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Genocide
B.D.M.
Dedicated to the Armenians slain during World War I due to the Ottoman Genocide.
The town I was born in had no name. I saw myself as an Armenian, that's what the soldiers said we were. They called us filth and scum, but mother told us to be proud of our heritage. I had a fair childhood for am Armenian-Ottoman. Our water was untreated, but we had it. Food was scarce, but not poisoned. We did good.
In 1914, late spring, the men came. Turkish soldiers said father did something bad, plotting against the state or something like that. An unforgivable offense besides. Sister and I knew we would never see him again.
I was sleeping when they came. Mother was protesting when I woke up, arguing and on the verge of tears. My sister was asleep at that time, curled up in a huddle of blankets on her mat. I got up, shook off my sleep, and stumbled out of the bedroom into the kitchen. I peeked around the corner into the living room, where my father was trying to calm my mother.
The soldiers were getting impatient; one had lit a cigarette and started smoking furiously. The small dot of embers illuminated his dark face, outlining its deep creases in a smoky haze.
My mother's protests became more frantic as she started towards the door. She tried to hold him still, but he pulled away. The two men at the door reached out for him, slipping cuffs on and headed for the door.
"Da?"
My sister had woken up and stood in the hall. Her hair was tousled to the side and matted with clumps of dirt from the dirt floor beneath her mat. Her head was cocked a bit, her eyes still dreamy, her face the perfect rendition of confusion.
Father looked back once, and with dim eyes, winked at me. He looked so hopeless, yet somehow his gesture and feigned calmness reassured me. My sister started to cry quietly, and the trio left, slamming the door behind them. I was the head of my house, a title I had always yearned for. Yet the grandeur washed away in the tide of incoming responsibility.
The next day, my village got up and left. Being the smallest of towns, we had little more than one hundred citizens, and everything moved along smoothly. It was an accepted fact that the men were gone. Boys only nine or ten years of age, as myself, were the only males in town, barring the older citizenry. Not a trace of our fathers' faces, as if mere illusions in our past.
The whole move was very mechanical. I helped my mother pack the essentials, not that we had much to choose from. My sister watched us, perching with the other girls on the walls of the well. We were all on the road by the time the sun rose. The town had only a few mules, so all the girls were once again looking down on us.
We traveled northeast, towards Van. Paradise. Shelter, food, water, all of which were within the walls of Van, or so the rumors said. I was skeptical of paradise, but our one hundred were mere minnows. United we stand, divided we fall, an unspoken code was born.
Our first night was largely uneventful. The women put their girls down, cooing to them in soft tongues, tales of Arabian Nights and sandy treasures. The older men, too "senile" to be bothered by the Ottoman raid, hunkered down by the fires and smoked whatever pipe they could spare. For "senile old men", they knew their share of the Old Stories, if one could pry their cracked lips apart. Most of the boys didn't get much of anything from them. We all slept quite well under the circumstances, slumber drowning out even the rolling grumble of young stomachs.
Such was the life of my little hometown for a while. Get up with the sun, sleep with the moon. Hot days, cold nights. Life's goal was no longer to prosper and flourish, but to survive.
We were not fully separated from the world though. We met with similar caravans, all going to Van. Word spread about Ottoman murderers. Armenians, it seemed, were not just being captured , but actively hunted. It was common knowledge that the Turkish Ottomans didn't favor us, but these tales whispered genocide. After that we made it a point to avoid other travelers, as they did us, just in case.
Although the tales of physical brutality and murder were on the winds, I was witnessing my own decay; mental, not physical. Kids, boys I'd known since childhood were changing. What had started as a lot of scared boys, had grown into young men. As resources dwindled, fights broke out. Fear of the inner strife was just as bad as the "Big Brother" feeling we had from the Ottomans, breathing down our necks.
The journey changed us all. The boys inside us died in those months , or was it years? A harder, more rugged being was born out of tender shells. Although not as aggressive as others, I could feel it in my own breast. Snapping at my sister, ordering my mother, who could barely work I was wracked with self-imposed guilt. Some boys in other groups had seen men shot down ruthlessly, but to feel your own soul split and clash was infinitely worse. Tenfold when you're not sure if the good in you is winning.
Just as we were losing faith, good news came. The one thing we once had all feared had transformed into a savior. The Great War had begun. Russia and America were closing in, slowly but surely beating the Ottomans back. The boys and elders celebrated the best they could with halved souls. The women hated war, but eventually they too hid smiles. We marched on with renewed vigor. Like a songbird, we freed hope from our black cages of bone. But as my life-tale continued, it became hard to determine whether the bird was Hope, or the black, sickle-winged bird, Panic.
I remember the day perfectly. The weather was mild, not excessively hot as it had been. Although it was cooler, dead vegetation flecked the blackened, cracked landscape.
As the afternoon got deeper, the air got hotter, which was usually not the case. Far in the distance, we could see a fire. Usually our policy was to avoid all possibility of contact, but lack of food and natural peak of curiosity got the better of us. As we closed the distance, the winds changed. A sickly-sweet aroma surrounded us, with a thin black smoke.
Around nightfall, we reached the flames. I never expected the atrocity that smoldered. A corpse of trees had risen out of seemingly nowhere, the middle of a long stretch of grainy sand and dirt. Flames licked the top leaves, cooking them black. The fuel of the fire was a large dark hill. As we got closer, we could see the scene more clearly. Bodies were piled into a small mountain, buried in flame. The lot of us stopped and stared at the huge mound of charred bodies, periodically disrupted by the popping of smoldering hair.
A lot the other boys sprang into action, but I couldn't will myself to move. Somehow, I knew that my father was there. I could see every step of his journey. Yanked from his own house, brought through several convoys, but for what? Hundreds of Armenian men shoved into a ditch.
In my subconscious, it was so vivid. His face pressed into the gritty mud, a snake of blood seeping from his lips into the ground. Hearing the cheap boots scrape around at the end of the ditch and knowing what came next.
A soldier would shoulder his rifle.
"Traitor, be silent."
Then a fury of sound and light as the Turkish automatic weapons ripped through my father and minced his innocent companions,
The hole would literally fill with blood, the very definition of overkill. That night the Ottomans would celebrate, and the gasoline would be laced with blood.
And so after almost a year of travel, we had had been sobered, understanding the consequences of our course of action; to flee. If caught, we would die, all of us.
As if summoned out of despair, Van appeared. It was like a dream. We mounted a dune, and the next thing we saw were the walls of the city, seeming to rise from the strained sands.
It was not the heaven we'd been hearing about. Not a perfect society. The walls looked battered, and there was a dirt trench a few feet from the wall. A used city, but it had everything we needed: food, protection, and stability.
That night I slept better than I ever have in my life. We were brought in without much of a hassle. They checked us for weapons and all, but found none, and led us in. A few meagerly equipped Armenian guards brought us to our quarters, a barracks gone hotel, but still, we slept on beds. A rare commodity as I'd learned on the road.
Our group was maybe sixty strong, one of the smaller refugee groups. All together there were little more than four thousand Armenians within the walls. An odd number of Kurd that wouldn't help the Turks finish the Armenian population, also resided within. Another thousand made up a little militia, although weapons were scarce. Many were armed with any sort of weapon they could find. I spotted one with a jagged shard of glass bound to what looked like a splintered two by four. Maybe a third held rifles, not that we expected the Ottomans to make such an openly attack anyway, but never the less, it made us feel safer.
To my distaste, I remember the next day quite vividly. Due to the habit, most of the encampment woke up early. For once there was enough food for everybody, hot food to boot. We all devoured our breakfast, and as if magically, the little men's facade's faded away. It was really only a thin stew, but compared to a diet of dry bread and water, it was heavenly.
Soon after, my mother and sister scampered off to join the gossips, so I was left to my own devices for a few hours. I walked around the militarized township, observing the peaceful Armenian community that had grown like a Garden of Eden from the treacherous sands of Turkey. I found myself watching a few boys kicking around a ball when it happened.
All too quickly everything was in motion. Light, sound, and an overall terrifying speed clashed around me. Mothers swept from unknown terraces and pulled children inside. Soldiers on the ancient walls pointed and yelled orders down to the people. Dust had suddenly kicked up and the whole city had become a sandstorm. I ran inside, half diving, half tripping, through the closest doorway. An old crone with a little girl around my sister's age came in behind me and slammed the door shut. I glanced at her, panting, as she sat in a chair and held the girl tightly, rocking with her eyes squeezed shut. I heard the sound of bullets biting into rock. The Ottomans had found us.
I pushed the door open and looked back at the aged woman. The moment I did, an explosion rocked the building. The crone's grip on the crying girl slacked as her eyes rolled back into her head and it rested on the girl's. As I ran out the door, I noticed her foot making a valiant attempt at life, twitching , her sandals falling off.
Outside was a picture of chaos. Soldiers were quickly running towards the gate, hopping into quickly formed trenches. Many of them wielded makeshift weapons, picking up rifles off the dead.
I ran outside the walls, launching myself into the ditches, and slid down the sides, my chest heaving. I could feel the heat from bullets digging into the cool earth around me.
Across the sparsely grassy plain, the Ottoman's made their blockade. Their lines stretched for forever and the fire never seemed to end. Men around me dropped to the ground, dead or praying to their gods.
I moved down the trench, stepping over bodies, my bare feet (for I had lost my shoes long ago) often squishing into the blood soaked mud.
I walked for close to an hour seeing the numbers and morale of my people fall. I had become a shade of my former self, forgotten my mother and sister, and pulled by some unquestionable force.
Just as the sun started to sink below the fortified city walls, I saw my father, or what in my battle stricken disillusion, I thought was my father.
He leaned against the gritty trench, his dirt caked finger squeezing rounds across the barren plain. He had lost his boots and discarded his helmet, dark hair clung wetly to his head by sweat and blood. I raised my foot from the muck to join him, to ask him why and what to do, but I was interrupted.
An arc of red spray raced across the air from my "father's" throat, slowing to a dribble as he fell back. I launched myself to catch him, my throat and nose suddenly filled with the stench of sulfur. I slipped on the loose ground, banging into the side of the trench. My "father's" body pivoted in mid-air, his shoulder somehow pierced by another mean metal bullet, digging into his weary flesh. He landed first on his right knee, then his face imprinted itself in the wet earth, just like I imagined my real father had landed, silencing him for good. The last thing I saw was the ugly mass of torn and burnt skin on the back of the soldier's throat.
And that is where my memory fades, trying to remember the face of my real father, the one with blood or dirt or smoke. Far away, the chunk of granite that would smash my sister's skull, was falling.
The older man took a white handkerchief from the podium and dabbed his face. He had nothing else to say, and the principal hesitated, not knowing what to do. He paused, then walked towards the podium, clapping. The student body fell in as expected.
The princepal shook the speaker's hand and looked sadly over the auditorium of students, "Keep this in mind next time you see a friend or anyone make a discriminative comment, I would like to thank Mr. Malakain, the last survivor of the Armenian Massacre, on behalf of West Lowell High School. The guest speaker just nodded and picked up his papers with his ancient hands, his arthritis-strained joints cracking.
Joe Tower stood up, the legions of students following suit. The other students started to move towards the bottlenecked doorway, but he lingered. He slowly pulled the earphones off of his head, drowning out the voice of Serj Tankian, preaching of his System of a Down. He may not have heard the presentation, but deep in his subconscious, the legend lives on.
A whole race Genocide,
Taken away all of our pride
A whole race Genocide,
Taken away, Watch Them all fall down~System of a Down
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