Читать книгу Last Letter from Istanbul - Lucy Foley - Страница 24

When they found him he had been cradling Babek as though he were his own dead child. The officer in charge had informed him, graciously, that he would not write this up in his official report: it was not quite seemly. What he would write was that Babek had: ‘died in proud service of his country, a hero of the Empire’. There: that would be something for his wife and children.

On that train south he had caught sight of himself in the glass and seen how the cold had disfigured him into someone he did not recognise. He had grown so thin that his skull seemed to be only loosely covered by a thin layer of skin: his near-death writ large upon his body. But there was more than this: his eyes had changed. Perhaps it was just the reflection, but he thought he saw in them a new absence, something that the place had taken from him and might not give back. It frightened him, the sense of distance he felt looking at this stranger. Where was the man he had been? The cold seemed to have killed some invisible part of him as efficiently as it had destroyed visible flesh: the ends of his toes, the pads of his fingers, the scabrous patches on his face, and even the tip of his nose – black as a mark of punctuation, the cold’s little joke. That young schoolteacher, who seemed now like a person he might once have briefly met.

The Red Crescent medical officer who treated him had seen worse cases, though.

‘Worse how?’

‘Oh. Well – the ones who have lost whole limbs, of course. And then there are the ones who die. You’ll be all right.’

He wondered what this meant, exactly. He got his answer quickly enough: it meant that he was whole enough to join a new regiment in the south, below Lake Van. Here, their principal enemy was no longer the Russians.

It was quite simple, his new commanding officer explained. The Armenians had betrayed them. Now they had to leave Ottoman lands. There were two options. They had to be encouraged to go, leaving their villages after collecting the possessions and food they would need for the journey eastwards, toward Mesopotamia, or they had to be forced.

‘All of the Armenians?’ he asked the officer. ‘Have they all turned against us?’

There had been children in his class who were Armenian – one of his favourite pupils, a small boy – had been Armenian. Then he thought of the man who had betrayed them. He thought of Babek. But these were simple people, weren’t they? Their villages were sleepy, unremarkable places: the bleat of a goat, the wail of an infant, the constant low drone of the heat. Where the most dramatic things that happened was a wild dog running amok in the chicken coop, the occasional modest wedding, the death of an old man. They had lived like this for hundreds – perhaps even thousands – of years. These people, surely, knew nothing of grand deceptions. It was unclear whether they even knew much about the war until these men of the Ottoman army had descended into their midst and ordered them to begin packing their bags.

‘To remove the cancer,’ the officer told him. ‘We must remove everything. You think these people wear a uniform, to tell us, helpfully, that they’re the ones to look out for? They’re a little more clever than that. They work in the shadows. That’s what makes them so deadly. But we have the element of surprise now. They have no idea what’s coming for them.’

This was certainly true. The villagers had simply stared at them as they gave them their orders – even after they had been translated into the local dialect. When they had eventually assembled at the muster points – after threats both shouted and administered with the butt of a rifle – many had come empty-handed, without the possessions they had been ordered to collect. It was as though they did not believe any of this could be quite real.

‘But most of these people,’ he said to the commanding officer, ‘the ones we’re actually moving … they seem to be all women, old men, children. Surely we should be looking for young men?’

‘Look – what’s your name? These orders come from the very top. Oh. And you do know the penalty for disobeying a direct order, don’t you?’

He thought of the dogs, feasting on the flesh of men who he had laughed with, and eaten bread with, and who had become almost like the brothers he had never had. That had been because of an Armenian. He thought of Babek’s family dwarfed by the huge war train, the boys dressed up like little men, waiting for their father to return to them: a hero.

They were to take the Armenians further east, to the very edges of the Ottoman Empire, toward the border with Persia. These were their orders; from the highest echelons of the War Office in Constantinople. A ‘rehoming’: this was the term used, apparently. But the area to which they would be moved was known only for its hostility to life: a desert place, a no-place. No one could be expected to make a life there. Yet he could not summon the indignation that he expected to feel, that he might once have felt. It was as though the cold had got deep inside him and frozen any repository of emotion. There was a barrier beyond which he could not go; a numbness.

Besides, Babek had not been given the chance to live. And his old life had been taken from him. He had witnessed events that had changed him, irrevocably. So perhaps it was no unexpected thing that he could not find the empathy he might once have felt. At least these people would be given an opportunity to make a new life, slim though it was. Wasn’t that more than he and Babek and all those other frozen corpses had been allotted?

So he no longer complained, no longer questioned, when they marched into the desert with the elderly and very young, the sick, the unfit, the pregnant mothers and newborn babies.