Orhan's Inheritance

by Aline Ohanesian

  “What happened?” she whispers. “Did they hurt you?” She dabs his brow with her handkerchief.

  “No,” he says, taking it from her. His skin gleams with sweat. “I fell as I was running back.”

  “And Hairig? Where have they taken him?”

  Kemal swallows hard, pressing his apron into a ball.

  “Can you take me?” she asks.

  Kemal does not answer.

  “What?” she asks louder. “Tell me.”

  “He’s . . . gone,” Kemal whispers. “He’s dead.”

  Lucine jumps to her feet. Impossible. He’s mistaken. It was dark. Kemal takes her hand and pulls her body back down to the ground. Lucine wails, burying her head deeper into the folds of her skirt. She remains there, bent in half, despair pouring out of her until there are no sounds left in her throat.

  “I’m sorry,” Kemal whispers.

  When the sun illuminates every corner of the courtyard, Kemal removes his arms from around her hunched back. He holds her head in his hands and lifts her face up to him.

  A sin against God. Hairig’s voice will not leave her.

  “You are not safe,” Kemal says. “Let me help you. I know that this is a difficult time, but it’s the only time we have.”

  “A difficult time? We?” she asks, indignant, her hands involuntarily forming into fists. “This is no time for drawings.” Lucine pulls away from him and stands up. “This is no time . . . I have no time for anything.” Her voice bounces from one cauldron to the other until it fills the entire courtyard. “Don’t you understand? Nazareth is gone. Anush is always crying. Mairig moves as if in a trance, and I still have Bedros and the baby to consider. And now Hairig.”

  “Listen to me, Lucine,” Kemal interrupts. Still seated on the floor, he reaches for her hand. “You are in grave danger. It is too late to help your father, but it’s not too late for you. You need to hide or go north. I can help you. If we go north, we can make it to the Black Sea.”

  “We’d get killed before we reached the town wall.”

  “Then we’ll stay.” He stands and moves closer to her now, placing his hand on her elbow.

  “Don’t. Please,” she says, shrugging his hands away. Looking down, her eyes rest upon his shoes, Nazareth’s old church shoes, scuffed and torn from overuse. The sight of those shoes on his feet emphasize the impossibility of what he suggests.

  “There are places in the north and the west, small villages where no one cares if you are Greek, Muslim, Armenian, or Turk,” Kemal says.

  “You don’t even have a last name,” she says, remembering her father’s words.

  “What does that have to do with anything?” Kemal asks, withdrawing from her. “You think having a last name makes you better? More European? You are just as Ottoman as I am, Lucine. The only thing that makes us different is a few thousand lira and your mother’s propensity to bow down to the missionaries.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Isn’t it?” he asks.

  “You want to be a hero,” Lucine says, “but only to me. What about my mother, Anush, and my brothers? I am only one piece of wool. You can’t just pluck me out and dye me whatever color you choose.” The words catapult out of her mouth, partial truths burdened with fear and regret.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Go away, Kemal. Leave me alone.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “Please, just go,” she repeats.

  “No.”

  “Leave at once,” she says, angrily.

  “I will not leave,” he says.

  “Deli misin? Are you stupid?” She raises her voice and sees his eyes lower with the weight of her words.

  “This is my property,” she continues, “and in case you have forgotten, you work for us. The world may be turning upside down, but you are still a Turk and I am an Armenian. And if you think I’m going to forsake my family, my religion, and my race for a measly drawing, you are out of your mind!”

  Seconds later, she watches his broad back recede across her father’s courtyard. The apron lies at her feet. She stands perfectly still, letting her breath out to meet his absence. A part of her wants to run after him, but the other part, the one permanently linked to those in the house, rushes back inside.

  CHAPTER 13

  The Whips of Satan

  KEMAL HAS NEVER been more grateful for his father’s donkey. Getting away from Lucine on foot, wearing these contemptible shoes, would be unbearable. He knew the moment she looked down at them that she would break him in two, but the knowing did nothing to prepare him. What does she mean by “You don’t even have a last name?” Her words have conjured up a betrayal so dense he swears he can taste bile in his mouth. Her handkerchief, still wedged between his hand and the donkey’s rein, burns the center of his palm. He rides the animal mercilessly, not because he’s angry but because he fears in slowing down he might lose all the shattered pieces of himself. His heart, his limbs, his mind and pride, may peel away and drop to the earth, creating a trail of skin and organs that could be used to find him. And he does not want to be found.

  Kemal curses his body for wanting her and his poverty for repulsing her, and rides away from the pain. This morning his heart was filled with pity and fear for her. He expected her to act shy, like a child, but she had not acted like a child at all. The Lucine who climbed trees in his shadow had vanished. In her place stood a condescending young woman whose resolute rejection of him was measured and cruel. There was no tenderness in it and no remorse. When he remembers her words, all the yearning in his heart turns to anger and rage. He suddenly understands why everyone hates the Armenians. What gives them the right to judge us? They are living in our country, living off our land. What made them think they were superior? Their god? Their ability to read? Well, he thinks, we have a god too, and anyone can learn to read.

  The roads are narrower now, yet Kemal rides recklessly past the mosque and heads straight toward the town khan, a dilapidated inn populated mostly by traveling merchants and vagabonds. There he intends to get some raki to drown his sorrows.

  Inside the khan’s damp walls, the innkeeper is busy serving an older man in uniform. He places a small glass and a few Turkish delights on the table next to the man’s fez. The soldier sits tall with his back straight, reading piles of documents and sipping his drink. At first, Kemal only sees the top half of the man’s face. His eyebrows, like two fat caterpillars crawling toward one another, nearly hide his eyes.

  Kemal settles at a table. “One raki,” he yells out.

  The soldier puts his documents aside and nods in his direction.

  “A little early for raki, isn’t it, son?” he says, furrowing his brow so that the caterpillars meet.

  Kemal remains silent, watching the innkeeper pour a bit of raki into a tiny glass. When he adds water, the two clear liquids dance gracefully toward one another, before forming an opaque liquid that looks like a white cloud of smoke. He thinks of himself and Lucine: clear and unscathed until they try to merge.

  Kemal shoots an arrow of the milky poison down his throat, letting the taste of aniseed coat his insides and burn the pit of his empty stomach.

  “Another,” he says. The innkeeper flashes a toothless smile and brings an entire carafe of raki to the table.

  “They call it lion’s milk,” the soldier says, pointing to the carafe. He picks up his empty glass and his fez and takes a seat across from Kemal. “Women or money. Which is it?” he asks, helping himself to the bottle.

  Kemal wants to tell the soldier to mind his own business, but the man’s age and his uniform stop him. “It’s nothing,” he says, taking another swig. “Just a girl.”

  “Ah yes. Women can ruin you, if you let them. Let me guess, she represented all that is good and pure. All that is possible in the world. Am I right?”

  Kemal nods. Already the raki is drifting up from his belly, past his heart, his throat, up all the way to the top of his head, where, if he closes h
is eyes, he can follow its ethereal dance.

  “Women are the whips of Satan, my friend. And there are many to choose from,” the soldier says.

  “She’s different,” Kemal mutters, swirling the remaining contents of his glass.

  “Oh? How so? Wait, don’t tell me.” The soldier waves an open palm in the air. “Her beauty causes the moon to blush . . . silences the nightingale. Am I right?”

  Kemal pours more water on a fresh glass of raki.

  “And maybe she’s rich. Richer than you? Daughter of a sultan, maybe?” the soldier continues, eyeing Kemal’s country clothes.

  “No, it’s nothing like that, ” says Kemal, not wanting his problems so easily categorized.

  “Then how is it? Tell me,” says the soldier.

  “She’s no sultan’s daughter.” Kemal’s words, burdened by raki, leave his mouth slowly and with little grace, but he continues talking nonetheless. “She’s Christian. Learned. Reads like a cleric, rides like the wind,” he says. “She was going to teach me my letters,” he adds, though this isn’t exactly true. “With her, I could be something . . . other than what I am.”

  “Ahh, Habib, we have a poet on our hands!” The soldier shouts to the khan keeper who flashes his toothless smile. “Well, it sounds like this little Christian girl did not see or want the poet in you. Am I right?” He slaps Kemal’s back. “Or maybe she saw the poet but couldn’t find the man . . . hmmm?”

  Kemal nods into his glass.

  “It’s just like a Christian to enjoy the splendor of our land while they thumb their noses at our provinciality. It’s time we take Turkey back for Turks. You know, you could show her, young . . . what did you say your name was again?”

  “Kemal.”

  “You could show her, young Kemal. You could get out of this hamlet and see the rest of the world. You could become rich and powerful, cultured, and educated. You can become all these things without her. Despite her.”

  These were the thoughts circling around Kemal’s foggy head when he reported to the conscription office. In the years ahead, he would think back to that moment in the damp khan and remember only two things: the unruly eyebrows of the enlisting officer and the idea of escape burning in his chest.

  PART III

  1990

  CHAPTER 14

  Selling Minds

  ORHAN SETTLES HIS jet-lagged body into the starched white sheets of his hotel bed, wedging one of four pillows under his neck. The land of plenty indeed, he thinks, reaching for the phone. He calls the Tariq offices in Istanbul first. The head weaver insists his new designs are too intricate and confusing. The weavers are having a hard time telling one shade of any color from the next.

  “Too same same,” insists the head weaver.

  “That’s the point,” says Orhan. He’s going for incremental changes in color, so gradual that the eye and mind are softened into the transformation. Nothing abrupt, no stark contrasts. In fact, no contrasts at all. “Keep trying,” he says, before hanging up.

  It’s two o’clock in the afternoon in Los Angeles, which makes it somewhere around 7 p.m. in Karod. Auntie Fatma will have already served his father dinner. Mustafa would be sitting in front of the television now, watching some government-sponsored program. The ringing of the phone, one of only two in the village, will startle him. It may even throw him into a rage. He might even take it out on Auntie Fatma. Orhan decides to make the call anyway. Auntie Fatma knows how to handle his father. She was always better at that than Orhan. It takes six rings for her to pick up the receiver.

  “It’s me,” Orhan says, lighting a cigarette.

  “Yes, yes. Who else would it be? My friends don’t use the telephone, and your father hasn’t got any friends,” she says. “Have you found her?” she asks.

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “She’s an old Armenian woman,” he says. “Lives in a nursing home.”

  “Nursing home?” She clucks her tongue in disapproval.

  Decent people don’t put their loved ones in nursing homes. Even he knows that.

  “Does she speak?” Auntie Fatma asks.

  “No, not really,” he answers, hearing her breathe a sigh of relief at the other end.

  “She has no voice?” she says.

  “Yes, she has a voice. But she doesn’t want to speak, not to me anyway. And she understands Turkish,” he adds.

  “I see,” says Fatma.

  “She seems to be eager to get rid of me,” Orhan says, exhaling a cloud of smoke through his nostrils.

  “Yes, but will she sign the papers?”

  “I think I’ve managed to entice her,” he says.

  “Entice her? Oh-ho! Because you have so much experience enticing women,” she teases him.

  “I’ve enticed plenty of women,” he lies.

  “Even so, you need to get that signature and hurry back.”

  “I have a feeling that getting the signature won’t be a problem,” he says. “But getting her to reveal her connection to Dede is another matter.”

  “Who cares what her connection is?”

  “I care. Don’t you want to know who she is?”

  “She’s probably some tart from his past,” says Fatma.

  “Doubtful,” says Orhan.

  “Some things are better left alone.”

  “I want to know why he did it.”

  “This is no time for fairy tales and interviews. You’ve got bigger problems waiting for you here.”

  “What are you talking about?” Orhan feels a lump forming in his throat.

  “Your father is talking nonsense again. Says he’s going to contest the will. He even mentioned the name of that lawyer, Hakan Celik.”

  “That piranha? Tell him no. I need more time. I just got here.”

  “This is not just about the house. You know that.”

  Mustafa would forcibly take the approval Dede would never give him. “I’ve poured my entire life into this company,” he says. “All my time and attention, for years.”

  “By law, he is the first heir,” continues Fatma. “The one who should inherit the business.”

  “He hasn’t worked a day in his life,” shouts Orhan.

  “Nor will he. I imagine that will be your job.”

  “Did you show him Dede’s letter? Did he read it?”

  “Not yet, but I don’t think it would change much. He’s hurt. Has a right to be. Your dede wasn’t very kind to him growing up.”

  “Oh, please,” says Orhan. “At least Dede didn’t beat him like he beat me.”

  He drags at his cigarette and tries to think strategically. His body aches of hunger and sleep deprivation. There will be no stopping his father once he has Celik working for him. If he wrestles the company away from Orhan, he’ll sell everything Dede built and pocket it. No one knew this better than Dede. It’s why he circumvented Mustafa and left everything, or almost everything, to Orhan. He has to show everyone that he has the situation under control. He has to get the old woman to give the house back immediately.

  “Shit,” he says. “You have to talk to him. Tell him I can fix everything. Everything will go back to the way it was before.”

  “You tell him,” Auntie Fatma says.

  “He hates me. You know that.”

  “He’s angry and bitter, but he’s not a bad man. And he’s still your father.”

  “My father who wants to sue me,” says Orhan. “Why are you always protecting him? Why can’t you protect me for once?”

  The question is a loaded one. Orhan was seven when the beatings began.

  Auntie Fatma is silent for once.

  “I just need more time,” he continues. “Promise me you’ll talk to him.”

  “I’ll talk to him,” she says finally, “but you know what happened when they started selling minds in the market?”

  “What are you talking about?” asks Orhan.

  “There were no sales. Everyone liked his own mind.”

  CHAPTER 15
r />   Ani

  THE ARARAT HOME is pressed under the thick gray fog of sleep, the day still tucked beneath tired lids, when Ani slips inside Seda’s room, trailing the faint scent of gardenias along with her. Even with her eyes shut, Seda can sense her niece standing above her bed. Seda feels the blanket lifting but does not stir. Then Ani does something she hasn’t done in a very long time: she climbs into Seda’s bed, the way she used to when she was little, and wraps her arm around Seda’s body, cradling it with her own.

  “Meza,” she whispers. Short for mezmama, or grandmother, it is what Seda called her own grandmother a hundred years ago in Karod.

  Seda keeps her eyes shut and inhales the familiar spirit trapped in Ani’s breath. When her niece was little, Seda used to place her face beneath Ani’s sleeping head and inhale the oxygen leaving her nostrils. The little gust of expelled breath filled her with joy. It is the only thing she’s ever taken from her niece. Ani has lost so much already. Bedros’s children were conceived and born in loss. Ani (short for Anush) and Aram, both named for his dead siblings. What right did Seda have to take anything from them? Even their names were not their own.

  Once, when she was in her twenties, Ani fell in love with a Ukrainian boy named Roger. “His parents survived the Holocaust. He understands us,” she told Bedros.

  “He understands nothing,” Bedros had shouted. “He shares his horror with the world, and the world gasps and apologizes. And what about us?” Bedros was right. The Armenians bore their loss alone. They tucked it away, like something precious, in every syllable of language taught in Saturday schools, and in the smell of dishes, and in the lament of songs. In the breath of children.

  “Marry him and you finish what the Turks started,” Bedros told her.

  It is hard to believe that was over twenty-five years ago. They never heard much about her love life after that. If she had one, she kept it to herself. Fifty and still single, she teaches Armenian-language classes, when she’s not devoting herself to her people’s painful past. Seda should have said something back then, in the days of Roger.