Anyush (23 page)

Jahan

Sivas 1916

S
ome eight months after leaving Trebizond Jahan found himself in Sivas, the capital of Sivas Province in East-Central Anatolia. The order to leave Constantinople had come unexpectedly when he was woken at first light one morning and told there was a ship leaving for Terme and that his passage had been booked. After five days at sea, he disembarked at Samsun and began the long mosquito-ridden trek over the mountains to Sivas. The town lay in the broad valley of the Kızılırmak river and was built at the crossroads of the main trading routes to Mesopotamia and Persia. By the summer of 1916 it was overrun with Germans looking to link the town with the advancing Baghdad Railway. Jahan was puzzled to find himself there, when all anyone could talk about was fighting in the Dardanelles. He had received nothing in writing and was given no time to say goodbye to his family or his men. He clung to the thought that he was now, geographically at least, closer to Anyush, even though all his letters had gone unanswered. The mail service was unreliable, but one letter at least would surely have reached her. He wondered if Ahmet had never given her the note and then discounted the possibility. The lieutenant would not disobey him, no matter what he thought of the affair. Something else lay behind her silence. Something less easily explained. Did
she still love him? Did she still think about him as he constantly thought of her? Could she ever be with another man the way she was with him? Jahan didn’t believe it. If he hadn’t heard from her, it was for a good reason, or possibly the worst of reasons. So long as Nazim Ozhan was in the area Anyush would never be safe. In this gloomy frame of mind he arrived in Sivas, and the town only worsened his mood. The people seemed wary, the streets mean and the climate too extreme. Another backwater with none of Trebizond’s charms. One piece of good news was that Lieutenant Kadri and his old company were stationed there. Jahan questioned the lieutenant closely about events in the village since he had left, but the news was grim. More assaults, seizure of property, unexplained arrests. Only Dr Stewart’s employees had been left alone and the hospital seemed busier than ever. Why then did Anyush not write? The captain’s certainties wavered. He began to think she had forgotten him, that she didn’t care what happened to him. He fell into a state of apathy, passing his time playing cards or composing angry letters to Anyush which he never posted. He became unreasonable with the men and demanding of the lieutenant. After two weeks of this, the lieutenant decided the captain needed distraction. A trip away from town and an introduction to a new friend.

Armin Wegner held the rank of second lieutenant in the retinue of Field Marshal von der Goltz who was overseeing the building of the Baghdad Railway. The field marshal was in Sivas to explore the feasibility of a spur-line around the feet of the Taurus Mountains and had brought a number of German engineers with him, along with Wegner as the company photographer. Von der Goltz had come down with malaria and Wegner had taken the opportunity to explore the region, hiring Lieutenant Kadri as his guide.

They were to travel first by boat and then on foot to the Monastery of the Holy Virgin, a deserted ruin on the mountainside outside the town.
The lieutenant and Jahan arrived at the dock in the early morning, stowing their supplies into the bottom of the boat.

‘Where is he?’ Jahan asked irritably. ‘I thought Germans were supposed to be punctual.’

Ahmet pointed to the figure approaching from the direction of the town. He was a full head taller than Jahan, broad across the shoulders and long in the legs. In each hand he carried a wooden box. Wegner was dressed in the German army uniform but wore an Arabic ghutrah and agal on his head. Although his face was half in shadow, Jahan could make out large dark eyes, high cheekbones and a long aristocratic nose. The German didn’t smile when Ahmet introduced them and took Jahan’s hand half-heartedly.

‘Careful with those boxes,’ he said when Jahan stowed them beneath the seat. ‘There’s very valuable equipment in there.’

He checked the boxes again and seated himself next to them. By the time they pushed off, Jahan already disliked him.

The boat moved at a snail’s pace along the Kızılırmak river and in a short time Ahmet was grunting with the effort of rowing in the heat. They had set out while the sun was low, but it was a windless day and already very hot. Sliding past the broad, treeless valley, the slopes of the Kuzey Anadolu Dağlari advanced on them from the hazy distance.

‘There’s nothing to photograph in this place,’ Jahan said. ‘Only miles of the same.’

‘I’m not interested in this,’ Wegner said dismissively.

Jahan fell back to his contemplation of the water. Every now and then he glanced at the lieutenant whose face was red and whose beard glistened with sweat. They would get eaten alive or burned raw, Jahan thought irritably, and all for a disagreeable German. After a time, Ahmet stopped rowing and pulled the oars into the row locks. Balancing them on the gunwales, he let the boat drift with the current while he took off
his tunic and stowed it under the seat.

‘Better,’ he said, opening his collar and rolling up his shirtsleeves. He took the oars again and manoeuvred the boat straight, keeping it parallel with the riverbank.

‘I would keep my skin covered if I were you,’ Wegner said in perfect English. He nodded at the swarm of mosquitoes hovering above the surface of the water.

‘Not a problem for me,’ Ahmet said, pulling more easily on the oars. ‘Mosquitoes like only the infidels.’

The boat made slow progress along the valley, splitting the water like oil. There was no sound, no birdsong leavening the heat, only the splashing of oars and the constant scratching of cicadas. The mountains inched closer, falling from the sky in stark relief. Jahan watched the German who seemed untroubled by the heat or the flies.

‘How did you come to be taking photographs?’ he asked. ‘Are you a photographer by profession?’

Wegner looked at him as though he had forgotten who he was. ‘I’m with the Sanitary Corps. Photography is just an interest.’

‘You’re a doctor?’

‘A nurse.’

The large French woman who ran Dr Stewart’s mission hospital came into Jahan’s mind.

‘Something amuses you?’ Wegner asked.

‘No. Not at all.’

‘I am a
field
nurse,’ Wegner said. ‘My job is to bring in the wounded.’

‘I see.’

‘Do you?’ Wegner looked as if he would say more but turned back to the water and the hills.

‘Move over Ahmet,’ the captain said to the lieutenant.

They changed places and Jahan sat between the oars. It wasn’t as easy
as Ahmet made it look and he kept pulling the boat diagonally across the river.

‘Pull more with your right,
bayim
. And sit straight in the seat.’

Eventually he got the hang of it and the oars rose and fell with an even rhythm, pushing the boat smoothly along the valley. The sun was almost at its highest, and the horizon disappeared behind a shimmering wall of heat. Jahan’s hands were slipping and he found it hard to maintain Ahmet’s pace. Just when he thought he could row no more, the lieutenant told him to bring the boat to the left bank. They pulled up at a jetty that was mostly rotten and choked with river-grass and reeds. Ahmet held the boat steady as Jahan disembarked and Wegner retrieved his boxes.

‘The path to the monastery is behind us,’ he said, heaving the boat onto the riverbank. ‘Up the side of that mountain.’ He pointed to a barely visible track disappearing into the scree at the base of the hill. ‘It’s further than it looks and stony. Watch your footing.’

The Monastery of the Holy Virgin clung to a rocky outcrop close to the top of the mountain and had once been the size of a small village, but what came into view as they climbed was little more than a crumbling ruin. The monastery had almost vanished, reclaimed by the mountain that had given life to it. Stone arches over the windows of the church were still intact as was the main doorway, but some of the walls had collapsed or were starting to buckle. Fine dust whipped into their eyes as they walked around outside, and it was a relief to go into the roofed interior out of the sun and the wind.

It took a moment for their eyes to adjust. Frescoes of the Virgin in faded shades of azure blue and gold covered the surviving wall. Wegner walked slowly around the interior, examining the crumbling colours of brick red and cerulean blue. On one wall, a downcast virgin carried her child and his solemn benediction. On another a crush of halos above a
host of saints was pressed like gold coins into the plaster.

‘There might be enough light.’

Wegner retrieved his equipment from where he had left it inside the door and mounted it on the stand. By the time he had finished, a light mist had snaked around the foothills, the sun had settled in the west and the air on the mountain had grown cold.

Wegner emerged from the church looking pleased. ‘Stand over there,’ he said to the others. ‘I will take a photograph of you before the light disappears.’

Ahmet buttoned his jacket to the collar and set his cap straight on his head. Jahan stood at his shoulder, two Turkish soldiers looking solemnly into the lens.

‘I’ve been sending the plates back to Germany,’ Wegner said, as they made their way down the track. ‘This one I will develop myself. I’ve set up a photographic laboratory in the cellar under my landlady’s kitchen. If it turns out properly you can have the photograph.’

It was the longest speech the German had made since they left Sivas and as they drew near the boat he fell silent again. He loaded his boxes on board and just as they were preparing to push off Jahan spotted something white in the water nearby. He went to have a look.

‘Captain,’ Ahmet called after him, ‘we have to get back before dark.’

The white object Jahan had seen was a body floating face down in the reeds. Taking off his boots, he waded in and turned the corpse over. The blue-white face of a young man looked up at him. A boy with filmy eyes and a deep cut riven from one side of his neck to the other. Grabbing him under his arms, Jahan pulled him onto the bank.

‘I’ve seen that boy in the square,’ Wegner said. ‘Outside Colonel Abdul-Khan’s office.’

‘Armenian,’ Ahmet said. ‘His father used to work in my family’s carpet factory.’

A cold wind blew along the river as the men looked at the body. It frilled the surface of the water, bending the reeds towards the shore.

‘We have to bury him,’ Jahan said. ‘We can’t leave him here.’

‘Not possible,’ the lieutenant insisted, thumping his heel against the hard-baked earth. ‘The ground is like stone.’

‘There must be something on the boat? A shovel or a pick?’

‘We have two oars, captain, nothing more. Throw him back in the water. He’s beyond caring.’

Jahan looked at the body. Only a boy. Maybe a few years younger than himself. He looked up at the path to the monastery, partly hidden by the darkening mountain.

‘Plenty of stones up there.’

Catching the corpse under the arms, he began to pull him backwards along the ground.

‘You’ll never get him up there. Captain, this is madness. We have to get back on the boat.’

Jahan’s feet began to slip on the shingle as he struggled with the corpse, but suddenly the weight lightened. Wegner had taken hold of the boy’s legs, and between them they began to carry the body up the track.

‘Stop!’

The lieutenant put his arm around the boy’s waist and slung him easily over his shoulder. With the others following behind, he carried the boy towards the monastery.

The night markets were closed and the patrons in the coffee houses long gone by the time the three men reached Sivas. Ahmet, Wegner and Jahan moored the boat and took out their belongings. Very little had been said on the homeward journey, but as they disembarked at the dock, the
German held out his hand and gripped Jahan’s.

In the weeks that followed, Jahan came to know Armin Wegner better. It was Ahmet who discovered that the German had been awarded the Iron Cross, but Armin would never talk about his experiences on the battlefield. Instead, he spoke of his poetry and his idea for a novel, and how he hoped to write seriously after the war. Jahan was impressed, and surprised by the German’s sensitivity. The photographs he took were not of Turkish palaces and landscapes, but of orphaned children, and street beggars, and buildings collapsing under the weight of those who lived in them. He sought out the marginalised and the ruined, and saw things Jahan would not ordinarily see. Armin captured pictures that at times made the captain uncomfortable and occasionally ashamed. It was easier to look at Armin’s photographs of the partly built Baghdad Railway, or Field Marshal von der Goltz and Enver Pasha on the steps of the Topkapi Palace, or the formal portrait of Colonel Kamil Abdul-Khan. Shortly after seeing this picture, Jahan was called to a meeting with the man himself.