I heard Nazim Bey give an order to his zaptiehs. Some of them picked up the bodies of my dear ones and carried them away, I do not know where. The others lifted me off the ground—I could not walk—and carried me to the house and back to the room where the divan was. For two days and nights no one came near me but the slave girls. All that time I cried; I could not keep the tears from coming. That was when my eyes gave way; that is why I cannot see very well now without glasses.
On the third day Nazim, accompanied by his father, Ahmed, came to my room. Ahmed spoke with the same cruel gentleness. “What is past is gone, little one; it is time your thoughts should turn to the future. Nazim desires you. You are honored. He has punished you for your stubbornness, and he would forgive you and take you to his heart. That is as it must be. Your people are gone. There is none to give you mistaken counsel. You will now accept the favor of Allah and enter into a state of true righteousness.”
“I want to die—kill me! I will never listen to your son nor to your Allah,” I said.
They took me into another wing of the house, to a dungeon room, with just one iron-barred window looking out into the courtyard. There was no divan or cushions, just the floor and the walls. The window was high in the wall. I could not look out at anything but the sky—that same sky which covered so much of tragedy in my ravished Armenia.
Day after day, night after night, went by. Each day the alaiks came and brought me bread, berries and milk. And each day the hodja, a teacher-priest, came to ask me if I were ready to accept Islam. But each day God took me closer into His heart, for I kept up my courage by talking to Him.
THE ROADSIDE OF AWFUL DESPAIR
First the children died, and then the parents, and uncles and aunts. The grieving parents wrapped the little ones in the sheets they had brought along, and then lay down beside them to starve. It was a common scene in the deserts and along the sandy roads over which the exiles travelled.
And then one night, after so many days had passed I had lost count of them, God reached in through my dungeon window. I was awakened by a commotion in the courtyard, where, on other nights, it had been very quiet. Soon I understood what was happening—sheep were being driven in through the gate. Ahmed’s flock was coming in from the hill pastures, driven in, perhaps, by military conditions.