Orhan's Inheritance

by Aline Ohanesian

  “A scab is much better than an open wound,” he says, thinking about his own past. His memories of prison are never visual. They always begin with the feeling of being cold and naked in an all-encompassing darkness; a feeling of despair that lodges in his chest and stops his breathing. He was blindfolded within minutes of entering the police station and remained that way for the rest of his three-week stay. Remaining in complete darkness, without light, without the ability to see, let alone capture anything.

  The first few beatings were painful but unimaginative. They quickly gave way to more sinister kinds of torture designed to entertain the guards and strip him of his dignity. They hung him backward, with his wrists tied together behind and above his head for hours. It was a special torture known as a “Palestinian hanging,” the entire body’s weight resting on the shoulders, causing them to dislocate. Questions about the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or the PKK, and its members were wielded his way, followed by electric shocks to the groin, the tongue, and the buttocks. Someone kept calling him an “ass licker for the PKK” and demanding a confession. That last beating entered his body and lies there still, dormant, nestled in his blood cells, muscles and organs, materializing unexpectedly for the rest of his life. These days, it is not an image or a memory that drags him back to that cell, but a feeling.

  The last thing Orhan remembers about his time in custody is screaming in agony and soiling himself. He discovered later that he suffered from five broken ribs, a bruised kidney, and a collapsed lung. His face and head were so badly beaten that Dede had trouble identifying him.

  Orhan was labeled a political activist, an honor he never sought and didn’t think he deserved, before Dede managed to put him on a plane to Germany.

  Propping herself up in bed, Seda turns her head toward the window, where the California sun is finally descending.

  “Shameless,” she says.

  “Pardon?” asks Orhan.

  “Shameless,” she repeats. “The sun. It is shameless. Like everything else here, it has no modesty. Always parading around like a harlot, regardless of the time of day or season.”

  “I’m sorry it offends you,” says Orhan, smiling warily and thinking he’s going to need another cigarette before defending the virtues of the sun.

  Seda gives him an amused smile.

  “I am so sorry about earlier,” he says.

  “Never mind that. You don’t have to apologize. You’re a good boy. I can tell,” she says, tapping her index finger to her temple. “Your name is Orhan?” Her question sounds like a demand.

  “Yes,” he answers.

  “Do you like Turkey, Mr. Orhan?” she asks.

  “Yes, very much.”

  “What do you like about it?”

  “Nothing and everything,” Orhan says, smiling sheepishly.

  “Like what nothings? What everythings?” she asks.

  “Like the taste of hand-picked apricots in the spring. And the bulbul’s birdsong,” he answers.

  “I remember. Like she is happy and suspicious all at once,” she says.

  “Yes. Like that,” he says.

  “But you didn’t fly all this way to talk about birds singing in trees, did you, Orhan?” she says finally.

  “No,” says Orhan. “My grandfather was my hero. I came to make things right and to understand why he did this.”

  “Then what? You’ll go back to your kilim business?”

  “Yes,” he says.

  “And your photography?” she asks.

  “I haven’t taken a photo in years.”

  “Yet there’s a camera hanging from your neck,” she says.

  “It is complicated,” he says.

  “All extraordinary things are complicated.”

  “You do not understand,” he begins.

  “I understand more than you know,” she says. “Places and things stay with us, and sometimes we stay with them. I left Turkey decades ago, but my göbek bağı, and with it my spirit, is still buried in Karod. You see?”

  Orhan says nothing.

  “How much do you know about your history, young Orhan?”

  “I know my mother died of childbirth,” he answers.

  “No, not that history. I’m talking about Turkey. How much do you know about Turkey besides what I’ve just told you?”

  “I know some . . . enough, probably more than most. I am an exile, remember?”

  “I remember. And you think this makes you an expert. How were you exiled?”

  “How?” asks Orhan.

  “Yes, how? By boat, by plane, by submarine? How?” she asks.

  “I left by plane,” he answers.

  “How very civilized.”

  “I would not call it that,” he says, trying not to think about the dark cell.

  “Did they mark your door?” she asks.

  “What?”

  “They marked our front door with the word sevkiyat,” she says finally.

  “Transport,” whispers Orhan.

  “At first, we treated it as just another example of the building tension. There was always tension, you see. It would come and go, like the tides of the river. And like the tides, it would subsist. We were used to it, our Muslim neighbors and us. We were part of a community, an extended family. Families fight, but they go on, don’t they?”

  “Yes,” says Orhan, thinking of his father and aunt.

  “At least that’s what most of us believed. There were others who knew otherwise. People like my father. He lost two older brothers to the Red Sultan’s army, so he knew what men could do to one another. And yet he was hopeful, some would say naive. He wanted to believe that things had changed. ‘This isn’t the Sultan’s empire anymore,’ he would say. They bewitched him with their constitution and their parliament.” Licking her lips, she continues, “And so we were exiled. Herded like animals.”

  A long silence follows. Orhan feels its presence expanding between the two of them.

  “That is terrible,” he says finally, because it is. There are decaying buildings all over the Turkish countryside that testify to the presence of Armenians before the war. His favorite was the Sourp Nishan Monastery just outside of Sivas, where he played target practice as a boy, before it was converted to an army base. When the soil beneath your feet has seen a half-dozen civilizations and been consecrated by the priests of five different religions, you learn that everything must be repurposed. Pagan temples converted to churches converted to mosques and back again. Why not a twelfth-century monastery into a military barrack? This was not sacrilege, only practicality.

  Orhan never thought much about those abandoned buildings until, during his stay in Germany, Armenians from the diaspora began protesting in front of Turkish consulates. In places like Los Angeles and Beirut, they insisted on using the word genocide. Turkey wasn’t perfect. He, of all people, understood this, but innocent people die in wartime.

  “Agh,” she moans. Her breastbone rises up before sinking down again, making her look like a deflated balloon. “I was only fifteen, a child myself. I had nothing left. We were hungry. Weak.” The words are only a whisper now. Her voice cracks beneath the silence in the air. “Bedros, Aram, and I. Hiding in a grove of apricot trees.” Seda pauses between each sentence, letting her voice rest. Then she begins again, each time with a little more strength. “I fell asleep. When I woke, Bedros was gone. I climbed up the hill, carrying Aram in my arms. I climbed out of the valley and up the next hill. And there he was, pegged beneath a farmer who was beating him senseless. I gasped. I couldn’t help it. The farmer heard.

  “I ran a long time, with the farmer’s thumping feet behind me. My arms burned from carrying Aram. Panic and fear surged through me. And then, like a siren calling, I heard the gurgling river. I ran until my ankles were submerged in the cold water and I could no longer hear the farmer running after me. The minute I touched that water, everything slowed down.

  “The river’s sound drowned out everything else—my fear and my hope in equal parts. I loo
ked down at Aram, listless, half alive. His sunken eyes could no longer produce tears. They glassed over as he stared past me. His cracked mouth finally went silent. I held his parched body in front of me and I suddenly understood that I could not save him. I remember lowering onto my knees into that shallow riverbank. The water’s surface was like a membrane. On the other side was silence. Peace. No bayonets, no blood or starvation. Just peace.

  “I remember thinking Aram would be my little Moses, floating toward safety. And so I slid him into the murky water. He slipped into death in that peaceful way he used to slip into sleep in Mairig’s arms.

  “My first feeling was one of relief. There was such lightness in my arms, in my whole being. I remember taking a breath in that lightness. It was a glorious breath. The last free breath I ever took. Because when I looked down at the empty space between my forearms where he once was, I suddenly realized what I’d done. I jumped in the water but I couldn’t swim.”

  The tears pour down her face. They fall out of her eyelids but seem to be falling inward too, so that her whole face wells up and her nose starts leaking.

  “I don’t remember anything after that.” She fixes her wild eyes on him.

  Orhan crosses the few inches of distance between them and takes the old woman’s papery hand in the cave of his palms. He wants to tell her it’s okay, that we must all find a way to first forgive ourselves, then one another; but he can’t bring himself to speak for a long time.

  “There’s nothing you could have done for him,” he says finally.

  “I don’t know how long I ran or where I managed to hide,” she tells him, “but when Fatma found me, I was unconscious, still holding Aram’s swaddling cloth.”

  “Fatma?” asks Orhan.

  Seda nods. “Your aunt saved my life. Gave me strength when I had none.”

  “My God,” says Orhan. Suddenly, this strange woman’s connection to his life is less tenuous. He understood all along that Seda was a part of his Dede’s past but had not expected that his aunt had saved her life. Then again, there are hundreds of people and their descendants who can claim the same about his auntie Fatma. In another time or place, there might be monuments constructed in her likeness.

  “She ran a small inn in Malatya. Helping an Armenian was punishable by death in those days, but she took me in.”

  “She is a good woman,” he says simply. “I’m sorry, but I still don’t understand how this all relates to my grandfather.”

  She withdraws her hand from his. “There is still so much to tell,” she says. “And I am doing a bad job of telling it.”

  “No, you are doing great,” says Orhan, hoping she does not retreat back into her silence.

  She nods at this, saying, “I suppose I could begin the way all ancient Armenian tales begin: Gar oo chegar . . . There was and there was not. You see, like all of life, a story is and is not.”

  And this is how she begins her tale, with her and Dede playing as children underneath the mulberry tree, its dark berries raining down upon their unsuspecting heads.

  AT FIRST, SEDA’S words spew out of her mouth in fits and spurts, reminding Orhan of a clogged faucet that suddenly starts working. But before long, the sentences come pouring out in a steady never-ending flow until she is interrupted by an uncontrollable fit of coughing.

  “I’ll get you some more water,” he says, grabbing the empty pitcher. Seda concedes by nodding her head midcough.

  Pitcher in hand, Orhan finds his way to the nearest water fountain. When he’s filled the container, he does not walk directly toward Seda’s room, but meanders in the hallways, trying to process everything she’s told him. Lost in thought, he almost passes an open doorway from which Mrs. Vartanian’s head is poking out.

  She startles him and Orhan blushes just a little, thinking how the bent old woman sometimes scares him.

  “Psst . . . psst . . .” she hisses, her hand beckoning him.

  He takes a few measured steps toward her.

  “Please, effendi, Mr. Gendarme, sir,” she addresses him in Turkish, her voice reverential, devoid of its usual spite. Her breath is sour and smells of medicine.

  “I am no gendarme,” he tells her. “My name is Orhan.”

  Her eyes are pinned to his face but have a far away look about them.

  Mrs.Vartanian nods. “I am marching to Aleppo,” she says, turning her slippered feet toward the corridor that leads to the garden.

  “What are you still doing here?” Betty’s voice comes from behind him.

  Orhan turns to find her walking toward him.

  “I don’t know who you think you are, letting little old ladies fall. What you talking to Mrs. Vartanian about anyway?”

  “She thinks she’s on some sort of death march.”

  “I know what she thinks, Mr. Orren. Haven’t you wreaked enough havoc?” She takes one more look at him and smiles. “I’m assuming you’re on your way out. It’s way too late for you to be up in here.”

  “Yes,” Orhan lies. “But I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  “Well, all right,” she says, her eyes studying his face. “You get anything out of Ms. Seda?” she asks.

  Orhan nods.

  “Really? Well, I’ll be damned! What she say?”

  “Many things.”

  “Anything that niece of hers would wanna hear?”

  “Yes, I think so,” says Orhan.

  Betty nods with approval. “I have to clock out,” she says. “You see yourself out now, you hear?” She turns down the empty hallway.

  When Orhan returns to Seda’s room, she is sitting up in her bed.

  “Feeling better?” he asks, placing the pitcher on the bedside table.

  “Evet, yes,” she says, but her eyes have retreated further into their sockets.

  “That is good,” says Orhan. He pauses, preparing himself to ask her about Dede’s will.

  “There is still much to tell,” she says, grasping the bed rail to prop herself up.

  “Where I come from, everything is more or less covered up or left unsaid,” Orhan says, thinking of Auntie Fatma’s doilies. “Have you told any of this to your niece?”

  “What do you know about my niece?”

  “Nothing. Only that she is very interested in the past.”

  “She is already drowning in the past. They all are,” says Seda. “She has too much past in her veins and you have none. I’m just evening things out.”

  “So you’re not going to tell her any of this?”

  “What I do and don’t tell her is my business.”

  “No one would judge you for what happened.”

  “You don’t understand,” says Seda. “It isn’t just what happened with Aram. It’s Kemal I don’t want to explain.”

  “He turned all our lives upside down for you and you don’t want to have to explain him? You are right, I do not understand. The situation back home is not good. My father has hired a lawyer to contest Dede’s will. A very good lawyer.”

  “I don’t know anything about a lawyer,” she interrupts him. “He was a clever man, your grandfather. He knew exactly what he was doing. He wanted you here for a reason.”

  Orhan wishes he knew what that reason was.

  “Kemal gave me a drawing once. We were separated during the deportations, but providence reunited us after the war. It happened at Fatma’s in Malatya,” Seda says, pressing her head into a pillow. “It was God’s hand working a miracle. I was so shocked to see him I thought he was a ghost.” She lets out another short laugh. “We had a few precious weeks, and then he had to go.”

  “Kemal’s plan was to establish himself in Istanbul, then send for me,” Seda continues. “He had been gone six months. Half a year. Seventeen moons dipping into my little window. Fatma was big by then, no longer able to hide her condition.”

  “Her condition?” asks Orhan.

  “She was pregnant.”

  Orhan lets the information wash over him. He struggles to imagine Auntie Fatma as a young pregna
nt woman. As far as he knows, she was never married. Inside her stout body rests all the comfort and nurturing that three generations of Türkoğlu men could ever want. She is unlike any other woman Orhan has ever known. A woman who stands apart from all the rest not just because of her sharp mind and even sharper tongue but precisely because she is immune to the limitations of motherhood and matrimony.

  “Was this at the inn?” he asks.

  Seda nods, coughing into her fist. “She lived in fear of her bey returning to find her as big as a house. What would happen to us then?”

  “Her bey?” he asks.

  “Yes, Nabi Bey, the lieutenant governor of Malatya was an important man in her life back then. In his absence, things had gotten so much worse around the khan. The soldiers and lodgers were not as careful with her, the food supply not as consistent. Even the stable boy had taken to disappearing into the mountains for days at a time.

  “I received no letters from Kemal,” Seda continues. “Not a single word arrived from Istanbul. I began to think he had forgotten me. And Fatma agreed.

  “‘Why so glum?’ she would ask me. ‘You didn’t really think that boy was going to whisk you away, did you? Men are like dogs. They will lick a bone until someone hides it. They may dig a little here and there, but if they find another bone somewhere, they forget about the first.’”

  “That sounds like something she would say,” says Orhan.

  “I was beside myself with sadness,” Seda says, smoothing the crumpled skin of her brow with a hand. “A new kind of sadness that only occurs after you’ve managed to find some hope. A fresh wound after a prolonged recovery.

  “That is when she convinced me.”

  “Convinced you to do what?” Orhan asks.

  “To write and tell him I was pregnant.”

  “To tell my grandfather you were pregnant?”

  “Yes.”

  “And were you pregnant?”

  “No. It was risky and deceptive, but what choice did I have? I knew nothing about men and she knew so much. Her plan was that I would claim her child as my own and raise it with Kemal.”

  Orhan’s chest constricts and his ribs tighten around a pocket of breath that travels up and gets trapped in his throat.

  “‘You owe me this much,’ she said. And she was right. She had saved my life at great risk. At first, I could not fathom lying to Kemal, let alone raising a child of some . . .”