Hovhannes wriggled in angst like a diver who, after having submerged too deep, could not bring his body to swim its way back to the surface. The whirl of writing was cavernous and encapsulating but also distinctively enticing. Words jumped to and fro on the parched paper, begging him to bring this last story to a close and to shepherd them to their long-awaited destiny.
'All right, then,' the Little Lost Pigeon chirped. 'Tell me the story of the Little Lost Pigeon. But I warn you, if I hear anything sad, I will take wing and fly away. '
Hovhannes Stamboulian knew what the pomegranate tree was going to say in return and how the last story started, but before he could put it down on paper, something somewhere fell on the floor and smashed into pieces. Amid the burst he picked up a snuffle; though it was muffled and short he instantly recognized his wife's sob. He jumped to his feet, now entirely flushed out of the abyss of his writing, and popped up to the surface like a dead fish.
As he darted toward the staircase, Hovhannes Stamboulian recalled his quarrel that very morning with Kirkor Hagopian, an eminent lawyer and member of the Ottoman Parliament.
'The times are bad, very bad. Get ready for the worst,' was the first thing Kirkor muttered when they ran into each other at the barber's shop. 'First they conscripted Armenian men. `Aren't we all equal, aren't we all Ottomans?' they declared. `Muslims and non Muslims, we will fight the enemy together!' But then they disarmed all the Armenian soldiers as if they were the enemy. Next they gathered Armenian men in labor battalions. And now, my friend, there are rumors…. Some say the worst is coming.'
Though sincerely concerned, Hovhannes Stamboulian had not been particularly shaken by the news. He himself was too old to be recruited and his boys too young. The only one in the family within the range of conscription age was his wife's younger brother, Levon. But he had avoided military service during the Balkan Wars thanks to receiving the badge of 'the unguarded' during the selection process. Men who were the sole providers of their families were spared military duty. That old Ottoman rule, however, might be changing. Nowadays one could never be completely sure. At the beginning of the First World War, they had announced they would solely recruit those in their early twenties, but once the war had gathered speed, those in their thirties and even forties had also been conscripted.
Combat was not for Hovhannes Stamboulian. Neither was hard manual work. He loved poetry. He loved words, feeling each individual letter of the Armenian alphabet upon his tongue and lips. After ample reflection he had deduced that what the Armenian minority needed most was not arms, as some revolutionaries posed, but books, more and more books. Though new schools were founded after the Tanzimat, they were in dire need of more openminded and cultivated teachers and better books. Some additional progress had been made after the revolution in 1908. The Armenian population had supported the Young Turks in the hope that their treatment of non-Muslims would be fair and decent. The Young Turks had stated it in their proclamation:
Every citizen will enjoy complete liberty and equality, regardless of nationality or religion, and be submitted to the same obligations.All Ottomans, being equal before the law as regards rights and duties relative to the State, are eligible for government posts, according to their individual capacity and their education.
True, they had not stuck to their promise, abandoning multinational Ottomanism for Turkism, but the European powers watched the empire carefully; they would surely intervene if something grim were to take place. Hovhannes Stamboulian believed that under the present circumstances Ottomanism was the best option for Armenians, not radical ideas. Turks and Greeks and Armenians and Jews had lived together for centuries and still could find a way to coexist under one umbrella.
'You don't understand a thing, do you?' Kirkor Hagopian snapped furiously. 'You live in your fairy tales!'
Hovhannes Stamboulian had never seen him so unnerved and confrontational. Still, he didn't go along with him. 'I don't think zealousness is going to help us,' he said, barely getting his voice above a whisper. It was his belief that nationalist zeal would solely serve to replace one misery for another, inevitably working against the deprived and the dispossessed. In the end minorities tore themselves apart from the larger entity at a great cost, only to create their own oppressors. Nationalism was no more than a replenishment of oppressors. Instead of being oppressed by someone of a different ethnicity, you ended up being oppressed by someone of your own.
'Zealousness!' Kirkor Hagopian's face scrunched into a mask of gloom. 'There is news pouring in from numerous towns in Anatolia. Have you not heard about the incidents in Adana? They enter into Armenian houses with the pretext of searching for guns, and then plunder. Don't you understand? All the Armenians are going to be exiled. All of us! And here you are betraying your own people.'
Hovhannes Stamboulian remained quiet for a while, chewing the ends of his mustache. Then he muttered slowly but surely, 'We need to work together, Jews and Christians and Muslims. Centuries and centuries under the same imperial roof. We have been living together all this time, albeit on unequal ground. Now we can make it fair and just for all, transform this empire together.'
It was then that Kirkor Hagopian uttered those gloomy words, his face already closing up: 'My friend, wake up, there is no together anymore. Once a pomegranate breaks and all its seeds scatter in different directions, you cannot put it back together.'
Now as he stood still at the top of the staircase, listening to the eerie silence in the house, Hovhannes Stamboulian couldn't help seeing that image in his mind's eye: a broken pomegranate, red and sad. With visible panic he called out to his wife: 'Armanoush! Armanoush, where are you?'
They must all be in the kitchen, he thought to himself, and hurried down to the first floor.
Following the commencement of the First World War, a general mobilization had been declared. Though everyone in Istanbul talked about this, it was in the small towns where its effects had been mostly felt. They had beaten the drums in the streets, echoing again and again: Seferberliktir! Seferberliktir! That was when many Armenian young men were drafted into the army. More than three hundred thousand. At the outset all these soldiers were given arms, just like their Muslim peers. After a short time, however, they were all asked to return those arms. Unlike the Muslim soldiers, the Armenians were taken into special labor battalions. Rumors ran amok that Enver Pasha was the one behind this decision: 'We need working hands to construct the roads for the soldiers to cross,' he had announced.
But then there came dour news, this time about the labor battalions themselves. People said all the Armenians were employed in hard labor for the road construction although some had paid their bedel and should have been exempt. They said the battalions were taken to dig roads, but that was just a pretext; in actual fact they were made to dig pits, deep and wide enough to… They said Armenians were buried in the same pits that they had been made to dig.
'The Turkish authorities have announced that the Amnenians are going to dye their Easter eggs with their own blood!' That was what Kirkor Hagopian stated before he left the barbershop.
Hovhannes Stamboulian didn't give those rumors much credit. Yet he acknowledged that the times were bad.
Downstairs on the first floor he called his wife's name once again and sighed upon hearing no answer. As he stepped outside onto the patio and walked past the long cherry table where they had their breakfast when the weather was mild, a new scene from the Little Lost Pigeon crossed his mind.
'Listen to your story, then,'said the pomegranate tree as it fluttered a few branches, shaking off specks of snow. 'Once there was; once there wasn't. God's creatures were as plentiful as grains and talking too much was a sin. '
'But why?' chirped the Little Lost Pigeon. 'Why was it a sin to talk too much?'
The kitchen door was shut. It was strange given the hour of the day; Armanoush would be working in there with Marie, their maid of five years, while the children clustered around them. They never shut the door.
Hovhannes Stamboulian reached for the handle but before he could turn it, the old, wood door was opened from inside and he stood face-to-face with a Turkish soldier, a sergeant. Both men were so shocked to run into each other like this that for a full minute they stood staring at each other blankly. It was the sergeant who first shed his stupor. He took a step back and eyed the other from head to toe. He was a tawny man who would have had a smooth, youthful face had it not been for the harshness of his stare.
'What is going on here?!' Hovhannes Stamboulian exclaimed. He spotted his wife and kids and Marie lined against the kitchen wall at the back, standing side by side like penalized children.
'We have orders to search the house,' the sergeant said. There was no discernible hostility in his voice but no empathy either. He sounded as if he was tired, and whatever the reason he was here for, he wanted to be done as fast as possible and be gone. 'Could you please show us the way to your study?'
