Lucine stops quite suddenly and looks up at him, adding, “Someone who suffers silently.” She grows quiet and serious now, her eyes filling with a knowing melancholy.
I will never make you suffer, he thinks. His hand is at her cheek, but only for a moment. The contact wakes her from her moral slumber and she jumps to her feet.
“I better go home now,” she says.
CHAPTER 8
The Crier
KEMAL: THE TURKISH boy. Kemal: the weaver’s son. Kemal, her uncle’s keeper, who always stood quietly at his right. He had not only talked to her but let her cry on his shoulder, making her angry and energized all at once. Lucine blushes when she remembers burying her face in his chest. She did not know how much she missed him until he started talking to her again. Ach pazoog, my right hand, Uncle Nazareth called him. Kemal hadn’t extended a fist to the enemy but an open palm to her face.
She whips the horse into a frenzied speed, racing away from the river and her confusion. Inside the courtyard, she hurries past bubbling cauldrons, past Hairig’s expectant eyes. She knows she should apologize for storming off—a dutiful daughter would. But looking at Hairig would mean confronting the fear in his eyes with the shame in her own.
Once inside, she heads to the library, which is not a library at all but a set of bookshelves, carefully arranged perpendicularly against one wall of the parlor. She sinks into Hairig’s red velvet floor cushion and places her trembling hands under her thighs. Her eyes dart from one title to the next, looking for answers to questions not yet formed in her mind. But the titles offer no answers, only reprimands.
“Daughter,” Hairig whispers from behind her. Lucine, wishing to avoid his eyes, fixes her gaze on the volumes above her. He too searches the shelves and finally selects a thin leaflet she recognizes as the collected poems of Daniel Varoujan, the poet of Sivas. Hairig lowers himself to the divan and opens to “The Longing Letter.” He points a finger to the seventh stanza, and waits for her to read it.
Oh, come, my son, your ancient home restore!
They burst the door, they swept the larders bare.
Now all the swallows of the spring come in
Through shattered windows, open to the air.
“It’s about a mother waiting for her son’s return,” he explains. Lucine nods, eyes lowered to the words. “Isn’t it lovely?” Hairig asks.
Lucine shrugs. “All our songs and poems are so sad,” she says.
“Poets write about what they know to be true,” Hairig says. “And we Armenians, we know about loss. When I was young,” he continues, “I only read poetry. Your grandfather was mortified. He wanted me to be fierce like my brothers, but I didn’t have it in me.” Lucine’s ears perk up at the mention of Hairig’s family. He lost all but one brother in the Red Sultan’s massacres, so named for all the blood he managed to shed before the Young Turk Revolution instilled constitutional law. Hairig rarely ever spoke of his lost brothers.
“What your grandfather didn’t understand is that strength comes in different disguises. It does not always ride a mighty horse or wield a shiny sword. Sometimes we have to be like a riverbank, twisting and turning along with the earth, withstanding swells and currents. Enduring.
“You,” Hairig says, pointing his finger at her, “are like my brothers. Strong and fierce. But sometimes it’s better to be like the river. Gu hasganas? Do you understand, Lucine?”
“That is how I survived,” he says, closing the leaflet. “I may have shamed my father by refusing to fight along with my brothers, but what matters is I survived and my mother lived to see it. And the same will happen with your uncle Nazareth,” he says, smiling at Lucine and stroking her hair. She gives him a weak smile and wills herself to believe him.
“I wooed your mother with the help of these books,” he says, waving the volume in his hand. “There was a time I could recite whole poems to her. She didn’t expect that from a merchant. Did I ever tell you how we met?”