“You don’t mind?”
“You could tell me more about the exhibit,” he says, walking alongside her.
“The photographs you saw were taken by Gerard Nova. There’ll be some oil paintings by tomorrow, as well as oral histories. It’s really about bringing our past out into the light.”
“I prefer to keep my past in the dark,” he says with a chuckle. “Under lock and key.”
“You must have an interesting past.”
He shrugs. “Not really,” he says, thinking how if you paid enough attention to your past, it would grow and grow, obscure your present as well as your future.
“Well, you can deny your past all you want, but it’s a part of you. Acknowledging it only gives you more power. Anyway, the idea is to record these stories for posterity.”
“Not sure what good that will do,” he says more to himself than to her.
“My mother nursed me with mother’s milk but also with sorrow. It flowed from her heart to her breast, into my insides where it probably still rests. She herself had ingested the same from her mother. They call it transgenerational grief now. We call it being Armenian. I had a Cuban friend claim she could spot the Armenian children at Glendale Middle School by the sorrow in their eyes. There is no cure to speak of. Of course, you could always ‘convert.’ Strange that we use that word even though it is not a religion but a nationality. But we have no nation, haven’t had one in a long time, so I guess the word works.”
“A disease of grief,” says Orhan.
“Except there’s really no cure for inherited grief. Some people look for the cure in the soil of the homeland. They call it reparations. Others seek the salve of an apology, recognition. I stopped trying to escape this sorrow long ago. I accept it the way I accept the color of my eyes and the width of my hips. It is part of who I am.”
“Is that what the exhibit is about? Finding a cure for your grief?” Orhan asks.
“That or just more probing of the wound.”
“You people know how to keep a wound fresh.”
“We don’t have a choice,” Ani says.
“Sure you do. You could forget it. Everyone else has.”
“Impossible. It would be a betrayal.”
“What is a memory if not the reliving of an experience?” Orhan asks, thinking of his own past. “Why relive this over and over again?”
“Because it happened. Remembering it is all we have in the face of denial. Silence is the enemy of justice,” she says in a mocking voice. “That was my father’s motto, anyway. The baykar, or the cause, with a capital C, is a sacred thing to an Armenian.” Ani fixes her dark eyes on him. “I’m oversharing, aren’t I? I tend to do that,” she says, smiling for the first time.
“No, I wanted to know,” Orhan smiles back at her. He walks a dozen steps before formulating a proper question. “This cause you were talking about. What’s the objective?”
She stops in front of a cream-colored sedan, its backseat crammed with boxes. “It’s about getting Turkey to admit to the genocide. You can’t get over a thing when the perpetrator denies it even happened. That’s why eyewitness accounts are so important.”
She reaches into the car and grabs a cardboard box. “Could you help me with this?” She hands him the box without waiting for an answer and dives back into the back seat of the car.
“War is a terrible thing,” Orhan says to her backside. “Everyone suffers.” It is the safest sentence in the world, but he knows he’s said the wrong thing because his words paralyze her. She extricates herself from the backseat and turns to face him.
“What did you say your name was again?” she asks, knitting her brows.
“Orhan,” he pronounces it clearly this time. He knows she is ingesting his name because she fixes her kohl-rimmed eyes on his face and takes a deep breath.
“There is a difference, Orhan, between wartime atrocities perpetrated by both sides and a state-sponsored campaign of genocide meant to exterminate an entire race.”
“There’s no real proof of that, is there?” Orhan asks, unable to silence himself.
“There are telegrams proving that the decision to annihilate the entire Armenian population came directly from the ruling members of the Young Turk Party,” she says, looking him directly in the face.
Orhan doesn’t respond to this. He is no historian.
The light vanishes from Ani’s eyes. Her mouth falls open and a kind of dread falls upon her soft features. She places one hand on the car door to steady herself.
“Who did you say you were visiting?” she asks.
“I didn’t,” he says. The box in his arms suddenly feels like a boulder.