“You and your hotel,” David said, “it seemed like fate. I found you just when I needed you.”
Balsan never needed her. Not that he admitted.
“We’re family, right?” David said.
PERHAPS IN TURKEY was some museum of mementos that held Gudrun’s past—the toys and photographs and clothing of generations of her family. But she owned nothing she could pass down to David; all she could give him was the stuff of actual memory.
First she told him the story of Balsan’s accident, then two more.
One was a story Balsan told Gudrun not long before his accident. It went like this: Once there was a man whose first wife was a human and whose second wife was a jinn. With his jinn wife he had five invisible children, and with his human wife, he had nine visible children. The five invisible children were a great help to him in his industriousness. The nine visible children seemed inadequate by comparison. The nine visible children grew jealous, though they knew not of what. One day, in their jealousy, they burned down the house, with the invisible children inside.
“So, Gudrun,” Balsan had told her, “you never know what’s really happening.”
He always made his own morals.
“And you don’t know a goddamn thing about me,” he added angrily.
They had been fighting. She had been trying to be the responsible one, age nineteen. She had told him he was self-centered, obsessed with money, and a fool.
How she missed him.
Maybe he was right. You never know what’s really happening. So don’t burn down the house. Even if you wish to see the sky.
SECOND WAS A STORY that Gudrun’s father told her once, which had been told to him once, by his own father. Gudrun’s father told it to her over the phone, from far away, after the accident, just before she never saw him again.
Gudrun’s grandfather had been a boy in Ordu, along the Black Sea, when an Armenian boy who’d lost his parents came to live with his family. Many Armenian orphans were placed in Turkish homes during this time. (It would be years before the grandfather understood that the orphans’ parents had been killed by the government.) The two boys lived like brothers. And then one day the Armenian boy was gone. (It would be years again before the grandfather understood that fear of reprisals had led the government to kill the children they had at first spared.) In the in-between time, when the boy was missing and his fate unknown, the grandfather invented many stories and adventures for his lost brother. He gave his brother a grand fantasy to live inside. But he himself lived in fear. How could he not? Here one day, gone the next?
GUDRUN GAVE DAVID these stories. The family inheritance. Not much, but the truth anyway.
And what did Gudrun inherit?
David, of course.
THE THIRD NOTE was left by a writer who’d been staying in the hotel for two weeks in order to finish his novel. He wanted to be part of the story.
JOANNA HAD THE BABY. David and Gudrun helped her. David and Joanna called their mother, and she helped them, too. Gudrun liked her, David’s mother, Balsan’s girlfriend, the one time they met.
Life went on. More babies. More years.
Is that all?
Yes and no, forever and ever.
Before: a nephew-stranger, a brother-replacement, an old beginning.
After: still fear but less, still stone but less, still Gudrun but more.
AND THE TRUTH ABOUT the first note? “You will be found out?” I am not sure I even want to tell you, it’s so absurd, such a meaningless coincidence with which to begin or end a tale. But the truth about the first note is this: a thirteen-year-old girl—the oldest daughter of an older woman on a second marriage and pregnant with twins—wrote it. She’d copied the idea out of a book she’d read. A prank, but an angry one, a protest. She was being sent to boarding school, and this was her bitter good-bye. What was the point of more babies? Why, she wondered, did they feel the need to replace her?
The note wasn’t wrong. Children do find us out. Sooner or later they realize we are so much weaker, more flawed, and more scared than they ever imagined, even when they were imagining the worst. And they find out because they, too, become weak and flawed and scared, at least the lucky ones do. I suppose it’s the best we can hope for. Even weak and flawed and scared, sometimes we do all right.
The girl intended to put a note under every hotel door, but she almost got caught (by Gudrun, of course) on the very first one. The girl threw the rest of the notes in the hotel dumpster. Some of them are still there, plastered to the bottom. The rest have made it to the landfill. Except for the one that escaped on the wind.
Maybe you’ve seen it?
THE DEAD
Edward J. Arapian, a.k.a. the Sponge King, b. Constantinople, May 1850, d. Key West, December 1920
For years, Arapian’s wife, Harriet, had held a party, famous throughout Key West, on his birthday. Then there was the war, and nobody expected a party, except there were the invitations, embossed on thick cardstock, delivered three weeks ahead of time, same as every other year. That was 1918, when Arapian turned sixty-eight, two years before he died, seven months before Harriet died.
In Key West, Arapian was known as the Turk, though he was Armenian.
The extraction of fingernails; the application of burning irons to the breast; the pinching of skin with burning clamps; boiled butter poured into wounds; the tearing off of genitalia; the penetration of orifices with swords, with brooms, with flesh; the sawing off of hands and feet, arms and legs; the bayoneting of babies; the slitting of throats, the exhibition of the massacred.
The difference between Turk and Armenian? The Turk extracted the Armenian’s fingernails. The Turk applied burning irons to the Armenian’s breast. The Turk pinched the skin of the Armenian with burning clamps. Or he had the Kurd do it.
Turkey for the Turks, they said.
In Key West, sponges made Arapian a millionaire, one of the richest men in America at the time, an immigrant from the Ottoman Empire, which would have killed him if it could.
Bow down to the almighty sponge! Either the highest order of plant or the lowest order of animal.
A Brief History of Sponge Diving
In the beginning, there were naked divers, each weighed down by a marble stone. The divers cut sponges loose with knives held in their hands. They tucked those sponges into nets tied around their waists. From time to time, they wedged their marble stones into the mouths of sharks.
No tanks, no suits, just the air in their lungs.
But then in 1865, Fotis Mastoridis of Symi Island bought a diving suit and a helmet in Berlin. He convinced his fellow Greeks of the suit’s safety by putting his pregnant wife inside and dropping her into the deep. Her feelings on the matter have not been recorded, but she surfaced unscathed, and the Symians took to the new suits immediately. Other islanders quickly learned their ways.
Divers were to go down only twice a day, to spend only five minutes on the sea bottom, to rise slowly, to breathe slowly. With every exhalation, carbon dioxide filled their helmets. With every descent, nitrogen spread through their bodies, a martini hitting them at every ten meters. But money was to be made, houses to be paid for, debts to be honored, rules—as ever—to be broken in the name of commerce.
Ten thousand divers died and another twenty thousand were paralyzed. Each year only half the fleet returned.
Women dreamt nightly of their unburied husbands, dropped to the bottom of the sea or stashed in a pile of stones on an island where the only growth was a crop of small wooden crosses.
The diving suit was banned by the sultan’s decree in 1881, but the ban was never enforced; it wasn’t even written down. (The word of the sultan was supposed to be enough, but that worked only if you heard it.)
In the meanwhile, Symi grew rich, richer, richest. By 1900, it was the wealthiest port in the Mediterranean, a treasure of the Ottoman Empire, even if the empire was the enemy. Everyone on the island believed divers were rich, so the divers lived like the r
ich even during the months they were not paid. They imported luxuries from Istanbul; they built mansions; they adopted European dress. Then they dove in order to pay the debts they’d incurred—the nineteenth century’s well-paid poor.
It was Greek sponges that Odysseus used to wipe up the blood of Penelope’s suitors after he killed them. In Egypt, sponges wiped ink from papyrus. A vinegar-soaked sponge was stuffed in Jesus’s mouth while he hung on the cross. In Paris, women dabbed their skin with the softest of sponges. But it was the industrial revolution—so much machinery to clean—that made the American market.
In Key West, the waters were not so deep. Sponges were retrieved from the side of a boat with a bucket and a hook. All you needed was a sculler to hold the boat steady while the sponger peered through his bucket’s glass bottom, trying to calculate, through the water’s shifting lens, where to plunge his hook. No helmets, no suits, no risk of the bends. They barely got wet.
In Key West, the sponge merchants—middlemen in suits of a different sort—grew wealthy, but the spongers did not.
Arapian had connections in Paris, in Constantinople, in London. The perfect middleman, the man who knew everybody, everywhere. He came to Key West on a tip, and there, in Key West, he found Harriet (her uncle had been the first to send a shipment of sponges to New York), and there, in Key West, he stayed.
Every day at three, there was a sponge auction on the docks, the harvest cleaned and sold and shipped. Every day Arapian bought and sold, never at a loss. Eventually he had boats of his own. Eventually nobody could outbid him. By the time the Greeks began diving the Gulf and stealing his market share, he was too old and too rich to be bothered. He had no loyalty to sponges, only to the men who had manned his boats, stocked his warehouse, shipped his wares. And he believed he was good to those men. They had fought him only once, over the unions; but he had long ago forgiven that lack of loyalty. Most of his men were dead already, anyhow; somehow he had outlived so many. At the time, Arapian thought he did not need forgiveness from the dead.
ARAPIAN’S BIRTHDAY PARTY was known as the Wonders of the Sea. Each year Harriet served a six-course dinner, each course featuring a local catch. No Key Wester was ever turned away, though an official invitation was a particular treasure.
Harriet Ellen Kemp Arapian, b. Bahamas, August 1863, d. Key West, December 1918 (Actually 1909, but fiction must take some liberties.)
Harriet grew up in a house once floated on a barge from the Bahamas to Key West and furnished entirely with wrecker’s treasure: a fan made of ivory and roseate spoonbill feathers, shipped from New Orleans, meant for Spain, wrecked on the Florida Reef; a telescope shipped from Spain, meant for New Orleans, wrecked on the Florida Reef; a full set of china shipped from England, meant for Havana (not a piece broken, though the boat went down); and so much more—a piano always slightly out of tune, a gold coin bearing the head of Athena, a rhinoceros horn, a brass birdcage, a wooden dollhouse, a ship’s bell, a full wardrobe of French dresses, three Persian carpets, and a small gold cross, which Harriet wore around her neck her whole life. All wrecked on the Florida Reef.
Over the years, wrecking, sponging, cigar rolling, turtle hunting, and tourism made many Key Westers—the Kemps especially—rich, and yet the poor remained a never-ending resource, always replenished, just like the sea.
Harriet’s insistence on holding Arapian’s party in 1918 was because of the money she wanted to raise for Anahid.
Anahid Restrepian, b. Ordu, December 1899, d. Los Angeles, February 1980
The famous survivor of the Armenian Atrocities. Her book, full of daring escapes and terrible nightmares, was a best seller. Soon there would be a movie, in which Anahid reenacted her own suffering. For the past year, Anahid had appeared regularly at cities across the country, but she had yet to come to Florida, and Harriet had arranged for her to speak at the party, which was to be a fund-raiser for Armenian relief. Harriet, as her own death approached, was trying to shore up Arapian’s chances for an afterlife.
The Survivor
I was born in a killing station—Ordu, a port city on the Black Sea.
From the time Anahid arrived in America, she was no longer a body in the world; she was a story. America’s favorite suffering angel, 1917–1919.
This saved the Turks the trouble of marching my family across the plains in the grand pretense of deportation.
She gave speeches.
It saved the Turks the trouble of putting my parents, my brothers, myself into cattle cars and shipping us to the place where we would be killed.
She wrote a book.
A ride we would have been obliged to buy tickets for, by the way.
She starred in the movie of her own abuses—all under the instruction of the American couple who took her in, a Hollywood producer and his wife.
Instead, my father and my three brothers were put on a boat. And they were taken out to sea and drowned.
She delivered her speeches in English, a language she barely understood.
Except I can’t be sure, because I didn’t see it happen. All my mother and I could be sure of was that they were taken to jail and they never came back.
The speeches were written by a Hollywood scriptwriter, which does not mean they were untrue.
My mother and I were bought by a Muslim man, who married us both. To protect us, he said.
Anahid was turned into a story the way Daphne was transformed into a tree and Actaeon into a stag.
I ask myself often, Should I tell my people’s story or keep my people’s secret?
Sometimes she was the fairy-tale princess rescued from capture, other times a wrecked soul never really to be recovered.
In the end, this man was able to protect me, but not my mother.
No matter what story Anahid tried to tell, she was turned into another.
“Pray for me,” he said on our wedding day.
She would come to recognize the false hope in the eyes of someone spotting a mirage.
I ran away.
And the last steps of someone already dead.
I feel foolish for it; I didn’t understand the things I would see.
She came to recognize the crouch of someone checking for breath, for food, for shoes, for anything at all.
Bodies were everywhere. You’d see a skirt hiked up, a shirt disarranged, and you’d want to fix it. But you were also repelled—the bodies are a horror, yet you want to love them, treat them with respect. But the bodies, they are monsters. You have never seen anything so disgusting. But sometimes it is your neighbor, your school friend, even your enemy and you want to love them . . .
Women were prostituted to the Ottoman soldiers, until the women caught venereal diseases.
If the soldiers knew we were rich, they put us in prison first, so that we’d bribe our way out.
Women with venereal diseases were poisoned.
They’d take our money over and over until we had none left. Then they killed us.
The grasping actions of a falling empire.
The gendarmes caught me. I was forced to walk with all the rest—toward the desert in Syria. Why they bothered with this pretense, I will never know. If we made it there, it was only to be killed.
The sword saves bullets.
Women tried to give their babies away.
Women tried to give their babies away.
For three lifetimes I walked.
But we are on the way to a happy ending—a story written by another.
At the beginning, a Turk bought me for eighty-five cents. For him, that was a good deal of money.
In the end, I was bought by an American missionary for a dollar.
That is how I came to America. That is how I was saved.
All of that suffering and I only grew in value. Here her audiences would begin their applause. Maybe I only grew in value by fifteen cents. And here her audiences would rise to their feet. But fifteen cents is something, isn’t it?
She was, it turned out, a very good perf
ormer.
Mrs. Vanderbilt herself suggested Harriet invite Anahid to Key West.
The Sea of Wonders
In past years, Arapian’s birthday party had been a full-service dinner for a hundred or more people under a tent, but when Arapian turned sixty-eight, in 1918, his birthday dinner was a buffet. The food was plentiful—war did not stop the sea from giving bounty. There were conch fritters, yellow turtle eggs, and turtle steaks, Bahamian conch salad scorchingly spiced, green turtle soup, crab gumbo, dolphin fillets, stone crabs, baked crawfish, mackerel, kingfish, and scallops. The food was endless. As if death would be kept at the door by gluttony. As if genocide could be countered by abundance. The guests couldn’t stop remarking on it. And they couldn’t help but notice, by way of contrast, how thin Harriet had become. How had they failed to notice until now?
She’d always been thin—long neck, long nose, spindle arms and spindle legs (though those were rarely seen). All her life, Harriet was elegant or childlike, depending on how she chose to dress. Arapian was a shape-shifter too, able to perform European elegance or dockworker bravado as called upon. He had dressed to the hilt for the party—a tailored suit, polished shoes; his still thick, now white hair slicked back. Next to him, Harriet looked like a draped skeleton. People had to turn away or look her only in the eye.
At first they stood together in the living room, greeting guests as they arrived. Harriet was waiting for Anahid, and Arapian was waiting for the Greek, his old business partner, who had recently sent him a letter requesting a five-thousand-dollar settlement for an invention they had collaborated on.
But after an hour, neither Anahid nor the Greek had arrived. The house was swiftly filling, and the party spread into the small backyard and onto the large front porch. Harriet took a seat on the couch, with a lesser Vanderbilt down from New York next to her, while Arapian stood over them. Guests came to the couch in a swirling rotation. Already it was hard for Arapian to hear anything but the buzz and hum of the party; he and Harriet didn’t even try to speak to each other. He knew they would talk later, after everyone had left.
The Trojan War Museum Page 11