The Hunger by Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch Page B

the other, all the single. Questions buzzed up and down the column. What would be better? To be married or single?
    “Maybe they’re going to make sure all the married couples will be deported with each other,” suggestedMarta hopefully. “We should pretend to be married.”
    “Or maybe they’re going to kill all the married couples,” Kevork countered.
    All around them, people were frantically looking for “husbands” and “wives” so that they could go stand in the married group.
    “Marta,” Kevork said. “Let us not make a mockery of our love. We should stand with the singles group.”
    Marta was not happy with this suggestion, but she didn’t argue. The group of married people was about triple the size of the singles group. Anna and Mr. Karellian, who could have easily posed as a couple, were also standing in the singles group.
    The gendarmes came over and ordered the married group to march over a huge sand dune to the left, and the singles were ordered to keep marching along the road to the right. Moments later, Marta heard muffled screams. All in the married group were bludgeoned with hatchets and clubs. No need to waste bullets.
    As the days passed, the sun beat down and the air was unbearably hot. Water and food were scarce. The bedraggled column of deportees was being marched into the heart of the desert.
    Daily rations no longer existed. Marta watched as one woman in her group resorted to eating tufts of grass that grew in patches all over the desert. She watched with despair, when later the same day, thewoman curled into a ball of agony and died from the toxic effects of the grass. There was no food to be had, and no food to be bought.
    Marta watched with fascination a certain man who would follow behind one of the soldier’s horses. When the horse defecated, he would fall to his knees and pick through the droppings for a stray kernel of undigested corn. The man lived, while others around him died.
    They were marched to Tel Abiad, a community on the banks of the Euphrates River, south of Urfa. Thousands upon thousands of men, women, and children, half-starved, with blistered feet and open sores showing through their rags, had been gathered together.
    The sight of the eerily still blue water made Marta gasp. This was the same river she had seen in her vision. She looked down at the clothes that she was wearing and nodded in understanding. Her shirt was now tattered and nondescript, as were her pants. She had come back to where she had started. There was one difference—on her feet were boots. The sand she had been walking on had worn the soles down to the thickness of a wafer, but they still protected her feet.
    “Water,” muttered Kevork, as he gazed longingly at the still blueness. He was about to break forward and run from the column, risking the whips and bayonets of the gendarmes, but Marta grasped his arm.
    “That water is death,” she warned.

    Kevork shrugged her hand off his arm and was about to step forward when they were both distracted by cries coming from the the river. On the banks were half a dozen Armenians who’d had the same idea as Kevork. They had drunk their fill of salt water. Stomachs distended with malnutrition and dehydration now burst like rotting fruit. They died an agonizing death as the gendarmes looked on, grateful that they didn’t have to waste more bullets.
    One day, Kevork pointed to a man in a tattered group of deportees resting on the side of the road, “Does he look familiar?”
    “No,” said Marta. “Who do you think it is?”
    “I am sure that is the Vartabed Garabed.”
    A “Vartabed” was an Armenian priest. And when Anna had first led her group of orphans back to Marash from Adana, her first stop had been to the Vartabed’s residence. In his kindness, he had arranged for Kevork, Marta, and Mariam to be admitted to the orphanage, and he had asked Miss Younger to hire Anna as a cook. Onnig, who had been very young at the time, had refused to leave