Orhan's Inheritance (16 page)

“A cup of coffee commits one to forty years of friendship,” she says, reciting the proverb in Turkish.

Orhan gives her his best smile.

“It wouldn’t be so bad,” he says, suddenly longing for a cigarette. “We could enjoy the good weather.”

“Here’s fine,” she says. “I don’t want anyone interfering.”

“I saw your niece head for the exit, if that is what you mean. It’ll be fine. I promise.”

The old woman sighs, clearly irritated. “Fine,” she says. “Just make it quick.”

Outside, Orhan pushes her chair along a meandering pathway. The sidewalk beneath his feet is covered with words. Etched into the concrete is a timeline of Armenian historical and cultural dates commencing with the Bronze Age in the year 3000 BCE and continuing to the present. What kind of a people is this? he wonders. So obsessed with their past that they etch it into the very ground beneath their feet. Orhan pushes Seda slowly toward 1982, skimming bits and pieces of history as he approaches the visitors’ courtyard and the circular fountain. The spouts emerging from the mouths of several cherubs are dry and the water in the circular pool is completely still. Just behind the fountain is a massive map made of marble. Under it a plaque reads
HISTORIC ARMENIA
. His own hometown, located in the province of Sivas, is included in the borders of what is labeled as
BYZANTIUM ARMENIA
. He stands there dumbfounded. Theirs is an entirely different version of history.

The sound of crunching leaves brings him back to the present. Seda is rolling her wheelchair toward a mulberry tree under which sits a lone wooden bench. Unlike the tree back home, this one displays thick succulent leaves, punctuated with berries drooping down in clusters. Orhan takes a seat on the bench next to her and lights a cigarette, letting another awkward silence hang between them.

The woman before him is like an ancient tapestry whose tightly woven threads could tell quite a tale, if he only knew how to unravel them. One loose thread and the whole thing could come tumbling out of her pursed lips.

CHAPTER 17

The Fountain

SEDA WATCHES HIM
light a cigarette. She knows where this is going, this path of shared photos and garden chats. It’s called intimacy and she must avoid it. She lets him take two long drags before speaking again.

“Not everyone would want me to sign those papers, you know,” she says finally. “There are plenty of people around here who wouldn’t. Plenty of people who would fight for that land.” She watches his face for any sign of worry.

“I know,” says Orhan. “And I’m grateful to you. But I don’t want to leave here without knowing why my grandfather did this. I’m sure you can understand that.”

You can never understand why people do what they do, thinks Seda. What’s the point in trying? It’s like trying to explain the world with a handful of photographs.

“I have something else to show you,” he says.

“I don’t want to see any more pictures,” she says, her voice firm.

He smiles at her again, revealing two sets of parentheses at the corners of his mouth. “This was one of my grandfather’s sketchbooks,” he says, pulling a tattered tomb from his backpack.

Seda’s heart stops. Looking at the photographs was hard enough. Seeing Kemal’s drawings might be more than she could bear. Seda stares at the tattered black cover in Orhan’s hands, where the last traces of Kemal’s fingertips remain. Before she can form another thought, her bent fingers reach for the sketchbook, drawing it to her and peeling the cloth cover open.

Seda is transfixed by the very first drawing. Fleshy dark mulberries dot a landscape of textured leaves thick enough to make a silkworm’s mouth water. And Seda is pinned like a butterfly. At first she can only see the sweeping gray of graphite covering all but slivers of the creamy paper. She flips through the sketchbook, trying in vain to weaken its power over her. In the drawings that follow, the tree loses its fruit, its leaves, and ultimately many of its branches, until it looks more like a lonely stump. The entire sketch pad is dedicated to the mulberry tree in Karod. Kemal has captured every corner and inch of their courtyard from its infancy to its ultimate decay.

Their laughter as children is trapped in the crux of a branch, where the imprint of her backside remains from when they climbed that very limb, the one with the eye of some forest djinn encapsulated inside it, forever glaring.

There is an image of the tree bearing fruit and offering shade, before all the lamenting began. Even then, Kemal has cleverly alluded to their impending tears, collected in the marrow that fills the cauldrons nearby. It is all there. The gray, black, and dark blue of their longing and sorrow.

On one page toward the middle, Kemal’s drawing reveals the cavity of the tree, the light gray living tissue of inner bark hidden beneath the hardened outer bark. The rendering is so close, it transforms the bark’s ridges into a topographical map. Here is a metaphysical fingerprint, a small indecipherable indication of the Creator’s existence and identity.

Seda extends her own knobby index finger, itself riddled with sloping lines and hardened bone, over an area of the drawing covered in cross-hatching, where Kemal’s pinky must have glided across the space as he drew. Like the djinn in the tree, Kemal is trapped here too. His whole life and her life with him is entombed in these pages.

“Are you okay?” Orhan asks her, his hand on her right shoulder now. Seda can not even look up at him, this young stranger, this bearer of her past. She covers her face with the hanky to hide the tears that won’t obey.

“I’ll get you some tea,” he says. She waves him away, too upset to respond. Alone with the last of Kemal’s drawings, she shuts the sketchbook, hoping to trap the mourning emanating from its pages. But the past and all its horrors have already escaped.

Seda’s eyes dart to and fro, searching for an escape, when she is confronted by a red-vented bulbul perched on a branch of the mulberry tree above her.

It is so like the tree of her childhood. It may be the same tree, even the same bulbul, a bird-ghost from her childhood, a phantom that flew out of Kemal’s sketchbook and into this Los Angeles garden.

And this is when she begins to hear it: the wind sifting through the tree’s branches, the river curdling and bubbling toward her. It gargles as it advances, spitting out blood. She tries to breathe, but her mouth and nose are full of water. Gasping, she drops the album and turns in her wheelchair. The custodian behind her is watering some bushes and the dreaded fountain has started working. Seda commands her mind to recognize these basic facts, but her heart is racing outside the reach of reason, and her body trembles and shakes. All she can see is the river screaming at her. Its liquid jaws swallow Aram’s face whole, again and again. She does not yell or move but watches in silence, as she did all those years ago. Murderess. Another whisper in her ear. Her eyes roll back into her head and everything darkens.

WHEN SHE COMES
TO,
the first thing Seda notices is the spicy scent of cinnamon and cigarettes. She realizes she is being carried, her body draped like a delicate tablecloth on Orhan’s forearms. She can hear his quickened steps and his panting. The citrine fluorescent light of the nursing home beats down upon them both as she hears him say, “Help me, please.”

“What happened?” Seda can hear Betty Shields squeaking across the linoleum.

“I don’t know. She fell or . . . passed out. I was getting some tea,” he tries to explain.

“I thought I told you not to let her near running water.” Seda can hear the anger in the orderly’s voice. It’s the same tone she uses when old Mr. Kalustian soils himself in the dining room.

“The fountain was off. There was no water. I don’t understand,” he says, carrying her into her room.

“There’s water everywhere, Mr. Orren,” Betty interrupts. “Do you know how I got to bathe her?” Betty asks as Orhan hoists Seda onto her bed. Seda keeps her eyes shut, silently wishing Betty would go away, but the orderly’s voice, shrill and full of reproach, keeps pounding on. “I got to let the water run with the door closed, shut it off,
then
bring her inside.”

“I don’t understand,” he says.

“There’s nothing to understand, Mr. Orren,” Betty interrupts. “She’s ninety. You can’t be upsetting her like this. You better go home now, Mr. Orren. That’s enough excitement for the day,” she says, checking Seda’s body for bruising.

Seda opens her eyes wide and grips Betty’s forearm in protest.

“All right.” Betty lets out a big sigh. “But he’s got to leave soon. I don’t want you getting sick from this mess,” she says. “You holler if you need me,” she adds.

When Betty is gone, Seda turns her eyes to Orhan, who is hovering above her. Desperate as he is, he has been nothing but kind and patient. She lifts her head to say something, to calm his worried face, but Orhan places his palm on her shoulder and gently pushes her back onto her pillow.

“It’s all right. You don’t have to say anything. I am sorry. I am so very sorry,” he says.

Seda holds his green-gray eyes in her stare and sighs. A lifetime of silence is suddenly weighing upon her chest and she wants to be rid of it, to cast it off, throw it into the phantom river haunting her. She reaches to him and grasps his hand.

“I killed him,” she whispers.

Orhan stands there bent over her bed, mouth agape, saying nothing.

“He didn’t fall. I threw him in,” she says.

“Who?” he asks, but Seda puts her fingers to his lips.

“It is my turn now,” she says.

PART IV

1915

CHAPTER 18

The Pretty Ones

WITHIN HOURS, LUCINE’S
world and everything in it turns to dust. Sound is the first thing that deserts them. The clamor of Sivas, its people and animals, the clang of its copper pots and tin coffee trays, grows faint with each step they take, until all that is left is the creaking of wagon wheels and the shuffling of feet. The paved roads slip away, stone by stone. Storied structures give way to small wooden abodes, until they too are sparse. And the deportees, their lips locked against the grimy air, have lost their tongues. In the six hours since they began marching, the family has exchanged few words. Only the baby, nestled deep in Mairig’s bosom, peppers the silence with random noises.

Anush, whose cream-colored bonnet hides a head of optimistic ribbons, is tucked deep in the back of the covered wagon with Mairig and Aram. She sings a ditty about a little partridge, cooing at Aram’s broad, smiling face.

“Gagavik, gagavik,”
she croons.

Lucine walks in front of the wagon, where she can be sure to see everything. She holds the missionary book with Kemal’s drawing tucked inside. It reminds her that somewhere under this same hot sun is an ordered world of books, and schools and libraries, a world where a boy can draw pictures for a girl. The smell of lemons and perspiration from the coachman, Firat, drifts backward and into the wagon’s cavity, but no one complains. He is a Muslim man, a talisman of sorts. There is safety in that body, in that smell. The Kurd has placed Bedros at his side, and now and then, when the road is smooth, he lifts the boy’s spirits by giving him the reins. He listens to Bedros boast about his skill with the slingshot and smiles, revealing teeth like yellow chicks in the nest of his scraggly beard.

The caravan of villagers—some two thousand souls—stretches out for several kilometers before her, reminding Lucine of a serpent twisting and turning its body up and down the dusty road. When an oxcart stalls or a family slows down for an elderly loved one, the slender bodied snake looks as if it has just swallowed a mouse. Lucine knows that she too is a part of this snake, but she tries to imagine herself as an insect on its back, able to fly away on a whim. The terrain is mostly flat until noon, when, just as the sun is at its cruelest, they are forced to start an uphill trek. Lucine hears the groans of those without oxcarts. Acquaintances, friends, and strangers march ahead like a band of gypsies. She tries to console herself with the idea that soon they will be marching downhill. She fixes her eyes upon the next hill and resolves not to ask for food until they reach the top, where she hopes the gendarmes will let them rest.

A spattering of men, too old to imprison and too young to conscript, accompany their families. Lucine makes a game of counting them, stopping at seven. The father of Gevork the apothecary walks behind his wife and daughter-in-law who take turns carrying the newborn. Lucine wonders how far the baby’s
göbek bağı
has traveled down the river. She wonders what the old man’s done with that silly white robe that belonged to his son. Everything that seemed so important days ago is now as worthless as a pebble.

A few meters to the left, the pregnant Arsineh walks slowly beside her husband, Vartan Berberian, the butcher known to trade a prime choice of meat for a quick glance at a girl’s feet. (It was the delicate fold where ankle met heel that he couldn’t resist, not that the Melkonian girls ever complied.) He pants under the weight of two large sacks carried on each shoulder. By the pungent smell of things, the sacks contain links of
sujouk
and
basterma,
the preserved meats and sausages that will sustain him and Arsineh on the journey ahead.