93 years ago, half a world away. A
young girl of nine, perhaps ten years helps her family bury their belongings
just outside the
“Tdatdo,”
my mother would say, herself a young girl sitting on her heels as her
grandmother’s voice caught on the memory of blood and burning sand, “tell us
more.”
Azneve
swallowed against an ancient, haunting thirst.
Far removed from her evening tales of Persian princes and happy endings,
she immersed herself once again in remembrance.
She would tell this story, because that is what history asked of
her. What the dead asked of her.
It
was too late. They had been found. She and hundreds of families were compelled
to march, the steel of Turkish gendarmes driving them to the east. Above, the crescent moon, crest of murderous
sovereign, set poised like a scythe to sweep them all into the sand, voiceless
and forgotten.
As
they were led away in forced procession, the village behind them succumbed to
the secret, vengeful fire of the long sand, its homes and churches reduced to
smoldering ruin on a dwindling horizon.
It
was a relocation, the Turk had told them.
“For your own protection,” he said as he oiled the edge of his
bayonet.
Later
she would watch as her cousins threw themselves to a river choked with bodies
of the fallen, foul waters pooling behind a dam of bent and broken forms barely
recognizable as human. She envied them that final, cold embrace. But still she
prayed.
Deeper
into the desert they walked. Others
joined them on the march with tales from other provinces; of teachers, poets,
and priests hung from bridges and trees; of children stripped from their
families, young girls carried off by laughing soldiers; of women burning alive
in the streets of Diarbekir.
They
killed the men, first. One by one,
husbands, fathers, and brothers all were given in crimson shadow to the
desert. A knife to the throat saved the
price of a bullet, pennies not to be wasted on Armenian dogs.
A
group of boys, bound together by rope, were led across a distant dune. They were not seen again.
Others,
the sick, the wretched, and the hungry, fell into the waste, their feet bound
in bloody tatters, their faces burned by sun and scathing sand. Thirst stalked them like a beast, picking off
what prey the gendarmes left it, wearing on the weary and the weak as the Turks
drove them onward. There were the Kurds,
too, who swept upon them, raping and murdering the women, and leaving with the
children.
But
not the girl with long hair and dirty hands.
One night she slipped away from the doomed procession, her ribbon
wrapped around her feet, her infant brother on her back.
She
did not know how long she wandered before darkness finally took her.
She touched her shoulder with a translucent, knotted hand;
she could still feel her brother’s terrified grip. It was 45 years later that
she discovered he had lived, taken to an orphanage after Russian soldiers
had found them unconscious in the sand. Of the thousands of kith and kin driven from
Moush in late April, only these two unlikely survivors remained. The others
took their place in the first genocide of the Twentieth Century, along with 1.5
million men, women and children sent to die in the desert of Der-el-Zor.
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