“Because there was a man in our region,” she answered. “His name was Demir. He was a writer and a scholar, but he had terrible things in his mind and he did terrible things because of it, and no one ever stopped him.” She paused and let her gaze deepen further. “What I mean is that no one killed Kulli Demir. That’s the point I’m making, Tom. There must have been lots of people who had the chance, but no one did. And so other men saw that Demir could do whatever he pleased and get away with it. Then they started to do the same things he did. They rounded up the men and killed them, and when the men were gone, they did whatever they wanted to the women and the girls. And the ones they didn’t kill, they drove into Syria. Most of them died on the way, but a few made it to Aleppo.”
Danforth offered no response to this, but years later, still seeking the truth through the bramble left behind, he would come upon this passage in the memoir of an American who’d found himself in Turkey at the time of Anna’s early girlhood:
The pattern was usually the same, according to reports, and it was corroborated by the one incident I witnessed myself. The local authorities would notify the Kurdish tribes and Turkish peasants that a caravan was on the way. The caravan was women and children, and they would be set upon by these Kurds and Turks and Chetes, along with various bands of thugs and criminals. These women and girls had no defense against these men because those who would have defended them, their fathers and husbands and brothers, had already been killed, and so they could be attacked without fear of reprisal. Many times these women did not survive the tortures and rapes that were inflicted upon them. They were “guarded” by the gendarmes, but these men not only did nothing to protect the women and girls, they sometimes joined the others in tormenting them. They seemed to hate the ones who survived, and when it was time to move on, they rained blows upon them with whips and truncheons, stabbed at them with bayonets, deprived them of food, and made no attempt to return the clothing, mostly rags, that had been ripped off their bodies, so that when the caravan I personally witnessed finally reached Syria, the women were starved and naked, and many were crazed and raving. I saw a group of these poor female skeletons stagger across the border one afternoon and I thought that they could not have come from any place on earth and must have somehow dragged themselves out of hell. The last of them, stumbling behind, were the most lost of the lost, very young girls, from twelve to as young as three, bereft of both mothers and fathers, with no one to help them even among their own people. Dirtyy, naked, unimaginably alone at the far end of the caravan, these little girls made their way into the desert wastes of Aleppo.
Reading that passage years later as he sat in the stillness of the New York Public Library, Danforth would wonder, darkly and incessantly, if one of those lost little girls had been Anna Klein.
~ * ~
Blue Bar, New York City, 2001
“Because she’d had this haunted look when she spoke of what she’d seen in Turkey, you see,” Danforth said. “I had seen that look a few times before that afternoon, but her personal history had never seemed so tragic as it did at that moment, which made me come to believe that she herself had suffered the outrages she described.”
“This is the Armenian genocide, correct?” I asked.
Danforth nodded. “Have you read much about it, Paul?”
“A little,” I answered. “But I didn’t know Jews were massacred as well.”
Danforth clearly appreciated my response. “Very good, Paul,” he said. “That would be the question, wouldn’t it?”
“Question?”
“If you ever came to doubt any part of Anna’s story,” Danforth explained in a coolly inquisitorial tone. “You’d have to ask yourself whether a young Jewish girl might have been rounded up and marched into Syria along with the Armenians.” He took a slow sip from his glass. “Well, I looked into this very question, and I found that as a matter of fact, by the time of the Armenian genocide, Jews had lived in what later became the Armenian provinces of Turkey for thousands of years. They had probably first come in flight, some from Assyria, others from Samaria, still others from God knows where.” Then, quite abruptly, he blinked a thousand years of Diaspora from his eyes and was miraculously returned to modern times. “Anna saw the assassination of the king of Yugoslavia, you know.”
Danforth saw my surprise at this fact and laughed.
“Not with her own eyes, of course,” he said. “But in the newsreels. He was killed in Marseille in 1934. The first assassination to be recorded on film. She once mentioned how easy it looked.” He shrugged. “Maurice Bavaud probably saw that newsreel too.”
“Maurice Bavaud?”
“In pictures, he never had the smile of an assassin,” Danforth said. “In fact, he didn’t seem to know how to smile. Or maybe it was that he simply couldn’t bring himself to smile in a world as chaotic as Europe was in 1938.”
This was one of Danforth’s divergences, and earlier I would have been eager to get past it, but by then I’d come to realize that his asides were always closely related to his tale, and so I simply heard him out.
Bavaud was a devout Catholic, Danforth told me, a young man who had been a seminarian at Saint-Brieuc in Brittany when he was seized by the insane notion that in order for Christianity to be saved, the Romanovs had to be returned to power in Russia. He was equally convinced that killing Adolf Hitler would set the wheels in motion.
In the fall of 1938, he’d traveled first to Baden-Baden and then on to Basel, where he bought a Schmeisser 6.5-millimeter semiautomatic pistol, Danforth told me.
It struck me that Danforth had studied Bavaud’s plot to kill Hitler in great detail, as if he’d been in search of some small element that might explain how his own had failed.
“After Basel, Bavaud boarded another train, this time heading for Berlin,” he continued.
He had planned — if his movements and intentions could be called a plan at all — simply to shoot Hitler in his capital, but he’d later decided to do it in Munich during the annual celebration of the Beer Hall Putsch.
“The celebration always included a march,” Danforth said. “With Hitler himself at the head of the parade.”
And so once in Munich, Bavaud obtained a complimentary ticket to the stand in front of the Holy Ghost Church, at the western end of Talstrasse, a site that seemed quite well situated to watch the march as it turned into Marienplatz, a turn, Bavaud correctly reasoned, that would slow things down considerably because everyone
