Orhan's Inheritance (29 page)

“Why not?” he asks.

There is another long silence followed by a heavy sigh. “Why criticize the decrepit seed of an otherwise fruitful tree? There’s no point in it,” she says.

“You can’t build something on a lie, Auntie.”

“Nonsense. It was the only seed I had. And I used it. And I’m not ashamed or regretful. I spent my days loving those who mattered to me. What else is there in life?”

Orhan cannot think of a thing.

“Not like her,” continues Auntie Fatma. “She ran from his love and it broke him apart. Even when a nail comes out, it leaves a gaping hole. Your grandfather struggled in Istanbul. He made some contacts, started a small stall, but within months he had a disagreement with his partners. He left with nothing and returned to Karod, where what was left of the family textile operation was waiting for him.”

“It was not his textile business to come back to,” says Orhan.

“What are you talking about? Of course the business was his.”

“Those cauldrons. That house. Everything we have, everything Tarik Inc. was built on, belonged to Seda once,” Orhan says.

“That’s ridiculous. Who told you that?” Auntie Fatma snaps.

“It’s the truth. Seda’s real name is Lucine Melkonian. Dede knew it.”

“Lucine? Seda is Lucine?”

“Yes.”

Auntie Fatma is silent for a long moment.

“All those times he said that name, he was talking about Seda,” she says, more to herself than to him.

“Yes.”

“What does it matter?” Auntie Fatma says suddenly. “The Hagia Sophia once belonged to the Greeks. You don’t see us handing it back to them, do you?”

Orhan snorts at this. “She says you saved her life,” he says.

“Your
dede
should have left the past alone,” she says. After a minute, she asks, “What else does she say?”

“Many things.”

“What many things?” Auntie Fatma raises her voice.

“I don’t know. Stories about her and Dede when they were young. Stories of deportation and murder.”

“I liked it better when she didn’t speak,” says Fatma. “She never spoke, you know. Back then.”

“Well, she’s speaking now,” says Orhan.

“Forget her. Don’t waste any more of your time with her.”

“There’s more,” he says. “She’s got a niece who’s obsessed with the past. She keeps going on and on about genocide. Threatened to get a lawyer.”

“You need to call Yilmaz right away,” says Fatma. “He’ll be dealing with that lawyer of your father’s and he needs to know about this. Don’t be timid, my boy. Remember, according to our inheritance laws, all this belongs to you, not Seda. I don’t care who her father was. You know what happens when a thief steals from another thief?” she asks.

“I’m not in the mood for one of your proverbs,” Orhan says.

“God laughs. That’s what happens. God laughs.”

“You’re missing the point.” Orhan rests his forehead on the edge of the pay phone. “None of it belonged to Dede to start with.”

“It was abandoned and he knew how to run it,” she snaps at him. “Besides, he did come back for Seda. She’s the one who didn’t wait for him. She’s the one who chose to leave. Followed that half-starved uncle of hers and, of course, the ghosts of her people.”

“You lied to Dede,” he says.

“Your father was only a baby. Kemal saw him and went to him immediately. I let him believe what he wanted to believe. That the child was his, a parting gift from the woman who’d haunted him all those years.”

“And you went along with him,” Orhan says.

“
Evet,
yes. I offered to help him take care of what he thought was his child. I tried to get him to forget her. I did everything, everything in my power. We started something new, he and I, our own kind of family. But then, as he got older, he regressed further and further into his past. He sat in front of that withered old mulberry tree day after day, sketching till his hand cramped. He took to calling me Lucine, a name I had never heard until a few months ago. It was unbearable, let me tell you.

“He took to dyeing his damn skin the way he used to dye wool. You don’t know how many times I ran out there with a towel in my hands and a curse on my lips. And this business of putting Seda’s name in the will. For what? I’ve never seen such idiocy.”

“When you went back to Sivas with him, was there anyone there?” asks Orhan.

“Just a Greek boy named Demi. He knew all the formulas for the dyes. Why do you ask?”

“Don’t you see,” he says. “None of it belonged to Dede. And even if it did, if he wasn’t my grandfather, then I can’t inherit a thing.”

“Nobody knows that,” says Fatma.

“She knows it,” says Orhan. “And her niece will know it soon enough.”

“Nobody will believe them,” she says. “This is no time to be weak. I don’t care what you do. I’ll be dead soon, and your father will figure himself out. But this is your future we’re talking about here.”

“Don’t say that. I can’t bear it right now,” says Orhan.

“What?”

“The part about you dying.”

“There, you see. It doesn’t matter what you call me.”

“I’ll call you grandmother,” says Orhan.

“It doesn’t matter, I tell you,” her voice rises with the reprimand. “Mother. Grandmother. Genocide. Deportations. Seda, Lucine. None of it matters. There is only what is, what happened. The words come much later, corrupting everything with meaning. Call me what you want, but love me, Orhan. Because that’s the only thing that matters.”

But love is a word, thinks Orhan before hanging up. Love is a goddamn word. And which ones we use does matter.

CHAPTER 34

The Photographer

ORHAN WALKS AROUND
in a haze of melancholy, carrying his arsenal of images through the empty halls of the nursing home. When he peeks into her room, Seda is in a deep slumber, as if the outpouring Orhan witnessed was her last on earth.

The Leica’s strap lays flat across his chest like a loving arm, the familiar weight swinging at his middle, comforting him. It is late in the evening and there are few residents shuffling along. Vapors of chlorine and lemons emanate from the shiny linoleum. Orhan finds himself looking for Mrs.Vartanian, but there is no one to spit at his shoes.

The door to the dining room is shut, but the murmur of voices comes through anyway. Someone has placed a freestanding sign at the entrance:
BEARING WITNESS: AN EXHIBIT
ABOUT MEMORY AND IDENTITY
. Orhan presses his face to the glass-paneled door. The room has been completely rearranged. The chairs and tables have disappeared, along with the stale air of decay. Large black-and-white photographs line the white walls. Each panel features the face and torso of an elderly person set against a black background.

Orhan is relieved to step inside this space awash in images. He approaches a photograph whose subject he recognizes. Mrs. Vartanian’s face is displayed as a black-and-white landscape. The horizontal lines that drift across her forehead move from the dark side of the frame toward a light source. The bags under her eyes sag in deep U-shaped crescents, reaching past her drooping nose. A thin-veined hand covers her unseen mouth. Orhan notices that each knuckle is tattooed with a symbol of some sort.

“Haunting, aren’t they?” someone says.

Orhan starts and steps back to find Ani staring at Mrs. Vartanian’s image. Seda’s niece is dressed in black again, her dark eyes and hair mimicking the backdrop of the photographs.

“Yes,” he says.

“The exhibit won’t be open until tomorrow, but you’re welcome to look.” She glances at the camera swinging from his neck. “Are you a photographer?” she asks.

“No, just a visitor,” says Orhan turning back to the photograph.

“She’s actually a resident here,” says Ani, pointing at the image of Mrs. Vartanian.

“What are those symbols on her knuckles?” he asks.

“Tattoos. Many of the deportees were branded by the Arab and Bedouin tribes that abducted them,” she explains. “I’m Ani Melkonian, by the way.” She extends her hand.

“Nice to meet you,” he says, shaking her hand. “Orren,” he says, pronouncing it the way Betty the orderly had. It’s a small deception, but it lodges itself in his throat like a fish gone bad. “Is this your project?” He gestures toward the wall.

“I’m not an artist, if that’s what you mean.” she says. “But I organized the show.”

“It’s very intense,” he says.

“Yeah, nobody does sorrow like the Armenians. Besides, art is always intense when it’s transformative. Only kind of art worth pursuing.”

Orhan turns away from the photograph to look at her. Something in the way she’s looking at the photograph reminds him of his youth. “Are you saying all art should be political?” asks Orhan.

“I’m saying art can change things.”

“So there is no value in a still life,” he says smiling.

“With the world as fucked up as it is, why would anyone choose the still life?”

Because it’s a thing of beauty.
“Because he feels like using the color red?” he ventures out loud.

“I guess I just prefer intense,” she says. “Have you seen a film crew, by any chance?” she asks, finally turning to face him again. “The documentary guys are supposed to be here by now.” She looks down at the clipboard in her arms. “Two guys. One old. One young, hopefully carrying a large camera?”

“No, sorry,” says Orhan.

She sighs and looks up at him again. “I’m trying to pair each photograph with an oral history.”

Why ruin the images with words? thinks Orhan.

“The idea is to document the voices of the surviving eyewitnesses.”

“Eyewitnesses,” Orhan repeats.

She looks at him as if he’s stupid. “To the genocide,” she says.

A young man with a headset pokes his head through the dining-room door. “Ani, we need those mikes,” he says.

“Okay, I’m on it.” She fishes through her purse and produces a ring of keys.

“And bring the blue binders if you can,” he adds before disappearing behind the door again.

“I have to go to my car,” she says to Orhan.

“Need help?” he asks.

“You don’t mind?”

“You could tell me more about the exhibit,” he says, walking alongside her.

“The photographs you saw were taken by Gerard Nova. There’ll be some oil paintings by tomorrow, as well as oral histories. It’s really about bringing our past out into the light.”

“I prefer to keep my past in the dark,” he says with a chuckle. “Under lock and key.”

“You must have an interesting past.”

He shrugs. “Not really,” he says, thinking how if you paid enough attention to your past, it would grow and grow, obscure your present as well as your future.

“Well, you can deny your past all you want, but it’s a part of you. Acknowledging it only gives you more power. Anyway, the idea is to record these stories for posterity.”

“Not sure what good that will do,” he says more to himself than to her.

“My mother nursed me with mother’s milk but also with sorrow. It flowed from her heart to her breast, into my insides where it probably still rests. She herself had ingested the same from her mother. They call it transgenerational grief now. We call it being Armenian. I had a Cuban friend claim she could spot the Armenian children at Glendale Middle School by the sorrow in their eyes. There is no cure to speak of. Of course, you could always ‘convert.’ Strange that we use that word even though it is not a religion but a nationality. But we have no nation, haven’t had one in a long time, so I guess the word works.”

“A disease of grief,” says Orhan.

“Except there’s really no cure for inherited grief. Some people look for the cure in the soil of the homeland. They call it reparations. Others seek the salve of an apology, recognition. I stopped trying to escape this sorrow long ago. I accept it the way I accept the color of my eyes and the width of my hips. It is part of who I am.”

“Is that what the exhibit is about? Finding a cure for your grief?” Orhan asks.

“That or just more probing of the wound.”

“You people know how to keep a wound fresh.”

“We don’t have a choice,” Ani says.

“Sure you do. You could forget it. Everyone else has.”

“Impossible. It would be a betrayal.”

“What is a memory if not the reliving of an experience?” Orhan asks, thinking of his own past. “Why relive this over and over again?”

“Because it happened. Remembering it is all we have in the face of denial. Silence is the enemy of justice,” she says in a mocking voice. “That was my father’s motto, anyway. The
baykar,
or the cause, with a capital
C,
is a sacred thing to an Armenian.” Ani fixes her dark eyes on him. “I’m oversharing, aren’t I? I tend to do that,” she says, smiling for the first time.

“No, I wanted to know,” Orhan smiles back at her. He walks a dozen steps before formulating a proper question. “This cause you were talking about. What’s the objective?”

She stops in front of a cream-colored sedan, its backseat crammed with boxes. “It’s about getting Turkey to admit to the genocide. You can’t get over a thing when the perpetrator denies it even happened. That’s why eyewitness accounts are so important.”

She reaches into the car and grabs a cardboard box. “Could you help me with this?” She hands him the box without waiting for an answer and dives back into the back seat of the car.

“War is a terrible thing,” Orhan says to her backside. “Everyone suffers.” It is the safest sentence in the world, but he knows he’s said the wrong thing because his words paralyze her. She extricates herself from the backseat and turns to face him.

“What did you say your name was again?” she asks, knitting her brows.

“Orhan,” he pronounces it clearly this time. He knows she is ingesting his name because she fixes her kohl-rimmed eyes on his face and takes a deep breath.

“There is a difference, Orhan, between wartime atrocities perpetrated by both sides and a state-sponsored campaign of genocide meant to exterminate an entire race.”

“There’s no real proof of that, is there?” Orhan asks, unable to silence himself.

“There are telegrams proving that the decision to annihilate the entire Armenian population came directly from the ruling members of the Young Turk Party,” she says, looking him directly in the face.