Silver Glass

Davit's Story, a Tragedy in Three Acts: Act 1

One eye open when you're sleeping,
the night has many arms that touch you.
One eye open when you're waking,
sometimes day itself can snatch you.
-- Gregory Djanikian, So I Will Tell The Ground

Մեկ (Mek)
One

If you want a proper history of Adana, you'll have to ask the historians. Davit only has his memories, and those are both too many and too few. They are sorted into two categories: things he knows, and things he has forgotten. The things he has forgotten are the most painful.

Two things he knows: his name is Davit Altounian. He is the youngest of five.

Two things he has forgotten: his father's voice. His brothers' faces.

He remembers the river running through the city, but not his neighbours' houses. He remembers his father owned a business, but not what it was.

He remembers his mother's parents lived with them. His grandfather died when Davit was a toddler. His grandmother Lusin sat in a corner most days and clutched an old tattered blanket. Davit is named after her oldest son, his uncle who died before he was born.

As a child he was afraid of his grandmother. Now he knows better. She lost all five of her sons in the Hamidian massacres[1].

Davit turns eleven in December 1908. By April the next year his voice still hasn't broken.

This saves his life.

He has no memory of when or how the massacre started. He remembers his mother Hamest running, clutching his hand, dragging him out of the house. He stumbles and she pulls him up again. It hurts his arm. His sister Dzovig grabs his other hand.

The street behind them is littered with bodies.

He never sees his father, his oldest brother or his oldest sister again.

Like hundreds of others the three of them take shelter anywhere they can find. In a church Davit stumbles across his second-oldest brother. Sahak has found a gun somewhere. His left arm is sliced open. The wound is covered by a few dirty bandages. He won't let Hamest clean it.

"Go to the American embassy at Alexandretta," Sahak says. "A British warship is coming to save us. But dress him," he jerks his head in Davit's direction, "as a girl. They're killing all the men and boys."

Sahak disappears during the night. Davit never sees him again either.

Hamest leaves and reappears with her arms full of a girl's clothes. They're splashed with blood and torn in places. She doesn't say where she got them. Davit doesn't ask.

They try to flee Adana. They don't succeed.

Davit doesn't remember what happened to his mother. He remembers Dzovig shoving him to the ground beside a dead man and lying on top of him. The man's abdomen is sliced open. Davit tries to move away so he isn't so close to the man's intestines spilling out of the wound. Dzovig tightens her grip and refuses to let him move. Flies crawl over both of them.

The mob thinks they're dead. It passes them by.

The massacre continues for a month. Half the town is burnt. Twenty thousand people are dead.

~~~~

Davit can't remember much of the next few months. He and Dzovig are sent to an orphanage run by foreign missionaries. Dzovig is adopted quickly. Davit isn't. Her adoptive parents don't want a boy.

Neither do many other people. He is twelve by the time he's adopted.

Davit chooses not to remember his first year in England. The Eames mean well. They read about the Adana massacre and decide to adopt one of the poor Armenian orphans. Reading is not the same as living. No words or pictures in a newspaper can make them understand what Davit has seen. He can't make them understand, not when he first arrived speaking only Armenian and not when he learns English.

Chapter Footnotes:

[1] The Hamidian massacres lasted between 1894 and 1897. Its victims were mostly Armenians, though Assyrians were also murdered. The exact death tool will never be known. The lowest estimate is 80,000. The highest is 300,000.