Granta 131

by Sigrid Rausing

  One Armenian paper, Asbarez of Los Angeles, claimed that Turks and rebels had murdered eighty Armenians in Kessab. Other overseas Armenians disseminated reports of mass killings and posted photos and videos that included the bloody corpse of a woman with a crucifix rammed into her mouth. It later transpired that the photo was from Inner Depravity, a 2005 Canadian horror film.

  Armenians worldwide mobilised behind the #SaveKessab social-media campaign. Armenian-American television celebrity Kim Kardashian, whose public persona would previously have offended Syria’s conservative Armenians, tweeted: ‘Please let’s not let history repeat itself!!!!!! Let’s get this trending!!!! #SaveKessab #ArmenianGenocide.’ Mayor Chaparyan tried to set the record straight, declaring, ‘Armenians [have not been] killed. I do not know where these rumours are being created.’

  Nonetheless, the Armenian disinformation campaign was having an effect. Four members of the US Congress wrote to President Barack Obama on 28 March: ‘With the Christian Armenian community being uprooted from its homeland, yet again, we strongly urge you to take all necessary measures without delay to safeguard the Christian Armenian community of Kessab.’ On 2 April, California Congressman Adam Schiff questioned American UN Ambassador Samantha Power, a vocal supporter of anti-Assad rebels, about Kessab’s Armenians. Schiff stated that ‘there is a particular poignancy to their being targeted in this manner’. One week later, six members of Congress denounced Turkey at a news conference in Washington. The Armenian National Committee urged the president and Congress to compel Turkey to cease its support for another genocide of Armenians. An online petition demanded that the US stop ‘history repeating itself’. Despite the Armenian lobby’s exaggerations and distortions, the onslaught was forcing Turkey to weigh its patronage of the rebels in Kessab against the harm to its relationship with the West.

  On Tuesday, 3 June, Turkey for the first time branded the Nusra Front that had led the assault on Kessab a ‘terrorist organisation’. Turkish support for al-Nusra and its allies gradually dried up in the Kessab region, easing the way for a Syrian Army offensive. Although Turkey continued to allow jihadists to enter Syria along the rest of the five-hundred-mile border, Kessab became a no-go area for the jihadis. Syrian government forces took the town on 15 June, ending a three-month occupation. The people began returning the next day.

  Garo Manjikian told me that he returned within hours of Kessab’s liberation. He reopened his grocery store, but his tractors and other farm equipment had been stolen. He and some friends founded the Syrian Armenian Committee for Urgent Relief and Rehabilitation of Kessab to oversee reconstruction. Strangely, I did not see Syrian soldiers in the town. Apart from a few checkpoints on the roads outside, there was no military presence to defend the area from a second rebel invasion. And there was little if any fear of it. ‘The Turks will not do the same thing again,’ Manjikian said with confidence, placing his trust in the Armenian lobby in the US.

  Although the rebels damaged the town, they did not destroy it. Most buildings were intact, but windows were smashed, doors removed and furniture looted. The rebels were not alone in the pillaging – one house that I visited had been looted by ‘liberators’ from the Syrian Army. The jihadist occupiers took a special interest in pianos, destroying every single one. The Armenian Cultural Centre’s music school had been teaching piano to twenty-seven students. The Cultural Centre had been burned, along with its books and pictures.

  The pastors of the three Christian denominations took me on a tour of their churches. They were pleased that so many members of their respective flocks had returned, although about 20 per cent stayed in Latakia or left Syria. ‘We cannot stop people emigrating,’ Pastor Sevag Trashian said, ‘but the majority of our community wants to stay here. We want to return Kessab to its good days. We have our own contribution as Christians and as Armenians to this mosaic.’

  The three clerics showed me the damage to their churches, the desecration, the burned books, the slashed paintings. Artisans labouring to restore the church buildings had yet to remove the jihadists’ Arabic graffiti:

  Soldiers of the Only One were here. God willing, we will crush the Christians, Armenians and Alawis.

  We will go after you wherever you go, God willing.

  Do not rejoice, Christians. We will step on you.

  It is a matter of time before we get you, worshippers of the cross.

  In Deir Ezzor, where a century ago thousands of Armenians had been herded into camps, starved and killed, jihadis blew up the Armenian Genocide Memorial Church. They then scattered the bones of the victims who perished between 1915 and 1918.

  The first time I visited Kessab was in 1987. My friend Armen Mazloumian, whose grandfather founded the famous Baron’s Hotel in Aleppo, escorted me to the Evangelical Protestant church. It was as austere as any Presbyterian kirk in Scotland, devoid of Eastern Christianity’s icons, incense and statues. The only decoration was a childlike painting that I described at the time:

  It showed Jesus Christ, the Good Shepherd, holding in His arms the body of a slain boy, the boy’s head and arms dangling like Christ’s own in Michelangelo’s Pietà. Behind Him were the mountains of Armenia, and at His feet was a mound of skulls and bones with the date ‘1915’ written on them. The caption was in Armenian, which Armen translated: ‘So much blood. Let our grandchildren forgive you.’

  The painting, like everything else in all of Kessab’s churches, had been burned.

  * * *

  PETER GIZZI

  Release the Darkness to New Lichen

  but I found a way to say no

  to the wood in my house

  it kept creaking

  wouldn’t stop talking

  I found a way to say no

  I need to be standing

  in the warmth of the wood

  that the sun made

  I need to find myself dissolving

  otherwise it is all otherwise

  I’m lost, did I say that

  I saw the frill of light today

  walking on the path

  could you hear the stirring

  in the wood, pine needles

  and the branches

  was it wind or a creature

  am I here or is it over

  this was the first day

  the nothing day

  in the nothing year

  it gave me courage

  it gave hints of blue,

  clouds, electric

  and dancing

  it gave me rays

  I’ve never seen

  shooting down

  touching things

  this was the first day

  * * *

  NOTHING EVER HAPPENS HERE

  Ottessa Moshfegh

  The house was white stucco, ranch-style, with tall hedges and a large semicircular driveway. There was a crumbling pool out back full of rust stains and carcasses of squirrels that had fallen in and slowly starved to death. I used to tan out there on a lawn chair before auditions, fantasizing about getting rich and famous. My room had green shag carpeting and a twin-size bed on a plywood frame, a little nightstand with a child’s lamp in the shape of a clown. Above my bed hung an old framed poster of Marlon Brando in One-Eyed Jacks. It would have done me well if I’d prayed to that poster, but I’d never even heard of Marlon Brando before. I was eighteen. I was living in an area of Los Angeles called Hancock Park: manicured lawns, big clean houses, expensive cars, a country club. Walking around those quiet streets, I felt like I was on the set of a soap opera about the private lives of business executives and their sexy wives. One day I’d star in something like that, I hoped. I had limited experience as an actor in high school, first as George in Our Town and then as Romeo in Romeo and Juliet. People had told me I looked like a sandy-haired Pierce Brosnan. I was broke, and I was a nobody, but I was happy.

  Those first few months in Los Angeles, I lived off powdered cinnamon doughnuts and orange soda, fries from Astro Burger, and occasional joints rolled with sta
le weed my stepdad had given me back in Utah as a graduation present. Most days I took the bus around Hollywood, listening to the Eagles on my Walkman and imagining what life was like for all those people way up in the hills. I’d walk up Rossmore, which turned into Vine once you hit Hollywood, and then I’d get on a crosstown local down Santa Monica Boulevard. I liked to sit with all the young kids in school uniforms, the teenage runaways in rags and leather jackets, the crazies, the drunks, housekeepers with their romance novels, old men with their spittle, whores with their hairspray. This was miraculous to me. I’d never seen people like that before. Sometimes I studied them like an actor would, noting their postures, their sneering or sleeping faces, but I wasn’t very gifted. I was observant, but I couldn’t act. When the bus reached the beach, I’d get off and run up and down the stairs that led from the street to the shoreline. I’d take off my shirt, lie out on the sand, catch some rays, look at the water for a minute, then take the bus back home.

  In the evenings, I bussed tables in a pizza parlor on Beverly Boulevard. Nobody important ever came in. Mostly I brought out baskets of bread and carafes of box wine, picked up pizza crusts and grease-soaked napkins. I never ate the food there. Somehow that felt beneath me. If I didn’t have to work and there was a game going on, I’d take the bus out to Dodger Stadium and walk around just to get a feel for the crowd, the excitement. Nearby, in Elysian Park, I found a spot on a little cliff where I could listen to the cheers from the crowd and watch the traffic on the freeway, the mountains, the pale gray and sandy terrain. With all those ugly little streets in the ravine down below, LA looked like anywhere. It made me miss Gunnison. Sometimes I’d smoke a joint and walk around the swaying eucalyptus, peek into the cars parked along the fire road. Sedate, unblinking Mexicans sat in jalopies in shadows under the trees. Middle-aged men in dark glasses flicked their cigarettes out their windows as I passed. I had some idea of what they were doing there. I did not return anyone’s leers. I stayed out of the woods. At home, alone, I concentrated on whatever was on television. I had a black-and-white mini Toshiba. It was the first big thing I’d ever bought with my own money back in Gunnison and the most expensive thing I owned.

  My landlady’s name was Mrs Honigbaum. When I lived with her, she would have been in her late sixties. She wore a short dark blond wig and large gold-framed eyeglasses. Her fingernails were long and fake and painted pink. Her posture was stooped in the shiny quilted housecoat she wore when she walked around. Usually she sat behind her desk in a sleeveless blouse, her thin, spotted arms swaying as she gestured and pulled Kools from a tooled leather cigarette case. Her ears and nose were humongous, and the skin on her face was stretched up toward her temples in a way that made her look stunned all the time. Her makeup was like stage makeup, or what they put on dead bodies in open caskets. It was applied heavy-handedly, in broad strokes of blue and pink and bronze. Still, I didn’t think she was unattractive. I had never met a Jew before, or anyone intellectual at all back in Gunnison.

  Mrs Honigbaum rented rooms in her house for forty-five dollars a week to young men who came to her through a disreputable talent agent – my agent. Forty-five dollars a week wasn’t cheap at the time, but my agent had made the arrangements and I didn’t question him. His name was Bob Sears. I never met him face-to-face. I’d found him by calling the operator back in Gunnison and asking to speak to a Los Angeles talent scout. Bob Sears took me on as a client ‘sight unseen’ because, he said, I sounded good-looking and American over the phone. He said that once I had a few odd gigs under my belt, I could start doing ad work on game shows, then commercials, then bit roles on soaps, then small parts in sitcoms, then prime-time dramas. Soon Scorsese would come knocking, he said. I didn’t know who Scorsese was, but I believed him.

  Once I got to town, I called Bob Sears nearly every weekday morning to find out where to go for auditions and what time to be there. Mrs Honigbaum let me use the phone in her bedroom. I think I was the only tenant to have that privilege. Her bedroom was dark and humid, with tinted glass doors looking out onto the swimming pool. Mirrors lined one wall. Everything smelled of vanilla and mouthwash and mothballs. A dresser was topped with a hundred glass vials of perfumes and potions and serums I guessed were meant to keep her youthful. There was a zebra-skin rug, a shiny floral bedspread. The ceiling lamp was a yellow crystal chandelier. When the door to the bathroom was open, I saw the flesh-colored marble, a vanity covered in makeup and brushes and pencils, a bare styrofoam head. The light bulbs were fixed along the edges of the mirror, like in backstage dressing rooms. I was very impressed by that. I went in there and studied my face in that lighting, but only for a minute at a time. I didn’t want to get caught. While I was on the phone with Bob Sears, the maid sometimes flitted in and out, depositing stacks of clean towels, collecting the crumpled, lipstick-smeared tissues from the waste bin by the bed. The phone was an old rotary, the numbers faded and greasy, and the receiver smelled like halitosis. The smell didn’t really bother me. In fact, I liked everything about Mrs Honigbaum. She was kind. She was generous. She flattered and cajoled me, the way grandmothers do.

  Bob Sears had said I’d need a headshot, so before I’d left Gunnison, my mother drove me to the mall in Ephraim to have my portrait taken. I had a lazy, wandering eye, and so I wasn’t allowed to drive. She drove me resentfully, sighing and tapping her finger on the steering wheel at red lights, complaining about how late it was, how hard she’d worked all day, how the mall gave her a headache. ‘I guess in Hollywood they have chauffeurs to drive you around and servants to make your food,’ she said. ‘And butlers to pick up your dirty underwear. Is that what you expect? Your Highness?’

  ‘I’m going to Hollywood to work,’ I reminded her. ‘As an actor. It’s a job. People really do it.’

  ‘I don’t see why you can’t be an actor here, where everybody already knows you. Everybody loves you here. What’s so terrible about that?’

  ‘Because nobody here knows anything,’ I explained. ‘So what they think doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Keep biting the hand and it might slap you across the face one day,’ she said. ‘Boys like you are a dime a dozen out there. You think those Hollywood people will be lining up just to tie your shoes? You think you’re so lucky? You want an easy life? You want to roller-skate on the beach? Even the hairs on your head are numbered. Don’t forget that.’

  I really did want an easy life. I looked out the window at the short little houses, the flat open plains, the sky purple and orange, blinding sparks of honey-colored light shooting over the western mountains where the sun went down. ‘Nothing ever happens here,’ I said.

  ‘You call fireworks over the reservoir nothing? How about that public library you’ve never once set foot in? How about all those teachers who I had to beg not to fail you? You think you’re smarter than all them? Smarter than teachers?’

  ‘No,’ I answered. I knew I wasn’t smart back then. Being an actor seemed like an appropriate career for someone like me.

  ‘You’re running out on your sister, on Larry,’ said my mother. ‘What can I say? Just don’t get yourself murdered. Or do. It’s your life.’ She turned up the radio. I kept quiet for the rest of the drive.

  My life in Gunnison really wasn’t that bad. I was popular and I had fun, and pretty girls followed me around. I’d been like a celebrity in my high school – prom king, class president. I was voted ‘most likely to succeed’ even though my grades were awful. I could have stayed in Gunnison, gotten a job at the prison, worked up the ranks, married any girl I chose, but that wasn’t the kind of life I wanted. I wanted to be a star. The closest movie theater was in Provo, an hour and a half away. I’d seen Rocky and Star Wars there. Whatever else I’d watched came through one of the three TV channels we had in Gunnison. I didn’t particularly like movies. It seemed like hard work to act in something that went on for so long. I thought I could move to Hollywood and get a role on a show like Eight Is Enough as the cool older brother. And later I could be like
Starsky in Starsky and Hutch.

  I explained all this to the photographer at the mall. ‘People say I look like Pierce Brosnan,’ I told him. He said he agreed, handed me a flimsy plastic comb, told me to sit down and wait my turn. I remember the little kids and babies in fancy clothes in the waiting room, crying and nagging their mothers. I combed my hair and practiced making faces in the mirror on the wall. My mother went to Rydell’s and came back with a new rhinestone belt on. ‘Discount,’ she said. I suspect she lifted it. She did that when she was in a bad mood. Then she sat down next to me and read People magazine and smoked. ‘Don’t smile too much,’ she said when it was my turn with the photographer. ‘You don’t want to look desperate.’

  Oh, my mother. A week later she drove me to the bus stop. It was barely five in the morning and she still wore her burgundy satin negligee and curlers in her hair, a denim jacket thrown over her sunburnt shoulders. She drove slowly on the empty roads, coasted through the blinking red lights as though they didn’t exist, stayed silent as the moon. Finally she pulled over and lit a cigarette. I watched a tear coast down her cheek. She didn’t look at me. I opened the car door. ‘Call me,’ is all she said. I said I would. I watched as she pulled a U-turn and drove away.