The Lamppost Diary

by Agop J. Hacikyan

  ‘Stop it, Mama. I hate that song. Tell me, what’s aksor?’

  ‘You’re too young to know. Now finish your breakfast.’

  Tomas was cocked like a loaded gun, ready to exterminate everybody older, taller, bigger, larger, fatter. He pointed to his grandfather’s imposing portrait on the wall behind the sofa. ‘He’d tell me if he was here.’

  Mama’s face changed. She gazed at the portrait. She had lost her father during the aksor. Tears welled up in her eyes. Tomas regretted his remark. He was, however, persuaded that aksor meant something dreadful – a long creeping caravan of short-legged serpents, or something like that.

  ‘If you don’t tell me I’ll ask Ekrem Bey, my Turkish teacher. I know aksor is mouhajirlik in Turkish. Papa told me.’

  ‘Don’t you dare!’

  An apprehensive silence.

  ‘I will, if you don’t tell me.’

  ‘Did I tell you that we’re going to the cinema on Sunday?’

  ‘No. And I don’t care.’ He held up a slice of pancetta between his fingers, as if in a gesture of negation. Then, his voice breaking with emotion, ‘I’ll ask my Turkish teacher.’

  His mother was caught between boundless love and extreme anger. Out of desperation, seeing her son’s distress, she blurted out, ‘Very well.’ She lowered her voice, ‘Aksor is when people are forced to leave their homes and go to other places.’

  Tomas was as docile as a kitten.

  ‘We had to leave Yerznga and go to another place.’

  ‘What place?’

  ‘Another country.’

  ‘What country?’ Receiving no reply, he raised his voice, ‘What country?’

  ‘I’ll tell you more when you’re a little bigger.’

  ‘Not again!’ His delicate face was now transformed by fury. He dropped his fork noisily on the plate, got up, shoved his chair violently aside and ran out of the dining room.

  Father was still in the kitchen, grilling ochi chornyes in the black frying pan ...

  *

  The following morning Tomas, sunk in his own bitterness, was looking out the living room window. Everyone was heading to work. ‘We’ll tell you when you grow up.’ The words vibrated in his ears. He yearned for the big kids’ world with jumbled impatience. ‘When you’re a little older.’ He was getting a taste of dissatisfaction, oblivious to the fact that it was inherent to man, to grown-ups. I’m small, he thought. He wondered if it was his face that made him look younger than he was. Damn it! He still had to wait many long months before he was old enough. He was convinced his childhood would drag on forever, even after he had children of his own. He had, on the other hand, no idea that people never abandoned their childhood; they held it tight inside. It wasn’t a question of growing that turned people into adults; it was the slow accretion of a thick skin to protect their innocence. Only then would they begin to distinguish between lies and reality.

  *

  When he left the apartment building to go to school he didn’t wave back at his mother who was waving at him from the balcony.

  The shopkeepers were rolling up the metal shutters to open for business. He put his hand on the lamppost and circled it three times. Anya was on the opposite pavement, on her way to school. As soon as he saw her, he crossed the street to join her.

  ‘Anya!’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t see you.’

  He stared into her big sapphire-blue eyes. How sad that they didn’t attend the same school. Anya was Russian. There were no Russian schools in the city. As an Orthodox Christian, she went to a Greek school. Tomas was jealous of her, because her parents never lied to her. Anya’s grandfather, Alexandr Novotni, like other high-ranking noblemen in the Czar’s army, had fled into exile with his family after the 1917 revolution. A year or two after arriving in Constantinople he opened a Russian supper club on Grand’ rue de Péra, a prime location in the heart of the city.

  Tomas found it fascinating to hear Anya speak Russian with her parents, Greek with her classmates and Turkish with him. They first walked slowly and then slid over the crowded vault of the city.

  *

  The first two weeks of October turned out to be the hottest of the year. The hot, humid days baked the city. People attributed this unusual weather to the dramatic expansion of the war. The bombs, the artillery, they thought, were warming up the atmosphere; some even presaged a sudden meltdown of the power stations in and around the city. The rattling buzz of the old electric fan on the mahogany sideboard in the dining room added an extra din to Papa’s ever-preoccupied mind. Would Germany, as it did to the Soviet Union, invade Turkey? Would the government deploy its reservists to the eastern front? The ceaseless rumble of cars, lumbering trucks and pushcarts made him get up and shut the window. Tomas was busy doing homework at the dining table. The heat was making him all the more resentful of the essay about the upcoming Republic Day he had to write for history class.

  Months were still passing as slowly as growing grass. Despite the sluggishness of the lunar cycle, Tomas had grown with vertiginous haste: tall as a grotesquely elongated gourd. Taken in by Tomas’s sizeable physical stature, his father decided to breach the generation gap and tell him all about the aksor.

  Papa began a journey of memory, recalling his parents, his friends ... He had had an exciting youth. He had been privileged ...

  He began by describing their ancestral home in Afyon: the three-storey stone mansion with a stable for horses and ponies; a huge barn for cows, oxen and sheep; and fields covered with poppies. Tomas remembered, his heart pounding, that not very long ago an old family friend had sent them a jar of poppy jam. It was so delicious and so intoxicating that he could have devoured the whole jar in a single sitting. He was never allowed, though, to eat more than a spoonful.

  Then Papa talked about the Ottoman decree of 1915 that forced the Armenians to abandon their homes within forty-eight hours. The fascinating impression of the stone mansion was gradually replaced by ghastly visions: policemen, soldiers, carriages ... rail cars jammed with deportees ... orphans, missionaries, Deir el-Zor, an infinite expanse of Syrian desert ... scorching ... then holy Jerusalem ... Warsaw, Auschwitz, the Gestapo, gas chambers; no, no, they were just the headlines Tomas tried to read secretly in the newspapers every now and then ...

  Tomas had never imagined that aksor meant death, extinction, annihilation ... death everywhere: in the cellar, down in the laundry room, rats swarming on the cement floor, huge rats with no ears, rats with half tails ... no longer rats, but creeping legless soldiers, some floating belly-up in the wash basins, in ditches, in open sewers along the roads and in the dingy pages of history. How he wished he could devour a jarful of poppy jam and plunge into a timeless slumber. Corpses congealed with pitch-black blood. Brigands, gladiators with iron feet, bare and heavy, assaulting men, women and children. He heard death cries bubbling, jetting out of the Euphrates. He didn’t know what or where the Euphrates was. He didn’t know that the universe had turned upside-down and drowned in blood.

  His jaws were clenched. His teeth were grinding against each other. He strove to hide his horror so Papa would tell the rest.

  Papa’s memory stretched out like an unending fence of barbed wire. He envisaged his son among the phantoms of children; like colourless shadows, more elongated than their diminutive bodies. He held Tomas’s hand. He’d never dreamed that one day he would gather enough nerve to tell his son about God’s unforgivable negligence – the Armenian passion – to speak of yellowed bellies, hair caked in blood and mud, and to speak of death, the thankless sequel to being born.

  Papa’s face changed into a wax death mask; the past was incarnate in his being. He remembered how they had been hauled out of their homes and hiding places. He recalled everything he had read not too long ago in the British press about Kristallnacht, when the windows of Jewish homes and businesses were smashed and German Jews were forced from their homes and dragged through the streets. What horrified him most was not the cruel events and barbaric off
ences, but the relentless ferocity of human nature throughout history. Day by day, hour by hour, with every heartbeat, man was losing his humanity. How he wished to convince himself that those wretched years were over and done with. How he wished he could simply turn the page and fail to remember the past.

  Now Tomas was part of that human flood streaming slowly under the sizzling sun, far and wide, down, down, down, profound as memory. Papa held Tomas’s hand and continued to walk while Emma was driving an ox-cart through a deep pool of human excrement which surged over her and the exhausted animal. Around them, behind them, in front of them people were trying to break out. Occasionally the road rose more steeply and they could see clearly the chaotic multitude trudging through dust, mud and human debris that stretched far into the distance. A ten-foot-tall military guard, a swarthy upright beast, stood on its hind legs, ordering Emma to stop the carriage. One leg was already over the cart. Tomas and Papa observed the scene, paralyzed. But not for long. Grabbing his hand, Papa propelled him forward; they were running towards the finish line. Then, stumbling, panting, they dashed to the other side of the river. But they returned to exactly where they had been before. All Papa wanted was to save his son; only fate could spare them as a blade of grass that outlasts a storm.

  The ten-foot guard approached, ready to strike. A crowd of emaciated, mangy-looking women emerged from behind. They bellowed words that had no vowels. All at once they all tried to scurry away, but they were slow. And too late! The monster pursued the women and cast a huge wire fishing net with weights in the corners over them. They had been walking for days when the knot in Tomas’s throat got larger and tighter. He shrieked like a beast on its way to the slaughterhouse, louder than the thundering clouds. Papa had tears in his eyes that he could no longer conceal. Tomas had never before seen him weep. He hugged him so tightly that Papa was in danger of suffocating. How he wished he hadn’t asked about aksor. And how he loathed Papa for disclosing its true meaning.

  Mama darted in, horror-stricken. Then Noni, the moderator of the family, arrived and stopped Papa from telling Tomas the rest, which was much longer than all the years that had gone by since 1915. Tomas tasted the bitterness in his mouth and was sick.

  He had at last learned the meaning of the deportations: the elemental need to annihilate and eradicate otherness. His parents had been driven out of their home in Anatolia under gory threats. A slender image carved out of time and pain would remain shimmering before his eyes: executed masses, knives driven into mothers, fathers, grandparents and angelic sisters. His father and his family had managed to end up in Jerusalem, finding refuge in the Saint James Armenian Monastery there. His relatives on his mother’s side were sent on a journey organized by the Ottoman Tourist Bureau to Deir el-Zor, the Syrian wasteland.

  Dreadful visions would continue to wound Tomas, more profoundly than any bullet. There was no more growing up to do.5

  7

  May was coming to an end. Tomas was already in his summer outfit: navy-blue shorts, a sailor shirt with a matching white sailor cap, a pair of sandals and hair cut ultra short. The holidays weren’t far away. He had already been to Kilyos, the fringe of the universe where the Black Sea begins, for his first swim of the year. The shore stretched away as far as the eye could see – apart from a few bathing cabins scattered here and there, just the solitude of windswept sand. The blue-green sea fused with the sky without drenching it. Kilyos was about 25 kilometres from the centre of the city – an enjoyable drive over undulating roads endlessly lined with trees daubed white to facilitate night driving. Tomas, sitting in the back of his father’s ’36-model Hudson Terraplane, gazed out of the window, trying to count the trees as they flitted by in the dawning light. For him it was a journey halfway around the world, though it mustn’t have taken more than an hour and a half or two at most. It was always with his first swim in Kilyos that his summer began.

  But none of this had anything to do with what happened to him that afternoon.

  He was with his mother at Diran’s delicatessen to buy pastιrma, anchovies, pickles, chiroz, dried mackerel and salted tunny to celebrate Madame Adriné’s husband’s new lease of life after the successful removal of his gall bladder, which had caused him excruciating pain for the past three years. Drinking gallons of okra juice, eating bushels of stewed dandelion, and plastering his grilled lamb chops and meatballs with sacks of oregano hadn’t helped him in the least. As a last resort, before opting for surgery, he had even tried starting each day by drinking baby urine that had chilled on the balcony overnight in the belief that it would dissolve the stones, but it had only hardened them and worsened his heartburn.

  Shopping at Diran’s was one of Tomas’s favourite pastimes. It compensated for the boring weekly visits to Boghos’s barber-shop, which was hidden behind frosted glass windows next to a hideous apartment building. Boghos would place a narrow wooden plank on the arms of the barber’s chair and make Tomas perch on it while he cut his hair. It wasn’t the most comfortable way to spend forty-five minutes, being choked by a white towel around his cricked neck while listening to adults discussing politics.

  Diran’s shop was squeezed between a bakery and a florist’s. Despite its awkward shape and size, it was the oldest commercial establishment on the street, with an impressive clientele. It was Diran’s father, Gevork Galents, who had started the business just after the First World War. After labouring for years in a slaughterhouse and then in a sausage shop, the old man moved to the city to open a delicatessen, partly with his savings and partly with money borrowed from his uncle. As the number of clients multiplied so did the number of shelves and the length of the marble counter. A steadily increasing array of cans, bottles, sacks, boxes and jars gradually filled up the place, blocking even the two transom windows, leaving the main door the only opening through which daylight could penetrate the shop. There was no room left for expansion. The old man had been against moving to larger premises; he was convinced that it would bring him bad luck and destroy the reputation he had built up over the years as the best delicatessen in Nişantaşι. His son Diran, however, would have liked to move to a bigger and more modern shop, but the war hindered his ambition. His clientele consisted mostly of minorities, but he also enjoyed a crowd of respectable, well-to-do Turkish patrons.

  Tomas was in love with the shop. He loved everything Diran sold. He loved it especially when Diran gave him a slice of salami or a piece of feta cheese to taste so he could give his approval to cut the rest. Tomas also liked to watch Ali, Diran’s blind aide-de-camp who seemed to grow older with each visit and filled Tomas with pity. Ali wore a neatly ironed white tunic like his boss. He usually stood in the back of the shop, where the preserves and a variety of cans were carefully arranged on rows of wooden shelves. Despite his blindness, he worked as if he saw everything with great clarity. Tomas wondered if Ali could see in his dreams.

  Mother and son were standing in front of the long wooden icebox, which overflowed with stuffed vine leaves, Russian salad bathing in mayonnaise, tarama, cheeses and a variety of sweetmeats, including lakerda, garlicky soujouk sausages and fish roe. The contents of the icebox were safe from the ever-famished local black flies, popular patrons of the food and butcher’s shops throughout the city.

  The sausages caught Tomas’s attention. There were all kinds: dry ones, soft ones, long Italian and Hungarian salamis, and large mortadella rolls with complexions resembling Dalmatian hounds. Gathering extraordinary courage, he decided to ask his mother something of exceptional secrecy. It was so secretive that when he presented her with the question it sounded more like a shy whisper than a forthright query.

  Mama was busy telling Diran how thinly he should slice the salami: medium thin and diagonally to give the slices an oval shape.

  Tomas tugged at Mama’s sleeve and she looked at him as if to say ‘Later, son’. Tomas repeated the question in an equally inaudible mumble.

  ‘I can’t hear what you’re saying.’

  Diran was busy
cutting the salami according to his client’s instructions.

  Tomas dragged his mother to the back of the shop, next to the olive oil bottles. He blushed. ‘My bouboulig gets hard and big when I think or see beautiful things.’ He halted for a moment; then, blushing even more, he added, ‘But not the icebox; it’s very nice; I love everything in there. I love it all but ...’

  His mother smiled. Her smile encouraged Tomas to explain more about his newly discovered phallic peculiarities.

  ‘What I mean is that ... em, it becomes big and hard when I think of girls.’

  ‘Girls?’

  ‘Yes, naked girls.’

  His mother was at a loss for words. It was her turn to blush. ‘Where do you see naked girls?’ she asked as matter-of-factly as she could.

  ‘At the hammam, when you take me there for a bath.’

  ‘So your bouboulig gets hard; is that what you’re trying to say?’ The word penis was too gross for her to pronounce.

  ‘Yes, that’s what I’m saying. Didn’t you hear?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘It’s normal, son: you’re becoming a man,’ she smiled.

  ‘I need a big, hard bouboul to become a man?!’ He dropped the diminutive –ig at the end as he was becoming a full-fledged man.

  After a moment’s pause, she replied, ‘Yes, but don’t touch it when it gets hard and big.’

  Diran’s voice came from the front of the shop: ‘Digin Lucie, the salami is ready. Anything else?’

  ‘No! Don’t touch it, Diran.’

  ‘Touch what, Digin?’

  ‘I’m sorry: yes, yes, and some white cheese.’ Embarrassed, she turned to Tomas. ‘Yes, as I was saying, don’t touch your bouboulig.’

  ‘Why not? It’s mine, isn’t it?’

  ‘Of course it’s yours, Tomas.’

  The boy was assured of his possession, but he looked concerned. ‘What will happen if I touch it?’