"Zealousness!" Kirkor Hagopian's face scrunched into a mask of gloom. "There is news pouring in from numerous towns in Anatolia. Have you not heard about the incidents in Adana? They enter into Armenian houses with the pretext of searching for guns, and then plunder. Don't you understand? All the Armenians are going to be exiled. All of us! And here you are betraying your own people."
Hovhannes Stamboulian remained quiet for a while, chewing the ends of his mustache. Then he muttered slowly but surely, "We need to work together, Jews and Christians and Muslims. Centuries and centuries under the same imperial roof. We have been living together all this time, albeit on unequal ground. Now we can make it fair and just for all, transform this empire together."
It was then that Kirkor Hagopian uttered those gloomy words, his face already closing up: "My friend, wake up, there is no together anymore. Once a pomegranate breaks and all its seeds scatter in different directions, you cannot put it back together."
Now as he stood still at the top of the staircase, listening to the eerie silence in the house, Hovhannes Stamboulian couldn't help seeing that image in his mind's eye: a broken pomegranate, red and sad. With visible panic he called out to his wife: "Armanoush! Armanoush, where are you?"
They must all be in the kitchen, he thought to himself, and hurried down to the first floor.
Following the commencement of the First World War, a general mobilization had been declared. Though everyone in Istanbul talked about this, it was in the small towns where its effects had been mostly felt. They had beaten the drums in the streets, echoing again and again: Seferberliktir! Seferberliktir! That was when many Armenian young men were drafted into the army. More than three hundred thousand. At the outset all these soldiers were given arms, just like their Muslim peers. After a short time, however, they were all asked to return those arms. Unlike the Muslim soldiers, the Armenians were taken into special labor battalions. Rumors ran amok that Enver Pasha was the one behind this decision: "We need working hands to construct the roads for the soldiers to cross," he had announced.
But then there came dour news, this time about the labor battalions themselves. People said all the Armenians were employed in hard labor for the road construction although some had paid their bedel and should have been exempt. They said the battalions were taken to dig roads, but that was just a pretext; in actual fact they were made to dig pits, deep and wide enough to… They said Armenians were buried in the same pits that they had been made to dig.
"The Turkish authorities have announced that the Amnenians are going to dye their Easter eggs with their own blood!" That was what Kirkor Hagopian stated before he left the barbershop.
Hovhannes Stamboulian didn't give those rumors much credit. Yet he acknowledged that the times were bad.
Downstairs on the first floor he called his wife's name once again and sighed upon hearing no answer. As he stepped outside onto the patio and walked past the long cherry table where they had their breakfast when the weather was mild, a new scene from the Little Lost Pigeon crossed his mind.
"Listen to your story, then,"said the pomegranate tree as it fluttered a few branches, shaking off specks of snow. "Once there was; once there wasn't. God's creatures were as plentiful as grains and talking too much was a sin. "
"But why?" chirped the Little Lost Pigeon. "Why was it a sin to talk too much?"
The kitchen door was shut. It was strange given the hour of the day; Armanoush would be working in there with Marie, their maid of five years, while the children clustered around them. They never shut the door.
Hovhannes Stamboulian reached for the handle but before he could turn it, the old, wood door was opened from inside and he stood face-to-face with a Turkish soldier, a sergeant. Both men were so shocked to run into each other like this that for a full minute they stood staring at each other blankly. It was the sergeant who first shed his stupor. He took a step back and eyed the other from head to toe. He was a tawny man who would have had a smooth, youthful face had it not been for the harshness of his stare.
"What is going on here?!" Hovhannes Stamboulian exclaimed. He spotted his wife and kids and Marie lined against the kitchen wall at the back, standing side by side like penalized children.
"We have orders to search the house," the sergeant said. There was no discernible hostility in his voice but no empathy either. He sounded as if he was tired, and whatever the reason he was here for, he wanted to be done as fast as possible and be gone. "Could you please show us the way to your study?"
They went to the back of the house and trudged up the great curved staircase; Hovhannes Stamboulian in front, the sergeant and the soldiers following behind. Once upstairs in'the study, the soldiers moved around, each poring over some article of furniture, like honey-sucking bumblebees in a field of wildflowers. They searched the cupboards, the drawers, and every single shelf of the wall-towall bookcase. They leafed through hundreds of books seeking documents hidden among the pages; they looked over his favorite literature, from Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil and Gerard de Nerval's Les Chimeres to Alfred de Musset's Les Nuits and Hugo's Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. While a brawny soldier with beady eyes suspiciously scanned through Rousseau's Social Contract, Hovhannes Stamboulian couldn't help but ponder the passages the man was staring at without really seeing:
Man is born free but everywhere is in chains. In reality, the difference is that the savage lives within himself while social man lives outside himself and can only live in the opinion of others, so that he seems to receive the feeling of his own existence only from the judgment of others concerning him.
When done with the books, they started to sift through the many drawers of the walnut desk. It was then that one of the soldiers spotted the gold brooch on the desk. He handed it to the sergeant, who picked up the miniature pomegranate, weighed it in his palm, rotated it in the air to better see the rubies inside, and then gave it to Hovhannes Stamboulian with a smile.
"You should not leave such a precious gem in the open. Here, take it," the sergeant said with an air of placid courteousness.
"Yes, thank you. It is a present for my wife," Hovhannes Stamboulian said quietly.
The sergeant gave him a confiding man-to-man smile. But rapidly his face turned from cordiality to sulk, and when he spoke again his voice didn't have the same mild tone anymore.
"Tell me what it says here," the sergeant said as he pointed to a bunch of papers he had found in a drawer, all written in the Armenian alphabet.
Hovhannes Stamboulian immediately recognized the poem he had penned at a time when he had fallen ill with a high fever. It had been sometime last fall. He had been in bed for three days straight without being able to move, shivering and sweating at the same time as if his entire body had become a barrel of water that was full of holes and constantly oozing. Throughout Armanoush had stayed beside his bed, putting vinegar-soaked cold towels on his forehead and rubbing his chest with ice cubes. Then, at the end of the third day, when the fever had finally diminished, a poem had come to Hovhannes Stamboulian, and he had welcomed it as a compensation for his suffering. Thoughh not a religious man at all, he was a firm believer in divine compensations, which he thought operated less in large-scale manifestations than through small signs and gifts such as this.