The night I found out about a woman named Azat, my aunt Armen and I had gone to see the opera La Traviata. "It is my favorite opera," she had said during the ride over to the Music Center and added that, "It was the first one I saw as a schoolgirl in Varna".
Their days in the gymnasia, during WWII, were described by my mother and aunt as exciting, beautiful and filled with love. Little by little, stories would come out, such as my grandfather taking Jewish friends to the village for safety or their cousin being killed for harboring Communists. In fact, they'd say, he couldn't refuse when they'd asked to stay the night in his house. He was innocent, they'd add. Because nothing was ever clearly articulated by the sisters, I only know bits and pieces. This was also the case that night at the opera.
As we made our way to our seats, we had started a conversation while waiting for the theater to fill up and the curtain to lift. Generally our conversations were about current events and so the subject of a Kurdish leader's return to Turkey by Germany came up. It was all over the news and as a family we prided ourselves on our ability to sustain a conversation, no matter its direction. Armen's role in these conversations was to proclaim one absurd theory after another. This was the case that night at the opera as well.
"Leave those Kurds! I know all there is to know about them!" she said. Togh drants!
"Ehh, you are a Kurd expert now?" I asked. Kani hat es kyankumt chanachel? "How many have you known in your life?"
"I used to know one in prison and she drove me crazy, " she answered. Pandum kideyi, yev inzi khentetsuts.
"She had all gold teeth and drove us crazy. One day, we were all standing there, ready to go to shower and she would not take her clothes off. She was new. She just said, 'Adat! Adat!'. Means sin, I think. Can you imagine? Finally, I go to the soldier and ask, listen, we are cold, please let her just go like that. She really just had her underpants. You know, long, covering everything, like a peasant. I guess that is what they all to. Backward like that. Hedamnats. He let us all go, thank God, or we freeze, and she came like that."
As Armen told the story, her sympathy seemed to be with the good soldier. As the seats were filling next to us and people were looking at their programs, I couldn't shake the image of my aunt in this scene. She must have been either twenty four or twenty five at the time. I felt physically uncomfortable, mostly because she was the most prudish person I knew.
"Some months later, I see Azad again. She was walking around, naked, like nothing. Can you imagine?" Armen laughed and continued, "So, I ask. I ask, listen Azad, what happened to adat and all that? She just waved her hand and said, what adat? Adat gone. No more adat.".
My aunt was shaking her head in a reverie. The people sitting next to us in the theatre could have assumed from her gestures, that she was recounting a fond memory, a cute story.
"One time, I was sleeping, " my aunt continued. "Azad come and wake me up in the middle of the night. Let's go to the bathroom, she said. Because she had her gold teeth, she was afraid to go to the bathroom by herself. We were in the same camp again, so everywhere she went, she would ask me or one of the girls to go with her. She was afraid that they will kill her and take the teeth. So, we go."
"As we went to the bathroom, dark. And then, we see and hear something. I wait for Azad and then I stumble. On the ground, I see a woman, not one of us politicals, lying on the ground with an axe in her head. Blood all around."
"There were gangs of them You know, we kept separate, we didn't mix with the criminals. And this one had something to do with the other ones. They were both in contrabands or something. We didn't mix with them. All prostitutes, murderers. So we keep separate. But, I didn't see anything. Only the body."
"Later, at the trial, all I said was that I just saw the body. That is all. And you know what she said, that criminal, that thief? She was in the accused's box and I was testifying and she said, 'take that pathetic creature away.'. Can you imagine?", Armen asked, shaking her head.
My aunt was quiet, then she looked at me and asked, "Can you imagine? Me, pathetic... An educated, woman, pathetic, and she a murderer."
It was at that point, that the theatre turned dark and the curtain lifted. There was so much to think about, because for a brief moment I had found myself, inexplicably, sympathizing with the murderer.
The opera that followed, was a revelation. I did not fall asleep as I'd done previously, but instead found myself crying and very indelicately wiping my hands all over my seat.
After that evening, we never discussed Azad and I never did find out what happened to her. I wonder if she'd been Kurdish or Kurdish Armenian. I remember my father mentioning that among the many repatriates who moved to Armenia after WWII from the Middle East and Europe, there had been Kurdatsats Hayer -- Kurdish Armenians-- who had come across the border from Turkey and had gone to the countryside. I wonder whether the woman that Armen had met in prison had been one of them. I had asked once whether there were other Armenian women in the camps. Che, urdeghen! Polor rus ein, gam ukrainatsi, hrya, et bes. Minak yes ei. "No! They were all Russian, Ukrainian, Jews, like this. Only I was Armenian", she had responded.
Years later, during a car ride to San Francisco, my husband Mark decided to interview her and record her with his phone. She just started the pro Soviet propaganda, that seems so out of sync with her experience and would drive all of us crazy. It just made no sense. I was at the point of hitting my head on the car seat, when I remembered Sirarpi, who was a frequent visitor to Armen's apartment in Hollywood. Sirarpi was blind, walked with a cane and I vividly remember her reddish hair. She was older than Armen and I know she had a daughter and granddaughter who also lived in LA.
We lived in a first floor unit of a duplex in Hollywood, with Armen living in one of the back units on the second floor. Whenever Sirarpi came, my parents would walk her up the stairs inside our apartment and then send me to get Armen, who would then come and gently walk her up the stairs to her place.
The way Armen behaved with Sirarpi was almost soft, a quality reserved only for dealing with small children and animals. I honestly don't remember her acting this way with other adults, thus I knew that there was something different about Sirarpi.
"Oh, she and I went to prison together," Armen said when I asked. Irar het pand katsink. Ink al noreghogh er, mdadsum eink paxchil. Erexai bes paner eink anum. Menk kidein vor xosall der mexk gordzel che. Yerexai bes hekyatner ein badmum. "She was also a noreghogh, a newcomer, and we were thinking to run away. Childish things we wanted to do. We thought that only talking was different from doing a crime. Like children we were telling stories".
It was my father who would years later shed light on this story. When I asked him about Sirarpi, he told me that she was an Armenian from Beirut. Together with my aunt they had thought about crossing the border. Paxnil guzein. "Run away, they wanted", he said. Bayts sxal martots archev xosetsan. They talk in front of the wrong people.
"Our Armen never shows any fear," said Maro after we had come back from one of the many trips to the hospital. Mer Armen yerpek vax chi tsuyts ta. It was a quirk of fate that during the last year of her life, she would meet as her caregiver a woman just as tough as she. Maro took care of her and saw a side that I did not. She was the one who told me about the notebook of letters from prison friends and how Armen would spend her days, sitting on the couch and reading the words of despair written in pencil and compiled together and held together with thine.
I was sitting next to her on the couch, when Maro mentioned her lack of fear. Armen shrugged, got up from the couch, reached out for an apple and calmly said , "Oh, I learned that in prison." Oh, yes ayt pan pandum sorvetsa.
Now that all of them are gone, I understand my mother's commitment and fierce devotion to her sister. "I saw it with my eyes," she would say. Achkovs desa. Though I never knew the full story, I do know this. She died as stoically as she had lived. The words in the notebook are of despair, loss and physical hardship. This is not how Armen ever told it. She talked only of things that had happened, discussing as a matter of fact how her jaw was broken when a beam fell on her while doing hard labor. She talked about the knowledge she had gained, like putting urine on her face to prevent sunburn. What she never, ever talked about was loss and despair, the difficulty of coming back and dealing with society after the things she had seen. This was never a subject for discussion, because, as she stated before dying-- you never show weakness. This she learned in prison.
Yes ayt pan pandum sorvetsa.
