Llines upon lines, they flow like food for the tail-eating snake. They love the void and they grow in death, they rise and become part of it like murals on a cracking wall that become the cracks themselves. Dear Death, dear dying friends, here are more of them, another mystery and a search. The plot is simple: an old hairy-nosed and horny artist is reviewing his life’s work and he confronts the spirit of history, of our species who kill each other and of his grandmother who was slaughtered in the desert. Who is she, what does she look like? He wants to paint her as if she is the woman he’s always wanted and the quest for her figure leads him through the labyrinth of the mysterious female. The Old Grapevine Meanwhile life goes on. A bunch ofold Armenian women is sitting around in a place tike Fresno, California, and the grapevines are like those they once knew in Turkey. They were youngsters in Turkey when the Armenians were massacred and like other survivors they came to America and settled in a town across the river from New York. They worked in factories and raised families and when they retired they moved near a vineyard where they get together every once in a while and shoot the bull. Our hero's mother could be one of them. He visits her about once a month and she tells him of her own mother whose face she can't remember. He struggles to imagine that face as if it were the image of a home they both lost in their different ways. He tries to find her inside himself but his imagination fails, his memories interfere and they become like veils he can't clear away. Back in his shack in Berkeley he tries to 36 Clinton St. Quarterly figure them out and they grow like doodles in a margin of a letter. Some of these letters are to his old friend, Charlie, whom he never sees anymore. The lines twist and curve like an old grapevine at the end of harvest, the shredded bark and tortured trunk like an old ego on a cross, its arms out as-if it were praying for death. By a Vineyard in the Great Valley of the West T1 he harvest is over, the summer is gone, and yet more grapes still hang on the hairy vine, their soft skin now freckled brown and their juice very sweet. They survive, they ripen, and as they dry they grow even sweeter. A fat moon appears above the horizon and the long rays of the sundown send blue and purple shadows to some ancient figures bathed in gold. One of them pinches the air and shakes it back and forth. •Eh? •Don’t ask me, I never knew that kind of love. •I watch it on my television story. •I don’t watch that garbage anymore. •They should tell it to the toilet and pull the handle. •No, I like it, it's just like life. •Whose life? •Not mine. •Which one of us knew that kind of romance? •Don’t look at me. In the orphanage I said okay as long as he was not crippled or blind, so they showed me a picture of a soldier with a hat in his arm. But when he came to get me on Ellis Island his one eye was glass and he was lame from a wound in the war. And as if that was not enough he was sixteen years older than I and I was not even sixteen. •But you loved him. •I learned to love him but he was not my sweetheart. •What about Anna, she had a sweetheart? •Her sweetheart was a Moslem. •She was in love with the boy next door. •A Moslem. •Moslems like Christian girls. •Those filth. •Moslem or Christian they had a son. •A bastard. •A bastard to you, to her a prince. •You remember Jack-knife Nishan, his sister-in-law had one of those bastards. No one talked with her when she walked down the street with it. Some even spit at it. •No one spit at Anna because no one knew. •I never knew till you told me. •Tell us again. •Her husband died not even a year after the baby was born and that very year the massacre started. She was living with his family and her father and brothers came to get her. ‘No,’ she said, ‘how can I leave my child?’ ‘Your child is a Moslem bastard,’ they said, ‘you’re coming with us. •She should have taken the child. •Her husband’s family would have killed her. •Poor girl. •Girl is right, no woman would leave her child. •Her father was a powerful man and he took her away whether she wanted to go or not. •Either that or become a Moslem. •I know more than one who did. •They’re still over there. •No, Anna left her son and went to Aleppo with her father. First to Aleppo and then to Alexandria and her father died in Alexandria.
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