Orhan's Inheritance (27 page)

The next thought that comes to her is unexpected and obscene, for at that moment, she thinks that perhaps, maybe, there really is a god.

PART V

1990

CHAPTER 32

Exile

THE SOUND OF
Seda’s breath rises and falls, gentle and melodic, in sharp contrast to Orhan’s own frantic heart. Did the old woman just confess to murder? And if so, whose? He leans his body closer, taking in the contours of Seda’s sleeping face. He can see the still straight and narrow Roman nose, the almond-shaped eyes as they must have been before the upper lids lowered with age. Suddenly Orhan is certain that this is the woman in Dede’s black sketchbooks. Where does the chain link of this woman’s harrowed past attach itself to his own family history?

Seda opens her eyes slowly, smiling when she sees him.

“White days,” she whispers.

“Yes,” he says. “A white day sheds light.”

“Not always,” Seda says. She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, pulling the bedsheet up under her chin. Orhan pours water from the pitcher on her bedside table into a cup and offers it to her. She purses her lips and drinks from it with her eyes closed. When she opens her eyes again, they are fixed, trancelike, on the opposite wall.

“I too lived in Karod once.” Her Turkish is old and rusty, but the dialect of the interior, rural and rugged, is unmistakable. She is from that “other Turkey.” His Turkey. “Until recently, I could remember very little from that time. I spent a lifetime forgetting it.”

This information does not surprise him. Where else would she have met Dede? As far as Orhan knew, Dede left Turkey only once, in World War I, when he fought as an Ottoman soldier in Baghdad.

“Maybe that is why I hate it here,” she says.

“Here?” he asks.

“The nursing home. It’s everywhere. They won’t let you forget it. It’s in the music, the damn sculpture in the garden, in schools and living rooms. You can’t open a book or sip a cup of coffee without confronting it.”

“Confronting what?” Orhan asks.

“The past.” The word comes out like an ancient curse. “Everything is soaked and mired in its bitter liquid. Our young people want us to live in it. They can’t get enough of it. Where did you come from? How old were you? How did you survive? They make you tell it over and over again, write it, record it, make videos. It’s exhausting,” she says. And he believes her. She looks thoroughly exhausted.

“Maybe they think it’s therapeutic,” Seda continues, “this sharing of past horrors. But not for me. I don’t want them poking their fingers into my wounds.” She jabs a finger into the air. “All these years, I was praying for a scab, a hardened piece on dull skin that would cover it all up. But I’m ninety years old, and still the thing festers like an open wound in my chest.”

Orhan thinks of his own past, the photographs and his time in exile, hidden under some hardened scab he has no intention of picking.

“I thought I could put it away,” Seda continues. “Abandon it like I abandoned everything else. But then here you are.”

“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 looked 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.”