LAKE VAN, TURKISH
ARMENIA, 1905–1915

A white wall. It was the first thing she saw when her mother took her outside, opening her eyes wide into the sun’s dazzle. A white wall. She looked at it and remembered everything she’d learnt to forget. Memory before memory had a name. A white wall. Its flickering light familiar yet distant, the same blankness she’d gazed at for forty weeks, the walls of her mother’s womb.

First a wall, whitewashed each spring. On its surface, shadows of a window grille in diamond shapes: close-patterned bands of light and dark as the sun moved. She lay and looked at it for a long time.

Her mother called her lamb, quince-bud, rose-petal. The infant responded to the sounds but did not understand the meanings. She cooed and held out her fists.

In time the child learnt to recognise numbers and letters, great black rounded vowels. She didn’t know how to string them together but Mamma did; she would start to speak and a bracelet of sound would form itself into links of here and there, yes and no, right and wrong. Truth and lies. Muslims and Christians. Them and us. Turks and Armenians.

‘There’s a war on its way,’ she heard Papa say. ‘A world war.’

He said it in the same way he spoke of the weather, approaching rain. Her small head was tucked into the curve of Mamma’s neck and shoulder and she burrowed in, rubbing the soft creases of skin with her lips and cheeks.

‘Ssh,’ Mamma said. ‘The child.’

Mamma’s breath smelled of apricots. Dragonflies swooped around her hair, her pale cheeks, her mouth with its constant uplift of surprise. The airy sound their wings made had nothing to do with war, fear, what they were hearing. She fanned them away, stamped her bare feet a little in the long grass. When she moved closer to Papa, wet blades lay flattened and crumpled where she stood.

‘Maybe it’s already in the city,’ he continued. ‘Wars start there and seep into the countryside like blight.’

But Mamma turned away, spoke so low only her little girl could hear. ‘There’s always hope, do you know what that means?’

Hope. She made her daughter say it. Hope means everything will be all right someday. The little girl nodded and bit her lip, afraid to say anything wrong. Mamma sighed and swung her up into the trees, so high she was covered in leaves, while polished fruit all around threatened to fall. ‘Pomegranates,’ Mamma whispered. ‘The fruit of our forbears. Remember that.’ As she looked down through Mamma’s arms, yellow and purple irises made a Persian rug beneath her, their two lower petals little sucking mouths.

She played by the lake while Mamma caught fish to sell. Pearl mullet migrated against the current at this time of year, leaping out of the water straight into Mamma’s hands. She waded in with an apron bunched high around her hips, and algae trailed behind to catch between her legs, sinister green curls.

‘You wait there, my lamb. Don’t follow me.’

She nodded with her finger far in her mouth. She remembered a time, so much time ago it seemed, when she tried to follow her mother into the shallows, fell and cut her lip on the jagged rocks that hid beneath. Her blood fanned out into the water like wet hair, like the moving, sipping weeds on Mamma’s thighs.

Mamma was gone a long time, so she pulled oval stones from the suck of mud and washed them until their colours sang dove-grey and pomegranate red. She didn’t know those words yet but remembered the drowsy feel of pink and green and purple behind her eyes, when her mother hummed an old Armenian song as she bent over her at night. My darling, my love, your sufferings and joys will be many.

She learnt Lake Van was dangerous, more lethal than a split lip. Mamma told her the surface might look like a pale drawn-out sheet of sky, so calm and still it reflected the mountains above, but the depths were dead, so salty nothing could live there. Be careful. You could sink to the bottom and we would never know. The little girl poked her toe in the water, drew it away again. There was always fear around her in whispered commands: Don’t do that, or Watch out. She moved imperceptibly so she wouldn’t brush against Mamma’s anger. Mamma is very sad when you’re naughty. Or, Wait till I smack you. She was on guard against accidents: of gesture, thought, word. Perhaps that was why it took so long for her to speak. She learnt her name first: Lilit. Lilit Pakradounian. It was another litany against fear. Mamma made her repeat it many times, scolding if she stammered.

She was ashamed, bowing her head, afraid of letting Mamma see the sting of water in her eyes. Flat stone eyes, blue-black as the scum of silt marking her mother’s feet in wavering lines. Van blue, Mamma called them. You have eyes like the lake before sunrise. Lilit didn’t know if this was the truth; she’d never seen her own face. She turned the pebbles over, sleek round objects, comforting to hold. They warmed her hands, these little reflections of her, mirror shards polished by the lake at low tide. She looked into them, opened her eyes wide. Tried on different faces: sad, sorry, fearful, glad. She was bored. They stood all day together beside the pot of fish, throwing their arms out wide whenever a horse and rider or a cart clattered by, raising vapours of dust.

Sometimes they had eggs to sell. Mullet roe Mamma smoked then piled in tiny pyramids, amber orbs come alive again, gleaming in the slow sun.

‘Tsoug,’ they shouted at retreating travellers, making the sign of a fish with their hands, two fingers apart like a gaping mouth and forked tail.

One of Lilit’s hands was clenched tight, holding on to the last pebble.

At night they smelled the burning of fragrant grass. It went on for weeks but nobody in Van paid much heed, other than to bolt the shutters of their houses more carefully than usual at sundown. Only the ancient widow who begged outside church would point to the mountains, charred now, divested of foliage, and say: ‘They stank like that the last time our people were killed.’ Lilit looked up as she passed into the nave, lit a candle to hush her heart’s pounding. Her little brother Minas poked at her with a cruel finger, before rushing to join the priest behind the altar to begin the liturgy. She didn’t respond. The old, nameless fear paralysed any movement, the same fear that haunted her since she was a small child, the fear of never knowing enough.

The men milling in the porch narrowed their eyes to survey the barren peaks ringing their town. Rocks no different than before, skyedged and veiled by inevitable mists, shy as a virgin bride – not that there were many of those now. What with Kurds carrying girls away as fourth wives after they’d already been spoilt. The tribesmen had begun acting like lords lately, requisitioning houses when they passed through these valleys for their wintering. Of course they had been here for centuries too, as the Turks had. It was an uneasy relationship: nomad Muslims, farming Christians, Ottoman overlords. Much as the Armenians wished to believe they were autonomous, they had always been subject to the Turks.

The Kurds had begun moving into Armenian houses with their pack animals, exhausting provisions then turning their attention to the women of the household. No Armenian man would protest when they carried off his daughter. She was soiled now, indistinguishable from the wild-bearded men who claimed her. Lilit hoped this wouldn’t happen to her. She was old enough, now, for these violations. She peered sideways at the men, at their sunburnt cheeks, wondering how brutal they really were under those colourful silks and tassels, their wide-throated laughter. Surely they couldn’t be so bad, with smiles like that. They even came to her church on holy days, Muslims venerating the same Orthodox saints.

‘Look at the Kurds,’ the Armenians told the widow. ‘They respect us, we respect them. We even go to a mosque on their feast days to show our solidarity. Look at our mountains, our fields, our orchards. Nothing has changed. Look at our houses, our churches, our schools. They are still standing. Nothing has changed here for thousands of years. When have Armenians been killed by Muslims? Never. Not in our recollection or in our grandfathers’ or great-grandfathers’. Nothing is amiss. Everything is the same.’

Minas knew the men were wrong. Or lying, to keep their women quiet. They hadn’t read all the books he had. Most of them were afraid of the Kurds, bowing and smiling on the street, yet calling them the Turks’ butchers under their breath. They did all the dirty work. The Turks paid them to crucify Armenians a long time ago, for being Christian. The old men swapped these ancient stories between breaths, wheezing in the high air as they cut wood for winter.

‘We Armenians got our own back,’ they joked.

Minas piped up – they didn’t realise he’d been listening. Lilit sat aside under the trees, watching her wilful sheep, and thankfully out of earshot.

‘How?’

‘Ah, Minas,’ one man sighed. ‘You always want to know everything.’

Minas’s teacher began to speak, now his tongue had been loosened by the recollections of the older men. ‘Remember the Kurds in the 1870s?’ He was shivering and sweating as he brought down his axe to the soft white wood. ‘Remember what they did to us?’

The other men ignored him. Minas watched, his heart pulsing with a new understanding.

‘Remember the Turks moving in and pushing us out? Remember the atrocities twenty years ago? Two hundred thousand killed.’ He pointed at an old man. ‘You? You must have lived through it. And you. You.’

The men muttered, looked down at the blades in their hands, wouldn’t catch his eye.

‘We’re under occupation, I tell you. They’re calling it a holy war.’

The men continued to evade him, shaking their heads and spitting on the ground.

‘What about the massacre of 1908? Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten that as well?’

One of the older men cleared his throat, spoke without looking up at the teacher.

‘Enough, effendim. Enough now. We have constitutional rights again, after the end of that scoundrel Abdul Hamid may-he-burn-inthe-fires-of-hell.’

Another man chuckled.

‘You know his mother was an Armenian dancing girl? Neglected him in the harem. Maybe that’s why the bastard hated us so much.’

The older man frowned, deciding to ignore such levity.

The teacher cut in. ‘She was Circassian. A blonde slave from the Trebizond markets.’

The man pressed on. He continued to address the teacher, laying a grimy hand on his shoulder. ‘The Young Turk party are fine men, they are … they are … I don’t have the words for it.’

‘You mean liberals, intellectuals, reformists? In the lies they’ve been feeding us in newspapers and on posters?’

‘They can’t be liars. They’re civilised. We can carry arms now, own property, even emigrate. What’s there to worry about anymore?’

The teacher flung his axe down, threw up his hands. ‘I’m going. I’m getting out of here before they start killing us again, even if none of you are.’

When a breathless youth came running into Van with stories of hanging and looting in Constantinople, only a thousand miles to the west, all the men turned away.

At any rate, by day they didn’t smell the burning.

They still went to church each Sunday. They tied scraps of fabric to holy trees on the way and prayed guiltily to other, older gods, nature gods, fire gods: Hope nothing like that happens to us. Rag ribbons faded in sun and rain. The men fed their frightened beasts, or what was left of them. All pack animals had been seized by the Turkish army in the last few days, but the Armenians accepted this. After all, this was a time of war.

A night like any other, and Lilit’s hair a shiny black hole in the light of the dying fire. Her father’s seamed hands at rest on the blanket; her brother’s profile, sharp, waxen, childlike; her mother’s bridal earrings heavy on the pillow – all gilded by the last burning coals. She woke. Sobs wracked her whole body but she didn’t make a sound. Tears welled deep inside, a formal, adult sadness that seemed to tear her stomach and lungs apart. She stayed very still, as if to move an inch would cause her to sever completely, to forget the dream she had the very moment before she opened her eyes: fires in the mountains, mossy boughs of oak and birch burnt black, charred in the shapes of men’s bodies. She lay frozen in her bed, panting, while her brother, father and mother circled her and slept.

In the morning, she heard her mother wake before she saw her. It was just before dawn, the room they slept in still dark and fusty with lambs’ breath and herbs, too cold for late spring. She opened one eye, worried she’d be called to help gather kindling and stoke the fire. A sliver of morning light picked out the pinkness of objects: rose-cheeked icon above the window, earthenware plates and bowls from last night’s dinner, the brass coffee kettle on its side.

She watched Mamma sit up in her mound of blankets and don a heavy scarf, kiss Minas on the forehead, before she closed the door. He murmured sleepily and turned over. Even on a Sunday before church Mamma had to work. She cleaned the homes of rich Turks, most of them officers on leave with their families, or the feared gendarmes who patrolled the streets, neither police nor army, with no rules anyone could see. At night she hurried home with tales of cruelty, how the lady of the house had called Armenians bloodsucking parasites, an infection in the neighbourhood that should be eradicated now. But Papa urged her not to be so easily offended. Thus they could pay the infidel taxes imposed on them and still afford to send Minas to the missionary school, where he was taught the glory of the Ottomans and what his American teacher termed ‘their passive brutality called justice’. But that was all in the past. The Young Turks were different. Secular, modern, pro-Western. And they believed this. They had to.

Now Mamma was away most of the time, Lilit learnt to cook, clean, string rows of walnuts in front of the house to preserve them in the sun. She watched how neighbouring women painted them with plum syrup each day until they were purple and fragrant, a faint wine-rich whiff of death. When she’d left them there a few more months they were packed in jars to lie unopened until autumn.

They all planned in this small way for the future, averting their eyes from the whispers and sighs across their mountains and lakes. They tried not to dwell on stories of their brethren in Constantinople: dangling from gibbets in city squares, stripped of clothes and jewellery. Mansions, townhouses, chapels burned. Tokatlians, the city’s most famous Armenian restaurant, destroyed one night by a Turkish mob. Poets and merchants arrested and deported to the wild interior. City folk were different anyway; who knew what subversive behaviour they indulged in? Bringing retribution upon themselves. Artists and intellectuals, proud men with proud ideas. Self-defence in the face of violence. Self-determination. Self-rule. Self. Self. Count on city dwellers to be selfish. Writers of fantasies and lies. Setting up printing presses, talking of freedom and sovereignty from empire. That composer Komitas always big-noted himself; well of course they’d send him to a labour camp just to shut him up. They laughed at the paltry joke that did the rounds of town, shook their heads, went on with their patient work, the daily caress of the familiar.

Nothing much had changed in Van. The Pakradounians lived on the outskirts, to the east of the walled citadel. It was cleaner, Mamma said. And safer too, Minas mouthed, but didn’t dare speak aloud. They lived in Aykesdan, the Garden City of fields and farms, where there was a great deal of space to run and hide. It had once been the granary and pleasure quarter of the old town, now reduced to a hamlet of huts and orchards clinging to the slopes. Nothing had changed there since the war began, except for the shape and colour of their worries. Minas still fed their pet lamb – the runt of the flock – with warm milk each evening, taking comfort in the small round head resting against his knee. Mamma continued to bake holy bread every Saturday night to be carried under Papa’s none-too-clean jacket, and Lilit still put the sacrificial hen to roast slowly on the coals before they left for church. She twisted her hair in curl papers the night before, at her mother’s insistence, and had angry, vengeful dreams from sleeping on her stomach with her face buried deep in the pillow.

Mamma was always pale from the early morning’s work, her lips shut tight on her secrets. Papa strode well ahead, calling formal greetings to all his friends. Lilit halted every few paces to pull up her summer stockings, surreptitiously, under cover of her voluminous skirts. The stockings were old and thin, much darned, too loose for her now. She’d grown since last summer, cast off baby fat, and her legs were longer, trim-ankled, shapely. Minas trailed behind his parents, stepping on his sister’s heels deliberately each time she stopped: a small diversion from the boredom of the long walk from home.

She uttered whispered yelps of protest each time but never looked behind or raised a hand to her brother. Yervan sauntered behind them with his parents, whistling his secret signal so she’d know he was there. She could feel his gaze burning into the flesh of her buttocks, hidden by her lawn tunic and layers of undergarments. She wore a linked belt her papa had made, embossed with inscriptions promising a good future and many children. She knew that if she married Yervan the belt would widen then diminish as she became pregnant, gave birth, whittled down to her girlish shape again. It would be her fortune: the only record of her life, years written in silver and underlined in gold.

In church she contrived to stand opposite Yervan, able to see across the thicket of heads to where he lounged against a wall among all the other men and boys, avoiding her eyes. A frescoed Christ rose behind him, robed in cloth of gold, pomegranate buds twined in his unruly hair. Woven designs of flowers and fruit, constellations of earth. Black skin from so many burning candles. His three fingers were raised in benediction, touching the top of Yervan’s perfect head. She breathed a prayer: Please let nothing happen to him. In the next heartbeat, halfashamed of herself for such frivolous appeals: Forgive me, Jesus. But I meant it.

She mingled with the other women at the end of the service, eating her morsel of blessed bread, careful not to scatter crumbs, when all she wanted to do was fling away those trappings, bread and all, stride across the courtyard to Yervan and kiss his half-open lips. The sun shone on snowy scarves and upraised faces, where whispered gossip bred darker each year. He loitered past her, head down, hands in his pockets. She turned to listen to what another girl was saying about dried meal being good for the pigs, and he was gone.

When they arrived home, the chicken was cooked through and dripping fat. Mamma placed dough on the tonir over a bed of coals as they washed and prepared to eat. The dough was elastic, so transparent her hands could be seen through it. Minas took out his schoolbooks, not before telling Mamma she should sprinkle a little water on the bread as it baked to prevent it from drying out. She replied that a young man shouldn’t be so concerned over the doings of women, slapping the dough onto the hot surface, where it blistered. Yet Lilit knew she was pleased Minas knew about cooking and keeping house. She only yelled at him to keep Papa satisfied his only son wasn’t turning into a girl.

Papa napped now near the smell of baking, his cheek cupped in one hand. Mamma went outside to pull up spring onions to have with their meat, and Minas sighed as he began to read from the light at the window. Lilit stood in the middle of the room watching them all; she could sense the mood of her family, of the town, concentric ripples of doubt under sedate Sunday streets. She was alone; she among them had nothing to distract her. A shiver of fear passed through her, but she was used to that by now. She unbuttoned her cuffs, rolled up her sleeves in prudent folds and sat at the piano.

In front of her stood another window and a low white wall marking the boundary of their property. Mamma had never planted a vine or flowers over it; she said the shadows of fruit trees were beautiful enough. Lilit cracked her knuckles and looked at it now. Moving light seemed to draw letters on the rough surface, letters more powerful than those she wore at her waist. You will see him, it said. The shadows weren’t of leaves and branches, but of the diamond-shaped bars on windows that kept her inside. He will love you above all others. She began to play. Her fingers were long and brown and thin against the black and white keys. Two silver rings clicked against each other, point and counterpoint. The piano was badly tuned, some keys emitted no sound, some only creaked when she laid her fingers on them. But to her it was a wonder, singling her out to Yervan from the rest of the girls. She could play – granted, not very well – but she could play.

She knew Yervan’s family would walk past on their way home, and she wanted him to hear her voice and stop, enchanted by its lilting beauty. My darling, my love, your sufferings and joys will be many. Mamma stopped to click her tongue.

‘It’s Sunday, Lilit. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, singing like a Turk?’