Months later—or was it only weeks?—when the gendarmes and the mob came to the house, they threw all those books out the window, every single one, and then they took axes to the bookcase. A young man had carried the perfume bottles down the stairs, cradling them against his chest, laughing at the haul and crying out to a friend that all this perfume was going to guarantee them both a little extra company that night.
Hatoun pauses now and sits back on the divan, looking up at one of the jasmine blossoms. She can see the back of her father’s head and the broad gray shoulders of one of his western suits. She can see the collar. The pinstripes. But, try as she might, she can no longer remember his face.
IT RAINED IN the morning and the air remained damp in the afternoon. The clouds never broke. The streets were cold and slippery and dark from the drizzle.
But Armen savors the cool twilight as he emerges from the train at the station in Aleppo with little in his satchel but Elizabeth’s letters and his service revolver. He glances at the cluster of Turkish soldiers standing and smoking beside their rifles and packs, but they have no interest in one more Bedouin in a white cotton tob and striped sleeveless coat. His headdress is held in place with a band made of camel wool and tin wire. In places like Van and Harput, winter is coming. There may even have been snow there by now. But here? Chillier than Egypt, but a far cry from northeastern Turkey. A far cry from, he presumes, Boston.
His first thought is how little the train station has changed since he left in the summer. Yet why would it? In the long months he has been away, certainly he has been transformed. But Aleppo? The people come and go, but—like the massive citadel that looms over everything—the streets and structures themselves succumb only to millennial consumption. They wither, but it takes a long, long time. Someone told him that centuries ago there was a devastating earthquake here. He doesn’t doubt it. Nevertheless, he can barely imagine such a thing.
The fear that Elizabeth has left Syria by now rises once more inside him like a sandstorm. But he tries not to dwell on that possibility. He focuses instead on the hope that after all he has endured and all he has lost, neither God nor fate would deny him Elizabeth. And so he is going straight to the American compound. As the train neared Aleppo, he had considered finding a place to trim his beard and at least wash the worst of his long journey from his skin, but now that he is here, he has no intention of waiting another moment. He is almost mad to see her and hold her and be reassured that she is as changeless as the streets.
SAYIED AKCAM HAS no idea how Ryan Martin got him so much aspirin and so much morphine, but he stares at the bottles as if they were rare but wondrous jungle wildflowers that somehow are thriving here at the edge of the desert.
“It’s not from the Bostonians?” he asks Nevart, who has carried the two boxes to the hospital herself.
“I believe it was bought with money the Bostonians raised,” she tells him, studying the German lettering on the aspirin bottle label and the meticulously drawn ivy that surrounds the largest word like a crown. “But I’m honestly not sure whom Mr. Martin bribed to get it.”
“Thanks be to Allah for bribes,” he says, smiling. “Or—let’s be more accurate—thanks be to Allah for opening someone’s mind and purse to our plight.” Then he stretches his arms and back and rubs at his shoulder. “You know,” he says, “at some point the Americans are going to take sides with the British.”
“What have you heard?” she asks, unsure what has led him suddenly to offer this conjecture.
“Nothing, really. Just what I read in the newspaper. Just what I know of the Americans and British I’ve met. You’ve lived in London, Nevart. You know those people.”
“And you’re worried that Miss Endicott and Mr. Martin and his staff will have to leave Aleppo?”
He slips a key into the lock of a cabinet in the wall and opens the doors. Carefully he places the bottles of morphine on the top shelves. He is not looking at her when he continues. “You will have to live somewhere when that happens—”
“Hatoun is terrified of the orphanage,” she tells him, cutting him off.
“All children are. But some—and this is a mistake—view it as … as bedlam. It’s not.”
“Nevertheless—”
He turns to her and gently raises a finger to shush her. “You and Hatoun will have to live somewhere,” he says, “and I have spoken to my wife. You are both welcome to live with us. Our children are grown.” He pauses, raises his eyebrows mischievously, and flutters his hands as if they are wings. The birds have flown. “I should warn you, our house is modest. It is nothing at all like the palace you are living in now. But we would find room. And you could continue to work here at the hospital.”
She gazes at him, trying to make sense of this kindness. Will there really be a need for her here once the empire has finished off the deportation and slaughter of its Armenians?
As if he can read her mind he tells her, “My worry is that soon enough these beds will be filled with Turkish soldiers and citizens. The British will attack again in Palestine. They will come up through Mesopotamia. The sick and the wounded will have to go somewhere.”
She thinks of Hatoun back at the compound. At least she presumes the scarred and silent child is there. One never knows for sure, even though the girl has curtailed her wandering. Then Nevart sees in her mind her old home in Adana. Her husband’s office down the block. She appreciates immensely this older physician’s generosity, but she feels a pang. She wonders if she will be destined forever to live off the charity and the goodwill of others.
ELIZABETH PASSES A woman she presumes is Armenian near the American compound and nods politely, their eyes meeting briefly before the woman looks away. Then she crosses the street and stands perfectly still, utterly stunned. The man’s headdress falls away and Elizabeth recognizes instantly who it is standing before the hulking double doors and the black wrought iron grating, waiting and watching patiently. There is no doubt, none at all, despite the robe and the beard. There is no doubt, despite the way the dusk and the low clouds have darkened the street. And so she runs to him, uncaring whether such enthusiasm is proper, her fatigue forgotten, and abandons herself into his arms. She wraps herself around his neck and his chest and feels her feet rising off the ground as his arms enfold her, and, before she knows it, she is flying, flying, as he swings her in a circle and small eddies of wind roll over her boots and stockings and up her legs. When he finally places her back on the ground, she presses her fingers against his face. His beard is soft and his cheekbones are stone, and she looks into his eyes, moist and big in a way that she would never have expected. “My God, my God,” she says, “it is you. It really is you.” She does not try to blink back her tears, as he nods ever so slightly and smiles. Then she presses her forehead against his chest and closes her eyes, allowing her body to shudder amid its small tsunami of sobs.
Across the street, that other woman—the Armenian—feels her own legs suddenly turn rubbery, and she collapses back against the wall of the building behind her. She has just come from the German consulate, hoping to find this Ryan Donald Martin here at his own country’s compound. And so she has witnessed this reconciliation, every bit as surprised as the American woman by who has emerged from under the headdress. She feels not even a flicker of desire to reveal herself and confront either the man or the woman. After all, she should be dead. They should all be dead. She should be as cold as her daughter’s bones, or her parents’ or her brother’s or sister’s. She should have perished with everyone else who had been marched out of Harput or Adana or Van—all the Armenian enclaves—the mothers and the grandmothers, the children and the babies.
What had she been thinking to have presumed for even a moment that there was a God in heaven—or that there was a heaven, period? There is only this, and this is only a variation on hunger and heat, exhaustion and pain. They called it the long march and whether it ended in Aleppo or Der-el-Zor, did it matter? No. It all ends here, and here is nothi
ng but sadness and loss.
It starts to drizzle, and the rain mixes with her downcast tears. She takes a breath, fruitlessly hoping to stifle her shaking—it’s as if she is, once again, feverish—and turns away from the lovers, briefly thinking that she needs to be gone before they see her. But then she realizes that she needn’t worry; to them she is invisible. They see only each other, and to them she is already dead. Still, she walks briskly away, her pace accelerating as she distances herself from the compound, and she finds two words taking root in her mind:
Already dead.
At first she walks without direction, unsure where she is going to go. But then the destination comes to her and her pace accelerates as she makes her way through the city’s labyrinthine alleyways. To the crowds she must look a little frantic. No matter. No matter at all. She knows, finally, not simply where it all ends, but how.
WHEN I TOLD MY HUSBAND THAT I PLANNED ON USING THE PRIVATE letters my grandparents had written in 1915 and the stories that Elizabeth Endicott had chronicled in her private diary and for the Friends of Armenia, he sat back in our bed and put his book down on the quilt. He was quiet for a moment and then said in carefully measured tones, because—like me—he is wary of arguing in the bedroom, that he had suspected I would, but he wondered if doing so would be a violation. The fact that Armen and Elizabeth had shared so very little of their nightmare with their children and grandchildren was a clear indication in his opinion that they wanted their history kept private. They had lived alone with their losses and taken to their graves the worst of the tragedies that had marked their lives. Not even Armen knew everything. My husband said he believed that whatever Elizabeth had written for the Friends of Armenia was fair game; everything else should remain privileged. After all, he added, neither Armen nor Elizabeth was in any position to stop me.
I reminded him that Elizabeth hadn’t destroyed the letters or her diary entries, either, and obviously she could have. Instead she gave them to the museum. I suggested it was possible that she hoped on some level that someday someone would share the story—reveal what really had happened.
He conceded this was at least possible. “But think of what a wreck you were when you came back from Boston,” he said. “Do you really want to relive that unhappiness?”
But, of course, I already was reliving it. I suggested that chronicling my grandparents’ story might in fact be cathartic.
My sense is that museum curator and historian Peter Vartanian agreed with my husband to a certain point. Later, when Peter and I were having a cup of coffee together in Watertown after he had read a first draft of this manuscript, he smiled and observed, “If there is a heaven and you meet your grandparents there, it will be a highly charged meeting.” But he understood why I was doing it. And I will always be confident that there is a part of him that is pleased I have commandeered my grandparents’ ordeal to tell a bigger story: the Slaughter You Know Next to Nothing About.
When I was touring on behalf of the novel that preceded this book, a comic novel about a visit to Disney World gone awry, people would ask me what I was writing, and I would tell them. The saga of a small group of Armenians and Bostonians in 1915 is a far cry from my usual work, which tends to focus on slightly eccentric, contemporary American women. Usually the biggest problems my characters face are barracuda-like real estate agents, inept daycare providers, and—in the predecessor to this book—an overly zealous stage mother. Nevertheless, my sense from appearances I had made prior to the publication of this story was that readers were interested in the Slaughter precisely because it was at once so big and so unknown. How do a million and a half people die with nobody knowing?
I remember one reader asked me why Turkish officials allowed so many Armenians to remain in Aleppo. Eventually, they wouldn’t. On September 16, 1916, Talat Pasha, minister of the interior, issued the following order: “To the Government of Aleppo. It was first communicated to you that the Government, by order of Jemiet, had decided to destroy completely all the Armenians living in Turkey … An end must be put to their existence, however criminal the measures taken may be, and no regard must be paid to either age or sex nor to conscious scruples.”
Other readers would ask me if I was going to Armenia to research this story. I did. But, arguably, the worst of the story did not occur there. It happened in the desert. In Aleppo and Der-el-Zor.
In any case, the short answer to that first question—How do a million and a half people die with nobody knowing?—is really very simple. You kill them in the middle of nowhere.
IN THE MORNING Elizabeth stands in the doorway to Armen’s bedroom, a shawl draped over her shoulders, and watches him lying flat on his stomach in bed, one bare leg revealed where he must have kicked off the sheet in the night. A ribbon of sunlight through the slats in the shuttered window lands on his thigh like a paint stripe. Last night she had waited until his breathing was even and she was sure he was asleep to climb from under the comforter and return down the corridor to her own bedroom. She hadn’t thought about where she would sleep when they had retreated to this particular room ten hours ago; she hadn’t thought about that at all. She had been aware only of the feel of his hands on the small of her back and the taste of the anise on his lips from the arak the two of them had drunk with Mr. Martin and David and Nevart to celebrate his return. This time he did not stop her and pull away the way he had that morning on the stairs so long ago. Later, when he was moving inside her on the bed, she had giggled.
He grew perfectly still, resting on his elbows above her, his lips within inches of hers. “This is funny?” he whispered, smiling.
“No, not at all. But Turkish coffee? Arak? A hookah? And now this. I am not sure Boston’s … charms … will ever be sufficient for me again,” she answered, and then she had taken her legs and wrapped them as tightly as she could around his thighs and his rear and pulled him deeper within her. Only much later did she think of the others in the compound—particularly Hatoun—and decide that everyone would be better off if she awoke in her own bedroom. Now Mr. Martin and David are in the wing of the compound with their offices and Nevart and Hatoun have left for the market with the cook.
How funny that he had been so worried about her foot. Only rarely does she even think of the cut and the infection these days. She can barely recall even mentioning it to him in a letter.
Abruptly, as if he can sense he is being watched, he rolls over and opens his eyes. Before he says a word she darts across the room like a puppy and leaps back into the bed beside him.
SISTER IRMINGARD WATCHES the American consul lift the small boy under his shoulders and twirl him around in the air. The child shrieks euphorically and cries out “Again!” when Ryan gently deposits him back on the ground in the midst of the throng of orphans who surrounded the diplomat the moment he walked through the gates.
“I have to see the Sister,” he says, chuckling, and he pats the boy along the top of his back, a gesture that is somewhere between an endearment and a shoo. Then he shields his eyes from the sun with his hand and spots her. He waves when he sees her in a corner of the courtyard, a sentinel, and works his way through the children. One of the boys dives at his feet and hangs on to his leg like a dog. The consul leans over and peels the child’s fingers from his trousers, murmuring, “Now, now, I do need my leg. You seem to have a perfectly good pair of your own.” He bows ever so slightly when he reaches the nun. “Good day, Sister Irmingard,” he begins. “Your charges seem as … as energetic as ever.”
She smiles at him. She is confident that she knows precisely why he is here. He is going to ask her to take that mute little waif off his hands. Hatoun. And, of course, Sister Irmingard knows she will say yes. Because here at the orphanage is the best place for the child. It may not be perfect, but it is far more suitable than living at the American consulate with a horrifically scarred widow and a directionless young woman as surrogate mothers.
“This is the children’s favorite time of the day,” she tells
him. “When they’re tired, they’ll nap. And then they will spend some more time on their studies before dinner.”
There is a shriek behind them when the boys fall upon the very child Ryan had spun in the air, pounding at him with their fists and kicking him with their sandal-clad feet. She is about to go and pull apart the scrum when Sister Geraldine dives in and separates the young brawlers.
“I have a favor to ask,” Ryan says. He pats at the dampness on his forehead with a handkerchief.
She nods, waiting. She knows what a sin pride can be, so she takes a small breath to calm herself as her mind forms the thought, I knew this was coming. But anyone would. Everyone, in fact. It was obvious from the beginning the child would be back.
“I have some pictures in my possession,” Ryan begins. “It’s a long story. But I want to get them out of Aleppo and I thought, well, that a nun might be able to help.”
SAYIED AKCAM KNOWS of the thousands of women who have killed themselves by hurling themselves into the deep waters of the Euphrates—a visiting Swiss physician told him how every day this past summer he had seen half a dozen bodies float past in the river—or by leaping from the cliffs of the rocky mesas in the desert, but he has been spared their corpses. Not today. The woman is still breathing, barely, but he doubts she will survive into the afternoon or open her eyes ever again. A German soldier and a German diplomat carried her here just after dawn. They discovered her at the foot of the eastern walls of the citadel. The diplomat recognized her—despite the fact that one of her cheeks had swollen like a soccer ball and a crust of blood had scabbed from her eye to her jaw—as the Armenian who cleaned the consulate and changed the linens on the beds. After determining that there was absolutely nothing in the world he could do for her, Akcam had her placed in the bed of a girl who had been moved to the orphanage yesterday. The woman must have landed first on her legs, because the bones in her feet and her shins had been reduced to gravel.