1 The Flood
Hosh Hanna and Aleppo—January 1907
The village of Hosh Hanna was completely silent when the storm hit and the Great Flood rose.
Within a few short hours, the houses of the small village were destroyed, its inhabitants drowned in their rags. No one survived apart from Shaha Sheikh Musa, wife of Zakariya Bayazidi, and Mariana Nassar. The two women clung to the trunk of a walnut tree caught between the iron columns of the lighthouse that guided boats through the depths of the river. Some fishermen rescued them and took them to a house in a nearby village, and by dawn, everything had quieted down.
Before Mariana Nassar lost consciousness, she saw the bodies of her mother, her father, and her four brothers and sisters floating on the surface of the river alongside others she recognized: her neighbor and her six children, the rest of her impoverished neighbors. She saw the corpse of Yvonne’s fiancé—the girl was currently in Aleppo having her wedding dress made, oblivious to the rumors that her betrothed had deflowered her in his father’s mill. The village priest was smiling as usual, and next to him was Hanna’s son, not yet four years old, and his mother Josephine Laham, gripping him tightly. Their bodies rose and fell with the waves as if they were dancing.
Mariana had known most of the drowned. They were her students, her neighbors, family friends from the neighboring villages, her own friends. All the corpses passed by her. An entire life was buried in the river, and she wasn’t certain she had survived herself. She closed her eyes in surrender, praying desperately to Jesus as she held on to the sturdy tree trunk caught in the lighthouse. She noticed Shaha next to her, clutching the body of her son to her chest. Later, the fishermen would succeed in extracting him from her arms only after a struggle.
Mariana saw cooking pots and rugs and beds, shards of large ceramic water pots mixed with roof timber, mirrors, bridal trunks, and other things she couldn’t make out. Seared on her memory was the image of Shaha grabbing hold of her dead son when the waves tossed him near her, and the smile of the priest who had dedicated his last sermon to defending the honor of Yvonne and her fiancé, “the eternal lovers,” as the fellahin of Hosh Hanna called them.
Zakariya Bayazidi and his friend Hanna Gregoros arrived in the afternoon after hearing news of the disaster. When the destroyed village appeared in the distance, they were horrified. Shaha was unconscious when he found her, and Zakariya couldn’t believe that she was still breathing. Their son’s body lay curled up in her lap, and they were still clinging to each other. Hanna was utterly stupefied—he thought for a moment that he had lost the power of speech. One of the fishermen led him down a narrow, debris-filled lane to the body of his wife, Josephine. She was paler than she had been in life, her lips closed like all the dead, and his son was next to her, rigid, his stomach distended like a waterskin.
Hanna trudged back along the river road, a familiar route. He stepped over the corpses of cows, sheep, and people. He climbed the long staircase to his room built a short distance away, and from the broad window he looked out over his village, transformed into silt and the remnants of things. There was no longer anything blocking his view over the remote distances. The river, which he knew so well, ran along as it had for eternity, demure and quiet, as if it hadn’t done anything at all. The sunlight glittered on its surface like golden coins.
He reflected that once again he was alone, without a family. Entertainment and pleasure had saved him and Zakariya. If they had delayed their visit to the citadel with their friends, they would now be two bloated corpses reeking of mass death, that fetid smell that he would later try and fail to describe. He could not forget Mariana’s words when she told him that Josephine had been terrified as her soul rose to Heaven, raising her hand and clutching at the air while her other hand gripped her son tightly. She had plunged into the river and resurfaced more than once before she drowned and became a corpse, meek and smiling, just as she had been when she arrived at Hosh Hanna for the first time and all the fellahin of the village saw her get down from the carriage. When Hanna insisted on asking Mariana about their last moments, all she said was that drowned people’s features disappear, and they don’t look at all like the other dead.
Hanna felt as if he were caught on a shadowy horizon, hearing the bones of perished beings shattering under his feet. Zakariya couldn’t bear to see his friend so frightened, so he acted decisively. He arranged the village graveyard anew with the help of the fellahin from the neighboring villages, and he buried most of the bodies that the river had spat out onto its banks. He still knew them, even though their features were distorted. He knew their scars, the color of their eyes. He buried an intimate part of his life in their graves.
The graveyard was a vision of horror to Zakariya and Hanna as they looked at it from the window of Hanna’s room. The graves of the Christians were lined up neatly next to the graves of the Muslims, and the graves of the unknown and the strangers were in a third orderly row. Other graves were left open to receive any corpses that the river had swept away to distant villages. The fellahin had spent three days digging graves according to instructions from Zakariya, who at that moment had no thought for anything other than burying the dead. He kept repeating that the dead would turn into a plague before long. He buried more than 150 bodies and was never truly rid of their cold touch and the smell. He hadn’t known that the scent of death hangs in one’s clothes, and that burial wasn’t the least arduous task, as it had seemed to him when he was giving orders to the fellahin to dig the graves and sending someone to call a sheikh and a local priest to complete the requisite rites. The priest and the sheikh arrived, and both refused to pray over the unknown corpses, or those with features too distorted to be recognized. The sheikh said that it wasn’t permitted to bury a person in the Islamic way or pray over their body if that person might be Christian, and the priest agreed—they had to confirm the religion of the body. But Zakariya went on burying them all in his own way, without bothering to pray over them, repeating that the dead lost their religious affiliations and became creatures without an interest in the affairs of Heaven.
It was ten days before Zakariya finished burying the bodies. He sat on the steps of Hanna’s room and heard his friend sobbing. Exhausted, he reflected on their former lives. It was no consolation for him to see his sixty horses return—their ancestry had been lost when their pedigrees were drowned. They had come back to gather at the site of their stable, where only some wooden fragments and empty stone troughs remained.
Zakariya prepared two horses to pull the carriage and set off with Mariana Nassar and Shaha—but only after extracting a promise from Hanna that he would join them in Aleppo within a few days. Zakariya didn’t look back when the carriage pulled away from the place that used to be known as Hosh Hanna. He wanted to forget the village that had become a graveyard. His horses ran behind him with bowed heads, dejected to be leaving behind the riverbank and their obliterated stables.
Zakariya couldn’t make sense of the loss of his only child. He spent the whole journey in heavy silence and didn’t reply when Shaha told him that the noise was hurting her. Before the flood, when she would lie naked beside him on the bed, she would ask him to close the curtain when the dawn’s light pierced their window, saying that it wounded her. They lived, before the flood, in the certainty that everything would be all right, that they would have children who would inherit a love of horses, and who would be wounded by invisible things like light, air, and sound. But now, after the flood, they entered Zakariya’s family home in the new quarter of Aleppo like a pair of orphans. They couldn’t explain what had happened, neither to Zakariya’s father, Ahmed Bayazidi, nor to his sister Souad, who knew that the flood hadn’t just taken the son of her brother and his wife; it had also destroyed their passion and their love for each other. She said to her father, “We have to get used to them being ghosts, two invisible people.” Her father didn’t understand. He encouraged her to persuade her brother to open an ‘aza and go to Hosh Hanna to bring back Hanna. Leaving him alone with the dead meant he would disappear like withered rose petals.
Zakariya left the business of caring for the horses to his groom Yaaqoub, who was already responsible for his second stable in the village of Anabiya. He didn’t reply to Yaaqoub’s question about recovering the pedigrees and paid no attention when Yaaqoub said, “What are the horses worth without a record of their bloodline?” When Zakariya returned to his room in his family’s house at night, Shaha was asleep. He sat next to her on the sofa and looked at her for a long time. She had changed considerably. Surely it wasn’t possible that witnessing death could turn you into another being within a few hours? Her laughing eyes were hollowed out, transformed into two pits of clotted blood. Her chest rose and fell with her agitated breathing, her lips clamped shut as if she were afraid that river water might leak in. Her large moist nipples had shrunk, and the gorgeous valley between her breasts had become a shadowless pit. He had never seen her like this before. Never again would she scold him for his frequent trips with Hanna in search of pleasure and women and card tables. She wouldn’t laugh coquettishly when he calmly replied that horses love women and gambling and fun, pointing out, “You won’t find purebreds in the houses of the frightened, or the misers, or the moneylenders.” She used to conclude their little flirtation by asking him to describe the women whom the horses loved so much—but now she had surrendered to the image of death.
Shaha hadn’t understood the relationship between horses and moneylenders in the early days of their marriage, but she liked the idea of it. She thought that pleasure and entertainment were the kind Zakariya had introduced her to. When he saw her one night in the house of her brother Arif, she stole his heart with her slim figure and large eyes. Zakariya fell in love on the spot and exchanged some lingering glances with her, and later he whispered a plea to an intoxicated Hanna to make the marriage proposal for him. Arif burst out laughing when Hanna told him gravely that he was asking for Shaha’s hand on behalf of Zakariya. Arif went out of the salon where his guests usually gathered, bringing his sister with him. He asked her, “Do you accept Zakariya, that outrageous wanton?” She said, smiling, “Yes.” He went on, “You have to know he is utterly shameless and a complete buffoon. He has no respect for married life and will betray you with the first woman he trips over on the road to Afrin.” She repeated her answer: “Yes, I will marry him.” Arif had no idea what he was supposed to do in moments like this. He walked to the cupboard, took out his rifle, and fired a shot into the air. Then he sent for Mala Mannan to record all the terms of the dowry and marriage contract, and no one disputed any of the details.
Hanna felt that this novel event merited drunkenly staggering to his feet in the middle of the party and taking some gold liras out of his leather zunnar to present to Shaha as a wedding gift. Everything was very simple and joyful—“wonderful,” as Shaha described it. Arif didn’t care about the objections of his wider family, who would have preferred a Kurdish groom for the daughter of Sheikh Musa Agha. He didn’t stint his sister and put on a lavish wedding for her, where he danced and flattered both Ahmed Bayazidi and Souad (whom he privately called “arrogant”). Souad was no more pleased by her brother’s improvised wedding than she was by his marrying a girl from the countryside, even if she was the daughter of an agha, but the happiness of the bride and groom was enough to defer her criticisms. She knew, deep down, that this marriage was a declaration of Zakariya’s permanent separation from his family. He couldn’t care less what his relatives would say and delegated the task of informing them to his father who, for his part, was delighted. Shaha belonged to a large and powerful family, and by marrying her, Zakariya had put an end to his father’s constant fear that he would be ensnared by one of those prostitutes at the citadel, whose shamelessness and licentiousness were the stuff of legend across the city.
After the wedding, which continued for three days, the married couple left Sharran trailed by large carriages crammed with gifts: rugs of virgin wool, embroidered cushion covers, Kurdish carpets made specially for Shaha’s jihaz many years before, enormous copper cooking pans, and earthenware jars of goat cheese, olive oil, and cured meats, plus small things that Zakariya hadn’t seen yet like Shaha’s anklets and a heavy necklace of pure gold. And there was a carriage just for the married couple, pulled by a black purebred stallion that Arif had gifted to his friend and brother-in-law.
On their way to Hosh Hanna, Shaha said to Zakariya that she had loved him since she first saw him three years before. She used to look out for him among her brother’s ever-present guests, and she could relate many stories about the moments he came to light. She said that she had put compresses on his forehead one day two years earlier when he had been struck with a fever. On that night of revelry, Arif had gathered his many friends for a party to mark the end of the olive harvest. In actual fact they were celebrating many things that had happened that year, most important of which was the return of his father’s library to its rightful place, and the reconciliation that had at last taken place between Arif and his uncle, who had struck Arif with his shoe in front of a servant and called him ignorant after learning that he had sold the library to an Englishman who perpetually wandered the region that extended from Kilis to the Cathedral of St. Simeon Stylites in the company of an interpreter. This Englishman was interested in the theater of Nabi Houri, the ruins of the destroyed temples and churches in Barad, and the villages of Mount Simeon. Arif had regained the library only after great exertion. He had traveled to Aleppo, where the Englishman was staying in a residence belonging to the English consulate, and he ended up paying substantially more than what he had been given for it. Leaders of Arab tribes and Kurdish aghas mediated on his behalf and succeeded in striking a bargain for the return of the library, which was still in trunks, waiting to be sent to London. But three ancient texts written in Kurdish were missing, the most important a manuscript of Mem and Zin copied by Abdel Latif Bihzad, an adherent of the work’s original author, the Sufi poet Ahmed Khany.
The library was welcomed home with a raucous celebration. Munshidun recited the odes of Ahmed Khany and Mala Jaziri for three days straight. Arif’s uncle and Mala Mannan examined the books that Arif’s Ethiopian servant, Mabrouk, had reordered and returned to their original places. Despite mourning the loss of the three unique texts, they were satisfied that the library was once again where it belonged: in the house built on a hill within Arif’s estate known as Grandfather’s House. It was an isolated residence composed of two spacious rooms that overlooked his vast olive groves.
At that party, Zakariya drank a lot of arak. By the end of the night, he was exhausted and suffering from sharp stomach cramps; his forehead was sweating, and his body wouldn’t stop convulsing. Arif summoned a doctor from Azaz, but it didn’t take much effort on his part to diagnose Zakariya’s condition. He said that Zakariya had drunk like a mule, and his malady was just a fever that would necessitate complete rest and a few compresses soaked in an herb tisane. Arif conveyed Zakariya to a large room in Grandfather’s House and instructed Shaha to change his compresses. She was delighted with this task—to find herself so close to him that their breaths mingled. When the servant Mabrouk went to bring the firewood brazier, she seized her opportunity. She looked at Zakariya for a long time, she inhaled him slowly, she took hold of his fingers and rubbed them, she wiped his forehead with her palm, and when he opened his eyes, he saw her as an angel hovering overhead. Just then the servant Mabrouk returned with the wood, setting it in the brazier. Shaha was embarrassed, rose from her place, and left, but she lingered at the door to smile at Zakariya.
The road to their house in Hosh Hanna was filled with Shaha’s skillful storytelling. Half an hour before they arrived at the village, he pinched her breast. She leaned against him and said that his scent was what had caused her desire for him. Smirking, he asked, “What else apart from that?” She replied, laughing and reaching coyly toward his sex, “Don’t you know that scent pierces my heart?” It was the first time she told him about the invisible things that wounded her.
A year after their marriage, her happiness was overflowing. She joined in telling stories and daydreams, and Zakariya loved her generosity and her creativity when it came to lovemaking. He was constantly surprising her, and she responded enthusiastically to his imagination, and to his peculiar tales of horses and women that he brought back from his trips with Hanna, her brother Arif, and the rest of their companions, all of whom adored uproarious parties at the citadel. Arif was the most resplendent of all the visitors there, obediently losing everything he won throughout the days of his visit. He would say that the gambler was a creature of eternal loss, and he liked this phrase so much he would reformulate it and repeat, “Gambling is eternal losing.” Then he would roar with laughter, as always, and add, “A winner is a cowardly gambler and should be ashamed.”
Zakariya and Shaha led a cheerful life in the few years before the flood. Whenever he went away with Hanna, he missed her. She enchanted him. She wasn’t hostile toward the citadel, she didn’t ask him to remain at her side, but after his marriage he didn’t waste much time in the city. Leaving Hanna drunk in one of the many houses they were both familiar with in every city, he would depart at dawn and return to her weighed down with gifts and desires. She loved it when he called her by the names of his horses, and his trade expanded considerably when he added nine purebred Arabian stallions to his stable. A traveling broker had displayed them to him, saying that he was selling them on behalf of the sheikh of a large tribe who didn’t want to give his name. Zakariya, who knew everything about the horses of his region, had dispatched his groom to the sheikh, who was staying in Khan Al-Wazir during his visit to Aleppo. Without mincing words, the groom had asked the sheikh if it was true he wanted to sell his nine horses, swearing to keep his secret. On receiving an affirmative reply, they had agreed on a price and the agent’s percentage, and the sheikh had surrendered the horses’ deeds. Zakariya never forgot the moment they made their grand entrance. He had long dreamed of the day that such horses would be in his stable to fill out its shortcomings and make it into one of the most important in the whole Vilayet of Aleppo. Horse traders made a beeline for him, and so did Bedouin sheikhs who loved horses, princes of distant regions, and foreign hobbyists who couldn’t believe this outstanding collection could be found in a single place—and enjoying such a high degree of care. Their mangers were spotless, their saddles were hung on designated hooks like new clothes for Eid, and the spurs had the pleasant smell of gazelle leather. The stable was always clean, as the four grooms (who would also drown in the flood) used to take it in turns to mix the dung with straw and muck out every six hours. The horses drank water from huge copper basins inlaid with tin, just like rich people in the city. A long passageway separated the stables and the horses’ overnight shelter from the large office. Composed of several rooms, its walls were filled with walnut cabinets, and lined up on the shelves of these cabinets, the complete files archived in a single register, were the biography and the bloodline of each horse, which Zakariya had delighted in writing out in his splendid calligraphy. Alongside this was a special cabinet where the pedigree of every horse was arranged, written on gazelle leather, signed and witnessed by seven people of good standing. (According to custom, Zakariya had memorized the lineage of the horses.) There was also a guesthouse attached to the stables, which had been expanded several times over ten years. And in the stables in Anabiya he kept several rare horses for breeding and crossbreeding. Everything was overseen by Yaaqoub, the most experienced groom in the region.
On their first night back in the family home, Zakariya sat on the sofa all night, watching Shaha as she drowned in uninterrupted nightmares. She had lost her magic; she had aged suddenly. He had always believed that coming back to the family home was a bad sign, a man losing his dream, especially if the place was tumbledown, dripping with the chronic illnesses of its elderly inhabitants, stinking of rot from being crammed full of old furniture and his father’s detested files.
After the departure of Zakariya, who considered his friend’s conversation about regret to be an evil omen, Hanna woke at dawn. He didn’t want to think about his new life; instead, he let it seep away into the river that he had begun to see as a river that was new every moment. He brightened at the thought that he required very little: just a couple of cotton thobes and some garments he could gather in a single bag if he wanted to leave suddenly. Gone was his wardrobe of sumptuous English suits and European hats, custom-made shoes and perfumes and rich objects that reeked of his adoration of the good life—all drowned. He thought that the Lord wanted him to have a new life, one he could touch with his hand and heart. Hanna resolved not to regret anything he did from then on. Nothing would go back to the way it was, no matter how many times Zakariya said it; he himself was wagering that Hanna wouldn’t be able to bear living among the meek, those who feared a bit of frivolity.
Hanna wouldn’t listen to his friends who came from villages and cities, near and far, to assist and condole with him. They brought carts loaded with provisions for hundreds: clothes, cured meats, lambs, cages filled with chickens, bottles of wine and cognac, excellent tobacco, and money. Hanna was silent, wouldn’t reply to any questions, and rebuffed all condolences. After a few weeks he refused to receive any of them. In his room, he pondered the meaning of death by drowning and wouldn’t allow the gifts to be brought in. He asked his servant to bring everything to the caretaker of the church in the nearest village so he could distribute it among the few families that had stayed by the river. He begged Zakariya to tell their friends not to bring him anything else, as he already had everything he needed: olive oil, a little bulgur wheat, and some dried vegetables. But their friends wouldn’t allow him to turn into a vagrant (or an imbecile, as they termed it), an ascetic who had renounced property and uproarious living. Everything could be replaced as long as there was still the thousands of dunums of his fertile lands, the olive groves that extended for great distances over the territory of Anabiya, as well as his great citadel and its gardens of 129 dunums planted with all types of trees, the khans in the souq, and the four splendid houses in Aleppo, only half a day’s journey from this one-room dwelling, which, as he kept informing everyone, was more than sufficient for him.
Hanna felt like the flood hadn’t just drowned his wife and son; it had drowned all his sordid and riotous past, his entire life. A desire welled up inside him for a new one. An image came back to him of Father Ibrahim Hourani, the itinerant priest who came to Aleppo every now and then and stayed in a large room attached to the Syriac Catholic Church. Hanna would greet him silently at Sunday mass, which he was assiduous in attending, compelled as he was to prove that he was still Christian and had not converted to Islam, as the rumors went. Once Father Ibrahim had blocked Hanna’s path and told him, “You won’t feel the power of weakness until you fall to the lowest point.” At the time, he had no idea why this man, so venerated by the other worshippers, had stopped him. Hanna didn’t leave the church after the prayers were over. He went to see Father Ibrahim, who took him by the arm, and together they went out into the city’s streets. They sat in a nearby coffeehouse, and Father Ibrahim told Hanna that he had known his father Gabriel Gregoros very well. He had lived his entire life in fear of being massacred, of being forced to abandon his religion and convert to Islam. To be safe, he hid the money for the jizya tax in a place no one knew apart from Ahmed Bayazidi, despite Sultan Abdel Majid’s Imperial Reform Edict of 1865, which relieved non-Muslim citizens of the Ottoman Empire from paying the jizya. Gabriel hadn’t believed that he would never pay the jizya again and lived his whole life resigned to the imminence of his death, so when the massacre took place, he was expecting it.
Continuing to address Hanna, who was unusually submissive, Father Ibrahim said, “You are not like your father, but you will gradually transform into an exact copy of his original, and your wicked soul won’t be saved unless you sink to the very lowest point and realize that everything you have ever done in your life has been mere meaningless ignominy.” Hanna asked for his address, and Father Ibrahim replied quietly, “You may consider me a person with no address. I walk this earth in constant anticipation of my death.” He wouldn’t permit Hanna to question him further. He rose smiling and left him alone, turning onto the street that led back to the church.
“This is the lowest point that Father Ibrahim was talking about,” Hanna said to himself. He felt that life was passing before him, slow, pleasant, and lightened of material things. Death was treading lightly alongside, invisible, reaching out his hand to help if life stumbled. Hanna left his room at dawn, walking slowly over the flat ground that used to be the village his father had founded more than thirty years earlier, which he named in honor of his youngest son. Hanna wished it would fall into oblivion forever, he didn’t want anyone to remember it, he wanted to go back to the image of the world as it was first created. He felt himself to be a child, reborn into another life without a past. He was a blank page expelling a memory, burdened down with the uproar and gaiety and pain of an entire life that was over now. Then he felt guilty and longed for his son and the face of the gentle wife who had endured a life with him. From the first day of their marriage, Josephine had never depended on his presence in their family life. She had gifted him to the distant wilds and the citadel of Shams Al-Sabah, with its endless caravan of women selling pleasure, with its troupes of musicians who played for days without stopping at the command of a party of landowners passing a winter immersed in gambling, with its sumptuous feasts prepared by Aleppan cooks who were adept at catering to the tastes of the little group that Hanna and Zakariya presided over. They would invite women from Aleppo, Damascus, and Beirut who had been hand-selected by a group of pimps throughout the year. In mid-December, the women would arrive at the citadel on the small hill overlooking the ruins of Barad, accompanied by trunks of sumptuous, exorbitantly expensive clothes, all paid for by the men. They were spread out among the chambers of the citadel and would wander half-naked through the passageways, the large salon, the rooms, and the cellars tightly packed with bottles of fine wine and foreign drinks brought back by the men from their trips to Beirut, Baghdad, Damascus, Venice, Paris, Istanbul. They bought the finest alcohol from the Jews in Aleppo and sent it to the cellar of the citadel, whose every detail had been considered and chosen by Shams Al-Sabah herself: feather pillows, embroidered silk sheets, tall copper bedsteads furnished with mattresses of combed wool. She had gone to the trouble of selecting an individual color for the bedcovers in each of the nine rooms. The card table had been imported from London by a Jewish cotton trader from Aleppo. He had intended to open the first casino in Aleppo, only for his plan to fail before it began: the men of religion attacked him in a Friday sermon, and his friend Raoul the goldsmith begged him to abandon his project. The Jewish trader dropped the idea and sold the ebony table to Arif, who donated it to the citadel along with a china service, copper saucepans, and cutlery fashioned from pure, unadulterated silver.
Shams Al-Sabah didn’t neglect a single detail. She understood that she was there at the pleasure of the elite, who didn’t care what was going on in their vast lands, leaving the communication and defense of their interests with the governing classes to a group of lawyers and politicians. One of the men looking out for them was Ahmed Bayazidi, chief accountant of the Ottoman vali, director of the Ottoman Bank in Aleppo, and the dear friend of Hanna’s father Gabriel Gregoros. Gabriel Gregoros came from a pious family, of which Hanna was the sole survivor. In 1876, every other member of the Gregoros family had been slaughtered at Mardin as punishment for the murder of an Ottoman officer who had tried to rape Hanna’s aunt in broad daylight. The Gregoros family attacked the officer in the souq, dragged him off his horse, killed him, and threw his mutilated body in front of the governor’s headquarters, threatening anyone who assaulted their women with the same fate.
Even after many years, Hanna’s hatred and resentment for the three officers who had perpetrated the ensuing massacre was undiminished. He managed to have his revenge on two of them, but the third, the leader of the garrison at Mardin, still lived. This man refused to mix with the populace, wore gloves in order not to touch the fingers of those who greeted him, wouldn’t accept gifts from anyone, and never betrayed his wife, who was described as the paragon of beauty by everyone who knew her. And so the battle between the two men remained unfinished. As the years passed, Hanna would convince himself that killing the first two officers had healed his thirst for revenge, and he dismissed the idea of vengeance on the leader of the garrison when he saw an old man getting down from his carriage in front of the vali’s residence in Aleppo.
And yet the outrage done to his murdered father remained the hardest image in Hanna’s life, and he never forgot it. It kept him awake for long nights. He would choke suddenly in the midst of joy and feel like he was suffocating. During these times, he would hide himself away from his companions, and thoughts of revenge would return in full force. He would imagine extraordinary deaths for this haughty officer. Hanna thought he would order him to eat a sack of salt, or he would drown him in a lake of piss taken from Zakariya’s horses. Hanna wanted him to have a slow death so he could relish it and erase the shame that had accompanied him all his life.
Unlike this last officer, the other two had been susceptible to Hanna’s stratagems. They had loved parties, and he was able to hunt them down easily by means of a well-known pimp. Hanna paid the pimp a massive sum to lure the officers from Mardin to Aleppo, kill them, and then disappear completely from the territory of the Ottoman Empire.
Copyright © 2019 by Hachette-Antoine
Translation copyright © 2023 by Leri Price
