Sing the Long Sorrow: A Compelling Story Set in the Time of the Armenian Genocide

Sing the Long Sorrow

(A Compelling Story Set in the Time of the Armenian Genocide)

Copyright 2009 by Vahan Gregory

SMASHWORDS EDITION

© December 25, 2009

This is a work of historical fiction. While many of the characters represented herein are real, as well as most of the events, some license has been taken regarding additional characters and events.

For my mother

Still her courage sees me through.

Introduction

Early in the 20th century, barely a decade after the Turkish massacres of the Armenians, I slowly grew aware of the tragedy of our family, my mom, dad, my sister, grandmother, and my mom’s younger brother. Her two older brothers were lost, and feared dead; her father had disappeared. My dad’s mother had died of typhus during the deportation, and an eyewitness had seen my dad’s 82-year-old father bayoneted. My grandmother and uncle each bore a wound from the same bullet, and her wound was visible.

The spiritual tone in our family was of grief and sadness, of longing melancholy, even during the frequent nights of song to my dad’s oud. Momma smiled only so rarely. Her occasional moments of delight—perhaps a new roll of oilcloth for the kitchen table, or her favorite scissors (on my desk at this moment) sharpened by the man with the pushcart—always made me cry. The joy in her smile somehow was a shock to me, revealing the immeasurable wells of grief that lay in her expression. Nothing ever in life could touch me with such terrible poignancy as my mother’s rare smile. And they never understood why I burst into sobs at those moments. Of course as a child, I could not bear to tell them.

I am indebted to the reminiscences of my step-uncle, Dr. A. Nakashian, author of A Man Who Found a Country, whose family my dad and I were privileged to join sometime after my mother’s early death in 1936. The memoirs of the American Ambassador to Turkey, Henry Morgenthau, further established the historic context of the time, as did the remarkable works of Rafael de Nogales, and the dazzling and necessary Ms. Armen Ohanian. strangers who heard of my interest generously offered me books, papers, letters, diaries, faded clippings, and personal anecdotes, each of which became vital to me and my mom’s endeavor, for which our gratitude extends from both dimensions.

The quoted tale of the couple in the boat attributed to one of the chief characters in this book, Kero Arak, is from a story by Krikor Zohrab, who is in part the basis for the character of Kero Arak as is also the legendary Fedayee commander Kevork Chavoush.

The lyric cry of poet Siamanto is represented here, as are the reminiscences in powerful imagery of numberless other survivors, poets, artists, and memoirists, all in synthesis with imaginative work of my own.

June 2004 Vahan Gregory

A Dream

I was invited to dine this day,

with a figure who was unknown to me,

who spoke Haieren, my mother tongue,

which I no longer know,

and have not spoken or occasionally sung,

for only a century or so.

Dinner roared forth in many courses,

as lines of an epic rhyme to the tune,

of a sculpture vastly immense whose verses,

were rugged curves, towering stone,

flowers, trees, and precipitous charm,

a repast that rang a stirring flood,

of color deep in the resonant form,

of our long sorrow and ancient blood.

Enthralled with the feast, we imbibed of hope.

The song of the waterfall continued to weep.

Chapter 1

As morning rose over Constantinople on April 24th, 1915, a train departed the Haidar Pasha station amidst whistles and bells. It was filled, and a shrieking throng was left still clamoring around the ticket booth. The Turks' military scorn of mere business would never permit of sufficient personnel to attend to all who needed to board a train.

Of all the creeping things that creepeth, thought Dr. Nakashian, nothing equals a Turkish train. Shrill toots had announced the general intention to start. A ragged child had tolled the station bell, the stationmaster had blown his hunting horn, the engineer had whistled back, and at last, the train had begun to move. The stationmaster saluted the conductor, the station assistants saluted the guards, the fireman, and the station sweeper exchanged salutes, all as solemnly as a general reviewing his troops on the eve of the last battle.

Through the windows of the train, the ice cream peddlers could be heard shouting Yah bellesh, dongdermam kellesh. Further on, the lion voiced street vendors of old clothes were calling, Eskiler alayim!

Avo Tertzak stared at the sky as the train pulled slowly away from the station. Those fluffs of serene clouds, thought Avo, should rain a century's storm of tears upon this city, the city of cities where, as nowhere else in the world, one is so aware of the immense glories of the past, of its great figures buried and remembered by ages upon ages, of beautiful and powerful loves intimately mixed with bestial crime and dreadful murder, of fountains of women's tears and their howls of agony, and of the ancient, horrible trail of Man’s vengeance upon his friend, and of his joyful, masterful infliction of terror, of long unutterable agony and slow shrieking death upon his brother. This insane city piled high as heaven with the rot of grief as angels sit about it looking sad and ungodly.

Strangers always find Constantinople a sprawling mass of mystery and enchantment, Avo Tertzak said to his two companions, Dr. Nakashian and Commander Kero Arak. But soon enough they find its charm shrouded by a sense of impending doom, of imminent catastrophe. It crawls the air, a massive, invisible film of worms, and our spirits must try to breathe and love and take our light through that appalling, writhing mass.

Avo Tertzak's deep love for the venerable city of Constantinople was shot through with his vision of the doomed humanity of his brothers, tortured, soon to suffer again the impossible agonies of Turkish terror, as he himself and his entire family and village had suffered seven years earlier. He could see the mothers gone mad, the shrieking orphans, the silent, horrendous tears of the old, the blood of his ancient people sinking into mire beneath the grimy feet of the pious worshippers of Allah.

To Commander Kero Arak the city had never looked lovelier or so sinister as it did that morning. It was a virtual dreamland of beauty, low hills wooded to the very edge of the sparkling waves, glittering bubbles of mosque domes, fairy minarets, pastel tinted houses gleaming amid their embowering trees, with red tiled roofs lending warm color to the scene and black pointed cypresses offering character and dignity. Orchards, vineyards, scattered villas, gray crenellated walls and towers centuries old. And, circling the horizon, the blue waters of the Sea of Marmara, so lovingly blessing Europe and Asia, imploring them to be friends.

To some, Commander Kero Arak added, the monstrous horror surging over us in this city is part of its charm.

Dr. Nakashian waved to the singing children. He smiled. The train had been moving for two full minutes and still the goats walking alongside the train were the faster. He was keenly enjoying the company of these two famous and unique men. They were traveling together a few hours distant to meet a legendary man known as Sarko the Khatchkar, the Cross of Stone. Dr. Nakashian sensed that this could well be the last time the three of them could be together for a few hours in peace. It was a unique opportunity to observe the two friends together, Avo Tertzak and Kero Arak. They differed so extremely on the basic issue of the time, the fate of the Armenian people. The historian poet Avo Tertzak expected nothing of the Turk but the doom of the Armenian race. Kero Arak, however, was hopeful there might be a world political metamorphosis during the war sometime, or after it, which would in some way support the Armenian effort to achieve independence, form a government of its own on its ancestral territories, and hold sovereignty as a world state, as it deserved in the view of advanced nations.

But Avo Tertzak held that the Turk would never permit the Armenians to threaten Turkish territorial integrity. They would simply use their practiced instrument of massacre to prevent the regeneration of Armenian political interests.

Commander Kero Arak, with the grand flash of graying hair, had been one of the great company commanders of the Armenian Freedom Fighters, the immortal Fedayeen. His long production of fiction since then had richly ennobled Armenian literature. About his work it had been written, His style is a palace flooded with light. We read him with wonder, we understand him, search for him, long for him.

Avo Tertzak, in his mid thirties, had recently returned from America after four years. He had been driven through insanity by the hideous persecutions and cruelties of the Turks upon his family, himself, his village, his nation, and his beloved friend Father Zarian, whose biography he had written. He had come back, now, back from the safety of America into the jaws of the beast, back into this vast, forbidding, impenetrable nest of secrecy, savage distrust, and stupefying dread, because of his furious perception of the imminent doom of his land, his language, the destruction of his ancient culture.

The will of this young man, Dr. Nakashian thought, to merge his soul with the perishing spirit of his people, was an illuminating manifestation of the apotheosis of human courage. Dr. Nakashian smiled sadly but with pride thinking that a nation capable of producing such stature and character in its individuals must prove of itself a spirit indissoluble, a society in the process of attaining to its greatest growth, its greatest spiritual strength, which must inevitably project itself into sovereign statehood by the sheer stamina of its moral power, by the thrusting momentum of its intellectual renaissance. His heart shook with the huge, historical longing of his people to rise above the Turkish yoke of stupefying, dismal ignorance, and to play its rightful role in the society of enlightened nations.

The other evening, Avo Tertzak began as the train emerged into the countryside, I went to the house of Astrik. Her young husband had at last died of his beatings. ‘Cousin,’ she said to me, ‘if you could have seen his face, beautiful and serene in his shrouds, you would not have been able to believe that on his death bed, while he was dying, he tried to strangle me in order to take me with him into the other world.’

Kero Arak glanced at the lady with the young daughter across the aisle to see if she had responded to Avo Tertzak's story. The lady's eyes were arresting. They seemed unspeakably sad, as was not uncommon of Armenian eyes, and yet they spoke so enchantingly when they fell full upon him. He had noticed the pleasant rivers flowing gently over him whenever her glance brushed his own.

He was reminded of another pair of eyes, from long ago, like two deep caves glowing with vulcanism, shining dazzling rays of desire upon him. One morning he saw her gentle smile. She was a young Turkish bride, his own age, and he was only fifteen. She invited him into her home because she was alone that day. She kissed his mouth again and again. Smiling through her tears she said, How beautiful that, despite the age old enmity between our peoples, you and I can be lovers. Please remember, she murmured, that your first sweetheart was a Turkish girl. You must never hate us all. You must keep our loving moment in your mind forever!

I will! I will!

Treasure it, as I shall. In a few years, we will be unrecognizable to each other. But this moment must lie enduring within our hearts forever. Then we cannot ever entirely hate.

She caressed his face. Her tears mingled with his happiness.

From across the aisle of the train coach, the daughter of the lady, perhaps fifteen, spoke to Avo Tertzak. My mother says you are the man who came back here from the United States.

Yes. He smiled and regarded the girl. This gentle fawn of a people, he thought, creative and diligent, beset for five centuries by the bestial warrior Turk.

Is it true that American women flirt shamelessly?

Avo Tertzak laughed. "Their flirting is not so serious as