Khalil Agha, the egg-seller, looks at the unchaperoned young girl standing quietly before him, her head bent amid her hands tucked into her carsaf.
How many eggs you need, girly?
Anaguil pulls her left hand from the inside of the floor-length veil and raises four fingers to the egg-seller's eye-level.
Four eggs? You want four eggs, eh?
Khalil Agha stares at Anaguil's bent head and knows that since the war began seven mouths ago even small treasures can bring a profit.
The price is 15 paras per egg. Prices have gone up today; these are difficult times. He smiles broadly, showing a missing incisor and a front tooth edged in black.
Anaguil stares intently at the packed dirt. She shakes her head. Ten paras, I have only 10.
Khalil Agha smacks his lips together, making a sucking sound.
They're not paying you too well, eh?
Anaguil presses the coins she is holding in her right hand into an even tighter fist.
Well, girly, for that I can give you one egg. A bargain for a sweetplum like you.
Anaguil thinks of the word one - one-egg - and she wonders if her thoughts have brought this moment into being; her thinking on one making it the only possible number. She removes her clenched hand from the carsaf and stretches it toward the egg-seller; she opens her right hand, revealing a score of indentations left by the coins. The red crescents are relief for the 10 paras in her palm.
Khalii Agha reaches across the table to take the currency. As he begins to remove the coins from her hand, he runs his fingers down the centre of her palm. He slowly glides his fingers along each of the red moons and when finished, reaches to her wrist and then underneath the carsaf. His hand skims her forearm. Cacudes, Anaguil thinks, as she glares at the white pebbles lying next to her feet. When Khalil Agha squeezes her elbow through the cloth of the dress she wears beneath the veil, she clenches her hand again.
I do have discounts, cutie.
Anaguil shakes her head three times in the negative and notices in that moment how her hands perspire; she smells the bitter residue of the coins in the sweat of her palms.
No? No? Take your egg then, littlewhore, he says, removing the coins from her hand. Even little-whores shouldn't come to the marketplace by themselves.
Anaguil receives the egg he hands her into the linen square she has brought from home. She carefully folds the cloth around the egg and for each fold of fabric she titters one syllable: I-shit-in-your-mouth: cacudes.
The egg-seller's gaze is drawn towards her bitten fingers where only small stubs of fingernail remain. Anaguil turns away from the egg-seller's stall and she feels how the back of her dress now sticks to her skin; her hands tremble as she begins walking. It was worth it, she thinks, it was worth going to the market alone and buying from the son of an ass. The boys are at home safe with Mama, and I have done something I never expected. She disregards the burning feeling in her belly as she begins the walk home. She presses her thighs tightly together and ignores the need to relieve herself.
She passes the idle bootmaker's corner and the rows and rows of shuttered shopfronts as she winds out of the market. On another corner she passes the knifemakers' stalls. Anaguil smells the horns of goal in the high heat of the Turkish knifemakers' shops. The odours drift onto the morning air and into the mouth like bone, as the knifemakers melt and shape the cartilage and mineral life into handles and blades for cutting and slicing and killing. She hears in the distance the high-pitched call of the muezzin for the mid-morning prayer; it is a voice she has heard five times a day since the day of her birth and the sound is familiar, like skin.
Anaguil very deliberately moves her thoughts to her feet again, to each step that she is taking and to each step that she is about to take: one booted foot then another on hard-packed dirt, past discarded apple core, spittle, dog shit; another booted foot, the toe scratched and worn as it veers onto the stone of the main road. She turns left, passing the closed bakery, passing the empty space where further down the road the well lies, and she heads towards home.
An omelette is what Mama needs, she whispers. An omelette with green onions. It will ease her spirits. In the summer we have always eaten them.
The wind has picked up since she left the house one half-hour ago. A tall cypress leans into the invisible force. Tall cypresses remind her of burial grounds, water, the colour of death.
Sargis Becomes a Writer
DRESSED like a woman, can you imagine it? And sitting here in the pitchblack darkness like some mewling schoolgirl. My mother sneaks in dolma and cheese and pieces of fresh fruit and small strips of succulent lamb when she can get it. What I would give for the simple and unfettered pleasure of standing in the garden and tipping my head to the sun and the sky, of talking with the neighbour's beautiful girl Koharig in front of the white lilies, and lazily smoking a cigarette. I would even climb the mulberry tree like I did as a boy; I would shake the branches so that Mairig and my sisters-in-law could catch the berries in the blanket they'd hold like a fisherman's net below me. The red fruit would rain down in one thunderous catch and we'd laugh, thinking of the delicious fruit spreads Mama would make. I would feel the slight wind on my cheeks from the rush I had created in the branches. I would breathe the blue-white in the sky, the crimson in the berries, green on the leaves and the grey of the tree bark. My cheeks would puff up like a rodent's with the fruit I would pilfer. Mairig says these cheeks are beginning to look sallow, and that I'm not eating enough. Bollocks, I say. But I seem to have lost my big appetite.
When we saw Professor Najarian running in the street like a crazy man, Mairig, who has always been my clever mama, grabbed me by the collar and pulled me up the hidden ladder into the attic saying, Not my boy, they will not touch my youngest boy. Later that evening she brought my books and some wax candles into this dark hole. The following week she pulled off my suit jacket and pants as if I were a two-year-old child, and while I was spitting and hawing, pulled an old woman's mu-mu over my head. Now I look like an old Christian village woman. Mairig wanted to go as far as rubbing ash into my cheeks but I said, Enough, they can't even see my face with this headscarf!
If it hadn't been for Professor Najarian, I probably would have resisted my little mama. I don't think I will ever erase the last image of the professor from my memory. Perhaps I will never again see him as he was when he lectured to us at the Euphrates College, with his stern voice and drooping dark eyes, his large waxed moustache that stretched from jowl to jowl and curled delicately at each end like a girl's hair ribbon. Now when I think of our esteemed professor I can only see him dancing naked in the streets between his wife and three daughters. No matter how hard I try to re-enact his lectures on poetry and philology, I can only hear him singing and babbling like a lunatic. This too feels like a betrayal.
The day he was released from prison after a fortnight's stay, we all stood behind our shuttered windows and peered surreptitiously through small cracks into the almost empty street. From our street windows we had a direct view of the professor's house and so we watched how the gendarmes dumped him in chains in a heap at his doorstep. He and Mussig Agha (whose wife had been able to prove her husband was an Assyrian by birth) were the only two men released from the group of detained intellectuals and prominent businessmen arrested in March. Each of the others had passed beneath our windows at night in an old wooden cart; their corpses were dumped at the edge of town in a large and unmarked hole. Ignominious death. Urine on their faces. Beard and chest hairs plucked out. Fingernails and toenails removed. The look of death on their faces, frozen. Ears disjointed and bloodied clothing sent to the wives as mementoes. Eyeballs for afternoon tea. Severed skullcaps.
The professor was the only one to leave the konak with his extremities intact. Yet the damage had been done. Who could recognise the gibbering and drooling naked old man with shit pressed into his hair and groin and filling the cracks of his arse? The man who yelled at the top of his lungs like a stuck sheep while his wife, Digin Hassig, and three daughters tried to cover him with a blanket and escort him back into his home?
The world is a pile of dung and a crock, la-la, and a crock, la-la, of hor-sees' doo! the Professor sang, and wiggled his hips, and then began to yowl like a feral cat while his wife and daughters tried to hold on to his twitching arms. The Turks stood laughing a few feet away as he was escorted inside; it must have been better entertainment for the gendarmes than even the previous weeks' fun. As Digin Hassig tried to close the door, the professor stretched his neck and turned his head to the sky and cried, Where will the next tete-atete be, O Lord? And one the laughing gendarmes yelled out, Don't worry, Professor, we'll invite you to another party very soon! The professor twisted his neck to look behind him at the police and yelled back, Thank you, thank you, effendi! If his hands had been free, perhaps he would have waved to them gaily.
Once Mussig Agha was back in his home the gossip spread throughout the quarter about the torture of the men. Word travelled of how the professor had been chained on a high ledge in the room where the gendarmes practised their black art. He had been the chosen one. The professor witnessed the beatings and slashings of his friends and colleagues, he felt the splattering of their blood when it arced steeply, and he heard their continual screams for mercy. He was told the same would happen to him unless he confessed where the arms were hidden.
Mussig Agha says the professor saw everything. Day and night for days and days. Mussig Agha says they didn't let him sleep.
TOWARD the end of the first week the professor began to rub himself in his excrement (they left him to urinate and defecate on himself) with the aid of his unbound feet, and to laugh like a demented child. After that the gendarmes loosed him and let him roam the prison grounds freely - he amused and entertained the working men. He performed his assigned duties. He folded the soiled clothing carefully so that it would arrive in a neat bundle to the owner's family.
In the days after the professor was released, the late nights became unbearable for the inhabitants on our block. I could barely see him from my hiding place, from the tiny attic window which gave on to the street. Whether or not I saw him, I always heard his screeching cries as he ran through the dark night, yelling at the top of his lungs, Somebody stop them! They're doing it again! They're doing it again! - after which he laughed uncontrollably.
For 11 days after his liberation the macabre scene was repeated. Mairig said the neighbours listened in fear but did nothing, only watched through their curtains as the professor ran naked up and down the street while his wife and three daughters trailed after him with a large coverlet. On the twelfth night I waited for him patiently as I had on previous days; I do not sleep until dawn in the attic. The streets were quiet all night and for the first time in days I felt relieved and even a bit hopeful by morning: perhaps the man was regaining his senses.
Later that morning Mairig told me that the professor's heart had stopped. Everyone is thankful that his suffering has ended, she told me.
Witnessing our brilliant professor lose his mind has caused me the worst kind of grief.
He received a proper burial in the cemetery. He lies in a marked grave and his face, they say, bore a stiff smile.
I've been in the attic 20 days. The gendarmes have begun to search the houses throughout the Armenian quarter more frequently; they still say they are looking for illegal arms caches. That is the reason they give for everything - for arresting and torturing the prominent teachers and businessmen of Kharphert, for coming into our homes uninvited. The town crier announces on each street corner that the Infidel is planning a coup d'etat! We ask ourselves: for Godsakes, what "caches" and armed rebellions are these shit-in-the-mouths talking about?
Some of the families in the quarter are now desperately trying to purchase arms to turn in to the Government: it has been said that if we turn nothing in they will know we are hiding something. But Mairig is clever: I don't trust those dogs. Do they think we are imbeciles? Stupid bleating sheep? And disregarding the orders, she dismantled the antique pistol Hayrig had sometimes used for hunting quail, burned its handle in the fire, and buried the metal pieces in the cellar.
When Hayrig was alive and the centuries' old rules still applied, he always paid the fee to keep his sons out of the army. Now even gold does not seem to help. The officials accept the payment, smile reassuringly, and then send the gendarmes to round up the men while the women wave the papers futilely and protest as ineffectually as squawking birds: Here it is, effendi. Look, effendi, my husband's pardon. We paid, sir. What are you doing, effendi! By God, we paid. Look here at this paper! Here!
My older brothers worried about the changing climate in town, but wouldn't listen to Mairig's pleading that they also hide in women's clothes.
I will never don a woman's habit. Things will settle down, Mama, my brother Melkon said, you'll see.
WHEN the call came for Armenian men between the ages of 18 and 25 to report to the commissary, Mairig came up to the attic to inform me.
They're taking the young men now. But you are not a boy for this war, son. I showed them your papers for advanced study in the capital. I told them you'd departed weeks ago for Constantinople.
As the days passed I tried to do my reading and keep up with the course work from the college. I wanted to be prepared to take my exams in the autumn so that I could later take up my extended course of study in the capital as planned.
Three days ago the decree came from Constantinople, demanding that all Armenian males between 13 and 70 report to the commissary. Already the gossip has been circulating about the earlier recruits digging the trenches for their own burial pits. Last night the police began to break into the homes and drag men out forcibly. From my perch in the attic I heard the cries of the women throughout the quarter.
He has done nothing!
What are you doing?
Let him go!
Dear God, have mercy upon us.
I dared not look through my small window for fear someone would see me. I used the brass bowl again and again to relieve my bowels. Mairig climbed quickly to the attic at 4 a.m. crying, Sargis! Sargis! They've taken your brothers. They're taking all of the men now. And she was at once assailed by the foul stench in the small space. I looked down at her as she stood on the top rung of the ladder.
Ah no, Mama, I said, don't come in now. And I cried quietly, as if I were a schoolgirl. The following day it was quiet in the quarter. Quiet as the grave, as the old people say here.
With the long days in the attic, as I tired from the reading by candlelight, I began to think of writing. It was as if my hands wanted to record of their own volition. I began:
There is nothing of more importance to an Armenian than his books. For we understand that we have survived in this hostile land for thousands of years because of three things: our language, our faith, and our texts. And it is in our texts that our language and our faith have been preserved. The people know that Armenia has been preserved in the books and that the books have been the testament of our people.
We are a culture that bases our existence on the Book. Let us recall that our first work of Armenian literature was, after all, the translation of the most holy of texts: the Gospel. This is what is offered to the people in our liturgy: the word of God: sepculum gloriae Dei. The book is sacred, thus the holy book is never directly touched, we do not sully it with our stained hands.
Dammit. I sound worse than a pompous cleric.
For the Armenian, the book is more precious than wife or mother. The book is the symbol of our preservation as a people under horrible domination.
Shittyshit bollocks.
Eh, Mama? Yes, I hear you. Yes, I would like some tahn with lunch.