DER EZ ZOR, 1915

Lilit scrubbed Suleiman’s baggy underclothes against the ridged board in the tub outside. She rinsed them, wrung them out until she felt she could extract no more moisture from the heavy coiled folds. She scolded the servant girl responsible for the washing this morning; last week certain festival clothes had been folded and put away with sweat stains still on them.

She wasn’t sure herself if she was truly angry with the servant girl or merely conspiring to be outside in the courtyard today, closer to the front gate and to freedom. She’d taken to wearing every item of jewellery Suleiman had given her all at once, pushing ring upon silver ring onto her swollen fingers and fastening bracelets all the way up to her elbow. Leave-taking preparations, the decisive gesture finished before the brain had time to realise exactly what it meant. Just as she had pushed the girl away today, warning her she would be beaten if it happened again, and announced that for the first time she would soil her own hands with Suleiman’s dirty clothes.

She was surprised at her own audacity, she who only months ago was a scared and cringing slave in the household. She who now had the power to order the servants, to avoid heavy work and play the lady. A nameless doubt gripped her. Her hands were shaking, her lower spine ached. She straightened up and arched backward with her hands on her hips, stretching. The baby was nearly due. She could feel it rasp and fret inside her, a sharpened stone growing too large for its cavern, questioning, demanding to be let out, demanding to be free.

She wiped the soapsuds from her arms. Today was the day. She was going without telling Suleiman, without telling Fatima. She was going to leave them all and escape with her unborn baby. She reckoned on this time of day being safe: Suleiman at the notary’s office, discussing the ongoing lease of his cotton fields and palm groves; Fatima on her pallet with a headache, shutters closed and a wet cloth over her eyes; the cook ensconced in the kitchen muttering to herself as she chopped up a lamb killed only that morning, squatting on her haunches, throwing the pieces into a pot at her foot.

The noon hour had only just passed and the town seemed still and drowsy as a drugged bee. She rolled down her sleeves, fastening them at the wrists, collected her meagre provisions and the jingling cache of coins. One rolled out of the pouch and fell to the ground. She grimaced at the sound as she bent to pick it up, belting the pouch at her waist. The ginger cat miaowed as if aware of her defection, and she knelt down to bury her face one last time in its fur.

With swift deliberation, she draped her veil firmly over her face and traversed the courtyard in silent steps, peering into the kitchen on her way. The cook’s back was to her and she was humming. She unbolted the courtyard doors. Her hands were trembling again – she knew she made more noise than was necessary. The pounding of her heart louder than the fountains’ splash. She slipped through the tiny opening she made and closed the doors behind her.

When she was outside, she stopped for a moment with her back against the wall. Her blood was still surging in her temples, thick with dread. It was so easy. So simple. The street murmured painful foreboding in the shimmering heat. She shaded her eyes, gazed up and down its length and breadth. But what do I do now? Her plans had seemed so perfect, so watertight when she lay awake at night beside Suleiman, his knee wedged between her legs, her body weak and yielding and moulded into his.

She would go back to Van and find Papa. There would be khans on the journey for her to sleep in, where she might remain unmolested. She might be able to give birth on the way. This terrified her. But to wait here would mean she would lose all hope, all freedom, become Turkish and give birth to a child who would grow up Turkish, knowing nothing of its true culture. She had to leave, for her child’s sake if not her own. She would be protected, she’d have to be. A peasant woman would help her birth. A Bedouin, used to labouring alone in the desert. She would arrive home safely. She would reclaim their old house and live in it with only her baby if she couldn’t find Papa. If the house had been burnt down by the Turks, she’d get someone to build it again. Yervan? He might still be alive. After all, it was still their land. Suleiman had told her all Armenian assets had been classified by the government as abandoned goods. She didn’t quite understand what that meant in her case. Surely they couldn’t take away her ancestral fields. Surely she would be safe again at home.

Now the street stretched before her in a terrifying spiral of doubt. Where do I go? What if the Turks find me? They’ ll know I’m Armenian. She looped another thickness of fabric over her face and made herself walk to the end of the street. Her legs trembled and threatened to buckle beneath her. She knew she looked odd; she couldn’t help making little whimpers of fear she knew were audible through the veil.

Yet there was nobody around. The buildings moved closer together in the heat haze, conferring over her escape. Black palms swayed above her, although there was no wind. She looked up, squinted into the sky, blue as the indigo dye she saw for sale in the markets. Too blue, too perfect, sinister, like the cold glass eye Suleiman had tucked into the folds of her nightdress when he found out she was pregnant. She hadn’t wanted to look at it. It reminded her too much of her own Armenian eyes, the colour of Lake Van.

‘Keep this,’ he said. ‘It will protect you and our baby. Trust me.’

She fumbled in her clothes as she walked higher up the incline of the silent street. Her fingers searched between her breasts, in her underclothes, digging into her navel. It was nowhere to be found. I’ve left it behind!

She halted, her face twisting beneath her veil. I can’t leave here if I’ve left it behind. The panic of choice held her down, deep in the belly. Suleiman. Our child. Help me. She remembered the way his face had looked last night in the moon’s pale shiver. ‘No,’ he had said when she bent down and touched her mouth to him. His penis was a little furled bud, vulnerable. ‘No.’ His cheeks crumpled, like a baby hurting. He helped her put her clothes back on with jerky movements, fumbling with the buttons, tying the sash askew, and sat with her on the bed, saying he was too tired. ‘The others,’ he said, ‘they demand so much from me. You, Lale—I can only be myself with you.’

Standing at the crossroads, torn by her indecision and the desire to scurry back to the safety of the courtyard, she saw a caravan in the distance, visible over the high town walls.

I could go straight back there now and nobody would ever suspect.

She thought of Fatima: all those barren years of longing, her reckless desperation. She thought of her child in the future, a son or daughter that would look just like its father, blank-eyed when she tried to tell the story of its origins, the suffering of its race.

The caravan was coming closer now, skirting the edge of town. She could see men in bright checked scarves, the fluid grace of camels, litters and palanquins carrying piles of clothes, rugs, thick bolts of rainbow fabric. Also women, perched high on the smaller beasts, unveiled and tattooed on forehead and chin. She thought their eyes sought her out, could see who she really was under all her veils and gold. For an instant she thought she would raise her hand and alert them to her presence. They would take her now, look after her. But her hands remained where they were, clasped loose on her belly. The child kicked; a sublime nudge into the present. She turned away and began to retrace her steps to Suleiman’s house.

Now the voice in Minas’s head redoubled in its efforts. It was shrill and then there were more of them calling, brittle and insistent, sweet singing refrains from the community of the dead. They would not let him rest so he lay awake at night scheming, planning his escape. He pushed away the girl with the flat of his hand when she wanted to touch him. Yet he was selfish. He held on to her greasy braid as he plotted, the same way he had with his sister when their mother left for work each dawn in Van. Her hair a living reminder he was not alone in the dark.

He thought of the other boy, now assigned to the best sleeping block in the camp and given work in the kitchens. Minas had seen him some mornings in the back courtyard, throwing last week’s slops to prisoners lucky enough to be there at the right time. Old and young men fighting over garbage, cradling it in cupped hands, taking it back to their sleeping block or behind the latrines to savour, mouthful by mouthful, deflecting kicks and blows from the others. He watched the boy eat his breakfast ration of gruel with fastidious slowness, brushing the curls out of his eyes, then wipe the tin bowl with his little finger to lick it clean. He seemed more energetic than most, even robust, with less prominent ribs. Working among food would have something to do with that, scrounging scraps left over from the guards’ meals, stealing an extra mouthful here and there.

Minas hadn’t approached him again since the time he was rebuffed; they hardly acknowledged each other’s presence at all. Survival was hard enough without pleasantries. Yet tonight as he curled up beside the girl and tugged at her hair, he knew the key to his escape lay with this boy. He seemed to have retained a faint trace of dignity among the filth, some vestige of an intact identity from his life before; the rigours of the camp had not yet rendered it meaningless. This awareness was present in all his gestures: the unhurried rhythm of his movements, his sense of hygiene, the youthful arrogance Minas could also – faintly – recognise in himself.

The boy was the only other inmate in good enough physical condition, and perhaps even optimistic enough, to consider attempting an escape. He had access to water and provisions they could take with them for the desert journey; he could even steal a knife or two for their protection. He was younger than Minas, perhaps even young enough to be easily manipulated should anything go wrong.

He rose from the ground, stealthy, and the girl beside him grasped his arm.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Piss,’ he muttered.

She let him go, her hand lingering for a moment on his elbow. He stepped over sleeping bodies, eased the tent-flap open. He strained his eyes into the desert dark, terrible and final as a blanket draped over the eyes. No Turks close by. Far away, in the direction of the kitchens, he could hear male voices singing, smashing glass, a girl’s thin, insistent cry. He made his way to the next sleeping block, his ears painful with the effort of listening out for a patrolling guard’s footsteps, the slaver of the sleeping dogs, his own cough.

Now he slipped into the other tent. How to find the boy among so many people? He stepped over recumbent bodies again, more careful this time of out-flung arms or legs. In a moment of panic, he realised he didn’t know the boy’s name. He waited until he stood in the centre before he spoke, hearing his own voice come back to him in a tight, controlled whisper. ‘Is the young boy here who works in the kitchen? The one with curly hair?’

Nothing. Then from the darkness came murmurs and whispers like the rising of a tide. ‘Why, do you want to fuck him?’ ‘No boys here, only men!’ And a reedy woman’s voice, ‘Shut up, all of you, I’m trying to sleep.’ One of the figures sat upright, pointing an accusing finger. ‘I’ll call the guards! Get back to your own block, you’ll have us all killed.’

He quashed the instinct to flee, gulped and tried again.

‘I beg you, I need to find him.’

Somewhere in the far corner, he heard a fretful voice.

‘I think you’re looking for me.’

He stumbled over bodies in the dark, all the while being prodded at and kicked in the shins. He knelt down so close he could smell the boy’s breath, feel the tickle of those damp curls on his forehead. Anxiety and the fear of being found out made him garble and cough and spit out his words.

‘Come outside with me. I need to ask you something – in private.’

The moon glinted through the tent flaps. The boy hesitated, flung his hair back. It seemed an affectation.

‘You’re not—you don’t want me, do you? Because you know it will cost. In food.’

Minas breathed out, exasperated already.

‘Just come outside.’

He yanked the boy up by the arm and pulled him through the tent and outside where they both crouched on the ground, shivering in the night air. The boy was gasping with what seemed outraged pride and fright. Minas tried to look into his face.

‘Listen to me. I don’t know you well but feel you’re in the same mind as I am. I need to speak to you about—escaping from here.’

The boy stood up.

‘You’ve got to be joking.’

He seemed recovered now, his tone and stance familiar.

‘We can do it together. I’ve been thinking about it for months.’

‘Why me?’

Minas decided to lie.

‘I trust you.’

He felt rather than saw the boy nod his quick assent.

‘But how do I know I can trust you?’

‘Listen to me now and make up your mind. I’m putting my life on the line just by telling you, aren’t I? I have a plan and need you with me. Will you listen? Just sit down again. Tomorrow we hide in the kitchens after the evening meal – you must know a good place – and when the back gates are opened next morning for the provisions to arrive—’

‘They only come on Wednesdays.’

‘All right then, the day after tomorrow.’

‘I’ll be serving Tuesday night; it will be easy for me to hide. As for you …’ ‘I’ll think of something, if you tell me where you’ll be.’

The boy seemed to be lost in contemplation, silent in the dark. Minas looked around him, acutely conscious of the time passing.

‘Anyway,’ the boy finally said. ‘What’s in it for me?’

‘We can help each other in the desert. And when we reach Van. You are a Vanetzi, aren’t you?’

‘Yes. So far I’m helping you, but I don’t see how—’

‘We’ll stick together. If we get out of here alive, I’ll look after you. I promise.’

He felt the boy’s thin hand on his leg. The high voice throbbed in his ear.

‘You promise?’

‘Yes.’ Minas was becoming exasperated again. ‘I promise. So, the delivery comes the next morning, and as they’re unloading we make a run for it.’

‘In broad daylight? They’ll shoot us before we can run ten metres.’ ‘There’s no other way.’

They were squashed hard against each other in the kitchen storeroom. It was little more than a cupboard, so crammed with jars and sacks there was barely room for the rats that scurried over their feet and faces, let alone two grown boys. It had been more difficult than Minas first thought, evading the guards at the evening meal and managing to hide. A new Turk had been on duty, a younger man who seemed to feel the need to be vigilant, counting prisoners as they filed into the tent for their evening meal and then out again. But Minas had created a diversion by spilling his scalding broth on the bare feet of another inmate, and in the commotion had been able to slip to the side in the shadows and join the boy.

Now, as he sat twisted up against the boy’s heaving chest, he remembered that he still didn’t know his name. He couldn’t ask him now; any sound or movement could give them away. The Kurdish cooks were still in the kitchen scouring the huge pots that held every meal, morning gruel or evening broth, each day. Some inmates were busy sweeping the dirt floors, wiping down the thick slab of stone that passed for chopping board and serving counter. He could hear their whimpers and groans as the cooks kicked them in the kidneys to urge them to work faster. He moved his knee back an inch, and felt the boy flex his muscles in gratitude for the extra space.

They tried not to breathe too loudly, although the air was becoming staler. He felt the stolen knife dig into his thigh, but there was no way he could move again to ease his discomfort. The boy seemed to be gasping, then in a terrible moment, ceased to make any sound at all. He pressed his lips to the boy’s ear.

‘All right?’

A slight twitch was the answer. He let himself drift into reverie then, and the pimpled girl’s face swam at his side in reproach. This morning he told her he was going to try to escape tonight. He saw in her careful expression she was hurt. Although she insisted she was too weak to come, his obvious hesitancy to take her now was unforgivable. Yet she still nestled into him to say goodbye and he moved away from her stink with a squeamishness he had never been aware of before. He was leaving her now, his body shrinking from contact before his brain even severed the bond.

Fastidious, after everything he had touched and seen. The rats stirred at his feet. Not as fastidious as this boy at his side. He saw him avoid certain inmates as if afraid to be infected by them. He saw how the boy cultivated the guards in the hope of favours. He pinched him to make sure he hadn’t suffocated, and felt a flicker of response. He must have dozed then, or slipped into unconsciousness, because the next he knew there were shouts and sweeping shadows cast by lanterns held aloft, and thick Turkish voices in an uproar. He heard the commander’s fractured voice over the loudspeakers.

‘Two men missing! Search the entire camp.’

He could hear the sirens now, and dogs snuffling at the storeroom door, and his bowels turned to water. He felt the boy stir beside him, and try to stretch out. He held him fast in his grip. He manoeuvred his arm painfully to the side and clamped his hand over the boy’s mouth. The boy struggled and flailed, and Minas knew they would soon be discovered. Still he nursed some faint hope, if he could only hold the boy still long enough.

He felt the warm stench of vomit seep through his fingers. He tightened them on the boy’s face, resisting the urge to let go. More liquid bubbling out of the boy’s mouth – it seemed to never end. He felt his fingers relax their grip somewhat; the boy’s face was slippery now, unmanageable. In an instant he wrenched out of Minas’s grasp and yelled.

‘He’s in here, my lords! He took me hostage against my will.’

While Minas was in solitary confinement he wondered why the Turks hadn’t just killed him on the spot. He supposed they needed labour, and he and the boy were two of the very few inmates at this point healthy enough to work so hard. There hadn’t been new convoys for many weeks now. He had also seen some of the older guards stepping forward and pleading for leniency on their behalf, the very same guards who had propositioned him by the mass graves.

Both boys had been bundled out of the storeroom, landing at the feet of the assembled company. Minas would have laughed if he hadn’t been so terrified. The knife had skidded across the floor in a wide, shining arc, evidence of his guilt and the boy’s betrayal. Although the Turks had only half-believed his babbled story, the boy had been whipped and left out in the sun for a day and a night as an example to other prisoners. Minas was spared the sight of his oozing, blackened body at assembly and taken to solitary for three weeks.

Thank God they hadn’t stripped him before throwing him into prison. His mother’s earrings still pressed into the flesh of his nipples, all but healed now, and growing over the piercing. A voice he learnt to rely upon soothed him in these confined quarters, his cage of steel wire. Sometimes it came to him in the guise of his mother at bedtime, her black hair redolent of bergamot and her temples damp from the bath, an open window at his head to let in the lake’s summer breezes. My darling, my love, your suffering and joys will be many. At other times it mimicked the voice of Lilit, hissing and swaying and not allowing him to forget. There is hope, she said, hope means everything will be all right someday, and the familiar girlish voice echoed somewhere deep down in his gut.

He couldn’t lie down or stretch out, only crouch with his head tucked into his chest and his knees buckled up to his ears. The sun beat down on him constantly during the day, and in the chill of the desert night rats, lizards and scorpions sought some warmth in the recesses of his body. He killed the smallest lizards with the flat of his hand, watched their pale bodies blacken and shrivel as he waited until he was brave enough, or starving enough, to partake of them.

He felt he was slowly dying, moment by moment. Yet the voice lulled him to sleep, sang him lullabies.

He busied himself with more escape plans. They became ever more elaborate and improbable, yet they helped him brave the buckets of camel dung thrown over him by jocular guards, the clump of dry gruel flung at him once every two days, the incessant evening chatter of the younger soldiers on duty. At three-hour intervals the guards kicked him awake so that he never enjoyed a full night’s sleep. Five days into his confinement, after a surprise meal of mouldy bread, he thought of the Bedouin. Perhaps the extra nutrients jolted his brain into some semblance of logic.

Before the failed escape, he’d seen some of the younger Bedouin from nearby tribes loiter around the periphery of the camp in the mornings, looking for some work, a handful of liras in exchange for an hour’s menial labour. The guards sometimes used them and their camels to transport prisoners out to the middle of the desert to be shot and buried on the spot. He would have to befriend a Bedouin when they let him out.

In the meantime, he tried to exercise, but there was no room to move. He wriggled his fingers and toes at strict intervals, kept himself from total boredom by tightening each individual muscle he could detect then relaxing it again. After the first week, this began to tire him. After the second, the most he could do was wake throughout the day and night from longer and longer periods of unconsciousness and open his mouth – yes, I am still alive, because my jaw hurts – then close it again. This in itself was an achievement. At the end of his third week, he was hardly aware of his body at all. He floated above the cage, borne along by the ear-splitting, painful accents of his mother’s voice. My darling, my love, your sufferings and joys will be many.

His first morning back at dawn assembly, he was so weak he could hardly keep from falling down. His arms and legs would not obey him: his impotent brain confusing signals. His torso was bent double. He tried to straighten up a little and gasped with the pain. The other inmates stood apart and watched, waiting for him to fall so they could jeer at him. He tried to walk, but found he couldn’t. He leaned against another man, who elbowed him in the side and glared. He stumbled and managed to right himself, panting and clutching at his chest. He felt as if he’d run for days, lifted the weight of worlds, been stretched out on a rack. Every inch of his body, every muscle, rasped and burned and screamed for relief.

Before the commander’s tirade began, he squatted in the dust and scrutinised his arms and legs, holding them out in front of him in the sunlight as if seeing them for the first time. Skeleton bones, shreds of yellow skin, reddish in places. Now he looked like everyone else, or even worse. A walking corpse. No longer himself. When was the last time he knew who he was anyway? The little boy who used to sit by the window in Van entranced by his schoolbooks. He searched for the pimpled girl and couldn’t see her. Maybe she was dead, he thought without emotion. Maybe she was avoiding him, afraid to be tainted by his botched escape and subsequent ordeal.

He kept to the outer reaches of the crowd of prisoners, trying to see without moving his head if there were any Bedouin waiting on the outskirts, beyond the barbed-wire fences. There were. He knew that to walk across and speak to one of them openly would mean certain death. And he wasn’t entirely sure he could walk that distance unaided. He knew no Arabic. He would have to trust they spoke at least some Turkish, would have to trust they would listen and not betray him. And would they even want his gold earrings?

Assembly ended with the usual curses and oaths from the commander. Minas was selected, as always, to go with the youngest team far into the desert to carry and bury corpses. He didn’t think he would be able to bear the dead weight, not now. They were given extra rations for this job – two ladles of gruel instead of one – and, even in his consternation, he was glad of that. During breakfast, the guards sat to one side and were never overly vigilant, slurping their tea from huge metal panniers, eating food the inmates of the camp could never dream of: fresh goat’s meat, frothy milk, eggs. He knew the Bedouin supplied them with such luxuries in exchange for a few more coins. The milling crowd of prisoners worked in his favour; it was easy to wander, be unpredictable.

He waited in line for gruel, using his fingers to scoop it into his mouth. He saw the boy who had betrayed him squatting behind the main cauldron, being fed by another inmate. The older man seemed to be cajoling him, one hand clamped on the boy’s scarred thigh. As Minas came near, the boy was in the act of opening his mouth wide to the spoon, like a baby bird. Minas caught his eye, made a growling sound in his throat then decided to ignore him. He was beneath contempt.

As he ate he walked in circles, feeling the strength come back to his legs and lower back, stretching, straightening, adjusting his spine. He walked, giving the impression of rumination, a man in the morning sunshine with nothing much to do. He caught the eye of a young Bedouin close by, a boy with a fine hawk’s nose and copper skin. The boy edged closer, twining his fingers in the mesh of the fence. His eyes were sharp beneath his red and white headscarf. Minas walked up and down, up and down, skirting the boy, always coming closer into his vicinity. When he passed him for the last time Minas slowed down, speaking between gulps of his gruel in rapid, slurred Turkish.

‘I have gold if you’ll help me.’

The Bedouin didn’t move, didn’t register a flicker of interest.

‘Do you understand?’

The Bedouin closed one eye, a lizard’s reflex. When he spoke, his Turkish was accented, melodious.

‘Show me the gold.’

Minas pulled up his shirt in a flash, then down again.

‘I need you to help me get out of here.’

The Bedouin made to walk away, not before making a clicking sound with his teeth.

‘Tonight, insh’allah, I shall come for you. Wait near the latrines.’

He waited, shivering in the cold air. If he were caught outside his sleeping block so late at night he’d be killed on the spot. Mauled by those dogs. The Bedouin hadn’t mentioned a time; he could be waiting here all night. He’d volunteered to be the one to empty the slops out in the shallow ditch that served as a latrine, to rinse out the bucket, to bring it back where it stood stinking all night by the door.

He’d been here many minutes now, maybe even five. Ten. Too long. He squatted in the ditch among the turds and felt his bare feet sink into the moistness of earth fed with excrement. He didn’t hold his nose; after the corpses he managed to carry all day, this was easy. Still, he didn’t like the sensation of it on his soles and worming around his toes. He fought the need to retch, but there was nothing in his stomach. Maybe the Bedouin has been and gone. Maybe he’s going to betray me too.

Barking. The soft, crunching sound of bare feet on sand. He crouched still further into the ditch, until the spongy mass of it touched his nose. He covered his eyes with his hands. If I’m mauled, I don’t want to see it coming. He heaved, tried not to cry. After everything I’ve seen, why am I so scared? A light hand on his arm.

‘Quick, Nazarene.’

It was the Bedouin.

‘I managed to come in on the pretext of bringing them some mansaf. Run now. They will not be eating it for long.’

He swathed Minas in a dark bolt of fabric, winding it around his face and neck.

‘Good. Now you look more like us.’

He followed the Bedouin’s swishing robe to the very perimeter of the camp, on the south side, which the Turks usually manned with only one or two men. He saw a guard holding a gun and panicked.

‘I can’t,’ he panted. ‘I’m scared.’

The Bedouin put his finger to his lips, miming sleep. Minas looked again. The guard – just a boy – was indeed sleeping upright, head sagging, the gun almost slipping off his shoulder.

The Bedouin smiled, a flash of teeth and grimace in one, and cupped his hands low to the ground. Minas looked up at the barbedwire fence; it was too high, but he saw that the Bedouin had thrown a saddle over it to ease his passage.

‘Come. Use my hands. Jump up high. My cousin is waiting on the other side.’

He jumped, scraped his torso against the barbed wire, wincing at the sound, and managed to climb over, lacerating his whole body. When he landed in the sand on the other side, he felt his right leg buckle and knew he’d sprained an ankle. The cousin helped him to his feet. Limping, quietly sobbing, he clambered behind him onto a spitting, groaning, exasperated camel.

Minas remembered his sister: her half-smile, the way he laughed at her long plait and pulled it hard so she screamed. There was not much else to do, except think and remember. He thought of the girl he left behind at the camp. Her own greasy braid, cold as a snake between his fingers at night. He tried not to think of her again. He’d been hiding now in the litter under a pile of rugs for too long. His thigh muscles ached, his neck permanently twisted to one side, his throat tickled then shut down completely from lack of fluid. The Bedouin gave him water twice a day with his food but in this heat he craved liquid constantly. The dried strips of unidentifiable meat they gave him increased his thirst only the more.

On the first night, they pressed a cold, mealy compress of some desert herb on his ankle, bandaged the swelling and left it to heal. He reached inside the swaddling now and scraped some of the paste onto his fingers, tasted it and immediately spat it out. It did not quench his thirst and was decidedly bitter. He regretted the loss of saliva. He moved his ankle cautiously now, flexing it back and forward, feeling the warning twinge of pain all the way up his thigh.

At sunset he was let out for a few minutes with a handful of dates. He balanced on one leg, holding his penis, pissing in a trickle and gazing at the promise of a new world. The Bedouin had laughed at him the first time; they all knelt to urinate in an attitude of prayer. He continued to stand, heedless of their remarks, gazing out at a landscape with no horizon. The colours of the dunes and pillars of sand became softer, although at the same time more distinct: shimmer pinks and beaten gold and tinges of night blue. Clay dwellings in the distance were shaped like helmets fashioned of copper, ancient headdresses for long-dead Armenian men. His dates were fresh and plump, syrupy. The sensation on his tongue overwhelming. While he ate them, they alone constituted the sum of his existence. He kept the few date pips in his mouth until he had extracted every last molecule of sweetness from them, until they resembled pellets of bone, sparking a jolt of memory.

The young Bedouin hadn’t accepted the earrings after all. He waved Minas’s offer away with wide smiles and clicking sounds and said he was as glad as Minas to be going far away from those Turks, to be travelling to Damascus to buy kilim saddlebags and tea sets and iridescent veils for the long journey back to Baghdad. They had gold enough this season, he said. Their trade was good. They sold their wares for twice the price the further east they went. Better than any amount of gold was the coinage of heaven. And by saving him, hopefully the Bedouin had paid some of his dues.

Sometimes people would sit on top of the pile of rugs and woollen saddles and he almost suffocated in the odour of hot flesh and drying sweat. At those moments he felt the Bedouin were torturing him for their own pleasure instead of aiding his escape. He cursed them under his breath as vile Arabs, traitors, sadists as bad as any Turk. He waited until the next meal, the next morsel tossed from camel-blackened hands. He begged for more water, clutching at his throat, but the boy assigned to him didn’t understand, or didn’t want to.

When they left him in Damascus he had no idea what to do. They had provided him with a clean set of clothes in the Arab style; it took him several days before he grew used to feeling the loose fabric swirl across his calves, the uprush of air on his genitals as he walked, limping at first, then slowly gaining in strength. Even in all his fear and confusion, sometimes the airiness of his new clothes made him desire another’s body. He wandered the streets in this way, patting the beard that had grown sparse and wispy as a grandfather’s in patches over his cheeks. Reddish, he assumed, as his father’s had once been. He had no mirror.

He tried to catch a glimpse of his reflection in shop windows or in mounds of scattered glass on the road but he never managed to see any detail or colour, only his smudge of a face, features clouding, insubstantial. He bared his teeth at himself like an animal. Over the last months in the desert and with the Bedouin he had become a man.

He scavenged in piles of refuse for discarded food and drank full to bursting from the elaborate fountains on every street corner. He didn’t want to sell the earrings, not yet. He had sewn them into the hem of his garment before he left the Bedouin, with needle and strong thread they gave him. He wasn’t sure where he wanted to go next, or what to do with the money if he sold them. At the same time he grew to like Damascus and was loath to leave. Its open squares and fountains were bathed in early morning light, where he washed fully clothed with the city beggars. Spikes of sun came through the high palms that shaded its thoroughfares. The water raining over his body made cataracts of silver that fanned out into the circling streets, wetting flower sellers, donkeys laden with watermelons and boiled sweets and bananas, or the derelicts that seemed more affluent to Minas than himself. The mosques and museums offered shaded courtyards where he could sleep and rest in the noonday heat, sometimes even eat a meal when pilgrims and mourners dispensed their largesse of crescent-shaped cakes and jellies to all the beggars.

He made a habit each day of walking through the dim archways of the gold souk, wondering how much his earrings would be worth. He pressed his nose to the polished-glass fronts of jewellery shops, street upon street. They were all the same. Tiny bands of gold for newborn babies, miniature fragments of the Koran on thin chains, garish belts of carnelian and chased silver. Papa’s were better than these. He straightened up, caught a blur of his own reflection in the glass. I can do better than these. He wondered if he could stay in Damascus, settle into life as a shopkeeper and fashioner of gold. In the next breath he dismissed the thought. I’m a refugee, for God’s sake. I don’t even have any shoes.

He passed a stall on the corner near the Umayyad mosque and begged for food by placing both hands together and bowing his head. The vendor gave him a dried husk of corn, assuming he was a Muslim pilgrim. At noon when the sun reached its zenith he entered the mosque compound and lay with believers in the shade of jasmine vines that ran riot over gates and crumbling stone walls. He slept with the scent of his mother all about him. He dreamed of her, a pale shade dead for little less than a year now. His sister gone with a Turk seven months ago. Probably dead as well.

He knew he must leave soon; Damascus was not far enough away from the Turks, the great maw of the death camps. The straight road to Der ez Zor like a character meaning death. Those long evenings in the sleeping blocks, with nothing to do with other prisoners except reminisce, mourn the death of their culture. The Ark foundered on the shores of Lake Van, or Mount Ararat? Some of the old stories did not stick. He was living the myths now, writing in his body a new narrative of suffering. Surviving the deluge, as they had. Their land of Hayastan, now gone forever. Only the women had kept the old words alive. The tenacity of wives and mothers and sisters: women scratching letters in the sand as they marched, teaching their children the Armenian alphabet so it would not be lost forever.

The Armenian alphabet, milky words flowing like hidden springs in the desert. Mamma had told him a story, when she sat in the slight breeze from their Aykesdan window at dusk. How the creator of their alphabet, Mesrop Mashtots, died and was to be buried on a mountain far away. The walk to the burial site was long and hard, much as Minas now knew the forced marches were. The mourners suffered with thirst. They were fatigued, could go no further. His body was laid on the grass, and from the place at his feet appeared a spring of cold, bubbling water, pure as truth.

No miracles in the desert this time. The women suffered great thirst, great hunger, watched their babies pushed deep into sand, not laid to rest on grass. They took the holy manuscripts of mediaeval Armenia with them, cut in half, buried them with rituals, psalms for the dead. Tears mixed with blood, with sand, words fragmenting into syllables, cries of uncoded meaning. The letters remained in the sand for an instant, only to vanish in the careless desert wind. The women died. The children perished without language to guide them.

Minas broke off a thin branch from the jasmine above him and knelt in the dirt. Armenia is no more, he wrote, in the squat, round script Mamma had taught him. Near his foot, he saw a wet blade of grass, a yellowing jasmine leaf, its striations as curved as the Armenian alphabet, the white squares of light between the mosque walls – and he had to stop. There was a litany of names, dates. A dirge. Lilit. Mamma and Papa. Yervan. The pimpled girl. So many more. And what of the shadowy ones, the unknown?

The voice in his head reached a higher pitch. It taunted him with his apathy. He rubbed out his previous sentence. Minas Pakradounian is no more, he wrote. He would have to go away from here, to the farthest edge of land bordering the sea. He would go to Beirut.

Lilit stopped short when she saw Suleiman coming toward her. She thought of turning around and going the other way but it was too late – he’d already seen her. She drew her veil tighter around her face but knew he would recognise the cut of her clothes and her swaying walk, the advanced pregnancy singling her out from other women of the neighbourhood.

He came alongside and pressed his mouth to her veil.

‘What are you doing away from the house without my permission?’

She felt flecks of his saliva on her cheek through the fabric. She didn’t know how to begin, or even if it was wise to begin at all. He hauled her into the courtyard, gripping both her wrists in one of his hands.

‘You’re hurting me, Suleiman! Don’t pull so hard.’

‘Where have you been? What have you been doing?’

She unwound the veil from her face, let it fall to the floor in a heap. Suleiman came closer, thrusting his face into her line of vision.

‘Tell me why you were out of the house. Bringing shame onto me and my household.’

From the corner of her eye she saw Fatima by the door, woken by Suleiman’s shouting. She was wearing bathroom clogs, looked awkward without her jewelled slippers. Lilit remembered her own clogs, once bright as pomegranates, drifted for a moment, wondering where they ended up after the gendarme speared them with his bayonet and flung them into the garden. She had a vision of hundreds of shoes sprouting from tree branches, dangling fruit of painted wood. Looking into Suleiman’s eyes, illuminated by the memory, there was a moment of tenderness, of possibility. I don’t have to be afraid of you.

Fatima moved slower than usual, as if a small part of life was drained out of her body. She made her way through the courtyard, reached up to touch the trembling fronds of the date palm as she passed. The cook shadowed her, wiping streaks of sheep’s blood on her apron, wearing the same neutral expression she always cultivated when in the presence of a man.

Lilit whispered, ‘Not in front of them.’

Suleiman slapped her twice, once on each cheek.

‘Yes, in front of them! I want them to listen and learn.’

She straightened, looked Suleiman in the eye. Her cheeks were pulsating; the sudden pain gave her power. There’s nothing to lose now. She made her voice high and shrill and fast so she could be carried away by its insistence, unafraid of what would happen when it stopped.

‘Fatima wanted me to give her our child then run away and leave you, and we’ve been planning it for months now and I couldn’t bear to give my baby away to her so I decided to leave today but then I came back because I was afraid and now I’m scared she’ll punish me and so will you, and I don’t know what to do.’

She stopped, felt the fear she’d kept at bay filling her lungs. She prepared herself for a beating, a swift drowning in the shallow pool, or a public death with the imam nodding in assent. Suleiman wheeled around, beckoned Fatima to him with a crook of his finger. She took her time responding, her powdered face suddenly flushed red under her transparent veil.

‘Kneel down,’ Suleiman told her.

She knelt in front of him, ringed hands flat on her thighs, waiting. She didn’t look at Lilit.

‘Now bend your head and kiss Lale’s feet.’

Fatima gasped, made as if to rise, but Suleiman held her down with one hand on her shoulder.

‘Go on. Lift up her robe and kiss her feet.’

Lilit’s knees turned to water. She saw Fatima look up at Suleiman imploringly, her eyes filling with tears under the veil. He remained impassive. She stood very still as Fatima crawled on her knees toward her, a bare shuffling on the wet tiles of the courtyard. It was an indecent, naked sound. Oh God, she’s going to kill me after this.

Fatima lifted up the dusty fabric of Lilit’s travelling cloak with one hand. Her breathing became heavier; it filled the courtyard. Lilit kept her eyes lowered, almost shut. I should not have to see this. This should not be happening. In a furtive movement, Fatima pressed her lips to Lilit’s toes. Her mouth was warm and moist, too intimate. Lilit tried not to breathe as loudly in the ensuing silence.

Suleiman clapped his hands, once, then twice, as if summoning a slave. He knelt beside Fatima and placed his open hand on her head, forcing her to stay down. Lilit felt Fatima’s jaw push hard against the delicate bones of her foot. Suleiman spoke precisely then, without emotion.

‘Never, ever think you can abuse my love, Fatima.’

He stood up and turned to Lilit; she felt rather than saw the flash of his teeth.

‘She will never hurt you again.’

Fatima stayed in the same position, lips pressed to Lilit’s feet, a moment that seemed to last an eternity.