Maybe I was imagining his resistance. He was never rude, but was never entirely welcoming, either. Or maybe that wasn’t a fair assessment; now and then when I ran into him at a community event, he told me I should pay them a visit at the summerhouse. I always nodded brightly, and sometimes my intentions would get me so far as to ask Ertan or somebody else whether they would like to join me for such an excursion sometime soon. But the barrier with the Armenians of Istanbul was still there. It was one of the many complexities of Turkey that I couldn’t resolve. And so when I saw Sarkis Bey exiting the stadium in Bursa, on my final night in Turkey, I wondered what I would do. Perhaps the current of people would flow in the right direction and send him close enough that I would be forced to say hello, or, in this case, good-bye. I watched him from a distance and then a crowd of rowdy teenage spectators overwhelmed the forty feet of space between us. There was nothing to do but leave.
* * *
I HAD ARRANGED to meet Ramazan postgame at a soup shop where his newspaper colleagues were debriefing. When I told him how upset I got during the match, Ramazan tried desperately to convince me that it was just soccer and not anything specific against Armenians. That this was what happened in any sporting event, no matter who the opposing team was, and that I shouldn’t take it personally. But I was beyond consolation, and disappointed that I would have to say good-bye to Ramazan like this, when he had tried to show me a nice time in Bursa, his city.
I needed to catch a two a.m. bus to get back to Istanbul in time to make my flight to California. Ramazan drove me to the bus station. Just before we parted ways, he produced a small bag and handed it to me.
“So that you’ll have at least one sweet memory of Bursa.”
It was a jar of candied chestnuts, the Bursa specialty. He had been running around all day, covering press conferences and visiting locker rooms and chasing the match from the sidelines with his camera, but he had managed, somehow, to make time to buy a gift. I wasn’t sure whether it was okay to hug a man as religious as Ramazan, but I did anyway.
* * *
THE HEADLINES OF foreign papers hailed the progress in Bursa. “Armenian Leader in Turkey for Soccer Diplomacy,” announced CNN. “Diplomatic Coup at a Football Match,” the BBC reported. Well-meaning readers of the news probably said, “Huh, isn’t that great,” imagining the players lining up and high-fiving when the match was over.
But the agreement to proceed with diplomatic relations was never ratified. On April 22, 2010, one year after the announcement about starting talks, Armenian president Sarkissian took the project off the table. He was still open to negotiation, he said, but he was not going to let another April 24 pass with Prime Minister Erdoğan making Armenia look like the fool by insisting on Armenia’s exit from Karabakh as a precondition.
“We consider unacceptable the pointless efforts of making the dialogue between Armenia and Turkey an end in itself; from this moment on, we consider the current phase of normalization exhausted.” Although he singled out Prime Minister Erdoğan for criticism, he closed his speech by expressing gratitude to President Gül for his comportment throughout the entire process. Anyone who had watched the two men would have to agree: Gül was the good cop, Erdoğan the bad cop. Or maybe Gül was just a better politician.
* * *
I REACHED ISTANBUL at four a.m., just in time to race home, brush my teeth, lock up the apartment one last time, and drag my six giant bags down five flights of stairs to the street. I was afraid that the tiny cars that made up Istanbul’s taxi force would not be able to fit my luggage. But then a driver pulled up and, seeing all my bags, jumped out and got right to work, heaving them into the trunk and the backseat, prodding and pushing until he had used every spare inch in the vehicle. He was a short, soft-bodied little fellow who looked to be in his fifties. When I tried to help him, he waved me off. My sole remaining goal was to make it to the airport without shedding any more tears, but a sudden surge of gratitude for this cooperative driver threatened to put me over the edge. He slammed the trunk shut with satisfaction and got in the driver’s seat.
“Do you have a wet napkin?” he asked. It wasn’t as strange a question as it would have seemed to me a couple years earlier; Turks are obsessed with hygiene, and they use wet wipes for everything. Even men carry them around.
“Sure,” I said, pulling a L’Oréal eye makeup remover towelette from my purse.
“Oh, that’s great, thank you.”
He gave his hands a quick ablution and we were off.
It was my last chance to speak Turkish, I suddenly realized. I wanted it to be memorable, but I was too tired to make an effort. My brain was numb from so many sleepless hours, and my stomach felt cavernous. I had tossed out what I hoped was my last pack of cigarettes before getting into the taxi—I did not want to bring the habit home—but the previous day in Bursa I had set a new personal record in the sport of chain-smoking and now my insides felt like they were made of ash.
We were silent for a while, and then, as we crossed the Galata Bridge, the driver turned to me and asked where I was from. “Germany?” he guessed.
This pleased me. I certainly didn’t look German, so I took it as a compliment to my language skills; he must have thought I was a diaspora Turk from Germany.
“I’m an American citizen,” I said, “but I’m from Iran.”
“What languages do you speak?”
I told him I spoke English, French, Turkish, and a bit of Persian and Russian. I didn’t include Armenian. There was no point. That science project had run its course, and there was still a twenty-minute drive ahead of us. I didn’t want to spoil this final leg.
“Any other languages?” he asked.
Why did he say that? Did he sense I was holding something back? It was always like this: I would tell myself that I did not want to discuss being Armenian, but then some subconsciously generated fairy dust swirling through the air would lead the exchange exactly where I claimed I didn’t want it to go.
“I also speak Armenian.”
“You’re a walking library!” he said.
He betrayed no reaction to the word “Armenian,” so I wasn’t sure if he had heard me clearly. We chatted about languages for a while. He tried out a few words of English, which led to a long conversation about the difference between “Sit down, please” and “Please, have a seat.” He had learned to say these things to tourists at the airport but had been wondering which was better. I explained that one was like a command and the other was like an invitation. He appreciated this conceptually but was confused by the “have” in the second phrasing. Turkish doesn’t have an exact corollary for this general form of the verb.
I complimented his accent and he beamed and said he had a good ear but that he could only dream of speaking English the way I spoke Turkish. Trying to be modest, I told him it was easier for me to learn Turkish because in my culture we use a lot of Turkish words. But there I went again, baiting him to ask what I meant; I could not resist bringing it up, again and again, to find out where the limits were, feel out the edges to determine the shape of the thing.
“Which culture?” he said.
“Armenian. I mean, Iranian. I mean, Armenian from Iran.”
“What do you think about Obama?” he asked.
Foiled again. I was bored by the Obama question so I asked him what he thought about our new president.
“Obama is pretty good,” the driver said, “But why does he support Israel so much?”
Oh, Israel. Turks have a bizarre relationship with Israel and Jews. They are incredibly proud of the fact that five hundred years ago, when Spain ejected its Jewish population, the great, generous Ottoman sultan welcomed them with open arms into his multiethnic utopia. Try it if you don’t believe me: ask anyone in Turkey what Turks think about Jews and this is the first thing you will hear. They also trot out this defense if you point to examples of anti-Semitism in Turkey. But as far as I had seen, every time there was a flare-up between Jews and Palestinian
s, Turkish cities exploded into protests during which Israeli flags were laid on the sidewalks for passersby to stomp on, and demonstrations featured banners with cartoon Jew-faces and lines drawn through them.
I explained to the driver that in the United States there are many Jews and that they are an important part of American society. Sometimes, I added, it seems like the rest of the world feels that anything short of hating the Jews counts as excessive support of Israel.
He nodded. I was pleased, thinking he appreciated my point.
“By the way, who lives in Israel?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“The people in Israel. Are they Armenians? Or Jews?”
If ever I were to be convinced of such a thing as destiny, this would have been the moment that made me believe. For had it been a different day, with a different driver, or simply fewer bags so that I could have taken the bus to the airport like I usually did, I would have missed out on this final, necessary amazement.
“Are you serious?” I said. “You’re asking whether the main group of people who live in Israel are Armenians or Jews?”
Then he was embarrassed. “Tarihim çok kötü,” he said. My history’s really bad.
“Jews,” I said. “Jews live in Israel. Israel was created to be a Jewish state. Armenians live in Armenia. Armenians are not Jewish.” I tried to control the judgment in my voice. “Armenia was the world’s first Christian state,” I added, as though a few more details could shore up his unfathomable ignorance.
He said nothing.
I asked him whether he had heard somewhere that Armenians were Jewish.
He shrugged. “I can’t remember. You just learn things here and there, you know?”
“I am surprised you thought that,” I said finally. “But I guess I can imagine how it would be easy to mix up Armenians and Jews since everyone hates both of them.” I giggled at my own joke. He did not laugh.
How could I be offended by this driver? What he said was simply so shocking to me that I could only marvel. I had lived in Turkey for two and a half years and I did not think there were too many things left to surprise me. Certainly I was sure I had heard every possible variation on the themes of anti-Armenianness and anti-Semitism. But this driver was here to offer me one last taste, a special deluxe combo package, before I flew home. And I felt sorry for him—sorry, after he had agreed so cheerfully to deal with my metric ton of suitcases, that I, a woman half his age, a visitor from the wealthy world whom he’d tried to treat generously, might make him feel stupid and small. Sorry that he had never been anywhere or seen anything, and that he never would.
The driver said nothing more, so I decided I might as well squeeze in a few extra clarifications before we reached the international terminal. “Israel is the country that was established after the Second World War, specifically for Jews. They had no place to go after millions of them were killed or forced to leave the European countries they were living in, like Germany.”
“Öyle mi?” he said. “Almanya’dan mı attılar?” Is that so? They threw them out of Germany? His voice curved upward with genuine but casual surprise, like I had just handed him an interesting but inconsequential bit of trivia, that I’d told him, for example, that the tallest man in the world was Chinese.
I nodded. “Germany and other places.”
We reached the airport. After he finished piling up my bags onto two carts, all three hundred pounds of luggage, he handed me his business card. “When you return to Turkey, please call me if you need a taxi. Happy travels to you.”
I thanked him warmly. Then, on behalf of Armenians and Jews everywhere, I gave him a generous tip and went inside.
21
Terms
In November 2008, a group of four Turkish writers and scholars bought the Internet domain name www.ozurdiliyoruz.com. Özür diliyoruz: Turkish for “We apologize.”
They created an online petition that read as follows:
“My conscience does not accept the insensitivity showed to and the denial of the Great Catastrophe that the Ottoman Armenians were subjected to in 1915. I reject this injustice and for my share, I empathize with the feelings and pain of my Armenian brothers and sisters. I apologize to them.”
A group of 360 Turkish public figures served as founding signatories. Over the next month or so, thirty thousand regular Turks logged on and added themselves to the list.
* * *
WHEN I HEARD about the petition I was impressed—amazed, even—but it was not until I looked at the Web site itself that I really felt something. Have you ever tried scrolling through the names of thirty thousand strangers? Each one had, alongside it, the city where the person lived and their occupation. An architect from Ankara called Ahmet. A lawyer from Mardin named Abdu. A retired teacher from İzmir named Duygu. Who were these people? Who was this potter, Nil Pektaş? Who was this tailor from Köln, Ali? A deejay from Atlanta, a student from Elâzığ, a pharmacist from Diyarbakır, a secretary from London, a customs agent from the border town of Iğdır.
You could sort alphabetically: how many Kemals or Mehmets, Mustafas or Müslüms, each name like a one-word biography. I was sitting in my bedroom at my parents’ house, on a holiday visit home to California, and I stared at all these names in wonder. First and last, city, job: all these people apologizing for something they, as Turks, had not personally done, apologizing to me, an Armenian, for something I had not personally experienced. A feeling of gratitude overwhelmed me as I read the names, quietly asserting their humanity on my laptop screen.
For me, the wording of the apology was as good as it needed to be. Conscience, injustice, insensitivity, empathy. The first time I read it I didn’t even notice the absence of the word that would make the entire enterprise come to naught. They had called it a “Great Catastrophe”—büyük felaket in Turkish—not a genocide. The organizers of the petition said that the point was to acknowledge the emotions associated with the events of 1915, and to make it easier for Turks to connect with those feelings. They believed that if they used the word genocide, some people would have shied away from adding their names for fear of legal consequences.
A group of Armenian cultural figures wrote a heartfelt letter accepting the apology completely, without qualification. But they were in the minority. The European Armenian Federation for Justice and Democracy, a lobbying group based in Brussels, sent out a press release:
“While being fully receptive to genuine expressions of sympathy and outreach by Turkish individuals who choose to speak out against their own government’s policy of denial of the Armenian Genocide, we must also make clear that the cause of justice with regard to this mass crime cannot be ‘apologized’ away by populist initiatives, however well-intentioned such actions might seem to be. The recently publicized ‘apology’ campaign in Turkey is, indeed, a populist initiative, which deliberately avoids the term ‘genocide’ and which, by so doing, intends to de-criminalize the destruction by the Ottoman Turkish government of 1.5 million Armenians.”
Judging anecdotally, many Armenians, at least when called to speak on the matter publicly, felt the same. Nice try, but not good enough.
And some of the angriest detractors of the apology campaign were Turks—not nationalists but radical liberals who felt that the project was merely a ploy to put the genocide issue to rest without having to break through the final taboo, that dreaded word. They considered it not only immoral but dangerous to normalize the idea that there was any legitimate way to acknowledge the genocide without calling it one. In Turkish, the label büyük felaket had no symbolic meaning; in theory, somebody could have used the phrase büyük felaket to refer to a really bad haircut. The word genocide, however, meant much more than simply the catastrophe to which it referred: it was a proxy for a broader problem, the power of the Turkish state and every small and large oppression suffered in Turkey by anyone who had ever violated the state’s written and unwritten rules.
* * *
SOME MONTHS AF
TER the büyük felaket campaign was launched, Barack Obama encountered his first April 24 as president of the United States of America. When Obama was merely a presidential candidate, he won the enthusiastic support of Armenian-Americans by making it unequivocally clear that he was on their side. “The Armenian genocide is not an allegation, a personal opinion, or a point of view, but rather a widely documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical evidence,” he said. He promised that as president he would uphold the same view. (Up to that point, our presidents had piled up a great many synonyms for “incredibly heinous event,” but none had used the g-word in an official statement.)
But when April 24, 2009, approached, and Turkey and Armenia were on the verge of announcing their secret talks toward establishing relations, Obama’s speechwriters came up with an entirely novel workaround used by none of the president’s predecessors. He made the following statement: “Ninety-four years ago, one of the greatest atrocities of the 20th century began. Each year, we pause to remember the 1.5 million Armenians who were subsequently massacred or marched to death in the final days of the Ottoman Empire. The Meds Yeghern must live on in our memories, just as it lives on in the hearts of the Armenian people.”
The Meds Yeghern—Armenian for “great catastrophe.” Obama had taken a page from the Turkish apology campaign for the büyük felaket, using Armenian words with the same meaning. That few people knew what meds yeghern meant was precisely the point. With this absurd maneuver, almost grotesque in its contrived, contorted way, the president managed only to infuriate both sides equally. But according to a former ambassador to Turkey, Mark Parris, it was a reasonable solution to an unreasonable problem. “Had the statement contained the word ‘genocide,’” Parris said, “US-Turkish relations would have gone into a deep freeze that would have taken years to thaw.”
There Was and There Was Not: A Journey through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond Page 29