“And why am I throwing it in the river?” asks Lucine.
“The umbilical cord has the power to influence a child’s future,” Mairig says. “If you bury it in the courtyard of a mosque or church, the child becomes devout. If it’s buried in a school garden, the child becomes educated.”
“And if you throw it in the river?” asks Lucine.
“Then the child is forced to search for his or her destiny elsewhere, far away from here.”
“Do you believe in such things, Mairig?” asks Lucine.
“I believe what my Bible tells me to believe. But just in case, throw it as deep into the current as you can, my love. May the water carry it as far away from this cursed land as possible.”
Lucine throws umbilical cord as far into the current as she can. “Where is my umbilical cord?” she asks.
“Under the mulberry tree, right next to Anush’s and Bedros’s cords,” Mairig says.
Hairig’s mulberry tree is the most glorious thing Lucine has ever seen. It emerges from the earth like the hand of God, fingers spread wide and reaching eagerly for every bit of sun, wind and sky. Its branches beckon the children’s eager limbs and its fruit moistens their parched tongues.
“Why there?” asks Lucine.
“Because your grandmother thought it would tie you all forever to the family and its land.”
“And what about Aram?” she asks.
“What about him?” says Mairig.
“What did we do with his umbilical cord?”
“Nothing,” says Mairig. “We lost it.”
“What?”
“One minute it was there, and the next it wasn’t. That whole cord business was your grandmother’s obsession. Not mine. And by the time Aram was born, she had already passed. I kept thinking we might find his cord under a cushion someday, but it never turned up.”
“That’s awful.” Lucine imagines her own g?bek ba??, buried deep in the hardened soil of the courtyard, and immediately feels safe again. So much better than an umbilical cord traveling down a winding river or one that’s lost altogether.
When they arrive at the baths, the attendant, an unusually large woman with yellow teeth, looks unsettled by the sight of Mairig and her daughters. She sits with a burlap bag of sunflower seeds in her lap, their discarded husks at her feet. She loads one seed after another between wedged teeth, expertly cracking, stopping only long enough to say, “The hamam is full.”
“We can wait,” Mairig says.
Several minutes go by, filled with the attendant’s steady cracking and spitting. As the mountain of husks, jagged and slimy with saliva, grows, two women exit the bathhouse.
“Surely there is room now,” says Mairig.
“They were two and you are three,” says the attendant.
She opens the inner door anyway and leads them into a small changing room, where all three undress. Anush and Lucine slip on their wooden bath slippers and wrap themselves in the thin cotton sheets used for bathing.
In the vast marble hall milky clouds of steam carry gossip from one group of reclining nudes to the next. Bodies, pink from rigorous scrubbing, lie languid at the foot of the massive fountain in the center of the room. Children shriek in protest under the heavy scrubbing of their mothers’ arms. Lucine looks around the room for a familiar face, but there are none. They are the only Armenians foolish enough to brave a bath on this day.
Mairig leads her daughters past the others and stops in front of the private room they always use. But the measured kindness of the attendant has run out. She stands stoically in a cloud of steam and motions toward the communal room.
“Are the private rooms all occupied?” asks Mairig.
“The private rooms are for Ottomans,” the attendant says.
The Melkonian women take their place on one of the divan cushions pressed against the outer wall. A Kurdish woman, seated to the right of Mairig, eyes the girls’ hips with the discerning eye of a connoisseur. Anush and Lucine disrobe quickly, but the Kurd moves even quicker.
“Fine legs,” she says, patting Anush’s thigh appreciatively. “You’ll need an Osman as strong as a lion.”
Lucine and Anush ignore the muffled laughter of nearby patrons and begin unpacking. The pressed linens, bars of soap, keses for exfoliating, along with the glass bottle of eau-de-cologne and the silver cup for rinsing are all dutifully laid out, but the room is suddenly unnaturally quiet. Hard stares replace the familiar chiding and clicking of tongues from village women.