Free The Gendarme by Mark T. Mustian Page B

ultimate destination has never been clear, only the “border,” the limits of Turkish-speaking Anatolia. Now rumors abound. Some caravans are apparently pushing on to the Syrian city of Aleppo, several days’ journey southeast, others are supposedly being diverted into the desert, for extermination. The ranks of corralled deportees have grown since we arrived, the conditions of the holding area we call the “pit” progressing from squalid to intolerable. Hundreds die each day, the dead hauled out each morning to new burial dumps dug hastily beside ones filled the day before. The ground in the pit has become that of an animal pen, filled with clumps of human excrement, its stench overpowering even at a distance. Military officials fear the onset of disease, less out of concern for the deportees than for the possibility that it might spread to the troops or the town’s general population. Deportees with the strength or valuables left to do so hire carts or make out for Aleppo on their own. The rest wait in misery.
    Perhaps she has left with the others, although I am relatively certain she has no valuables. She spoke little at the boardinghouse, nodding or shaking her head at questions, eating almost nothing. She went with me to the pit each day, to the stares and knowing looks of my fellow gendarmes (including, one day, a black-faced Mustafa), to the sneers of her fellow deportees. Boz , some called out. Whore. Dönme . Turncoat. She did not shrink from them, or hang her head, but instead seemed to look through them, as if they no longer existed, as if she, or they, were now dead. After one such visit she spoke to me, one of the few direct exchanges during our days there together.
    “Do something,” she said.
    But I was at a loss as to what to do. I had to wait for orders, which were not quick in coming in the disorganized mess of Katma’s command. The vali in charge of the region had been away, and the second-in-command was reluctant to make decisions. There was pressure from the Syrians, who wanted no more refugees, and from a handful of British and American missionaries, who wanted alleviation of the deportees’ deplorable conditions. One day I saw a bearded, robed man emerge from the command center, the bishop of the Armenian Apostolic Church. German military officials came and went. Still, nothing happened. The temperature rose. Conditions worsened. Food became an issue, the deportees reduced to fighting over scraps, standing in endless lines, picking the seeds from fecal matter. The swarms of flies intensified, if such a thing was possible, heaving about in such densities they resembled shimmering gray and white clouds. Then rain arrived, merciful at first but destructive in time, soaking the shelterless deportees, turning the ground into vile, soupy mud. The heat roared back afterward, moistening and thickening things, a condition more wretched than even before. I loitered near the command center, watching and observing. I annoyed the bey’s staff with my questions, my frequent appearances. We sweated, swatting flies. We drank foul-tasting water. We waited.
    The cramped confines of the rooming house forced a certain closeness. Araxie and I slept within a few hand lengths of each other, she close to the curtain, her back turned to me. I heard her breathing at night, soft and measured, heard the trickle of her urine in the chamber pot we silently shared. Once in the night I sensed her shaking, her body twitching in soundless sobs. I spoke to her often, even if she would not respond, telling her about myself, about the village in which I’d grown up, my father’s trade as a knife maker, my pride for my cousins taking part in the war. I respected her grief and her privacy, averting my gaze, demanding nothing, avoiding physical contact. I offered her food before I ate. I bathed every day, looked at myself in the tiny cracked mirror, made several attempts at combing my hair. I disrobed in front of her only once,