He was like the Straw Thief, she thought, a hero who loved her and his people and took great risks to help them. He had embarked on a long road across the globe and had produced something new and wonderful for them but had made mistakes along the way. One by one, his successes had slipped through his fingers, numbed by this savage winter. She pressed the flannel parcel to her chest and gave way to her grief, whether for herself or for Gabriel, she didn’t know.
“Come with us, Vera.” Alicia pleaded, her eyes dull with the pain of losing Victor. Her freckles looked almost black in her pale face, and her hair blazed in the sunshine. She and Apollo and some other comrades were boarding a ship to Batumi the following morning, then traveling overland to Tiflis.
“This is just a harbinger of things to come,” Apollo told Vera. “They’ll go after the Armenians whenever the wind blows the wrong way. The villagers don’t have any coordinated defense, just bands of young men with outdated rifles. They would barely have been armed if Gabriel hadn’t brought in weapons.”
Vera didn’t point out that it was Apollo who had brought the weapons to the east.
“We have to organize.” Apollo took her hand. “Come and help us do that, Vreni. It’ll be in Gabriel’s name. He would have wanted us to do this.”
Vera thought about the women and children huddled in hastily assembled wooden shelters at the edge of town, coughing in the smoke from their braziers. Would forming an armed revolutionary group help them? Or could justice be had without violence? Gabriel had always wanted peace, yet his actions had led to the deaths of so many people.
“I need to think on it,” she told Apollo, her hand lingering in his. “Kamil Pasha has asked me to return to Istanbul to testify in a court case. I should do that first. Send me a message when you’re settled and tell me where you are.”
Kamil Pasha had told Vera about Sosi’s murder and the attempt to blame it on him. She had failed Sosi once, and she promised herself that she wouldn’t fail the courageous girl again. The idea of bringing Vahid to justice for what he had done to them was immensely satisfying.
Apollo drew Vera to him and kissed her on the lips. “Promise me you’ll come, Vreni.”
Vera nodded, mute with joy, now and forever adulterated with regret.
92
The following morning, Kamil stood on the pier and watched a group of refugees and the surviving members of Gabriel’s commune board their ship. Omar had learned that they planned to organize an armed resistance against the Ottomans, coordinating and arming all the small village-based groups like Levon’s. As an Ottoman official, Kamil knew he had a duty to stop them. As a representative of justice, he had no idea what the right thing to do was.
He was spending the empire’s wealth-the proceeds of a robbery that he had been charged with solving-on saving these Armenian refugees, who in the future might well turn on the empire. He had helped them while they used illegally obtained weapons to defend themselves against the sultan’s irregular troops. Worse yet, he had subverted his soldiers to fire on their own. The sultan could exile him or even have him shot for any of these offenses. Yet he felt he had done the right thing. Did moral decisions have to be worked out along the way, or could one rely on a set of moral principles that applied under every circumstance? He found himself thinking that what was right today might not be right tomorrow depending on the circumstances. He wondered uneasily where such a relativist attitude might lead him.
Kamil raised his hand in farewell, then turned and walked away through the morning mist. “A magistrate without principles,” he muttered to himself, shaking his head. “What’s left?” he asked, louder. His voice echoed between the houses in the early-morning stillness.
Elif had returned and was waiting for him in the dining room, where Yakup had laid out breakfast. The sight of her slight form and keen eyes was as heartbreakingly lovely as the flower-strewn meadow outside his window.
Elif stirred her tea. Kamil sat down and for a moment was captivated by the delicate clink of her spoon against the glass. “So fragile,” he said, half to himself.
“What is?” she asked, handing him the glass of hot tea.
The best-brewed tea is the color of rabbit’s blood in the glass, Kamil remembered his mother saying. Not knowing what to answer, he drew Elif close, then closed his eyes and sipped the scalding liquid.
Vera saw Chief Omar on the docks that morning, supervising the loading. Now clean-shaven except for his extravagant mustache, he leaned on his staff and bellowed orders. The local doctor had cleaned his wound and rebandaged it. It seemed to be healing, but the police chief had been warned to watch for infection. Vera was amazed that after all their travails, the eight remaining soldiers from the pasha’s force of thirty were still willing to march in formation as if they made up a company. In two hours they all would embark on new lives, but, she was sure, not lives any of them would have recognized two months earlier.
93
Sultan Abdulhamid received Kamil in his private quarters. Kamil could hardly believe three months had passed. Everything looked the same: the furnishings of the receiving hall, the sultan’s formal gold-braided suit, the tip of his sword embedded in the pile of the carpet. Enormous gilt-edged mirrors at the sides of the room reflected each other, as if opening a tunnel into the void. Dozens of officials and servants stood in formation along the walls, with Vizier Köraslan by the sultan’s shoulder. Only this time the French doors to the garden stood open, admitting a soft breeze. Birds rioted in the hydrangeas.
Kamil bowed before the sultan, then stepped back, keeping his eyes lowered.
The vizier walked over and closed the French doors. Kamil’s ears rang in the sudden silence.
“I’m glad to see you returned safely, Kamil Pasha.” Kamil thought he heard a trace of genuine concern in the sultan’s voice. “If you would be so kind, sit and tell me your account of events in the east.” The sultan indicated a brocaded chair.
As Kamil sat down, he felt the full weight of the exhaustion that had dogged him since his return. He straightened and took a breath. “From my inquiries, I estimate three to four hundred dead, most killed by the Kurdish irregulars, but many refugees died on the road of hunger, cold, and disease.” He couldn’t think what else there was to say.
The sultan waited for Kamil to continue. When he remained silent, Sultan Abdulhamid asked, “And what of the revolt? That was your purpose, was it not, to investigate the revolt?”
Kamil looked up into the black eyes of the sultan. He could read nothing in them, neither concern nor interest. “There was no revolt, Your Highness.”
“We have reports that there were hundreds of weapons in the villages as well as in the monastery where your supposed socialists set up their commune. I suppose those weapons all grew in the meadows like spring flowers.”
“The guns were taken from the arms shipment the police intercepted in Istanbul in January.”
“I thought the police had confiscated those,” the sultan exclaimed, turning to Vizier Köraslan for explanation.
“The cargo was moved to Yorg Pasha’s warehouse,” the vizier admitted. “The British company wanted its ship back, and we thought that was the best place to store the guns. As far as I know, they’re still there.”
“You didn’t know they had been stolen?”
The vizier flushed.
“What of your Akrep sources?” the sultan asked impatiently. “Surely they knew. This was under their jurisdiction.”