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I know that yedi means seven in Turkish. My father taught me such things, like counting to 10 and other words like ekmek for bread and kef for fun. And kilise means church, according to Google Translate, but I vaguely already knew that.
We are on our way back from touring the Turkish countryside. Yedi Kilise is what they call the site, but in Armenian it is Varakavank, the name of the 1,000-year-old monastery left in ruins, and locked shut today as the groundskeeper has gone to Van on errands. The villagers gather to watch us, confused at our disappointment in not being able to enter. After all, the crumbling building only serves to house livestock now. “You see,” my father would have said, “they want to erase any clue of our existence here.”
The breeze grazes my arm through the open window as we drive away down the faded asphalt highway, and Ibrahim points out the abandoned churches stranded on far-off hilltops along the way, wild weeds standing out among the fields of stubby, colourless grass.
My father, Hairig, would never have approved of this trip; travelling to Eastern Turkey, alone, as a Canadian-Armenian woman, to meet a Kurdish guide for a week-long tour of the homeland my family departed from before I was born. But Hairig isn’t alive any more to dissuade me. He cannot tell me one more time about the wars fought and lost here, heroes fallen and risen again, or about all of the Armenian ghosts left to watch silently over these remote lands.
I asked Hairig many years ago why he had left Istanbul for Toronto.
“Do you know about the ‘September Events?’” he said. “It was already 40 years after the Genocide, so we thought we were safe, but no. They were digging up our graves. Burning down our homes. And the police did nothing to stop it. We were still just gavurs, heathens in their eyes. We knew then that we had to leave and could never look back. Never.”
In the last few months of my father’s life, visits to Princess Margaret Hospital for blood transfusions and cancer treatments made him a shell of the powerful man he once was. His stockiness was replaced by frailty, his olive complexion gave way to sallowness, and the fading smiles that once pervaded his whole expression would be lost, only to be found again in his future grandsons.
We stop the car to picnic at the steppes of Mount Ararat, claimed by Turkey within its borders, but for Armenia the most important symbol of loss. The two snowy peaks seem to be backward, not as I have seen them in countless pictures, because I am looking at them from the Turkish side, the wrong side.
As we sit on large, mossy, grey rocks, there is a long silence as Ibrahim tears the lavash with his hands to prepare the sandwiches. He hands me one, and as I peel back the top layer I can’t help but smile at the familiar pungent scent. “Is this cemen? If we eat this we are going to stink for days.” He laughs. “We will, but isn’t it delicious?” Nodding, I take a bite of my garlicky sandwich and gaze up at the mountain.
Reminders of my father here in Turkey make me unsure whether I’ve chosen to come here or been beckoned. I falter in recognition at the sound of backgammon pieces hitting wooden boards as men play casually in the city squares, at the familiar alliteration of the forbidden language my father spoke privately to my mother – even at the Turkish coffee I am offered at the hotel. “Yavrum, my dear, be careful,” my father warns me, “don’t let them know who you really are.”
Later, for dinner, we end up sitting in the hotel dining room with the innkeeper as well as the only other guests at the hotel. They are a Persian couple emigrating to Los Angeles, she with cosmetically enhanced lips and wearing a Burberry scarf, and he a much older man in a purple suit with a silk handkerchief billowing from his chest pocket.
The music is live, a band with guitar-like instruments, a duduk flute and a man bellowing a Turkish folk tune into the microphone. The Persian man gets up and starts to dance, much like Hairig would; arms bent above his head, elegantly moving across the ornate red and blue carpet that covers the dance floor. His eyes are closed as he sways to the music.
“Let’s go!” says the innkeeper, and he and the woman get up to join her husband in his rapture. They link pinkies and begin to move in a big circle. I sit back with Ibrahim, taking a puff of the nergule.
“You know, if you dance with them, you aren’t doing anything wrong,” he tells me.
“I never said that.”
“But you’re thinking that.”
In defiance, I get up and lock hands with the others. Being at the end of the line, I am handed a handkerchief to hold and wave to the music. I dance the dance. I twirl in rhythm to the bouzouki and close my eyes as I listen to the melancholy words. I drink the raki. I let the night take me back to the pleasant memories of my childhood, forgetting what I could and could not say, forgetting my hatred, and ignoring the ghosts who gawk at my brashness. Because I am imagining I am on my father’s shoulders again, both terrified and thrilled to share the moment with him.
Nadine Arzumanian lives in Toronto.