Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides [28]
In the backseat of the last car sits Mustafa Kemal. He is lean from battle. His blue eyes flash. He hasn’t had a drink in over two weeks. (The “diverticulitis” Dr. Philobosian had treated the pasha for was just a cover-up. Kemal, champion of Westernization and the secular Turkish state, would remain true to those principles to the end, dying at fifty-seven of cirrhosis of the liver.)
And as he passes he turns and looks into the crowd, as a young woman stands up from a suitcase. Blue eyes pierce brown. Two seconds. Not even two. Then Kemal looks away; the convoy is gone.
And now it is all a matter of wind. 1 a.m., Wednesday, September 13, 1922. Lefty and Desdemona have been in the city seven nights now. The smell of jasmine has turned to kerosene. Around the Armenian Quarter barricades have been erected. Turkish troops block the exits from the quay. But the wind remains blowing in the wrong direction. Around midnight, however, it shifts. It begins blowing southwesterly, that is, away from the Turkish heights and toward the harbor.
In the blackness, torches gather. Three Turkish soldiers stand in a tailor shop. Their torches illuminate bolts of cloth and suits on hangers. Then, as the light grows, the tailor himself becomes visible. He is sitting at his sewing machine, right shoe still on the foot treadle. The light grows brighter still to reveal his face, the gaping eye sockets, the beard torn out in bloody patches.
All over the Armenian Quarter fires bloom. Like a million fireflies, sparks fly across the dark city, inseminating every place they land with a germ of fire. At his house on Suyane Street, Dr. Philobosian hangs a wet carpet over the balcony, then hurries back inside the dark house and closes the shutters. But the blaze penetrates the room, lighting it up in stripes: Toukhie’s panicked eyes; Anita’s forehead, wrapped with a silver ribbon like Clara Bow’s in Photoplay; Rose’s bare neck; Stepan’s and Karekin’s dark, downcast heads.
By firelight Dr. Philobosian reads for the fifth time that night “ ‘… is respectfully recommended … to the esteem, confidence, and protection …’ You hear that? ‘Protection …’”
Across the street Mrs. Bidzikian sings the climactic three notes of the “Queen of the Night” aria from The Magic Flute. The music sounds so strange amid the other noises—of doors crashing in, people screaming, girls crying out—that they all look up. Mrs. Bidzikian repeats the B flat, D, and F two more times, as though practicing the aria, and then her voice hits a note none of them has ever heard before, and they realize that Mrs. Bidzikian hasn’t been singing an aria at all.
“Rose, get my bag.”
“Nishan, no,” his wife objects. “If they see you come out, they’ll know we’re hiding.”
“No one will see.”
The flames first registered to Desdemona as lights on the ships’ hulls. Orange brushstrokes flickered above the waterline of the U.S.S. Litchfield and the French steamer Pierre Loti. Then the water brightened, as though a school of phosphorescent fish had entered the harbor.
Lefty’s head rested on her shoulder. She checked to see if he was asleep. “Lefty. Lefty?” When he didn’t respond, she kissed the top of his head. Then the sirens went off.
She sees not one fire but many. There are twenty orange dots on the hill above. And they