I began to tell the story of the Genocide to area high school classes as part of a group of Armenian college students intent on teaching our history to the Fresno masses, whose complete ignorance of our culture struck me as a measure of how pitifully fa r we had gone to blend in.
I imagined I was taking on the mantle of my grandfathers, and yet they themselves rarely, if ever, talked about the Genocide. Instead, it got told obliquely, through their remoteness, through the ardor of their old-world politics, through verse and sermon.
Unlike my parents, who never found it necessary to ask their parents about life in Turkey during World War I, I no longer saw history as something I had to circumnavigate. My insides didn't gnaw with a hunger to blend in. The question for me was opposite, everything but a sprig of Armenia and Armenians lost, and I had no one but my parents to thank and blame. When it came time to name their first son, it wasn't Aram or Ara or Karnig or Serop but Mark. Mark Randy. When I came home that first week of school dumb to Armenian, there was no argument waged or disappointment registered. All but a few words—anatomica parts and bodily functions— were eventually lost to me. I cursed the inability to talk to my grandparents in their language and did nothing to remedy the situation. What remained of our homeland, one part now Turkey and another part Soviet Armenia, a source of friction between Dad and Mom's clan, didn't exactly stir me either. Still, deep down and unstated, my mother expected I would marry an Armenian and when I brought home Coby, my pretty blond o-dar (the dismissive word we Armenians reserved for those outside the race), she found it difficult to display even a touch of the warmth she lavished on my male friends, Armenian and otherwise. When Coby's reception was decidedly warmer at Grandma and Grandpa Arax's house, Mom remarked, "You could have brought home anyone and your grandparents wouldn't have cared."
I had lost my father and I wasn't willing to lose that rest of him, and me, without a fight. One day not long after I declared independence from Mom, I called a meeting between my two grandfathers to ask the question my parents never needed to ask.
They were each fifteen years old when Talat Pasha, under the cry "Turkey for Moslems," ordered the razing of the Armenian homeland. Fifteen, the same age as I was when murder trenched my life. That day in the living room, my grandfather’s began to will their irrevocable past to me. It took so little prodding—actually one small question—that I later wondered how it was possible that they had managed for so long not to poison with bitterness their children and grandchildren.
The man I called Pop, my father's father, had a contempt for the Turks that was hard to reconcile with his sweet nature and poetry, paeans to Lenin and Dr. King and Cesar Chavez. The Turks, he said, were cousins of the great bandits of the world, nomads who took from every culture they conquered. The original motley crew. They were great warriors, no doubt, capturing the Armenian saddleback of Anatolia and then Constantinople itself in 1453, a new empire that exceeded even the Roman in girth. But this tradition of plunder-and-run allowed so little opportunity for craft building that the sultan's first act was to summon Armenians to rebuild the city. For the next 500 years, shorn of country, the fate of the Armenians would rest in the hands of these Ottomans whose arrival they had preceded by 1,500 years.
"On one hand, the Turks said we were loyal subjects. On the other they barred us from government and banned us from carrying arms."
He mixed English, Armenian and a few words of Turkish, the swear words. His accent was not harsh: fawdr (father); vehdee (very); eeder (either); reech (rich).
He shook his fist. "Our testimony in court meant nothing ... We were gavours, infidels."
What about these Armenian extremists who are now assassinating Turkish diplomats and bombing airports, killing innocents in the name of justice?" I asked. "Can this be right?"
"These are vehdee bad things, Mark. But you know, you can only take so much. We must never condone these killers, b u t..."
The poet faded into silence, equivocation.
The priest thumbed his worry beads two-by-two.
"It was late in the day," my mother's father, Reverend Yegishe M ekhitarian, the man we called Hyreek, began. "The Turks came inside my house. My mother said, 'Son, your father and mother are going.' I hugged her. I was crying. And she handed me this Bible and told me to run, not look back. I ran.
"I saw with my own eyes. I saw everything. The babies still in their mother's wombs. The nipples cut off their breasts and strung around the soldiers' necks. I walked for three years pretending to be Turkish. I saw thousands and thousands of bodies. Systematic. The Turkish government, the Turkish people, the Turkish army. Because the Armenian people were reech people. We had our own homes, villages, schools, churches. Everything we owned in Turkey."
Hyreek had officially retired from the pulpit after 50 years of "dedicated service," words scrawled into gold plate and displayed on his dining table turned shrine. His wife had died a year earlier and he was lost without her and the routine of the church. He tried going to the Asbarez Hall where the old freedom fighters smoked cigars, drank Turkish coffee and cursed at the backgammon boards, but he could never be one of the boys. The collar made sure of that. They were polite and respectful—too polite and too respectful—and he must have felt their unease. Unshaven, swigging VO from a fifth he kept cold in the refrigerator, he had stopped dressing as priest and unveiled his neck. One hundred and seven degrees outside and he wore two frayed shirts under a brown wool cardigan.
I quoted the official Turkish line: "The deportation was necessary because the Armenians were revolting and joining forces with Russia, the enemy."
"Big lies, big liar. Not revolting. Not against the Turkish government. It was because we are Armenian and we have our causes. That country belong to us, for centuries and centuries. Forty-two people in my family. Vehdee big. Vehdee reech family. All gone. My father, Khoorshood Mekhitarian. His father, Baghdasar. My uncles, Garabed, Hagop and Sarkis. My mother, Atlas. My three brothers, Hovsep, who was nineteen with a wife and two children. Khonar who was twenty. Antranig who was younger than me, maybe eleven or twelve. My four sisters, Khatoon, who was married. Noyemi was nine. Verkin was seven or eight. Anakas was five or six. We lived in a big house. In the same family forty-two people. All of them gone. Turkish government. All of them killed. I don't know how, but God saved me. Only me."
Sixty-five years later and my grandfathers were still drudging for justice, still waiting for Turkey to acknowledge that its sire, the Ottoman Empire, had committed the crime of their youth. What they got instead was this absurd battle each year in the U.S. Congress over a bill to set aside April 24th as an official day of mourning—the day Armenia's greatest poets, musicians, painters and political leaders were herded for slaughter.
In this unholy fight, Armenians and Turks were going to great lengths to court the Jewish heart. Armenians portrayed the Genocide as a harbinger of the Holocaust, pointing out that Hitler had remarked on the eve of invading Poland: "Who talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians?" Turkish-American groups took out ads in Jewish weeklies accusing Armenians of debasing the oneness of the Holocaust with a phony precursor. When historical revision didn't work, the Turks tried extortion, warning American Jewish leaders that their sponsorship of Armenian genocide speeches would imperil the well-being of Jews in Turkey.
I myself never doubted that the mass slaughter was anything but genocide: genocide in premeditation, genocide in efficiency, genocide in cover-up. But we were not the lambs our own busy lobby in Washington wanted the world to believe. The Armenians of Ottoman Turkey were not casual observers. They were not patsies. Armenian political parties agitated for independence. Armenian irregulars existed in greater numbers than Armenian scholars were willing to admit. And many Armenians boldly rooted for Russia to defeat Turkey and liberate them.
Yet because the men who controlled the machinery of death were Turks, none of these things, alone or together, threatened the empire's existence. The pashas who oversaw the massacres were not responding to the imperatives of civil war. They made no attempt to distinguish villages of discontent from villages of calm. The decision to do away with the Armenians was general, sweeping and based on the single genus of race.
What they launched lacked the gas chambers and visual documentation of the Nazis. But this was quibbling over contrivances, the form and style of killers three decades apart. What got lost was that the Turks, using the means available to them at the time, wiped out the presence of Armenians from their ancient homeland. And never has modern Turkey come clean on this.
What happened to Armenia stood on its own, I thought. It needn't be linked to the Holocaust. It needn't matter that each year Congress sided with Turkey, that the importance of military bases outweighed any duty to history. In a perverse way Turkey's unrepentance had done us a favor. The Genocide was the one thing unassailable, the one thing resonant, the one thing Armenians could agree on.
At the same time, there was something in the accounts of both my grandfathers, particularly the priest that bothered me. The hint of arrogance? Presumption? Naivete? We were Armenian. We were smart and educated. We demanded freedom because the land belonged to us. We were there first.
Maybe the Armenian had let his contempt for the Turks' backwardness blind him to his power. How the Turk must have felt, a supplicant in a land he had conquered but could not manage, leaning on the Armenian merchant and banker to negotiate with the outside powers. How could Armenians instigate for equal rights and talk revolt at a time when Turkey was watching its empire crumble? They had lived side by side with the Turks, 800 years of bloody history. Could they not have foreseen the consequences of these acts? Had the Turk not killed for less?
At some point it occurred to me: These were some of the same questions I was asking about my father. Did Dad provoke his murder by betraying the world around him and did this betrayal somehow reduce the crime? Didn't the Armenians see it coming? Didn't Dad see it coming? Why hadn't they bailed out in time? Why hadn't he? The Armenians were talking freedom, talking independence, willing to risk everything. That they even pressed their rights at all and some armed themselves and fought back was being used to discredit a genocide. Yes, they went about it stupidly. Yes, whatever Dad did, it was naive and foolhardy. Restive Armenia. Restive Ara. Neither one quite knew how to gauge and navigate the peril.
