Gabriel Bagradian really spoke these solitary words without knowing it.
Nor did they frame a question, but something indefinite, a kind of
ceremonious amazement, which filled every inch of him. The clear glitter
of this Sunday in March may have inspired it, in this Syrian spring,
which shepherded flocks of giant anemones down along the flanks of Musa
Dagh and far out across the irregular plain of Antioch. Everywhere their
bright blood sprang from the meadow slopes, stifling the more reticent
white of big narcissi, whose time had also come. A golden, invisible
humming seemed to have encased the mountain. Were these the vagrant swarms
of the hives of Kebussiye, or was it the surge of the Mediterranean,
audible in the bright transparency of the hour, eroding the naked back
of Musa Dagh? The uneven road wound upwards, in and out among fallen
walls. Then, where it suddenly ended in heaps of stone, it narrowed out
into a sheep-track. He had come to the top of the outer slope.
Gabriel Bagradian turned. His shape, in rough European homespun,
straightened itself, listening. He thrust the fez a little back off his
damp forehead. His eyes were set wide apart. They were a shade lighter,
but not in the least smaller than Armenian eyes usually are.
Now Gabriel saw what he had come from. The house gleamed out, with its
dazzling walls, its flat roof, between the eucalyptus trees of the park.
The stables, too, and the outhouses glittered in this early morning sunshine.
Although between Bagradian and his property there was now more than
half an hour's walk, it still looked so close to him that it might have
been following at his heels. And further along the valley the church
of Yoghonoluk, with its big cupolas and pointed, gabled minarets at the
sides, greeted him clearly. This solemn, massive church and Bagradian's
villa formed an entity. Bagradian's grandfather, the fabled founder
and benefactor, had built them both fifty years ago. It was the custom
of Armenian peasants and craftsmen, after their journeys abroad -- to
America even -- in search of profit, to return home, into the nest. But
bourgeois grown rich had other notions. They built their luxury villas
along the Riviera from Cannes, among the gardens of Heliopolis, or at
least on the slopes of Lebanon, in the neighborhood of Beirut. Old Avetis
Bagradian had drawn a definite line of demarcation between himself and
such new-rich. He, the founder of that world-famous Istanbul business,
which had offices in Paris, New York, and London, resided, in so far as
his time and affairs allowed him to do so, year after year in his villa
above the hamlet of Yoghonoluk, under Musa Dagh. But not only Yoghonoluk;
the other six Armenian villages of the district of Suedia had basked in
the rich blessing of his kingly presence in their midst. Quite apart
from the schools and churches built by him -- from his summoning of
American mission teachers -- let it suffice to indicate the gift which
in spite of every other event remained, even today, fresh in the memory
of his people: that shipload of Singer sewing machines which after a
more than usually prosperous business year Avetis had distributed among
fifty needy families in the villages.
Gabriel -- he had still not turned his listening gaze away from the villa --
had known his grandfather. He had been born in the house down there and
spent many long months of his childhood in it. Till his twelfth year.
And yet this early life, which was, after all, his own life, seemed so
unreal that it almost hurt to think of it. It seemed like a kind of life
in the womb, the vague memories of which stir the soul to unwelcome
shudderings. Had he really ever known his grandfather, or only read of him
and seen his pictures in a story book? A little man with a white goatee,
in a long black-and-yellow-striped silk gown. His gold eyeglass dangling
from a chain upon his chest.
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