Like Water on Stone (16 page)

This story began, as many stories do, with a conversation. A sentence from that long-ago conversation has haunted me since I was a little girl. I asked my mother about her mother’s childhood in western Armenia. She replied, “After her parents were killed, she hid during the day and ran at night with Uncle Benny and Aunt Alice from their home in Palu to the orphanage in Aleppo.”

My grandmother Oghidar Troshagirian died long before I was born. My grandfather Yeghishe Mashoian, also a genocide survivor, died when I was six. Uncle Benny and Aunt Alice were colorful characters in my childhood, but I knew little about their lives. In my family, we didn’t speak about the genocide. My mother married an American, so my brother, my sister, and I grew up speaking English. By the time I thought to ask the serious questions, that generation was gone.

I know little of how my grandmother and her siblings survived. I know that from Aleppo, with the help of a
keri
, a maternal uncle, they made it to New York. Somehow, a pot came with them
—
my American relatives argue over who has it. I know that they were millers from Palu. One older brother escaped to the east. An older sister was married to a Kurd.
Her grandson now owns a Turkish restaurant in The Hague, in the Netherlands, and a hotel in Antalya, Turkey.

Long before I ever imagined that I might write this story, I filled in the gaps of my family history by reading everything I could about the Armenian genocide: accounts by eyewitnesses, such as Henry Morgenthau, the United States ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1913 to 1916; oral histories; memoirs; academic tomes; and works of historical fiction. Still, I wanted more.

In the summer of 1984, my husband and I traveled to Palu. An unmarked Armenian church perched on the top of the hill above the town, its roof missing and its walls defaced. In town, vendors peddled
ayran
, the cool yogurt drink Armenians call
tahn
. We asked if there were any mills nearby and were sent across a modern bridge, built next to one of crumbling stone with eight arches. We followed the river’s bank to a fast-flowing stream, then headed up the stream into the woods until we reached a mill with a series of attached buildings running up the slope.

On the rooftop of the largest building, the head-scarfed lady of the house served us sweet tea in clear glass cups. A half-dozen children with big brown eyes watched and listened. Mounds of apricots dried in the sun. She said that the mill had been in her family for sixty years; before that, it had belonged to Armenians. With anti-Armenian stories running in Turkish newspapers that summer, and all visible traces of Armenian inhabitants systematically denied or destroyed, I had kept my identity hidden as we traveled. But I told her the truth. We held each other’s gaze as the water hit the mill
wheel and the stones of the stream. The official Turkish policy of genocide denial evaporated for one brief moment on that rooftop.

The form of this story chose me rather than the other way around. Everyday language cannot express the scale and horror of genocide. Severed heads, rape, rivers red with blood, stinking heaps of dead bodies; the living emaciated, naked, sunburned, marching through the sand
—
we all turn away. I could only put it onto paper in fragments that slowly accumulated into a story. The eagle, Ardziv, and his magic came into the story to make it safe for me, for the reader, and for the young ones as they traveled. Three-quarters of the total Armenian population, about 1.5 million people, died in this genocide. Only luck, miracles, and perseverance saved the few who managed to survive. More than just a magical being, Ardziv embodies the strength of spirit that lives inside us.

If magical realism makes up this story’s warp, then historical facts are woven into its weft, starting with the rooftop where I sipped tea. Various beetles have been used as carpet dye in the Middle East for centuries. The
oud
was traditionally played with an eagle’s quill. The terrible facts of the genocide are also real. During the first half of June 1915, all the Armenian men of Palu, along with ten thousand men from nearby Erzerum, were slain by
chetes
on or near Palu’s eight-arched bridge. Aleppo was a central staging ground for deportees from all over the empire who were then marched into the desert of Deir-el-Zor to die. Armenians from regions near to the then partially complete Baghdad Railway line were packed into cattle cars and brought to Aleppo.

The journey of Shahen, Sosi, and Mariam is entirely imagined, though with the benefit of many hiking trips in the cold above the tree line. They stayed along the ridge lines of real mountains and passed through archaeological sites such as mystical massive stone heads on Nemrut Mountain and the Byzantine ruins known collectively as the Dead Cities of Syria. When the Turkish state was founded in 1922, many place names were changed. Kharpert, the city where Shahen would have gone to college, is now Elâzı
ğ. Constantinople is today’s Istanbul. To map the young ones’ journey, I linked today’s names to those from the time of the genocide.

International relief work in the Ottoman Empire had begun during the Hamidian Massacres of 1895 to 1896, with Clara Barton, national hero, nurse, and founder of the American Red Cross, leading the American efforts. As the violence intensified in 1915, so did international aid. In Aleppo, orphanages were established by priests such as Hovaness Eskijian and the Swiss missionary Sister Beatrice Rohner. In the greater region, the Near East Relief organization founded orphanages, hospitals, and refugee camps and sponsored food, clothing, and medical supply drives through direct appeal to the American public. But by 1917 the Ottomans had closed down most aid efforts within their borders. Aleppo’s international orphanages were replaced with ones run by the state only for those young enough not to remember their Armenian identity. A lucky few, like Shahen, Sosi, and Mariam, were hidden by families of Arabs and Kurds and even Turks like Mustafa. While Ottoman authorities used a rhetoric of
jihad
to incite the murder of Armenians, the sharif of Mecca called for Muslims
to save them. After the war ended, Near East Relief continued their work, ultimately saving the lives of 132,000 orphans.

One of the largest of the Near East Relief orphanages was located in Gyumri, a city that sits on the closed border between present-day Turkey and Armenia. From 1918 to 1920, Armenia briefly had the status of an independent republic. According to the Treaty of Sèvres, signed by the Ottoman government and the Allied powers in 1920, this republic was to include much of the land that is eastern Turkey today. Turkish nationalists under the leadership of Kemal Attatürk opposed this treaty; war erupted, and the fledgling republic collapsed. What remained of Armenia was absorbed into the Soviet Union. On September 21, 1991, Armenia declared its independence from the Soviet Union. This small nation has remained independent since then.

I took a bit of purposeful poetic license with a few facts. In this story, Ardziv calls the Ottoman Turks “drum caps,” identifying them by the felted fezzes they wore. Though the fez was certainly part of the Ottoman army uniform, Armenians also wore these stylish hats at the beginning of the twentieth century. We mongrels know that identity lives in social surfaces.

And what of people who marry across social boundaries, as did Anahid and Asan? In 1914, the lives of Armenians, Kurds, and Turks near Palu were socially intertwined. The rare “love matches” that undoubtedly occurred contrast with the many acts of violence committed against women during the genocide. Some Kurdish groups were well known for helping and hiding Armenians.

Genocide, the systematic extermination of one people by another, always includes a phase of dehumanization that links those who will be eliminated with animals, diseases, vermin
—
things humans have permission to kill. Genocide ends when denial ends. Healing involves finding our shared humanity, achieving justice for the harm done, and finding the space in our hearts to forgive.