They were wearing immaculate collars and elegant suits. All were men of letters. They were kept in the headquarters without an explanation until finally they were deported either to Ayash or to Chankiri. The ones in the first group were in worse condition than the second. Nobody survived in Ayash. The ones taken to Chankiri were killed gradually. My grandpa was among this group. They took the train from Istanbul to Chankiri under the supervision of Turkish soldiers. They had to walk three miles from the station to the town. Until then they had been treated decently. But during the walk from the station, they were beaten with canes and pickax handles. The legendary musician Komitas went mad as a result of what he saw. Once in Chankiri they were released on one condition: They were banned from leaving the town. So they rented rooms there, living with the natives. Every day, two or three of them would be taken by the soldiers outside the town for a walk and then the soldiers would come back alone. One day the soldiers took my grandpa for a walk too.'
Still smiling, Auntie Banu looked left and right, first to her sister then to her niece, to see who was going to translate all this, but to her surprise there was only perplexity on the faces of the two translators.
'Anyway, it is a long story. I won't take your time with all the details. When her father died, my grandma Shushan was three years old. There were four siblings, she being the youngest and the only girl. The family had been left without its patriarch. My grandmother's mother was a widow now. Finding it difficult to stay in Istanbul with the children, she sought refuge in her father's house, which was in Sivas. But as soon as they arrived, the deportations began. The entire family was ordered to leave their house and belongings and march with thousands of others to an unknown destination.'
Armanoush studied her audience carefully, and decided to finish the story.
'They marched and marched. My grandmother's mother died on the way and before long the elderly died as well. Having no parents to look after them, the younger children lost each other amid the confusion and chaos. But after months apart, the brothers were miraculously reunited in Lebanon with the help of a Catholic missionary. The only missing sibling among those still alive was my grandmother Shushan. Nobody had heard of the fate of the infant. Nobody knew that she had been taken back to Istanbul and placed in an orphanage.'
Out of the corner of her eye, Asya could tell that her mother was now intently looking at her. At first she suspected Auntie Zeliha might be trying to convey to her to censure the story as she translated it. But then she realized that what flickered in her mother's stunning eyes was nothing but interest in Armanoush's story. Perhaps she was also wondering how much of all this her unruly daughter was willing to translate to the Kazanci women.
'It took Grandma Shushan's elder brother ten full years to trackher down. Finally Great Uncle Yervant found her and took her to America to join her relatives,' Armanoush added softly.
Auntie Banu tilted her head to one side and started twining the beads of her amber rosary through her bony, never-manicured fingers, all the while murmuring, 'All that is on earth will perish: But will abide (for ever) the Face of thy Lord, full of Majesty, Bounty- and Honor. '
'But I don't understand,' Auntie Feride was the first to raise doubts. 'What happened to them? They died because they walked?'
Before she translated that, Asya glanced at her mother to see if she should continue translating. Auntie Zeliha raised her eyebrows and nodded.
When the question was asked to her, Armanoush paused briefly and caressed her grandma's Saint Francis of Assisi pendant before she answered. She spotted Petite-Ma sitting at the other end of the table, her sallow complexion carrying the wrinkles of so many years, staring at her with an expression so deeply compassionate that Armanoush could suspect only two possibilities: Either she had not paid attention to the story at all, and was not here with them anymore, or else she had been listening so attentively that she had lived the story, and was not here with them anymore.
'They were denied water and food and rest. They were made to march a long distance on foot. Women, some of them pregnant, and children, the elderly, the sick, and the debilitated. . ' Armanoush's voice now trailed off. 'Many starved to death. Some others were executed.'
This time Asya translated everything without skipping a word.
'Who did this atrocity?!' Auntie Cevriye exclaimed as if addressing a classroom of ill-disciplined students.
Auntie Banu joined in her sister's reaction, although hers was inclined more toward disbelief than anger. Her eyes wide open, she tugged the ends of her head scarf as she always did in times of stress, and then heaved a prayer, as she always did when tugging the ends of her head scarf didn't get her anywhere.
'My aunt is asking who did this?' Asya said.
'The Turks did it,' Armanoush replied, without paying attention to the implications.
'What a shame, what a sin, are they not human?' Auntie Feride volleyed.
'Of course not, some people are monsters!' Auntie Cevriye declared without comprehending that the repercussions could be far more complex than she would care to acknowledge. Twenty years in her career as a Turkish national history teacher, she was so accustomed to drawing an impermeable boundary between the past and the present, distinguishing the Ottoman Empire from the modern Turkish Republic, that she had actually heard the whole story as grim news from a distant country. The new state in Turkey had been established in 1923 and that was as far as the genesis of this regime could extend. Whatever might or might not have happened preceding this commencement date was the issue of another eraand another people.
Armanoush looked at them one by one, puzzled. She was relieved to see that the family had not taken the story as badly as she feared, but then she couldn't be sure that they had really taken it. True, they neither refused to believe her nor attacked with a counterargument. If anything, they listened attentively and they all seemed sorry. But was that the limit of their commiseration? And what exactly had she expected? Armanoush felt slightly disconcerted as she wondered whether it would have been different if she were talking to a group of intellectuals.
Slowly it dawned on Armanoush that perhaps she was waiting for an admission of guilt, if not an apology. And yet that apology had not come, not because they had not felt for her, for it looked as if they had, but because they had seen no connection between themselves and the perpetrators of the crimes. She, as an Armenian, embodied the spirits of her people generations and generations earlier, whereas the average Turk had no such notion of continuity with his or her ancestors. The Armenians and the Turks lived in different time frames. For the Armenians, time was a cycle in which the past incarnated in the present and the present birthed the future. For the Turks, time was a multihyphenated line, where the past ended at some definite point and the present started anew from scratch, and there was nothing but rupture in between.
'But you haven't eaten anything. Come on, my child, you came a long way, eat now,' Auntie Banu said, shifting the topic to food, one of the two cures she knew for sorrow.
'It's very good, thank you.' Armanoush grabbed her fork. She noticed they had cooked the rice exactly the way her grandmother did, with butter and sauteed pine nuts.
'Good, good! Eat, eat!' Auntie Banu nodded as vigorously as she could manage.
With a sinking heart Asya had watched Armanoush politely accept the offer and grab her fork to go back to her kaburga. She lowered her head, losing her appetite. Not that she was hearing the story of the deportation of the Armenians for the first time. She had heard things before, some pro and most con. But it was quite a different experience to hear an account from an actual person. Never before had Asya met someone so young with a memory so old.
It wouldn't take the nihilist in her too long, however, to chuck out the distress. She shrugged. Whatever! The world sucked anyway. Past and future, here and there… it was all the same. The same misery everywhere. God either did not exist, or was simply too aloof to see the wretchedness into which he had thrust us all. Life was mean and cruel, and a lot of other things she had long been tired of knowing. Her hazy gaze slid toward the screen where the Turkish Donald Trump was now grilling the three most culpable members of the losing group. The uniforms they'd designed for the soccer team had turned out to be so awful that even the most easygoing athletes had refused to wear them. Now somebody had to be fired. As if a button had been pushed, all three contestants started insulting one another to avoid being the one eliminated.
Withdrawn, Asya lapsed into a disdainful smile. This was the world we lived in. History, politics, religion, society, competition, marketing, free market, power struggle, at one anther's throats for another morsel of triumph…. She sure did not need any of these and all that…
… shit.
Still keeping an eye on the screen, but now having fully regained her appetite, Asya jerked her chair forward
