"The highly esteemed Bagradian family . . ." Yet in a flash Gabriel knew for a certainty that this suavity and its "highly esteemed family" had been no more than a single piece of insolence. It had been worse -- hate masked as courtesy. This same hate flowed around him here. It seared his skin, galled his back. And indeed his back was suddenly panic-stricken, with the panic of a man hunted by enemies, without a soul to befriend him in the world. In Yoghonoluk, apart, in the big house, he had known nothing of all that. And before, in Paris? There, in spite of all his prosperity, he had lived in the cool spaces surrounding aliens, who strike root anywhere. Had he struck root here? Here for the first time, in this mean bazaar, at home, he could measure fully the absolute degree of his alien state upon this earth. Armenian! In him an ancient blood-stream, an ancient people. But why did his thoughts more often speak French than Armenian -- as for instance now? (And yet that morning he had felt a distinct thrill of pleasure when his son answered him in Armenian.) Blood-stream, and people. To be honorable. Were not these mere empty concepts? Human beings in every age have strewn the bitter bread of experience with a different spice of ideas, only to make it still more unpalatable. A side-alley of the bazaar came into view. Most of its venders were Armenians, standing before their shops and booths: money-changers, carpet-sellers, jewellers. So these were his brothers, then? These battered faces, these glistening eyes, alert for custom? No, many thanks, he refused such brotherhood, everything in him rebelled against it! But had old Avetis Bagradian been anything other, or better, than such as these? -- even though he were more far-sighted, gifted, energetic. And had he not his grandfather alone to thank that he was not forced to live as they? He went on, shuddering with repugnance. Then he was suddenly conscious of the fact that one of the great difficulties of his life sprang from the circumstance that nowadays he saw so much through Juliette's eyes. So that not only in the world was he an alien, but within himself, the instant he came into contact with other people. Jesus Christ! Couldn't one be an individual, free from all this seething, stinking hostility, as one had that morning on Musa Dagh?

 

 

Nothing more unnerving than such a test of one's reality. Gabriel fled from the Usun Charshy, the Long Market, as the Turks called the bazaar. He could no longer endure its hostile rhythm. He found himself in a little square, composed of new buildings. A pleasant-looking house leapt to his eyes, hamam, the steam-bath, arranged, as everywhere in Turkey, with a certain luxury. It was still too early to call on the old Agha Rifaat Bereket. And, since he felt no inclination to go into one of the dubious restaurants, he turned into the bath.

 

 

He spent twenty minutes in the big steam-room amid slowly mounting vapors, which not only made the other bathers look like far-off ghosts, but seemed even to divorce him from his own body. It was a kind of minor death. He could feel this day's impenetrable significance.

 

 

In the cooling-room next door he lay down on one of the bare couches to submit to the usual treatment after a bath. Now he felt more naked than he had before in the steam. An attendant hurled himself upon him and began, according to all the rules of his art (which truly is one), to knead his flesh. With resonant smackings he played on Gabriel's rump as on cymbals, humming and panting as he did it. A few Turkish beys, on the other pallets, were undergoing similar treatment.