As the Poppies Bloomed

by Maral Boyadjian

  Mgro and Daron had placed themselves at the end of the high road past Vartan’s house, before the road rolled to the right and then out of sight. They studied Arsad’s face, trying to anticipate what trouble he might bring.

  Vartan pushed open his front door. His rough hands caressed the planks as if to draw warmth and reassurance from their strength. Was he bringing more grief to his own hearth or just helping to lay an old, broken woman into a peace-filled grave?

  The front room was still warmer than it would have ever been at this time of the year, at this time of day. Only Yeraz and Mariam appeared to have remained. Their bodies were bent as if to shield Anno, whose rasping breaths could be heard from several feet away.

  Vartan stepped aside to hold the door wide open for the Kurds to enter.

  Yeraz stood, but Mariam did not. She inched herself closer to Anno and her eyes were cold as Arsad moved toward Turgay. His sons did the same. They took no notice of their surroundings, but only dropped to the floor at Turgay’s side.

  Arsad lifted the shroud and saw that his mother lay cleaned and groomed. Her skin was ashen. He held the white cloth in a tight fist. He thought, still, she might move and turn her eyes on him once again, pained and pleading. He waited. His sons watched him warily. Finally, Arsad took his mother’s hand to his chest. He inhaled deeply and then released air, fraught with regret. He would spend his remaining lifetime trying to extinguish the truth.

  “We shall take her home now.” His voice rattled as he spoke to Vartan.

  “Then I shall arrange a bier, if you will allow it,” Haig offered, his hand already on the door.

  Arsad did not refuse. Haig slipped his large shoulders through the door, allowing only a wisp of a draft to enter.

  Arsad moved around Turgay to peer at Anno. She was awake now and turned glassy eyes to meet him. She had been aware of his presence despite the wall Mariam had tried to erect with the width of her own body. Her lips were parted and she took shallow, painful breaths. Tears slid out of her eyes and down past her uninjured temple.

  “We do not know how long they lay in that icy water,” Vartan said, at his side now.

  Arsad moved closer still to Anno. “It has become our good fortune as well as yours that your home has been blessed with such a brave daughter as she.”

  Vartan did not answer. If that was how he would choose to look upon Anno’s actions, it was acceptable to him. It was what he would have wished for, since it was the truth.

  “Our mother did not die lost and alone in some forgotten corner as we had feared.”

  Anno strained to see Turgay, but the view was blocked by the old woman’s grandsons, still absorbing the reality of their grandmother’s passing. Tears flowed from her eyes freely now.

  “Have you all you need for her care?” Arsad asked.

  “Yes. Everything,” was Mariam’s curt reply. But this was pneumonia and what cure did either of them have?

  Anno wheezed deep into her lungs.

  “Let us pray that is so,” he said only.

  Haig had returned with a bier. The coffin maker, who also crafted small pieces of furniture and fine barrels, had been pulled away from his breakfast, short minutes ago, by Haig himself. Having once retrieved the bier, Haig had carried it, high over his head, back to Vartan’s door.

  Arsad’s sons lifted Turgay easily. As her body rose, her long white hair streamed down, hushing all with a startlingly intimate image of the woman.

  Anno’s coughing deepened. She understood that all her attempts had only amounted to Turgay’s death.

  Mariam, rising only in respect as the dead was removed, swung back to pull Anno to a sitting position as the coughing brought on a panic of suffocation. The sound pierced them all.

  Vartan and Haig left to accompany the bier procession as far as the stream.

  Yeraz sprang forward. She pushed open the front door and the back door leading to the stable, letting a bitterly vigorous wind blow through all the rooms of the house. She hugged her body against the cold and waited. The angel of death must enter and take Turgay’s soul.

  Hours passed into darkness again.

  C H A P T E R 26

  At first, Yeraz had struggled to believe that Anno would suffer a bout of fever and chills only. She was healthy and young. She would toss and complain about her confinement soon. But then the fourth day passed and the fifth dawned. Her lungs were infected.

  Old Mariam’s heavy sigh filled the room. Yeraz knew she was watching them.

  She and Vartan had pulled Anno to a sitting position, but her arms fell rag-like to her sides. Vartan held her up effortlessly, cradling her back against his chest. Her head hung forward as she coughed. Yeraz knelt close to her side, a bowl held to her chin, until finally, Anno filled it with a blood-tinged mucus. Vartan then slowly lowered her back onto her pile of pillows.

  Mariam turned back to the fire to continue her stirring. For days now it seemed Mariam had never stopped her stirring.

  A rope had been pulled from one short end of the room to the other and Anno’s bedclothes hung on them, along with thin undergarments. Yeraz scrubbed and rinsed them each day and wrung them almost ruthlessly, as if she would squeeze the infection away.

  The toneer’s flame was never allowed to weaken and candles eerily lit each corner of the room.

  Yeraz turned to one window and her eyes met blackness, staid and lingering.

  Outside, the frosty air swirled over the village roofs and floated its way down the twisted lane to the last still and darkened house.

  Inside it, Daron lay on his back with his arms over his head staring at the lead-colored ceiling. His thoughts were with Anno, always. He had seen her that day. He was admitted each day for one brief visit. He did not kneel or touch her. Her chest and shoulders ached and a small fold had formed between her eyes. Her lips were a bright, parched red and her face and neck glistened with a blend of oils and perspiration. A deep-colored tea was about to be forced between her lips as he watched. She had been lifted off her pillow and her eyes opened. She saw him and an abyssal series of coughs began that produced blood and left her nearly unconscious again, with pain and, he feared, surrender.

  It was a week since the night Vartan had pounded on their door searching for Anno, and still Daron and his family did not know what had taken place before she went missing.

  Daron felt his chest sinking into itself a bit more each day at the unalterable helpless state that was his and Anno’s life.

  C H A P T E R 27

  Vartan was not accustomed to the sensation of guilt that was now with him always. Anxiety, trepidation, and often fear, yes, but not guilt. It sat between his ribs and bore deepest when he tried to rest. It had been with him twelve days now, because that was the very damned day when mention of Mgro and his boy had invaded his home. It was true, he argued with himself, that Mgro’s boy found Anno and carried her home to them. But she would not have been out that accursed night anyway, if it had not been for their attempts at familiarity and union between their two families.

  Vartan was not able to distance himself from Anno. This was unlike him and unlike their customs: The fathers commanded, directed. They steered the children this way and that with a look, an arched eyebrow, a nod, never a caress and rarely a conversation. But, now, he found himself to be Anno’s nurse. He knew Yeraz and Mariam were watching him. He knew, also, that if either one could muster the strength, the heart, the moment of privacy, they would implore him. “Why? Why not that family for our Anno? What do you know of them that could be worse than this?”

  Anno hardly opened her eyes now. It was enough that she kept breathing, kept swallowing the liquids that would soothe her chest and fever. It was two days now and she had gotten no worse and no better.

  C H A P T E R 28

  Uncle Hagop blinked painfully into the bright winter sky. Maratuk’s snowcapped ridges rose and fell vividly against a background of bouncing clouds. With the added reflection of a newly fallen layer of snow, his ey
es watered as they struggled to adjust after the murky shades of the room within.

  He had pulled his mattress to the front room. Here was infinitely better for all, he declared. Lying at the opposite end of the room from Anno, he found himself closest to the chimney fire and could be the first to make the women know when they had let Anno’s teas and broth boil too long. He was needed here. Anyone could see that.

  He was heedful, too, to no longer crack open the door when observing Mt. Maratuk. The draft was not good for Anno. He now stepped fully over the threshold and stood shivering outside a firmly closed door.

  It was a singularly clear morning. It baffled him. Were they to be subjected to a dry winter, with water shortages to add to all their problems? There would be more opinions about this later in the morning, with the men who gathered in the church square. He would use this very subject to ward off their questions about Anno and Turgay. He hmmphed in disgust at the needling he had received these past days. No different than a lot of old women was what they were.

  Yeraz stood near a rough wooden plank that served as a shelf for their cups and plates, not far from the chimney fire. Anno seemed to be sleeping, her rasping breath a bit slower and deeper than when she was awake. She and Mariam were alone in the room for the moment. The empty cup Yeraz held slipped from her hand and fell to the floor. Mariam looked up from her place on a stool near the toneer. Both their gazes fixed on the cup and neither moved.

  Head hung, Yeraz spoke. “God has favored us, Sister Mariam.”

  Mariam, unsure as to her meaning, did not answer.

  Yeraz’s body swayed forward and her arms leaned against the shelf for support, upsetting more cups.

  “Until now, he has favored us. We have not had to mourn the passing of a child.”

  Now Mariam understood. The child mortality on their secluded mountain was high. And massacres targeted the young no less mercilessly than the able-bodied men.

  Mariam, herself, had never seen a doctor. She had heard of them and their skills but had never benefited from one. She had her grasses and her herbs and her experience and left the rest to God, because it was what there was.

  “Nothing has changed, my sweet. Anno is neither a child nor an old woman. You will not lose her. She has the strength to overcome this.”

  “I feel she does not care to.” Yeraz’s voice was muffled, partly because she faced the wall and partly because she had begun to weep.

  Mariam did not answer this last, because she also saw an absence of spirit in Anno. Certainly she pulled away from the pain, but she seemed to treat it as a sensation only, not as something trying to take her life. It did not seem to matter whether she filled her lungs with air or not; whether she was lifted to dispel the mucus that would choke her or not.

  “When are we to discover what all this is about, then?”

  Mariam twisted her weary bulk at the hips to look back at Uncle Hagop, standing once again inside the room. He was making his own best effort to not bellow his question, but have it received instead.

  Yeraz, once certain he had not woken Anno, turned to face him. His bushy eyebrows had fused again and his mouth opened and closed as if to speak, a further sign of his agitation.

  Mariam watched his large knuckled hands hanging at his sides. His fingertips were stained a deep reddish brown from whichever latest task he had put himself to.

  “And your words are spoken correctly, my brother,” Mariam answered as if speaking to his hands. Then she tipped her head backwards to address him fully. “My brother, today we must understand what this objection of Vartan’s is. Why he continues to watch Anno suffer, watch us all suffer, and think he has good reason.”

  Yeraz’s eyes filled again. “There is nothing left of her but bones now.”

  Uncle Hagop began to upset things in corners as he searched before locating his cane camouflaged against the spoke of the spinning wheel. He did not require it for balance, but rather for effect.

  “Then this morning none of us shall attend church. It will be good to not stand next to that foul-smelling wool dyer! Not today!”

  “And let someone summon Haig.” Mariam rose and spoke lowly to Uncle Hagop. The old man disappeared into the maze of rooms, slapping his cane as he went. Both women dropped their weighted heads onto their hands.

  Vartan did not regularly attend church. He made an early appearance in the church square to meet the people and be made aware of disputes among them. That morning, however, Haig drew him back home. He found himself sitting cross-legged on a thinning, uncomfortable cushion facing Mariam and Yeraz, with Haig at his side.

  Vrej was told to assume Anno’s care for now, but his ears strained to catch each word spoken. His father’s head was bent as he fingered his wooden tobacco box with his initials carved on the lid. He ran his thumb over its curves.

  “We are listening, Vartan.”

  He raised his eyes to meet Yeraz’s and saw again Mariam’s perpetual frown in his direction. Then he nodded, accepting that it was time to reveal what he knew. “I shall speak, then, if this is what you ask. If you insist on knowing what it is, why it is that I cannot give my daughter to that family.”

  He reflected for a moment before beginning. “It was two years ago.” A quick glance at Haig, who tipped his head sideways, made him start again. “More. It was three years ago, to be sure, we noticed Mgro was making frequent trips to Van. Three seasons of the year we would hear of him either leaving or just returning.”

  “He went to see his wife’s people?” Yeraz offered.

  Vartan looked at her as if she had not even spoken and continued. “He would, of course, be gone for good lengths of time. It is days of walking just getting back and forth.”

  Vrej listened openly from across the room where Anno lay sleeping.

  “We noticed his brother, father, never spoke of his whereabouts, never wanted to answer the simplest question, and were never too willing to even mention his name.”

  Yeraz wrung her hands and Mariam’s chin lifted higher in defense, against what, she did not know.

  “He did not bring much back with him to trade or sell. We waited for him to produce seeds, saplings, grain, jewelry, cakes of detergent from Lake Van at least. Nothing. There was nothing to explain these long, frequent trips away from his land and his family.” Vartan shrugged. “It did not take long for our lads to notice either.” He referred to the freedom fighters, always wary of informants. “They told me they would trail him. It was simple, really. He had no idea he was being trailed. From the moment he started down our mountain until he reached Van, he was watched.” Vartan shook his head in disgust.

  “Then?” Mariam insisted.

  “Well, he did not go to his wife’s village. He did not even pass through it. He went elsewhere. To Sufla. He stayed in a han. He visited the bazaars infrequently. He appeared to have no friends to see. He did almost no trading. He did only one thing. Regularly. He visited a woman.”

  Yeraz’s eyebrows arched and Mariam’s hands finally stilled. In his corner, Vrej moved not a muscle.

  “This woman made her living, for herself and for her mother, as a seamstress.”

  Since Van’s textiles were famous and the villages were full of tailors and of course seamstresses, the women still did not understand.

  “In that house, there was no husband, no father, no brother, no uncle.” Vartan counted off his fingers, pushing down on each to its limit. He paused no more, eager to be done with the telling. “The man trekked that entire distance, month after month, for her only.” He threw up his hands. “He was trailed back here, again, almost to his doorstep, when our lads stopped him. They say he told them, outright, he was in love with the woman. He was a man, and should he feel it made sense, one day, he would marry her and bring her to his hearth.

  “They told him that he was a fool. Any woman alone, with no male relative of any kind, who does not bear children, who lives with an older woman she calls her mother, does certainly not sit at home with her nee
dle and thread waiting for only him to appear. You go back and forth all you care to, until your legs buckle, if you like, they told him, but our advice to you is to think again about bringing her home to sleep next to your mother.

  “He, of course, found his way home and then back to her again, more times than I know of.” Vartan stopped.

  When, at some time, he probably returned with the eggplant seeds, Yeraz thought to herself dully, unable to speak a word.

  “This woman,” Mariam tapped her knee sharply, “what is she?”

  “Assyrian and Armenian both, she claimed,” Vartan answered.

  “And for the next customer she would be a Turk or a Jew or a Greek, as would be preferred,” Haig added.

  They sat in silence for some time now. Yeraz rose only once as Anno stirred, to help Vrej spoon clear water into her mouth. She rubbed some oil on her lips and smoothed the hair from her temples. Her lids had not fully lifted for days now and they concealed eyes as opaque as glass. Yeraz returned to Mariam’s side.

  “So the man is a fool. Or let us say, he did a foolish thing.” Mariam attempted to speak lightly but was cut short.

  “There is more,” Vartan said. “This woman’s neighbors wanted her away from there and from their sight. The Turks, the Armenians, the Assyrians, I am not sure which. So one afternoon, Mgro arrived to see that she had been attacked. She did not know by whom. She was in a state where she could hardly speak and hardly move. Mgro wanted to bring her here, to Salor, for her safety.”

  Yeraz’s hand pressed against her mouth. Vrej, always unsure of Anno’s state of wakefulness, was anxious that she not hear what was being said and equally anxious that he should miss none of it. His eyes flew from his sister’s face to his father’s.

  “To his home?” Mariam demanded.