Victor was examining his hands now, as if he were thinking the same thing. “There haven’t been any cases in two weeks, so I hope it’s over, but we need food. The weaker they are, the more susceptible they become. One more outbreak and we might as well give up.”
“We have some ammunition left,” Alicia said. “Ten cartridges.”
“Alicia is the best marksman we have,” Victor announced. “The source of all the game in our pot. Never wastes a bullet.”
Gabriel saw his admiring look at Alicia, and her face lowered, a barely repressed smile on her lips. He thought of Vera. What would she think of him for abandoning her? He allowed himself to wonder for the first time whether she was still alive. He closed his eyes and willed the pain in his gut to subside.
“Something hurt?” Victor asked him with a concerned look. “Life, comrade.” Gabriel forced a smile.
The next morning, Gabriel and Alicia donned snowshoes that a Norwegian comrade, now buried beneath the snow, had brought with him.
“But you can’t shoot.” Victor pointed to Gabriel’s bandaged right hand. “You’d be more helpful giving a morale talk to the comrades. Their heads are as starved as their bellies.”
“Alicia can’t go by herself,” Gabriel insisted.
“I do all the time.” Rifle slung across her shoulder, she was already swinging her feet, attached to the webbed snowshoes, across the field like a duck, heading for the forest.
“Alicia,” Gabriel called out. “Stop. What if you’re hurt? And how will you get the carcass back?”
“I’ll go.” Victor held out his hands for the snowshoes. “You’re right, she might bag a deer instead of a hare.”
Over several hours, Gabriel heard occasional shots ricochet through the mountains. He was stacking wood when he heard a shot that didn’t sound like the others. It had a quicker report, like a snarl instead of the boom of the shotguns. He stared at the woods, then took up a rifle and stomped awkwardly though the knee-deep snow toward the line of pines, following the broad track of snowshoes.
He met Alicia and Victor stumbling through the woods.
“He’s been shot,” Alicia gasped.
As soon as they were back in the monastery, Victor shrugged off his coat and pulled back a blood-soaked sleeve. “Just grazed,” he announced, his relief audible, but his face gray with pain.
Alicia cleaned the wound with an iodine solution.
“What happened?” Gabriel asked.
“I shot a deer,” she said, her hands busy with bandages. “We were walking over to it when a man stepped from behind a tree with a pistol and shot Victor. He looked familiar. I think he works for one of the local landowners.” She stroked Victor’s forehead.
“Did he say anything?”
“I didn’t understand him.”
Victor sat up, wincing. “He said, ‘Get out. You bring bad luck.’”
“In what language?” Gabriel asked.
“Armenian.”
“I didn’t know you spoke Armenian.”
“My grandfather on my mother’s side was Armenian. He moved to California, looking for paradise. He didn’t find it and returned to New York, but I thought I should keep looking.” He reached up with his good arm and pressed Alicia’s hand against his lips.
“Wonderful,” Gabriel declared. “Now the locals are after us too. Did you have any trouble with them before?” He wondered whether news of the bank robbery had reached this valley.
“A few months after we arrived,” Alicia explained, “we were running short of money, so we stopped buying food from the Karakaya farmers. We had our gardens and a promising crop, and we hunted. The farmers left us alone. But recently we heard that the governor had paid a visit to the three biggest landowners, and after that it seemed like they turned on us. We had five goats, but one morning they were gone. When we hunted, sometimes there’d be the sound of a drum that would scare the game away. But nothing like this. They never shot at us before.”
“Maybe we should think about leaving,” Victor ventured. “There aren’t all that many of us left.”
“That would mean our comrades died for nothing,” Gabriel answered crossly.
“The living are our responsibility too.”
“Well, I’m staying,” Gabriel insisted. There was nothing left for him in Europe, and he could never return to Russia or to Istanbul. There was only this valley. He saw Victor meet Alicia’s eyes before he turned to stir life into the fire.
62
Father Zadian remained closeted with Apollo in the sitting room with the door shut for the entire morning on the day after he arrived. Vera had long since figured out that Father Zadian must have been the leader of Gabriel’s cell. Gabriel had once complained to her that the men in his cell wouldn’t take orders directly from him. Now she understood why. Father Zadian’s rectory was visited, day and night, by all kinds of men, some who looked like wealthy merchants, some tradesmen, others dressed in rags. They spoke rapidly in Armenian, but sometimes in French. When their voices were raised, she could hear and sometimes understand.
There had been a fight over tactics, with some of the visitors objecting to provoking the government.
“Do you know how many lives will be lost if the sultan decides to strike back at our community?” Vera heard one man shout, but she didn’t hear Father Zadian’s response. It hadn’t satisfied his visitor, who slammed the door on his way out.
Now Father Zadian was sequestered with Apollo and she could hear nothing, although she hovered by the door until Marta took her firmly by the shoulder and led her into the kitchen.
When Apollo emerged, he looked tired and unsettled. He went outside without remembering to put on a coat and paced about the rectory garden. After a while, he came in and sat before the kitchen stove, shivering. Marta left, closing the door behind her, leaving him alone with Vera.
“How much do you know, Vreni?” Apollo asked her. He pulled a small leather pouch from his jacket, took a pinch of tobacco from it, and tamped it into his pipe.
She told him what Marta had said about Gabriel’s bank robbery and the explosion.
“I don’t think Gabriel knows that there might be an attack on the commune,” Apollo said, “but he should be safe for the moment. Father Zadian heard that the vizier wanted to go ahead with an attack, but the sultan decided to wait. He’s sending an envoy east to see for himself whether the commune is a threat.”
“That’s good news, isn’t it?”
“Not if he decides it is one. Or if the vizier convinces the sultan to go ahead with the attack before the envoy returns.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Another provocation like that bank explosion might make them think attacking the commune is necessary to protect the empire. We have to warn Gabriel, but it’s not just about the commune anymore. Father Zadian thinks that if the sultan believes the Armenians are revolting, then the entire valley might be attacked. It wasn’t what he had planned.” Apollo gave a deep sigh. “I don’t know, Vreni. People do the most awful things.”
When Vera heard “we,” her hopes soared. She was vaguely aware that the thought of seeing Gabriel gave her less pleasure than the prospect of traveling with Apollo. Gabriel might be furious if she followed him and became a liability again.
“We have to bring him the guns.” Apollo opened the stove door and held a piece of kindling into the fire. It burst into flame, and he held it to his pipe bowl as he inhaled.
“Marta mentioned a shipment of guns, but it was confiscated.” She breathed deeply of the fragrance of Apollo’s pipe. It conjured memories of evenings in Apollo’s apartment in Geneva with Gabriel and others in heated discussion that would go on deep into the night.
“For heaven’s sake, didn’t Gabriel tell you anything? That’s why he was here-to get the guns and bring them to the commune.”
“He didn’t tell me what he was doing here.” She bowed her head, feeling as though this statement had revealed her inadequacy, but also her resentment toward Gabriel.