May 22, 2014: Here is the cancelled prologue to my new
novel about the Armenian-American family of Armen Ararat and his wife, Artemis – from the
time of the Armenian Genocide in 1915 to 1972. The novel’s title is “The Ash
Tree,” and it will be published April 24, 2015, on the hundredth
anniversary of the begining of the Armenian Genocide; a description of the novel is to be found at www.theashtree.net .
Andranik
in America – August, 1924
I have been
pummeled, shot at, imprisoned, and sometimes now I can hardly breathe. I am
fifty-nine, and my time is coming to an end, sooner rather than later. There
remain, of course, moments of life for me. After the Great War, I met an
intelligent woman by the name of Nevart, and two years ago I married her – in
Paris, lyrical bittersweet Paris, almost forty years to the day after my first
wife died in Anatolia.
Paris is bittersweet because it
is the site of our defeat five years ago – in 1919, when Wilson’s so-called
Peace Conference gave us no promise of a homeland and no justice for the
Ottoman massacre of our people. Naturally, we were not alone in being betrayed
at Versailles. Yet we Armenians still idealize Paris, as much as do the Slavs.
And we love the French language, the language of Racine and Rousseau, of
Baudelaire and Verlaine – beloved by our great poets Siamanto and Varoujan,
whose works are filled with echoes of them. In 1915, both men were murdered by
the Turks.
So a breath of time ago I was
married in bitter beautiful Paris. Soon we moved to California to aid my
asthma, and I walk now beneath Fresno’s summer sun. Its fury beats down on me,
through to the bone. I call it my constitutional, trudging about my backyard. A
grey-green eucalyptus towers over one side of the yard, and a Fresno ash tree
with its blood-red blossoms borders the other. Beyond the yard, I look out at
parched, wind-blown fields, which stretch to the Sierras. The earth here is as
hard as iron and dry as the moon. But when worked by spade and shovel, it can
be planted with vines, which once irrigated yield tasty grapes. Many Armenian
farmers make the attempt, pitting their knowledge and scant cash against the
heat. My Fresno yard, though, remains hardpan. What energy I have, I devote to
my wife and to my writing. In the shade by the side of our house we do,
however, grow our purple basil, parsley, and mint, bushy and aromatic in
terracotta pots. We can’t help it.
The
mornings I spend at my desk writing these words or sometimes in my basement
workshop, where I build chairs and tables, for as a boy I was an apprentice to
my father, a carpenter. I remember admiring the wonderful form of his tables,
the perfect lines of their slender legs, the elegance of his carving, and also
the clarity of his instructions. From the age of twelve to eighteen I worked
toward whatever mastery I could achieve in his workshop. When I was seventeen,
I met a short, tender village girl, and I courted her with some dedication. We
married in April of 1882. Soon our son grew within my wife. When the time
arrived in all its wonder, she died giving birth. Two days later the infant also
died.
Yes, a
carpenter. My chairs are like my father’s, lithe and simple. A few weeks after
my little loved ones died, my father walked into our kitchen, his head bloodied
and his eyes blackened. A Turk had taken offense for no reason, in the way
racists do. For a long week, I silently watched and memorized the perpetrator’s
habits, his haunts, his walks. One evening, I followed him through a barren
field and called out that I was the son of Ozanian. I beat the Turk to death.
Soon after, I walked away from our village.
Walking has been my destined
mode of transportation. Even in childhood, we would walk the hours west from
our Sivas village to Ozan, our ancestral home. When at eighteen I walked away
from our village, for weeks I walked west hundreds of miles, finally reaching
Constantinople. It was in 1883, and I joined the Armenian national liberation
movement. After a decade, I found myself in Kars, where I was imprisoned for
being a proud man and an Armenian. I am among those who have witnessed
atrocious murder, and I have also been one who is willing to return blow for
blow. When the Turkish prison guard assigned me clean-up, I swept with the
stiff-bristled broom and suddenly turned to thrust it in his face. Blinded, he
was unable to fend off my blows or prevent my escape. I walked two hundred
miles from Kars to Sassun in order to join the Armenian General Serob; neither
of us felt we had any choice but to defend the Armenians of Anatolia from
Sultan Abdul Hamid’s slaughter of our people. And when Turks assassinated Serob
in 1899, I searched the region with my men and tracked down the assassin,
General Khalil, whose throat I slit.
Two years later, on foot, we
snuck into the Armenian Holy Apostolic Monastery in the Turkish-occupied city
of Mush. We were only a few score of men, but we held the Monastery for nineteen
days, and we involved the European Consuls in our negotiations. That was our
mission: to broadcast to the Europeans the tragic fate of the Armenians under Ottoman
rule. On the last night, we dressed in captured Turkish uniforms and escaped
through a secret door. I was first out. I was dressed in an officer’s uniform
and walked calmly through the Turks’ lines, addressing soldiers in formal
Turkish. Little did they know I was not one of their officers but their enemy
Andranik Ozanian.
When I fought in the Balkan War in 1912, the
Bulgarian general said that “General Andranik was brave to the point of madness.”
I dispute that, for all I did was to walk shoulder to shoulder with my men.
Even as the men around me were struck down by on-coming fire, I would charge
ahead; my aim was always to teach them to become aware of the origins of fire,
its force and direction, to dodge it, and if possible to turn fire on itself. I
had already lost everything more than once; I had seen what death brought down
on the innocent, even an infant a few days old. Always I tried to relieve my
men of fear. I would go among them, speak quietly, and ask after their
families, their feelings and fears. In my austere way, I tried to be kind and
loyal. “What did you eat this morning?” I asked, and “What did you dream last
night?”
This
California valley reminds me of Anatolia. The starkly out-jutting Sierra
Mountains, the stretches of tinder-dry brown earth, the interruptions of
irrigated green, and the small towns like villages – it brings back our
homeland. Anatolia, with its ancient Armenian farms and villages, is a similar
patchwork of irrigated vines and blank dirt, of outcropping hills and hardened
plains with a looming horizon of mountains. I would tramp across those plains
with my men, whether in an army of thousands or a score of partisans, all of
them ready to fight with courage and intelligence to defend our people. Never
will I forget the years of fighting side by side with them. Life would be
worthless to me if I had not pit myself in that way against fate and death.
Struggling to save Armenian
lives in 1915, I led my army against the Turks, who were driving us from our
lands and murdered 1.5 million of us. Using all our cunning and desperation, we
freed Van from the Turkish siege in 1915, and in 1916 we fought against them in
Bitlis. In 1918, I was made governor of all the Armenian cities of west of the
Arax River, and we helped hundreds of thousands of Armenians to escape to the
east as again the Turks attacked and sought to obliterate us. In those years,
the political leaders of Armenia on both the right and left capitulated to the
Young Turks and then to the Ataturk regime. Finally, they agreed to the
worthless Batum Treaty, which created a shrunken Armenian nation. My army and I
held out to the southeast in Zangezur until the end of 1918, but then bitter
winter descended.
I first came to the United
States in 1919. Wilson’s government would not see me or any other official from
Armenia. Even now, if only America helped, the little we need is not too much
to ask, and we could then raise a sufficient army to defend our now tiny
nation. Across America, I have spoken to filled auditoriums in Boston, in New
York, in Detroit and Chicago, and as far west as San Francisco, Los Angeles,
and Fresno. To Armenians and non-Armenians alike, I described how the Turks had
expelled our people from Anatolia, how since 1896 they had murdered two million
of us; over these years entire lost provinces of our homeland have been wiped
out, and the legions of the disappeared call out to us: Do not believe the
deceptions of the Turks; they will honor no treaty. We must protect our
vulnerable people. By early 1920, I raised half a million dollars for our
refugees.
For the sake of my lungs, I have
now returned to California. In the afternoon, I walk the few blocks to our
downtown Armenian café called the Asparez Club, where I sit by the window and
quietly sip black coffee. Around me, Armenians gossip and play cards. These men
fled from Turkey’s machine of death and now are mere shadows of themselves,
provincial imitations of the Armenian life in Constantinople, Harput, Van, and
Yerevan. Of course, there is Lulegian the publisher of our little newspaper and
the gifted actor Zarafian, but it is as if they all pretend, as if they are
acting rather than living, and then there are the boasting farmers and
packing-house bosses, who worship the American god of money and whose loud
voices fill the club. In this city named Fresno, the ash tree, these
self-important men, leaders only by virtue of their wealth, come to my table to
pay homage while I quietly sit and read Lulegian’s rag of a newspaper.
Maybe the young will rise from
these ruins to save us. There is big Aram Saroyan, who at twenty years old is
studying in law school; he’s a genuinely Armenian character, yet American too.
There is also little Armen Ararat, twenty-four, both a farmer and a poet. He
speaks such literate Armenian, it is as if we are talking together in the
shadow of the Galata Tower in Constantinople, two witnesses to the disaster.
But these young men are weak, tender shoots struggling to survive in the
blasting heat of the intolerable Valley. They too pretend, act rather than
live, though my heart is touched by their struggle in this place of no culture,
no history, no hope. A few of my fellow soldiers have also found their way to
this city of dust and ashes. On some Sundays, I visit with Colonel Dikran
Haroutian, who helped to defend Harput. His wife’s cooking transports me back
to vanished Anatolia, and there is his daughter Artemis, who is so pale yet so
sharp as she assesses me with her big Renaissance eyes. In a better time and
place, she could well become a colonel herself.
