Читать книгу The Crossing Place: A Journey among the Armenians - Philip Marsden - Страница 8

One summer, walking in the hills of eastern Turkey, I came across a short piece of bone. It was lodged in the rubble of a landslip and had clearly been there for many years. I rubbed its chalky surface and examined the worn bulbs of the joint; I took it to be the limb of some domestic animal and dropped it into my pocket.

Beyond the rubble, the land fell away to a dusty valley which coursed down to the plain of Kharput. The plain was hazy and I could just make out a truck bowling across it, kicking up a screen of pale dust in its wake. I carried on down the valley. It was a strange, still place and rounding a bluff, I stumbled on the ruins of a village. A shepherd was squatting in the shade of a tumbled-down wall, whistling. I showed him the piece of bone and gestured at the ruins around him.

The shepherd nodded, wiping together his palms in an unambiguous gesture. He said simply, ‘Ermeni.’ Then he took the bone and threw it to his dog.

Ermeni: the Armenians. The guide books hardly mentioned the Armenians. No one mentioned the Armenians, yet everywhere I went over the coming weeks, every valley of that treeless Anatolian plateau, was haunted by them. Arriving one morning on the shores of Lake Van, I took a boat to the island of Aghtamar. The island had once been the court of an Armenian king, the centre of a tiny realm squeezed between Persia and Byzantium, but now it was uninhabited.

Continuing north, around the lower slopes of Mount Ararat, I came to the ruins of the Armenian city of Ani. Its extraordinary thousand-year-old cathedral, in no man’s land between the Turkish and Soviet borders, was open to the sky, shelter for three ill-looking sheep. A long way up a gorge near Digor, I found an Armenian church so perfect in its design that at first I did not notice its collapsing roof, nor the gaps in its walls.

I left Anatolia with a clutch of half-answered questions. Who were these people, and what had happened? I knew about as much as most – that the Turks had done something terrible in the First World War, that Armenia was the first Christian nation, that it had hovered for centuries on the fringes of the classical world. But it was not an explanation. Everything that I learnt about the Armenians only served to deepen the mystery, to make them more surprising, more enigmatic.

The following year I was travelling through northern Syria and came across an archaeologist in Aleppo. He knew a good deal about the Armenians and one afternoon took me to meet Torkom, an elderly Armenian lawyer with a bony face and deep-set blue eyes. Torkom lived alone, at the top of a set of winding stairs. His room was dark and musty and filled with books. A few glass-fronted cases had been built into the wall for manuscripts and they glowed with a yellowy light; they looked like preserved organs in laboratory jars.

When he heard I was interested in the Armenians, Torkom peered at me suspiciously.

‘Why?’

I said I’d been to eastern Anatolia.

‘Yes?’ I told him about the cathedral at Ani and the church at Digor. I told him about the bone and the ruined villages and he shrugged as if to say: ‘What do you expect?’

But when I mentioned Lake Van, he said, ‘My family was from Van. You see my eyes? I have Van eyes – deep blue.’

‘Like the lake,’ I said. He smiled and led me into a back room. A photograph of Mount Ararat hung on one wall. Beneath it was a large desk, covered in papers.

‘Do you know anything about the marches?’ he asked.

‘Very little.’

He opened one of the drawers and handed me the xerox copy of a hand-drawn map. Years of interviews had gone into that map, he said. He had collaborated with an Armenian truck driver who knew every town and village of northern Syria, and they had spliced the oral information with the few written records to draw the map. It looked to me somewhat like a tidal chart: a mass of arrows curling and twisting down the page. But the arrows, when I looked closely, were overlaid on a map of the Near East and they all pointed in more or less the same direction, away from Anatolia, south towards the Syrian desert.

I spent the following day in Torkom’s library.

On 24 April 1915 the Turkish authorities arrested Constantinople’s six hundred leading Armenians. They rounded up another five thousand from the city’s Armenian quarters. Few of these people were ever seen again.

In the interior Turkish forces began to deport the Armenians. Torkom showed me the published report of one of the only foreigners who had witnessed what these deportations really meant. Leslie Davis had been the American consul in Kharput. He had watched the Armenian groups come and go, and had listened to the rumours. Since it was wartime his movements were severely restricted and he had been unable to confirm what he heard. But one morning before dawn he managed to slip out of the town. He rode on to the plain of Kharput.

And wherever he rode he saw the Armenians. They were casually buried in the roadside ditches, their limbs half eaten by scavenging dogs; he saw the heaps of charred bones where the remains had been burned; he saw the swollen bodies of the newly dead and in places they lay so thickly in the dirt that his horse had difficulty avoiding them. As the day wore on, Davis rode further into the hills. He reached the shores of Lake Goeljuk. Here, in the valleys leading down to the lake, the scene was the same: corpses scattered amidst the thornscrub, bunched together in their hundreds – at the foot of cliffs, in gorges, in the hidden folds of land.

Those who weren’t killed at once were gathered into convoys and driven south. These were the marches. Davis had managed to compile an account of just one of these dismal convoys; it had left Kharput on 1 July 1915:

Day 1	3000 Armenians leave Kharput. Escort of seventy zaptieh under command of Faiki Bey.
Day 2	Faiki Bey levies 400 lira from convoy for its safety. Faiki Bey disappears.
Day 3	First women and girls taken by Kurds. Open violation by zaptieh.
Day 9	All horses sent back to Kharput.
Day 13	200 lira levied by zaptieh. Zaptieh disappear.
Day 15	Kurdish ‘guard’ take 150 men and butcher them, then rob convoy. Joined by another convoy from Sivas. Numbers swell to 18000.
Days 25–34	Harassed by villagers. Many women taken.
Day 40	Eastern Euphrates. Blood-stained clothes on river-bank; 200 bodies in water. Armenians forced to pay to avoid being thrown in river.
Day 52	Kurds take everything, including clothes.
Day 52–9	Naked, without food or water. Women bent double from shame. Hundreds die beneath hot sun. Forced to pay for water. Money hidden in hair, mouth, genitals. Many throw themselves into the wells. Arab villagers give them pieces of cloth out of pity.
Day 60	300 remain from 18000.
Day 64	Men and the sick burned to death.
Day 70	150 arrive in Aleppo.

When I rose after several hours of reading such accounts, I felt dazed and numb. I walked back into the centre of Aleppo, through the high, narrow streets with their 1950s cars and the clattering souks. But I could not erase the images of the massacres. I carried on walking until well after dark and by the time I returned to my hotel had decided to try and find out more. One place in particular had struck me – a certain cave at Shadaddie. I rearranged my plans: I took Torkom’s map and a letter of introduction and left Aleppo for the desert.

South from the town of Hassakeh, the road ran straight ahead of the bus for mile upon mile. It dipped and rose and tapered towards a low horizon, but did not change direction. Beside it the telegraph poles echoed into the distance until the heat-haze dissolved everything into a shimmering mass. On Torkom’s map, Shadaddie was no more than a dot in the desert. A thin arrow pointed down to it from Ras ul-Ain. Now it has become an oil-drilling station and in one of the pre-fab homes I found a technician who nodded when I gave him Torkom’s letter: yes, he knew about the cave.

The technician drove me out of the town in a battered jeep. I sat half-hidden in the back and at the checkpoints crouched down behind the seat; we were now close to the Iraqi border and the oilfields were well guarded.

A dry wind swept through the flaps of the jeep. It sped out across the desert and into the jumble of hillocks ahead. It was a cool, unrelenting wind and in places it had scoured the sand from the bedrock and the quartzite gleamed beneath it as white as bone. Nothing grew here. The only things that moved were the lifeless profiles of the nodding-donkey pumps. We left the road and slowed on to a rutted track. All around it were the egg-like shapes of compacted dunes. We bumped along the track until the dunes gave way to a wide depression. The technician stopped the jeep and pulled on the handbrake. Lighting a cigarette, he pointed into the hollow.

Flash-floods had cut a deep gulch which pushed down into the rock below. I followed its dry pipe-like channel to where it opened out suddenly into the mouth of a cave. Peering into the cave-mouth, I could see the chamber spread out as if from the lantern of a dome. I dropped down onto a damp, muddy floor. Three startled doves flew out through the skylight. At the foot of one wall, where the sun fell on it, was a green cushion of moss. Down to one side a passage led away into the darkness. The air was warm and heavy and I felt that here, if anywhere, was the Armenian story – hidden inside a muddy cupola, in an area sealed off by state secrecy, tucked away and buried in a hollow amongst a thousand other hollows, beneath the crust of a desert that stretched for hundreds and hundreds of miles in every direction. Here was where Armenia had ended.

I turned on a torch and went down the passage. There was no sign at all of what had happened, nothing to show that it had ever been anything but a vast storm-drain for the desert.

But for the zaptieh, it had provided a ready-made solution. As the mountains were emptied of Armenians so the Syrian desert filled up. The order came from Constantinople to clean up the area. All sorts of methods were adopted. Shooting was slow. Some were driven into the river. A great many simply perished from disease and hunger and thirst. Shadaddie provided its own natural apparatus. The passage was very long and very roomy.

The guards brought the Armenians here and pushed them in by the thousand; as more fell in so the first ones were forced down the passage. Then the guards dragged scrub to the entrance and set fire to it. That night they kept a watch over the cave, camping on the edge of the hollow. Then they returned to the town.

They might have got away with it (are there other Shadaddies that went unreported?), had a young boy not been able to get enough air from the depths of the tunnel to survive and, three days later, to crawl over the bodies and the ashes of the fire, back up to the desert.

The passage went on, curving and dipping in ways I could only imagine. I could see little in the yellow tube of light. The air became still and I could no longer feel the breeze from the entrance. I felt drawn on into the tunnel by a strange irresponsible urge. Each footfall seemed to take me further from the familiar. I felt a huge emptiness behind me – but a bigger one in front. I was trespassing, a grave-robber motivated by something darker than greed: I was driven by curiosity. I knew there was nothing I would find, but I carried on. I carried on without really thinking. I carried on because to turn back was to lose what there was left of Armenia.

My feet slid and splashed through unseen puddles. I steadied myself with a hand on the damp wall. I could feel the tunnel narrow and I began to stoop. Then one foot slipped on a mud bank and the torch spun out of my hand; it clanged against a rock and went out.

For several minutes I squatted there, quite still. I passed a hand in front of my face, and saw nothing. I turned my head one way and then the other, and soon did not know from which way I had come. I tried to imagine the smell of smoke seeping down the tunnel, and the noise – would there have been hysteria, or simply quiet resignation? Mothers murmuring for their children in the void, the few men too broken to care, the tangled bodies, the slow suffocation …

For an instant I felt the cave spin around me. Submerged by the horror it had witnessed, I was suddenly disoriented.

It passed almost at once. I crouched and ran my hands around my feet, probing for the torch, wrist-deep in the slimy clay, pushing through the cave’s damp and formless floor. My fingers struck something hard. I clutched it and with the other hand found the torch, several yards away. I thought it must be another bone but when I switched on the torch it turned out to be a large crystal – five inches of transparent calcite in the shape of an arrowhead.

Outside again, the Armenian technician clapped a hand on my shoulder and smiled for the first time. He was worried I’d got lost. He lit another cigarette and started up the jeep. I wrapped the crystal in a scarf and buried it away in my bag. It seemed an appropriate relic from the cave: Armenia may have died here, but something survived. A year or so later, in Israel, I took it with my unanswered questions to Jerusalem.

The old city of Jerusalem, the holiest square mile on earth, is divided into four distinct quarters. Three of the quarters – the Jewish, Christian and Muslim quarters – represent the great monotheistic faiths that have sanctified and fought over the city for hundreds of years. The fourth quarter is the Armenian quarter.

That the Armenians have survived in this, the most intense of all cities, is proof of their extraordinary resilience. The Armenian quarter is in fact the longest established of them all – and it remains the most secretive. Much of it lies within its own high walls, where the laity live cheek-by-jowl with the monastic order of St James. It is closed to visitors and only for half an hour each day are non-Armenians allowed inside to visit the cathedral.

Peering into the side chapel of St James, which contains those of the saint’s limbs which did not reach Compostela, I heard a voice behind me.

‘Can I be of any help?’

A man with black-rimmed glasses introduced himself as George Hintlian, the community’s historian. I told him I had seen Ani and Digor and that I had brought something from the cave at Shadaddie.

‘I could tell you were not interested just in the cathedral.’

‘How could you tell?’

‘I could just tell.’

He took me up to his office and I laid the calcite crystal on his desk. He smiled and shook his head in disbelief. ‘Let me show you around the quarter.’

For several hours we wandered through a labyrinth of crypts and alleys and sunny courtyards. He took me up over the roofs and in amongst the cloisters to meet the monks, and when I left he said, ‘If ever you want to find out more about the Armenians, why not come and spend some time here with us?’

I left the crystal with George and within eighteen months I was back. My Armenian questions would not go away. I told George I wanted to get to Armenia and he said he could help. I stayed in Jerusalem for a few months, in a small, vaulted room on the border of the Jewish and Armenian quarters. The city was tense; Kuwait had just been invaded and all talk that autumn revolved around the likelihood of war. Jerusalem waited. The Israelis waited and the Palestinians waited; the Armenians waited between them. I waited – all the time planning a roundabout journey to Armenia, to seek out the Armenian communities that appeared to be scattered throughout the Middle East and Eastern Europe.

I took daily lessons in Armenian with a polyglot monk, took long walks with George, talked to everyone I could, and spent the rest of the time among the books of the Gulbenkian Library. I visited the Armenian community in Jaffa and a fifth-century Armenian monastery in the Judean desert; I spent a week with the Armenians of Cairo. And I realized more and more that the Armenian story was not so much one of massacre and persecution, as survival.

The first princes of Armenia had emerged in central and eastern Anatolia about six centuries before Christ. Five hundred years later, Armenia stretched fleetingly all the way from the Mediterranean to the Caspian Sea. At other times during these centuries the Armenian rulers paid tribute to the Persians, to Byzantium, to the Baghdad caliph, or some combination of the three. Even in these years Armenia’s survival seemed improbable. Lying always on the fringes not only of opposing powers but opposing beliefs, the Armenians would adhere to no one’s ideas but their own. In AD301 the Armenian King Trdat III became the first ruler to adopt Christianity – while in Rome the worst persecutions of Christians were yet to come.

When some years later Constantine chose the outlawed cult to be the cornerstone of Byzantine theocracy and the world’s greatest empire, the Armenians still stuck to their own interpretation. In 451, at the Council of Chalcedon, the Byzantine bishops agreed some sort of Christian orthodoxy; the Armenians didn’t even turn up – they were too busy fighting off the Sassanid Persians.

Even the earth itself seemed to conspire against them. Within a few hundred miles of Ani are the borders of half of the world’s twelve major tectonic plates. In a single earthquake in the ninth century, seventy thousand were recorded as having been killed in one Armenian town alone.

Yet during this first Christian millennium, between the earthquakes and invasions, between the Mazdaeans, Manichaeans, Muslims, dyophysites and dualists, the Armenians emerged briefly to stage brilliant half centuries of their own, writing and building with passionate skill, before being stifled again by some rampant horde. In the ninth century Armenia emerged again as an independent state, centred on the city of Ani. I had caught a scent of that city’s genius, sitting in its ruined cathedral a few years before. At one time Ani was bigger than most European cities. But in 1064 the Seljuk Turks swept up out of Asia and sacked it.

What should have happened then to this small people, occupying as it does the perennial buffer between empires, the most routed, trampled-over region on earth, was a gradual assimilation into its bigger and more powerful neighbours. Its scattered families should have struggled on for a couple of generations in exile, clinging proudly to traditions before intermarriage consigned them to history’s roll of honour: a set of dusty ruins on the Anatolian plateau and some glass cases in the British Museum.

Instead the Armenian princes travelled five hundred miles to the south-west. There in the lee of the Taurus mountains, in Cilicia, they established a new Armenian kingdom. Many of those who didn’t flee and who weren’t killed by earthquakes nor slaughtered during the Seljuk invasion, but who remained on the land, were driven in 1604 by the Safavid Shah Abbas down into Persia. And those who survived both the Seljuks and Shah Abbas, and who didn’t drift away beyond the Ottoman empire, who weren’t killed in the pogroms of the 1890s, nor those of 1909, but who stayed in the villages, were rounded up in 1915, pushed down one of history’s dark side-alleys and murdered.

More than a million Armenians died in the last years of the Ottoman empire, a half of Anatolia’s total. The Turks had managed to do what numerous powers had tried before them: they managed to finish Armenia, though not the Armenians. In most of the world’s cities you can find Armenians – Armenian newspapers in Armenian script, Armenian restaurants. In exile the Armenians are curiously resilient; only the Jews have resisted assimilation as fiercely. In the mountains of Colombia there is a small town actually named Armenia where they serve ‘Antioch-style’ beans. In Paris the first-ever café was opened in 1672 by an Armenian, as it had been earlier in Vienna, by the same Armenian spy who had helped break the Turkish siege. At the siege of Vienna the Polish King Jan’s private doctor had been an Armenian, as was the doctor to the harem of Akbar the Great, the Mogul emperor whose adopted Armenian son was regarded by the Jesuits in India as the greatest poet of his time.

The ‘Polish Byron’, Słowacki, had an Armenian mother, as does the chess-master Garry Kasparov, as did Gurdjieff, as did the Abbasid Caliph al-Mustadi who ruled the entire Arab world during the twelfth century, except for Egypt where a few years earlier Armenian vizirs held power, and Jerusalem where the hereditary Crusader rulers had long had Armenian blood coursing through their royal veins. When Richard the Lionheart was married, in Cyprus, his best man was an Armenian; the last king of Armenian Cilicia, exiled in France, taught the French king to play chess. It has even been suggested that the Man in the Iron Mask was none other than the Armenian patriarch of Constantinople.

The first yoghurt in the United States was manufactured by the Armenian family Columbissian. The particular green ink of the US dollar bills was developed by an Armenian, as was the MiG jet, named after Mikoyan, whose brother was the longest-standing member of Stalin’s Politburo, and the first to denounce him. Abel Aghanbekyan, an Armenian economist, produced the blueprint for perestroika.

They shouldn’t really exist at all. They should have been destroyed, written out of history by its worst horrors. But they have survived. Instead of a footnote to the story of these border regions, the Armenians can be read like a kind of subtext.

With the Gulf War imminent, the Soviet Union crumbling and Eastern Europe in a state of dangerous uncertainty, it seemed the perfect time to set off around the Armenian diaspora, to try and reach Armenia itself. I prepared to leave Jerusalem.

In the library of the Armenian quarter, tacked to the wall, were the lines of the Armenian writer William Saroyan:

I should like to see any power of the world destroy this race, this small tribe of unimportant people, whose wars have all been fought and lost, whose structures have all crumbled, literature is unread, music is unheard, and prayers are no more answered. Go ahead, destroy Armenia. See if you can do it. Send them into the desert without food or water. Burn their homes and churches. Then see if they will not laugh, sing and pray again. For when two of them meet anywhere in the world, see if they will not create a New Armenia.

Wondering what Saroyan meant by a ‘New Armenia’, and wondering what remained of the old, I said goodbye and left the monastary on a damp December evening. I headed for Venice, where there had been an Armenian community for more than eight hundred years.