There Was and There Was Not: A Journey through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond

by Meline Toumani

  “No, no,” I said, laughing. “I’m actually American but I’ve been living in Istanbul for two years.” I held up my US passport, that blue and gold rectangle that is recognized the world over as a kind of dum-dum pass, as in, don’t expect much from this person, this is just another pampered, contented American, trotting around the world as Americans do.

  But the woman ignored my passport. She was more interested in my small carry-on bag. “Is that all you brought? Most girls your age would need a bag that size just for their shoes!”

  Everybody laughed, and I did, too. I told her I had been in Berlin for a short visit to see friends, and assured her that normally I’d have more luggage than this.

  Then she stepped closer and dropped her voice. “You see, dear, I can’t take both of these suitcases on board.” She waved her arm toward two enormous suitcases, the hard-case kind, each large enough to hold an entire wardrobe. “Together they will be over the maximum combined weight. It will be better if you take one of them.”

  She looked at the people next to her, unrelated passengers with whom she had been consulting on the subject, and they nodded.

  So that’s what the discussion had been about. The travelers had been scoping out the line to see who could help, and with only a tiny carry-on, I looked like the perfect candidate for the job. But of course it was inconceivable, after years of being battered with questions at American airports—“Does this suitcase belong to you? Did you pack it yourself? Has anyone unknown to you given you anything to carry today?”—that I would even consider checking a stranger’s luggage under my name.

  Yet suddenly it wasn’t so easy to say no. Turkey is the sort of place where, when a car tries to drive down a narrow street, ten shopkeepers immediately step out of their doorways to guide the driver to safety; where friends seem to treat their money as communal, and strangers had helped me a hundred times in ways that I never would have expected in America.

  I looked at the other passengers to see if anybody understood my hesitation, but I found no hint. I suggested to the woman that maybe they wouldn’t charge her—sometimes, you know, they’ll just accept the extra weight, I said.

  “Oh no,” someone else chimed in, attempting to lift the suitcases one by one. “These are way too heavy for that. It won’t work unless you take one of them.”

  I couldn’t believe that nobody else thought the request was strange.

  “Let’s wait and see,” I said, figuring that by the time we reached the front of the line, the woman would sense my discomfort and let me off the hook.

  “It’s not a big deal,” said a tall man, stepping up. He was the woman’s brother, and had come to see her off. “Nothing will happen.” He told me he used to be a police officer in Istanbul and showed me his old ID card, as though this would put me at ease.

  I tried another argument: “I want to help you,” I said. “It’s just that as an American, since September 11, traveling has become very complicated for us. They ask us all these questions at airports…”

  I waited for somebody to nod or show that they knew what I meant, but instead the words “September 11” drew a few snickers. I tried again to explain what I meant about being American; and then it occurred to me that with my messy Turkish, it probably sounded like I was saying that since 9/11 I didn’t trust anybody from a Muslim country anymore. I didn’t know what to do. I thought about showing them the page on my passport that said I was born in Iran.

  As our turn at the check-in desk neared, the woman actually asked me for my passport, so that she could present us as a pair traveling together. I merely needed to say that the black suitcase was mine, she said.

  I held my passport close. Standing there, I knew that if anyone had ever described this situation to me, I would have sworn, without hesitation, that I’d never agree to such a request.

  At the counter, the woman’s brother heaved the suitcases onto the scale, and I made a silent compromise: I told myself that if the German attendant asked me directly whether the second suitcase was mine, I would say no.

  What happened instead was that the attendant reached for both of our passports and hit a few keys on his computer. The woman pointed to one of the suitcases and said, “That’s mine.”

  He slid a tag around the suitcase handle. Then, peering at his screen and then at me, he said, “You are Meline?”

  I nodded ever so slightly.

  “Yours is too heavy,” the clerk said. “You need to take some things out.”

  I had not spoken, had hardly moved, had only confirmed, if anything, that my name was Meline. Nobody could accuse me of more, I told myself, preparing my defense.

  The woman’s brother hoisted the suitcase and dragged it to a corner, where the two of them began sorting for items to move into a carry-on.

  I took my passport back, turned numbly in their direction, and stared at the open suitcase. It held a disorganized pile of unmarked plastic shopping bags whose contents I couldn’t discern. Anything could be in those bags. Guns, drugs, cash. Why were there so many bags? I felt miserable. I couldn’t stop myself from imagining what would happen if there were explosives inside, and that later, when my parents received the news about the plane that was blown up by a terrorist, they would be told that the suitcase containing the bomb had a sticker with their daughter’s name, and nobody would be left to explain what had happened.

  That was it. I stood in front of the woman and said, as firmly as I could, “I’m very sorry, but I’m not comfortable with this situation.”

  Then I grabbed the handle of my tiny rolling carry-on and walked quickly toward the revolving doors that led outside. Fresh air. Germany. I hadn’t finished checking in, but I needed to get away from that woman and her luggage. If I waited long enough she would have to go on without me. On the sidewalk, I smoked a cigarette, then walked all the way to a farther set of doors to reenter the terminal out of sight of the Turkish Airlines desk. I stalled for another few moments in a gift shop, my heart pounding, my eyes blurring over souvenirs and stacks of Toblerone. Then, hearing the final call for my flight, I turned to head back to the counter.

  When I was still about fifty feet away, I felt a hand on my sleeve.

  “There you are! Dear, please, we don’t have much time. Everybody else has checked in now. The German man just needs you to go and take your boarding pass. He is waiting,” she said.

  I couldn’t believe it. Walking in a kind of trance, I began to reason to myself that if the suitcase contained something illegal but not lethal, several passengers could bear witness that I had been bullied into taking it, so my sentence might be reduced. And if the luggage contained a bomb, all would be moot because we’d be dead regardless of who checked it in.

  At the counter, I handed over my passport again without a word, did not comment one way or another on the giant black suitcase that waited on the scale, made sure not to watch too closely as the clerk wrapped its handle with a sticker bearing my name, accepted my boarding pass, and then shoved my way through the final security line, a too-late surge of aggression directed at everyone and no one.

  I had requested an aisle seat when I purchased my ticket, as I always do. But when I got to my row, I saw that, infuriatingly, my boarding pass placed me in the middle seat.

  “This is us, dear!” said a familiar voice. Her again, standing beside me.

  That’s when I realized that we had been assigned to adjacent seats, naturally, since we were “traveling together.” After all this, there was no way I was going to sit in the middle. I stepped aside and motioned for the woman to go in first. She looked at her boarding pass and at me, and then shrugged and slid in. I dropped into the aisle seat and tried to avoid her gaze.

  But the woman wouldn’t stop talking. She spoke about her nieces, about Berlin. She offered me hard candy from a sandwich bag, and I looked at it and wondered if it contained some sort of sleeping potion. I didn’t see her put a piece in her own mouth. I refused the candy. I decided to read. But then I
realized I had brought with me only a dry history book, which ran the risk of putting me to sleep. I needed to stay wide awake in case something happened.

  * * *

  ABOUT HALFWAY THROUGH the flight, I began to calm down. The woman herself had nodded off, which gave me a chance to take a closer look at her. She was plump, but attractive, with smooth, golden skin and a healthy head of hair whose copper highlights looked like the work of a good stylist. Her hands, clasped across her belly, bore several gold rings of various arrangements, and her long nails were polished in a shimmery rose. She reminded me slightly of Müge, I was surprised to discover—she was about the same age and had that same light coloring, the envy of most Turks—and as I relaxed, I reflected on how much had happened since that first time I nervously dialed Müge’s number, since the day I first met her in person in the Istanbul airport. In the subsequent four years, there had been bad moments and good ones, but my adrenaline had been pumping at full throttle all the while. I was exhausted.

  * * *

  I WAS JUST starting to doze when suddenly I heard a voice. “Excuse me,” it was saying. “Excuse me.”

  I opened my eyes. A German stewardess was standing over me.

  “Excuse me. Could I know your last name, please?”

  Oh God. We hadn’t even arrived yet.

  “Toumani,” I said quietly.

  The attendant looked confused. She glanced up the aisle, looked at me again, and then walked away.

  They must have searched the bag at Tegel Airport, I realized. Now the passengers were captive in the plane so they could easily pinpoint the offender. I would be arrested on landing. This could not be happening.

  A moment later the flight attendant returned. “Miss, your surname one more time?” I repeated it, then from a survivalist reserve of clarity, I managed to ask her why she wanted to know.

  “Did you order a special meal?” she said.

  A special meal? A special meal! A special meal. My hands went to my face, pressing my eyes shut. We had changed seats. It wasn’t me she was looking for. I was not being arrested. There was no bomb.

  I turned and landed a hard poke into the fleshy arm of the woman who, after ruining my day, was now resting peacefully, and asked her, in Turkish, if she had ordered a special meal.

  “Oh yes, dear, I did! The doctor says I need to watch my sugar, you know,” she said with a wink.

  “The meal is hers!” I nearly shouted in English. “We changed seats!”

  “But you are not supposed to change seats,” the attendant said.

  I nodded.

  “Changing seats is a violation of policies!” The energy with which she delivered this made it sound like something she had waited years for an opportunity to say.

  “I know.”

  “We need to know exactly who is who and what is what.”

  She waited for me to offer an explanation. I looked over at my companion, who did not understand English, but smiled genially and nodded with interest, as if we were chatting about the latest skin cream.

  Then a Turkish flight attendant who had come over to see what was happening repeated the phrase like a recorded announcement: Changing seats is forbidden. Koltuk değiştirmek yasaktır.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” my companion replied, her expression turning solemn. “But this poor girl has some claustrophobia so I wanted to help her.”

  * * *

  WHEN I GOT back to my apartment in Istanbul, I called my parents in California to tell them I had returned safely from Berlin, and then I recounted what had happened at the airport.

  “Are you crazy?” said my father.

  “Why would you do that?” my mother said.

  “You guys know how it is in the Middle East,” I said. “Everybody helps everybody. I didn’t want to be that American who only watches out for herself,” I insisted. “Come on, do you mean you wouldn’t have helped the woman?”

  “Never,” said my dad.

  “Mom?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  My parents had suffered through two years of worrying about their youngest daughter’s strange adventure in Turkey. For the most part they had hidden their fears, showing interest in all my stories and proudly describing how they defended me when their friends raised questions about what I was up to. But after the luggage incident their anxiety, as well as my own growing disillusionment, could no longer be ignored.

  As we talked, I realized something that I had not seen clearly before. I would not have hesitated to say no to a passenger who was Japanese, or French, or Indian. I had given in to the woman, in the end, not because of Middle Eastern virtue, or American overcompensation, or because I was simply an idiot—but because she was Turkish and I was Armenian. And even though I never told the woman I was Armenian, some part of me, something deep inside of me, wanted her approval, and wanted this only and surely because she was a Turk.

  I had absorbed this habit over months and months of smiling and contorting my words and having half-baked conversations with clerks and cabbies about how we’re all human beings in the end, and finally it had deranged me. This was the Stockholm syndrome I had heard about and dismissed before I had started my journey. The role I had taken on was incomparable to the lifetime of subjugation endured by my Armenian peers in Turkey, but even this controlled experiment had taken its toll.

  My friend Talin, an Armenian from Istanbul who moved to the United States as an adult, once told me she was jealous of the way I was able to love Istanbul. She knew how captivating the city could be, knew it in her very cells, but at some point that wasn’t enough, or rather it was too much. Because of who she was, Istanbul could not love her back. We had this conversation when I had been there for only one year; long enough to understand exactly how wonderful Istanbul was but not long enough to realize the price I was paying to stay. She was jealous that I could still love it, but eventually I felt like she did, and in my memories I would not know which Istanbul to think of: the one I fell for or the one where I nearly lost my mind.

  For expats, Istanbul was a cosmopolitan dream come true. Yes, it was East and West; yes, it was a bridge between worlds; yes, it was oriental and exotic while still being modern and glamorous. All the clichés were spot-on. For me, it was all of these things, too, but it was ultimately a place where this single dimension of my life, my being Armenian—this feeling of fatigue with the clannishness and conformity of Armenian life that I had come to Turkey hoping to escape, or at least to broaden—had become more a fact of my existence than it had ever been before. If I had to say I was Armenian ten times a day in Turkey, or choose not to say it, but to think it and to wonder about it, and to be a little bit afraid each time, and to twist myself into knots to try to avoid offending anyone, until I had all but lost track of myself entirely, well, this could not go on. That was the day I bought my ticket home.

  20

  Soccer Diplomacy

  Early on in my project, whenever I told somebody I was researching “Armenian-Turkish relations,” it was a bit like saying, “I’m studying unicorns.” You could study the idea of unicorns, but beyond that there wasn’t much to work with. Likewise with Armenian-Turkish relations: officially, there were none.

  But then a stroke of luck set the stage for this to change.

  It was the draw for the qualifying rounds of the 2010 World Cup. Out of the fifty-three national teams in what the FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) soccer league considered “Europe,” Armenia and Turkey landed in the same group of six countries that would face off for a chance to advance to the finals.

  The first match took place in Yerevan in September 2008. Armenian President Serge Sarkissian invited Turkey’s president, Abdullah Gül, to attend, making Gül the first leader of the Turkish Republic to visit the Republic of Armenia. Turkey won, which surprised nobody—they were seeded much higher in the rankings.

  But the match was an opening, an example of possibility, not something to be taken for granted. Aft
er all, things could have been worse: Armenia and Azerbaijan were not even allowed, according to FIFA rules, to be grouped together. (This was a rare exception made for only the most volatile pairings; Russia and Georgia were also kept apart.) Soccer as litmus test: it is clear that you hate each other, but can you get through one game without starting a war? In the case of Armenia and Azerbaijan, significantly more tame cultural exchanges had proven impossible; a Caucasus chamber orchestra that had recently brought together musicians from around the region for a few concerts was banned from playing in Azerbaijan because it included Armenian members.

  Thus when nobody lost any limbs in the 2008 match between Armenia and Turkey, and no bombs went off, the two governments took the next step. With help from Swiss mediators, they began secret talks toward establishing diplomatic ties. And on April 22, 2009, they announced publicly that such talks were under way. Details were vague: the countries had agreed to the intention of developing “good neighborly relations.”

  “The two parties have achieved tangible progress and mutual understanding in this process and they have agreed on a comprehensive framework for the normalization of their bilateral relations,” the statement said. “Within this framework, a road map has been determined.”

  Decisions to set frameworks to establish road maps to develop agreements. Nothing had been signed, but it was huge news all the same.

  In Armenia, the Dashnak Party immediately denounced President Sarkissian for agreeing to a framework based on no preconditions, and ended its participation in the coalition government. The party was in favor of opening the border, but only after Turkey acknowledged the genocide. Most Dashnaks were against any plan that guaranteed the current borders, since they still wanted to reclaim parts of eastern Turkey.

  In Turkey, the Nationalist Action Party (MHP in Turkish)—the Dashnaks’ hardline corollary—was angry that talks had gone on without the parliament’s knowledge. They insisted that no friendship could be established with Armenia until it ended its occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh.