His neck twists as if I have slapped him. “Yes, of course,” he responds. He purses his lips. His eyes flutter. “It was during the war. It was a difficult thing.”
I nod my head. “I have read articles. I am trying to know more, to understand this.”
The nephew shifts his legs, his mouth open to reveal small, even teeth. “There is so much misinformation about this in the West,” he says suddenly. He leans forward, his hair falling into his eyes. He wipes his face with one hand. “There was a war. There were signs of subversion. The Turks had to react in some fashion, do something. Almost all countries under attack would have done the same, if not something worse. Would those that criticize now prefer a result like the Balkans—a patchwork of tiny countries, divided, always in conflict? I want to tell Americans to look first at themselves—at their Trail of Tears, the march of Native Americans from Florida to Oklahoma, their slavery. Even the internment camps where those were sent who looked Japanese.” He grips his elbows with his hands. His face is flushed now. “There is so much hypocrisy.”
I start to say something but he waves me to silence. “Please,” he says. “I do not wish to berate you.” He shrugs. His face takes on a sheepish look, like that of a small boy who has spoken out of turn. His hand flips his hair. “It’s just that this issue . . . It is behind us now. The Turks have moved on.”
I nod again. I try to make my face look sympathetic, appreciative. I wish once more to be alone with Recep—to remember. To provide form to things. I turn, to see if Recep has been following this exchange, but his gaze still drifts away from us, off toward the window.
“Recep,” I say. “It is me, Ahmet. Ahmet Khan. You came to visit me, remember? I am from Mezre.”
The cloudy eyes brighten. His mouth forms a word, which seconds later I conclude is my name.
“How are you?” I ask. “Are they treating you well? Are you getting enough to eat?”
He stares at me quizzically, as if I have inquired of odd things. An arm jerks out, stops. Slowly, painfully, he brings his head forward. “Yes.” He smiles. His teeth form a rampart. “Ahmet.”
The word is strange in his voice, foreign. Americanized as I have become, my name changed on entry. Emmett Conn. I have become Emmett Conn.
“You remember me, then?”
Softly, “
Evet
.” Yes.
“You may remember—I told you when you visited—I was injured in the war. I lost much of my memory, from before, from my childhood. Lately, I have been . . . these dreams have come to me.” I glance at Recep’s nephew but then back at Recep, and launch into descriptions, of Burak, the trek, the girl, the deportees. I find it relaxing, even therapeutic, an unburdening of images I have kept to myself. I watch Recep as I speak. His eyes are like apricots, too large for the sockets. He has few lashes. He does not blink.
“These Armenians, Recep, this journey. Do you know anything of this?”
He shakes his head quickly, as if I’ve said something to offend him. For a time he says nothing, leading me to think that perhaps he has not understood, that he is like Carol, alone in her twilight. His head shifts the way hers did, the eyes never quite aligned.
“I know the Armenians,” he says in clear Turkish. His eyes remain trained away. “There were deportations. It was war. It was a bad time.”
“Do you remember any girl with mismatched eyes?”
He looks down. The top of his head is scraped like a rock. Then up. “No.”
“And Burak, what of him? Do you remember, when he went into the army? I . . . I cannot remember.”
I am surprised, suddenly, by the tears in his eyes. He pulls at his face. His eyebrows spring back.
“You do not remember?” he asks in his strangled voice.
I shake my head. “No.”
He stares, as if he does not believe me.
“Why?”
“What?”
“Why did you come?”
“To see you! To understand.”
“I came to see you, in Georgia.”
“Yes. Yes.”
“Burak . . .” His voice halts. “Burak was killed before the war. An accident.”
“An accident? Before the war?” Something roils in my stomach.
Recep nods. “A rock from a slingshot hit the side of his head.”
Something clicks in my mind, to the point of almost hearing it. I remember the wailing, the robes. My father’s face. An accident.
“Are you sure?”
Recep’s hands cover his face. After a time he lifts them. “
Evet
,” he says. He stands, begins a trembling step, falls back in his wheelchair. His face is the texture of paper. “It was my slingshot.”
I sit back in my chair.
I do not know what to do, or say. I cannot think. Recep’s nephew stares at me.
“Your father died soon after,” Recep says again. “And then you left. You joined . . . the gendarmerie. They would accept you, even if you were not yet of age for the army.” He stops, his eyes alight. A guilt shines in his face, and for an instant I see myself in it. “You . . . you do not remember?”
I shake my head. But I know. I know he is right.
6
The sand whips and whirls,
the sting of thousands of wasps. A
kumaş
clings to my face, leaving a slit for my eyes, but still the tiny grains penetrate, shifting in unpredictable slants, burrowing in crevices, caking my nose and eyelids. I instruct the group to stop, as it makes little sense to advance under such conditions, bent and blinded by clouds of sand. We find a small ravine and bivouac, seeking what shelter the topography affords. We bury ourselves like rodents and wait, the sound of the wind all around.
The original two thousand deportees have dwindled now to three hundred, many of these suffering from dysentery. A number of the guards are gone, too, leaving only three gendarmes, including myself, to prod our group on its way. Our progress has been slow, slower than before, maybe six or seven miles per day. At this pace it will take four or five days to reach our destination. Food is scarce, water even scarcer. The dead and dying increase daily. At the current rate of loss, only fifty or so of the deportees might actually make it to Aleppo.
I am not sure why I remain with the group—I almost had to beg the area governor, the
vali
, to be allowed to continue. It would have been easy enough to leave the deportees in Katma, to transfer back to fight in the war. Most gendarmes do not complete the entire journey with their original caravan. I tell myself a three-week delay will not hinder my advancement. I rationalize it as a duty, broadened by the abandoned deportees we encounter, the bands of unsupervised, starving packs of women and children that merge with our group, some almost naked, their bodies blackened by the sun. I ponder the need for closure, the delivery of these pathetic, stumbling creatures—her people—to their destination. Neither the war nor their complicity nor the inevitability of this journey has changed. But they are dying—children with tongues swollen large as fists, mothers with dead infants still clutched in their arms. I offer what assistance I can. I call for rest breaks, for water. I urge the group on. I listen to the requests she makes of me. I wonder if I, too, might falter and perish.
The other guards keep their distance. The one, Karim, is as sick as the deportees, necessitating his transport in one of the two ox-drawn carts still accompanying the group. The other, Mustafa, has grown mean and bitter, lashing out at stragglers, railing at small matters. He insisted on continuing to the journey’s conclusion, even though I secured specific orders otherwise. In the end I was desperate for any assistance. Now I regret it. His demeanor distracts me, disturbs me. An incident on our second day out exhibited the decline in our relationship.
I had instructed the gendarmes to avoid using their weapons, given our lack of ammunition and the uncertainties ahead. As such, a rifle shot’s crack, loud in the clean desert air, sent me galloping in concern to the rear of the caravan. I found Mustafa there, pulling at his beard, his mouth obscured, standing over the body of an elderly deportee.
“What happened?”
He shrugged, looking off in the distance. “She wouldn’t move.” He kicked at the corpse.
“My instructions were to use your weapon only if attacked.”
Another shrug. “You’re not growing soft, are you?” He pulled a dirty thumb at a large front tooth. “You and your Armenian whore?”
I eyed his stubby fingers, curled near his rifle’s trigger. I fingered my own weapon.
“If you disobey my orders again, I will kill you.”
A girl rushed forward, wailing, to drape arms around the dead woman. Mustafa’s lips clamped together. He pulled again at his beard. Then he strode away, as if we had not spoken.
I have kept a close eye on him since, positioning him at the caravan’s end, taking care that Araxie never comes near him. We sleep under the stars together, she and I, side by side, rarely speaking. She eats my food, the guards no longer dining as a group but scavenging about for themselves. She wears my extra clothes. I want to reach for her, day and night. I crave her breath on my neck, her arm on my shoulders. I dream of the glimpse I had on the hilltop, the small sculpted breasts, the narrow hips. Yet I never consider touching her, for reasons I cannot quite say. Guilt, perhaps, or anxiety. Perhaps something more.
“Did you go to school?” she asks, the third day out from Katma.
“Of course.”
“For how long?”
“I completed my seventh year.” Burak and my cousins attended military school.
“Do you speak other languages?”
I shake my head. “And you?” She is riding behind me, her hands clasped loosely about my waist, a posture that produces a near-constant erection.
“Yes. French and German. I would like to speak English. I would like to go to America.”
“America.”
“Yes. You have heard the missionaries, their descriptions of it?”
I have. I was warned away from the missionaries and their strange beliefs, their foreign accents, but I went anyway, to listen. The America they described merged with visions of heaven. Motor cars. Crates that flew through the air. “Things so modern,” I say now, “the people so rich. Yes—I, too, would go there.” I pause.
“Did you like school?” I ask.
“Oh, yes. I loved it.” She pauses, as if considering this statement’s finality. “I wanted to be an actress. I was always playacting in school, and for my parents.”
We continue in silence. “My father, too, has died,” I say eventually. His memory blazes within me, as if I have forgotten and only now remembered. “He died of an illness, almost a year ago now.”
She does not respond. I realize my foolish remark has clogged the air between us. I stutter on, unleashing hurried descriptions of youthful achievements, my athletic prowess, my cousins’ military advancement, my training at my father’s knife-making trade. I explain how blades are forged, cooled, and tempered, how the haft is attached, how the finished product is evaluated. I describe sabers and scimitars, swords and rapiers, knives for pruning and skinning, blades for whittling and killing. I keep to myself my hatred of knife making, the fact that I refuse even to carry a knife. My father’s death has freed me from the shower of sparks and the smell of the forge, from the dickering and tedium and pressure to measure up. My life is my own now. I am grateful for this.
“Do you have brothers or sisters?”
I chastise myself immediately for raising this question, for the way it is phrased. If she does have siblings, their fate is likely not pleasant.
“I have a brother,” she responds after some time. “He is seven.” Her voice catches and trails away. “My father placed him with a Turkish family. He was required to renounce his faith, to become a Muslim. He is in Harput.”
“And you—why did you not do the same?”
I feel her hands on my back, pushing, as if attempting to drop off the horse.
“I would not turn my back on my father. Or my God.”
I twist and grab her with one arm, my head facing backward. I say nothing, even though I want to argue with her, to point out that her God, their God, has done little to help in their time of need. Her eyes have gone red now, enlarged and tearful, so clouded that the pupils appear almost common and alike. It changes her face in a curious way, accentuating her exoticism, as if she has been revealed only now as a rust-eyed alien, dropped from the open sky into the desert spread below. Her arms fall to her sides as she lifts a leg to escape. Her face tilts near mine. It is in this posture that Mustafa finds us, riding up unnoticed in a curtain of sand.
“We have visitors,” he says, pointing to a trio of camels and men in Arab headdress at the other end of the caravan.
I disengage. Araxie slides off the horse.
It is Thursday.
I sit in the Piggly Wiggly. Ted accompanies me again, studying the magazines, eyeing me occasionally. We do not speak.
I have browsed the aisles, examined the teas—but there are no good teas here. I have resigned myself to a cup of coffee, testament to my despair. The liquid is vile, like oil. I sip at its bitterness.
Recep’s confirmation has shaken me. I have toyed with it, battered it, questioned it anew. Might he be mistaken? He is an old man, confused as I am. But a curtain has parted, a certain door in my mind. I am sure. I remember Burak’s death, its aftermath. The timing, the deportations beginning in early 1915, my injury in late August . . .
And then he appears, in front of me. Wilfred. He’s grown taller. His face shows the lesions of adolescence. His hair is curlier.
“Hey,” he says, looking down at me.
I struggle to stand, to speak. “It is so good to see you,” I say when my voice comes.
He nods. He looks so much older, like the young man in
The Searchers
.
“What . . . what have you been doing?” I sound so grasping. So elderly.