I had the illusion of finally beginning to comprehend something important about the Armenians-something that might at least partly explain the peculiarly shrill and wounded quality of the Armenian response to the trauma of the Turkish massacres. For ever since I began my “investigations” of the Armenians / had been perplexed as to why so many of them, even today, still seemed inextricably fixated on the evil times that had befallen their people in Abdul-Hamid’s Turkey, and later, in 1915, at the hands of the Young Turks.
In a sense, I knew that this was an inexcusably insensitive thing for me to think or write—for me, a comfortable American in the nineteen-seventies, to wonder why my people (or any people) should still respond deeply or with passion to the fact of their countrymen's having been killed in the thousands, in the hundreds of thousands. And yet it was what I wondered.
It had never occurred to me that what happened to the Armenians was worse than what had happened to numerous other peoples, nations, creeds in the course of man's long inhumanity to man. What could be worse than death, worse even than death by pain? And was there an appreciable difference to the victim in being hanged, decapitated, clubbed, gassed, or starved, or undergoing any of the other nearly endless methods that men have developed for administering physical pain to one another? Even so, the response of the Armenians to the bygone brutalities of the Turks seemed of a different nature from the response of other groups to massacre. It was as if a particular poison had entered the system several generations back, and had remained within it: a poison that one might up to a point live with but that caused the limbs suddenly to twitch, or the mouth—perhaps in mid-sentence—to grimace grotesquely.
After all, what invisible "virus" was it that had reduced to tears that old man I talked with a few months earlier in New York, on Thirty-third Street, and that had brought so many other Armenians of my acquaintance to the equivalent of gnashing their teeth? What was it that had caused such a marvelously tough writer as William Saroyan to manifest an unearthly sweetness? What had driven my father to write about everything except his Armenian background, and all his life to refuse to weep over anything? What of Sarkis—surely also a tough and rational man—and his wild diatribes against "the Turks''? Some writers, I knew, had ascribed the emotional or ingratiating aspects of the Armenian temperament to the Armenians' long history of being a conquered people. But the main fact to emerge from the lengthy and curious history of the Armenians seemed to be that though much of the time Armenia had been controlled by a greater power, the Armenians themselves had remained independent of mind and spirit. They had been hardy mountain people first, perhaps not very cultured or clever—people who grow up in the mountains are rarely cultured or clever—but direct, practical, and physical. And if the depressing and isolating experience of several centuries of Ottoman Turkish rule had turned the Armenians inward, had sent them down the roads that were then most practical - the roads of trade and commerce, of interpreting, of "being useful"—today one might see for oneself on the streets of Erevan the still direct, clear-eyed, at times quite fierce look of younger Armenians, who were now left (more or less) to pursue their own instincts. No, it was not so simple a matter; one could not "explain" Armenians by saying that they had suffered a great deal, or that they had always suffered a great deal.
In obvious ways, the closest parallel lay with the Jews, who had undergone, numerically, an even larger genocide in Hitler's Germany. But here, too, there seemed to be a difference. Certainly there were many Jews I knew, or knew of, who still looked back to the terrible period of the concentration camps and gas chambers as if it were an open wound, a fact of everyday consciousness. But, for one thing, the Jewish experience in Germany had been fairly recent. For another thing, it seemed to me that a majority of the Jews did not look backward in this way—in the manner of people bearing a permanently open wound. Of course, the issue might be forced: a careless or abrasive remark, sometimes only remotely anti-Semitic in intent, and even the most assimilated American Jew might respond with a flash of anger about the Six Million. Indeed, I had sometimes noticed a curiously proprietary air on the part of Jews and Armenians alike toward the misfortunes of their own peoples—proprietary and almost competitive, in the fashion of two insecure strangers trying to narrate two similar nightmares in an inattentive room. "Now, these Armenians," an intelligent Jewish friend had once said to me, with studied vagueness, "didn't they once have some trouble with the Turks?" Another time, I had overheard an Armenian say outright, "The way they talk, you'd think the Jews invented genocide." Doubtless this was original black comedy—perverse and deeply human. But generally it seemed to me that the Jews had handled their nightmare better than the Armenians had handled theirs: had somehow resolved it, or, at least, incorporated the trauma into everyday life—were more nearly free of it.
And what of the countless other peoples who had undergone massacre and genocide: the Ibos of Nigeria; the Communists of Indonesia; the Hindus of Bangladesh; the Incas of South America; the Indians of North America; the Ukrainian peasants of the U.S.S.R.; the black slaves of Haiti and Guadeloupe; the Protestants; the Catholics; the Muslims; the Cappadocians whom Tigran of Armenia had marched across the wilderness to his new capital; and all the rest, whose names and stories were never entered, or entered vividly enough, in history books—for the list is surely long and ancient? Had not all these suffered, and suffered very greatly? What, then, was different about the Armenian experience? Perhaps it had not been so different? Perhaps some peoples were created with more self-pity, shrillness, and vulnerability than other peoples? It seemed an unlikely proposition. I thought of something I had increasingly noticed in Armenians: an absence of a profoundly convincing "flash of anger"—at least, in this matter of their feelings against the Turks. An absence of a rage that they seemed to believe in. Or maybe it was not so much an absence of rage as a rerouting: a rage trapped underground. Beneath the skin.
I thought of my father often in those days, for I was conscious of many things about him: conscious, for example, that he was born in 1896, the final year of Abdul-Hamid's massacres, and had never talked about any of this in my presence; conscious that, to that degree, he had tried to free me. It seemed no small thing to have tried to free a son from one's own pain. There was also something about it of the story of the man and the fox: the man who, for fear of being caught with contraband, clutches the animal so close beneath his shirt that the animal tears at his stomach.
It was hard to imagine what this pain had been. The pain of being hated—hated unto death. For what was genocide except an expression of generalized hate, a hate so wide and encompassing that it included everyone—man, woman, child—within a certain national or racial group? If a "crime of passion" was particularizing—you stole my wife—at least it defined the victim as himself. Genocide not only killed its victims but dehumanized them, in the ultimate sense of ignoring the particulars that had made each one individual: save only the most basic and unindividual of all characteristics— the supposedly racial.
I wondered what his father had told him about the massacres, about Abdul- Hamid, about the Turks. A certain amount, 1 imagined. Probably rather more than he—an uncertain Armenian- English youth—had wished to hear. "Your grandfather," an elderly Armenian once told me, "was very active in Armenian affairs." Sometimes it was hard to believe that my father had had a father— this more distant father I had never seen.
My father was born in Bulgaria, where his family had been settled for several generations. Before that, the Kouyoumjians had been in Constantinople. Before that, they had lived in the ancient city of Ani, on the Armenian plateau. In the town of Rustchuk, in Bulgaria, the Kouyoumjians owned and ran a department store—the Kouyoumjian store. It had been described to me only a short while before by the aged grandmother of a school friend of my daughter's, who remembered it from her childhood. "A very fine place," she said to me reassuringly. "You could buy everything there."
The Kouyoumjian store. The man in the blue velvet hat. Some odd memories of my childhood came back to me. I remembered my father standing on the lawn of our house and telling me that I should learn how to box, how to defend myself. I think he used the phrase "self-defense." I was eight years old at the time and had given no thought to "self-defense"—at least, not beyond what basic skills were required to scuffle with the neighbor children. He had his hands on his hips and wore a white shirt and white trousers. Perhaps he had been playing tennis. I think he even briefly struck a boxing pose and made a show of sparring with me. I was a most reluctant partner. "You have to know how to defend yourself," he said, with surprising severity. He seemed very intense about—I never knew what. Boxing? We never talked about it afterward.
My father was a short man, although wiry, and carried himself with a certain brittle strength. I believe I remember his saying once, "All Armenians are short." (There are no piano tuners in Japan. All Swedes are drunks.) It made me weep inside my head to think of him sometimes. That figure in the white shirt and white trousers, hands on hips. That figure whom I later saw inside his coffin, wearing some appropriate suit, the necktie well in place, everything motionless, the impassivity a final fact. I used to think that what he had wanted of me had been hard. But what he had wanted of himself turned out to have been literally unspeakable.
For the first time in my life, I thought I saw my father clearly. Some little while ago, I had seen how his face, with its coolness and authority, it’s supposed impassivity, concealed within it the silent, helpless fury of that man in the blue velvet hat. But it had taken me this long to understand where the fury had been directed: at himself, Dikran Kouyoumjian. I thought, This proud and sensitive man—how he must have hated growing up an Armenian in England, not so much because of being condescended to by the English (although there was bound to have been that) as because of being himself marked, or feeling marked, by the collective guilt and self- hatred proceeding from a race that had been hated unto death. For that was the curse of genocide: death took the victims, but over the survivors settled a mark, a "fallout," of having been hated unto death.
1 thought of the struggle, all the wriggles, he had made throughout his life to avoid being Armenian, to escape from this "collective unconscious." His detached manner. The mask of not caring about, not bothering about, his racial past. Not even writing about it—the "it," after all, being his identity, the one solid piece of wood that any writer has.
I wondered how many Armenian sons had felt abandoned by their fathers: abandoned into nothing more than their Armenianness, that racial psyche of guilt, of anger without an object and always disguised as something else— braggadocio or saturnine lament, darkness or light. Such a waste, it seemed. I thought, If only he could have told me about this! Then what? What would I have done? I realized I would have done nothing, except be more afraid. Besides, he hadn't known it himself.
I stayed a few days in Istanbul—new Constantinople. Each morning, the sun came up glowing across the Bosporus, which lay a half mile or so below our window: a river of black water filled with little craft, and dozens of ferryboats that crossed incessantly from bank to bank, and sometimes the massive, quiet shape of a Russian tanker returning empty to the Black Sea.
Across the Bosporus stretched the shore of Asia, house-crowded and tree- lined. About two miles upriver, a great new bridge now connected the two sides; it was a graceful green construction, with two tall towers and curving suspension cables. There was talk in the hotel of traffic problems during the rush hour. A little way downriver, right at the edge of the water, stood the gray stone expanse of the Dolmabagdshe Palace, that ponderous, frilly, nineteenth-century strudel of a royal edifice which had been built for the Ottoman sultans by the Armenian architect Balian. "The Armenian architect Balian." It said so right in our Turkish guidebook. And if that was not exactly the only reference to Armenia or Armenians visible in standard Turkish touristic publications, it was nearly so. With the exception of an occasional inclusion in a list of the "polyglot mixture of ancient races" that had once inhabited "pre-Turkic Asia Minor," the name, the presence, the idea of Armenians appeared to no longer exist in modern Istanbul. It was not so much that there was no sense of an Armenia here (in this nation that contained the classic home of the Armenians), for in political terms that was comprehensible; it reflected a political fact. What seemed less comprehensible and much harder to accept was the extent to which the Armenian connection had been erased. The slate had been wiped bare, as though by an act of will—or, if not absolutely bare, then as close to absolutely bare as was possible.
The first afternoon, 1 remember, we drove past an old church, so unmistakably Armenian, with its conical roof, that we asked our Turkish guide if we might stop. "It's a Greek church," he said. "I know it very well. It is of no interest."
My wife said, "It looks Armenian." "There is nothing Armenian around here," the guide said. "It is Greek." And he drove on.
Later, we went back on our own. On the ancient stone above the church entrance, part of the Armenian lettering had been literally erased—rubbed off. But not all of it. The church itself was closed, and a new apartment house had been built in such a way as to wall off the side entrance and the stained-glass windows. Two men in rough clothes were playing cards at a table in the alley. One of them looked at us quizzically.
"Armenian church?" my wife asked. One of the men shook his head and said something in Turkish. The other man scowled and got to his feet. We left the alley.
"I didn't like that," my wife said as we walked down a more crowded street.
"He didn't understand us," I said. I don't think that either of us thought he hadn't understood us.
Once, I knew, Istanbul had been filled with Armenian churches and with Armenians. Armenians had formed a key element in the life of the great city—especially, perhaps, as artisans and craftsmen. I had read how in the late Byzantine period, when the western arch of Justinian's Saint Sophia collapsed, an Armenian architect had been called in to study the problems of stress and geometry, and undertake the restoration. Later, when Muhammad the Conqueror captured Constantinople, the people he summoned to build up his new capital were the Armenians and the Greeks, and also the Arabs.
For centuries (regardless of their political position), Armenian artisans had been masters of tilework, of stonecutting, masters at working with things—perhaps that antimetaphysical instinct that Mandelstam had spoken of. How strange, then, to be in Istanbul and learn that it had never happened. "Observe this unusual tilework," another guide remarked, pointing to some beautiful orange and blue tiles that adorned a sixteenth-century mosque.
"Who made the tiles?" a fellow tourist asked.
"Turkish craftsmen," said the guide.
"There were some Arab tilemakers, too."
On the outside of the mosque stood several twenty-foot columns of basalt, each elaborately, even obsessively, adorned with stone-cut designs that were the familiar geometric figures we had observed on so many old Armenian churches—even the smooth, eroded shapes of grapes and pomegranates I remembered from the fallen cornices at Garni and Zvartnots.
"Who did the stonework?" I asked. The Turkish guide was middle-aged and accommodating. He gazed upward, examining the designs, which he had surely looked upon each day. "Turkish stonecutters from Anatolia," he replied.
In a sense, all this felt unreal, and almost comical. I realized that I had traveled a long distance from my previous disdain of most things Armenian to my present barely suppressed chauvinism in Istanbul. Perhaps too far. (Had I really become offended by that remark about Anatolian stonecutters?) On the other hand, I felt something faintly evil in the air. Or perhaps it was this: As an Armenian, for the first time I had a sniff, a scent, of what it was like to be hated for being Armenian. Because what was it except hatred to say that a people did not exist?
