DER EZ ZOR, 1915

There was malice and revelry in the faces of the Turks, their lewd jokes and swearing, the aroma of raki from their mouths colouring the air. Not such good Muslims after all, Lilit thought. She saw a man at the back of the mob puff out his weak chest and look about, smiling at the drunken gendarmes who grinned back, frowning at the white naked women who kept their heads lowered to the dust. Lilit kept her head up; she knew by now it was the way to survive. Many women were already mad, maimed beyond recognition, fingernails and toenails gone, disjointed puppets with burnt skin peeling in patches from their faces.

The man moved forward through the marketplace, brushing women with his shoulders as he walked. It was almost as if he had to touch each woman as he passed to steady himself. Most were naked, but some wore rags that were once underclothes: bloomers and corsets and petticoats now grey and disintegrating. Lilit still wore the skirt she’d been wearing in Van, though it hung in limp ribbons now. But she was thankful she had it. Her whole body was black with filth and she hid her breasts with her arms, conscious even in her terror to be ashamed.

She watched his face; he looked as though he would vomit. A woman close by gazed at him in sublime indifference, her proud lion’s head created by the lack of a nose. Only a gaping hole remained, the bridge completely cut away. A gendarme saw him staring, too, and boomed in his ear.

‘See this? I taught her a lesson. She kept screaming about her baby, her baby, her arsehole baby. Not a peep out of her now.’

Lilit tried to block out his voice. She squinted at the sinking horizon and the stippled sand dunes with the odd sensation of coming to a place where she knew she would stay. Dead or alive, she wasn’t going anywhere. One woman lay on the ground, legs open in a triangle, palms upturned to the sky. The way she’d lowered herself down was careful and pathetic, like an old woman preparing for bed. Seeing this, an obtuse, dangerous anger took hold of Lilit. The light breeze irritating the hairs on the back of her neck seemed complicit, intimate as a lover’s or an assassin’s breath. Beneath it, the smell of sweat, of meat and blood. And something else mocking her – not rage exactly, but an emptiness, or a profound regret. The gendarmes made her line up in a row with the others, and she suddenly goose-pimpled as the rising wind hit her bare skin. A familiar panic lashed through her as one and two and three, thirty, more, were bound together, now beyond speech or thought or the shame she’d felt so acutely the moment before.

Yet she still stood straight, head held up. Her braid had been hacked off some days before, and she could feel the rough cut at her nape, the bite of the bayonet on tender skin. Her brother, one of the few boys left alive, closed his eyes and murmured to himself. She turned her head to look at him, maybe for the last time: he was growing, already had a faint smudge on his upper lip, reddish strands of hair. He spun around, oblivious, humming. My darling, my love, your sufferings and joys will be many. She pulled him to her to quieten him and felt his bones grind against hers.

But they weren’t being killed, not this time. Only sold as slaves.

So many had already been killed in countless ways. Thrown into desert rivers, roped together by the waist so only one bullet would drag them down. Lines of dead women, the whiteness of their thighs. Caves nearby filled with the living, then torched by Turkish boys carrying bundles of wood. Charred stumps, blackened rock, matchstick bones. Mass graves of grandfathers, sons, children without names. Mothers and girls raped, strangled, pushed under clumps of sand.

The man that had been standing at the back now came forward and touched Lilit’s arm. She lifted her chin, stared at him. His face was pale, as if he spent a great deal of time indoors, and he wore fine European clothes. She assumed he was checking for typhus or dysentery before he paid, pulling her lips away from her teeth. ‘Gently, gently,’ he murmured, studying the whites of her eyes. Pushing a finger into her distended stomach. He came so close she could smell his breath. He stank of desert wells, death and decomposition. The sand and sky and a lone thorn tree seemed to recede behind him into the distance, then come to rest between him and her, suspended in silence amid the chaos.

Lilit leaned forward, then spat in his face. For a moment he stood there, her spit dripping off his forehead onto his lashes. Then he sprang back, wiping it off with the edge of his jacket.

‘Crazy girl,’ he whispered. ‘Who do you think you are?’

Three Turkish soldiers came running, bayonets ready. The man put both hands out wide, held them back.

‘It’s all right, all right. Nothing happened. She accidentally stepped on my foot.’

Twenty piastres they asked for her, claiming she was still a virgin. Those visibly raped and mutilated went only for five. Tarnished coins, tarnished women, passing from hand to filthy hand. He led her away. When they were out of sight of the gendarmes he placed his soiled jacket over her shoulders.

She looked back at the marketplace once, to see her brother for the last time, but by then it felt as if she’d already left him forever.

Suleiman wasn’t aroused in the least by the girl he’d bought; the sight of breasts, small or large or pointy or spaced wide apart, round or sagging, the details of thighs and hips and groins, the emaciation or dimpled fat, the hair under armpits and on legs was too confronting, pathetic. They had all become one strange mass of limbs and no faces. Animals. He had to cut out the expressions and the eyes; it was too much. Most of all, beneath the awe and revulsion he felt was a deep, profound sadness. He would never plumb the depths of this sadness. Women, these women – all women – were unknowable.

And he was distracted. He wasn’t happy to be here, afternoon sun and flies, touch of heatstroke coming on, more accounts to do at home and the cook sulking yet again. Something about plates of food being virtually untouched at the feast last night. Did they not appreciate all her efforts? Only Suleiman could appease her. But the summons had come that morning from Zeki Bey, the governor of Der ez Zor, and couldn’t be ignored by any Ottoman subject. Anybody disregarding the command could be called a traitor. Even the Syrian Arabs had come. Only males were duty-bound, of course. It wouldn’t do to let their women see such horrors.

He’d chosen a woman to buy not because he wanted one, but because not to do so would invite recrimination. The soldiers were so drunk all they wanted was more money to buy raki and wine. He wondered what his dead brother’s wife would say when she saw him bring another woman into the household. At least Armenians were people of the book. Even if he did end up sleeping with her the Koran allowed it, though he didn’t think it likely he would want to. She was not unattractive, though. She had a small round mouth so she would be tight, that was one good thing. Her thighs seemed thick and strong – she would be bold in bed. He decided to like her.

She stood straight beside him, head held up and with no expression. She was black-haired, which was normal for an Armenian. He preferred blondes: Georgians, Circassians, Northern Greeks. Her braid had been hacked off. At least she wouldn’t have head lice if her hair was so short. She still wore a skirt, unlike most of the other women, although it was so ragged it hung about her calves in strips.

Her irises were a flat, serene blue that made him draw breath. They seemed to have no depth, only colour. She looked almost healthy, even robust compared to the terrible condition of the others, and incredibly young. She did have lice, though; he could see them crawling over her hair and under her arms. In her secret hair, too, no doubt. He suppressed the urge to part her legs and look. Her eyes stared at him with no plea, no recognition of him as a human being. He flinched inwardly at this. He didn’t like to think she had the moral high ground.

He had given the gendarmes all the liras he had in his pocketbook, not caring how much he paid. After all, what was a human being worth? He had only let himself ask the question for a moment, as he watched the money being counted. He wondered again, with the panic of a man with no recourse, what Fatima would do to him when he walked through the door with another woman.

Lilit accepted the offer of the jacket. Jacket, she said to herself. That’s the word. She looked at the Turkish man without blinking. Waistcoat, she murmured in Armenian. Baggy trousers. Belt of watered silk. Her hand went out to finger the shiny crescent buckle, the gleaming pistol at his waist, but she stopped herself just in time.

They walked quickly as the sun balanced red on the horizon. In the dusk, full-skirted women and their many children sat on the verges, enjoying the creeping rumour of a new season. Light arced from the sea behind the citadel. Another walled city. Where have I seen one like this before? Palms were outlined against the sky like the pencil drawings she had seen Minas do. Minas. Now where is he again?

She turned her attention to the wet, shiny street. Tiled courtyards in the centre of houses were sprinkled with water to settle the dust of day. She remembered home now in a pale flash of images, the Turks of Van building watercourses and aqueducts, bathhouses adjacent to their mosques. Now she and the man passed shallow pools in gardens, glimpsed through elaborate stonework walls, and fountains in public squares. She stopped and concentrated on the sight as something valid and true, palpable reality to cling to. Her smooth forehead marred by the effort of thought. The Turkish man thought to bring her a tin cup of water and for this she was grateful, draining it and holding her hand out for more. She drank and drank, water pooling at the corners of her mouth, dripping down her chin. Women came with buckets to sluice their courtyards and children skidded on the wet road, avoiding her. He led her away by the arm.

‘Please,’ she said in Turkish when they had passed the curious stares.

‘Yes?’

‘What is this place called?’

‘Der ez Zor.’

‘I’m sorry I spat at you.’

He stopped, looked at her. Really looked at her, in the eyes.

‘Why did you?’

‘I don’t know.’

He put his arm around her waist when she stumbled, she noticed he didn’t flinch at her filthiness and it endeared him to her.

‘Bey effendim, would you prefer if I walked some paces behind you? I must smell so bad you’ll be embarrassed—’

‘No. They’ll think you’re an escaped slave if I’m not nearby. Who knows what they would do to you. Anyway, I don’t mind your stink.’

She nodded, keeping her gaze to the ground.

‘What happened to your eyebrows?’

‘The soldiers shaved them off. Wanted some fun one night.’

‘Did they hurt you?’

‘They moved on to a girl from Moush who cried and screamed. Cut off her breasts. She was more interesting than me.’

He concentrated on her eyes again as she spoke, and nodded carefully as if he didn’t believe her.

He brought her to a mere wall, a facade of peeling paint amid garbage from the street and the crush of people. In the centre, a tiny door. She hesitated, in an instant felt the dawning suspicion of loss and a bubble of panic. Minas. She remembered where he was now. Her fingertips tingled with the effort of being again in the world. For a moment, the grapple of sensation, the struggle of remembering, then the Turkish man pulled her to him in the crowd. Lips tight against her ear. Teeth the white of almonds when he smiled.

‘You’re home.’

When the door opened, as if by invisible hands, all was splendour and beauty and peace. No further thought of Minas, of her mother. Papa and his magic clocks the stuff of heroic legend, Lake Van a far-off fairytale. She stood in the centre of a courtyard among tiled fountains in diamond patterns of black and white. Drops of water silvered on the flagstones. A ginger cat lay in a puddle of sunshine on the largest fountain’s rim, uncoiled itself and stretched. Lilit knelt down and cupped water in both hands, wetting her chest and arms. She turned and smiled at the man. Sun sparkled on her face. Then he hit her.

He had been so deferential as they walked, so solicitous of her comfort. As soon as he saw the other woman look down from the hidden quarters upstairs, raising her glittering veil and her eyebrow, he hit Lilit squarely on the cheekbone. She assumed he did it so the other woman would look upon her more kindly and would spare her future blows. Was she wife, servant or concubine? She looked like a mixture of all three.

Lilit looked at herself in the only mirror that night after he slept. He had taken her to his bedroom and, as she watched him draw the soft curtains around the bed, moving around her gently in the half-light, she had surprised herself by feeling both hopeful of being treated well and afraid of what would come next. But he hadn’t touched her; said he could wait until the time was more propitious, it now being the waxing of the moon. She was glad of that. He merely brushed her forehead with his little finger and turned over to sleep.

The other woman was nowhere to be seen. Before he blew out the lamp, Lilit ventured to ask him. ‘Effendim, the other woman, with the veil? Is she your wife?’

His voice was muffled by pillows. ‘My dead brother’s wife. Now mine. She is my first wife. You may be next, if I like you.’

She couldn’t settle when he fell asleep; the mirror flickered whitish at her in the dark. She hadn’t looked at herself since she left home, and gasped when she saw her face. Thin lines where her eyebrows once were, a growing raft of black stubble. She wept at her reflection; there were too many shadows and recesses in this new, sepulchral face. No stars outside, no street lights. Only the moon swelling silent through the window. She examined her neck grown scraggy, breasts so slack, jumped up to catch a glimpse of her painful stomach. Her breath frosted as she leaned her cheek against the mirror. She wiped the gleaming surface with her little finger, a stroke for memory, just like that.

In the morning, she lay on the divan in a soiled nightdress one of the servants had given her. The Turk asked her to call him Suleiman, not Effendi, not Bey, neither Sir nor Master. She nodded and closed her eyes, embarrassed by her ugliness. She was clean now, except for the dress.

After he hit her last night in the courtyard she’d been led away by one of the other women, older, fatter – another concubine or slave, she wasn’t sure – and made to sit in a steam-filled room with a bucket of scalding water and an ancient scrubbing-brush. In a corner, razors and soap and pumice stones lay in a pile. She knew these were for getting rid of all her hair. She shuddered when the woman pointed to them, then at her armpits and groin and legs. She set to work, sobbing with the pain, hoping nobody could hear. The woman looked in on her at intervals and replenished the water level in the bucket, pouring the dregs over her as though she felt it was all taking too long.

The woman came in again finally after a greater length of time and spread Lilit out on her stomach, pressing her down hard on the slippery floor. She took Lilit’s chin in her hand and showed her a small green vial she held; Lilit read the label as best she could, making out the Arabic phrase: Oil of Lebanon. The woman let go of her chin then and straddled her, massaging her back with the cedar-scented oil, working her way up from the buttocks to the tiny bones of the neck. The weight of her elbows was unbearable, but Lilit bit her lip and did not cry. The woman then turned her over onto her back, still looming above, fat face painted with red lips and gold lids and a moustache too close, sweat dripping into Lilit’s eye.

She sat on Lilit’s stomach and grasped both breasts in her hands, laughing and kneading them, saying something in Arabic Lilit did not understand. She pointed to her own flabby mounds under her housedress and shook her head. Lilit opened her mouth to cry out; the woman’s fingers were tight, pinching her nipples, she tried to put her arms up to stop her, but the woman leapt up and was gone. She was left to rinse herself of oil and wait, naked, dripping sweat in the steam, for someone to come and dress her.

Now she suspected the nightdress belonged to Suleiman’s second wife, the one she saw as she arrived; a cast-off she’d not even bothered to wash.

Suleiman sat cross-legged on the rug, smoking a water pipe. Its fragrance reminded her somehow of the peach orchards at home. She poked out her bare foot, studied the way it emerged from the threadbare cotton folds.

‘Now, listen carefully,’ he said. ‘From this day on, your name will be Lale. Do you remember that? Yes? Good. Lale means tulip in our language – but I suppose you already know that. Yes? And you’re not to speak anymore – ah, ah – Armenian. Just Turkish, all right?’

She looked at him, squeezing her eyes together so she wouldn’t cry. His eyes were lowered, fiddling with the coals in his water pipe.

‘So, Lale, my girl, tell me in your own words. How did you come to be here?’

Lilit felt this were somehow a test, an evaluation of her intentions.

‘We were forced out of our homes in Van.’

‘Why? What did you do wrong?’

‘There was no reason. Except, I suppose, that we’re Armenian.’

‘Come, come – there must have been a reason. Was your father involved in political activities? I hear Van was a hotbed of subversion.’

She could hear her own voice grow softer, more indistinct, as if part of her half believed him.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Well, then, what happened to you on the way here?’

‘I was beaten and robbed of my money.’

She remembered something else had happened to her, wanted to tell him, wanted him to understand, yet wasn’t sure how to say it. He didn’t give her time.

‘Your family?’

‘All dead, I think. All dead.’

‘What about that boy I saw standing beside you at the square? He looked just like you.’

Her eyes glazed over. She tried to recall his face, the little boy who was taller than her now and stronger, too, but the only thing she could remember were two spots of blood on a ragged shirt. She spoke so quietly Suleiman had to lean closer to hear her.

‘I don’t know what’s happened to him.’

‘What about the rest of your family? Mother, cousins, aunts? Couldn’t they make the journey?’

‘They were killed. The gendarmes tied them together, one behind the other, and shot right through them.’

The woman with the glittering veil walked through the corridor. Suleiman didn’t raise his head, didn’t indicate he was aware of her presence. He looked at Lilit properly for the first time that morning.

‘You’re making it up. Turkish soldiers would never do that. Unprovoked. To civilians? Impossible.’

Something in Lilit – a residue of her former self, an abstract sense of injustice – made her get up and put her face close to his.

‘They were murdered!’

He hit her. She refused to back down, screaming, standing up again after he knocked her to the ground. He hit her again. When he was finished, she crawled across the floor to the side of the divan, leaning her back against it. Her face was numb, her ribs hurt with a pain that seemed to wait, crouching, for her to lower her guard. She felt her elbow carefully with her other hand. I hate you, she said to herself, not trusting her voice to speak it aloud. I despise you, you imbecile Muslim.

He sat again on the rug, took a long puff of his water pipe and looked at her, almost curious, or amused, through the fitful smoke.

‘Well, Lale?’ he asked. ‘Where do we go from here?’

She didn’t answer. The veiled woman shuffled toward them with a bundle of linen, poked her head in the door, hurried off again down the hall. Suleiman jerked his chin in her direction.

‘Fatima. My dead brother’s wife. She already hates you.’

She didn’t know what to make of this offhand admission, their obvious intimacy.

Minas watched Lilit being led away with no emotion. It was his heart, not his face that seemed blank and cold. On his face he exhibited every natural expression of grief that could be expected of him. His eyes watered, his lips twisted, his cheeks slow-burned. But it was only his heart that remained still and lifeless, its beat ever slowing to a threatened halt.

He watched Lilit’s cropped head bobbing through the surge of people as she followed the Turk. The man seemed gentle, a little bemused by the spectacle perhaps. A follower. A man who submitted to authority, who bowed down before those who knew better. A man capable of any cruelty if someone else told him to do it. Minas hoped he was not a cruel man. Cruel or not, he still hated him. The way he prodded and poked at Lilit as if she were a cow. The silly grin on his face when he asked her if she was all right. Of course she’s not all right, Minas wanted to yell. Can’t you see for yourself? But he hadn’t. He stood beside Lilit like an idiot, helpless to change the outcome of the moment, helpless to alter the course of their lives.

When Lilit couldn’t be seen any longer, he sat down in the dust to await what the rest of the evening would bring. He crossed his legs beneath him and pulled his shirt tighter across his nipples. He ignored the rigidity in his stomach, signalling either hunger or anxiety, he couldn’t tell which anymore. All around him, women were being led away by Turkish men of the town, some by the hand, others resisting, with the aid of knotted rope or even a chain. A group of Kurds had just arrived on unhealthy horses; they dismounted and made a great show of inspecting the rest of the women, only to leave without buying.

He watched them ride away with something like envy. It wasn’t really envy, it was more a wistful question or a wish: Wouldn’t it be wonderful to choose a place and then go? Just like that. To be autonomous, to have choices. He looked around at the other Armenian prisoners. We have no courage. We’re letting them lead us around like animals. But there was nothing he could do about it, except beg one of the Turks to let him die.

Again, the sick realisation that he was helpless, among others just as helpless as he, caused his throat to swell and his empty belly to revolt. He bent over and retched. A woman nearby wiped his brow with the back of her hand. He thanked her with a smile. It hurt to speak, he had no more words. He looked around him, looking for someone with strength, someone to lead them, a saviour. There was none. All that remained in the town square were the old, the very young, a few boys like himself and the disfigured or mad women, picking at their scabs. He curled up on the ground, at the feet of the woman who had helped him, and slept.

When he woke, all was grey. He could see the silhouettes of gendarmes standing about before the blaze of a dying fire, drinking. Dawn was beginning to break, and he was overwhelmed by thirst. He stood up, thinking to find Afet, perhaps some water. He approached the gendarmes, knelt in front of them with his hands outspread. Afet was nowhere to be seen. The Turks regarded him silently for a moment, then one of them giggled like a girl.

‘Give him a glass, boys. Where he’s going he won’t last long.’

Minas sat on the ground sipping at the rough moonshine he’d been given. For a moment, he was content just to drink and sit, and not think about anything else. He looked at the sleeping and huddled forms of his fellow prisoners, vulnerable now in the rising light. One boy sat apart from the rest, with his curly head bowed so low to the ground Minas thought he might be dead or in a coma. He shuffled over and jabbed him in the ribs.

‘You all right?’

The boy didn’t look up. He gurgled deep down in his throat then a blob of mucus fell on the dirt, narrowly missing Minas’s feet.

‘Leave me alone,’ he growled.

Minas swore at him in a whisper then looked up, alarmed. The gendarmes were yelling now at the prisoners to start moving. There was another long walk ahead of them, to a camp on the outskirts of Der ez Zor.

They passed mulberry trees shading the length of cotton fields. Dusty leaves on the ground. In the distance, peasant women in white kerchiefs worked in the early morning coolness. Did they not realise what was happening? He wanted to cry out to them, make them understand. He watched their steady movements, their worn, quiet faces creased by the sun. He knew that, even if he ran toward them, even if he made it without being shot, even if he spoke to them in Turkish, knelt and put his arms around their knees, they would not help him. They would not even believe his story. He was nothing to them. He was annihilated.

He continued to trudge along with the other prisoners through the strengthening heat. After many hours, passing the town and into the desert, he looked up and saw a shape he couldn’t place. It rose before him like a spike in the eye. The tent compound came closer and closer as they walked, and then reared in front of him, cruel, glinting in a shimmering heat, hidden by a heavy set of gates. He stopped short, looking up at their curved and rusting bars.

From inside, he could hear a shuffling and wailing, a sinister, whispered sound like the gnashing of teeth, the howling of wolves, the sound of unnamed fears at night. He felt his stomach contract, leaned over and tried to vomit again. Nothing came, but one of the gendarmes slapped him on the neck and laughed.

‘Time enough for that later. Wait till you get inside.’

The gates were opened by armed guards, and the prisoners herded into the compound. Within an instant, a naked man seized Minas’s arm. He pleaded with him in Armenian for hope, escape, any news of outside. Minas saw burst pustules around his eyes, fat flies buzzing. He lurched backward in disgust, shook him off before he could finish what he was saying. The man fell to the ground and opened his mouth to curse, but no sound came out. A guard had lunged forward and stabbed a bayonet into his spine.

Minas hurried on with the rest of the prisoners, not looking back at the fallen body. I must keep going. Won’t let anyone stop me. The guards increased the collective speed to a trot, barking out orders.

‘Haircuts over here! Latrines there! Line up in rows for assignment to sleeping blocks!’

He tried to avoid the barber’s long shears. He kept very still but the man still managed to nick his ear, graze his forehead, as it was all done in such fear and reckless haste. He could feel the barber’s hands trembling as he cut down to the scalp; he was a prisoner too. The men lining the paths between the tents and outhouses were prisoners: gaunt, shiny-faced with sores, but they had learnt to talk in the half-chewed jargon of the guards. They held whips and clubs fashioned of desert thorn. They beat him as he ran from one tent to another, as if punishing him for arriving even a moment later to the camp, for suffering one iota less than they already had.

He saw the bathing room, swiftly put his mother’s earrings into his mouth. He would not speak now, he would keep going, outwit them all. He tasted sour gold and blood on his tongue. The man assigned to help him wash was also a prisoner. He muttered without opening his own mouth as he doused Minas’s head with cold water and kerosene for lice and rubbed all over his body and wet clothes with a cake of coarse brown soap.

He strained to hear the man’s ceaseless patter: ‘Don’t get sick, they’ll kill you, don’t catch malaria, they’ll surely kill you, don’t let them see you vomit, they’ll kill you right away, don’t help anyone else, they’ll kill you, don’t look at anyone, don’t raise your eyes, don’t stop, don’t sleep, don’t lose your soul, they’ll kill you.’

Minas set his jaw and suffered the man’s ministrations, careful not to allow him to brush his hands over the wounds left by his mother’s earrings.