1The 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.
Copyright © 2019 by Hachette-Antoine
Translation copyright © 2023 by Leri Price