There Was and There Was Not: A Journey through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond

by Meline Toumani

  “So my mother, myself, from a big family there were about four people left. The Turks they took the men, tied two together, and they were gone and never came back. I saw with my own eyes, I was, what, four or five years old?”

  Aggie chimed in, “Six.”

  “I was asking my ma why they doing this? She started to cry, they are going and not coming back. After that they took everything away from us, we were poor for years. Everything the Turks took away from us. They took the men, killed them away, then the poor women and children were left. That’s all. They took everything away from us. And this is the truth, and I remember just like today. I never, never forget that.”

  Perouz had a forceful tone and, unlike the others, she stuck almost entirely to English. As she continued, there were only unresolved threads. A mother disappearing and reappearing, an orphanage in Kharpert and another—or was she describing the same one?—in Aleppo, Syria, 300 miles away. The kaleidoscopic swirl of remembering and forgetting, remembering and forgetting things that you could see only through a pinhole even as they were happening a century ago. Like the other survivors, Perouz seemed to understand that some burden of proof was now teetering on what remained of her memory. What could she do? She might not have even remembered a few years after the fact, when she was ten or twelve, much less ninety years further on. An experience was trapped inside her and, as much as she insisted that she could never forget, she had neither the words nor the details to convey what she remembered. She kept saying, “This is my story. This is my life.”

  Later I wondered what to make of the possibility of a child walking the miles between Kharpert (the Armenian name for old Harput, modern-day Elâzığ) and Aleppo. In my research, I came across a statement dated October 16, 1915, signed by the American Consul General of Aleppo.

  On the first of June, 3,000 people, mostly women, girls, and children, left Harput, accompanied by 70 policemen.…

  On the 15th day they were again trodding their way through steep mountains, where the Kurds gathered 150 of the men … and taking them to some distance, butchered them.… That day another caravan of exiles, only 300 of which were men, from Sivas, Eğin, Tokat joined that from Harput, thus making a bigger caravan, 18,000 all counted.…

  On the 52nd day they arrived at another village, here the Kurds took from them every thing they had, even their shirts and drawers and for five days the whole caravan walked all naked under the scorching sun. For another five days they did not have a morsel of bread, neither a drop of water … their tongues were turned to charcoal.… At another place, where there were wells, some women threw themselves into it, as there was no rope and pail to draw water but these were drowned and in spite of that the rest of the people drank from that well, the dead bodies still staying and stinking in it.…

  On the 70th day, when they reached Aleppo, 35 women and children were remaining from the 3,000 exiles of Harput, 150 women and children from the whole caravan of 18,000.

  The statement was dated one week later. I cannot know whether the caravan it described was the same one that Perouz was now trying to find in her own recollection. The document was cited frequently in books about the genocide. State-sponsored historians in Turkey pounced on it as an example of “Allied propaganda.” But there was Kharpert and there was Aleppo, and Perouz would have been, indeed, six.

  Somebody asked Perouz, “What do you want people to learn from hearing your story?”

  “What can they learn? They are here, Turks are there. They feel sorry, that’s it. What can they learn? We are in America, we are saved, that’s it, they already forgot it. But I never forget it.”

  Aggie reminded her that she told a committee in Washington that she wants the genocide to be recognized officially. “Oh yeah, they took me there, that’s right, I forgot, sorry, I don’t remember everything.”

  I recalled seeing a photograph on the front page of the New York Times a few months earlier, the morning after the House Committee on Foreign Affairs had given preliminary approval to the genocide resolution (the bill never made it to the House floor). In the photo, a row of elderly Armenian women sat in wheelchairs in front of a roomful of wonks and lobbyists.

  “So you want us to know there was a genocide?” asked Linda.

  “Yes. We went to White House.”

  * * *

  THE OLDEST WOMAN we met was Hingeni Evrensel. She was one hundred years old. She was born in March 1908 in Ordu, a city near the Black Sea coast famous for its hazelnuts. Her father had a big hazelnut store. She survived thanks to a Muslim family, we were told.

  The case manager looked at Hingeni and shouted, slowly, creating the effect of a record playing on the wrong speed at full volume. “Hingeni, hokis”—my dear—“this group of people have gathered here today for you to explain how the Turks massacred your family.”

  “I don’t know a single thing, I was a baby” (Yes hich pan muh chem kider, bebek eyi).

  She said a few more things then, but it was impossible to understand her. Age had burnt the pathways connecting her brain and her voice such that what emerged had the rough texture of language but not the necessary dimensions. Her appearance, too, stood apart from the others, as if she had seen not only a few more years, but a harder life all along. Clumped locks of hair hung from her head in patches. Her face came from another epoch, like a set of antediluvian Armenian chromosomes that had not been passed on to later generations. Or maybe she was ethnically mixed; the town of Ordu had a level of diversity unusual even for the Ottoman Empire. It was the home not only of Turks and Armenians but of a Georgian Muslim minority and the Hemshin people, a mix of Christians and converted Muslims who had Armenian roots. The name Hingeni was not typically Armenian. Her last name, Evrensel, means “universal” in Turkish.

  Hingeni’s daughter Nadya was sitting next to her. Nadya was also a resident at the home. The director explained to the group that because Hingeni was getting upset thinking about the past, her daughter would tell the story.

  Nadya looked like she was in fine health. But when she began to speak, it was incoherent, and one could see that in aging, her mind had fallen far behind the rest of her body. Suddenly she was talking with gusto about the years she spent in nursing school.

  The director gently reoriented her to the matter at hand, and then, as though somebody had pressed a button and changed the channel, Nadya said, “Kurd people took the whole house.”

  “She doesn’t know,” muttered her mother.

  Nadya peered up at the case manager through thick glasses. “You tell it.”

  “If I knew it, I would tell it,” the case manager said.

  Now Hingeni, the mother, lifted her head again. “Badmem?”—Shall I tell it?

  That voice—it was as brittle as the crumbling paper of an ancient manuscript. The beginning and end of each sound she made was faded, and I struggled to detect the meaning in a pileup of half-words, each one disintegrating further into fragments of Armenian, Turkish, perhaps even Kurdish or Arabic or Georgian, I could hardly tell.

  “What did they do?” somebody asked her.

  “What did they do?” Hingeni repeated. Then she said something that ended with sürgün, Turkish for “exile.”

  Suddenly Hingeni’s daughter blurted out, in English, “You know Atatürk? They killed Atatürk. They gave him medication and he thought that it was good medication but—”

  The case manager stopped her again and turned our attention toward a woman who had been sitting primly and with excellent posture throughout the discussion, her blue eyes, neatly styled beehive of white hair, and red lipstick making her look younger than the others, something like a genteel southern lady.

  She went by Charlotte, an Americanization of the Armenian name Arshalouys, which means “dawn.” Charlotte was born in 1912 in a place we were told was Nikhda, possibly what is known now as Niğde, a town on the outskirts of central Turkey’s Cappadocia. Like others who left Turkey before Atatürk’s 1928 language reforms, she had a story ma
rked by names of places that no longer exist, a living register of Ottoman-era sounds and spellings that are difficult to correlate with their modern replacements.

  “Charlotte, now you’re going to tell them about your origins and how your family was killed and how you survived and escaped. That’s the story you’re going to tell them, okay?”

  I knew that the point was to keep the elderly speakers from straying to random topics, but I wished, if only to quiet the ready cynic inside me, that this stage direction would cease.

  “I hate to go through all that,” Charlotte said. “It’s sad for me because my mother’s children never lived. And I lived. I saw my father at wartime. And that was the end. I just saw him. I had no chance to get acquainted with him. And we suffered hunger, thirst, everything, walking and walking for miles, with my mother. My mother kept pressuring me. Aghchigus, kich men al, kich men al.” My girl, a little bit more, a little bit more. “That kich men al never ended.”

  Now and then, as she spoke, her dentures slipped and she paused to wiggle her mouth back into place.

  “There was somewhere where we stayed overnight.”

  “Where did you stay overnight?” the case manager asked.

  “I don’t know, it was in Turkey. Thank God I had my mother. If I didn’t have my mother, how would I have courage? I was eight years old. My dear daughter, she said, bear a little more, a little more, there’s going to come an end of this. You’re going to have comfort. You’re going to have a home. You’re going to be happy. So who else did I have to listen to? I never had a father, I lost him. I lived because I had a shirt that they sent to Jerusalem to be blessed. The children did not live in their own country and in their own comfort. I lived through wars and everything. And came to America at the age of ten with my mom. My mother was thirty-three years old. My mother worked so hard doing needlework and bought a house in New York City on Thirty-Third Street, four floors. She went to night school to better her English. Later on, she opened a grocery store and a house. How could she take care of it by herself? She couldn’t afford to take care of it. So she asked my permission, ‘I’m going to marry an old man so he’ll be a good father to you.’”

  “Was he Armenian?” I slid in a question. Charlotte seemed completely American to me somehow. Her enunciation in English was as careful as a kindergarten teacher’s.

  “Yes, of course he was Armenian! And then my mom sold the house. And I was married. I was pretty comfortable. I gave the whole thing to my brother. That house still stands now. That’s the memory I live with. I had a wonderful marriage, I had four children, I sent them all to college, and I’m in this home now. That’s life. And I had a wonderful life, with all that. And I brought up wonderful children in America.”

  “Do you ever think about seeing the place where you came from in Turkey?” I asked.

  “I do, but I feel I’m in the right place. They have to live their life. I lived mine as well as I could. And I loved it. I learned from every step. And I thank America for it. Because I don’t know the other side. And my wonderful mother. She was a nurse in the Kilikia orphanage, my mother, till we came here. I’m so happy I had here. Otherwise where would I be?”

  “Was your mother being a nurse a reason you were saved?” I was asking questions eagerly now because Charlotte seemed more able than the others to move between her own thoughts and our interjections.

  “Yes. My mother was a nurse in the orphanage and my aunt, a college graduate, was a teacher. So that’s the way we got away a little bit, to safety. And it wasn’t easy. I had an uncle. He brought us over. Otherwise we had no money, how could we come over? We were walking and walking and I was so thirsty. Mom, I can’t walk anymore.”

  “Where were you walking?”

  “Andarneruh, anabadneruh.” The forests, the deserts.

  Suddenly Hingeni, the oldest woman, blurted out, “Sood eh.” It’s a lie. She repeated this twice. After a while, she said, “Cheghav”—which can mean either “that didn’t happen” or “it didn’t work.”

  Nobody translated these interjections or asked Hingeni what she was talking about, though the staff could not be blamed for losing track. But there was something performative, even melodramatic about Charlotte’s delivery, and I wondered if Hingeni, despite being senile, was responding intuitively with annoyance at these theatrics, trying to express that what Charlotte was saying didn’t ring true. Another option: was Hingeni channeling an imagined Turk, denying Charlotte’s story? I wish I knew why Hingeni kept saying “cheghav,” but she seemed so much farther away than a few feet across the table, and I could not bring myself to risk making things more awkward by asking.

  Charlotte ignored her. “That kich men al never ended,” she said again.

  The way Charlotte kept repeating this line depressed me, not only because the little girl had to keep walking but because her story had the fixed contours of one she had told a thousand times. It sounded like a story that over the years—and how could it not?—had been shaped by the other stories she had heard and read, and by the context in which such stories are told: a witness stand, a podium in the congressional hall, at the end of a journalist’s microphone. It had condensed itself into plaintive one-liners. The rest was inaccessible. The soul wants to connect, to be heard, and to persuade. But the storyteller, having heard herself so many times before, loses faith in the innate power of her experience or in her ability to convey it. The aging brain does not yield to new pathways, and the same hard-beaten roads are trekked over and over, the same few stores of memory squeezed dry and then squeezed again.

  Charlotte found another detail. “They took us to a churchyard, and they gave us a little lunch of some kind. Where was the church?” She preempted our question. “I have no idea, I just know there was a church. And we came to America when I was ten—”

  “Yes, you told us that already,” said the case manager.

  “Yes.”

  * * *

  THE LAST WOMAN we met was a ninety-four-year-old named Arşalos (the same name as Charlotte’s—Arshalouys—but with a Turkish spelling). Her uncle, a doctor, was among the large group of intellectuals killed on April 24, 1915, in Constantinople. Arşalos was clear and direct. She said her family had been elite. She was one year old when they had to leave Şebinkarahisar. Her family, being very well-off, was saved by a wealthy Turkish family they were friends with. They ended up in Sebastia, modern-day Sivas, and eventually Arşalos settled in Istanbul, from which she emigrated to the United States thirty years ago. She told us that after the war, her mother, an expert in the niceties of table settings, was enlisted to train the people who were responsible for setting the dining tables of none other than Atatürk himself.

  At the mention of Atatürk, Hingeni began a chant from across the room. “Atatürk Turk cher,” she said—Atatürk wasn’t a Turk. What could she possibly mean by this? What combination of brain chemistry and intention, what echo of irretrievable life was triggering these contrarian cries? Soon all the old ladies were making different comments in different languages, now Armenian, now English, now Turkish, each in her own world of time and place and self, their memories filling the room like scene-shifting, cast-swapping, overlapping dreams.

  4

  A Real Armenian

  It was a very long time before it occurred to me that none of my own grandparents survived the genocide. Nor did any of them not survive. They were simply elsewhere, part of the two million or so Armenians in the world at that time who did not live in the Ottoman Empire. This was a surprise only because the genocide had become central to my understanding of being Armenian. It was almost disappointing to realize, as I did in the gradual and unspecific way in which one learns most things before adulthood, that my family had had nothing to do with it.

  I was born in Tehran, as was my father. My mother was born in Tabriz, in the north of Iran, and so were both of her parents. My paternal grandfather came from Tbilisi, Georgia, my paternal grandmother from Mashad, near Iran’s eastern
edge. My great-grandparents on both sides came from all over the Caucasus region: Tabriz, Maragheh, and Qareh Dagh in northern Iran; Agulis, an ancient Armenian settlement in Nakhichevan; and the mountain town of Nukha, now Shaki, in Azerbaijan.

  Yet as far back as anyone knows or can imagine, every last one of us has been Armenian. When I was younger and tried to explain to friends, or to myself, why we called ourselves Armenian instead of Iranian, Georgian, Azeri, or even Russian, I came up with this: “Armenians were always living in these places, but over the years the map changed.” Everything about Armenians was always “always.” Time itself seemed to begin with us, as we proudly noted that Noah’s Ark landed on Mount Ararat (although the mountain is now on Turkey’s side of the border, it remains our national symbol).

  Although some history books written by Armenians insist that we were the original Indo-Europeans, more humble accounts show that about twenty-seven hundred years ago, a group of people in southeastern Turkey branched off from a kingdom called Urartu, centered around Lake Van, and came to be known as Armenians. The earliest-known reference to Armenians was carved on a rock in northern Iran around 500 BC by the Persian king Darius. On his massive cliffside history scroll, the king described his battles against all the rebellious nations of Mesopotamia; five of those battles were against the Armenians.

  For most of the next two millennia, there were Armenian dynasties and kingdoms all over what is now southeastern Turkey, the Caucasus, and northern Iran. A century before the birth of Christ, King Dikran the Great brought the Armenian kingdom to its height: for sixteen years, the domain of Armenia stretched from the Mediterranean to the Caspian Sea. But from then on Armenia shrank and struggled between empires: the Romans and the Parthians; the Byzantines and the Persians; the Ottomans and the Russians. From 1375 until the Soviet Union disintegrated—except for an eighteen-month stretch from 1918 to 1920—Armenians were under other people’s rule. Today there are about eight million Armenians in the world, and a remnant of rocky country east of Turkey and north of Iran that still, or again, is called Armenia. Almost two-thirds of the world’s Armenians do not live there.