“Do you know what the Turks did to my grandmother? They shot six of her brothers. Dead. In front of her. The youngest was only 11 years-old. And then they tattooed her.”
“They what?”
“They left marks all over her face. Her neck. Her arms.”
“But why? Why would they do that?”
“To make her ugly. To make her so ugly no one would want her.”
Then this man in his baggy blue suit, fat blue tie, and brown leather shoes smiles. Not at me. At his client who has just walked through the door after twenty minutes of panicked texting in the back of a cab. He shakes my hand, “Thanks for talking to me,” he says, before getting up to greet her.
The man is gone and I sit there, still trying to take in what he’s told me. This vision of a terrified little girl stunned by grief, her flesh, her body, exposed to the eyes and the sweaty, brutal hands of young Turks, torturing her. Was this a common form of mutilation back then? And what happened to her mother? Did she survive the killing of all her sons? And her husband?
“I am Armenian,” the man had announced, proudly, when I first broke the ice. He was sitting next to me on his stool, checking his cell phone and chewing cashews. I, of course, don’t own a cell phone. So when I sit in a bar… I sit there. I look around. I check out the mirrors. I eavesdrop. This guy was shoveling so many nuts into his mouth, I was afraid he might choke.
“So? You a local?” I asked.
“No, I live near Manhasset.”
“Sure. I know Manhasset.”
“I wish I did. That’s where I’d live if I had more money.”
“Ah! Yes,” I said. “Guess we could all use a little bit more of that.”
“Mmnnn,” he says, returning to his phone. “But it’s OK where we are. My kids like it.”
“How many?
“Three. All boys and another on the way,” he grins.
“Is your wife American?”
His tongue makes that clicking sound and his chin shoots out. “No. She’s Armenian like me.”
“Such a big family,” I say. “You must work very hard.”
“I’m in diamonds.”
I light up. “Really? Doing what? Buying, selling…”
“Buying. Mostly low-grade stuff. I use them to make jewelry. Necklaces, bracelets, earring..”
“Where do you buy them?”
“Antwerp. But the merch is made in the Dominican Republic and China now.”
“How did you get into diamonds?”
“My father and my grandfather. They were both dealers.” Which he when he, finally, puts the phone down, pops another nut into his mouth, and leaps back into history.
“Yeah. My grandparents were born in Constantinople. It was a great city in those days, you know? Full of Jews and Greeks and Armenians like us. Then came the genocide. But you probably know nothing of that?”
“1915, right?
He nods, surprised, then tells me that his grandparents were lucky enough to escape. “What was left of the family… They moved to Paris then Israel.”
“I don’t imagine there were many who escaped?”
“No, there weren’t. And even the ones who did never really escaped.”
Taking a delicate sip from his glass of white wine, he then tells me the story about his grandmother.
Conversations between strangers in bars are often like one- night stands or conversations on long-distance train rides. People loosen up. It’s the anonymity, I guess. And the booze. It creates these flashes of fearlessness. And intimacy. As I wait for my friend to arrive, I think about the power of history; of how some hold onto it as fiercely, as tightly, as others hold a whiskey glass. Then I wonder if this man with his three boys and another on the way is still attempting to fill that horrendous void; if these sons of his are an homage to the men who are missing, the men who might have been his great-uncles. I also wonder if his client, this woman with whom he will spend the next couple of hours, not to mention a fortune, feeding, has even the slightest idea of where her host comes from; of the things that make him so much more than a salesman of low-grade diamond jewelry.
