The New York Times
February 4, 2007 Sunday
Late Edition – Final
The Terminated
By CHRISTOPHER DE BELLAIGUE.
Christopher de Bellaigue is the author of ”In the Rose Garden of the
Martyrs: A Memoir of Iran.” He is currently writing a book on
eastern Turkey.
SKYLARK FARM
By Antonia Arslan.
Translated by Geoffrey Brock.
275 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $23.95.
After a silence dictated by shame, pain and politics that lasted the
better part of a century, the suffering of Armenians massacred by the
Ottoman Turks and their Kurdish allies during World War I has
recently become an urgent issue. The parliaments of several countries
in the European Union, a club Turkey wants to join, have labeled the
massacres genocide. The Turks refuse to do so. Of all those involved
in this slow, bitter process of remembering, it is writers and
journalists, not politicians, who have touched the rawest nerves. On
Jan. 19, Hrant Dink, a prominent Turkish-Armenian who had promoted
both reconciliation and an honest appraisal of the past, was
murdered, apparently by a Turkish nationalist. Earlier, Orhan Pamuk’s
reference to the massacres in an interview and an allusion to the
Armenian ”genocide” in a novel by Elif Shafak led to the
prosecution of both on charges of ”insulting Turkishness.” Neither
was convicted (unlike Dink, who received a suspended sentence on the
same charge) but the country’s reputation has suffered.
The Italian writer Antonia Arslan’s first novel, ”Skylark Farm,” is
based — how closely, we are not told — on the experiences of her
Armenian grandfather’s family during those massacres. The farm of the
title is, in fact, a country house that Sempad, a well-to-do Armenian
pharmacist living in a town somewhere in Anatolia, is trying to
complete in time for the visit of his brother, Yerwant, who emigrated
years earlier to make his fortune in Italy. Absorbed in their
domestic affairs, Sempad and his family are oblivious to the signs,
unmistakable in hindsight, that Turkey’s government is preparing to
get rid of a minority population it suspects of abetting the empire’s
Russian enemies.
May 1915 comes around and what follows is, for any Armenian, a
dismally familiar story. Out at the farm, Sempad and his male
relations are murdered by Turkish soldiers. His wife, their daughters
and hundreds more women from the same town are then forced to walk
many miles through hostile country to Syria, where death camps await.
The marchers are ”escorted” by guards who connive with marauding
Kurdish tribesmen to take first the women’s possessions, then their
honor and finally — in many cases — their lives. It’s a despicable
story, and one that has been told, in Armenian and other languages,
in countless memoirs and histories.
In Arslan’s hands, the gruesome details of this tragedy are palliated
by an old-fashioned story of redemption. After the marchers set off,
Nazim, a Muslim beggar who used to inform on the Armenians for the
authorities, joins forces with a Greek woman to shadow them, slipping
them food and dressing their wounds at night, before finally using
guile and gems to buy the survivors’ release in Aleppo. As it
happens, the unappealing Turkish suitor of one of the family’s young
women has been posted to Syria. Once he regarded most Armenians as
worthy of elimination, but by the end of the book, even though his
sweetheart has died, he undergoes a conversion of his own, using
connections to secure passports for the surviving members of the
family so they can join Yerwant in Italy.
Although history keeps wrenching her back into shocking events,
Arslan seems instinctively a writer of magic and intuition.
Premonitions, dreams and religious faith provide her characters with
respite from the horror. A bereaved mother dies by allowing her heart
to break; a decent German official becomes an angel; and there is a
delightful image of those medieval knights-errant ”for whom
hospitable Anatolia, with its small courts rich in flowing water and
lovely maidens, proved more pleasing than their gloomy, distant
northern lands.”
Arslan reports dialogues involving the architects of the
deportations, including the interior minister, Talat Pasha, who
writes in a telegram: ”No mercy for women, old men or children. If
even one Armenian were to survive, he would later want revenge.”
This is a prophetic reference to Talat’s murder in exile at the hands
of an Armenian who chanced upon him in a Berlin street.
”Skylark Farm,” is an affecting book, and sensitively translated by
Geoffrey Brock, but it is marred by uneven writing. Arslan’s habit of
flashing forward at moments of happiness to the wretched times that
lie ahead detracts from the novel’s intensity without adding to its
resonance. And some of her deadpan descriptions of hideous events —
”This was sufficient time for the young bride Hripsime to recover
from her delivery and to see her baby die, skewered on a bayonet and
held aloft” — slue into bathos.
Putting down this book, it’s worth trying to separate Arslan the
promising novelist from Arslan the iffy historian. She describes the
Armenians as a ”gentle, daydreaming people” who would like nothing
more than to share their ancestral homeland, a platitude that ignores
the existence of Armenian political groups seeking independence from
the Turks. And in a novel containing footnotes to explain historical
events, readers might mistakenly assume Arslan’s Talat telegram is
irreproachably historical. The lack of a universally authenticated
document implicating the Ottoman leadership in a plan to kill the
Armenians is a central part of the Turks’ argument that the massacres
were not a premeditated genocide but a tragic and unintended
consequence of war.