarts, but Anyush please, listen–’

  A shrill cry came from the direction of the pools, followed by hysterical high-pitched screaming.

  ‘Dikkran!’

  Running along the path, Anyush rounded the corner where the children were huddled around the injured child. Behind her, Jahan called her name.

  Dikkran was concussed and bled copiously from the cut on his forehead. Houry tearfully explained that he had wriggled out of her arms and hit his head against the iron sluice. Anyush cradled him on her lap while Dr Altounyan stitched the wound. There would be a small scar, he said, but the boy would heal.

  Some time later, she sat by the child’s bed, waiting for him to fall asleep. She wasn’t thinking of the little boy any more, but of the conversation with Jahan. Dikkran’s eyes closed, and she crept from the room, making her way along the corridor to the main door and the yard outside. The pools were empty when she passed them, and she took the path around the corner to the garden. The seat by the gate was scattered with fallen leaves, and the wind whined through the bars of the gate. Of course Jahan was gone.

  Arshak was waiting for her on the hospital steps. She was to go to the matron’s office, he said. At once. Climbing the stairs, she prepared to face Mrs Norton’s wrath. A child in her care had been injured, and she should have been apprehensive, but as she approached the matron’s office, Anyush realised she felt nothing at all.

  She had imagined this day for so long. Everything she would say. Everything she would hear. All those feelings of hurt and loss she would give voice to, and all the feelings of joy and happiness she would share with him. And how it would be to touch him again. To smell his hair, his skin, his clothes. To feel his hands on her. To remember what it was like to make love. But the man she knew had died in the war and a Turkish businessman had come to take his place. A man who would ease his conscience with money.

  A dog’s loud barking distracted her. The sound was not coming from the yard outside but from somewhere within the hospital itself. She realised that Spot must have managed to get into Matron’s office and was making a lot of noise. Fearful of what she might find, Anyush stopped outside the door. Pushing it slightly open, she saw Matron Norton standing in front of her desk smiling and clapping her hands. Opening it wider, there was Spot performing his trick of standing on his hind legs and begging for food. But he was turned away from Matron, his attention on someone else, someone with a small hand holding out a piece of bread for the delighted dog. Anyush pushed the door open wide as Spot snatched the bread and dropped on all fours to eat it. A small, smiling face turned towards her. A little girl of about five years of age with silky black hair tied up in a bow, skin so pale it was almost white, and laughing brown eyes like her father’s.

  Jahan willed himself to keep moving, to distance himself from his daughter and the woman he still loved. But his body felt uncoordinated, hampered by his leg and the weight of what he was about to do. And he would do this, no matter what the cost. The pain that squeezed his heart and whipped the breath from his lungs was evidence enough of his contrition. A first drop in an ocean of years. He drew in his shoulders and stiffened his spine against the wind blowing up from the sea. Heading towards the harbour and the port, he thought he heard his daughter’s voice calling to him … ‘Papa’ … but he didn’t turn around. Beyrouth was fixed in his mind. The light and cold and desolation of it. The broken hopes and misery of it. And the sea and the waves and the wind whispering of atonement.

  Diary of Dr Charles Stewart

  Springfield

  Illinois

  March 29th, 1922

  I found my old journal in a trunk this morning and spent some time reading over everything I had written. As it was one of those wintry Illinois mornings, a fire was burning in the study and I thought I would throw the journal onto the flames. For whatever reason, I couldn’t burn it. Instead, I find myself writing one last entry, a few words in the hope of ending what should never have been started.

  We are back in Springfield, Hetty’s home town, and I am discovering what it is to work as a city doctor. People have been so kind and welcoming that it’s easy to forget why we left in the first place. My days are fully taken up with the practice now that the Armenian Relief Fund has folded and finally closed its doors. I wrote to Henry to tell him, and he wrote back that it was inevitable after the donations dried up. Still, it rankles with me. How soon we forget. Hetty believes it was only to be expected, that people’s hearts and minds are drawn to other causes, other tragedies, and she’s probably right. In my lifetime, Armenians and their story will be forgotten. On thi
s side of the world, at least, it will only be amongst those of us who lived through that terrible time that anything of it will be remembered. That is the great irony. Those of us who might wish to, can never forget.

  In my own family the legacy of our years in the Empire lives on. Thomas is an angry young man who intends to change the political world, and Robert is studying medicine and hopes to work abroad. The girls may marry or not as the case may be, but Milly, who is quieter and more reflective of late, is studying law. They all miss their sister and talk about her sometimes which I suppose is a good thing. Of course it is.

  Sometimes I try and imagine how life might have turned out if we had never gone to Trebizond, had never left Illinois. I wonder what I really hoped to achieve. As a young man I wanted to show Hetty the world, but a world as I had experienced it. Where right and wrong, good and evil conformed to my understanding of them. It was only after our return to America, when I became ill with a debilitating depression that left me unable to get out of bed or to eat or even to communicate with my children, that Hetty brought the world to me. I never doubted that I loved my wife, but it was during those long weeks and months of my illness that I came to understand the meaning of the words. My lovely wife, who lost her daughter, her innocence and her youth and who never blamed me. Who has forgiven me. I am trying, God knows, to forgive myself. Does she marvel, I wonder, at the arrogance of a man who believed he knew best? A man who thought his influence alone could save Trebizond’s Armenians when, in fact, he could do nothing? Nothing that mattered.