The Book of Whispers by Varujan Vosganian & Alistair Ian Blyth

Author:Varujan Vosganian & Alistair Ian Blyth [Vosganian, Varujan & Blyth, Alistair Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300223460
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2017-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

7.

“Do not harm their women,” said Armen Garo. “Nor the children.”

One by one, all the members of the Special Mission gathered at the offices of the Djagadamard newspaper in Constantinople. They had been selected with care. The group had been whittled down to those who had taken part in such operations before, working either alone or in ambush parties. “I trust only a man who has killed before,” Armen Garo had declared. They were given photographs of those they were to seek out, wherever they were hiding. Their hiding places might be anywhere, from Berlin or Rome to the steppes of Central Asia. Broad-shouldered, bull-necked Talaat Pasha, the minister of the interior, was a brawny man whose head, with its square chin and jaws that could rip asunder, was more like an extension of his barrel chest. In the lower part of the photograph, his fists, twice the size of a normal man’s, betokened pugnacity. Beside him, fragile, her features delicate, his wife wore a white dress and a lace cap in the European style, so very different from the pasha’s fez. Then there was Enver, a short man made taller by his boot heels. He had haughty eyes, and his slender fingers preened the points of his moustache. He was proud of his army commander’s braids, which, cascading luxuriantly from his shoulders and covering his narrow chest, were meant to disguise the humble beginnings of a son whose mother, in order to raise him, had plied one of the most despised trades in all the empire: she had washed the bodies of the dead. In one of the photographs, his thin, possessive, but nonetheless timid arm encircles the delicate waist of his wife, Nadjeh, a princess of the imperial harem and therefore a daughter of the sultan. And in another photograph, Enver, the son of the woman who washed the dead, the son-in-law of the sultan, strains to look haughty; his face set rigid, he stands between portraits of his idols, Napoleon and Frederick the Great. Then there was Djemal Pasha, the Lepidus of that martial triumvirate. Ordinary in appearance, if he had not worn the epaulettes of a naval minister, he would have gone completely unnoticed, although he made painful efforts to match the brutality of Talaat and the haughtiness of Enver. Then there were Dr. Nazim and Behaeddin Shakir, the ideologues of the Union and Progress Party who had come up with the idea of releasing criminals from the prisons. Enrolled in armed units, the criminals were to guard the convoys of Armenians and slaughter them at the crossroads. We do not know how beautiful their wives were; they were plump and had black hair, but their features are hard to make out since the only photographs we have of them are from their youth and show them with veiled faces, weeping by the coffins of their husbands after the avengers had completed their mission. And the others, Djemal Azmi, prefect of Trebizond, Behbud Khan Javanshir . .

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