Rock Wagram

by William Saroyan

“Yes,” Haig said.

  “Who’s editor now?”

  “How should I know? I don’t read Armenian. You don’t either, do you?”

  “No, but I thought you might have heard from your father.”

  “No. He didn’t say anything about it,” Haig said. “Your father was editor for a while, wasn’t he?”

  “Everything,” Rock said. “Typesetter, editor, writer, janitor. He was the whole paper for ten years or so when I was a kid. Want to go in and look around?”

  “Sure.”

  They were walking across the street when Rock knew his cousin was going to ask him about his father’s death.

  “Can I ask you something, Rock?” Haig said.

  “You want to ask me why he did it,” Rock said, “or if he did it. Yes, he did it. I don’t know why he did it. That’s something nobody can ever know.”

  “Pop says he didn’t do it,” Haig said.

  “He did it,” Rock said. “He took his own life at the age of thirty-seven. He turned on the gas in the kitchen. He sat there writing, and died.”

  “What was he writing?”

  “A poem.”

  “Who found him?”

  “I found him,” Rock said. “My mother had gone to your mother’s. I’d just gotten back from driving Murphy to Bakersfield. I was sixteen. You know how the kitchen is in the house on Winery Street, door to dining room, door and two windows to screen porch. The two windows were always open, except in the winter. He’d shut them. I saw him from the screen porch and thought he’d fallen asleep, but when I opened the door, I knew he wasn’t. I shut off the gas, carried him to the couch on the back porch, and opened every door and window in the house because I didn’t want my mother to know what he’d done. I put the poem in my pocket and I’ve still got it somewhere. I took off his coat and unbuttoned his collar and tried to make him start breathing again. I knew he was dead. You can tell the minute you look at a dead man that he’s dead, but this was my father, and I kept believing he’d start breathing again. I tried to get him to walk, even. I didn’t know what I I was doing. I was sick to my guts, because a dead man, even if he’s your father, is sickening. I was scared to death my mother would come home and smell the gas and be even more brokenhearted than I knew she was going to be anyway. She loved him, as crazy as he was. She still does. She never got married again. We didn’t have a phone, so I ran to Kazanjian’s Grocery and called Doctor Burridge, the family doctor. I don’t know what I told him, but I didn’t tell him my father had killed himself. Burridge was in the house in ten or fifteen minutes. He asked me to tell him what had happened and I told him. He asked if anybody knew. I told him I had telephoned from Kazanjian’s where the phone is on a shelf, and whoever was there heard whatever I said. He asked if I wanted my mother or my family to know. I said I didn’t. He said he would stay in the house while I went to get my mother. He told her my father had died of a heart attack, and he wrote that down on the death certificate. My mother soon heard the gossip that her husband had taken his own life, but I’ve never told her. I think she knew, though. I think she knew from my face the minute she saw me at your mother’s. If your father says he didn’t, I’d rather you didn’t tell him any of this.”

  “Of course not,” Haig said.

  They went into The Asbarez Building.

  Rock looked at everything in the place, for a man is the vagrant parts of many men scattered and left desolate in many places, in rooms and in machinery, at tables and within walls.

  A man is a traveler, a dreamer traveling the highways of sleep, a crusader on his way to the grave and the holy grail: around the clock, around the calendar, around the open eye of the wink, around the red-brick church, around the town, around the block, around the world.

  The typesetter of The Asbarez when he saw them got up from his work and went to them with his hand outstretched.

  “Please,” he said in Armenian. “Come in. I am Krikorian, Ahpet. Native of Van, in Ani, Ancient Armenia. Resident of Fresno thirty years, typesetter, editor, writer, janitor of The Asbarez six years.”

  He was a tall thin man who apparently smoked incessantly, his fingers and lips stained brown, a man perhaps sixty years old. His words meant that they were welcome, whoever they were, and they were a polite request for them to give their names.

  “Arak Vagramian,” Rock said softly, and the boy quickly after him, “Haig Vagramian.”

  The man looked from Rock to Haig, then back at Rock again.

  “Arak Vagramian,” he said.

  “I am Vahan’s son,” Rock said.

  “Yes,” the man said. He did not speak for some time, and then he said, “Nothing’s changed, as you see. Everything is here. The machines, the type, the paper, the desks and chairs, and one of us is still here to get the paper out on schedule. Welcome, though I wish I could say we had come to a better time. Our story is the same. Fewer and fewer readers year by year. They are dying. Almost no writers at all, for a writer must have readers. We have even become resigned. That is a good thing, or a bad thing, depending on what your thinking is. Your father sat in this chair at this machine. He worked here, as I work. He got the paper out twice a week, as I do. I remember you as a boy coming here to watch him, coming with a small brother now and then. It is a wonderful place, a place of words, of print and paper. I was then only a contributor, unpaid.”

  “I remember you,” Rock said, for as the man had spoken, slowly and with many sighs of despair and amusement, Rock had seen him again, tall, lean, hard, swift of eye and speech, his moustache then broad and black, a man with a shouting voice and a roaring laugh.

  “You have come here to remember your father,” the editor said. “Your coming gives me joy, for I am part of your father, all that is here is part of him. What is the paper we get out? What is it for? What is it supposed to do? What do we mean by going to so much trouble twice a week year in and year out? Well, we have our language, and it is a good one. Had we also half a dozen writers it could become a great one again. Having fewer and fewer readers, we have also fewer and fewer writers, but even these few writers have hearts that are no longer alive as they once were. Even so, twice a week the language must appear, and that is what we mean by going to the trouble. I am delighted to see you. Will you have a drink?”

  As he had spoken he had walked, moving among the machines, and he had come to a bottle with a liquid in it that might have been water, which they knew was not water but rakhi. The editor removed the cork and handed the bottle to Rock, who lifted it to the man and said, “To you, sir.” Rock took a swig and handed the bottle to Haig, who lifted it and said, “To you and the language, sir,” and drank. Haig handed the bottle to the man, who lifted it to both of them and said, “To the Armenians, whoever they are, and to their language, whose majesty we all know, lost as it may be forever.” He drank and handed the bottle back to Rock, saying, “Again, please.”

  “To my father,” Rock said.

  “To my mother,” Haig said.

  “To those,” the man said. “And to those who are dear to me, and dead.”

  They went to the editor’s study where the bound copies of the paper were. The editor removed one of the bound volumes from the shelf, placed it on the desk, and opened it.

  “Here is a poem,” he said, “written by your father, Vahan Vagramian. It is called To My Haig, the word meaning both a boy’s name and our nation. May I read it? Would you mind if I read it?”

  They did not speak, and the man read the poem. It was fourteen lines, Rock saw, and as the man read, Rock remembered his father reciting the poem in the house on Winery Street.

  “That is a father speaking to a son,” the man said. “Any father to any son, but it is also my friend speaking to his nation. It is also a great poem, never known to more than a handful of people, and now forgotten. These bound volumes contain many more poems that your father wrote, as well as stories, essays, and editorials. You do not read, I know. Even so, sit here at this desk where your father worked, a
nd I will return to my work.”

  He embraced each of them and went off to the machine, and to his work. They heard the machine clinking out the letters of the alphabet, dropping them into the words of the language.

  “Did you understand the poem?” Haig said.

  “My father used to recite it at home,” Rock said. “I had forgotten it, but when he read it I remembered it. I understand it. I always did.”

  “What does it say?”

  “It says, Here is a world in which I am a stranger, given to me by a stranger, my own father. I give it to you, my own son Haig, and a stranger. It is a poor world. Give this world to another stranger, your own son, for that is all any of us can do with this world. But it says these things in a way that must be called Armenian, for it says them in Armenian.”

  “Didn’t it say some other things, too?” Haig said.

  “Yes, it did,” Rock said. “It said, Would God this world were better and more, and you and I not strangers, for I love you, I love you so deeply that my love estranges you from me, me from myself, and love itself from love.”

  “Didn’t you ever learn to read?” Haig said. “I mean, wouldn’t it be a good idea to read everything he wrote?”

  “I went to Armenian School across the street in the redbrick church for a while,” Rock said. “I was just beginning to learn when I quit. I didn’t want to learn. It’s too late now.”

  “Do you want to say goodbye to the old man?” Haig said.

  “He said goodbye,” Rock said. “He knows we’re not interested. He’s back there doing his lonely work, as he always has. That work was supposed to be for us, but we’re not interested. We never were. Let’s go.”

  A man travels through a mournful dream seeking many things, but in the end they are all only one thing: the Word, and nothing in the lonely world is lonelier, for the name of the the word is Love.

  What is it a man needs? Is it anything nameable? If it is named, does the name mean the need? Does it mean what it is supposed to mean? If what a man needs is named Love, does Love mean anything? If what a man needs is named Meaning, does Meaning mean anything? How long does Meaning mean whatever it means, and after that where is a man? What’s a man supposed to do to be whatever he is supposed to be, to get whatever he is supposed to need?

  A man is a wonderful and worthless thing. He is a rock but a swift one. Give him love, give rain love. Give him meaning, give fire meaning. Give him money, give birds money.

  The cousins walked across the street to the motorcycle in front of the red-brick church, but instead of getting on the contraption the older one walked to the top of the cement steps and sat there, while the younger one, foot resting on the curb, waited.

  “How old was your sister Rose when she died?” the older said.

  “She was three,” the younger said.

  “How old were you at the time?”

  “Six.”

  “What did you think of her?” Rock said.

  “I forget,” Haig said. “I’ve forgotten. How old were you when your brother died?”

  “Nine, and he was six,” Rock said.

  “What did you think of him?” Haig said.

  “Before he died I thought he was the greatest man ever born,” Rock said. “Next to myself, I mean. But differently, in his own way. He was a smiler. I never smiled. After he died I didn’t know what to think. Finally, I decided that he did it on purpose, let himself die, because he was a smiler. I decided he was a smiling killer. He killed me. He killed me a long time. He helped kill his father forever. I killed my father for a while myself, but not forever. I didn’t smile and die and kill my father forever. I fought with my father and killed him for a while. When he was angry at me, I was angry at him. When he wanted me to be better than him, I argued with him. When he didn’t want me to be whoever it was I was going to be, I fought with him. I had to. I had to find out who I was going to be.”

  “Who did you turn out to be?” Haig said.

  “The one you see sitting here on the steps of the red-brick church.”

  “Which one’s he?”

  “The father’s son, after all,” Rock said. “The Armenian, after all. The one he wanted me to be, after all. He broke my nose. I broke everything he didn’t break. It took thirty-three years.”

  “Could he fight?” Haig said.

  “He was mad,” Rock said. “He couldn’t fight, but he was mad.”

  “If he couldn’t fight, how did he break your nose?”

  “You don’t have to know how to fight to be able to break your son’s nose, do you?”

  “How mad was he?”

  “Mad enough to kill me, I suppose.”

  “How mad were you?”

  “About the same.”

  “Did you fight back?”

  “I started to,” Rock said, “but I changed my mind.”

  “Why?”

  “I was afraid I would kill him,” Rock said. “If it’s not easy to be a son, don’t think it’s easy to be a father, either. He was light enough, but so was I.”

  “How did the fight start?” Haig said.

  “He’d seen me standing on a corner talking to a couple of street girls,” Rock said. “When I got home that night he told me that if he ever saw me doing that again he would give me a beating. He saw me the next night, and I saw him. The same girls. We were just standing there talking. He stood across the street, and then walked home. I didn’t get home until around eleven. He was sitting in the parlor, waiting. My mother had gone to bed. He got up and went to the backyard. I knew he expected me to follow him, so I did. I knew he expected me to fight, too, since I had already disobeyed him, and was as big as he was, so when he began to fight I began to fight, too. He didn’t say anything, and I didn’t. We fought about a minute when I decided not to fight back any more. I didn’t stop fighting, I just didn’t fight back any more. My mother was standing on the steps of the back porch. She didn’t say anything, either. He got me square on the nose and knocked me down. He walked to my mother and took her inside. My mother turned to me and said, ‘Shame.’ She said it softly. One word, in Armenian. The most painful word in our language. I walked to town, around town, all night. It was morning when I got home. I went inside to ask him to forgive me. He was asleep on his folded arms at the round table in the parlor. He sat up and looked at me and shook his head slowly several times. You know the way they do it.

  “I said in Armenian, ‘I ask you to forgive me.’

  “He was dead tired and deeply angry. He stared at me a long time.

  “‘Go wash your face,’ he said at last. ‘Eat something, go to your bed.’

  “I said, ‘Do you forgive me?’

  “‘For the fight, yes,’ he said. ‘For the other, never. I will call Doctor Burridge in the afternoon to look at your nose. Is it broken?’

  “‘Yes.’

  “‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  “After that, we were strangers. If we weren’t a father and a son any more, we weren’t enemies, either. We just didn’t love or hate one another, that’s all.”

  “Why didn’t he want to see you standing on a corner?” Haig said.

  “He wanted me to be a poet,” Rock said. “A man who reads, who writes, who lives in a proud, lonely world.”

  “What did you want to be, a pimp?”

  “Don’t get funny,” Rock said. “I wanted to be anything I felt like being. I didn’t feel like being alone. A man’s alone enough, anyway. I know I was, and I know I still am. I liked to read, I liked to write, and I still do, but I didn’t want to read and write because he wanted me to. A man wants to do anything he does because he himself wants to do them. He wants to do them as himself, not as his father’s son, not as a member of a family, a nation, a religion, a society, a class. All the same, it turns out that even if he does what he does as himself, he also does them as the other things.”

  “So you’re a Christian,” Haig said.

  “I’m an Armenian,” Rock said.


  “What’s your class?”

  “The proud poor.”

  “What nation?”

  “American.”

  “What race?”

  “Human.”

  “What family?”

  “Vagramian.”

  “Yes, you are,” the younger cousin said. “All you are is a human being, and you know what phonies they are. You don’t really want to go to Fat Aram’s, do you?”

  “I want Fat Aram’s to be the way it was,” Rock said. “I don’t want it to be the way it is now.”

  “Well, it’s going to be the way it is now, anyhow,” Haig said. “Everything’s going to be the way it is now, not the way you want it to be. You’re getting tired.”

  “I know,” Rock said. “That was the trouble with my father, too. Come on, we’ll go to Fat Aram’s and let it be any way it wants to be.”

  “And we’ll like it, too,” Haig said.

  They sat on the motorcycle and went roaring down Ventura to Eye, up Eye to Tulare, and stopped in front of Fat Aram’s.

  What a man needs is unnameable, but he is forever naming it. Whisky—even the memory of whisky—helps him name it.

  A man’s mortality comes to him haphazardly in his mother’s womb. His mortality is a disease. It is himself on schedule, in the beat of time. Whether it is pain a man knows or pleasure, his health is poor, for his illness is in him instantaneously and forever, and it is incurable, although every man is indestructible, as he himself knows.

  Outside the Tulare Street door of Fat Aram’s four young men stood. They watched the arrival of the cousins on the motorcycle, one in uniform, one in a pair of blue gabardine slacks and a blue-and-white plaid coat. The four young men were laughing and talking in Armenian. The cousins pushed open the corner swinging doors and stepped into the saloon. It was five in the afternoon and the place was jammed with drinkers, most of them women.

  “What’s happened to the place?” Rock said.

  “It’s doing well, that’s all,” Haig said. “It’s not the old place any more, that’s all.”

  “Where’s Fat Aram?”

  “He doesn’t get around until after eleven,” Haig said. “He closes the joint, counts the money, sits alone with a few friends, drinks and talks. The place is jammed. The tables and booths are all taken. Want to go?”