Across a Precipice of Days

by Cate Touryan

Touryan family photo, Jerusalem house, 1945

September 3, 2023—Central California

Still warm in rumpled pajamas, I ease into my desk chair, careful not to slosh my coffee, and start my computer, a slow wake for us both. Scrolling through the morning emails, I pause at a friend’s September newsletter, Lift! Clicking it open, I’m dazzled by a fuchsia banner emblazoned with a parade of cheery letters. BIRTHDAY EDITION! A balloon-studded card fills my screen, below it the reason for the fanfare: “September is my birthday month, and I’m inviting you to celebrate with me.”

I skim the newsletter, give it a second go, wonder at the omission, and hit reply.

“Such a lovely Lift! this month, Jill. But”—I take a needed sip of coffee—“why don’t you say which day in September? Is it today?”

Her quick response tells me she too is scrolling through her inbox. She chats about the change of seasons, an upcoming trip, a poem she’s read, stalls until her final sentence: “My birthday is 9/11.”

But of course! I wince. I want to retract the question. My heart sinks—for her, for the date. Where there is evil, there is no passage of time.

“I’ve long taken to celebrating off-day,” she writes. “When is your birthday?”

It’s a week later when I reply. “Happy TOMORROW birthday, Jill! Though the date casts a long shadow, it cannot darken the joy of your birth. You are the light that still shines.”

And then I answer her question: “My birthday is October 7.”

A day untarnished. Unlike hers.

                                                                

October 7, 2023—Central California

My husband relents. We will forfeit a coastal hike and rally my family for a celebratory breakfast at Budget Café, a 1980s mom-and-pop diner with mulberry booths and buttermilk pancakes. We drive the few streets to my mom’s house first, and before she is even in the car, she says, “Have you heard? They’re attacking Israel.”

She does not seem to know who “they” is. It’s still early, the news reports scant. Or perhaps it’s her memory that is scant. At almost ninety, she understands best that which is simple, remembers most what is past. Though I don’t know who “they” is either, I surmise that it’s the same “they” that always seems to be attacking Israel.

“What happened?” my husband asks, helping her into the back seat.

“It’s really bad,” she says, an extra syllable in the word really, laden with portent.

And then she remembers.

“Happy Birthday, Cate!”

And in remembering, she forgets. Any question I might ask—when? why?— will only perplex. I can check the news later. No reason to let the outside world intrude on my day. Now—now, I think about birthdays. Mine. But also hers.

She was born in Israel, my mother. Palestine then.

                                                                

July 22, 1946—Jerusalem, Palestine, morning

For the boys—her brothers—Mondays hold two days’ worth of mischief, for the girls—her sisters—two days’ worth of chores, Sundays set aside for worship at her father’s Armenian Brethren Church and hospitality from their mother’s kitchen, a parade of Armenian dishes fit to feed the five thousand. Today, shaded beneath fruit trees, her younger sisters play hopscotch across the backyard pavers. Mairig—mother in Armenian—scrubs clothes in the washtub nearby, suds to her elbows, while Hairig—father in Armenian—sequestered in his corner study, already prepares next Sunday’s sermon, the room musty with old books and typewriter ink. At the far end of a corridor lurks the broom closet, stuffed with cleaning supplies and the occasional naughty boy. Mairig rarely consigns the girls to the “jail,” and should incarceration mean a missed lunch—particularly one serving up french fries—she keeps their portion warm to quell their tears.

This Monday is no different, the sun hotter perhaps, the sound of the British soldiers at their drills louder. The garrison occupies a good half-block, from the leprosarium to the far road sign announcing the German Quarter. The soldiers are favorites of the family, playing street soccer with the boys, “popping round” for Mairig’s thick Armenian coffee and Hairig’s keen comments, political and theological, and acquainting the children with salty English words.

Arousiag with her sisters, Jerusalem, 1946


My mother, Arousiag, at age ten, is the oldest of the six children. She is outside in the courtyard with her little sister, who has just collected freshly laid eggs from the chicken coop—three brown, four white—and is walking gingerly across the yard, cradling them in her apron, when from behind the garbage bins, a rooster comes charging. Her shriek splinters the morning. The boys—my uncles—halt mid-pelt, arms cocked to volley rocks at the neighbor’s peach tree, undeterred by last week’s jail time for breaking her window. Mairig, pinning a sheet on the clothesline, turns, stomach plump with a seventh child. My mother’s little sister, my aunt, has begun to run, is nearly to the porch, but her shoe catches on a loose paver, sends her sprawling, eggs catapulting, shells shattering.

My mother laughs each time she tells the story.

Hairig—my grandfather—wept each time he told his.

                                                                

June 1915—Darman, Province of Erzerum, Ottoman Empire

He thinks he was seven.

The soldiers come at dawn, shout them awake in Turkish, herd them from the village, the children, the women, the elderly, tell them not to worry—they will return. Where are we going? A susurrus from child to mother to grandfather to God. To the Interior. The men have already been routed from the village, ordered to surrender their weapons, forced into the Turkish military, Christians in service to Allah, building roads, digging trenches. They will return.

The caravan of creased brows and hastily shod feet weaves through narrow streets, goaded by soldiers on horseback, snakes up the road to the cemetery, past goats grazing among the tombstones. His mother clutches her newborn, holds little Papken’s hand. His other brother clings to her skirt. Behind him, his sisters slow their steps to match those of their grandfather, stooped over a cane. Papa has long since left for Keghi to pay the forty gold pieces required to exempt him from military service. He has not returned.

Three years later, Ambassador Henry Morgenthau publishes his testimony to “this, the greatest crime in modern history.” Of a conversation with Talaat Pasha, Minister of the Interior, the American ambassador writes, “If what was left of Turkey was to survive, added Talaat, he must get rid of these alien peoples. ‘Turkey for the Turks’ was now Talaat’s controlling idea.”1

Turkey for the Turks.

The village fades from view, and with it all record of his birth, their births, now archived—perhaps—in the Ottoman Archives of Istanbul, along with the genocide.

Who, after all, remembers the annihilation of the Armenians?

                                                                

August 22, 1939—Bavaria, Germany

One week before the Germans invade Poland, Adolf Hitler galvanizes his chief military commanders with a speech at his Obersalzberg home, ruthless and unapologetic:

“Our strength consists in our speed and in our brutality. . . . Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formations in readiness . . . with orders . . . to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space which we need. . . . Who, after all, remembers the annihilation of the Armenians?”2

Wer redet heute noch von der Vernichtung der Armenier?

                                                                

June 1915—Darman, Province of Erzerum, Ottoman Empire

Across deserts they march—“the starving Armenians” to the Western world, but to the boy who might be seven, his beloved mother, grandfather, aunt, siblings, and cousins. In and out of valleys, bent by fatigue, beset by plunderers and scorching sun, prodded by bayonets along trenches filled with the bodies that dug them—they did not return—the exiles travel. Three days after leaving their village, they reach the mountains. As if on cue, a Kurdish tribe swarms, women with butcher knives, men with rifles—a holy war against the infidel—shoot his grandfather, snatch Papken.

The burst of gunfire sends families scattering, the stricken boy reeling, his shrieks an echo of a thousand others. He falls, is trampled underfoot, cannot breathe. He feels himself raised to his feet, though no hands grip him. Where to go? He runs nowhere, everywhere, crouches behind a rock, jams his fingers in his ears, recites fragments of the Lord’s Prayer, a remembered Psalm of David. I will lift up my eyes to the hills, to him who is my help. Near the shallow river, women and children try to hide, take cover in the bushes, huddle against boulders, the remnants of his people. He spots his oldest sister among them, sprints toward her, sees the deep gash in her back.

From April to October, 1915, practically all the highways in Asia Minor were crowded with these unearthly bands of exiles. They could be seen winding in and out of every valley and climbing up the sides of nearly every mountain—moving on and on, they scarcely knew whither, except that every road led to death. Village after village and town after town was evacuated of its Armenian population. . . . Detachments of gendarmes would go ahead, notifying the Kurdish tribes that their victims were approaching, and Turkish peasants were also informed that their long-waited opportunity had arrived. . . . Thus every caravan had a continuous battle for existence with several classes of enemies—their accompanying gendarmes, the Turkish peasants and villagers, the Kurdish tribes and bands of Chétés or brigands. 3

Strong arms lift him, heave him onto the saddle of a horse. He nestles into his wounded sister; in front of her sits his dazed little brother. She bleeds from the gash, but the gendarme has staunched the flow with his tunic. He rides beside them, a foot soldier leading their horse. Days become a week, nights spent in abandoned villages or on open plains, sleeping among corpses, stepping over those who fall by the wayside, the caravan reduced to a trickle. Near Deve Boynu, a place he no longer knows how to find, but whose name he remembers, at the fork in the road, the gendarme orders both boys removed. A soldier yanks the smaller boy from the horse, reaches for the other boy, but cannot seize him. My grandfather’s sister has wrapped him in steel arms. To have her, the gendarme must keep the boy.

At the fork in the road is the last he sees of his brother, his aunt and cousins, his mother, infant at her breast.

He names his firstborn—my mother—after his mother: Arousiag.

On April 24, 2021—more than a hundred years later—the United States formally recognizes the deportation and massacre of 1.2 million Armenians as genocide.

My grandfather, with no birthday to recognize, chooses one: September 15.

                                                                

July 22, 1946—Jerusalem, Palestine, noon

Her knees sponged and bandaged, my aunt lets my mother braid her hair. Mairig is preparing an eggless lunch, while Hairig coaxes two doves from their cage. They spread ivory wings, flit through the window, seek shade in a leafy tree. From a distant mosque comes the minaret call to prayer. As he does every Monday night, Hairig will meet with immigrants at the YMCA—Jews, Muslims, Christians—to help them find jobs and housing. He was one of them once, seeking a new home, the genocide taking his. Now his roots run fourteen years deep in the soil of Jerusalem, those of his children a lifetime deep. An architectural marvel of arches and a soaring bell tower, the YMCA overlooks Jerusalem’s Old City, faces the stately King David Hotel. He dips lavash into baba ghanoush and waits for the doves to return.

As the children jockey for cookies, a deafening blast rocks the city, shakes the kitchen windows. They rush outside, parents and children, hands clapped to their ears, smell the dynamite of death in a blackened sky.

At 12:37, bombs concealed inside seven milk churns detonated in Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, destroying the British Mandatory administration’s headquarters, killing 91 and wounding 46. Among the dead were British employees, both civilian and military, hotel staff, both Jewish and Arab, and bystanders. The Zionist paramilitary group Irgun, led by Menachem Begin, later claims responsibility. 4

The children wake and sleep to the death throes of Palestine, terrorism and violent clashes rending the city, the Jews calling for a homeland, the Arabs for independence. Hairig pledges no allegiance except to the one to whom he lifts his eyes.

                                                                

January 1948—Beirut, Lebanon

Wedged into a taxi, they drive all night, the children rousted from bed, told to pack only their clothes. Their father unlatches the birdcage. The British soldiers have urged him to take the family and flee. They’ll be back, gone only while the Arab-Jewish war rages, while schools remain closed, roads blocked. Just a week or two, safe in Beirut. My mother, not quite twelve, presses her face to the car window, whispers farewell to her silent piano, above the dwindling roof the skeletal reach of the peach tree.

The doves would never return.

                                                                

April 1956—Beirut, Lebanon

Arousiag (center), Beirut


In the weathered photograph, my mother stands on a wharf, her dress billowing, her face turned toward the Mediterranean. Waving from the ship’s bow are her parents, her siblings, headed for America as Palestinian refugees. She is three months pregnant, my father a Lebanese American. We, her children, will have our own story.

In Pasadena, the Armenian Evangelical Brethren Church awaits the arrival of its new pastor, my grandfather. An eighteen-month missionary tour has whisked him from Beirut to Greece, France, Canada, Great Britain, and finally the United States, to Armenian communities formed during the diaspora. Born in an Armenian village, deported to the Interior, adopted by a Turkish bey, coerced into an American orphanage, expelled to Greece, settled in Palestine, relocated to Lebanon, from Armenian Apostolic Christian to Sunni Muslim to Evangelical Brethren Christian, from orphan to father of seven, he is now and finally bound for America.

He will never cross the sea again.

Three years earlier, for the first time since World War I, the Turkish government allowed Armenians to visit the country. He arrived in Istanbul on December 6, 1952.

I was entering a country where 10 members of my family remained unburied. In memory of those who had fallen victim to the sword, I was carrying a Bible instead of a club. . . . as a preacher of scriptural truth and light. The three joyful months in Turkey passed quickly. My stay there revived the past, still fresh in my memory. 5

Though there was evil, there was, too, the passage of time.

                                                                

September 15, 1988—Central California

I grip the telephone, meet my husband’s gaze.

“Your grandfather? Is he worse?”

He has been sick, ravaged by leukemia. In tortured sleep, he cries out, wrestles the sheets, punches a hole in the wall. He shouts Armenian curses at the Turkish soldiers dragging him into the Interior, swings seven-year-old fists at ambushing Kurds. He wakes weeping for his lost brothers and sisters, his mother and father. He weeps for Armenia.

Where there is evil, there is no passage of time.

“What? What is it?”

“He died this morning.” My voice catches. “On his birthday.”

                                                                

                                                                

October 7, 2024—Central California

Another birthday. And a day of collective horror remembered, reverberating. Can I ever celebrate the day again?

Can I even divulge the date if asked? Or has my birthday now become a month—October, as my friend’s is September, celebrated “off-day”—both dates setting into motion unspeakable carnage? To celebrate birthdays, to celebrate life, to hope in the presence of so much despair, such darkness, is it not, as C. S. Lewis asked, “like fiddling while Rome burns”?

Or while Gaza convulses, Artsakh bleeds, Donetsk gasps? How do we live within the question? Really live—as C. S. Lewis urged in the midst of World War II—study philosophy, write poetry, perform symphonies, celebrate birthdays?

“Human life,” he wrote, “has always been lived on the edge of a precipice.”5

To look down is dizzying, a sheer drop into the abyss. To look up, as did my
grandfather—I will lift up my eyes to the hills—was for the Psalmist, and for the boy with no birthday, to see hope.

And to lift another is to be the light that still shines in a world on the edge.

                                                                

                                                                

                                                                

                                                                

Notes
1. Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story, 1918, p. 51, Doubleday, Page & Company; Preface (Henry Morgenthau Sr., United States Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, 1913 to 1916)

2. Louise P. Lochner, What About Germany? (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1942), pp. 1–4: German original: Akten zur Deutschen Auswartigen Politik 1918-1945, Serie D, Band VII, (Baden-Baden, 1956), pp. 171–172.

3. Morgenthau, p. 315

4. Bruce Hoffman, “The Bombing of The King David Hotel,” July 1946 https://research-repository.standrews.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/10023/24114/Hoffman_2020_SWI_BombingKingDavid_AAM.pdf?sequence=1.

5. “Through Dark Clouds into Bright Horizons,” 1986, Vahram S. Touryan

6. The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses, “Learning in War-Time,” C. S. Lewis, HarperOne, 1949