Gun-Running!
187
TWO ARMENIANS IN THE NEGEV
WE ARRIVED in Beersheba in the afternoon, exhausted,
dusty, and smelly. Faris, good as his promise, promptly sold
the oranges and the gasoline at a good profit and added the
money to his gun fund. The hired truck went back to Jerusalem. For lunch we were again invited by the mayor for a meal
of pilav and lamb. Sitting at my right was a gray-haired man
with a worried face. His features, tempered by suffering, were
not Arabic, though he was dark-skinned and unshaven. We
had been talking in Turkish. The man ate with unusual gusto.
"He cats almost like a starving Armenian," I said to myself.
Something in me clicked. . . . I looked again at his face, especially the eyes.
"Hye yes? Are you Armenian?" I asked.
The man almost choked. He stared at me in my khaffiya,
my armband, my deeply tanned face, and gasped:
"Toun Hye yes? Are you Armenian?"
I laughed. "Ayo. Dzo hoss inch guness gor? Yes. What are
you doing here?"
"Yev toun inch guness gor ass anabadin metch? And what
are you doing in this desert?"
His name was Iskender Demirjian and he was a miller. For
fourteen years he had ground grain for Bedouins. A refugee
from the Turkish massacres, he had lived in Jerusalem, and
saved his money. Seeing that Arab women still ground their
wheat by methods older than Mohammed, the enterprising
Armenian had built a mill, installed the machinery, and was
earning a good living. His mill was out in the parched desert,
at a Bedouin crossroads. Now he was in town to buy gasoline
and was going back in the afternoon.
"Moustafa, meet another good Arab, an Armenian. He will
give us a ride."
"Ahh, an Armenian—bravest of brave he-men, boldest of