HAMASDEGH: JOURNEY WITH A SKULL
Hamasdegh

The Armenian Weekly
April 2010 Magazine
Tue, May 11 2010

Once, many, many years ago (these words sound like the start of a
fable…), in 1929, I went on a trip to become more familiar with our
people’s sadness. Those were the years that the deportees of 1915,
with heroic effort, enduring a thousand and one torments, had made it
to some foreign shore where they could keep their collective existence
and identity going.

Sign on the road to Der Zor (photo by Khatchig Mouradian) I saw the
hovels of Marseille, Aleppo, Lebanon. People reaching Jerusalem were
a bit luckier settling in the Armenian Monastery.

All of them, all, were destitute and sad with a dust-colored sadness.

If there was still something alive in them, it was their native spirit,
awake as their eyes and nerves.

On their faces lingered the gray wisdom of suffering, like the ancient
stones of our thousand-year-old monasteries.

Sadness always has its moments of introspection, and I wanted to bond
with our people’s grief, to make it part of my body and consciousness.

I wanted to go from Lebanon to Der Zor-that immense graveyard of
our martyrs…

The owner and driver of the car was a young Armenian man, thin, slight,
with a quiet melancholy in his features, especially in his Armenian
eyes. He had not only witnessed the horrors of Der Zor, he had lived
and been physically part of the daily turmoil and temper of the place.

His name was Manas. I also recall his vivid voice and sad smile. With
all that, Manas was audacious-he had covered all the roads we were
traveling on that day. There wasn’t a rock, a field of thorn-bushes,
a hill, a path that did not have its dreadful tale for Manas.

"Right there, near the bridge, the bandits assaulted skeletal
creatures, while on the slope of that hill, the corpses had become
the share of vultures and crawling beasts. In those days, monstrous
animals, never seen before, had appeared, no one knows from where…"

Manas showed me a spot, where his mother had collapsed, unable to
walk anymore.

"Strangely enough, I saw that at the last moments of her life,
my mother was calm, and seemingly content that she was dying;
she was particularly happy, that she had trusted me to a woman
with whom they had become sisters in adversity. She too, had lost
everything…children, husband. With great courage, she took me all
the way to Aleppo, and became a mother to me."

With similar stories, we continued on our dusty, rocky road to
the Euphrates River. On one of its banks was the city of Der Zor,
and on the other started and expanded the vast desert of Jezireh,
with a copper-colored, red hot sun and limitless sand, where, in a
very short while, 40,000 Armenians had succumbed en mass and melded
with the sands.

Manas kept telling how, in those days, the Turks of that alien desert
would not allow these 40,000 Armenians, huddled together in stark
terror, to reach Der Zor on the other bank of the Euphrates, to the
outskirts of habitations and shelter.

There were still decayed wooden planks sticking out of the banks of
the river. They were erected there to give shade in the scorching sun.

Some writings in pencil on those planks were yet to vanish: "I had
20 gold coins I acquired 20 loaves of bread." There were words of
curses and prayers, their significance still preserved on those
crumbling planks.

It was in the immensity of that desert, that I saw bleached bones and
shattered skeletons, ribs ripped from spinal columns, knee caps and
skulls, all of it half buried in the sand. The Euphrates, cresting and
flooding once in a while, had performed that interment under a cool,
bone-colored moon. That flooding had formed layers, and in between
those strata stuck out countless limbs and skulls, large and small
skulls. It was from one of these sandy crevices that I removed, with
both hands, a heavy, sand-filled skull, with awe and reverence, as
a celebrant priest would raise the chalice with both hands during Mass.

The shiny pallor of the skull had almost acquired the color of ivory in
the dry sand. Its sturdy array of teeth was powerful and expressive as
a curse, and the two cave-like eye cavities-where the eternal unknown
seemed to start-conjured the image of ruined Armenian monasteries,
with crumbling walls crusted with the ageless moss of tradition…

We became travel companions, the skull and I. Intimate friends sharing
stories of green fields and desert days, me and the skull. The story
of that journey is yet to be written.

If only I knew the name of that skull… In my agitated imagination,
names paraded in single file and became alive, growing tall with an
intense countenance. I could even hear their voices, powerful and
wise as silence.

Mahtesi Arutin? Perhaps from Erzerum, tall and stately, with bushy
eyebrows, heavy moustache, and clear eyes. He is wearing a coarse
woolen shalvar, a gold watch chain across his Lahore shawl belt.

Mahtesi Arutin was a merchant and deacon of his church. He was
expecting bales of merchandise to arrive via the Black Sea, when the
Turkish mob attacked his big store and large house on nightfall. They
looted and burned, then seized and delivered him and his spouse to
the caravan gathered at the cemetery. They abducted his two lovely
daughters in whom beauty bloomed like a flower. They had been so
pampered and nurtured in the warmth of oriental rugs and plush pillows.

Makar Varzhapet? That day, the blackboard of the advanced students’
class was covered with Anania Shirakatsi’s equations, while the
alert eyes of the students reflected a sadness; there were troubling
rumors: A caravan of tormented Armenians had been seen passing on the
highway skirting the town, a caravan of shivering dogs… "Tomorrow’s
assignment is Lazar Pharpetsi," had said Makar Varzhapet, restraining
the distress in his voice.

The next day, neither the teacher nor the students were back.

Ter Tatik? Incense lingered in his voice and breath. The goodness
of Holy Chrism was in his eyes as he raised his arms to the heavens
in prayer. It was Sunday and Mass was being celebrated. A heavy,
silver-threaded cape and a silk miter, around which were silver
embroidered renderings of the 12 Apostles. The angel-voiced children’s
choir of acolytes was singing.

People were slowly coming out of the church.

"Father! Father!" yelled the people in vain.

White-robed children of the acolyte choir scattered like doves. From
the upper road of the surrounding fields, Kurds and Turks were entering
the village armed with clubs and sabers.

The church was now empty just like that skull, while the priest
continued his celebration of Mass…and I heard the skull’s
incantations of the Holy Mass.

If only I knew the name of that skull…

The skull was there, on the table, sometimes in a dim candlelight. The
skull pondered, the skull lived. It seemed to breathe and to speak
in silent wisdom. There were still dreams in it, despite the enemy’s
wish to fill it with sand. And it waited, as all the martyrs of 1915
waited for the mighty trumpet of Haik, the heroic bowman, calling them
to gather their bones, to stand up, form ranks as mighty armies and
reclaim their land, their monasteries, schools, their green fields
and the rising smokes at the dawn of Navasard.