My grandfather said that I was born under the sign of death because the umbilical cord was wound around my neck. The midwife, Linda Saliba, saved me from death by a miracle. She let my mother scream in pain, because she forgot the placenta in her belly, and began to undo the umbilical cord from around my neck. It had blocked my cries, making everyone think that I had been born dead.
I was born strangled, and the rope of blood is my one legacy. So it will not surprise anyone if I wrap the rope around my neck in the end, making my beginning my end, making my life no more than a dream.
The story was born in my memory only here in prison, once I sat on the bottle, which allowed me to savor that man lives outside of time. It is true that the pain was great, but living outside of time was an incomparable pleasure. This explains, in my view, Yalo’s insistence on remaining there in the memory of the dead.
I do not know, sir, why I am writing this story now, in spite of my being aware that you don’t care about it and it will add nothing new to the investigation. For all the crimes have been confessed to, and all you have to do is render a verdict. I am writing it for the sake of poor Yalo, for this would be the first time he’d hear the whole story of his grandfather.
The story begins with a child named Abel Gabriel Abyad, born in the village of Ain Ward, near Tur Abdin, in a country with no name, because it was the country of a people who did not yet exist. There, at the onset of the twentieth century, the Turks committed a dreadful massacre, killing about a million and a half Armenians. This was the massacre that our brothers the Armenians commemorate every year. My grandfather’s massacre, however, no one remembers it because it was a minor massacre incidental to a major one. Woe unto a people butchered in a peripheral massacre, because the butcher will not even find it necessary to wipe the blood from his knives. And this is what happened early in the century, when the small Syriac population was massacred.
The armed hosts attacked a small village called Ain Ward, the Spring of Roses because of the red damask rose that grows on the banks of its stream, from which sprang water turned golden by the sun. (That is how my grandfather described his village to his daughter, before adding that he spoke like the poets, and that he had wasted his life by neglecting his poetic gifts.) There the massacre was committed that killed all the inhabitants of the village. Sensing the imminent danger, the villagers took refuge in the Monastery of St. John, about three kilometers from their village, but the attackers, who surrounded the monastery, settled for nothing less than the surrender of all of them. After negotiations led by Cohno Danho, the villagers were promised safety. They came out with their hands raised after throwing their rifles to the ground, and the massacre began. The attackers used swords on every neck, both women and men without distinction, and only a tiny band of villagers survived, who slipped through the valleys and fled in the direction of the city of Al-Qamishli.
My grandfather didn’t remember the massacre, because he was less than three years old. He told the story of the massacre as he heard it from the uncle he hated. So I am not compelled to believe the story, not the story of fleeing to the abbey nor the story of the villagers being massacred and buried in a mass grave dug under the willow trees. What can be believed is that the children under the age of three were not harmed, and that the attackers pillaged the houses in the village before deciding to move into them. So the image of blood that became my great-grandmother’s kokina might be merely a metaphor by which my grandfather wanted to prove his poetic gifts.
The children wandered the streets of their village, begging. Their terror and hunger left them no time to weep over their murdered families.
Then Mullah Mustafa issued a decision.
I know only his first name, because my grandfather refused to talk about him. The mullah decreed that children should not be left wandering in the streets and issued orders to distribute them among the Kurdish families who had taken over the houses in the village. It was my grandfather’s great luck to be taken to the house of Mullah Mustafa. The boy’s name was changed from Abel to Ahmad, and he became a Kurdish boy, speaking Kurdish, Arabic, and Turkish, and living in the bosom of the mullah’s family, as if it had always been so. The willow forest was the only remaining witness that remembered what had been. The children were forbidden from playing in it because of the moans that seeped from among the branches of the trees that grew so remarkably after the massacre.
The story might have ended here, with Abel Abyad forgetting his origins, or even becoming an officer in the Turkish army like so many children who were snatched from the arms of their mothers and raised by the Ottoman Army, becoming pillars of the Janissary corps whose very name evoked terror.
But destiny had a different view.
Ten years after the massacre, and after the Ottoman defeat in World War I, with the dissolution of the state, some of the Syriacs in the regions of Tur Abdin, who had fled to Al-Qamishli in northern Syria, began to look for their children. Here my grandfather’s uncle, named Abd al-Masih Abyad, appeared.
Abd al-Masih arrived in Ain Ward, went to Mullah Mustafa’s house, and said that he would buy the boy for any amount they named. The mullah swore that he would return the boy to his family, community, and tribe. The mullah said that he was ready to give the boy Ahmad back to his uncle without compensation if that was what the boy wished.
The mullah called over Ahmad, who stood between his Kurdish father and his Syriac uncle. He heard his story from his father’s mouth and understood that the mullah was making him choose between going with Abd al-Masih Abyad and staying here.
When my grandfather got to this part of the story, his tears used to stream down and his voice would choke up, and he began to stutter and stammer. He would fall silent for a long time and ask for a glass of tea before relating how he went away with his uncle without looking back.
Instead of the story ending here, it took a new turn in Al-Qamishli, because the lad felt redoubled banishment. He did not speak Syriac, and he hated the job his uncle found him as a bakery worker. He felt that people treated him as a Kurd.
In Al-Qamishli, my grandfather regained his original name but lost his identity, because in people’s eyes he had become a Kurd. He felt banished. The world had closed in his face, and he had lost the smell of the trees that had filled his life in Ain Ward. And in this house he had to contend with his uncle’s spates of madness. When his uncle drank arak, he turned on his wife and three daughters and beat them, then he’d start in on his sister’s son, whom he had wanted to be a son to him, as God had not granted him a son, and beat him savagely.
Abel did not know what to do. He could not go back to Ain Ward, nor could he stay in this small, dark house. Nor could he leave the exhausting job in the bakery because that would mean dying of hunger. So the only salvation he could see was in the Church of St. Ephraim. He attended Sunday mass assiduously, and took part in cleaning the church after mass, which brought him to the attention of the deacon Shimon, who assigned him to the Sunday school he held in the church’s vault to teach his pupils the religious rituals.
Here, my grandfather said, God saved him. A love of learning blossomed in his heart, and he excelled among his peers, memorizing all of the Syriac prayers without understanding a word.
Once again fate intervened because the deacon Shimon advised Abel to go to Beirut, where the world would open before him. The boy made his decision right away, collected his weekly pay from the bakery, and instead of going home, took the bus from Al-Qamishli to Aleppo and onward to Tripoli and then Beirut. Abel arrived in Beirut carrying nothing with him but the address of the St. Severus Church in Mseitbeh. He searched for the church for a long time before finding himself before its locked door, where he spent the night.