SYRIAN DESERT, 1915

Minas could stop himself from despair for moments at a time by imagining it all as one big game: last person standing wins the prize. As he saw the surging crowd thin, as the gasps and sighs and screams subsided, he knew he would survive the journey – if only because he lulled himself into apathy. The voice in his head conspired to keep it so.

It doesn’t matter, it said to him. Nothing matters. It will all be over soon. He didn’t dare look at Van behind him, houses burning, their mutinous crackle heard well into the fields, the fabled lake awash with fire. Mamma groaned and fell onto the dirt, knocking her forehead against stone, hand to chest in immovable despair. He couldn’t help thinking it was all an act. If she really cared to survive, she’d be still and quiet, circumspect as he was.

He clapped his hand over his mouth so he wouldn’t yell at her. Lie low, head down. The only way to get out of this alive. He imagined his schoolbooks burning in neat piles where he’d left them, in order of size, propped against the window. The voice in his head whispered, cajoled. Isn’t it ironic? The first novel ever published in Turkish was written by an Armenian. He was holding a book to his chest when the Turks came, now he couldn’t even think what it was. The officer in charge had arrived waving a firman from the Vali of Van and the Minister of the Interior in his hand. He dismounted from his horse, handed the paper to Mamma, who looked at it blankly. As Minas stretched out his arm to take the official document, one of the gendarmes knocked the book out of his hand.

He watched the book skid across the floor, pages unfurled and spine broken, then thud against the tonir. It made a sound like bone cracking. He stood with his back against the wall, unable to move, breathing hard. He thought he’d vomit – please, God, no – and, as if watching a stranger fall, he felt his body bend in half and crumple, both palms down on the floor. When he eventually looked up, the officer stood above him, face screwed into fastidious disgust. Flecks of bile on his polished boots and on Minas’s knees.

Mamma came forward, knelt on the floor beside Minas. He felt her arms around him, but didn’t dare look at her. She peered up at the officer, recognition lighting faint hope in her eyes.

‘Bey effendim, I know you. You do remember me, don’t you? I clean your home each Sunday. I know your wife, your children. Please, effendim, you’re a family man, you understand. Your little boy always asks me to—’

But he cut her off with a slap to the face so hard Minas felt his heart jump in his chest. He was ashamed, so ashamed. Ashamed to see Mamma so helpless, and so hated. He watched her press her lips together, holding the tears in, resting her head on her knees, waiting for the pain, the disbelief to pass. After that he didn’t remember much. He must have received a blow to the head as well, because his temples throbbed even now. He came to, still sitting on the floor, propped up against the linen chest. Mamma’s right cheek was scarlet, head held high. She and Lilit were bustling about as the gendarmes shouted and cursed at them to leave the house, quick. They picked up one object at a time – a patterned plate, a daguerreotype, a discarded stocking – then laid it down and took another, until they were forced to drop everything they held in their hands. Mamma had placed a pale rose from the garden in the middle of the table two nights ago, when Papa was still alive and everything had been different. The flower fell to the ground now from its smashed vase, petals in disarray, blown. All blown away.

The gendarmes went through the house in a frenzy, finding money Papa had hidden behind the plaster walls, an old fob watch, some jewellery he’d been repairing, Lilit’s silver-inscribed belt. They ripped icons from the walls and swept cups and glasses from the shelves to the ground. Minas watched Lilit stop at the door to slide her feet into her clogs as one of the gendarmes took them on the point of his bayonet and flung them outside.

He looked back at his home among the laughter of Turkish men, the tears of Armenian women. He was picked up and forced to walk, a gendarme on each side.

‘Steady there, janoum,’ one of them yelled. ‘Get back into line.’

Janoum – he knew that word. It meant jewel in Turkish, used for darling, precious one, a term of endearment for sweethearts, beloved children. His mother sometimes used it when he was younger, with a mocking, half-reproving air. His legs refused to obey him – was it fear or sadness, was it the blow the Turk had given him? – he lolled between them like a man stuffed full of straw. His feet rolled outward and the gendarmes gave up in disgust and dropped him to the ground. He was drowned in the crowd of deportees, losing Mamma and Lilit, helped up by some neighbours and carried along. He craned his head over them to keep home in sight until he was forced to turn the corner. The windows – unshuttered now, open to wind and the sighing summer rains – flashed at him for the last time in the morning light: You will never be back. He fought to hold down the tears, wiping his eyes with his dirty sleeve.

Mamma kneeled like a Muslim, face to the sand, hands cupped around her ears. Now they were gone from Van, Minas tried not to look at her. He was ashamed of her: a deep, deathly shame he’d never known before. If she could alter in an instant, what would become of him? He sprang to her side, bent down and shook her by the shoulders.

‘Straighten up, Ma! I can’t breathe when you carry on like this.’

She flung herself away from him, wild-eyed, her weeping uninterrupted by his outburst. He could see her eyes questioning, trying to put it together in some digestible pattern, failing in the end. He glanced at his sister, telegraphed her a frantic message with his eyes. What do we do now?

‘Ma! Why are you doing this to us?’

She looked up as if she didn’t recognise him, unresponsive to his once-familiar voice. He felt her pain in his skull, at the back of his eyes. ‘Stop it,’ he mouthed. ‘Stop doing this to me.’ His mother continued to wail, hitting out when Lilit knelt to help her up. He bent down, gripped her chin in his hand.

‘Enough,’ he said. ‘I can’t stand it anymore.’

He let go of her face and watched her flop onto the dirt, walked away, lost himself in the horde of patient women and wailing babies, didn’t look back. He was struck now by the silence of the gathering; except for the babies, nobody made a sound. They were being led like sheep to the slaughter. Wasn’t someone going to scream, raise their fists, make a run for it? People shuffled around him, heads down, helping grandparents and children walk faster. A blind man walked alone, his arms held out in front of him, face untroubled and serene. The gendarmes must have knocked his stick out of his hand. Everyone was resigned. Everyone was quiet except his mother. He could hear his own spit being swallowed, the sucking sound it made in his mouth. They had all become one terrified, cringing organism, alert to any hint of danger, moving blindly toward some obscure goal. Only his mother could bring them all down. He could still hear her, louder and more unpredictable than the children’s droning whine.

Please, God, make her stop, he prayed. Make her stop, just make her be quiet. They were all so vulnerable here. They were one slow-moving, brainless beast. His mother’s cries were a buzzing of hornets in his ears, not allowing him to think. The time she bathed his ear with warm wax and water when he was stung in the field; the time she rocked him to sleep when Turkish girls snubbed him on the street, holding their noses at an imagined stink, for his being an infidel. She rocked him and rubbed his back even though he was already twelve and a big boy too.

He remembered his father’s slumped body in red flashes of heat, shutters opening and closing in his mind, no connective thread to the story. Papa. Body soft. Falling. Poked in the rib by a Turkish heel. Sharp spurs. Cut. Gaping flesh. Papa. His mouth. Wide open. I know what it’s like. She doesn’t. He still hadn’t told his mother or sister what he’d really seen last night. He hung back for a moment or two, eluded the guards, made his way slowly to the outer edge of the column to his mother. Thank God she’s stopped. He could breathe again. She walked, unsteady, her face now composed in the mask she had always worn. Her cut forehead trickled a tear of blood into her eyebrow. Lilit put her hand out to wipe it but Mamma stopped her.

‘It’s nothing, not now. Here.’

She spoke without moving her mouth or looking at Lilit, passed her a handful of coins under cover of her clothes.

‘Hide these.’

Then she unclasped her wedding earrings in a swift movement and made to press them into Lilit’s unwilling hand.

‘If I go—before you. Save yourself.’

Lilit gasped.

‘No, Mamma, I couldn’t!’

She pushed them weakly away. Minas lunged out at her and grabbed the earrings.

‘What about me? Am I not to be saved?’

He ran further into the crowd, disappearing from his mother and sister as he clutched the earrings closer. He tried not to look back at them, desperate lambs bleating against the inevitable. The pet lamb he’d been allowed to keep now left behind, those trusting eyes consigned to ashes. Lilit’s round eyes, growing wider by the second, as if only now had she begun to see. The glint of gold in her hand, a muffled movement and the money vanished somewhere among her skirts.

He strode further away. Where to hide the earrings? He thought of his tiny navel, his anus – so tight, impossible. I could never do it. The voice in his head whispered. Pierce your nipples under your shirt. He fingered the diminutive buds, pinched them between thumb and forefinger. He would have to do it tonight, under cover of darkness. Heaven help me if they find the earrings before then. He licked his lips, realised how hungry he was. His last meal had been at dawn, the coarse bread his mother had rationed after he saw his father die. Don’t—think of Papa. He busied himself with food fantasies. I’m strolling through stalls giving off the fumes of roast lamb, fried onions and herbs.

He scuffed his shoes on thorny undergrowth and rock, calf muscles seething with the strain of walking uphill, of walking so quickly. The gendarmes cracked their whips at anyone not walking fast enough. He forced himself to pick up pace, dragging Mamma and Lilit behind him. They came to a rise overlooking fields and valleys, where they could look down in all directions, even on Van itself, marred by those bright, random patches of fire. Smoke stung their throats and eyes even here, even up so high.

‘Look,’ he said, pointing. ‘Our neighbourhood’s not burning.’

His mother and sister stared at him, open-mouthed, but he didn’t care anymore what they thought. I don’t care about anything. Other than making the Turks angry. From his new vantage point, he could gaze down as if drinking deep, upon Lake Van lying like an eye, gazing upward but seeing nothing. He could look upon the plain of sand stretching all the way to the horizon, marking what he assumed was the jagged boundary of northern Syria. They were being marched south-west, past Gevas, Mardin, Qamshile – places he’d only ever heard nomads speak of – then down into the blinding heart of Arabia. Ahead of him, the column of deportees trickled forward like a river toward the desert, sparkling in the afternoon sun, soon to be sucked up like water into sand.

He looked behind him. More people following, more than he could ever count. Gendarmes and soldiers rode on horses alongside, their bayonets pointed and shiny in the heat haze, lances of blinding light. Behind him, the mountains and grassy hills of Armenia beckoned. Before him, the desert lay still and sinister as a mirror at night.

He didn’t feel the days pass so acutely any longer. He was too obsessed by survival. He walked in his sleep, watched his shoes fall off blistered feet as if they belonged to somebody else. He trudged alongside his mother and sister through a moonscape of white stone and parched animal bones, tufts of saltbush he learnt to fight over for its sparse liquid. Bowls of cherries and cheese white as a sheep’s coat, scrolls of bread and peach brandy. Sometimes he held the plant high above his head and wouldn’t let Lilit or his mother share. Soon they stopped asking and let him walk ahead.

He made games of counting how many bloody footprints he could make each day. Lilit’s cracked lips and burning face made him turn away. He didn’t want to feel sorry for her. Yet at the same time he was amazed at her gritted calm. Only her hands betrayed her suffering; they twisted and pulled at each other as if she were trying to wrench them off, substitute one pain for another. Mamma’s cut forehead turned septic in the heat and he told Lilit not to bother when she tried to clean it with her own saliva. He twisted the earrings in his nipples, regularly opening the wounds he had made. He thought the fresh flow of blood would stop them from infecting, so he continued to twist slowly each day, wincing at the pain. Some mornings he woke before dawn with the gendarmes, started off with them and walked alone at the head of the convoy, close to the horses.

Most times the Turks offered him a cigarette, which he took with a studied nonchalance and coughed over between cupped hands. Sometimes Afet, who seemed to be the leader, allowed him to walk ahead of the entire convoy, and on these rare times he felt as if he were exploring new territory he had only dreamed of before. He was a solitary figure in an empty landscape. He was now a man, the new man. Nobody before him in history had ever experienced this. It made him proud, yet ashamed at the same time.

Sometimes, if Afet was in a thoughtful mood, he would talk to Minas, slowing his horse to a walk. He would explain how this was a duty for him, just a job like any other, that he had no choice but to fulfil it to the best of his ability. The future of modern Turkey was at stake here, even in this benighted desert. Minas could understand that, what with the world war and unrest in the cities and villages and those starving Muslim children Afet described so elegantly. It was only when Afet painted the Armenians and Jews and Greeks as greedy obstacles to this shining future that Minas had to blink hard and smile up at the officer to stop the tears from forming in his sandpaper eyes.

He wouldn’t let himself cry as the others did. That would blur the clarity of his vision, muddy his purpose. Observe. Remember. Record. Do not forget. He was now scribe and recording angel made flesh. He had flashes of the past and then his future as he walked: himself as an old man, sitting on a chair soothing a baby. A little girl who mewled constantly, screwing up her face in anger. A daughter, a granddaughter? In this half-dreaming state he knew the little girl had been abandoned by her mother, just as he had. He tickled her under the chin. Little one, you’re not very pretty, are you? And she made fists of her tiny red hands and punched at him as if in reproach, gulping in bubbles of air.

He blinked away the image, trying to keep his eyes open in the glare. There were no signs of life in the desert that he could see, except a solitary hawk high over the mirages of towers and plumed minarets, a stone seeming to take the shape of a djinn or an animal, a mythical beast out of a Crusader bestiary. Fine grains of sand through his fingers, falling, collecting in mounds, obscuring, so easy to hide any traces of killing in, as the blood simply welled up and disappeared.

So much blood. He let himself close his eyes for a moment and could almost believe they were walking through a sea of it, instead of sand. He was conscious of his own blood seeping at times from his pierced nipples, especially when a gendarme leaned over to speak to him; but among so much blood and dirt and so many people, he knew nobody would notice. He tried to calculate how many had died already, knowing he’d be asked at some point, when it was all over, when the Turks were called to account. He counted on his fingers, scratched figures of the marching dead on pearl-smooth pebbles. After two hundred, he gave up.

The fifteenth evening – or was it the sixteenth? Lilit had lost count – they were ordered to stop by a desert well. One acacia stood guard, its spindle branches their only shade. The gendarmes and Chettis – Muslim criminals, mercenaries Lilit feared the most – flopped beneath it. They brought water up in a rotting bucket, drank their fill and replenished their leather flasks. Lilit wanted to drink; she was going crazy from thirst. If only she could have a drop, one drop. If only she could lick the outside of the flask, glinting wetly in the sun. She could suck at it. She saw drops of water glisten on one of the gendarme’s fingers, his mouth. But she didn’t move.

In time the Turks washed their faces, feet and hands, shook out their prayer rugs and faced Mecca. As the sun set over the sandhills, they pared their nails with the daggers kept at their belts. They ate from provisions of hard rusks and dried meat, while the deportees watched their every movement with increasing intensity as the hours grew: greasy index finger to mouth, white tongue visible for only an instant to lick, gristle tossed into sand behind them, where prisoners would not dare to venture.

It had been days since any of them had been given rations. Lilit assumed the Turks wanted as many of them to die of starvation and heat and thirst as possible, to save bullets and perhaps their sense of guilt. It was only at night, if the Turks seemed in the mood, that they taunted and killed with impunity. As she tried to sleep, she could hear the cries of women being raped. The grunts, the sound of heavy flesh hitting flesh. The mechanical precision. She shut her eyes tightly and tried to sleep, tried not to think of what she would do, how she would still manage to be Lilit – her very self – if she too was raped. She pressed Mamma’s hands to her stomach, pulled Minas’s arms around her waist. Welded like this with her family, she listened. She’d passed the point where she cared anymore about other people’s suffering. She was not shocked. Only the crying of the children continued to pain her, but only hazily, only in theory. She was so hungry, so tired she could hardly muster the energy to feel anymore.

Minas had managed to find a few snakes and spiny-tailed lizards, trapped some rodents, eaten them fur and all. He hadn’t shared with her or Mamma. They had been following the course of the Euphrates for the last week, so at least there was enough water to drink, when they were allowed to. The river was sluggish and narrow in these parts, silted by the grey pall of desert sands. At intervals it was filled with corpses, and Lilit could feel her lips grow slick with the fat that came off the dead, the white jelly of decomposition. She forced herself to drink and helped her mother kneel on lacerated knees to also cup her hands in the water. She overheard the Turks saying the river widened further on, became fast-flowing and red with the flame of the setting sun. But she wasn’t interested in words anymore, even when she drank enough to vomit. Her hunger remained.

Now she watched her brother salivating as he followed the swallowing mouths. She saw how his body echoed the gestures of the guards: spasmodic, exaggerated, parodying the motions of eating and involuntarily partaking in their meal. When they ingested a morsel of meat his throat worked too, as if forcing it down. When they burped their satisfaction or hiccupped, he jerked back and forth as though it had been him. She knew his hunger was growing out of control, puberty taking over, dictating his need for nourishment. She saw him try to eat sand many times already, she even saw him contemplate his own excrement yesterday when he finished squatting. One of the Chettis crouched near him, combing through with his bayonet to see if there were any coins in it. Minas was oblivious. His knee bones strained through the skin, his shoulders broadened, that once-gentle voice was thickening by the day. He needed food and was half-crazed from the lack of it.

He seemed to be blaming all the prisoners, all Armenians, anyone who dared to fall down or cry or speak out of turn. At times she thought he was becoming one of them: a Turk. Or perhaps pretending so well he could even fool his own sister. He seemed to have developed an anxious tic, constantly patting his chest through his shirt, looking down at it, as if afraid it would suddenly disintegrate into his flesh. She noticed little flecks of blood, sometimes fresh, sometimes dried, on his torso. He would mutter to himself, as if answering silent questions.

She shivered. All she wanted to do was lie down, close her eyes for a long time. It was agony to imagine getting up again, talking, even thinking complete thoughts. The sun exhaled on the rim of sand and disappeared. The women held their children up to the darkening sky in both hands, an insane parody of a baptism ceremony. Lilit’s heart squeezed in her chest: Could I and Yervan have had—? The babies wriggled and cried in whimpers, limp legs and arms jerking in the air, scalps glistening under the new moon with sweat. Some seemed half-dead already, their heads lolling back. The women continued to wait, arms upraised and aching. They were pleading for food: not for themselves, but for their children. Lilit saw Afet nod only once to the gendarmes and they began to move, slow as cats, then suddenly faster, upon the babies. The women screamed, fought, kicked. One woman took a blow to the head and got up again, blood pouring from her temples, to attack the gendarmes. But they were too weak, even with the crazed strength that came from defending their babies. Soon enough, the children were all taken away, some already dead, others wailing and struggling, crying for their mothers.

Hours later, when the women finally subsided, the gendarmes laid the tiny corpses out on the sand. All the children were dead, even those they last saw alive. The women were quiet. They caressed their children and other people’s children, blessing them with Armenian psalms, fingers soft on foreheads, lips, on wide-open eyes.

Lilit shut her own eyes and refused to look. Part of her had wanted to leap up and stop the Turks, to die with those babies. But she held her mother and Minas close and he did not push her away this time. He shook with guilt, with shame. She looked at him, felt the ancient, nameless bond they shared. He knew what she was feeling, she in turn knew his suffering. Her fears, her selfishness, her private cruelties had taken shape and form, threatening to grow a face that was too much like her brother’s.

The action of walking became the only constant. One leg in front of the other, dry feet wading through sand. All Minas could see in every direction was sand. The undulations and waves and Arabic inscriptions in the sand. A holy Koran. An unholy verse of thirst and pain, hunger and sleeplessness. White sky and burning sand, melting and bleeding into one another in the heat.

The ache in his muscles subsided, only to be replaced by the unbearable lust of hunger and the equally unbearable agony of thirst. Even so, the act of walking soothed, gave shape to existence. He knew it was the only thing to count on, and he needed something. The rest of the days and nights were immense and frightening: capricious, a fine broken thread between living and dying or going mad.

Killings became more common, but he never knew if or when they would happen, or for what reason. He tried to avoid any confrontations with the Turks, tried not to speak to anybody unless he had to. He kept his head down and was the first to volunteer for anything the Turks wanted done. He listened to the voice in his head and it assured him this was the only way to survive.

Mamma had stopped looking at him, as if he weren’t worthy any more of her love. He grimaced and capered in front of her and she merely turned her face aside. He fed her a bit of cured meat one of the Turks had given him but she spat it to the ground. Lilit bit her lip in sympathy yet shook her head to indicate how sick their mother was, how deserving of his forgiveness. He didn’t acknowledge Lilit’s gesture, merely picked up the moistened morsel and ate it himself. Nobody brought food to him, nobody asked him if he was all right, if they could somehow ease his fatigue or thirst. He watched Lilit trickle some of her own saliva into Mamma’s mouth, he saw Mamma smile weakly and try to kiss Lilit’s hand. And what of me? Confronted by this secret feminine tenderness, he steeled his heart. Stupid women. They could die in their sentimentality. Only he would survive.

One morning, when they veered away from the river, he watched soldiers laugh while they stabbed and played among the bodies of women perished in the cold of the desert night. He stood close to Afet, ready for anything the Turk needed done. He’d learnt to look when ordered to, yet taught himself to see nothing with his glazed, swollen eyes. He stood and watched with an impassive face, eyes squinting tight against the glare on the horizon. No visible sign of distress, except perhaps the sun tears streaking his cheeks. He beckoned Lilit to him, held her arm tight by his side and forced her to look as well.

Their mother lay naked on the sand in full view of the prisoners and Turks. By her left side were all her clothes. She was curled into a ball, her round back like a glistening pebble on the sand.

‘We have no time for insubordination,’ Afet said. ‘Let this be a lesson to all of you.’

One of the gendarmes kicked out at Mamma as if to emphasise Afet’s words, yet no sound came from her. Minas was only aware of the sensation of Lilit’s cool hand on his back, the current that passed through her shaking body into his. She tried to put her hand over his eyes, to spare him the sight, but he pushed her away.

‘This woman does not understand,’ Afet said. ‘She questions our motives. And yet, if you do what you are told, there will be no punishment. We young Turks are not unjust.’

Mamma’s face upturned now, twisting and turning to avoid more blows, her palms open to the sky.

Afet leaned over her.

‘So, I will ask you again, madam. Where is the hidden gold?’

Not a sound from Mamma. Minas could feel Lilit shaking harder, opening her own mouth to speak. He pinched her, and continued pinching until she closed her mouth and bowed her head.

‘Once again, madam, where is the gold?’

Minas moved away from Lilit, still further into the crowd. Hiding among strangers, peering over shoulders and behind heads to catch a glimpse of the woman on the ground, watching indifferently, denying his connection, just another bored onlooker wishing it to be over soon, to stop. My Ma? Her body sinking, sinking, covered over by drifts of sand.

He saw Lilit look around, searching for him, wondering where he went. His mother convulsed for an instant, subsided again. It’s all her fault. Afet said so. She didn’t believe they’re taking us somewhere better. This wasn’t his mother, not the mother he knew. She was filthy, blackened, a beggar. Her hands and face were dirty, like a child’s. Her feet a mass of bleeding sores. A hand was clamped over her head, Afet’s cloaked body over hers.

‘This is the last time I will ask you. Where is the gold you have hidden?’

Minas concentrated on her hands, her wrists, those strong fingers that had once scratched and rubbed him, massaged his tummy when he was ill. No. That wasn’t her. Not this stranger lying on the sand.

There was a sound from the huddled shape. Afet put his ear to her mouth, nodding intently. He looked toward Lilit, then scanned the crowd for Minas, still nodding. Minas nodded too. He studied his mother’s fingers again, the way they clutched and clawed at grains of nothing. Not my Ma. Long fingers, delicately turned. He was looking so hard he jumped at a sound that seemed to come from behind his ear. The jolt of a rifle and her body jerked upward. Suddenly he felt the tiny hairs at the back of his neck tingle. He hummed, a buzzing in his ears, a wordless song of no sound, My darling, my love, your sufferings and joys will be many, the shouts and cries diminished, the voice in his head loud, louder, It’s not really happening. It’s not happening at all.

His legs moved before he knew why, running, running toward her to the front of the crowd. Then beside him he felt a rush of air like the felling of a sapling. Lilit was spread-eagled on the ground. A fat Chetti bent over her.

‘No!’

He heard himself say it, but the terrible motion of two bodies didn’t stop. He mustn’t have said it at all. The jerking, the painful burrowing, the thrust and pull would not end. Lilit fought, clutched at sand and hair. The Chetti swore.

‘Daughter of pigs. Whore. Christian whore. Wriggling. Moaning. Shut your mouth.’

His hands were now inside her. Minas looked at his own hands, held them up before his eyes. His eyes were open, were they? Better to close them. He heard faint scuffles at his feet; the song reached a crescendo amid the ringing of imaginary bells. He opened his eyes once more. All he could see were burning spaces and blind white sky and the voice in his head took over, urging him on as he ran away, while the song swelled and burst.

He turned back heavily. How much time had passed? Lilit was still and mute on the ground, bared breasts flat against her ribs. Her cache of gold discovered hidden in her vagina. The Chetti threw chinking coins up and down into the sand. Her short pale legs blossoming bruises. He watched them change from white to black to yellow. What funny colours. Never seen those sorts of colours before. He concentrated on the spreading shades and wanted to cover them up; they were too vivid for churchgoing, deepening to purple and green. Where are those summer stockings of yours then, Lilit?

He thought of Lilit pulling up her stockings on the way to church, the sad little folds that invariably gathered around her ankles. He laughed and the other prisoners around him clicked their tongues. He’s mad, poor thing. Lost it. Lilit gazed up at him, reproachful. He didn’t care. He hauled her to her feet and arranged the ragged skirt around her thighs, patting fabric into place like broken bread on a table.

They were nearing settlements now, sickly villages carved out of sand and powdered rock. ‘Shaddadie,’ the old women whispered around Minas. Shaddadie. The name of the largest town seemed to hold some morbid significance. There were empty caves on its outskirts and the prisoners were made to sleep in one of them, they weren’t sure for how long, while the gendarmes and soldiers rested.

‘Not far to go now,’ Afet yelled at them from the mouth of the deepest cave. His voice grew distorted before it reached Minas, changing into the howl of a jackal. ‘A train will be along soon to take us all to Der ez Zor. You’ll be well looked after there.’

More and more prisoners were herded into the cave, until there was no space to sit or stand or even breathe. Some began protesting at the entrance, and he heard shots, a muffled collective sigh, then silence. He was pushed to the back, where curved inner walls dripped condensation. He turned his head and licked at beads of moisture, fire-cold on his tongue. Old women crushed against him, all sharp bones and rotting teeth, and he grazed his chin on rock before he fell.

He was lifted, almost carried aloft by the pressure of other bodies. He craned his neck above them to try to catch a glimpse of Lilit. Sometimes he thought he saw her dark head, but it was always another girl, or a bald man, a trick of light and shade. When he finally settled against the wall, knees to chest, arms clasped tight around them, it occurred to him the cave stank of burning. A stink that penetrated into his nostrils, his ears, into his eyes. A suggestion of burnt clothes and hair and something else, something he’d never smelled before. Soft stones broke under his weight when he adjusted his position, ash stained his feet and the side of his face when he lay down to sleep. It was dark, save for the lantern strung up at the entrance of the cave, and when he lay down it too was extinguished by the shapes made by others’ bodies.

He closed his eyes, although it made no difference to the uniform shades of black, curled up in his corner. Beneath him, the ground of the cave shifted and exhaled, disintegrating further into darkness.

‘Minas.’

He opened his eyes slowly, not sure if the girlish voice was part of a dream. He couldn’t see anything, but felt the firm grasp of a hand on his arm. His first instinct was to shake it off and place both hands on the earrings in his nipples.

‘Minas, it’s me.’

‘Lilit?’

‘I’m scared.’

He sat upright, took her two hands in his. They were cold, so cold, in the chill of the cave. It occurred to him there, in the safety of half-sleep, that neither of them had mentioned Mamma since she was killed. Or what had happened to Lilit. It was too much to bear. Too much. And now this? But her voice in his ear intruded into his thoughts.

‘They’ve pushed us in here to kill us, Minas.’

He let go of her hands.

‘Nonsense,’ he muttered. ‘You heard Afet. The trains are coming in a few days.’

‘Minas, listen to me.’

Lilit’s voice was low, and thrilling with a new, deathly intensity.

‘I’ve been talking to the women. This is Shadaddie. This is where three thousand of us were burnt alive only months ago.’

Minas snorted.

‘Why would they want to do that? They need us, our labour, skills, education, to help them build a new state.’ He heard a shuffle to the right of his foot and felt her smear something dry and chalky onto his palm.

‘Feel it. Burnt bones. Ash. Charred bodies. We’re going to die, Minas.’

Lilit woke tangled in Minas’s limbs. For a moment, before she opened her eyes, she thought it was Yervan, a sleepy afternoon, his penis hard against her leg. But it was only her brother’s hipbone, and she pushed him away and stepped over the sleeping prisoners toward the mouth of the cave, brushing ash from her arms and licking her fingers to wet her face. She wanted to stand in the cool air, away from the sour smell of sleep and unwashed bodies and excrement. Away from the memory of what had happened to her yesterday. And Mamma. The shapeless sense that all was not right with the world. The sun was not yet up and the desert retained the chill of night; she walked on tiptoe to the entrance and felt each grain of sand damp and clammy under her feet.

Only one Chetti guarded the cave, with a rifle across his knees. She was glad it wasn’t the man who—but she wouldn’t let herself think of that. He was smoking a long ivory pipe, but as he turned to look at her he placed it with careful delicacy to the ground and lowered the gun to her belly. She stood still, meeting him with a level gaze, until he placed it over his lap again and beckoned to her. She hesitated, afraid to come too close, but something in his calm, almost indifferent manner quietened her fears. So she stepped toward him and he offered her a puff. She shook her head, and seeing the hunger in her eyes he rummaged in his trouser pocket and held forward a hunk of dry meat.

She grabbed it, sitting at his feet and tearing at the goat’s flesh with teeth that hurt, guilty at not waking Minas to share it with him, ashamed of accepting food from a Turk at all. As she swallowed the last mouthful she looked up at the burly man. He made no effort to smile or even acknowledge her, merely gazed ahead into the distance as Yervan had often done, but she felt safe curled up on the sand near his dusty boots; she knew the train would come now and they wouldn’t be burnt, and for a moment she even felt they would be all right.

When Lilit allowed herself to witness what happened to the last living baby she pushed away all sentiment. She told herself it wasn’t her fault. She’d heard the baby cry in the cave at Shaddadie, seen it survive the suffocation and heat and cold with all of them. There was no bonfire, no mass deaths, other than the daily shootings and knifings that came as a matter of course. The Turks did it only last month, the old women told her, pushed Armenians into those caves and torched them with brush fires. They heard Afet talking, telling his soldiers that perhaps it wasn’t wise to do it again; there would be too much evidence.

Many of the prisoners from Van and its vilayets were still alive. Only a few had been left on the damp floor of the cave, expired overnight with the scattered bodies of their compatriots, strangers, sisters, lovers in death and dark. She saw the baby taken onto the train with everybody else, hidden by his mother’s long hair and rags, still sucking at her flabby breast. It was hard to hold on to Minas in the crush of bodies, gendarmes pushing people up onto the carriages with their rifles, women screaming, children falling underfoot. Many refused to get on, having never seen a train before, so the gendarmes dispatched them quickly – more room for the others, they said.

Minas held on to Lilit’s arm so tight she thought it would be wrenched off. She felt herself lifted headfirst into the train, Minas bundled behind her. Only when all the prisoners had been packed into the sweltering carriages and the doors were bolted did the baby begin to cry.

It might have been the sudden dark and quiet that frightened him. Lilit breathed a sigh of thanks for the tiny chink of light up high in a corner. At the same time she felt she couldn’t breathe. A man pressed on her, his beard grazing her bare arm. A girl had soiled her underclothes. In the heated closeness the odour was overpowering, making it difficult to think.

The train moved forward with a shudder. There was an unfocused brutality in its movement, in the sickening, shrill sound of wheels grinding on tracks. She opened her eyes wider in the dim, searching for Minas. Hadn’t she been holding his hand? People started to scream; at least, those who were still well enough to expend the energy did. She screamed with them. The mechanical movement so final. It was more terrifying than anything else, this fiery beast that held them in its belly. She saw Minas in the periphery of her vision, his mouth open and eyes blazing, perhaps he was going to die, too. The shock of that thought made her stop. She curled up on the floor, dragging him down with her and cradling his head on her lap. The noise of the train and the shouting was deafening, the baby’s cries even louder.

Soon people began complaining, threatening to denounce his mother to the guards if she didn’t shut him up. They now wanted silence; they wanted to talk in whispers; they wanted to sleep. Lilit trembled at the fear that Minas might betray the woman, expecting a reward of food. She bit her bottom lip and, as if reading her thoughts, he looked at her and wagged his head, dog-like, from side to side.

Somebody flung the woman a jacket to suffocate the baby with. She let it stay on the floor. She continued to give her baby the breast, forcing her huge nipple into his angry mouth, stuffing him with it, trying to drown out his wails. The baby nuzzled at her for a moment then flung his head back again in disgust. The woman began to sing a lullaby, high wailing that filled the room. My darling, my love, your sufferings and joys will be many. Lilit wanted to scream again. My mamma sang that to me. Where is she now? Ossified in sand, bones picked clean by desert rats and birds. Her mamma. That cushioned lap, those strong hands, breasts she buried her face in against the cruelty of the day.

She knew the woman’s milk had dried up, knew the baby would soon die. But there was nothing she could do. She thought of latching the baby onto her own small breasts, praying milk would come in sympathy, but, somehow, she was too tired. Too sleepy. Too indifferent. Too afraid of what the Turks might do again if they saw her.

Earlier in the day, before the train came, the woman had crawled over sleeping and sick prisoners to the cave mouth. The sun hadn’t yet reached the rim of hills, and Lilit sat at the entrance to the cave, shivering. The woman patted her on the arm and asked her to help look after the baby.

‘I saw you watching us. You care.’

Lilit turned away, frowned. The young mother became insistent.

‘My milk’s running out. Don’t know what to do. He keeps screaming.’

Lilit looked down and pretended not to hear. The baby was asleep in his mother’s arms, his mouth and nose crusted with scabs. She distracted herself with disjointed memories, scenes from girlhood fantasies. I wore a narrow band of lace across my forehead and my too-tight bodice. Yervan took me for a walk. Her shadow wavering then tight on the sand. She continued to look down, as if studying her own serrated outline, until the woman sighed and went away.

The train now stopped at the outskirts of another town and the gendarmes’ horses were let out first. ‘Malaria,’ she could hear Arabs shouting on the platform. ‘Malaria here. You must leave now.’ Minas hoisted her onto his shoulders and she peered out of the tiny opening near the roof of the carriage, where timber slats had been pulled away for air – by former prisoners? Who were they? Where were they now? Little boys stood so close she could touch them, in long robes with gold-woven kerchiefs wrapped around their heads. Red dust flew about, settling in mouths and ears and the corners of their eyes. They held up white banners scrawled in green. Malaria.

The Turks didn’t care. She watched them lead their horses to the well and let them drink. Amid the stamping hoofs and coarse shouts, she felt the young mother push her aside to lean out as well. She balanced on the shoulders of a thickset man whose face twisted with the effort. The baby, bound to her body with a wide length of cloth from her skirt, seemed asleep again or dead, his mouth pinched tight. Lilit jumped down, wondering what the woman would do next. She nudged Minas. The woman seemed to wait for a few minutes, perhaps until after the animals had their fill, then Lilit saw her beckon one of the gendarmes closer with a pitiful smile.

‘I need some water, Bey effendim. Please. A few drops.’

‘No water for deportees,’ she could hear him announce. His voice bored into her head. ‘No water until we reach our destination.’

Soon Afet let out the prisoners for a moment, if only to give them enough time to throw out any dead or dying from their carriages. Lilit saw the mother make for a well with the bundle of concealed baby under her arm. She was shaking now, her head jerking from side to side like a hen’s, the movement of her legs spasmodic. The gendarmes glanced at her for an instant as if surprised by her temerity, then turned to their drinking flasks and food.

‘No water for you either,’ they said, ‘so don’t bother hanging around.’

But Lilit could see she was no longer waiting for their pity in a few sprinkles from soiled hands. In an instant of despair, she dropped her baby like a wishing stone into the well. He would bring her good fortune. He cried too much. She was too tired to carry him anymore. There was no milk left to give him. She wanted him to drown, have a swifter, easier death.

She could see the woman screaming now, slapping at her own face and hair and clothes, trying to fling herself down the well too and being held back by Chettis and gendarmes. It had become a loud, riotous game, the men competing to see who could hold her down long enough without being bitten or kicked. She had tapped into some superhuman strength, shrieking, scratching, teeth bared, with no fear of their whips or clubs.

Lilit tried not to look. Madness was catching. The woman seemed unaware of the blows, the bruises. Lilit studied the stones at her knee as she lay on the ground resting, flicked a lump of dirt from Minas’s elbow. She picked up a smooth pebble, held it before her eyes like a talisman. Pebbles from Lake Van, oyster-grey and pink, she’d played with so long ago. The image receded, she was too tired to hold it. She wanted a pillow, soft, something she could sink into. All her energy and faculties trained upon this one pinpointed desire. A pillow. Only that. Somewhere to rest her head. She tried not to feel anything as the woman collapsed suddenly in the dust, worn out by her fighting, as the men shouldered her and took her away behind their horses. She heard nothing, but knew what they were doing.

She tried to make herself inconspicuous. Poppies cut from the riverbank were made into bouquets bigger than I could hold. Yervan gave me one. The woman was only heard at intervals now, a choked cry here and there. She lay, bloodied, a broken doll slumped on a gendarme’s horse, finally inaudible as the prisoners were herded back onto the train, still further into the desert and to Der ez Zor.