Scorpion Sunset Read Free Page A

women and children had been told to make their way to the church at two o’clock that afternoon with sufficient food for three days’ travel and a change of warm clothing. After waiting patiently in a slow-moving line for over an hour a Turkish gendarme had ticked her, her mother’s, grandmother’s, and sisters’ names off a list so thick it resembled a book.
    Her mother had settled their family as close as she could to the altar rail on the premise that proximity to hallowed ground would ensure God and the Blessed Virgin would look after them, especially her grandmother, who was confused as to what was happening. Their neighbour Mrs Gulbenkian, the dairyman’s wife, laid claim to a patch of floor next to them.
    â€˜You know all our men are all dead?’ she whispered.
    â€˜How dare you suggest such a thing?’ Rebeka’s mother demanded indignantly. ‘The men have been marched south to work on farms where we will join them.’
    â€˜You choose to believe the gendarmes’ lies?’
    â€˜They wouldn’t have asked the men to bring warm winter clothes as well as food for three days if they had meant to kill them. The gendarmes would have shot them in the town square when they assembled. They collected them to work in the fields to produce food for the Ottoman Army. Everyone knows that the Turks make poor farmers.’
    â€˜They want to get rid of all of us Armenians because we are Christians. The Turks want a Muslim country, which is why they killed our men. The gendarmes shot the old men who couldn’t walk and the cripples first,’ Mrs Gulbenkian asserted.
    â€˜They loaded them into carts. I saw them pass at the end of our road. As soon as the carts were out of sight of the town, the gendarmes pulled the weakest from the carts and shot them. Don’t tell me you didn’t hear the sound of the rifles.’
    â€˜They were warning shots.’
    â€˜The American missionary Mr Brackett and Mr Bilgi followed the men when they were marched out. Mr Brackett told me himself that he had seen the bodies of all our men, including the old and the crippled. He recognised your husband’s corpse and my husband’s, and Anusha’s Ruben. Every last one of them, all of them had been shot and their bodies heaped up in Green Horse Canyon.’
    â€˜I don’t believe you.’ Rebeka had never seen her mother react so fiercely. ‘And I’d appreciate you keeping your lies and stories to yourself, Mrs Gulbenkian. Do not repeat them in front of my mother and daughters.’
    â€˜First they killed the men, now it’s our turn,’ Mrs Gulbenkian persisted. ‘Soon there’ll be no Christian Armenians in Turkey or the whole of the Ottoman Empire. They only waited three days to collect us so they could be sure there’d be no men left in hiding to fight for us or our honour.’
    â€˜Enough! Stay away from my family!’ Rebeka’s mother ordered.
    Mrs Gulbenkian shrugged and turned her back to them.
    â€˜Do you think Mrs Gulbenkian could be right?’ Rebeka whispered into her mother’s ear.
    â€˜I think she is talking a lot of nonsense. Look after Mariam and your grandmother while I see to Veronika and Anusha. Too many of the gendarmes are looking at them for my liking.’
    Rebeka, the second of four daughters, had long accepted that she was the ‘plain one’. She had been relegated to working in the jewellery business founded by her maternal grandfather, because there was little hope of her attracting a financially secure husband. She didn’t resent her status, though; rather she revelled in the independence it gave her, like her mother’s spinster sister.
    Her mother retied the scarves around Anusha and Veronika’s heads so the cloth hid as much of their faces as possible, as well as their hair. Mrs Gulbenkian occasionally looked in their direction but when Rebeka’s mother glared back at