“I hope she looks better than that now,” she says coldly. “Girls her age will end up showing up in one of my stores sooner or later,” she adds as an afterthought. “Put a copy of the picture in all my stores. You never know.”
The next day Yuri takes a copy of Anna’s picture to each of Carla’s three stores. “Let me know if she comes here,” he tells the managers. “Her full name is written in the back of the photo. If she walks in here, find an excuse to get her address and phone number. Call me immediately.”
Lucy, at the store off Abovian, looks at it briefly and puts it on the table in the back room. “Will do,” she says.
Chapter Twenty-Five
I walk into the hotel lobby with trepidation. I would have preferred to meet in a café or a park. But at least he did not ask me to meet him in his room. We’re meeting in the lobby bar. I am deliberately underdressed. A pair of jeans, one of my favorite turtleneck sweaters and a light grey jacket. I wear flat shoes and minimal makeup. My hair is tied back in a ponytail.
But I am wearing his ring, next to Araxi Dadik’s. I probably make a bigger deal of that than he would; he might not even remember that he gave me the ring and asked me to always wear it.
I notice him sitting at a table with Manoj. I have not seen him in western clothes before. He’d always be in his Arabic robes and headdress when he visited me. He looks good. He also has jeans on, a white shirt and black leather jacket. His curly black hair, his high cheekbones, small eyes and goatee are as I remember them. I wonder what Manoj is doing here when I’m supposed to meet with Ahmed, but then I remember Sumaya telling me once that people of Al Barmaka’s importance cannot be seen in public alone. It will look like they are idly waiting for someone, which is unbecoming of their stature. They should always either be attended by a subordinate or in a meeting. I watch them for a minute, then take a deep breath and walk toward their table.
Manoj notices me first and jumps to his feet. “Ms. Lara,” he says with a wide smile that only he can produce, “what an auspicious day this is that I can see you again, in the presence of His Excellency.”
“Hello Lara,” says Ahmed and stands up, extending his hand.
“Hello Ahmed.” I had debated whether I should call him Your Excellency or Sir, because we are in the presence of others. He had given me permission to call him by his first name, but only when we were alone. But if I am to go forward free of the past, then ‘His Excellency’ has to die too.
“I do hope that you’ll forgive me Ms. Lara,” says Manoj, “but I have to attend to a few matters of some urgency. I will take my leave now.” With that, he is gone. Ahmed has not moved his eyes from me.
“Hello habibty,” he says when we sit down.
“How was your flight?” I ask, realizing that I have to get rid of my nervousness.
“It was fine. Thank you. I have waited a long time for this.” He looks at me for a minute, and adds, “Seven months and three days, to be precise.”
He notices the slight flicker passing over my eyes. I think I control it in just about two seconds, but he notices anyway. He smiles, the slow, knowing smile that gathers like a wave and concentrates in his eyes. Ahmed is not handsome. Even when he smiles, his face is not warm. He has a thin, bony, angular face, a shape that his goatee accentuates. There is a harshness in his looks that used to give me chills. But that’s what makes his kind manners, by contrast, even more impressive.
I want to get my practiced words out of the way as soon as possible. “Again, I am sorry for the way I left. I should have talked to you. I had issues to tend to, that’s all.” There. Done. It is all out. I’ve said what I came here to say. Perhaps I should just excuse myself and leave.
He waits to make sure I’m done talking. His hands move toward mine and then he withdraws them quickly as he fights an impulse to touch me. In the process he notices the ring, and his smile returns.
“Thank you,” he says, looking at the ring, and then returns to where I had left off. “You told me all that already over the phone, remember? If that’s all I wanted to hear, why did I come to see you?”
So much for rehearsing my words.
“You tell me. Why did you come to see me?”
“Because I need to understand. What we had should not have just ended. I need to understand why it had to end.”
The waiter appears, and Ahmed’s smile returns.
“How about a glass of champagne?”
“Okay.”
He orders a bottle, probably the most expensive. The waiter speeds away to fill the order.
“You do not understand why it ended,” I say looking him straight in the eye, “because you do not know how it started.” I know I have his attention. My words come out as a challenge, even though I do not intend them to be.
“I don’t know how it started? I think I know how you ended up gracing my life, Lara.”
“No, before that. Do you know how I ended up in Dubai in the first place?”
The waiter approaches with the bottle of champagne. He uncorks the wine and pours two glasses, puts the bottle in the cooler, wraps a white linen napkin around its neck and leaves.
Ahmed is too intrigued by my last question to pick up his glass. He keeps staring at me while the two glasses bubble up in front of us.
“How did you end up in Dubai?” he asks.
“Against my will. I was abducted. I was forced to come to Dubai. I did not want anything to do with that life. I spent eighteen months planning an escape.” I want to add—I’m sorry I had to finally succeed after reaching your place—but I realize how wrong that would sound, and stop myself just in time.
“We have more to talk about than I thought. I did not know that, Lara. And I’m sorry that I never asked. But I always assumed that people were where they wanted to be. That’s why, when Ayvazian offered to return you to me, I rejected his offer. My house is not a prison, I said. Whoever does not want to be there, should not be there. And I meant that then, and I mean it now.”
“Do you really think that every girl who ends up working in the nightclubs of Dubai is there by her own free will?” I know I am not being fair.
“No, I do not think that. I’ve heard of some cases. But I myself had never known a case like that.”
“At any rate, it is important that you know that I was not in Dubai voluntarily. I was not in that business voluntarily. If you knew the truth, I doubt you could remain indifferent, Ahmed.” I’m happy that I got that off of my chest. For me, that is probably the single most important piece of information that he needed to know. And now he does.
“Tell me what happened,” he says.
“It’s a long story, and I’ve already told you the bottom line.” I want to give him a way out if he is not seriously interested in the story.
“I want to know what happened to you,” he says. “But first, let’s not let this fine champagne get warm.” We lift our glasses and we take a sip.
“Now,” he says again, “what happened to you?”
I recount the highlights. My father’s death, my mother’s agreeing to let them have me, the first night in Ayvazian’s house, then Moscow, Dubai and his villa. Snapshots of each phase, as in screenshots from a movie.
He downs his champagne, and reaches for the bottle, but the waiter beats him to it. He refills our glasses and leaves.
“Here’s to you Lara.” He has a serious and sad expression on his face. “The most beautiful woman I have ever known, both inside and out.” He looks so serious that I cannot think of anything to say. We drink. I get the feeling that he’s processing what I’ve told him. He is not ready to react to it yet.
“Now,” he says, finishing his glass. “Let’s get out of here. Manoj and his Armenian driver will lead the way, and you and I will follow in a separate car. I brought my driver from Dubai, in case we needed to talk privately while traveling around the country. I cannot pronounce the name where we’re going. It is supposed to be a ski resort or something. We’ll have dinner there
.”
“Dzaghgadzor?” I say, surprised. It is around forty minutes from the city. The peak of the ski season has ended, but the hotels and restaurants remain open year round.
“Something like that,” he laughs. “They’re supposed to have excellent traditional dishes.”
We walk out of the hotel. Manoj and two men are standing by the entrance. As soon as they see us they scurry toward two cars parked at the front of the hotel, and open the doors. Manoj waits till Ahmed and I get in one of the cars, and then gets in the back seat of the other.
When the cars pull out of the hotel parking lot, he takes my hand, leans over and kisses it, then lets go. The gesture is abrupt, and takes me by surprise. But it does not create any awkwardness; if he had kept my hand in his any longer, it probably would have.
“I have a lot to tell you,” he says. “I have news specifically about you. But first, I want to learn a bit more.”
“You have news about me?” How can he come from Dubai with news about me? Scenarios involving Yuri and Ano flash in front of my eyes, and then my mind wanders to the way I left and I wonder if there are lingering legal ramifications.
“Don’t look so worried,” he laughs. “Would I come all the way here to give you bad news? But talk about yourself, your family, your village.” He slides back in the seat, puts his head on the backrest, and shuts his eyes. I remember that is how he listened—to music, to me, even to himself. In the villa, as he reclined and shut his eyes, he’d have his hand on my thigh while he listened to music. But his hands are folded on his chest now. “Talk,” he says again, “and don’t forget that family friend, the one Manoj met in your village.”
I imagine Manoj was thorough in his report. I tell Ahmed about Papa, Mama, my brothers and sisters, village life. I talk briefly about Gago and Edik, Edik’s dacha in Vardahovit, his bench at the edge of the cliff. I tell him Edik calls it the point of ‘truth and redemption.’ At that he briefly opens his eyes and turns towards me, then shuts them again. Of course I say nothing about the events of last fall in Sevajayr.
He has not moved again nor opened his eyes. This is good, I think. Nothing we’re doing now has anything to do with the past. The past is not here, except for some of his habits, like the way he listens. “Listening is a much more complex human function than most people realize,” he had told me once. It was late, he was tired, and he often revealed his personal thoughts when he was tired. “One of my teachers taught me to listen to two separate things: listen to the person talking to you, and listen to what he’s saying. If they’re not saying the same thing, don’t trust either. If they tell you the same thing, trust both.” I remembered my father’s story of the third ear then and wondered if it meant the same thing. But the thought left me like a flash. I was not supposed to indulge in deep thinking when I was with Ahmed. I was supposed to focus only on his needs.
Here he is now, in Yerevan, listening to me, and at the same time, as a separate process, listening to what I’m saying.
The car stops, and he opens his eyes. I’m done talking anyway. I’ve told him as much as I can. I’ve described people and places quickly, in wide brushstrokes, trying to tie them together to give a sense of the community that we have, hoping that I have managed not to bore him. I know he does not want to get involved in his girls’ personal lives. Sumaya told me the story of one of his Tunisian concubines, who tried to sweet talk him into helping her father, who was in some kind of trouble back home. He left her villa without a word, and the next morning she was let go.
That same man has now listened to me talk about my family and village life for over half an hour.
The restaurant is a collection of private dining rooms, the size of small one-room cottages, scattered along a slope, with beautifully landscaped pathways between the rooms. The pathways are lined with flowerbeds, and a variety of antique agricultural tools decorate the entrance of each dining room. There are large clay jugs, the type that we still use at home to carry and store drinking water, and there are clay and wooden butter churns, which we also still use to churn butter in Saralandj. I wonder how many other everyday utensils we have which would pass for decorative antiques in this place.
Ahmed and I are led to a cottage. The two drivers and Manoj are in a second cottage nearby. Manoj can express almost any emotion through his smiles, and his smile as he enters the cottage with the drivers shows disappointment, sadness and a touch of embarrassment. I get the feeling that Manoj is not happy about being lumped with the drivers, but he won’t insist on taking a dining room all by himself.
“We have a lot to talk about,” says Ahmed, checking the inside of the cottage. It is rustic, with crude, solid-wood tables with thick tabletops, and heavy chairs, with small wool carpets serving as cushions. Everything seems to be a novelty to him. “I had come prepared to discuss a few matters with you, not knowing your story. Now that I know some of your story, I can’t decide if I should change anything.”
It feels strange seeing him here. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say. “But I know it is important that we both understand that my being in Dubai was wrong. You did not know that. You tried to make something happen between us there; at least I felt that you were trying. I appreciated that then, and I appreciate it today. But whatever it was that you were trying to build would have been built on a lie.”
“That’s not what’s worrying me,” he says surprised. “Lara, good things come out of disasters all the time. One does not throw away the good just because it was a bad thing that made it happen in the first place! Is that what you want to do?”
His take on this is far too simplistic, but still, I have to admit, I had not thought of it that way before. A crime was committed, it destroyed my life, but something good came out of it. If I accept the good, does that mean I am implicitly accepting the bad from which it came? Interesting take, I think, but way too naïve. Besides, what exactly was the good that came out of the bad? The good according to him? According to me? And I know precisely what the “bad” was in this case, and I reject it. He does not, not entirely. He accepted me knowing that I was a prostitute.
“It is not that simple, and I think you know it,” I say, trying not to sound patronizing. “This is not like suffering a setback in one business venture, which inadvertently leads to a better opportunity somewhere else.”
Two waiters open the door, each carrying a large tray. There is almost everything except pork. Ahmed, although not a strict Muslim, does not eat pork, partly because Islam prohibits it, but mostly because it is alien to him. He will not be able to taste the famous Armenian pork khorovadz, nor some of the pork sausages.
The two trays are the appetizers. The main courses will come when we ring the bell. The special today is a rabbit stew, says the waiter, in tomato and red wine sauce, cabbage, carrots, potatoes, garlic and a few types of greens. He recommends it strongly. But Manoj has also ordered lamb khorovadz, he says. I translate to Ahmed. Ahmed does not want to be interrupted by ordering food, so he’s asked Manoj to arrange a large selection. The waiter asks what we’d like to drink.
“What do they usually drink with this food?” asks Ahmed.
“Cognac, vodka or wine. But I’m not sure you’d like the local wines.” I remember one of Edik’s comments about local wines.
“Let’s try your famous cognac then. I’ve heard it is good.”
Ahmed focuses on the various dishes for a minute, asking me what each one is. I think he’s making small talk because he does not want to be interrupted in the middle of something more serious when the waiter returns with the cognac. I feel like lightening the mood too, so, a bit more jovially than I usually talk to him, I describe the various local cheeses, the Armenian kamadz matsun, which is similar to the Lebanese labne we used to have for breakfast in Dubai, the famous Armenian basturma, which he knows about from the Middle East, the traditional large plate of ganachi, which includes six or seven fresh green herbs, then I pass to the various salads, and I get more a
nimated as I go, happy to explain to him something from my life…then I notice that he is staring at me, not at the dishes that I’m pointing to.
“Are you listening to what I’m saying or to me?” I ask laughing.
“You remember!” He is moved. He fights another impulse to touch me. “I love listening to you,” he says.
I ignore his comment. The waiter returns, serves the cognac and leaves.
“Where were we?” he asks, taking a sip of his cognac. “This is strong. I’ve had this after dinner, not with dinner. Are you sure they drink this with dinner?”
“I’m sure, but you don’t have to. Do you want something else?” and I hold up the little button that summons the waiter.
“No, no, this is fine,” he says. “Where were we?”
“We were talking about building something on a crime, and how that was not the same as good coming out of a setback.”
“That’s what you were saying,” he says with a devious smile. “But it is okay, let’s talk about that. Lara, regardless of how we met, we’re not strangers, right? We had something together, and it was not just one night or a day or two, but three months. So, for old times’ sake, please just say it, exactly as you feel it.”
Is this the moment when I acknowledge and confront the past? I have a direct invitation from the only representative of the past that matters.
“Say it as I feel it,” I repeat, having decided to take the plunge. “Here are the facts, Ahmed. You bought me as a prostitute. I was basically your property. Sorry,” I say when I notice him cringe, “but that is the truth. Even if I had chosen that… Umm… let’s call it a profession, even if I had chosen that life, I was still captive in your beautiful villa. A bird in a golden cage still dreams of the wilderness, we say here. I was such a bird. Now, imagine that I did not choose the profession in the first place, and I did not want to be bought and sold, and I did not want to be anyone’s possession. I had to go through those motions, for fear of my life, for the safety of my family and because of the absolute lack of alternatives. Until I escaped. Imagine all that, Ahmed, and tell me you don’t understand what is bothering me.”
The Doves of Ohanavank Page 21