By Sempad Shahnazarian

Chapter Five (Continued)

  It was the summer of 1908, when, on his way home from the Monastery, Sempad stopped at Arakelotz Vank,  Apostles’ Monastery. He was roaming around with one of the teachers enjoying the beauty of the mountainside, when a shepherd ran, excitedly, toward them, crying joyfully:

  “The prisoners are out! The prisoners have been freed! Der Kerope is free now! I saw them in Moush yesterday morning!”

  It was something unexpected! Something unbelievable! It turned out, however, to be true after some questioning.

  All the Fedayis were finally out, as one result of the Turkish governmental change. A new constitution was being written. A new regime had been declared. Everyone was so glad and excited about it all that without losing any time, they started running, and covered the two hour distance in no time. When they got there the freed prisoners were shaking hands with the crowd, joyfully.

  When Sempad saw his father smiling at him from among the crowd, he just ran into his arms crying with joy.

  Soon they were on their way home. It was about a three hour walk.

  How can one describe the emotionally turbulent moment when his father, after four years in prison, crossed the threshold and entered their home into the joyful arms of Sempad’s mother, grandmother and aunt Zumrout, while his brothers Kegham, Arshavir and Arsen and sister Satenik were waiting for their burning embraces.

  Soon a multitude of people filled the streets around our house. They had come to welcome Der Kerope.

  Their village was one of the largest villages of Moush Plain with over six-hundred houses and three churches.

  One of these churches was called Sourp Saint Dalile, which was a heap of ruins in the center of a cemetery, at the edge of the village. A huge tombstone of granite, in the form of some antediluvian monster would attract visitors’ attention. That rock, according to legend, had been dragged down the mountain by a man called Nal-Khran, to be used as his gravestone.

  It was such a huge and uncommon gravestone, children would climb on it and mount it, as if it were a horse.

  The other church was called Sourp Stepanos, close to barns and haystacks, with a little school building next to it, at the edge of the cemetery. This church was famous for its Holy Cross that had a miraculous emerald on it.

  The third and largest church was Saint Trinity, which was right in the center of the village, close to our home. Sempad’s father Der Kerope was the priest of this church.

  How glorious was the first High Mass performed by him after he was freed from prison. That day the entire population of the village attended the service.

  Standing at the altar and facing the congregation he delivered a very solemn and patriotic sermon.

  Tears of joy ran down the faces of everyone who had come to celebrate the unusual circumstance and to see their valiant and undaunted leader once again.

  That day the children in the choir sang more beautifully, being magnetized by the heavenly atmosphere.

  At the conclusion, people began moving out, silently crossing their faces and smiling at Der Kerope’s family, while they were anxiously waiting so they could walk home with him.

  Satenik, Sempad’s little sister who was seven years old, was holding his hand and walking proudly with their father, while Arsen, Arshavir and Kegham followed them silently. Their mother, grandmother and aunt Zumrout were watching them happily from the front yard of their house, smiling.

  Their house was a huge conical shaped structure of interlaced timbers with an opening at the topmost part of it, serving as a window.
  A ceramic hearth of five feet in circumference and about the same height was buried in the center of the hardened earthen floor, right below the window.  This was for cooking and baking.

  They had a stable large enough to take care of six buffaloes, six cows, a couple of bulls, some calves and a horse.

  Next to the stable was located a little hovel, which was always damp and cool, serving as an ice-box.

  All these structures were enclosed in a partly thatched court, with a skylight overhead, with two firm and heavy doors, one facing east and the other facing northwest.

  These arrangements had been made with the idea of security against thieves.

  Every morning the cattle of the entire village would be on the move to the pasture lands. They grazed and rested all day long, under the care of cowboys, and would return to their stables a little before sunset. When they returned to their stables the milk pails were awaiting them.

  At night, their mother would get busy covering the entire well-swept earthen floor with mattresses and blankets for the whole family, under the poorly illuminating clay lamp. The wick had to be minced every now and then to insure a little brighter  light.

  Before going to bed, the entire family, except for father, would line up in genuflection, to say their prayers before an ancestral Bible that had a golden cover and was placed on top of a cereal container. 

  Grandmother and aunt Zumrout were regular psalmists. They could keep on reciting psalms one verse after another for a long time. Poor mother, on the other hand, knew only the first line of some psalms.

  Before anybody had a chance to break in, she would hurriedly recite the only line she knew and would retire from the kneeling congregation to arrange the beds.

  After prayers were over, they would crawl under their blankets, while father was having a meeting with Fedayi friends in one corner of the stable, arranged for that kind of work.

  That night the prominent men of the village had called on Der Kerope to discuss the drought. The summer had been very dry that year. Wheat fields were scorched by the heat and the lack of moisture. Gardens had turned yellow. Trees had an air of despair. Stream beds dreamed about roaring torrents. Cattle roamed around in search of mud holes. People hopelessly looked up in the sky for banks of black clouds.

  So they came to discuss this matter and to see what they should do. It was decided that a choral procession with the Holy Cross of Sourp Stepanos was considered necessary.

  The following day, the village took on the festive appearance of a pilgrimage. Failed by the cruel weather, they finally turned their eyes toward the supernatural forces, and lay their hope into the hands of the Holy Cross, which had performed many miracles in that community.

  Der Kerope led the procession by holding the Holy Cross high above his head and walking around and around the meandering streets and on the pasture lands. This went on for many hours, when from nowhere, black clouds began rolling in the clear sky and a torrential rain came down like an enraged tempest.

  In the shrill cries of joy and bits of psalms, the procession ended and the Holy Cross was returned to the altar of Sourp Stepanos, where it belonged.

  Mustapha and Ahmed, two fanatic Turks, looked at one another with ominous grins and walked away from the crowd, cursing.
  It was night!

  Two horsemen dismounted at the outskirts of the village, tied their horses to a tree by the cemetery and stood there for a moment, looking at the chapel and the starlit sky.

  The village slept quietly. The silhouettes of haystacks blurred mysteriously against the barns in the night, as a sea of shadows extended peacefully far and beyond.

  Mustapha, rolling his big black mustache, threw his chest out and whispered to Ahmed: “This is going to be an easy task,  a  very easy one.”

  “What makes you think so?” said Ahmed, with a sound of sarcasm in his voice.

 “Just intuition! Besides, everything is in our favor. It is dark and quiet! The village is sound asleep, and the door of the chapel is open.”

  “Yet, I am not so sure,” said Ahmed

  “You are just scared, that’s all,” said Mustapha.

  Saying this, he walked with determined steps toward the chapel.

  Suddenly a dog’s barking from far away cut the silence like a knife. He stood still and craned his neck in the direction of the sound.

  There was an all-embracing silence again. The houses, the barns, the haystacks stood silently and the mountains, in the distance, shouldered the starlit sky like shapeless giants.

  Standing on the threshold of the chapel, he contemplated the magic simplicity of the interior.

  An oil lantern that hung from the ceiling over the altar, sprinkled a pallid light around and the jeweled Cross stood from behind shiny candlesticks, mute and sorrowful.

  “There it is!” exclaimed Mustapha ecstatically. “There is that precious stone which has kept me thinking day in and day out, the last few weeks.” He had been so captivated by it, that an uncontrollable desire had been born in him to possess it. 

  It was not the first time he was out for a nightly errand. All his life he had ridden around with his inseparable friend, Ahmed, breaking into stables and houses, stealing cattle and anything he could lay his hands on, and enjoying the friendship and intimacy of the night.

  From the open door of the chapel, he kept looking at the dimly glowing altar and the weird and silent interior.

  In that sullen obscurity, a magic scene suddenly burst out before his eyes.

  ...Shapeless shadows began dancing with exquisite dexterity...thoughts glowed like wet drops of phosphorus in the dark...ideas unfolded themselves as attractive flowers...sensations vibrated like tiny wings of hummingbirds...and eyes, like golden crowns of forget-me-nots, floated in the air invitingly, and blinked like stars...

  Mustapha, heavily shaken by this devilish scene, remained alarmed and motionless for a while, then regaining himself, thought out loud: “Get going! What’s bothering you? He started to walk toward the altar. His footsteps rang strongly on the paved floor, and his heart pounded heavily inside his hairy chest.

  He stopped before the altar and looked ecstatically at the Cross on which the emerald stone shone like a greenish flame.

  Impulsively, he grabbed it and held it tightly in his grip.

  As he turned around to go, an inky darkness suddenly enveloped him. He couldn’t see.

  “What happened to me?” he muttered to himself, puzzled and terrified. “Am I going blind?”

  Millions of thoughts surged in his mind. Conflicting ideas tortured him. In his excitement, when he accidentally laid the Cross down in front of the altar, the darkness vanished and he could see again as before he entered the church.

  “I can see now! I can see!” he exclaimed with joy. It was just my imagination;  nothing but imagination...”  he mumbled, trying to convince himself.

  He was now determined not to go away without the Cross.

  He uncontrollably grabbed it again and turned around toward the door, when the pitch-black darkness engulfed him again. He now felt strange and painful sensations in his eyes. It seemed as if thousands of needles were pricking his eyeballs.

  A voice suddenly came to him. Was it Ahmed’s voice, or that of his innermost, calling for him now: “Hurry up! Leave it there and go! I warned you, but you didn’t listen to me.”

  He was now convinced it wasn’t a trick of his imagination, but simply the power of the Cross manifested in that fashion.

  He immediately turned around, laid the Holy Cross at the foreground of the altar and hurried outside with his vision fully restored.

  When he joined Ahmed he felt that he had to attend to some unfinished business.

  To express his gratitude to the Almighty he broke into a barn, stole a beautiful white lamb and ceremoniously sacrificed it at sunrise on the threshold of the chapel.  In the morning, he confessed to the priest about what he had tried to do while the village was sleeping, peacefully...

  Days rolled on, joyfully, and the children played in the streets and on the roofs, happily.

  The new Constitutional regime had brought lots of changes. People were devoting much time and energy in organizing their school system and their agricultural methods.

  Der Kerope was thinking about having his children get a higher education.

  Sempad’s older brother, Mesrob, was now living in Armenian communities in the Caucasus, as a Fedayi.  Sempad was the only grown-up boy in the family to be sent away to a high school, far from Moush.

  In the winter of 1908, his father took him to Ketronagan Varjaran, the greatest Armenian school, in Constantinople. 

At that time, there had started a flow of Armenian students from Van, Moush, Erzeroum and other provinces, to Constantinople, and through the help of the Patriarchate they were admitted to Ketronagan Varjaran, Berberian and other schools, with some monthly aid given to each one of them.
 

  After Der Kerope succeeded in having Sempad admitted to Ketronagan Varjaran, he took him on a trip to Bulgaria and Egypt for a month to see their relatives and friends and then returned home to his community to continue his patriotic activities.