Orhan reaches for the camera, running his hand across the silver knobs and leather creases. His breath slows down, quelling his anxiety. There’s no harm in touching the thing. It’s only a camera, an inanimate object.
“What am I supposed to do about all this?” he asks, trying to concentrate on the problem at hand.
“You’ll do what you’ve always done,” she says. “Follow your Dede’s wishes. Just promise me you’ll get the house back.”
“Just like that. Like I’m picking up some simit on the way home from work.”
“Yes, like that,” Auntie Fatma says. She sighs, letting her shoulders drop. Never one for serious conversation, his aunt has a special talent for trivializing all of life’s little unhappinesses. But this time, for once, she seems worried.
“You don’t have to worry,” says Orhan. “I’m not going to let some stranger turn you out of your home,” says Orhan.
“Benim paşam. My prince,” she says, patting his knee. “You’ve got her information. Go and find her. Only be careful.”
“Careful?”
“Yes, careful,” she says. “You know what the trees said when the axe came to the forest?”
“No, what?” asks Orhan.
“The handle is one of us,” she says, smiling her devious smile.
Orhan knits his brows together in confusion.
“I don’t get it. Am I the tree or the axe?” he asks.
“Who knows?” she says.
CHAPTER 2
Pilgrimage to Ararat
WHEN THE BOEING 747 finally pulls its wheels up during take off, Orhan literally feels lighter. The more space between himself and his father, and that damned house and Karod, the better. He shuts his eyes and tries to push the terrifying thought of Mustafa moving to Istanbul and taking ownership of Tarik Inc. out of his mind. He tries instead to imagine California, where Seda Melkonian lives. Sunny beaches and German-dubbed reruns of Knight Rider come to mind. He thinks of the tall American in that show, David somebody, singing “Looking for Freedom” on top of the Berlin Wall minutes before it was torn down.
Orhan’s own freedom is in the hands of a total stranger. The thought lands him right back where he’s been since Dede’s funeral: wallowing in a pool of dread. Maybe the old man really had lost his mind. Maybe Orhan was too busy with the company to notice. Reports of Dede’s growing eccentricities did sometimes reach him, but indulging the old man’s whims was a time-honored tradition in the Türkoğlu house. Auntie Fatma and his father didn’t agree on much, but neither of them balked when Dede started making strange requests. As a boy, Orhan watched as his father washed all the coin money before placing it in a wooden box Dede had labeled TEMIZ, clean. His grandfather was always going on and on about the evil stench of money. One afternoon, Orhan found Auntie Fatma ironing the paper money. She placed the bills flat onto the board, then covered them with a linen pillowcase. The iron hissed as hot steam rose up from the bills, through the white linen and into the hallway. When he asked her what she was doing, she said, “I’m purging the money of all its evil.” Not questioning it, Orhan helped her hang each bill to dry on the clothing line.
Last month, the old man wrote a letter to the supervisor at the factory demanding that all the red fabric dye in the plant be the exact shade of a red mulberry he’d included in an envelope. The discreet manager had placed the letter with smudged fruit on Orhan’s desk and ignored its directives.
Orhan knew Dede’s requests were growing stranger and stranger, but he could never have predicted this. A battle begins in the pit of his stomach between the forces of anxiety and grief. Just when grief takes hold of his insides, a wave of anxiety sweeps in and coats everything with its venom.
Orhan orders a whiskey on the rocks and stares into the amber liquid, trying to make sense of what Dede has done. Is this Seda woman a relative? Even so, what would possess Dede to leave the house to her? Even if the family home is the least valuable of Dede’s assets, it encompasses four generations of Türkoğlu life.
Dede started Tarik Inc. inside those walls sometime after the First World War. The company specialized in handwoven rugs and grew significantly in the mid-seventies. By the time Orhan came along, the business had moved to the city. To Orhan, the house was always a place of confinement and conflict, a place where Mustafa’s menacing rod and booming voice faced off against Auntie Fatma’s iron will. As a boy, he’d escaped to the outdoors. But as a teenager, Dede’s Leica had saved his sanity. The truth is, when he first picked up the camera, he wasn’t trying to change the world or make it better; he was trying to escape it. The Leica gave him a legitimate reason to capture the world, without having to join it.
ALL THAT WAS before he was exiled to Germany, before he stopped taking photographs. But Orhan doesn’t want to think about that. What matters is not what the world does to you but how you respond.
Upon his return to Turkey, six years ago, Orhan had imagined himself a prodigal son, returning to claim his rightful place in his country, his home, his family business, maybe even his father’s heart—that most impenetrable of caves. He flew straight into Istanbul, took a cab to his grandfather’s factory, and never looked back. He worked tirelessly and without looking up. He collected patterns from all the most remote corners of the country and mined ottoman archives for designs that would have otherwise been extinct. Recently, Orhan designed his own line of kilims. He merged ancient patterns with the clean lines and a monochromatic color palette more suitable for younger buyers. He stopped thinking about photography altogether. The business, Dede’s failing health, and his father’s incompetence left little room for anything of his old life. He chased stability like a blind dog on a scent.
And now he was sniffing his way to Los Angeles.
Orhan downs the rest of his whiskey in one big gulp and eyes his travel bag. His Leica lies on its side, on top of Dede’s sketchbook and his old portfolio. Black on black on black, a triumvirate of dark casings that contain his past. Auntie Fatma insisted that he take the camera and his portfolio with him. He hasn’t cracked the portfolio open and doesn’t plan to. Looking at the images would be like rummaging through the things of an old lover and he’s got no need for that kind of pain.
Before leaving Karod, Orhan found an old roll of unused black-and-white film. He chose a 50 mm lens and stood staring at the house of his childhood. The once mighty mulberry tree prevailed over the aging structure, its black barren branches hanging like so many veins in God’s arm. The dark downward lines crisscrossed against the bright sunlit mustard of the house’s stucco. He took the photo, thinking of all the drawings of the mulberry tree and cauldrons in Dede’s final sketchbook. He pressed the shutter release and the camera snapped and moaned, but it brought no new knowledge about the tree, the house, or the man who loved them.
CHAPTER 3
Home
SEDA FINGERS THE letter tucked inside her sleeve, where its crumpled surface has molded into the shape of her left wrist. Pulling it out, she smoothes its creases against her knee. Her eyes roam around the page, like they’ve done again and again in the past few weeks, resting on the spots where the black ink stops and begins again, then to the white spaces in between. Thinking, sometimes, there is more in between words than within them.
I am the grandson of Kemal Türkoğlu . . . he’s written. Kemal’s name, warm and sweet, swims through her blood and down into her belly before it somersaults into her throat and threatens to escape. She presses her lips together, refusing to let him out.
It is a strange thing, receiving a letter from a dead man’s grandson. A letter from a place so far away and long ago that opening it was itself an act of heroism. Even in death, Kemal would not let go of her. He has reached through time and space to grab hold of her once again.
She feels the sheet of paper releasing an ancient djinn, a demon that threatens to uncover the past she’s painstakingly buried. She stares at the letter’s folds and creases, the frayed edge where it’s been torn out of a l
egal pad, reading the awkward English translation of Turkish thoughts.
From her room, she can see the other residents shuffling to and fro, searching for God knows what. Morning medications, breakfast, companionship, a reason to live. The first time she saw the words Ararat Home for the Aging, they were printed on a white folder sitting on the kitchen counter. Beneath a large photo of Mount Ararat was captioned: “Named after the holy mountain in Armenia where Noah’s ark is believed to have landed, the home is a refuge for an aging Diaspora.” It was the word refuge that bothered Seda the most, so similar to refugee, a word she was all too familiar with. She thought about flinging the brochure into the yard, burying it deep in that cactus soil that her niece liked so much. Ani was her only living relative, the daughter of her long-deceased younger brother. Seda knew Ani loved her. Still, a month later she found herself living in the Ararat Home. It is a museum for the living, breathing relics of an unburied past, built by a community for whom everything, from the church picnic to the baker’s son passing the bar exam, is a testament to survival.
“You coming?” Old Kalustian pokes his bald head into her doorway. The old goat thinks he’s got pull with the ladies just because he uses a fancy cane instead of a walker.
Seda clicks her tongue and waves him and his silver-headed cane away. Can’t hold his stool but still thinks he can command his pecker.
“Come on. The kids from St. Nishan are reenacting the great battle of Sardarabad,” he says, eyes shining.
Seda lifts both her eyebrows and clicks her tongue, before turning her wheelchair around in refusal.
“Suit yourself,” he says.
There’s no dignity in this place, thinks Seda. No privacy either. Some fool is always poking his or her head into your doorway. And as if the residents and nurses aren’t bad enough, lately all kinds of people keep showing up, waving their tape recorders in her face, asking her questions about the past. Everyone is an amateur historian. They use words like witness and genocide, trying to bridge the gap between her past and their own present with words.
She wants nothing to do with it. But the other residents have fallen under a confessional spell. They’re like ancient tea bags steeping in the murky waters of the past, repeating their stories over and over again to anyone who will listen. Who can blame them? Driven from their homes not by soldiers this time, but by their own loved ones, to this place so cleverly labeled “home,” a second exile. In some ways, Seda thinks it’s worse than the first: to the lexicon of horrific memories is added the immense shame of surviving, of living when so many others did not. Yet they all bask in their rediscovered relevance. But all the words in every human language on earth would not be enough to describe what happened.
When the past wells up inside her, Seda knows not to let it out. “I can’t remember,” she tells those who ask. When the river of words comes billowing out, it poisons everything. It taints the present with the blood and tears of the past. She wouldn’t mind the forgetting that comes with age, but whatever is eating at her brain is only wiping out the freshest of memories. It leaves the undigested past alone, lets it fester, decomposing in her mind. Despite her best efforts, the scents and visions of her girlhood come bubbling up to the surface. Yesterday, she thought she smelled pistachios and almost threw up her lunch.
Seda rolls her chair to the window and opens the blinds. She places a palm above her brow to block the sun. She can see three rows of plastic chairs facing the great fountain. A splattering of costumed boys and girls in varying heights are scattered between the fountain and the audience. One fat boy wears an Armenian priest’s robe complete with pointy black hat. She spots Kalustian limping toward the back row and leans forward to hear a few phrases.
“Let the bells of every Armenian church ring,” bellows the boy priest.
“To battle!” A girl dressed as a soldier waves a plastic rifle.
A stout woman kneels in front of the children, mouthing every word. She waves her arms, encouraging the remaining soldiers to take center stage. The audience is eating it up, Seda can tell. There may even be a few veterans of that battle in the audience. There’ll be claims of that sort by Kalustian for sure. All this incessant probing and recording of the past has made celebrities of them all. Outside these walls, these old people may be overlooked, their past a narrative the world insists upon forgetting. But here among the residents of the Ararat Home, they are esteemed as survivors of the genocide, bearers of unspeakable horrors, guardians of their people’s past.
“Morning Ms. Seda.” Betty Shields, Seda’s favorite orderly, enters the room, her shoes squeaking against the linoleum floor. “Not gonna leave the building today, are we? Well, it’s a damn shame, that’s for sure. It’s a mighty fine day out.”
Seda likes it when Betty speaks this way, adapting a comfortable vernacular that exaggerates her southern black roots. Being the only non-Armenian in all of Ararat Home, let alone the only black person, can’t be easy. It’s always amusing when in the presence of others, especially doctors, Betty Shields alters her speech, stripping it of all its color. Is it conscious? Seda wonders.
“You hear about the genocide exhibit? It’s next week, you know,” Betty says.
“I heard,” Seda says. She folds the letter in half then twice more and tucks it back inside her sleeve.
“They say the governor may come. Imagine that. The governor coming here.”
Seda shrugs her shoulders. It’s not all that hard to imagine. California’s governor, George Deukmejian, is Armenian American. The art exhibit is the brainchild of Seda’s niece, Ani.
Betty kneels before Seda’s wheelchair. She reaches over to stroke Seda’s silver bob.
“I’m not an invalid you know,” Seda says, waving her hand away.
“I know,” says Betty, “but you’ve been awfully quiet lately. You all right?”
“I’m ninety,” Seda answers. “How all right can I be?”
“You got a visitor. Not Ms. Ani. No ma’am. This one’s a gentleman. Checked in at the front desk a few minutes ago. Tall and handsome too. Like a Mediterranean Clark Kent.”
“Lucky me.” Seda rubs her fingers against the letter in her sleeve. Let him wait. She’s got nothing to say to him. The past is dead and now so is Kemal. Uttering even a single syllable might bring it all back and she isn’t going to let that happen. I will breathe. I will sign whatever he wants and make him leave. She repeats this mantra to herself whenever the panic sets in.
“Well, all righty then. Show’s over,” Betty says, jutting her chin at the window. “You ready for lunch?” Without waiting for a reply, Betty takes the handles of Seda’s wheelchair.
“Did I say I was ready?” says Seda. “I don’t remember saying I was ready.”
“All the same, it’s time for lunch,” says Betty.
Seda takes a deep breath and picks up the embroidery in her lap. She hunches over her hands, letting her fingers work the delicate piece of stitching. Three rows of red and yellow diamonds mark the pattern as Anatolian in origin. Despite her resolve, the past is bleeding out of her fingers, staining everything she touches.
CHAPTER 4
White Days
ORHAN STANDS IN the parking lot of the Ararat Home for the Aging, sucking on a cigarette and feeling more than a little intimidated. Inside the sprawling grounds and behind the palm-lined walkways are hundreds of elderly Armenian men and women, some of whom may have been alive during World War I. Singed and scattered by history, they are united in their hatred of all things Turkish. When Auntie Fatma told him to use the Armenian alias “Ohan,” Orhan had laughed at the suggestion. He’s done nothing wrong, and as far as he knows, neither have his ancestors. But he’s heard that they are an angry people, angry enough to inflict violence upon themselves and others over something that may or may not have happened seventy-five years ago. He extinguishes his cigarette on the side of a trash can and walks inside.
The reception area is a large rectangular room decorated in muted sea foa
m and mauve. Three loveseats surround a tiny coffee table much too small for the room. The sofas are upholstered in a floral print made of a vinyl most resistant to human waste. Silk flower arrangements grace the dusty piano. The place reminds Orhan of the prized living rooms of Turkey’s growing middle class: rooms stocked with every Western comfort but still uncomfortable. Rooms to be viewed but not used.
A bronze bust stands on a large pedestal, placed in the center of the room so that one must walk around it to get to the front desk. Below the bronze man’s creased forehead and comic mustache is a plaque identifying him as the writer, William Saroyan. A paragraph below the bust reads:
I should like to see any power of the world destroy this race, this small tribe of unimportant people, whose wars have all been fought and lost, whose structures have crumbled, literature is unread, music is unheard, and prayers are no more answered. Go ahead, destroy Armenia. See if you can do it. Send them into the desert without bread or water. Burn their homes and churches. Then see if they will not laugh, sing and pray again. For when two of them meet anywhere in the world, see if they will not create a New Armenia.
Orhan stands dumbfounded by this strange collection of words. In this homage to survival, the author actually invites an imagined enemy to try and destroy his race. At least the writer acknowledges that they are an unimportant people. The only thing that’s left to give them importance is this claim to a tragic past, in which Orhan’s people, the Turks, play the villain intent upon destroying them. Orhan knows all about the difficulties minorities face in Turkey, but that doesn’t make all Turks murderous thugs.
“Can I help you?” the receptionist asks.
“I’m here to visit a . . .” He considers the word relative or friend, but neither word fits comfortably in his mouth.
“Name?”
“Orhan.”
“The name of the resident, sir?”
Orhan's Inheritance Page 3
