What shall Marash Girl write about on this last day of the year? As she was walking across the bridge to the market this morning, she was thinking about her grandmother, Yepros, her grandmother, orphaned during the 1895 massacres, a little girl when she witnessed the murder of both parents in Marash, Ottoman Empire at the sworded hands of the Ottoman Turks, suddenly a little orphan girl holding her littler sister Mary Kurtgusian close to her, hiding in the closet where her parents told her to hide, where they told her to remain in silence no matter what she heard. She hid and held her little sister. How much she cried, Marash Girl will never know; perhaps it was what Yepros witnessed that caused her blindness those many years later, once she had reached the safety of the New World . . . that caused her to hold her silence no matter what she experienced in the years that followed . . .
Ottomans? you mean Turks, don't you? the same Turks, who twenty years later murdered upwards of a million or more Armenians? the same Turks, now bereft of the saddle of the Osmanli handle invaded Cyprus during Nixon's and Kissinger's reign, bragging on loudspeakers and seeking to terrorize the local Greek population, of how they had murdered and raped Greek women and children and would do it again if need be? the same.
ReplyDeleteoh, come on, Mr. Peterson, are'nt you being a bit negative? aren't you focusing too much on darkness? the past is the past, and let it rest, why don't you?
ReplyDeleteNo rest until the Turkish Government admits to its sordid past!
ReplyDeletei remember dad quoting Grandma Yepros as saying the Lord took her physical eyes and gave her better ones, spiritual eyes. That would explain how those who came to console her would leave consoled. also, read on, from a short story i wrote a while back:
ReplyDeleteIn the summer, on a day of calm and quiet, when the windows were thrown open in her attic apartment, when the moisture in the air settled upon everything, and the breezes were trapped in the green shade of trees whose branches were pregnant with fruit, I could hear that voice lifted up to heaven. Her prayers would fall to the earth, like rain, all afternoon. From time to time, if I listened, I would hear a name I would recognize, because she always spoke the names in English. Whenever I heard my name, I stopped, immediately, because I could feel her embrace of me three stories of house away. It was the certainty of the voice, and the rain of virtue falling to the earth, and rising to heaven, that was the steeple of my summer days. When I played baseball a mile away on the highschool field, or capture the flag two streets up the hill, or bicycled explorations into streets and corners, and shared secrets in rooms with doors shut and whispers that papered the walls, I knew her voice was raised on my behalf, and I knew it was a canopy under which I lived.
Sworded? You meant sordid, did you not, Marash Girl?
ReplyDelete'sworded is a perfect play on the word, as it captures the essence of Turkish history.
DeleteMary Kurtgusian, later, Mary Pambookian, always our Aunty Mary, would arrive at our dinner table every afternoon, following church service, and after she had fed her own family. we always ate late and long, so her arrival would always be timed for the end of the meal, not purposely, but just happenstance. her signature arrival was her asthmatic voicing of 'thanks God, thanks God', wheezed from her lungs upon her entrance, and her successful climbing of our 37 steps. Mary's faith was marked on her soul. Her love for us was something that never translated through the triangulation of her pock marked english, turkish, and armenian linguistic expression. it was a love that children know and feel sans any need for adequate language. it was a love that filled her presence and even when her seat was not occupied until her arrival, preceded her in the hearts of us children, as we waited for the oratorio of her 'thanks God, thanks god, entrance.
ReplyDeleteI remember aunty mary bringing whitmans chocolate candy with cherries stuffed inside --- remember how we would always look and hope for a different kind of chocolate center! Do you also remember that Aunty Mary would also babysit for us?
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