LAKE VAN,
TURKISH ARMENIA, 1915

Minas bent over his history books, steeling himself to forget it was spring, to ignore the soft, painful scents of plum trees and dry grass, the niggling reminder of other boys on the bank of the lake, slippery in the setting sun. He could hear their shouts carrying through the evening quiet to his window, where he sat hunched over the narrow ledge with his schoolbooks spread before him, Papa’s blunt nib seeping in the margins. He knew he could be punished for this by his teacher, but also knew it wouldn’t be severe, as he was displaying initiative and individualism, both prized above anything else by his American teacher at the mission school.

To date, the glorious Ottoman Empire spans the Caucasus to Eastern Anatolia and as far as the Balkans, he wrote. Unfortunately, the Great War has put a stop to any further imperialist ambitions. The Allies are doing enough of that. He put the pen down, chin on hand. The other boys’ shouts grew raucous. He picked up his pen again, inked out glorious.

Lilit came through the door, waving goodbye with her kerchief to someone who had only just run past below the hedge; she was still laughing, flushed with heat and vanity and the small, sweet deceits of her afternoon. Minas straightened up, peering through the cracked and flawed pane.

‘Who was that, chasing you to the front door of our house?’

‘Nobody. Anyway, Mr Nosey, you’re too young to question me about what I do.’

‘Wait till Mamma gets home and you’ll have something to worry about. Mincing around here in your red shoes.’

She poked out her tongue, admiring the bright wooden clogs she wore, pointing her toe rudely toward him. He refrained from his desire to hit her, retreating into lofty disdain. He hadn’t much respect for her nowadays; she was out all the time, neglecting her chores, hiding in overgrown thickets and caves with her boyfriend. He even saw her at it once, moaning and licking at this boy’s face, eyes closed against the world. He came upon them by accident, glad they hadn’t spied him and relieved to escape without a thrashing. They were high on the slope of the mountain, under the shelter of cliff-side carvings his teacher told him dated from the Bronze Age. Etched designs of knowledge trees and streams of wisdom. Spiral suns and moons shaped like curving prows, for navigating sweeter dreams. Van cats with eyes of blue and amber; every beast of field and steppe. Such beasts, his sister and that boy. It disgusted him, Lilit’s open need, the slight whimpers she made as she turned her head from side to side.

Now she tore a thick crescent from the bread on the table and devoured it, keeping half an eye on him.

‘Hey, I just baked that! It’s all we have for tonight.’

She ignored him, proceeding to swallow her last morsel and tear another piece from the ashy, still-warm disc.

‘Mmm. Needs some oil and honey, I think—’

He couldn’t let her get away with this. He bounded in front of her and grabbed her high up near the armpit. The bread fell to the ground and she fell with it, gasping, still laughing, tickling him hard until he fell on top of the bread too and bellowed at her to stop with breathless, wound-up cries.

They scrambled to their feet in a sudden shadow cast from the open door. It was Mamma.

‘What is going on here? I leave you two alone for an hour and what do I see?’

Minas picked up the bread from the ground and put it on the table again, giving the edges little pats here and there to squash it back into place.

Lilit lay with Yervan in his father’s stables. Sounds all around were muted: the low cackle of a broody hen, rustling of straw – ‘It could be rats,’ she whispered, but he shook his head – the high, limpid call of the shepherd to his few remaining lambs. She was almost content here, Yervan’s arm strong around her waist, her head carved into the curve of his shoulder. Yet at the same time not completely content; she didn’t like his attention to be somewhere other than on her.

She’d traversed fields of green-capped wheat to come to his house, afraid of being seen by a relative or neighbour on the main road and questioned. She was especially wary of Yervan’s father seeing her on his property, making haste as she climbed the fence to run toward the stables. The old man had been heard to say he would kill the boy himself before he saw him married to a Pakradounian, with no dowry to speak of and a mother who read American books when she should have been bearing sons.

Her skirt was soaked through to her drawers by the dew that lay thick on the crops even at noon; spring had arrived late this year and the earth still retained the damp and danger of winter. Her eyes were dazzled by the intensity of wild poppies and anemones thrusting out of the grass. She picked a few of the reddest for Yervan, and took off her sodden skirt when she arrived, as well as her stockings. There they lay now, faintly human still from the imprint of her legs, crumpled from being peeled off in such haste. She wondered if they were dry enough to wear again, although she luxuriated in this half-nudity, Yervan’s rough wool sleeve against the smoothness of her belly.

She sat up and checked on her stockings, feeling the dampness of fabric between thumb and forefinger. The anemones were limp now, already shedding their petals. Yervan moved his body a little to the left, finding a more comfortable position. She took the flowers and began pulling the heads off poppies, scattering them over his face and torso. Yervan didn’t stir. He lay on his back, eyes wide open, looking beyond the vaulted roof to something else. His mastiff slept beside him, snoring gently in its dreams, and Yervan kept one hand on the dog’s coarse flank.

She lay down again, throwing petals at his hair. If she moved her head a little to the right she could see his profile: too close, even painful, the edges of brow and nose and chin sharp against the fading light. He didn’t respond to her, merely kept gazing far away, his face still and unmoving at her side with its fall of crimson.

All afternoon he’d been that way, refusing to caress her when she undressed, not talking much, sighing too often. She had lain like that for hours now, shivering, exposed, and he hadn’t said anything at all. No compliments. Not even pleasantries. Selfish. Wrapped in his big man’s thoughts, while she curled up beside him, freezing. And hungry. There wasn’t much food left at home anymore, what with Kurds coming on midnight raids and the Turks taking the spoils. Shopkeepers in Van had barricaded their doors and windows to no avail. The peasants in Garden City could do nothing when they woke in the morning to find all their fruit and vegetables gone. Yet Yervan’s parents were rumoured to have stockpiles. People even whispered they were collaborators.

‘I must go,’ Lilit said. ‘Mamma will be home soon.’

He continued to look upward, not heeding her movements as she rose and pulled on her skirt, an old velvet jacket far too tight, so she looked awkward when she walked and tried to swing her arms. It was not like him to ignore anything she did. She bundled one of her breasts further into her blouse and leaned over him.

‘Yervan? I said I’m going.’

He passed a hand over his eyes, scowled at nothing in particular.

‘I’m sorry, Lilit, I just feel so lazy – and what’s the point of anything?’

She laughed, but not too loudly in case someone should hear.

‘Has your papa been waking you too early for the chores?’

‘No—no. He lets me sleep late when I’m not at school. But—I’m not well, I think.’

She bent down further, felt a wave of concern flood her face.

‘Do you have pain?’

She pressed her palm to his forehead, pulled up his shirt to expose his belly.

‘No, no pain. I think I’m—frightened. In my stomach and my head. Did you know the Armenians in the army have had their weapons confiscated? Papa told me they’ll just be killed now.’

‘Why would they do that, Yervan? The Muslims need us, always have. We’re smarter than them.’

She scoffed at his fears and left, after kissing him on the mouth and demanding they meet tomorrow at the same time. The skin of her forearms prickled with impatience. As she turned to go, Yervan yelled after her, heedless of any farmhands hearing him.

‘Lilit! I’m worried you and I are doing the wrong thing and we’ll be punished for it too.’

The dog followed her to the boundary of his master’s property, as if seeing her safely away, but she ignored him as she had ignored Yervan. Surely he was being silly, too sensitive. As if God were an irascible old prude, with nothing better to do than punish people who loved each other! Yet when she walked, scuffing her clogs on the gravel like any child, she wondered if Yervan was right. If God wouldn’t punish them, the Turks would.

Now she’d seen him, she was somewhat bolder and scorned the wet way home through the fields. It was quicker to pass the central square but she didn’t look in the shop windows as she always did. She was already late. Mamma might be home already, and Minas was sure to tell. Also, there were more soldiers than usual crowding the middle of the square, loitering near the bakery, squatting on their haunches with cigarettes as if their time was their own. Of course they were all Turks. A pair got up when they saw her and pretended to be on duty, tearing down some flaking insurgents’ posters from the walls. Better ten days’ liberty than to die the slaves we’ve been. She tried to avoid them by walking fast and keeping her head down. She couldn’t help noticing the others tearing at freshly baked loaves, fluffy and white and unlike any bread she had seen in a long while, cramming it into their mouths. Others held simit, the ring-shaped sesame rolls she remembered Papa bringing home on winter evenings when she was a child. Before this war raging through all of Europe, before the Turks had taken over the town. It was all she could do not to beg them to give her one.

She didn’t like the way the soldiers looked at her. Is it wrong to let Yervan touch me? Can they see it? Their stares confirmed her suspicions. They lingered too long on the flex of her breasts and arms, on her blackbright hair under a brighter scarf. She reddened, looked down at her feet. She knew Turks were afraid of blue eyes, thought they could cast evil spells. Who knew what they would do to her if they took it into their heads she was a witch? An Armenian witch. They kept staring. One soldier’s fists were clenched at his sides. Lilit turned away. She began to stride over the cobblestones – hard to do in clogs. One Turk stood and leapt in front, barring her way.

‘Hey, little one,’ he said, stretching his arms out wide.

She dodged him, but now there were others all around, laughing at her and shouting in Turkish.

‘Pretty whore! Pretty unbeliever!’

She crossed her arms over her chest, tried to find a way out of the crush of men’s bodies, their sweat, their breath.

‘Come on, gaivour, how about a look at this?’

The soldier in front made as if to unbutton his trousers. She ducked away from him, evaded grasping hands, running through the mass of stamping boots and kit and laughing faces. As she ran she could feel them pelting her with their pieces of bread.

Bread at home became blacker and coarser and Lilit’s hands hurt from kneading. She complained of it every day and Minas could see tiny cracks of blood in her knuckles when he looked hard enough. He would have baked for her but the jobs Mamma assigned him now were all out of the house. He grew tired of spotting the grains left behind on the threshing floor after the army requisitioned the town’s harvest, hauling his meagre collection onto the table before stomping out to sit in the yard, head on knees, eyes smarting.

‘Don’t whine,’ Lilit called to him, wiping the last of the grey dough from her fingers. ‘At least you’re not here when they burst in searching for arms.’

She took to hiding in the back storeroom whenever there was rumour of a search, a woollen scarf snug around her face. Minas felt sorry and brought her mugs of well water and even some of his simpler books; there was nothing else he could do. She had only finished three years of school before Mamma and Papa kept her home, so her reading of Turkish and even Armenian script was not very advanced. Minas sat with her some evenings and tried to teach her the harder words, but she became petulant and flung the book to the floor. He knew she hadn’t seen Yervan for weeks. He tried to care, but couldn’t.

There was more talk of killings at night, rape by the light of a lamp. Fortunately, nothing like that had happened to anyone in the Garden City neighbourhood, or to any of their relatives in the walled town. Only the poorer folk who lived near the army barracks. The streetwalkers who prowled the banks of the lake at night. The widows. The beggar women. But one could never be sure, Mamma said. So Lilit was banished to the storeroom for more and more hours each day, and Minas was ordered not to play outside with his friends from school. Most of them had joined the resistance, anyway.

Soon no one ventured out of the house unless there was no other alternative. Although Minas was considered small for his age, Mamma was afraid he would be abducted by the Turks for conscription in road gangs or labour camps, or even worse. School closed and his teacher fled to relatives far away in Dilijan, high up in the wooded mountains of the northern Caucasus. A combined force of Turks and Kurds besieged the centre of town and the Armenian insurgents hidden in basements were defeated in days. One hundred villages around Van were torched, they heard, but Mamma told Minas and Lilit not to worry, they would still be safe. Papa promised by laying his hand on his heart and poking his tongue out as he did when they were small, making them laugh despite themselves. Rings of fire danced above the trees and dyed the night sky red.

The men of Garden City still went to work each morning; they had no choice. The Turks had already conscripted Armenians to fight against the Russians in the Caucasus, against the British in Syria and Palestine. Minas had stood with Papa and watched them march by the house a year ago on their way to the front, in dun-coloured uniforms, proud rifles over their shoulders. One of the conscripts, a Syrian Arab, looked as young as Minas, though he must have been fourteen at least. He was being used as a hamal, a human beast of burden loaded down with supplies. He stumbled a little in his cast-off boots and a Turkish officer pushed him down into the mud with a foot between his shoulder blades. The boy spluttered and choked but the officer held him down until he lay limp and unresisting. Minas wasn’t so frightened by the boy’s pain as by Papa’s reaction; he staggered to the table and placed his head in his hands as if he had already seen too much.

‘If they’re doing this to their Muslim brothers, imagine what they’ll do to us.’

Minas was glad his father couldn’t go to war. The Turks had taken four hundred of Van’s men already; now they asked for four thousand. Those who stayed home, like Papa, had a trade to offer. They were not paid in liras anymore, only in bread. Sometimes the flat loaf was slightly warm when Papa brought it home. More often than not it was stale, dry and tasteless. Whatever it was Papa would bring it out from under his jacket, place it on the table like an offering torn from his own body. He broke apart morsels that became ever smaller as the weeks went by, until they were insubstantial, almost transparent. Equal portions for everyone, and one extra ration for Papa, because he had to force his poor body to get up each morning and trudge to work. They ate in silence without chewing, swallowing the wafer pieces whole. Bread had become a symbol, a communion, a commodity more precious than truth.

Soon came a time when Papa did not arrive home with any bread at the end of the day. Before the war he’d been a jeweller, and a successful one at that, designing heavy collars studded with mother-of-pearl, repoussé earrings, wedding bands, showing Minas how to mould and twist white-hot threads of silver and gold. Now he was fortunate to find any work of that kind at all. In his spare time, he made ammunition for the freedom fighters from spent cartridges and shells. More and more he couldn’t come home until the next morning, staying late if he was lucky to mend a travelling clock at a Turkish officer’s townhouse or tinkering with the mechanism of a lady’s watch.

‘Stupid Mussulmen,’ Mamma scoffed. ‘They do everything topsyturvy. Sleep at noon and work at midnight.’

Minas gasped as though his mother had uttered a blasphemy.

‘Keep quiet! Who knows if they’re listening?’

He knew from his studies that Muslims considered noon, not midnight, to be the most evil hour of the day, the time when the devil on his flaming horse could gallop away with the whole world on its back. At noon, he was foiled each time by the call of the muezzin, proclaiming Allah is great and banishing the devil with fear of God’s name. He had studied Islam at school; he knew the names of the holy caliphs better than those of his Orthodox saints. He knew the histories of the Prophet’s battles, knew of his flight to Medina. Mamma told him the story of the Christian Virgin on her journey from Egypt, burdened with a sacred pregnancy and her fluttering human fear. Something in him wanted to draw parallels, excited by common threads and like mistakes.

Now he stopped studying at night, as there were no candles or kerosene for the lamp. Mamma had used all the olive oil in her cooking long ago. The only light came from the fire, burnt down to staring red embers in the tonir. On the rare times it flamed up into brightness, for an instant he could make out the carvings on their ceiling cornices: picture histories of hermits and stocky angels, Byzantine dragons with tight mouths and curled tails. He was no longer afraid of them, as he’d been when he was a little boy; there were other, darker pictures to be afraid of now. He put aside his schoolbooks, running his finger down the length of each spine as he arranged them one by one on the windowsill.

Four Turkish regiments advanced on Van with artillery when the Armenians refused to deliver more men for their labour battalions. By now, even Lilit believed that conscription was another word for murder. Van was transformed into a garrison town, with soldiers throwing people out of their houses and moving in. The irregulars were the most feared; soldiers of fortune who claimed no responsibility to government or country, able to commit any atrocity without reprisal. Bombs fell on orphanages and churches. Even Minas’s Protestant missionary school, its American and Red Cross flags a half-hearted bid for protection, burnt to the ground. Refugees from outlying villages came swarming into Aykesdan, bringing epidemic diseases with them. They babbled in dialect, eager to speak their pain – only three out of three hundred villagers of Rashva have escaped; all but one of the monks on the fabled island have perished – but the Van women, Mamma and Lilit too, soothed them with childish songs and dressed their wounds, silencing such words with tea and clucking sounds, unable to hear what lay in store for themselves.

Minas knew there was no point in learning history any longer from his schoolbooks. Now he dug trenches with the other boys around Aykesdan, watched the fighters use mud walls and orchard terraces as fortified outposts. They only had enough provisions, ammunition and weaponry to last until the Russians came to liberate them. The northern advance was their only hope. Minas walked about mouthing it, Mamma murmured it as she wept, Lilit sang it with hope settling like a sawtoothed stone in her chest. They had to hold Van against the Turks until then. Papa was withdrawn, merely stumbling home at dusk or dawn to sit at the window and make ammunition from the scrap tin Minas gathered.

There were hardly any young men left after the last conscriptions and defeats. Or any weapons either. All they had were hunting guns, antiquated matchlock rifles and Mausers unearthed from cellars, rusty from misuse. Minas sensed the trap closing in. The god of oracles and dreams had brushed Minas with folded wings, Mamma used to say. Even at birth, this scribe and recording angel had whispered close in his ear. The one whose role among many was to register when someone was going to die.

Soon there were no more grains to glean from cropped fields and barn floors. Planting had been stopped, with such terror stalking the land. Now what little threshing to do was over, and the workers had gone home after their Turkish overlords had taken everything, even rusting tools. ‘Could be used as weapons,’ they muttered to the Kurds, encouraging them to see Armenians as a cow to milk, nothing more.

Minas saw fresh new posters pasted on walls and fences. Words daubed in haste and a drawing of a fat cow with an Armenian face. ‘Turkey for the Turks.’ The artist had made sure to make the nose large and crooked, the expression of lips and eyes furtive. Minas tore down the first poster he saw, weeks ago now, as red paint ran to the ground in puddles. There were flyers on every Turk’s doorstep: ‘The Armenians are enemies of our religion, our history, our honour. You must buy nothing from an Armenian or from anyone who looks Armenian.’ He ripped up every one he saw. When he told his father what he had done he’d been scolded. ‘Leave your energy for important things,’ Papa said. Minas went to bed that night seething. Even his own father was weak.

Now there were no more cows in Van, or sheep or goats for that matter. They had gone to find the mules and horses that vanished months ago. The only animals flourishing now among the filth of abandoned homes and bivouacking soldiers were cats, beloved pets turned strays, Van breeds with eyes of startling colours and no fear of water. Rumour was that people were catching them like fish as they swam in the lake, roasting them with salt and grass. Minas had visions of skinned carcasses, thin as rats without their fur. Rumour also had the new governor of Van, Djevet Bey, throwing his victims into burlap sacks with the starving animals, until they were bitten and clawed to death. Mamma refused to believe it, telling Minas and Lilit it was impossible for someone to be so evil – even a Turk.

Yet Minas knew it was the truth. ‘The Armenians must be exterminated,’ Djevet Bey had said in a recent proclamation. ‘If any Muslim protects a Christian, first, his house shall be burnt, then the Christian killed before his eyes, then his family and himself.’ He had visions of being lacerated, a skinned carcass himself, screams muffled by folds of fabric. His pet lamb was now skin and bone as well; Papa glanced at it more than once with a knowing look in his eyes but Minas threw himself onto the animal, pleading with Papa not to kill it. The lamb bleated, as if aware of the daily danger of being alive. Minas knew it was only a matter of days before he too would welcome the meat.

Lilit stopped baking at home other than on the rare times she was traded dried corn by Kurdish nomads trawling through town knocking on doors, willing to barter. Women with grinning faces and stumps of teeth; Minas couldn’t help but discern a sneering complicity in their false smiles. See what you Armenians have been reduced to. A handful of husks in exchange for a piece of Lilit’s dowry. Stiff linen meant for bridal sheets and pillowcases, embroidered squares of peach-coloured silk. A hank of wool she’d been planning to make into a vest for her shadowy, future husband. Yervan? No weddings now. Wiser to trade cloth for at least one night with a full belly. Bread was better than dreams.

She would grind corn into coarse meal then stir the mess into something like porridge, firing the solidified slab and putting it back on the tonir to be baked again. Now it was so hard Minas could throw it on the wall without it breaking apart. His gums cracked and bled from the repeated effort of chewing. His tongue grew great white blisters from the lack of fresh food, and Mamma was never home to comfort him. Nor was Lilit any longer, grown bold and reckless. ‘If we’re going to die anyway,’ she told him, ‘then what’s the point?’ She spent the daylight hours huddled in haystacks with her boyfriend, meticulous in making sure she was home before Mamma, face passive and bemused, hands busy working with nothing.

Mamma came home from the town bakery one evening after standing in a queue all day. She had her wedding earrings to trade. They were delicate – Papa had made them from soft gold and teardrop-shaped turquoise. She thought she would be able to get enough bread for the week at least, but she came home with the square package still wrapped in her apron. Her clothes reeked of sweat and fear and Minas shrank from her when she made to touch him, as if his mere innocence would keep her safe.

‘I couldn’t stay a moment longer. People started fighting over the last loaves and I was afraid I’d get hurt.’

‘Where’s Papa?’ asked Lilit. ‘You said he’d come home with you.’

‘I couldn’t find him. I waited. Maybe he has to work all night again for the Turks. I waited some more but the people at the bakery scared me.’

Minas couldn’t stop himself.

‘What will we eat tonight, then?’

Mamma furrowed her brow, a family trait.

‘I tell you, I couldn’t wait! A Kurdish woman tapped me on the shoulder and said, The soldiers are selling Armenian orphans to the Turks as slaves. She was laughing at us.’

She couldn’t disguise the horror in her voice and Minas turned away from his own panic, standing up and banging his hand on the table as he’d seen his father do.

‘I’ll go find food. Maybe Papa. Don’t wait up for me.’

He walked down the silent cobbled streets of his childhood. Mamma had run out after him into the street, forbidding him to go. He hadn’t looked back. Never before had he been out so late at night: he, usually in bed by eight under the yellow spool of the lamp, with a plate of preserved walnuts, with his beloved books. Another time, he thought, another life. Another me. This last realisation made him painfully happy: he walked faster, straightened his shoulders and set his tender jaw.

Neighbours’ houses were strange and unfamiliar, leering at him with lighted faces, slanted Turkish eyes. He trudged his way between them, traversing fields and orchards separating the city from Aykesdan, finally stopping at the town square. The mediaeval walls of the old city grinned, conspiratorial. He regarded the empty displays of the bakery, the butcher, the seller of sweets and wine. His face reflected in curved glass, wavering, as if underwater. None of their windows were lit, not even upstairs in the sleeping quarters. A voice in his head wheedled, then spoke with authority. A food vendor never starves. He thought of ways to break into the baker’s – never liked him anyway – to steal some flour, at least. The voice egged him on. There must be sacks and sacks of it; he’ ll never miss it. His stomach ached with a hollow pain, like death.

He walked to the back of the row, in a narrow alley where refuse was thrown, where stray dogs and cats marked out their territory. They hissed and spat at him, one dog barked, half-hearted, then resumed snuffling in the filth. He filled his pockets with whatever he could find. It was hard to see in the dark. He picked up a moist cake, mouldy on one side; it could be scraped off and toasted in the fire. A worm-eaten peach the animals hadn’t yet found. He forced himself not to taste the food, even when his stomach began growling and saliva gathered thick and slow under his tongue. He’d wait till he took it home, present his gifts with a flourish to his mother and sister.

There was a noise of boots, the sharp tap tap of clubs and rifles echoing on the paving stones of the square. He fell to his knees in the rotting squelch, heard men shouting in Turkish. He crawled closer. The moon shed a weird, spectral light onto the square, houses and shops around it black, muffled, their protests mute and ineffectual. He flopped down on his belly, using his elbows to propel him closer still, hidden by the shadow of the building. The officer who could be heard shrieking sidestepped the prisoners, who now held each other’s hands like little boys. He banged his club down on the ground each time he finished a sentence. When he turned to give orders, Minas glimpsed the side of his face, an open mouth with the glitter of gold eye-teeth in the moon’s gleam.

The officer directed his men to prepare the prisoners. Minas’s blood battered in his veins, thrashing through his arms, into his heavy, useless legs. Prepare for what? He watched the Armenians being bound to each other with thick rope. Made to hang their heads, some forced to kneel with a blow from a rifle butt or the jab of a pistol in the ribs.

He scanned the length of the company with his eyes. The butcher was there, still wearing his soiled apron. It was hiked around his waist like a skirt. Minas’s godfather, too, his spectacles smashed but still managing to balance on his face. His nose emitted a dark-brown liquid, but he didn’t wipe it away. The priest, lips moving in silent prayer. Lilit’s boyfriend was there, with a torn shirt and bloodied chest. A wet circle spread slowly at his groin. He whimpered at intervals, amplified in the acoustics made by the flat square and the amphitheatre of buildings.

Next to Yervan, a grey-haired man. One eye open wide, the other pulpy and closed, swollen from a blow. Oh, no, please God, not my Papa. He knelt with the rest of the men, his blue cap pushed low over his ears. He was stiller than the other fidgeting prisoners; he seemed to be asleep, kneeling upright, or even praying with the priest. Minas struck at his own thighs, blocks of wood. Get up! Get up, you coward! But he continued to lie flat on his belly, eyes and ears strained to every movement. He tried to catch Papa’s gaze. He watched the patient face, dwelling on it from afar, wanting to memorise every detail of its expression. He watched the men being lined up against the wall of a building, kneeling with their backs to the gendarmes and to Minas. He could no longer see Papa’s tired, trusting face. A shot rang out, echoing long on the cobblestones. One man fell, dragging those on either side down with him to the ground. Another shot. The butcher was thrown forward, his head hitting the wall. Then another. Yervan slid to the ground, neatly, as he had done everything in his life. The shots grew louder and Minas put his hands over his ears. Papa fell onto Yervan’s stomach. How could that be? He heard another shot. Not my Papa. Another shot, and another, a cacophony causing the stray dogs to throw back their massive heads and howl. He heard himself sobbing, too: a strange bubbling sound he was remotely aware of, as if coming from someone else. He didn’t hide his face, didn’t stop watching as the men were finished off in a volley of fire, slumped against each other, crushing the still-living to death with the already killed. He held his palms to his cheeks. He’d soiled himself.

The dogs grew quiet. Minas stopped crying; or at least, couldn’t hear the sucking in and out of his breath anymore. He couldn’t see Papa, his body was too entwined with other men’s limbs and the gendarmes and soldiers, standing over the bodies, poking at them with their swords, checking if they were dead. The officer drew his pistol and stared at it. For a moment Minas thought he would use it on himself. Instead he lowered it once more as he strolled around the bodies, firing a last round into each man’s head.

When he collected himself enough to run home, it was dawn. Pale light fingered the roofs of houses and tops of trees, suffusing the hills with shattered hope. As he left the town and made his way to the outskirts he came upon a withered, ancient woman sitting by the side of the road. He didn’t want to stop in case she needed help, didn’t want to look at her in case she was sympathetic to his own pain and he burst into tears again. Yet he forced himself to slow down when she raised her arm at him. Her legs were bare and swollen, as if she’d been walking for days, and she sat with them stretched out before her in the dirt. A vein on her left foot beat like a pulse. She wasn’t wearing a scarf and was completely bald, the dome of her head sunburnt and peeling. She was muttering something to herself and he bent closer, against his better judgement, to hear what she was saying.

‘Oh my sweet Virgin, help me, the Turks are coming to cut my throat.’

Her eyes were glazed, darting about and alighting on nothing.

‘My people have left me behind and fled into the mountains.’

She focused on his face for an instant and put her arm out to him again. The way she held it outstretched, so straight and still and unflinching, made him angry and frustrated and sad all at once.

‘My boy, do you know where they’ve gone? My boy?’

‘No.’

He surprised himself by kicking out at her and watching as the dust rained over her inert, lifeless legs.

‘No. Don’t bother me, old woman. I don’t know anything.’

He began running away from her.

‘No,’ he repeated. ‘No! No! No.’

He was still muttering the same denial to himself when he ran down onto the gravel road that passed his house. ‘No,’ he said, and kicked at the loose stones in front of him. ‘No,’ he repeated, louder now, as he slowed down and bent double, holding his side. ‘No,’ he murmured, panting and sweating, and it seemed the word came from somewhere outside of him.

Home appeared the same as before, squat and silent and screened by willows. He passed close to the whitewashed wall marking their southern boundary. It was a living pattern of sunshine and shadows; he remembered Lilit pointing it out to him when he was not yet at school, content to lie with her in the long grass for hours watching. Now he stopped and stared. It couldn’t be the same now Papa was gone; it should be struck down, subdued, in mourning. This happy movement was travesty. It was like any other day, a morning of no import, the sky a high blue bowl upended above him. Green summer light played on the white wall. A swallow darted back and forth, making infinitesimal alterations to its daubed nest. Feathers, twigs, mud with flecks that sparkled like the lake in the distance.

He lunged forward, hammered at the wall with his fists. This went on for a perhaps a minute, or an hour, until his knuckles were torn and bleeding. He stepped back, surveying them as if they belonged to someone else. There was no pain. The shadows continued to flicker. He put his hands down and turned his attention to the house again. The yellow shutters were closed, smoke curled in a lazy plume from the chimney. Home was ignorant of Papa’s death; smug and complacent, it couldn’t help him now. He kicked at the wall one more time, smacking at grapevines overhead as he climbed the worn steps to the front door.

His mother and sister were still up when he burst into the room, whey-faced and drawn, waiting. Mamma ran to him, shook him hard. She didn’t seem to notice his bloodied hands, the filth that stuck to his clothes. He glanced at Lilit for an instant; her eyes saw everything.

‘My son, where were you all this time?’

He lied, looking up at her wrinkled forehead.

‘As soon as I heard the news, I ran straight back to tell you, Ma.’

He told her a column of men had been taken by gendarmes and marched to the top of the hill overlooking the lake. His father was among them. He heard rumours they were being deported to a labour camp, far away into the interior of Turkey.

He watched his mother from the open door as she turned and distributed whatever she could find in the cupboards. Her movements were slow and easy, yet her face suddenly contorted in a spasm of helplessness. If it were not for the distortion of her features, he would not have thought she registered at all.

‘Did you hear me, Ma? He’s gone. He might never be back.’

She didn’t answer. She was calmer than he expected, tipping the last of their dry cornbread into his open palm and a gulp of cognac to Lilit: customary food of death and burial, though she knew nothing of what had really happened. Ancient sacrifice, came the voice in his ear and he slapped his forehead to drive the sound away.

Lilit grabbed his arm.

‘Do you know if Yervan’s among them?’

‘What do I care about your boyfriend,’ he bellowed. ‘It’s Papa I’m worried about.’

He hit her in the face, feeling all the rage and pain and disgust for the Turks who had killed his father find its outlet in the force of the blow. She stood there, unmoving, her eyes staring into his. When he drew back his hand, she untied her apron slowly. With shaking fingers and a swift glance at her mother over her shoulder, she was clattering out the door and down the path. Mamma stood in the middle of the room, holding her face in her hands. When she raised it to Minas, it was washed clean of any emotion.

‘Run after her, my boy. It’s dangerous out there.’

Lilit made for Yervan’s property. She plunged through fields of flowers, registering now at the edge of her awareness what those colours really meant, in all their shades of blood, from scarlet to deep blue, the arterial purple of emperors. Death, not love; pain in all its guises. Once they were tiny red banners of joy. Her cheek pulsed, she stripped the flowers and pressed their petals to her face.

When she got to the farm, she ran to the stable and pushed the thick doors open with both hands. Nothing. Even the hens were gone. She went to the house, her heart beating high in her throat. Maybe Yervan’s parents were merely sitting in the kitchen, drinking tea, and would frown upon a young woman bursting in on them like that. Maybe Yervan was there, too, and would not be pleased to see her like this.

She stopped in the courtyard when she saw a crumpled shape lying on the ground. There were large stones scattered about, spattered blood nearby, and the object lay like a heap of old clothes, face down. The clothes were dirty, as if they had been dragged to where they lay. She didn’t want to stop and examine the body; she already knew it was Yervan’s father from the fine gold-seamed waistcoat he wore. Nobody else could afford a waistcoat like that. Not in time of war. A beat, an instant of quiet. She could hear her blood pounding in her ears. Could she hear him trying to say something? She peered closer against her will, breathing hard. His skull had been smashed open. She felt her voice fizzing out of her in a high, crazed laugh, tried to quell the sound by clutching at her throat. ‘Oh my God, my God,’ she could hear herself screeching. ‘Yervan’s father’s been stoned by the Turks.’ Her voice was long and loud in the silence. ‘Oh my God, my God,’ she whispered, and the hysterical laughter burst out again until she vomited the bread her mother had given her into the dust at the dead man’s feet.

She sat on the dirt next to him for a long time. She made the sign of the cross, once, twice, three times, and her wrists were shaking so much she had to repeat the ritual a fourth, a fifth time before she did it properly. She gathered her strength and got up, drawing her scarf over her shoulders, mouth and nose, so only her eyes were visible. Her legs gave way, but she persisted. She was still laughing: a strange, low sound that seemed to come now from her stomach, not her throat. She tapped on the glass-paned door of the kitchen, trying to peer in. This habitual gesture of courtesy did not strike her as out of place at the time. A blurred figure sat at the table, head on arms, keening. Was it one of the servants? She could hear the thin, inhuman cry from the other side of the door. She turned the knob and entered, silent now. Her hysteria was crushed by the otherworldly sound coming from Yervan’s mother.

The kitchen was in chaos. Bins of flour and grain had been overturned onto the floor, splashes of dark wine stained the walls. A half-dead farm dog – not Yervan’s – lay under the table, whimpering in a child’s voice. Yervan’s mother stared up at her, uncomprehending, then put her head on her arms once more. Again the high, wailing cries began to fill the room. Her unbound hair was matted with men’s urine, her bodice torn and filthy. Lilit tried not to follow the implications of her ripped skirt, the blood down her legs. She put her hand out as if to touch her, then drew it back again and ran out the door, leaving it swinging.

She ran to the town hall, making a high wail under the folds of her scarf. Maybe somebody there could tell her what had happened. When she saw a group of Turkish soldiers march past, she flattened herself against the walls of houses lining the road, trying to blend into the bricks like a moth. Furled wings, brown-grey. She convinced herself they couldn’t see her this way, that she was safe. When they passed on, she made for the centre of town again, hiking up her stockings as she ran.

She hadn’t been out of the house for months now. In her absence, the centre of Van had become unrecognisable. She felt strongly as she ran to the square that she was inhabiting a nightmare: her sleeping self wandering through the streets and laneways of her childhood home, yet a home that had now become strange to her, skewed, laid out wrong. The stately facades with their scrollwork and pediments were still there, the same trees and buildings and street signs, but the spirit of Van was gone. Shops hollowed out, with looted or destroyed stock and charred timber. Turkish graffiti. Old men – grandfathers she’d grown used to seeing with their chessboards at the cafes, under the shade of the square arguing – now lay silent under those same trees, their faces so haggard she could see the egg-cup shapes of their skulls. The children – she couldn’t look at the children. Their faces were too crazed, or too accepting. All around her, a shuffling mass of the half-dead, begging and clinging to her skirt and sleeve. She batted at them in frantic misery, trying not to take in any more detail of the ravaged faces, making small sounds of protest between her closed mouth and nostrils, trying not to breathe in their stink.

She fled across the square, pounding on the doors of the town hall with both fists. From inside, a rise and fall of sound. It took her a while to register the sound as human screaming. Her legs turned to water and she crumpled against the steps, panting, overcome by blind fear.

‘Try to breathe.’

It was a man’s face, a man’s hot breath against her cheek. She stood up, swayed against the door.

‘Please, effendim – are you a soldier?’

A slight nod, the hint of a formal bow.

‘Effendim, can you tell me, what’s happening in there?’

‘It’s best for you to go home.’

‘But my father—’

‘Go home. Now.’

He came closer, put his arm out to her. He smelled of wet wool and dry sweat, a comforting, masculine presence.

‘If you would only check if my neighbour—’

‘Now. I’ll take you.’

Minas arrived at the town hall to see a uniformed Turk leading his sister by the arm down the steps.

‘Lilit!’

She gave no appearance of hearing him. The man saw him, turned around.

‘Are you related to this woman?’

‘She’s my sister.’

‘Well, take her home right now and don’t let her out of the house again. How old are you?’

‘Thirteen.’

The gendarme looked him up and down. Suddenly Minas was ashamed of his homespun trousers, Papa’s old jacket held together with pins used for babies’ diapers.

‘You’ll pass for eleven. Make sure that’s what you say.’

Minas took hold of his sister as soon as the man had let her go. He watched him take the town hall steps three at a time and push the wide doors open with a crack of his cane. He seemed familiar. His carriage: that affected yet proud bearing. He turned around for a last moment and Minas saw his face. Gold flash of teeth as he smiled one last time at Lilit.

Minas had a vision of the Turk poking a limp body with his bayonet, turning it over to make sure it was really dead. He grabbed his sister’s arm and propelled her down the street.

The Vali of Van, Djevet Bey, leaned back in his chair with an expansive yawn. All was going according to plan. Any males of the town above twelve had been apprehended and shot three abreast by the lake. Only last night, Turkish collaborators convicted of sheltering Armenians had been hanged in front of their houses, then the houses themselves burnt down. The ringleaders of the recent insurrection had already been beheaded in the town square, and the remaining women and children were terrified and starving, ripe for deportation. He would promise them new homes in the desert, on the banks of the Euphrates. Two-storey houses, more gold than they had ever managed to hoard and Arab servants.

Djevet was approaching middle age, yet still ambitious – he wasn’t afraid to admit that. Ideal for promotion, but in a strictly limited sense. He knew he was a safe bet. He’d already been assured a post in Constantinople if he made up the numbers from the province of Van and its neighbouring vilayets. His mother – his ancient, cantankerous mother – would be so pleased. Or so he hoped. Allah the merciful, make her be pleased for once. Just this once.

She never thought he could do it, do anything; he was a disappointment from birth. Gangly, unformed, with a big nose to boot, for her he only seemed to intensify an already burning dislike of his father. Poor Father, who shuffled from bedroom to table, table to bedroom in down-at-heel slippers, for his whole life. Even if the slippers were new, worn for the first time, he managed to make them look battered. It was the shuffling that did it, drove Mother mad. Head down, shaking hands growing worse and worse until he couldn’t even fasten his own trousers. Djevet would wake early and help him dress before school, so poor dear father wouldn’t be too ashamed in front of Mother’s vulpine stare.

‘You look just like him,’ she would sniff.

As an adolescent, he grew weedy and retiring, like those indoor succulents Mother kept in her bedroom: insidious, with flat pale leaves that tended to droop with the addition of too much water. She would water them herself and then yell at him from her bed to do it once more, with a little blue-painted pitcher she had bought in Ephesus.

He married at fifteen, a rapacious girl his mother had chosen. Layla soon banded against him as well. They never had children. This could have been one of the reasons she, too, turned against him so soon. It was clear from the start: he was hopeless. He couldn’t even give her a baby. Yet it was her elder brother, Enver Pasha, the Minister of War, who gave him this appointment in February, with the promise of a more salubrious position to come. He knew he was indebted to his wife, come what may. They were tied together by more than just the lack of babies. Policy. Propaganda. New laws. And still his mother considered him a failure on all counts, with no hope of retribution. Now at last he had his chance.

In the meantime he was biding his time here as a petty governor in the provinces, officiating over Armenian deaths and imprisonments, pleas and back-room bargains and the repossession of their assets by the few Turks and Kurds of the town who somehow found favour in his eyes. His spies told him he’d been dubbed ‘the horse-shoe master of Bashkale’ throughout the country for his exploits in the previous province. Horseshoe master, he chuckled with satisfaction. He liked having this much power; it gave him an ice-dark thrill of accomplishment, made him wonder why he’d waited so long.

He leaned forward to cut a pomegranate in half from the platter at his elbow, fingering his pearl-handled knife with pride. A present from one of his beneficiaries. The platter had been an artful arrangement of Persian melons, Smyrna figs, tiny tomatoes and olives. His secretary was good for something. Now the figs lay mashed and blackened, olive pips scattered, pulp of tomatoes sucked so only the skins remained.

As he ate his pomegranate, Djevet was heedless of the seeds spilling onto his desk. His secretary, Mehmet, called for a plate but Djevet waved him away. He enjoyed the pretence of poverty, the frisson of being a peasant for a while. Just like those Armenians. He liked their folk dances, the girls’ wide, smiling faces when he forced them to pretend they liked him. He enjoyed the aqua vitae of the region, drinking it secretly before bed so as not to offend his subordinates who were still devout Muslims, fundamentalist illiterates. He made sure the old men still continued to produce it, and among all the other privations there was always plenty.

He picked up one of the pomegranate kernels between his thumb and forefinger and put it in his mouth, savouring the tang of sweetsourness on his tongue. As he dictated his daily correspondence, he continued eating them one by one.

‘First a letter to my mother,’ he told Mehmet. ‘She’ll be worried about me. Write it on the good paper with my crest. And make sure you date it first.’

The secretary scribbled ‘April 1915’, cocked his head and asked Djevet Bey which day it was.

‘We pay you to know these things, Mehmet! Look, just don’t worry about it. All right. Ready? Dearest Mother, I have no work and much fun. The news from here is very heartening. We have killed 2100 Armenian males already, all of them food for dogs.’

‘I’m sorry, Bey effendim,’ Mehmet said. ‘My pen needs refilling.’

Djevet waited, tapping the desk with his ring finger, admiring the square-cut emerald.

‘Mother, I am safe and eating well. Our cook makes a superlative pilaf. Ask Layla to send my summer underclothes and tell her I kiss her eyes. May Allah bless her and you and Father. That’s all. Now turn to a new page,’ he instructed Mehmet. ‘Pay the butchers one gold lira per person.’

The boy hesitated, as if unsure of what the Bey wanted him to write, so Djevet got up from behind his desk and advanced toward him. Mehmet cowered, expecting a slap. Djevet seized the pen from him and scrawled on the paper, using Mehmet’s bent-over back as support.

‘Pay the halal butchers of the town one lira for each Armenian male they slaughter before Tuesday. I will not leave a single one standing.’

He touched his knee with a short chopping motion.

‘Mehmet, make sure you tell them we will not leave even one so high.’

He stabbed into Mehmet’s clean gabardine suit with a final flourish of his signature, threw the pen down and looked out the window. Outside his office in the town hall, some of the gendarmes were amusing themselves. They were cutting down branches from the plane trees lining the town square. Are they making an outdoor shelter? That would certainly be nice, he wondered. They stripped boughs of their leaves with the points of bayonets. A shady pavilion for hot afternoons. Tea and music.

They were letting out the female prisoners locked in the basement: raucous women with loud voices who had come to the hall in the last few days demanding to know what had become of their men. He remembered being harsher than usual with his orders – they reminded him so of his wife. Nasty and ill-tempered, blaming everyone but themselves.

The gendarmes beckoned the women out of their prison. He saw them squint and cover their eyes, unused to such bright light. Do they want the women to help build it?

Some – the very old, lame, diseased – had already been shot at night in the courtyard; the others were being kept alive to make up the numbers of deportees. He knew it wouldn’t do to have too many deaths in his vilayet. It could do his reputation more harm than good. He needed to appear efficient to his superiors, oh, yes, but Turkey itself also needed to appear not entirely ruthless to the world. The state needed to keep up the great pretence of the Armenian solution: women and children will all be spared. We’re merely relocating them to somewhere better, for their own good, far away from the theatre of war.

‘We Turks are civilised after all,’ he liked to say to the gendarmes. He didn’t quite agree with the ideology of the moment: reminiscent of the golden age of Turkic and Mongol warriors, fierce-bearded Genghis Khan and Tamerlane. ‘We are the master race,’ Talaat Pasha, the Minister of the Interior, had proclaimed in Constantinople. ‘It is our duty to subjugate inferior peoples.’ This glorification of ethnic Turkism irked Djevet, when he stopped to think. All that talk of blood and race, mystical. He much preferred the Ottomans, yet knew the boys screwed up their faces at him when he continued to refer to them as such. It was a term in danger of becoming obsolete.

At the same time, he knew the boys needed some diversion. It was hot and boring work guarding prisoners, feeding them, dealing with their constant cries and their smell. He watched the gendarmes throw off their embroidered jackets and roll up their sleeves. They began by stripping the prisoners down. Some women helped by doing it themselves, all the more fun to watch. It was slower, for one thing. More satisfying.

When the women were all lined up in the courtyard in the sunlight, some shivering, although it was so warm, the gendarmes stood aside and whispered among themselves. He could see their faces clearly: the boys were enjoying the situation. Some of the naked women were old and wrinkled in strange places and he turned his head away, not liking to look at those. They cried the loudest, short little quacks of fear.

The boys began whipping the women with branches. The more they wailed, the harder the boys struck them. He could hear the women praying and screaming, ‘Lord, have mercy, Jesus help us, Oh dear God, why have you abandoned us?’ The boys kept on whipping them, telling them to dance, to sing Turkish songs. ‘Sing, gaivour, sing it loud. Dance, Armenian slut!’ He could see they were in a frenzy of sex – pain and sex. He saw it was good for morale, a little healthy exertion before the long march they would have to take in the next few days. They forced the little children to stand in a circle around their mothers and sisters, and Djevet heard the high, reedy sound of their singing voices over the cries and groans. Soon the youngest children stopped, sobbing uncontrollably now, and one by one they all began to cry.

The boys let them be. They had run out of branches, having whipped the women so hard the boughs were breaking into bits. More trees were stripped, feverishly, with the leaves still clinging onto them. The prisoners were now nearly all on the ground, shielding their faces and those soft women’s parts with their hands. Some were motionless, supine in the dust. Perhaps the boys are going too far. He opened the window and leaned out, enjoying the sensation of his ribs sharp against the wooden sill. Perhaps not far enough.

‘Soon there’ll be no trees left the way you’re going!’

The young men stopped and looked up at him with open mouths. He shut the window to flick a pregnant fly from his shoulder. Slap – he killed it and kicked it under the rug for the cleaner to find.

‘Idiots,’ he muttered. ‘I’ll show them how it’s done.’

In the following days, the remaining Armenian prisoners were shod like horses with nails driven into their soles. They were forced to dance to ballads set up on a gramophone in the prison courtyard. My darling, my love, your sufferings and joys will be many. Djevet Bey stood aside and clapped in time with the music, his ring flashing dark in the sunlight.