Forty Days of Musa Dagh Read Online Free PDF Page A

But don't you worry. We'll manage the military

tax again for you, all right. I need you for Stephan."
     
     
Still Avakian did not raise his eyes from the wheel-rut. "Dr. Altouni,

Apothecary Krikor, and Pastor Nokhudian certainly aren't of military age,

though I may be. They've all had their teskerés taken away from them."
     
     
"Are you certain of that?" Gabriel was beginning to lose his temper.

"Who demanded them? What sort of officials? What grounds did they state?

And where are these gentry, that's the main thing? I feel very much

inclined to have a word with them."
     
     
He learned that it was nearly half an hour since the officials, escorted

by mounted gendarmes, had vanished in the direction of Suedia. Judging

by their demands it could only be a question of village notables, since

the common craftsman and peasant owns no teskeré, but at most a written

permission from the market in Antioch.
     
     
Gabriel took a few long strides to and fro, no longer noticing the tutor.

At last he said to him: "Go on into church, Avakian. I'll follow you."
     
     
But he did not so much as think of hearing the rest of the mass, whose

many-voiced choral that same instant came out to him in an especially

loud burst of devotion. His head was on one side, sharply reflective,

as he wandered back across the square, walked a little way down the

village street, and left it where the road forked to the villa. Without

even entering the house, he stopped at the stables to tell them to saddle

one of his horses, which had once been the pride of Avetis, his brother.

Unluckily no Kristaphor was there to accompany him. So he took a stable-boy.

He had not yet made up his mind what to do.
     
     
But an hour's quick riding would get him to Antioch.
     
     
     
     
     
     
2. KONAK - HAMAM - SELAMLIK
     
     
The Hükümet of Antioch, as the government konak of the Kaimakam was often

called, stood under the hill of the citadel. A drab but extensive building,

since the Kazah Antakiya is one of the most extensive Syrian provinces.
     
     
Gabriel Bagradian, who had left his boy with the horses at the Orontes

bridge, had already waited some time in the big central office of the

konak. He hoped to be received by the Kaimakam himself, to whom he had

sent in his card.
     
     
A Turkish government office like all the others Gabriel knew so well;

on the mottled wall, from which plaster was crumbling, a clumsy portrait

of the Sultan and a couple of sayings from the Koran. Nearly every

windowpane had been cracked and repaired with oil paper. The filthy

deal floor strewn with gobbets of spittle and cigarette-ends. Some minor

official sat behind an empty desk, sucking his teeth and gazing out into

space. An unopposed legion of portly flies were engaged in a fierce,

disgusting concert. Low benches ran round the walls. A few people were

waiting - Turkish and Arab peasants. One, not too squeamish, squatted

on the floor, spreading his long garments out around him, as though

he could not embrace enough of its filth. A sour aroma like that of

Russia leather, made up of sweat, stale tobacco, sloth and poverty,

infested the room. Gabriel knew that the district head offices of the

various peoples had each its distinctive smell. But this stink of fear

and kismet was common to all of them -- of little people receiving the

impact of the state as a natural and monstrous force.
     
     
At last the gaudily patterned doorkeeper conducted him negligently

into a small room, differing from the other by its rugs, its intact

windowpanes its desk, thickly strewn with documents, its attempt at

cleanliness. The walls displayed no portrait of the Sultan, but a huge

photograph of Enver Pasha on horseback. Gabriel found himself facing a

young man, with reddish hair, freckles, a small, military moustache. This

was not the Kaimakam, only a müdir in charge of the coastal district,

the nahiyeh of Suedia. The most noticeable thing about the