I’m sure you haven’t forgotten the day that Apkar, with a dirty snicker, played that game with us outside the Billard. The three of us were sitting silently, sullenly. Apkar had grown bored and kept yawning. Suddenly he got up and, with a smirk that told of the wicked deed to come, took out a piece of paper, folded it a few times, and made it into a little man. He put it on the table and dripped some of his coffee onto it. The paper man started to writhe, squirm, and soften, giving Apkar some childish joy. The writhing of the paper man reminded me of the movements of someone during particularly depraved sex. I couldn’t control myself and unjustly slapped Apkar, because in his paper man, I saw the image of Fatma and me as we sank into nothingness.
But I also remember the day—I remember it as if it were yesterday. How could I forget?—the orphan collectors came to our village with two Allied soldiers.11 Yes, I remember it as if it were yesterday. Together with a few other orphans, we waited as the collectors went from house to house. I didn’t understand what was happening. I stood there sadly with my head bowed along with the other orphans who were just as quiet and scared as I was. We didn’t talk to one other. There was absolutely no exchange among us. Sometimes we lifted our heads and glanced at one other, quickly looking away if our eyes met. All the kids were younger than I was and had forgotten their language, their past, their identity. There was a small, chubby boy who managed to hold my gaze and had a big, sad smile on his naïve face. It was in that moment, raising my head to avert my eyes from the boy’s heartrending stare, that for the first time I noticed the landscape that I had lived in for years, oblivious. In the distance was a wide horizon. The spring sun had cast a misty veil on the hills that stretched from north to south, a milky haze—still and ethereal—that hadn’t been able to rise higher than the damp earth. Above, the sun had dulled the blue of the sky. Beyond it was the dense forest where I had fled one day, frightened by Fatma. Along the edge, a stream swelled with melting snow and rushed through the visibly calm air. Our house was on the other side of the stream—that’s what Fatma used to call it: our house. In the garden, the plum trees and cherry trees had bloomed, looking wildly happy, like a colorful postcard. In that instant, I had forgotten the filth and ugliness of the shack, the hungry dog and Fatma’s husband, a soldier who hadn’t yet returned from the war. From afar, our house looked so pretty beneath the blooming trees. My heart grew fuller and my vision blurred. Here and there were the other houses in the village, spaced far apart from one another and hiding behind a curtain of fruit trees. My God, how big the world seemed! I understood then that I was coming out of a narrow, dark cave, thrust into the bright world like a butterfly springing from its cocoon, flapping its new wings in the sunlight after a short period of sadness. I, too, was a butterfly, who now flew and fluttered, intoxicated by the sun and air. I started to cry, to sob. Huge teardrops streamed down my cheeks and filled my mouth, and I licked their saltiness with delight. Fatma was watching from a distance. Encouraged by my tears, she probably attributed them to our separation and took a few steps toward me with her arms extended, but a soldier raised his hand to stop her. From a distance, Fatma smiled at me, a melancholy smile that still wanted to hope. A ray of sunlight shimmered over one of her eyes and I could see a teardrop. Yes, Fatma thought I was crying for her. But really, whom was I crying for? For the memory of my mother, who now painfully returned to my mind? No, I didn’t know why I was crying. I only knew that as I was crying, a mass of emotion was dislodged in my heart, and at times my crying became the ecstasy of a bird soaring into the sky. I cried like a newborn just entering the world, distressed and choking on his tears.
“Why are you crying?” asked one of the orphan collectors, assuming that it was because I was being separated from my mother, Fatma. That was how it was for many of the children who had forgotten their real mothers. They were crying and wanted to run away from the orphan collectors and—who knows?—maybe they were scared of the unknown, of an uncertain future, and their tiny souls clung anxiously to the present.
When we finally left the village and rode away in a military car, clouds of dust rising to obscure the village behind me, I sensed why I was crying. I was sitting in the back of the car brooding and daydreaming, my gaze fixed on the distance, on the village fading into the landscape, from which rose muddled and unwelcome images. The most vivid image was that of my mother—my mother who had lost her mind and, with pleading hands, was still calling after me, and there I was, laying on the road, stubborn and deaf to her pleas. This was the boy I was leaving behind. The farther away the car got from the village, the more he sunk into the shortening horizon, which closed in on him like a lid until, totally cut off from me, I no longer had any connection to him. Then big teardrops started falling from my eyes, slowly, involuntarily, and strangely peacefully. I cried for my childhood, for my tarnished, violated childhood, which had been snatched from me cruelly, just as I had been taken from my distraught mother years ago. Now the car drove away with a twice-orphaned boy of fifteen, jostling him as it jumped over the bumps and depressions in the road.
In reality, Minas, it’s hard to pinpoint in our dark, inner abyss the decisions that eventually drive us to commit the fateful acts that shape our lives. This is not a novel that you can construct any way you please. A novel is a reality unto itself, a self-contained reality, which renders acceptable the truth-like, even arbitrary, elements that go into composing it. We’re dealing with life here, the reality of life, so obviously it’s critical to understand the exact motives behind our actions, isolate the moment of their genesis, identify their basis, accept and digest, if you like, the special task of their classification, recall the instant of their manifestation in our consciousness and, even more, the organization of that manifestation in the realization of the act. Like I said, this is not about aesthetic pleasure or construction, but rather about a life lesson. This is a study. For this very reason, we are forced to record events with the utmost precision, then research and investigate whatever has collected in the subconscious. Like bubbles rising sporadically in water only to burst once they reach the surface and evaporate into the air, our inner impulses are neutralized on the surface of life by the daily demands that make up the struggle of existence.
Everything seems easy when it’s over and done with. At first glance, it would seem that just taking a closer look would clarify everything. But it’s not like that. The reality is much more complicated. When I sat down, what I had planned to write seemed plain and simple. Now, the more I think about it, everything seems more elusive, more unexplainable. Everything is turning into a puzzle. The issue is knowing the limits that compose and shape the danger. What was the moment that passed through his senses and was recorded and captured on film? It was the one that would eventually turn Vahakn into an inept stepson of life. In other words, what would turn him into the candidate of his Turcocidal impulse? Which one of the restless waves stirring in the ocean’s deep dungeon would sink the distressed ship trapped in the storm above?
That one and not any other.
This whole story, as you will see if we were to look closely, is just the tale of a handful of filthy sediment. No, I’m not talking about the ash on Ziya’s tie. That was just where the eye needed to rest for a moment to notice the filth everywhere else, the filth that my life has made a constant effort to flee from. You know, there’s no need to list the times that I’ve fled. As soon as I’d settled down, I would steal or cheat, and leave. I had just gotten married—I hadn’t even slept with my wife—the last time I fled. It would take too long to go into them one by one. In any case, the filth was what I always tried to escape. Wherever I was, the filthy feeling would engulf me. I fled convinced that I would be freed of it, that I could leave it behind. At least that’s what I thought. I saw everything as pure, because I needed to see everything as pure. It was a need to lead an upstanding life. Soon enough, though, the filth collected around me. On my wedding night, it seemed that once again I was about to get into bed with Fa
tma and enter a world devoid of thought and feeling, a negation of my life. Back then, as a boy searching for death, nothing was more desirable than that sense of nothingness, and I gave in to Fatma like someone willingly stepping into his own grave. Then I learned to like life thanks to the orphan collectors, who gave me the intoxicating freedom to think and feel, which reminded me of the soaring larks, but like them, I fell to the ground and into a muddy field. I tried to avoid this fall whenever I fled, but that impossible escape was really anything but an escape, because what I didn’t know was that what I was trying to flee from would always be there. It was rooted in me, clinging to me, attached to me like a Siamese twin. It was in my soul. I’ve carried it everywhere, from country to country, city to city, fooling myself into believing that I had run away from it.
Maybe I’m not explaining myself clearly. Now I’m afraid that I won’t even be able to go through with killing myself. My days are numbered. I’m already dead, right? Otherwise, how would I be able to see things so clearly? If I return to life, everything will be filthy again. Minas, when you write, do it in such a way that you can’t sense your own mortality. Only the dead have the power of discernment and fearlessness. Suddenly time has stopped. Past, present, and future no longer exist. Everything is in the present. Everything. But it’s not the present as we know it. It hasn’t been given a place in the dictionary. We have to create a new word. This is your job; some thinkers have called it eternity. But this word is suspicious, or if you prefer, it has a suspicious ring to it. For me, it’s an image. I leave it to you to confine it to a word. For example, let me take a math problem we were given in school. A few cubic meters of water run out of a faucet and into a bathtub in the span of a minute; a lesser amount runs into the drain at the bottom of the bathtub at the same rate. How long will it take for the bathtub to be filled to capacity? The tub will fill up, but the amount of water won’t be enough for a bath. This word “enough” corresponds to the idea of the present. We see the same image in mythology with the tub of the Danaides. The Danaides were continuously trying to fill a tub that was continuously emptying, but the tub would also fill by retaining its contents. The words “contents” and “enough” have the same meaning here and that meaning can be summed up with one word: reality.
That other kind of present that we use in daily conversation is a deceptive, slippery thing. How can anything be in the present when, as soon as it has broken from the future, it has already turned into the past? That present is an illusion. It’s past and future at the same time. A state outside time that the eye can perceive in its entirety, as though everything were at your disposal, strewn around your table, and you only needed to give shape to it and organize it as you pleased, moving an object here, another there, like a theater director in charge of all the elements of a play: the script, the actors, the set design, the stage—not the tiny wooden stage the size of a box, mind you, but the whole of the universe. After all, isn’t life a play that has been thrown into the universe?
You might be wondering if there is a point to this long digression. You might even be thinking that I’m trying to justify myself for all the evil things I’ve done, especially to you, the one who has enjoyed their bitter fruit. No, my dear boy, what is the importance of criticism to someone who will cease to exist tomorrow? What interests me is the search for truth. It’s truth that forces us to walk through life with our eyes wide open. But, alas, it’s always at the eleventh hour that truth appears, once we have our eyes fixed not on life, but on death.
Before, I wrote about how we left “our” village in a military car, raising into the air lazy, calm dust from the road as I carried with me my violated childhood.
Can I tell you something? These are all just words. Obviously they have a weight and an emotional charge that can easily bring listeners to tears, but they’re still nothing more than words. We must explain, convey a concrete meaning, even if it weakens the emotional resonance, and be truthful first and foremost. As I’ve said already, only the truth counts. What does a violated childhood mean? Explaining it would require a detailed description of a four-year story of how filth had settled little by little in the soul of a boy, like coffee grounds settling at the bottom of a cup. My soul was like that cup. How? You can’t be serious, Minas. Why wouldn’t a soul look like a coffee cup? You have a strange understanding of the soul. People have always loved abstract concepts. But the abstract doesn’t exist. The only abstraction is God. You can be sure that one day we will hold Him in our hands like a Mickey Mouse doll. You don’t believe it? But you do realize that they wash coffee cups after the coffee is gone. Now let’s suppose that a coffee cup had been left unwashed for four years. You would agree that the cup would be harder to wash than one that had just been used that day. It’s the same with the soul. Don’t be troubled by that word. I know that you’re a year older than I am, but don’t forget that I’m dead, so I have already grown old and can slip into your father’s role. It was the feeling of being forced to scrub away four years’ worth of crusty sediment and filth that suddenly made me cry with all my heart that day. We know what to use to wash a cup. Water, obviously. The soul isn’t a cup that we can wash with water. I didn’t say the soul is a cup. I said it is like a cup. You could assume then that the soul can be washed with tears. No, tears only streak our faces and tire the heart with the startling emotions that pass through it. You could assume this because I did cry when the time came to wash my soul. Yes, when the time came. But it wasn’t the time that had come, it was the unexpected awareness that it was coming. How would I do it and what would I do it with? This was what brought about a long, constant string of searches and escapes, and in the tears I shed that day, connected to my newfound awareness, were also hidden many trials and tribulations. I haven’t cried since that day. Not once. Not even in the most desperate of situations, because tears wouldn’t be what would wash my soul. And I waited. I waited for the idea to come on its own, just like everything else that arrives just at the right time for those who know how to wait, for those who allow themselves to wait, always open, like a poet to inspiration. Later becomes too late. All things deferred are subject to loss. It’s not for nothing that they say not to leave till tomorrow what you can do today.
Here are all the different parts of the machine and each one has its function. We can’t say that one part is better than another. Take away any part and the machine will stop working. There is also a driving force that brings all the parts together to form a whole for the sake of its function and power. I prefer another word: existence. But existence is blind, dark, devoid of consciousness, a kind of elemental force whose roots lay within the filth of the soul. Hence the tragedy in which we swim. We swim in filth. Yes, we’re filthy. That’s why they call us “filthy Armenians.” We’ve become so filthy that we look like those people who don’t dare enter a party and instead stay outside by the door under the sun and the rain. Every Armenian, you and I, the men at La Source, all of us, all of us live with the anxiety of being washed. One day a terrible storm splattered all the mud in our land, expelled us, and settled in the depths of our souls. We want to be cleansed, Minas. We want to be cleansed, so we can live.
The ancients used to spill the blood of a rooster, a lamb, or a slave, and fathers used to sacrifice their own sons to cleanse their souls, to please God. What heathens, Minas, heathens! But then again, how true! And then Jesus came and said, “Live in peace. Love each other. I shed my blood once and for all, for all of humanity.” In other words, he civilized humanity. I think it was Pascal whose soul rejoiced at the drop of blood that Jesus shed in the name of salvation. But Jesus’s blood has been watered down for a long time now, blended with the earth and rendered powerless and unrecognizable. What the Armenian needs is Turkish blood: red, fresh, warm, and fragrant.
The Candidate Page 7