Anyush

‘A beautiful, haunting and very important work. It’s quite an achievement to recount a part of history that has remained shamefully occluded in such a compelling and illuminating manner, through a story filled with love and life.’

Donal Ryan

‘A deeply touching, powerful and vividly described love story set amidst the barbarism of the Armenian genocide.’

Julia Kelly

‘A vivid and elegantly written page-turner, a haunting love story set against a background of sweeping historical events that shaped the modern Orient.’

Conor O’Clery

I am indebted to many people who helped make this book a reality. In particular, I would like to thank all the team at The O’ Brien Press, especially Michael O’Brien, who took a chance on an unknown, Ivan, Ruth, Clare, Gráinne, Jamie, and Emma, who designed the beautiful cover. Huge gratitude to my wonderful editor, Susan Houlden, for her keen eye, insight and considered suggestions.

Heartfelt thanks to my triumvirate of miracle-makers: my dearest friend, Eileen Punch, and Conor and Zhanna O’Clery, without whose kindness and generosity this book would never have been published.

Many thanks to Zarmine Zeitounsian, who corrected my shaky Armenian, and to Keith Barrett, who designed the map of the Ottoman Empire.

To Melissa Marshall and Gillian Stern, who read very early drafts and liked it nonetheless. Your kind words and encouragement underpinned everything I wrote.

Sincere love and thanks to my team of family and friends, whose enthusiasm and support for this book equalled and sometimes exceeded my own. I can never thank you enough. And in memory of my father, Percy O’ Kennedy, who told me my first stories.

To my darling husband, John, and five wonderful daughters, this book is dedicated to you.

Finally, to two remarkable Armenians, Houry Belian, and in memory of Salpy Godgigian.

Anyush

Trebizond, Ottoman Empire, Spring 1915

C
hange came to the village in the form of Turkish soldiers - a whole company of them, marching down the street as though they would flatten it. Women pulled their children close and old men looked away as the sound echoed around the stone walls. The soldiers had come to Trebizond in October of 1914 and to the village six months later. The world was at war and all anyone talked of was unprotected borders and a Russian invasion. The young village men had been put in uniform and marched away many months before, and their families still mourned the loss of them. These soldiers were not local, not Armenian, and the air blew cold in their wake.

Two young Armenian girls watched from the foot of the church steps. They followed the progress of the soldiers as they turned into the square and took up formation along the southern side. The smaller of the two girls, Sosi Talanian, was carrying a loaf of black bread which fell from her hand when the lieutenant shouted his command. A hundred rifles hit the ground, rising clouds of dust around the soldiers’ boots. The bread was snatched by a hungry dog, and it was only the dog which seemed untroubled by the stamping feet. Anyush Charcoudian, the taller of the
two girls, turned to look back along the street. On the other side of the street, standing in the doorway of Tufenkians’ shop, a small woman, Anyush’s mother, looked on. She was old for her thirty-nine years and thin like everyone else. She watched the soldiers defiantly, but her narrow face was white as flour beneath the headscarf. It was a moment Anyush would remember. One she would never forget. She understood then that her mother was afraid.

Through a rusty gate and down a lane overgrown with weeds, Anyush walked to the Talanian farmhouse. The farm once had a goat, a pair of pigs with a yearly litter of piglets, a milking cow and a proper hen-house full of laying hens, but by 1914 that had all changed. Sosi’s father and her two older brothers had been called up to join the Turkish army and Mrs Talanian tried to run the farm as best she could. Nine months after the letters and money had stopped coming there was no news of the men, and she had given up trying. The pigs were gone, one sold, one eaten, and the sty lay empty. The goat had disappeared and the horse was too old to be of much use for anything. The farmhouse, like Mrs Talanian herself, looked as though it had given up and fallen in. The roof of the long red-tiled building sagged in the middle and a creeper invaded the soffits and crept in under the eaves so that green tendrils hung down over the window of the bedroom Sosi shared with her sister Havat. Mushrooms grew in a damp corner of one of the downstairs rooms, and the shutters on the windows were coming loose or had fallen off altogether. Anyush tried to push one back on its hinge as she passed by, but it was rusted through and fell to the ground. In the yard the youngest of the Talaninans, eleven-year-old Kevork, emerged from the cow byre, pitchfork in hand.

‘
Barev
, Anyush,’ he said, his eyes on the koghov can she was carrying.

‘
Barev dzez
, Kevork. Where is everybody?’

‘Sosi and Mother are gone to the village. Havat’s over there.’

Havat got up from where she was sitting on the swing in the hay barn and walked over.

‘What is it?’ Kevork asked, nodding at the koghov in Anyush’s hands.

‘Taste it and see.’

The boy lifted the lid and inhaled the delicious smell. He scooped some out with his finger and ate it, his face breaking into a smile.

‘Your grandmother makes good
kamsi köfte
,’ he said, holding some out for his sister.

They sat under the oak tree, eating with their fingers until every scrap was gone. The fishy smell hung in the air and the Talanians’ goose lifted its head.

‘None for you.’ Kevork laughed.

‘More,’ Havat said, traces of anchovy meatball on her chin.

‘There isn’t any, Havi, and stop drooling.’

The boy wiped his sister’s mouth brusquely with the end of his sleeve.

‘We’ll check the hens later. There might be an egg for supper.’

But they all knew the hens weren’t laying, and the Talanians were living off the last of the chickens and whatever their neighbours could spare.

‘I’ll bring something tomorrow,’ Anyush said. ‘Pilaff maybe.’

Havat smiled, her tongue pushing against her lower lip and her eyes blinking in her wide face. In the village Havat was known as the Mongol because she resembled the Mongolian horsemen who rode into Rizay and Trebizond from the Russian steppes. The villagers said her mother had been too old when she had given birth to her, but, to everyone’s surprise, Mrs Talanian had become pregnant again and had produced a healthy boy, Kevork.

‘Bayan Stewart was asking for you,’ Anyush said to him. ‘She wanted to know why you weren’t at school.’

‘I’m working on the farm now. I have to help my mother.’

‘The prizes are being given out tomorrow. I’m not supposed to tell you, but I think you got one.’

Kevork squinted up at her.

‘A medal?’

Anyush nodded.

‘You came first.’

He thought about this for a moment.

‘Give it to Sosi. I have work to do.’

‘I think your father would like you to have it.’

‘My father would want me to look after the farm.’

Mr Talanian couldn’t read or write like many of the village men but encouraged his children to learn. He had been a childhood friend of Anyush’s father and a distant relative of her mother. Anyush’s father was a man she had never really known. There was only his portrait hanging by the door to remember him by and a shaving brush she kept in her room. In the picture he posed in a stiff collar and suit, standing beside her mother, who was seated and wore a traditional Armenian dress. They stared solemnly into the camera, like the two strangers they were. The daguerreotype had faded in colour from brown to a hazy green, giving them an otherworldly pallor, but it did not diminish the kindness in her father’s eyes or the lustre of his thick brown hair. Anyush adored the man in the picture with the love only a child can feel for a father she has never known. They looked alike, not in height, because he was unusually tall, but with the same dark eyes and hair. Her likeness to him was a source of great comfort, and when the other village girls put their hair up at the age of twelve, Anyush wore hers in a thick plait hanging beneath her scarf and swinging like a cat’s tail between her shoulders.

‘Push me,’ Havat said, taking Anyush’s arm and pulling her towards the barn.

She settled herself on the seat and Anyush stood behind, pushing gently against her back.

‘Higher.’

The ropes creaked and the rafters groaned as Havat’s feet swung through the cool air.

‘Higher,’ she said, leaning back against the ropes. The old barn seemed to heel against its foundations, joists lifted from the earth with every swing.

‘Push harder.’

‘You’ll fall off, Havi,’Anyush said, giving one hard shove.

A loud metallic screech startled the swallows in the rafters. Anyush caught the ropes and brought Havat to a sudden stop. In the yard Kevork dropped the pitchfork and went to look down the lane. Since the trap had been sold, the gate was never opened and access to the road was through a gap in the crumbling stone wall. The hinges had rusted in the salt air and complained loudly when the group of soldiers pushed it open. They came into the yard as Anyush and Havat emerged from the barn. The men looked mean and dangerous. One of them walked over to the boy. He was thin and short, not much taller than Kevork, with a narrow head and ferret-like darting eyes. One brown eye and one hazy blue were sunk too close together either side of a long nose.

‘You live here?’

Kevork nodded.

‘You?’ he asked Anyush.

‘I’m a neighbour.’

The Ferret turned to the soldiers at his back.

‘A visitor! Well … I like to make time for visitors.’

The soldiers laughed as he turned to the two girls.

‘We’re here for food. All of it. Go into the house and bring it out.’

‘There is no food,’Anyush said.

‘You’re lying.’

‘It’s true. There’s nothing here.’

‘Search the house,’ the Ferret said to the others, and they disappeared inside.

‘The place is a wreck,’ one of them said, coming out empty-handed. ‘Not a fucking thing to eat. Even the cool room’s empty.’

From an upstairs window a flutter of clothes drifted to the ground, followed by the double thud of heavy boots.

‘I’m taking the boots,’ the face at the window shouted.

At Anyush’s side Havat began to cry.

A third soldier appeared in the doorway with a photograph frame in his hand.

‘No!’ Kevork shouted. ‘That’s my father.’

The soldier pushed the boy away, but Kevork kept reaching for it.

‘Give it to me.’

‘Get away.’

‘It’s mine.’

‘Have it then.’

He smashed the glass against the barn wall and took the silver surround. Kevork picked the torn photograph from amongst the shards of broken glass.

‘Look in the outhouses,’ the Ferret said, and two soldiers disappeared into the pigsty and the barn.

‘Empty,’ one soldier said. ‘Old pig shit, that’s all.’

‘A few hens in the barn. Not much else.’

‘Start with those. Take Sanayi and wring their necks.’

Two soldiers closed the barn door behind them and, in the yard, everyone could hear the sound of flapping and clucking which stopped
abruptly. The door opened again and the soldiers appeared with four limp-necked chickens in their hands.

‘Where are the other animals, boy?’ the Ferret asked.

‘There’s nothing here,’ Anyush said. ‘There’s nothing left to take.’

‘I didn’t ask you. I asked farmer boy. You look like a farmer. Are you, boy?’

Kevork nodded.

‘So where are the animals?’

He didn’t answer.

‘Look,’ one of the soldiers said. ‘A goose.’

With arms spread wide, he hunched towards the bird, but it spat at him, hissing loudly and beating its huge wings.

The soldier jumped away and the others laughed.

‘You’re not afraid of a goose, Hanim?’

‘You catch it, then.’

‘Just watch me.’

‘Don’t take the goose,’ Anyush said. ‘Please … they have nothing else.’

‘Here goosey goosey,’ the soldier said, taking off his tunic. ‘Come on … that’s the way.’

The goose spread its wings, lowered its head and advanced on the soldier, but he held his ground and threw the jacket over it. Suddenly, he was on top of the struggling bird, calling for the others to help. Kevork ran over, screaming, but a hand grabbed him by the collar and threw him halfway across the yard.

‘Get me that axe,’ the Ferret said.

He pulled the jacket off the goose and two of the soldiers stretched its neck over a block of wood.

‘Hold it steady.’

Lifting the axe over his head, he brought it down on the goose’s neck, and warm blood spurted out like a living thing. It covered their clothes,
their hands and faces. A soldier opened his mouth and drank it as the Ferret held up the headless body triumphantly. But Kevork ran towards him again, biting and kicking for all he was worth.

‘Little bastard!’

With the full force of his fist, the Ferret hit the boy in the face. Havat screamed as Kevork fell backwards but struggled to his feet. The boy staggered towards them, but his knees gave way and he began to retch. Anyush ran to help him, but the Ferret launched himself at the boy, punching him again and again.

‘Stop it! Leave him alone!’

‘Hanim … calm down … he’s only a boy.’

The Ferret grunted, and as he drew back his arm to hit the unconscious boy once more, Anyush grabbed the pitchfork and rammed it into the heel of his boot. The Ferret roared, turning to lash out at her and pull the pitchfork away. He fell on his backside, clutching the boot and straining to see what damage had been done.

‘Armenian bitch!’ he swore, blood staining the leather. ‘My fucking ankle!’

He stood up and tested his weight. The boot had protected him, and he discovered he could still walk.