“I saw your niece head for the exit, if that is what you mean. It’ll be fine. I promise.”
The old woman sighs, clearly irritated. “Fine,” she says. “Just make it quick.”
Outside, Orhan pushes her chair along a meandering pathway. The sidewalk beneath his feet is covered with words. Etched into the concrete is a timeline of Armenian historical and cultural dates commencing with the Bronze Age in the year 3000 BCE and continuing to the present. What kind of a people is this? he wonders. So obsessed with their past that they etch it into the very ground beneath their feet. Orhan pushes Seda slowly toward 1982, skimming bits and pieces of history as he approaches the visitors’ courtyard and the circular fountain. The spouts emerging from the mouths of several cherubs are dry and the water in the circular pool is completely still. Just behind the fountain is a massive map made of marble. Under it a plaque reads HISTORIC ARMENIA. His own hometown, located in the province of Sivas, is included in the borders of what is labeled as BYZANTIUM ARMENIA. He stands there dumbfounded. Theirs is an entirely different version of history.
The sound of crunching leaves brings him back to the present. Seda is rolling her wheelchair toward a mulberry tree under which sits a lone wooden bench. Unlike the tree back home, this one displays thick succulent leaves, punctuated with berries drooping down in clusters. Orhan takes a seat on the bench next to her and lights a cigarette, letting another awkward silence hang between them.
The woman before him is like an ancient tapestry whose tightly woven threads could tell quite a tale, if he only knew how to unravel them. One loose thread and the whole thing could come tumbling out of her pursed lips.
CHAPTER 17
The Fountain
SEDA WATCHES HIM light a cigarette. She knows where this is going, this path of shared photos and garden chats. It’s called intimacy and she must avoid it. She lets him take two long drags before speaking again.
“Not everyone would want me to sign those papers, you know,” she says finally. “There are plenty of people around here who wouldn’t. Plenty of people who would fight for that land.” She watches his face for any sign of worry.
“I know,” says Orhan. “And I’m grateful to you. But I don’t want to leave here without knowing why my grandfather did this. I’m sure you can understand that.”
You can never understand why people do what they do, thinks Seda. What’s the point in trying? It’s like trying to explain the world with a handful of photographs.
“I have something else to show you,” he says.
“I don’t want to see any more pictures,” she says, her voice firm.
He smiles at her again, revealing two sets of parentheses at the corners of his mouth. “This was one of my grandfather’s sketchbooks,” he says, pulling a tattered tomb from his backpack.
Seda’s heart stops. Looking at the photographs was hard enough. Seeing Kemal’s drawings might be more than she could bear. Seda stares at the tattered black cover in Orhan’s hands, where the last traces of Kemal’s fingertips remain. Before she can form another thought, her bent fingers reach for the sketchbook, drawing it to her and peeling the cloth cover open.
Seda is transfixed by the very first drawing. Fleshy dark mulberries dot a landscape of textured leaves thick enough to make a silkworm’s mouth water. And Seda is pinned like a butterfly. At first she can only see the sweeping gray of graphite covering all but slivers of the creamy paper. She flips through the sketchbook, trying in vain to weaken its power over her. In the drawings that follow, the tree loses its fruit, its leaves, and ultimately many of its branches, until it looks more like a lonely stump. The entire sketch pad is dedicated to the mulberry tree in Karod. Kemal has captured every corner and inch of their courtyard from its infancy to its ultimate decay.
Their laughter as children is trapped in the crux of a branch, where the imprint of her backside remains from when they climbed that very limb, the one with the eye of some forest djinn encapsulated inside it, forever glaring.
There is an image of the tree bearing fruit and offering shade, before all the lamenting began. Even then, Kemal has cleverly alluded to their impending tears, collected in the marrow that fills the cauldrons nearby. It is all there. The gray, black, and dark blue of their longing and sorrow.