As the Poppies Bloomed

by Maral Boyadjian

Nurses in white were everywhere, American and trained Armenians both. Bottles of something were being distributed to the babies. Apart from all the rest was a woman with two smaller figures lying at her side. Their faces and necks were entirely concealed and bandaged. Raffi could not tell if they were girls or boys because their bodies as well were covered with sheets. Their mother, presumably, lay with her eyes wide open. He started, thinking her dead. He almost rushed toward her, but just then, she blinked once.

  He felt a hand on his arm and turned, agitated, to see Noushig. She pulled him away.

  “They are her sons. Twins. The Turks tied them to a tree and sliced their faces with razors. Then…” she stopped.

  His eyes told her to continue.

  “Then, they pulled the skin away with pliers. They were so intent on what they were doing they did not see the village women come at them. The children were carried here just two days ago.”

  Raffi followed her out of the ward. He asked himself again and again the same question. Was this what an Englishman did when ridding himself of a people and taking their land? Was this how an American fought? A Chinaman? Did they not fight like men, with guns or hand to hand with daggers? Or did they dehumanize their victims like the Turk? Did they kill the men simply to rape and torture their families like the Turk? Did the Turk really fight to rid himself of the Christians, or just to get the spoils?

  Noushig had led them to a supply room. There, she lifted a basket filled with garments. She would take them with her to be mended.

  Her hair seemed lighter in color than he remembered. Perhaps it was the light from these enormous windows. It hung in one single braid down her back and her head was uncovered. Her dress was also of the Western style. It was of a thickly woven material, high-collared and long-sleeved, and showed her curves quite plainly.

  She seemed very familiar and at ease here within the rooms of the hospital.

  “Do you work here at the American compound?” he asked.

  “I did before. They raised me. I am an orphan. Now they need my help with the sewing as well, so I spend my time in both places.”

  Raffi asked her to wait while he retrieved his weapons. She watched him walk toward the orderly who had stowed them, his stride slow, still taking in the unfamiliar surroundings as he went.

  He slipped everything into place and reached for her basket. As they walked out of the hospital and away from the compound, she asked him, “So, you did not come here looking for me?”

  Gunfire sounded from a distance and the metals of his gun and sword clinked as he moved.

  “Well, yes,” he answered honestly, “it seems I need more socks.”

  He watched her fleeting indignation and her preparation to defend her handiwork and then seeing the smile on his face, she laughed outright at him again. His heart hurt at the sound of it.

  “You make this trip back and forth every day?” Raffi asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Is it necessary?”

  “It is my job,” she stated, surprised. “And I sleep here.”

  “You are careful.” His voice was urgent.

  Noushig stopped.

  “I know what can happen, Raffi.” She motioned back toward the hospital. “I know because I see it every day. I lived it once before.” She slipped her hand into her pocket and pulled out a small dagger. It was smaller than any he had ever seen. “It belonged to my mother.” It did not offer her protection as much as comfort, they both knew.

  He had walked Noushig back to the American compound that night as well. The tune of “Our Fatherland” was being played by the boys in the Armenian school band and the music drifted to them through the streets. He asked why she was not married, being in her eighteenth year.

  “Who would want a penniless orphan, Raffi?”

  He had stared incredulously.

  “Is that truly why?”

  She shrugged and nodded.

  He had wanted to hug her to him and ask her to marry him, this minute, but reality was everywhere. It was in the thickening layer of gunpowder on their skin and in their hair and the unnatural lights in the sky from blazes and guns and a world that was no longer ever silent.

  He lifted and kissed her hand as they parted.

  THE TURKS HAD learned the terrain and their tactics had improved. Cannon fired and rifles shot as they screamed “Holy war!” and plunged forward.

  Dusk finally fell and Raffi remained seated in a trench. He had been tossing brickbats all day. Men filed by and he shook his head at hands outstretched to help. He should join them and find something to eat, but he stayed, instead, and watched the young girls and boys run into the darkness to collect empty shells. They would be refilled again and again.

  He had not seen Noushig for two days. He closed his eyes and imagined them walking side by side, up the twisted lane to his father’s home.

  THE SUN BEAT down on Raffi’s dark head and it seemed as if that day darkness would never come. He heard the pounding of boots and mechanically moved aside for a labor battalion to rebuild the rampart he stood behind.

  He leaned against a pile of brickbats and watched them as they worked. A defender offered him a sloppily rolled cigarette.

  “Did you hear?” the man drew on his cigarette deeply. “The German and American missions were fired upon.”

  Raffi’s hands froze. She would have no reason to be there now, would she? he wondered frantically. Fruitlessly he looked in the direction of the missions. The entire sky was filled with smoke.

  He closed his eyes and prayed.

  The day finally merged into night and the men crawled into a sheltered corner to rest. Raffi had been unable to gather any more information about the condition of the American mission. He drifted into an uneasy sleep.

  “Take your positions! Take your positions!” Raffi jolted awake at the sound of his commander’s bellowing voice. He and the defenders raced ahead.

  Two hundred mounted Turkish soldiers followed by a number of Kurds on foot were attempting a mass attack.

  Raffi fired and refired his pistol. He nodded as he was given his allotment of grenades and turned back to fire again. Darkness fell and the Turkish shelling still continued.

  The first wave of the attack failed, but the second brought the attackers not twenty feet away from their line of defense.

  NOUSHIG WATCHED THE door to the sewing hall. She looked over her shoulder in the streets. He had not come for days. She searched the Armenian surgery. He was not there.

  The Turks were preventing thousands of Armenians from entering Van. They were allowed to starve a bit more each day before they were finally ushered toward the Garden City. They dotted and then filled the inner streets and orchards like walking skeletons. The strategy was that this would once and for all deplete the food supply in Van.

  Raffi’s right arm had been grazed deeply by a bullet. The bleeding had not affected his shooting, but he was nevertheless finally sent to have it checked for infection. Raffi looked at his area commander and did what he had never done before. He asked for a few hours’ leave. Alarmed, the commander examined his face.

  “Why? Is there something else you are not telling me?” It was dark and hard to see, but his words were harsh. Their situation was desperate and he could not afford the loss of a trained man.

  “Nothing. It is the truth. I shall return in three hours if you will permit it.”

  “Go! But see that your arm is taken care of.”

  Raffi would have run, but it caused the blood to flow once more, and he was lightheaded. That was more from lack of food than the gash in his arm.

  At the American mission, he again handed his weapons to an orderly, and when his wound was noticed, he was directed to a nurse. She seated him away from their more serious patients and began to examine his arm, assuming that there could be no other reason for his presence. He did not object but turned his head right and left, searching.

  “Did you want something?” the American asked.

  Ra
ffi did not understand her words, but he understood the query in her eyes. Time was running out.

  “Noushig,” he attempted.

  The woman paused. She again took in his smoke-blackened face and hands, at his grizzly face and lastly, his anxious, falling eyes.

  “I shall call her. She is here, I think.” Her palms opened at him and she motioned he should stay where he was.

  His smile was rewarding, indeed, the nurse thought as she walked away.

  A word or two to a passing woman and she came to complete the work the first nurse had started. His wound was cleaned and bound tightly.

  “Wait here. She will come. She is not far.”

  Raffi closed his eyes to the sound of her reassuring voice. The ringing in his ears intensified.

  He liked to think of Noushig here. The foreigners were neutral and they were somewhat protected, were they not? They already held themselves apart, in their confidence, in their tranquility. Or perhaps it was their faith…

  He turned as steps hurried closer.

  “Are you hurt?” Her face was anxious.

  “No. Just… It is nothing. I wanted to see you.”

  A white apron covered her dress. Her hair was hidden under a cap.

  “You need water. You are so pale.” She helped him stand.

  They entered a room. There was a high table for eating on and chairs of wood arranged all around it. A pitcher of water and many cups glistened with cleanliness. As he drank deeply from one, she lifted a napkin and pulled out a boiled egg from beneath it. She peeled it and handed him this precious bit of food. Raffi’s brows lifted in surprise. Her laugh was low and short, but her worried eyes lingered on his and filled with tears at once.

  He had made his decision days ago. “If we live through this, Noushig, we shall be married. I shall take you home, to my family, in Sassoun.”

  She nodded and her tears trailed her cheeks.

  “It is not like Van. It is small. We do not have schools and buildings and, and foreigners…” His voice was apologetic and she did not want that. She did not care about the size of his village and she shook her head to silence him and tell him what she did care about.

  He kissed her and held her to him for long minutes. Eventually they moved apart, streaks and smudges of black and gray on her face and her apron. He tried to clean them and the stains darkened further from his coal-colored fists.

  “Please. Please come back, Raffi,” she pleaded.

  THE TURKS OPENED fire and the American mission’s cemetery was struck as well as the church and the boys’ home.

  Away from the business center of the city, Raffi was positioned inside an old home bombarded by cannons. As the house crumbled, they were all left without cover. It was nothing they had not experienced and they simply continued firing upon the Turks, using the rocks as cover. The Turks advanced alarmingly with their bayonets pointed. The defenders pulled forward to meet them, and some of the peasants threw rocks when there was nothing else.

  Raffi had no grenades left. He would use his pistol and sword. Beside him, breathing heavily, blood in his eyes, a boy of nearly sixteen years clutched a rifle backwards. He would use the butt as his weapon.

  Raffi began to sprint toward a heap of rubble. He could pick off numerous advancers there. The boy he left behind him screamed. Raffi skidded and whirled. A bayonet had pierced the boy’s chest. Raffi shot the Turk who had thrust it and watched him collapse beside the boy.

  He had left his back exposed too long. He swung around again in time to see the rifle pointed in his direction, held by a wild-haired man. Raffi’s arm lifted, light and sure, and fired first. But to his right, Raffi never saw the face of the Turk holding the sword that split his side.

  His death was instantaneous, but his body was not recovered until well after dusk, when his countrymen walked the bloodied fields and collected their dead.

  A barrel-chested well digger bent over Raffi’s body. He recognized the young man at once and groaned out loud at the sight of his body, bloodied and still. Once, he could have lifted a man of Raffi’s size with no effort at all, but he was weakened with hunger and tears and needed help. He carried Raffi’s body off the field, never once suspecting that there was someone beloved to the young man, in Van, who would search for him in vain.

  C H A P T E R 42

  Anno plunged her hands into the already tepid water and scrubbed at the last of Sossè’s garments with not nearly the detail they deserved. No task was performed well anymore. Eyes and ears were to the hills around and the slopes below them. When would their turn come? How would it end?

  She wrung out a tiny dress, a blanket, sleeping clothes, and undergarments and left them twisted and rolled in a dripping pile. She carried the wash water downstairs and emptied it onto the middle of a lone mound of snow that refused to melt, just outside the door. Spidery rivulets of water sketched and ran over newly formed ridges.

  Her wet hands stung with the cold and she pushed the door closed with her hip, having to execute two good thrusts to crush the wind’s obstinacy. Spring had arrived and their protective blankets of snow were gone.

  Sossè squirmed in her cradle, testing throaty sounds and focusing on her own thickly clad legs pointed at the ceiling and swinging before her own eyes.

  Anno’s fingers, bright red and wooden-like from the cold, reached for the silver bracelet she had placed on the edge of the bench. It was a bangle, shaped from one smooth strip of silver, an inch wide at its center, tapering off only slightly in the back where it clasped shut. The jeweler had crafted two openings to slip the hook into, accommodating the size of the wearer’s wrist. Anno used the further opening.

  The bracelet had been a gift from Daron, given to her after Sossè’s birth. Trailing flowers and leaves were engraved over its surface, with twin roses in a circle at its center.

  She removed it from her arm grudgingly and would not wait for her fingers to regain their limberness to refasten it.

  They had been forced to leave their tiny bedroom in late November. The heat of the toneer had not reached them there. They had clung to their haven, to each other, until one moonless night, when icy sheets of air came at them through their window. The coldest part of the night was still hours away and the heated stones warmed only inches of their body for brief minutes. Anno turned to Daron in defeat. They could not face the rest of the night with wool blankets that seemed to have opened holes to receive and absorb all of winter in their fibers.

  Daron had dragged their bedding to the front room and seen rolls of bodies covered to their heads near the fire. Aunt Naomi’s frizzled head had poked out at them in relief. Nightly, she and Nevart had worried at how long they would cling to their privacy and risk illness, with Anno greatly pregnant as well.

  Naomi called out sharply and a generous space near the toneer was created for Anno near Nairi. Daron settled a way off, near Kevork.

  “Daron,” she had told him after Sossè’s birth, “I want only to see spring again so that we may return to our own room. The three of us.”

  “Anno,” he had started slowly, almost reluctantly. “Do not be surprised if you find Kevork and Takoush there in that room instead of us, sometime soon.”

  He had shrugged and left her gaping. She did not know how to react, torn between the joy of her and Takoush living in the same household and the sting of having to surrender her haven to the next newlyweds so soon.

  “Do not worry,” Daron had encouraged her. “There are other rooms.”

  “Yes,” Anno brightened, “and we shall give one of those to Kevork and Takoush, then.” She had decided instantly and Daron laughed at her possessiveness.

  Sossè’s garments were strung across the room and Anno rubbed her hands to warm them. New, hungry cries came from the cradle and Anno’s breasts stung and flowed in response.

  Her nearly flat chest of a year ago had rounded impressively with her pregnancy and remained that way, consistently engorged with milk. Nevart had bitten back boastful word
s many times to neighbors, wanting to let them know that their hars, so diminutive when full-bodied, plump girls were coveted, had not only produced a baby nine months after marriage, but had enough milk for two! But she feared the evil eye, and she had bitten back the words, though it was regretfully hard.

  Talk of Takoush’s marriage had ceased since then. There was only preparation. And a furtive scanning of horizons.

  Sossè’s head was cradled in the crook of Anno’s left arm. Her brows lifted and closed in satisfaction as she drew in long swallows of milk. Anno pushed against her other breast with her arm to try to staunch the even flow. As her milk soaked through her blouse to her sleeve, Naomi brought a cloth folded many times over and wordlessly pushed it inside Anno’s open blouse to prevent the milk from dripping further. Anno smiled her thanks.

  Her daughter’s eyes, darkened to slate now, had opened at the disturbance, but dropped closed again as her belly quickly filled and the possibility of sleep overcame her. Her dark hair, fine and straight at the top of her head, rolled outward in the beginning of a voluminous curl above the tips of her ears. Her eyebrows already were well defined and would be thick and lovely one day.

  One day.

  Mgro had procured three rifles. One was a single-shot Mosin. The other two were refurbished Russian Mausers. One had a bayonet attached. The farm tools were kept close to the door now when not in use. They were never left as far away as the stable. Most of the villagers had no guns at all. Anno was certain her father would have something; Raffi would have ensured that. But what about cartridges?

  Easter had come and been all but ignored. The day after, however, the cemeteries had been full as always. Prayers were made, but it was hard to say whether they were made for the dead or the living.

  Vartan learned that the government had left it to the Kurds’ discretion to attack when they believed the time to be right. He accompanied a handful of other village leaders to meet with Kurdish clans known to be friendly with the Armenians in the past. The Kurds told them they could offer the Christians no help, and they were turned away.