Anyush (30 page)
Authors: Martine Madden
G
ümüşhane might have been on the other side of the world to the marchers who struggled towards it. Young and old had been taken by cholera, starvation and exhaustion. Food had run out and people were drinking whatever water they could find. Anyush went to check on Parzik, only to see her corpse tipped from the wagon into a culvert by the side of the road.
Anyush saw Jahan looking into the ravine where the German had set up his camera and was taking photographs of Parzik’s body. A little to one side, the Ferret was holding the captain’s mare by the reins. His closed hand slid beneath the saddle blanket and the horse gruntled and pulled away from him. Looking furtively around him, the Ferret withdrew his hand and led the mare over to the captain.
In her more lucid moments Gohar still asked about Khandut, but Anyush didn’t tell her that she had stopped searching. A new purpose occupied her: Lale, Gohar, herself. The hunger, dizziness and weariness that threatened to defeat her time and again was set aside whenever she looked at
her daughter or coaxed her grandmother to walk one more mile. For their survival, and her own, she did the unthinkable. From the corpse of a young woman she took a pair of shoes for herself and from a dying older woman a pair for Gohar. Without opening the laces she pulled them roughly off and the woman groaned in the throes of her lonely struggle to die. It was Elsapet, Meraijan’s wife. Anyush took the shoes anyway. At night-time, when the long-tailed desert rats came hopping across the scree, she pounced on them and tried to force Gohar to eat some of the raw meat, but Gohar was vomiting constantly and it was becoming difficult to get her to drink. Anyush realised too, as the milk in her breasts dried up and Lale became more silent, that her baby was slipping away from her.
‘Please God, please God, please God,’ she prayed, mile after mile after mile.
L
eading his horse by the reins, Jahan walked to the head of the column. Two of his men had died of cholera and three more were clutching their bellies in one of the covered wagons. It was spreading like plague and would take more before they reached Gümüşhane. He couldn’t bury them, couldn’t bring them with him. Along with the others, they lay at the bottom of the ravine, carrion for the wild animals and the crows. Anyush was still on her feet. a walking ghost but alive. Her grandmother was a different matter.
The mare pulled the reins through his hands and pawed the ground uneasily. She was fidgety and nervous.
‘Easy. Easy there girl.’ Jahan clapped his horse on the flank, but she jerked her head around and pulled hard again. Throwing the reins over her neck, he put his boot in the stirrup and grabbed the pommel, but the mare danced away from him so that he had to hop on one foot after her.
‘Whoa there. What’s the matter? Hold up.’ Swinging his leg over her back, he let his weight fall into the saddle.
The mare screeched and whinnied and reared up on her hind legs. Grabbing her by the mane, Jahan held on as she bucked and kicked and finally threw him off. Before he hit the ground, his leg knocked off the
corner of one of the wagons, the bones snapping in two and pushing out through his skin.
‘Don’t move him,’ Armin said.
The captain lay at an awkward angle, his face white with shock. A group of soldiers were staring at him when the lieutenant elbowed them out of the way.
‘What happened?’
‘Give me your rifle and your belt,’ the German said, splitting Jahan’s trouser leg to above the knee. The leg was already swelling and he cleaned the broken skin as best he could. Opening the breech of the lieutenant’s rifle, he shook out the bullets and splinted the captain’s leg to the gun barrel.
‘It’s a bad break, but the real enemy out here is the heat. Is there a hospital in Gümüşhane?’
‘No. Sivas is closest,’ Ahmet said.
‘We need a wagon and a driver.’
The lieutenant disappeared as word spread that the captain had been injured.
Jahan tried to sit, convulsed by a sudden urge to vomit, but collapsed back, spent.
‘You’ll be OK,’ Armin said when it had passed. ‘Keep drinking. It seems I will have to teach you the German way to ride a horse.’
‘This wasn’t an accident,’ Jahan said through gritted teeth. ‘My horse has never so much as whinnied at me before.’
A wave of pain washed over him and he retched again.
‘Don’t talk. Drink some more.’
‘Ahmet will have to take over. He’s the only one capable of it.’
The lieutenant appeared with something wrapped in a tarpaulin and a blanket to cover his leg. ‘It will keep the flies off,’ he said, tucking it in at the sides. ‘There’s food and water under there.’
Jahan grabbed him by the sleeve. ‘I want to speak to Anyush. Get her for me.’
‘
Bayim
, there is no–’
‘Get her, now.’
A
nyush held Gohar’s hand tightly in hers. The old woman was lying flat on the side of the road, a stolen shawl folded beneath her head. Her breathing was uneven and her mouth hung open, as though her teeth had outgrown her face and could not be contained by her lips. It was what her grandmother had become, a body of teeth and sinew and bone. Anyush looked down at her fingers. The knotted joints had more of Gohar in them than her wasted face. Her fingertips were discoloured a blue-black colour, as though someone had dipped them in indigo ink. The vomiting and diarrhoea had passed, but from Anyush’s days working with Dr Stewart, she understood what the discolouration meant. She thought for a moment about the Stewarts. About the hospital and the village and her home. It belonged to another time.
The convoy had grown quiet. Some sort of commotion had drawn the soldiers to the front of the line and Anyush thought the Shota had returned, but there was nothing to be seen across the plain or on the hills behind her. Everybody else took the chance to sit or lie by the roadside and rest for a while. Anyush bent her head and kissed Gohar’s cold hand.
‘You there.’ The lieutenant was watching. ‘Come with me.’
Jahan was lying in the back of a wagon, his face slick with sweat and
drained of colour. A shading of blue darkened the wings of his nose and the outline of his lips. From the clenching of his teeth, Anyush could see he was in great pain. The German pulled back the blanket covering him to reveal a bloodied mess of skin and bone. Jahan looked at her, his eyes a reflection of his daughter’s.
‘Anyush,’ he said, ‘I want you to come with me.’
‘
Bayim
–’ the lieutenant interrupted.
‘Ride with me in the wagon. I can hide you under the blanket.’
‘Not in broad daylight,’ the lieutenant said.
‘We’ll wait until nightfall, leave under cover of darkness.’
‘You can’t wait that long,’ the German said.
‘And you’ll both be shot if you’re caught.’
‘Get me a driver, Ahmet. Someone I can trust.’
‘You wouldn’t get two miles–’
‘She can hide under a tarpaulin then.’
They argued back and forth while Anyush stood by the wagon holding Lale.
‘I’m not asking you, lieutenant, I’m telling you.’
‘You want me to send both of you to your deaths?’
‘Just do as I say.’
‘I’m not going.’
The three men turned to look at her.
‘I won’t go.’
Jahan pushed himself onto his elbows. ‘Anyush, you have to come.’
‘I won’t leave my grandmother.’
‘She’s dying. She’s not going to make it … for pity’s sake, I’m offering you a way out.’
The horse hitched to the wagon grew restless, pawing the ground and pulling against the traces. Jahan winced in pain.
‘Anyush,’ he said, ‘please listen to me … this is your only chance. You
have to come. If you won’t do it for my sake, then do it for the child.’
Anyush looked at Lale, the small silent bundle in her arms. She was all that was left to her, everything that was precious and good. Gohar would not survive for much longer, she already knew as much. Anyush wanted her to die. She prayed for it as she had begun to wish it for herself. It was only because of Lale that she chose to go on. She looked at Jahan. Pain had dulled the light in his eyes, but she remembered their brilliance and how she had lost herself in them.
‘Take her,’ she said, holding Lale over the wagon. ‘Take her, Jahan. She is my only hope.’
Anyush laid the baby beside him and whispered in his ear. He turned towards her, his eyes clinging to hers. He was speaking, saying something she couldn’t hear. His mouth was open and his eyes were full but Anyush walked away from him. She knew if she went with them they would be discovered. Her feet moved faster and faster, trying to distance herself from what she had done. Trying to forget the sight of Lale lying on the filthy floor of the wagon. Trying not to feel she had abandoned her, and knowing she would go to her grave believing it.
A
rmin took out a silver brandy flask from his pocket. ‘For you, when the pain gets bad. And for her.’
Pouring a little into the cap, he trickled some into Lale’s mouth and it dribbled onto her chin. She made hungry sucking noises, opening her mouth wide as though wanting more, before the alcohol hit and the tiny face puckered in a grimace.
‘It will keep her asleep,’ Armin said. ‘Top it up from time to time.’
Jahan tilted the small face to look at her. His child. Anyush’s child. His daughter had the same colour hair as he did, but he couldn’t see her eyes, which were closed. She seemed lifeless, her tiny chest barely moving and her head too heavy for her fragile neck. How would he care for her? What hope did she have with him?
‘I’m not leaving without Anyush.’
The German screwed the cap onto the flask and put it into his hand.
‘I won’t go without her, Armin.’
‘You can’t force her.’
‘She’ll die if she stays with the convoy.’
‘I think you must respect her wishes.’
‘Why doesn’t anybody respect mine?!’
Armin put his hand on his shoulder before arranging the blanket to cover Lale, so that only her nose and the top of her head were visible.
‘I have a favour to ask of you,’ he said, pulling a stack of photographic plates from under his coat. He tucked them beneath the blanket at Jahan’s feet.
‘If word reaches the colonel about my photographs, they’ll be destroyed. There’s a division of the German Sanitary Corps stationed in Sivas. A friend of mine by the name of Günther Stoll will take these from you. Don’t give them to anybody else and don’t let the Field Marshal get his hands on them.’
Ahmet and one of the young privates appeared carrying a water barrel between them. They dropped it into the wagon with a sickening jolt.
‘Muslu is taking you to Gümüşhane,’ the lieutenant said, handing Jahan a filled goatskin. ‘You can trust him. He’ll organise fresh horses and bring you on to Sivas.’
‘Ahmet … listen to me … I want you to find Anyush. And something to cover her. One of the big tarpaulins.’
The lieutenant glanced at the German.
‘It doesn’t matter what she says. Take her by force if you have to.’
Private Muslu climbed onto the buckboard and took the reins in his hands.
‘She’ll be with the old woman somewhere at the back of the line.’
But Ahmet was looking at where Muslu sat waiting for the order to leave. The lieutenant nodded and the boy cracked the reins over the horse’s rump.
‘What are you doing? Stop! Ahmet, tell him to stop!’
Clouds of dust rose as the wheels turned and the wagon began to move.
‘Muslu turn around! That’s an order!’
The boy ignored him, whipping the horse furiously, as Armin and the
lieutenant watched. The figures grew faint behind the sunlit haze and Jahan craned his neck to see behind him. They were still there, less substantial now, like ghosts fading into the day. Jahan’s eye followed the line of marchers until he saw her. She was behind the others, head bent over the recumbent figure of her grandmother.
‘Anyush! Anyush!’
But the dust cloud swallowed her and there was no answer, only the sound of the wheels turning beneath him.