I moved forward to Lucine’s father.
“Will you walk with me?” he said.
I nodded.
We began to move toward the village square, a working square with a stone well in the center.
Arshak said, “One of the intellectuals escaped the net on the night of April 24. A playwright, as a matter of fact. He came here. A village of two hundred of us, including his uncle and aunt. They hid him in a root cellar.”
He said no more.
We walked on. Straight for the well.
And a new smell began to break over me like an invisible wave from a polluted sea, another smell like a battlefield gone silent, a smell that came with a sharp, clinging burn in the nose. The smell of chlorinated lime.
Two paces more to the waist-high circle of stones, prosceniumed by a simple wood bucket frame. Arshak put his hand on my arm to stop me.
He looked at me.
I said, “I’ve seen war.”
“Perhaps you haven’t seen this,” he said.
I made the smallest movement as if to begin to step forward and Arshak put his hand on my arm again.
“I’ve never seen it,” he said, and his voice, his demeanor, which had been confident, purposeful since we’d left Ortakiöi, was suddenly something else.
Of course. He’d been raging at the situation from London. He’d heard accounts. He was an exile. So far this was all just imagination to him.
“You don’t have to,” I said.
He did not answer.
He took his hand from my arm.
I found myself backstage, quick-changed into another character. I had two roles in this drama. Not a spy in this scene. I was a reporter. A war correspondent. I was in a country at war, and words for later were already forming in my head. About the ride up here. The silence. The shoe. I thought I was another kind of professional now. Objective. In control of myself.
I thought wrong.
The bodies down the hole were children. The lime had been slaked by the well water and by rain and I could see only the limbs of the few immediately below the child on top but there were more beneath. Many more. Of the one I saw whole, I could not say if it was a girl or a boy. The body was on its side and curled into itself as if waiting in the womb of a corpse. My gut said girl because a girl seemed more innocent to me, a girl seemed more vulnerable, a girl made me hear myself gasp as if from a great distance and made the welling in me — in my chest and in my throat and in my eyes — seem like another wave breaking, but now the polluted sea was within me.
The lime had done its work. She had not bloated. She had not been devoured. She had not come apart. She had been sucked dry. She had begun to shrivel into a thing that you thought might last a thousand years and make a future man wonder what had happened here.
But I knew what had happened.
“Mother of God,” Arshak whispered beside me.
I felt him draw away.
The Turks had thrown these children in here one at a time. Extorting the whereabouts of a man who wrote plays. Perhaps it took only a few of these children. Perhaps the rest — perhaps this little girl on the top of the pile — were simply the victims of the murderous inertia humans are capable of.
I stepped back. I turned away.
Arshak had moved off a few steps.
I could only take one.
He and I were both breathing hard.
The welterweight had come near, out of concern for us.
Arshak waved him off.
The man did not go past us to the well; he turned and moved away.
Arshak said, “There are fifty thousand dead since February in the eastern provinces.”
I believed what he said. And I took the news with horror. But with an intellectual horror. Fifty thousand was too many. That one little girl was real.
Arshak said, “The Western world thrashes at a few hundred dead Belgians. And our legion of dead is hardly noted. There are more than a million of us in this country. It has begun now. By forced marches and by starvation and by outright mass killings they will try to wipe us all away. It has begun.”
I had no words for him. But I moved up beside him.
He said, very softly, “They have rehearsed for years. Six years ago in Adana there were thirty thousand murdered. The women raped and murdered. My wife was one of them. Lucine’s mother.”
I felt I was looking down another well.
“She shouldn’t have been there,” Arshak said. “I took them both away from this country after Sasun in 1904. But Leniya’s own mother was in Adana and was sick and she went to her.”
His voice had grown husky. My mind kept wanting to move to Lucine, to fill in the answers to my remaining questions about her from all this. But Arshak was struggling. Before I could think what to say, he turned abruptly to me.
He roughed up his voice, played his righteous anger as a way out of his pain: “The rest of the village is in a mass grave in the middle of their spring wheat.”
I had my own roughing up to do. I was a reporter. It wouldn’t take long for me to confirm this story. “I should look,” I said.
“All right.”
They gave me a shovel, and none of these men could face this with me. I didn’t blame them. As I moved off, they were each of them, one at a time, approaching the well and standing before it and making the sign of the cross: three fingers of the right hand joined for the Trinity and brought to the forehead and then to three points on the chest, the bottom first and then the left side and then the right. And finally the hand opened to a palm, in memory of a wound, and was pressed into the heart.
Amen.
I walked fifty yards into the wheat, following the cart ruts and drag rows, the spoor of the Turks covering this whole thing up to keep the rumor out of Istanbul until they could get their bigger plans underway.
I found the place. Fresh turned and refilled earth in a plot fifty feet square. I took only a few steps into it. I had little doubt now. And I felt uneasy standing upon the villagers. I felt uneasy disturbing them.
But I dug. I dug and sweated and dug and it didn’t take many shovel strokes downward to open a seam into a miasma I knew quite well. I did not need eyes in this place to confirm the story.
I quickly restored the earth. I stepped off the grave.
And all around me was the growing wheat, the flag leaves unfurled, the wheat heads beginning to emerge.
55
Tigran had brought a bottle of raki in his saddle bag, figuring we’d need it. So before riding away from the village, we stood in a circle before our horses and passed the bottle, drinking it deep and slow, prolonging the burn.
When the bottle was empty, Tigran returned it to his saddle bag, which deeply struck me as the right thing to do. He didn’t want to litter this place.
And as we rose to our saddles and settled in, Arshak looked to me and said, “Will you help us do this thing, Christopher Cobb?”
My answer to this had also been confirmed in the wheat field.
“I will,” I said. “But we have to figure a way to get her out after the deed is done.”
He stiffened and nodded and I knew he’d been wrestling with this himself.
And as well intentioned as I was, it took until the sun was verging into late afternoon and we had crested the mountain north of Ortakiöi before I realized how stupid I’d been for these past few hours. How self-absorbed.
I spurred my horse ahead and drew alongside Arshak.
“We need to talk,” I said. “Not at a gallop.”
He nodded and drew us all up.
He said something to the others in Armenian, no doubt announcing a piss break. We all dismounted and the other three moved away separately.
“Look,” I said to Arshak. “I think I’ve been an idiot. On the ship from Constanţa, did you meet a trim man, maybe forty or a little older, with muttonchop whiskers?”