“What about Hrant Dink?” I asked, picking up our earlier conversation.
“What about him?”
“Was he a real Armenian?”
“Of course he was.”
“But you said Turkish Armenians aren’t real Armenians.”
“I’m not saying they’re not real Armenians,” he said, softening his tone, perhaps feeling sheepish because I’d invoked Hrant.
And in a way I knew he meant it. He wasn’t a monster; he was exactly like everybody else. His nasty remarks earlier probably seemed as quotidian to him as talking about the weather. But this was the problem; nobody ever stopped anybody from speaking this way, not in Armenia and not in Turkey, and certainly not in either of their diasporas. Was it really so ridiculous for me to think that the situation could change if only, one taxi driver at a time, it became unacceptable to say such things out loud?
I told him that one of the Glendale players had supposedly called a member of the Istanbul team a Turkish dog during the basketball game.
“Well, that’s not right!” he said, suddenly animated again. “They shouldn’t have done that. Those are vulgar people who said that.” “Vulgar,” anshnork, was one of the favorite adjectives of Yerevantsis, used liberally along with their other favorite, shnorkin, “civilized.” “It’s not their fault that they have to live in Turkey,” he went on. “And that Dink, he did many great things for the Armenian people.”
* * *
SEVERAL DAYS LATER, after having watched every possible combination of Armenian against Armenian in matches, races, and play-offs, I wondered how anyone could have thought it was a good idea to combine two of the most fierce and maniacal human impulses: patriotism and the animal competition of sports. Was this really bringing Armenians from different places together, or was it only driving them deeper into their microidentities of city and state, of us against them? Sure, the athletes were having fun, and a romance or two had sparked up between players from different teams. But there had also been some serious aggression and violence: a match between players from Yerevan and Cairo had ended in a knife fight, and three Cairo players wound up in the hospital.
Before leaving Armenia, I met with a Yerevan newspaper columnist named Hakob Badalyan, who had written an incendiary op-ed saying that the knife fight was the greatest triumph of the Pan-Armenian Games. What he meant, he told me, was that he was glad it had happened so that the hundreds of athletes from the diaspora could understand that the idea behind the games was a fantasy. “The fantasy that we are one people, that we’re all together, unified,” he said. “What we need is to have an honest conversation about the difference in our experiences, in our realities.”
Armenia was a tiny, landlocked country with a corrupt government, a lopsided economy, and a shocking number of families too poor to buy shoes. But for diaspora Armenians, it was a magic kingdom, a repository for their anxieties and hopes. Even if they pointed out problems, even if they were there to fix problems, even if they came armed with giant NGO grants to do so, the fantasy was what drove them—and me. Why deny it? This need for a sense of origin, history, home, was the most powerful force we had. But like love and like hate, it was an inherently irrational force.
* * *
THE KNIFE FIGHT was soon forgotten. What lingered was the Istanbul-Glendale “Turkish dog” incident. The day the games were over and the Bolsahay team flew home, the Turkish newspaper Sabah ran a front-page story with the headline, “OUR YOUTH WERE ATTACKED!” Our youth. This Turkish phrasing might have been sweet if it were not a gross hypocrisy. The Bolsahays had never been “our youth” to Turkey until suddenly they could be claimed in opposition to the despised diaspora. By the end of the day, the news of the basketball fight was all over the Turkish media.
And somehow this turned out to be my fault. My friend Onnik had written a blog post about the fight. Onnik himself had not spoken to the players or their parents after the match. He had only asked me what they said, and I told him. Without seeking permission, he wrote up my interviews. A Turkish journalist who had not been there at all saw Onnik’s blog post, and without speaking to either of us, she fashioned it into a story of her own. But she upped the stakes; in her account, “Turkish dog” became “dirty Turkish dog.” And thanks to her employer, Sabah newspaper, all of Turkey got to hear about it.
But if you read between the lines, Turks were not angered by this; on the contrary, they were gratified by the news that the diaspora was as obnoxious as they believed. It was the Armenian players from Istanbul who were furious. They called the Turkish papers and insisted that the story was untrue. No such fight had ever happened. Various team members gave interviews trying to mitigate the incident. Everybody was eager to point out that later, after the game, the teams had run into each other at a café and made peace. Suddenly nobody was sure whether anybody had ever said anything about a Turkish dog. Sabah ran a follow-up story the next day, saying that the whole thing was made up by a blogger in Armenia to create trouble.
In the midst of all this, I received a phone call from Nerses. He didn’t even say hello before he started yelling at me. “You created this whole thing. Why did you even talk to that guy?” he said, referring to Onnik.
Now I was furious, too. I asked him why he was lying to everyone. He himself had told me, moments after the game, that his player had been called a Turkish dog, and now he was acting like I had invented it. Still, he wouldn’t budge. He repeated his revisionist account and reminded me (yes, I had heard it ten times already) that they had made friends with the Glendale team later the same day. I told Nerses I understood why he had changed his story. They were in a bad enough situation in Turkey, and making the Armenian diaspora look volatile and anti-Turkish was not going to do them any good. He could say whatever he wanted to the Turkish papers. If I had known Onnik was going to write a blog post, I never would have shared anything with him. But he couldn’t just pretend to me that everything we had witnessed was false, that everything he and his teammates had told me, on the record, into my Olympus digital recorder, had not been said.
I felt very alone that day.
Onnik’s blog post, meanwhile, stayed online and turned into a field day of comments from the Glendale team and their supporters. The player who had started the fight chimed in and tried to clarify his position. He never called the players Turkish, he claimed. “I said they were playing in a Turkish manner.”
17
Reunions
My aunt Nora had always been one of my favorite relatives. When I was growing up in New Jersey, she lived in Connecticut, so we saw her often. Nora Morkoor (Armenian for “maternal aunt”) was an elegant woman, her tawny coloring and contoured cheekbones like an Armenian Sophia Loren. Savvy about ideas and art and other impractical things that immigrants did not make time for, she had a doctorate in architecture and had worked on a range of public policy issues throughout her career.
Nora Morkoor visited Armenia often, for work and pleasure, and she had recently purchased an apartment in the city. On one of my trips to Yerevan, she happened to be in town. Together, we went to watch old Armenian plays at the theater, to hear jazz at an outdoor café, and to shop for fruits and vegetables at the bazaar.
My aunt had a great talent for this last activity. Shopping at the bazaar might seem simple, but it always left me depressed. As a young woman from America, there was no good way to handle the haggling. If a gold-toothed refugee from a war-devastated village in Karabakh wanted to charge me triple the local price for tomatoes, I didn’t have the heart to argue—yet it seemed equally insulting (for her), not to mention annoying (for me), to blithely hand over that kind of money. I loved the sight of the market stalls piled with peppers and cherries and purple basil, the homemade packages of dried fruit decorated with peeled almonds and shelled pistachios in the shapes of flowers. But to avoid the awkward financial transactions, I tended to shop at the soulless new Star Market.
For my aunt, however, the bazaar ritual was an art form
. One day we strolled through the marketplace, and I listened as she quizzed an old man about his green beans, a long, flat variety common to the region. Instead of asking the price, she wanted to know his favorite way to prepare them. My aunt was no rookie in the kitchen—she was an enthusiastic cook, and we had a long history of feasting together on her creations. The old man did not pause a moment before launching into a recipe for browning and then steaming the beans with onion and egg, a kind of loose frittata, and spun verses at each of my aunt’s follow-up questions about temperature and timing. By the time there was a question of price, money seemed incidental. I loved shopping with her.
On our second-to-last day together, we sat across from each other at the dining table trimming the beans we had purchased. Then, for the first time, my aunt asked me directly about my experiences in Turkey. I knew she felt uncomfortable with what I was doing—all the Armenians in my life did, to varying degrees. We had skirted the issue a few times already, and I was hesitant to plunge in. It was hard—no, impossible—to get across everything I felt, and I didn’t want to be misunderstood. Correction: I wanted desperately to be understood.
When I was a child, my aunt had a particular way of taking me seriously that I always appreciated. Once, when I was about ten, she gave me a verbal quiz of sorts, listing words and having me say the first association that came to my mind. I had no idea what she was after, but I had loved it; it just wasn’t the sort of thing that happened in an Armenian family. Hopeful that she could hear me out now, I told her about the friends I’d made in Istanbul, the awkward conversations I had about politics and history, the people who helped me with my work, the people who didn’t know what to say, and the wonderful food, of course.
She listened for a while without comment, until finally she spoke.
“Have you ever entered a Turkish home?”
Sure I had, I said. Too many to count. On a trip to Ankara with my friend and translator Ertan, we stayed overnight at Ertan’s parents’ apartment. “His parents are schoolteachers,” I noted, “state employees. So they’re as Turkish as it gets.”
She said nothing.
I explained that Ertan had been employed at an Armenian book publishing house for ten years; he was even learning to speak Armenian. He was also working on a project to preserve Armenian liturgical music, and he spoke about Armenian literature more knowledgeably than anyone else I knew. Since Hrant’s death, he had been pulling sixteen-hour days at Agos. My project would have been impossible without his help.
I could sense that she still did not like what she was hearing, so I elaborated further, concluding with an earnest declaration that Ertan was, in fact, more Armenian than most actual Armenians.
“What was their house like?” she asked.
“It was nice,” I said, a comfortable middle-class apartment, three bedrooms, on a pleasant residential street near the center of Ankara.
“What was his mother like?”
“She was incredibly sweet to me. She kept asking if I was hungry, or thirsty, or if I was cold and needed a sweater.” I paused to check my aunt’s reaction—her gaze remained fixed on the beans—and went on. I explained that Ertan’s mother had made a lovely dinner, cheerfully accommodating her son’s vegetarian habits, and made certain to serve me first and to refill my plate after every few bites. I told her about how we fumbled our way through an English-Turkish conversation about my family’s origins, how she shyly asked me if my relatives had ever lived in Anatolia, and how we all giggled with relief when I told her that they had not.
“Where did you sleep?”
“I slept in his sister’s old room.”
“What was the room like?”
“It was very comfortable. His mother made it up for me. Just like my mom would have done”—I paused—“or like you would have.”
My aunt went silent again.
I knew from the start that this line of questioning was not innocent curiosity, but now it had escalated beyond even the pretense of being so, and I was getting angry.
“She put fresh sheets on the bed,” I went on, becoming theatrical with detail. “The sheets were pink, with flowers. She left an extra blanket for me, and put a glass of water on the table next to the bed, and just before I fell asleep, she knocked on the door and asked me if I needed earplugs in case the noise from the street was too loud.”
Had she wanted to hear that they lived in a filthy shack? That they made me sleep in the yard? Actually, I was furious. Nothing I said could humanize Ertan or his parents for her. Ertan’s parents! Modest people, civil servants, a couple who had raised a son who had transformed my understanding of dedication and generosity, and of what it meant to question one’s identity. Ertan himself had argued at length with his parents about all sorts of political issues, and they had weathered these conflicts better than many parents and children do. His mother could not have been more welcoming to me, a complete stranger. It had been, in fact, the very first time I had visited a home of ethnic Turks—as opposed to Bolsahays or Kurds—and I myself had been nervous about the experience. It had not escaped my imagination, either, that perhaps this was a strange event for Ertan’s parents, to have their unmarried thirty-four-year-old son show up with an Armenian girl from the diaspora who needed to stay in their guest room, and that his mother might have felt a confusing mix of hope that I was more than a friend (I was not) and unease that such a candidate, if I were one, would be Armenian. But they had done everything possible to make me feel comfortable, and had insisted that if I ever returned to Ankara, I had a place to stay.
My aunt herself was a generous, gracious person under normal circumstances, and not one to shy away from complex subjects. But when it came to Turkey, nothing I said could move her. Once upon a time—not so long ago—none of this would have surprised me. A terrible but familiar Armenian expression came to mind: “Turkuh yeteh voski el lini, grpanut mi ktsir.” Even if a Turk is made of gold, don’t put him in your pocket.
* * *
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, I took Nora Morkoor to meet Rafik and Roza. They were on different sides of the family, but Nora was curious to meet my father’s relatives and they were excited to meet her, too.
Rafik soon had us engrossed in stories about how some of my ancestors were killed amid violence that consumed the Caucasus during World War I. My great-grandfather Garabed, who lived in Tbilisi, had owned a copper mine in Kapan, near Karabakh. He was not involved with politics, as far as we knew, but was murdered on the road during a trip to the mine—either because he was wealthy, because he was Christian, or simply because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was between 1916 and 1917. If we wanted more details than that, we would have to invent them.
This was the first in a series of tragedies that decimated Garabed’s family: about a year later, his wife, Natasha, left raising four children alone, died of illness, not yet thirty years old. The oldest son—my grandfather Yeghishe (later known as Aram)—was taken in by an aunt in Tbilisi. Rafik’s mother, Mariam, was the next oldest; she and two younger brothers were looked after by another aunt, Zanazan, who worked in a Tbilisi orphanage. One day Zanazan received word that a house she owned in Nukha, 170 miles southeast, was in danger of being confiscated by Azeris. To go and save the house, she left the children at the orphanage, intending to return soon, but on her way back, her coach was attacked and she was killed.
At the time, around 1918, the Red Cross was consolidating orphanages in the region; thus my grandfather’s three siblings were moved to an orphanage in Kars, a city at that moment under Armenian control. In Kars they lived alongside Armenian kids from Ottoman towns who had lost their families in the genocide. But soon after, when Kars was reclaimed by Turkish forces, the children were transferred yet again, to an orphanage in Alexandropol (later called Leninakan, now Gyumri). After four more years, Mariam was finally retrieved by relatives in Tbilisi. But by then, one brother, Aleksan, had died in her arms from typhus, and the whereabouts of the other, Levon, w
ere unknown. Rafik believed the Red Cross might have taken him to the United States with a group of genocide survivors.
I knew this story already, but Nora Morkoor didn’t, and suddenly we heard a gasp followed by catch-breaths of sobbing. Everybody looked at my aunt. Rafik began to apologize as Nora covered her face with her hands. Her shoulders trembled as she tried to still herself.
“I’m really sorry, I know it’s a very sad story,” said Rafik, bewildered by this visiting stranger’s reaction to a long-ago tale about people who were not even technically related to her. “Maybe I shouldn’t have told it,” he said.
But I knew that her tears were not only about the story Rafik told; they were about me.
* * *
LATER, AS WE drove away from Rafik and Roza’s house, my aunt apologized for her breakdown. I asked her why she had gotten so emotional. Now calm, she took a moment, then answered.
“I was reflecting on the fact that even you, an Armenian from Iran … even your own ancestors were affected by the terrible things the Turks did back then.” Her voice broke again. “I just don’t want you to forget the injustice.”
What was I to make of this? Had I forgotten the injustice? I had asked myself this very question many times. But I had never suffered any injustice. I was not immune to the potency of hearing about my family’s traumas, not to mention my grandfather Aram’s later glories: he was known to his peers as “Kavkasi Marx”—Marx of the Caucasus—and I was more than happy to bask in the tale of his idealistic pursuits, how he got himself to Plekhanov University in Moscow despite all the losses he had known, how he rose in the party ranks as a natural orator, and how he later personally convinced Lavrenti Beria, party secretary of the Caucasus region and one of Stalin’s most brutal underlings, to arrange his sister, Mariam’s, medical school education. Or so we had been led to believe. I could, if I let myself, follow the dotted lines of my imagination connecting these heroics straight to me. But there was a subtle difference between savoring family history and being blinded by it.
There Was and There Was Not: A Journey through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond Page 24
