When I was five, I was a mute little girl who had learned to talk and then stopped. Nobody knew exactly why. My world was one of odors; in a sense, they were an alternate language. My father was a cobbler by trade. He had built up a business and owned a large workshop and two stores, one on either side of the Bosporus. Mrs. Yilmaz says he was considered the best shoemaker in Istanbul. People came to his shops from all parts of the city. My father ran the store in Pera and my mother ran the store in Kadik?y. Every morning Mrs. Yilmaz took me to the little school in üsküdar. My parents worked hard, but on Sundays my father always took us out for a carriage ride.
At the beginning of 1914, a doctor suggested to my parents that there might be a cure for my silence, that certain medicinal plants might calm my violent nightmares, and that normal sleep patterns might help my ability to speak to return. One of my father’s clients was a young English pharmacist who often helped families who could find no other solution. So every week, Mrs. Yilmaz and I went to Istiklal to see him.
It seems that whenever I saw the pharmacist’s wife, I would call out her name.
Mr. Pendelbury’s concoctions had a miraculous effect. After six months of treatment, I was sleeping normally and started speaking again with increasing fluency. Life was good. Then came the fateful day of April 25, 1915.
On that day, the elite of Istanbul’s Armenian population—intellectuals, journalists, doctors, teachers, and shopkeepers—were all rounded up and arrested in a bloody pogrom. Most of the men were shot without trial, and those who were spared were deported to Adana and Aleppo.
At the end of the afternoon, word of the massacres reached my father’s workshop. Our Turkish friends had come to warn us and hide us as quickly as they could. The Armenian community had been accused by some of conspiring with the Russians, one of Turkey’s enemies at the time. None of it was true, but nationalist sentiments had got people fired up, and in spite of many Istanbul natives speaking out against it, the violence continued unfettered.
My father had tried to join us, but along the way, he ran into a mob that was hunting Armenians.
“Your father was a good man,” Mrs. Yilmaz kept telling me. They caught him near the port. When they were done, they left him for dead. But he got up again. In spite of his wounds, he kept walking and found a way to make it across the water to Kadik?y, which the violence hadn’t yet reached.
“We saw him come home in the middle of the night, covered in blood; his face was so dreadfully swollen that we hardly recognized him. He went to see you in your bedroom, where you were sleeping, and begged your mother to stop crying so that you wouldn’t wake up. Then he took us to the sitting room and explained what was happening in the city—the murders, the burning houses, the rapes . . . All of the horror men are capable of when they lose their humanity. He said we had to protect the children at all costs. We were to leave the city at once, to hook up a carriage and head into the countryside, where the situation might be calmer. He begged me to hide you with my family, here in this house in Izmit where you had stayed before. Your mother couldn’t stop crying and she asked him why he talked as though he wouldn’t be coming along. I still remember how your father said, ‘I’m going to sit down and rest awhile, I’m a bit tired.’ He was such a proud man, the kind of man who made you feel like you had to keep your back straight in his presence. He sat down and closed his eyes. Your mother fell to her knees and embraced him. He put his hand on her cheek, smiled, and sighed. His head fell to the side and he never said anything again. He died with a smile on his face, looking at your mother, just as he had always wanted.
“I still remember once when your parents quarreled, your father saying, ‘You know, Mrs. Yilmaz, she’s angry because we work too much, but when we’re old, I’ll buy her a beautiful villa in the country with lots of land all around, and she’ll be the happiest woman on earth. And when I die in that big house, the fruit of our labor, when that day comes, the last thing I want to see is my wife looking back at me.’ I remember him saying it very loudly so that your mother would hear. She let a few minutes pass, and when he put on his coat, she came to the door and told him, ‘First of all, there is no way of knowing that you’ll be the first one to die, and second of all, the day that I die, exhausted from your cursed ambitions, the last thing I’ll see in the delirium of my death throes will be a pile of damned shoes.’ She hugged him and sent him on his way, saying he was the hardest-working man in the city, and that she wouldn’t have wanted anyone else for her husband.
“We moved his body to the bed, and your mother tucked him in as though he were only sleeping. She kissed him and whispered a few words in his ear before telling me to go wake you. We left as your father had told us to do. As I was hooking up the carriage, your mother packed a few things. One of the things she took was the drawing in the frame on my dresser between the windows.”
I went over and picked up the drawing. I didn’t recognize their faces, but the man and the woman smiling back at me were my parents.
“We drove the horses through the night, and as the sun was rising, we arrived in Izmit, where we were welcomed by my family. Your mother was inconsolable. Most days she sat underneath the big linden tree in the garden. On good days, she took you out into the fields to pick bouquets of roses and jasmine. Along the way, you told her all of the different things you could smell.
“We thought we were safe, that the murderous insanity had been contained, and that what had happened in Istanbul would be limited to the one bloody night that took your father. We were wrong. Hatred spread through the country, and in June my nephew came running up the hill, out of breath, to tell us they had started arresting Armenians in the lower neighborhoods of Izmit. They rounded them up like animals and herded them to the train station, where they were loaded into goods vans.
“I had a sister that lived in a big house on the Bosporus. That lucky girl was so beautiful that she managed to marry a rich and important man, the sort of man who is so powerful that other people never dare to come to his house unless they are invited. Thankfully, both she and her husband had hearts of gold. They would have never let anyone harm a hair on the head of a woman or her children. As a family, we decided you would take refuge with them, and that your mother and I would take you there. At ten in the evening—I remember it as though it were yesterday—we took your little black suitcase and ventured out into the darkened streets of Izmit. From the top of the steps at the end of our street, we could see the fires burning in the city below. They were the houses of the Armenians who lived near the port. We took to the alleys, trying to avoid patrols out hunting for new victims. We hid for a while in the ruins of an old church. Stupidly, we thought the worst had passed, so we went back outside. Your mother was holding you by the hand. And then, at the end of the street, we saw the patrol.”
Mrs. Yilmaz went silent. She began crying, so I took her in my arms and tried to comfort her. She took her handkerchief, wiped her face, and kept telling her horrible story.
“You have to forgive me, Anouche. I know more than thirty years have passed, but I still can’t talk about it without crying. It all happened so fast. Your mother knelt on the ground before you. She told you that you were her little wonder, her life, that you had to survive, no matter the cost. No matter what happened, she would watch over you, she would be in your heart, wherever you went. She said that she had to leave, but that she would never leave your heart. She pushed us into the shadow of a stable. She kissed us and begged me to protect you. Then she stepped out alone into the night to meet the patrol of barbarians. So that they would not come farther and see us, she went to them.
“They took her away. As they did, I led you down the hill on the old footpaths I had always known. My cousin was waiting for us in a boat. We set out across the water and traveled through the night. Well before dawn, we pulled up on the bank and walked again until we came to my sister’s house.”