Bone Ash Sky (14 page)

Soon no one ventured out of the house unless there was no other alternative. Although Minas was considered small for his age, Mamma was afraid he would be abducted by the Turks for conscription in road gangs or labour camps, or even worse. School closed and his teacher fled to relatives far away in Dilijan, high up in the wooded mountains of the northern Caucasus. A combined force of Turks and Kurds besieged the centre of town and the Armenian insurgents hidden in basements were defeated in days. One hundred villages around Van were torched, they heard, but Mamma told Minas and Lilit not to worry, they would still be safe. Papa promised by laying his hand on his heart and poking his tongue out as he did when they were small, making them laugh despite themselves. Rings of fire danced above the trees and dyed the night sky red.

The men of Garden City still went to work each morning; they had no choice. The Turks had already conscripted Armenians to fight against the Russians in the Caucasus, against the British in Syria and Palestine. Minas had stood with Papa and watched them march by the house a year ago on their way to the front, in dun-coloured uniforms, proud rifles over their shoulders. One of the conscripts, a Syrian Arab, looked as young as Minas, though he must have been fourteen at least. He was being used as a
hamal
, a human beast of burden loaded down with supplies. He stumbled a little in his cast-off boots and a Turkish officer pushed him down into the mud with a foot between his shoulder blades. The boy spluttered and choked but the officer held him down until he lay limp and unresisting. Minas wasn't so frightened by the boy's pain as by Papa's reaction; he staggered to the table and placed his head in his hands as if he had already seen too much.

‘If they're doing this to their Muslim brothers, imagine what they'll do to us.'

Minas was glad his father couldn't go to war. The Turks had taken four hundred of Van's men already; now they asked for four thousand. Those who stayed home, like Papa, had a trade to offer. They were not paid in liras anymore, only in bread. Sometimes the flat loaf was slightly warm when Papa brought it home. More often than not it was stale, dry and tasteless. Whatever it was Papa would bring it out from under his jacket, place it on the table like an offering torn from his own body. He broke apart morsels that became ever smaller as the weeks went by, until they were insubstantial, almost transparent. Equal portions for everyone, and one extra ration for Papa, because he had to force his poor body to get up each morning and trudge to work. They ate in silence without chewing, swallowing the wafer pieces whole. Bread had become a symbol, a communion, a commodity more precious than truth.

Soon came a time when Papa did not arrive home with any bread at the end of the day. Before the war he'd been a jeweller, and a successful one at that, designing heavy collars studded with mother-of-pearl, repoussé earrings, wedding bands, showing Minas how to mould and twist white-hot threads of silver and gold. Now he was fortunate to find any work of that kind at all. In his spare time, he made ammunition for the freedom fighters from spent cartridges and shells. More and more he couldn't come home until the next morning, staying late if he was lucky to mend a travelling clock at a Turkish officer's townhouse or tinkering with the mechanism of a lady's watch.

‘Stupid Mussulmen,' Mamma scoffed. ‘They do everything topsyturvy. Sleep at noon and work at midnight.'

Minas gasped as though his mother had uttered a blasphemy.

‘Keep quiet! Who knows if they're listening?'

He knew from his studies that Muslims considered noon, not midnight, to be the most evil hour of the day, the time when the devil on his flaming horse could gallop away with the whole world on its back. At noon, he was foiled each time by the call of the muezzin, proclaiming Allah is great and banishing the devil with fear of God's name. He had studied Islam at school; he knew the names of the holy caliphs better than those of his Orthodox saints. He knew the histories of the Prophet's battles, knew of his flight to Medina. Mamma told him the story of the Christian Virgin on her journey from Egypt, burdened with a sacred pregnancy and her fluttering human fear. Something in him wanted to draw parallels, excited by common threads and like mistakes.

Now he stopped studying at night, as there were no candles or kerosene for the lamp. Mamma had used all the olive oil in her cooking long ago. The only light came from the fire, burnt down to staring red embers in the
tonir
. On the rare times it flamed up into brightness, for an instant he could make out the carvings on their ceiling cornices: picture histories of hermits and stocky angels, Byzantine dragons with tight mouths and curled tails. He was no longer afraid of them, as he'd been when he was a little boy; there were other, darker pictures to be afraid of now. He put aside his schoolbooks, running his finger down the length of each spine as he arranged them one by one on the windowsill.

Four Turkish regiments advanced on Van with artillery when the Armenians refused to deliver more men for their labour battalions. By now, even Lilit believed that conscription was another word for murder. Van was transformed into a garrison town, with soldiers throwing people out of their houses and moving in. The irregulars were the most feared; soldiers of fortune who claimed no responsibility to government or country, able to commit any atrocity without reprisal. Bombs fell on orphanages and churches. Even Minas's Protestant missionary school, its American and Red Cross flags a half-hearted bid for protection, burnt to the ground. Refugees from outlying villages came swarming into Aykesdan, bringing epidemic diseases with them. They babbled in dialect, eager to speak their pain –
only three out of three hundred villagers
of Rashva have escaped; all but one of the monks on the fabled island have
perished
– but the Van women, Mamma and Lilit too, soothed them with childish songs and dressed their wounds, silencing such words with tea and clucking sounds, unable to hear what lay in store for themselves.

Minas knew there was no point in learning history any longer from his schoolbooks. Now he dug trenches with the other boys around Aykesdan, watched the fighters use mud walls and orchard terraces as fortified outposts. They only had enough provisions, ammunition and weaponry to last until the Russians came to liberate them. The northern advance was their only hope. Minas walked about mouthing it, Mamma murmured it as she wept, Lilit sang it with hope settling like a sawtoothed stone in her chest. They had to hold Van against the Turks until then. Papa was withdrawn, merely stumbling home at dusk or dawn to sit at the window and make ammunition from the scrap tin Minas gathered.

There were hardly any young men left after the last conscriptions and defeats. Or any weapons either. All they had were hunting guns, antiquated matchlock rifles and Mausers unearthed from cellars, rusty from misuse. Minas sensed the trap closing in. The god of oracles and dreams had brushed Minas with folded wings, Mamma used to say. Even at birth, this scribe and recording angel had whispered close in his ear. The one whose role among many was to register when someone was going to die.

Soon there were no more grains to glean from cropped fields and barn floors. Planting had been stopped, with such terror stalking the land. Now what little threshing to do was over, and the workers had gone home after their Turkish overlords had taken everything, even rusting tools. ‘Could be used as weapons,' they muttered to the Kurds, encouraging them to see Armenians as a cow to milk, nothing more.

Minas saw fresh new posters pasted on walls and fences. Words daubed in haste and a drawing of a fat cow with an Armenian face. ‘Turkey for the Turks.' The artist had made sure to make the nose large and crooked, the expression of lips and eyes furtive. Minas tore down the first poster he saw, weeks ago now, as red paint ran to the ground in puddles. There were flyers on every Turk's doorstep: ‘The Armenians are enemies of our religion, our history, our honour. You must buy nothing from an Armenian or from anyone who looks Armenian.' He ripped up every one he saw. When he told his father what he had done he'd been scolded. ‘Leave your energy for important things,' Papa said. Minas went to bed that night seething. Even his own father was weak.

Now there were no more cows in Van, or sheep or goats for that matter. They had gone to find the mules and horses that vanished months ago. The only animals flourishing now among the filth of abandoned homes and bivouacking soldiers were cats, beloved pets turned strays, Van breeds with eyes of startling colours and no fear of water. Rumour was that people were catching them like fish as they swam in the lake, roasting them with salt and grass. Minas had visions of skinned carcasses, thin as rats without their fur. Rumour also had the new governor of Van, Djevet Bey, throwing his victims into burlap sacks with the starving animals, until they were bitten and clawed to death. Mamma refused to believe it, telling Minas and Lilit it was impossible for someone to be so evil – even a Turk.

Yet Minas knew it was the truth. ‘The Armenians must be exterminated,' Djevet Bey had said in a recent proclamation. ‘If any Muslim protects a Christian, first, his house shall be burnt, then the Christian killed before his eyes, then his family and himself.' He had visions of being lacerated, a skinned carcass himself, screams muffled by folds of fabric. His pet lamb was now skin and bone as well; Papa glanced at it more than once with a knowing look in his eyes but Minas threw himself onto the animal, pleading with Papa not to kill it. The lamb bleated, as if aware of the daily danger of being alive. Minas knew it was only a matter of days before he too would welcome the meat.

Lilit stopped baking at home other than on the rare times she was traded dried corn by Kurdish nomads trawling through town knocking on doors, willing to barter. Women with grinning faces and stumps of teeth; Minas couldn't help but discern a sneering complicity in their false smiles.
See what you Armenians have been reduced to.
A handful of husks in exchange for a piece of Lilit's dowry. Stiff linen meant for bridal sheets and pillowcases, embroidered squares of peach-coloured silk. A hank of wool she'd been planning to make into a vest for her shadowy, future husband. Yervan? No weddings now. Wiser to trade cloth for at least one night with a full belly. Bread was better than dreams.

She would grind corn into coarse meal then stir the mess into something like porridge, firing the solidified slab and putting it back on the
tonir
to be baked again. Now it was so hard Minas could throw it on the wall without it breaking apart. His gums cracked and bled from the repeated effort of chewing. His tongue grew great white blisters from the lack of fresh food, and Mamma was never home to comfort him. Nor was Lilit any longer, grown bold and reckless. ‘If we're going to die anyway,' she told him, ‘then what's the point?' She spent the daylight hours huddled in haystacks with her boyfriend, meticulous in making sure she was home before Mamma, face passive and bemused, hands busy working with nothing.

Mamma came home from the town bakery one evening after standing in a queue all day. She had her wedding earrings to trade. They were delicate – Papa had made them from soft gold and teardrop-shaped turquoise. She thought she would be able to get enough bread for the week at least, but she came home with the square package still wrapped in her apron. Her clothes reeked of sweat and fear and Minas shrank from her when she made to touch him, as if his mere innocence would keep her safe.

‘I couldn't stay a moment longer. People started fighting over the last loaves and I was afraid I'd get hurt.'

‘Where's Papa?' asked Lilit. ‘You said he'd come home with you.'

‘I couldn't find him. I waited. Maybe he has to work all night again for the Turks. I waited some more but the people at the bakery scared me.'

Minas couldn't stop himself.

‘What will we eat tonight, then?'

Mamma furrowed her brow, a family trait.

‘I tell you, I couldn't wait! A Kurdish woman tapped me on the shoulder and said,
The soldiers are selling Armenian orphans to the Turks
as slaves.
She was laughing at us.'

She couldn't disguise the horror in her voice and Minas turned away from his own panic, standing up and banging his hand on the table as he'd seen his father do.

‘I'll go find food. Maybe Papa. Don't wait up for me.'

He walked down the silent cobbled streets of his childhood. Mamma had run out after him into the street, forbidding him to go. He hadn't looked back. Never before had he been out so late at night: he, usually in bed by eight under the yellow spool of the lamp, with a plate of preserved walnuts, with his beloved books.
Another time,
he thought,
another life
.
Another me.
This last realisation made him painfully happy: he walked faster, straightened his shoulders and set his tender jaw.