•Then she tried to go back to her son. • No, she came here. In Alexandria she met Yero Topjian. You know Yero Topjian, Asniv’s sister-in-law’s husband. •Asniv, the duck-killer’s daughter? •That’s right. Yero married her sister- in-law. Anyway, he was in Alexandria after the war and he brought Anna here to marry her cousin, Levon. •That’s right. Levon was her husband’s uncle. He married Anna and took her to Watertown. •My brother-in-law lived in Watertown fifty years ago. • I remember going to Watertown by boat. • How could you go to Watertown by boat? A bunch of old Armenian women is sitting around in a place like 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. • In those days we used to go from New York to Boston by boat. I think the dock was at Chelsea. Wasn’t the dock at Chelsea? •Who cares about Chelsea? What happened to Anna? •Did she have another child? •No, she never had another child. •The Moslem was her curse. •Curse or not she stayed with Levon and they had a grocery shop. They worked hard and saved their money and around her neck she wore a locket of her baby’s hair and no one ever knew. •Poor woman. • Not so poor, she had a house and they lived well. •But she had no child. •She had a child. Somewhere back there she had a child. •That was her suffering. •Each of us had our suffering. •That was her suffering but not her child’s. She lost hope but he didn’t. ‘Who is my mother,’ he kept asking. ‘Where did she go?’ •Good for him. •Yes, he looked for his mother. He went to Aleppo, he went to Alexandria, and in Alexandria he found her address in Watertown. •Vai, vai, the little Moslem bastard. •How happy she must have been. •She could not read the letter fast enough. ‘I am your son,’ he wrote. ‘I want to see you.’ • I saw something like this on my television story. It was about a girl who gave her child away for adoption. •Oh no? •Anna did not give her child away. She lost him and now she found him. •She found him, yes, but Levon also read the letter. •Uh-oh. • ’What’s this?’ he says. ‘W hat’s it look like?’ she says. ‘It’s from my son. I’m going to see him.’ ‘You’re not doing anything,’ he says. ‘You’re not going near that Moslem bastard.’ •He’s jealous. •He’s not jealous, he’s furious. •His whole family was killed by them. •That was the past and she had suffered enough. ‘Do you think,’ she says to him, ‘that you can stop me?’ •How can he stop her? Who is more important, a husband or a son? •Sometimes a husband is too strong. •No husband could be strong enough for Anna. ‘Stay out of my way,’ she says, ‘or you’ll never see me again.’ •Good for her. •’Don’t bring him back here,’ Levon said. 'No Moslem bastard is going to step in this house.’ •He was ashamed. •Let him be ashamed. Love is more important than shame. •Not in those days. In those days shame was everything. •That’s because everyone was so close. You couldn’t go to the toilet without someone knowing. •And now everyone was going to know about Anna. •Let them know. She had money of her own and she flew to Beirut and her son met her there. •Mother and son together after all those years. •Just like my television story. •Is her son here now? •No, he couldn’t leave his life back there but he comes to see her once a year. •Once a year, big deal. •At least she sees him once a year. Some mothers never see their sons. •Some sons don’t love their mothers. •How could a son not love his mother? Woman Bathing 1 remember my mother taking me to the bathhouse. I remember walking with her while she carried the sack with the towels and the footahs. The bathhouse was called hamam in Turkish and the women went on Fridays and the men on Saturday nights. I remember the big door that pulled open with the heavy iron ring and I remember the deep echo that boomed through the halls.” They enter the chamber of laughter and splashing, mother and daughter to a tiled stall. They undress and wrap themselves in their footahs and they take their place by a bucket. The water crashes through the halls and the wet sheets cling to shiny flesh, Moslem and Christian alike in the veil of steam. Women bathing. Degas’ woman bending over. Titian’s woman twisting her hair. Rembrandt's woman lifting the hem of her gown above her knees. Rubens’ with her arm raised, Ingres’ with her back turned, Renoir’s with her hand between her thighs. Durer’s, Cranach’s, Cezanne’s, Roualt’s. Lovely or noble, wrinkled or nubile, desirable or pathetic through the ages. She washes her breasts and cups them with her palm as if to milk the eyes of her passionate grandson. He’s obsessed with the crease of her buttocks and tne swell of her nipples, the hair of her mound and the lips inside them. He has wanted to see her naked ever She sits with her daughter in their burnoose towels and enjoys the pleasure of cleanliness and grapefruit. She peels the shiny globes into the ruby slivers of the juice, so delicious and refreshing and each dewy cell of the tartness like a teardrop. since he was not supposed to, the darkness under her dress and the contour of her bodice like mysteries he has wanted to solve ever since the dream of seeing Miss Savio’s cunt in the first grade, her legs open under the desk and the hem of her skirt over her knees. She was the mysterious female always wearing clothes. She was an executive in a suit, a dancer in a leotard, a lovely hygienist with an elbow in the crotch of her uniform as she bent over to clean some teeth. She was that woman in the Ganges who washed herself underneath her sari while the waves lapped her breasts and her hair glowed in the long spokes of a dying sun, her nimble fingers washing both her hair and the sun as if she were dancing, her head bending as she plunged the brilliant mass into the waves and then swung it around and curled it easily into a bun while a garland of marigolds floated downstream from where an arm of a corpse softly dropped into the ashes of a flaming pyre. She was the secret underneath the clothes of the flesh, the darkness in the eye sockets of a cadaver on the sand, her stench drifting through the years. She sits with her daughter in their burnoose towels and enjoys the pleasure of cleanliness and grapefruit. She peels the shiny globes into the ruby slivers of the juice, so delicious and refreshing and each dewy cell of the tartness like a teardrop. Beautiful Bodies 1 remember Lucia’s body in the bathhouse. She was so beautiful she felt ashamed. •She didn’t feel ashamed. The old women made her feel ashamed. •What mouths they had. •Now we have them. •Do we? My granddaughter doesn’t even wear a brassiere and do I say anything? •When I was her age I couldn’t even shave my legs without the old women calling me a whore. •What happened to the bathhouse? • I think it’s a Cuban restaurant now. • I remember the horse-stables in the back of it and the smell of horseshit. • How much fun we had there. •Now men and women sit together. Everything showing, even between their legs. •They just sit in a big tub. •Do they make music?. •I don't know what they do. •They smoke dope. •Good, let them smoke dope. •My son-in-law put one of those jacuz- zis in his bathroom. •Oh yeh? I want one too. •I don’t need any jacuzzi. I like a good keesah on my body. •You can’t get that flaxen cloth anymore. •My granddaughter wants one. She likes old-fashioned stuff. •She has a beautiful body, your granddaughter. •I hope it’s not too beautiful. Look what happened to Lucia. •It’s not easy to be beautiful. • My mother had to smear herself with shit so they wouldn’t rape her. •My granddaughter doesn’t have to do that. •They learn to fight now. They do that Japanese stuff. I saw on the news a woman who broke a man’s nose when he tried to rape her. •Good for her. •Did they catch him? •Yes, they caught him in the hospital when he went for his nose. She is Called California Fr hen we were kids we used to watch the sunset from on top of the road that snaked down into the marshes of Secaucus. The road would disappear out of sight into the cattails of the garbage dumps and on the other side of the marshes lay the blue hills of the horizon. The image of America always seemed to be on the other side of those hills, a kind of motherland, that waited to be explored. As the road snaked down and got lost in the marshes it seemed to point toward manhood and one day we would follow it. It was our rite of passage and the tunnels of Pennsylvania were like a birth canal. It led to exotic names like Wheeling and Columbus and our excitement was like an instinct that kept pushing us forward, each of us thumbing his way into the darkness and testing himself against the unknown. Keep going, it said, don’t stop, get a trucker at a cafe in the middle of the night and make St. Louis by dawn, the sudden thrill of the Mississippi and the new Memorial Arch shining in the long ray of the sunrise behind us, the great Saarinen line like a crowing into that immensity called America and the belly of the west. But there was no America, there was nowhere that could be named and the road pushed through a history of massacres and a cemetery of another culture. There was only the land and she had no name and she grew more beautiful as the road continued across the plains and the Rockies. What would she be like on the other side of the desert? All right, let her be called California, the word itself like a woman, her great thighs accepting anyone and her winters always green, her gentle hills like a boy’s first whore with a gold tooth in her smile. The first time he entered her he felt he had arrived at the end of a journey and he stayed as long as he could. And though Clinton St. Quarterly 37
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