I find no one in the Zuqaq al-Blat neighborhood where our house is… I can’t find anyone I used to know. Ankineh is no longer here, the Armenian woman whose house the fighters entered, beating her and her husband and stealing their rugs and artwork right before their eyes. At the time she didn’t say anything, but simply let them plunder. Perhaps they’d satisfy themselves, as she said. “Jibreel’s gang robbed my house and stole my rugs,” she said over and over again. After Jibreel’s son was killed by a car bomb in Beirut, Ankineh would say, “Honestly, I don’t rejoice at other people’s misfortunes, but look what happened to his son.” Though the doorway was wide, they couldn’t get the huge chandeliers out of the front door, so they took them out onto the balcony and threw them down from the second floor. Little pieces of crystal radiated everywhere like fragments of a shattered sun. One of the neighbors tried to stop them, saying that there’s no use taking valuables if you’re just going to throw them from the balcony and break them, then they won’t be worth anything. In response, they picked him up and threw him off the balcony as well. The fall broke his leg.
The shopkeeper whose store was in the building where Ankineh used to live tells me that he’s never heard of such a name, seeming amazed that there could be a woman named Ankineh. This shopkeeper is a child of the war; the list of names he knows is small and includes only names of those who belong to one sect, one religion.
Ankineh was a friend of my grandmother’s and often went to visit her in the mountains, staying for weeks, especially during oppressive Beirut heat waves. “You didn’t know how to do anything, we had to teach you,” Ankineh always said whenever she saw Olga preparing macaroons, the dessert she’s famous for. “You only knew how to make bread!” Ankineh’s memories were always vivid and present, despite her age.
Every time I sat with her, I asked her to tell me the story of how she came to Lebanon after the massacres that weighed so heavily on the lives of most Armenians in Turkey. She came to Lebanon in 1921 when the whole world was getting itself back in order after the end of the First World War. Ankineh came to Lebanon with her parents when she was five years old.
Her family had wanted to make their way to Jerusalem because they had relatives there, but they stayed in Lebanon and became Lebanese. They left everything they had in Turkey. The Turkish army took everything they had carried with them when they left their house. Ankineh would always thank God that her father didn’t take his family to Jerusalem because many of the Armenians who were in Palestine in 1948, during the first Arab — Israeli war, took refuge in Lebanon, including Ankineh’s relatives, who came to live with them in their house. Few Armenians have stayed in Jerusalem — most have emigrated to America or Canada or are preparing to emigrate now.
The house in our neighborhood was the fifth house that Ankineh had lived in since she moved to Beirut. When she and her family first arrived in Lebanon they were settled near the big theater in the middle of Beirut. Then they moved to Corniche al-Mazraa, where her father opened a jewelry shop. Her father had worked as a jeweler in Konya, Turkey. When they left Turkey, he sewed the jewels into blankets and covered the children with them.
Ankineh’s mother had adopted two Armenian children who lost their families so that she could bring them on the train and then the boat without risking arrest by the Turkish army. The adoption happened as quickly as that. She told them, “I’m your mother. If anyone asks you who you are, that’s all you tell them.” When they arrived in Marsin by train to take the boat to Lattakia and then Beirut, the Turkish army forbade them to take their blankets with them. They were forced to leave everything behind, including the jewels still hidden in the blankets. Some Armenians first took refuge in Beirut and then emigrated, “Because Beirut is very small,” as Ankineh used to say. They preferred to move on to Chicago, New York or Montreal. “Beirut is very small,” Ankineh would repeat, turning her closed hand and then opening it, on her lips and in her eyes the trace of a smile lost somewhere between pride and pity. She meant that her closed fist represented Beirut’s size. The word “small” for her meant two things. First, that everyone here knows everyone so everyone sees her as a stranger, an immigrant, or “eemeegrant” as she pronounced it. Second, that Beirut wasn’t enough of a trade and manufacturing capital for Armenian businessmen. Born and raised in Istanbul, they were used to a cosmopolitan life that Beirut couldn’t offer, so they left for Western cities.
Perhaps Ankineh was one of the few who came to Lebanon after the massacres of Armenians in Turkey and stayed until the end of the twentieth century. She married an Armenian man sixteen years older than her and never had children. When she would tell the story of her flight from Turkey, she’d say that she heard that Istanbul, or “Constantinople” as she preferred to call it, burned ten times after she left. She believed that these fires were the work of God, vengeance on behalf of her and her family. “This my darling, is God’s wrath,” she would tell me in Armenian-accented, broken Arabic, but with great confidence — as if she’d completely mastered the Arabic language and didn’t need to explain anything.
In the building across the way are people whose names and faces I don’t know. They don’t know me either. The houses have changed on the inside and the outside. Only one woman, Yvette, remains on the second floor of the building across from our house, though her brother left for Canada a year after we emigrated. “We no longer have a place here,” Yvette used to say before I emigrated. When she sees me, she doesn’t repeat what she used to say about wanting to leave Lebanon. Instead, she opens her mouth, confused, “Mimo, my darling, it’s you! People leave and you… What did you come back for?!” She carries on, her smile a false reprimand, “Like someone who leaves on a pilgrimage just when everyone else is coming back!”
Behind the building, the orange and fig trees have dried up. Only one decrepit pomegranate tree is still standing. It’s leaning slightly against the wall of a building that’s marked with holes of many sizes. Yvette says that the young men in militias didn’t leave one green branch in the whole neighborhood. During ceasefires they discharged their weapons into the roots of trees, splitting them open like the bodies of human beings. When there were no more trees left, they started in on the walls around them and sometimes on whatever pedestrians they could see in East Beirut.
Where are these disappeared people that Yvette is talking about? Where are they? Why don’t they come out and say something? Why don’t they tell me what happened? Where are the people who disappeared, who’ve been disappeared? How were they killed, if they were killed? Where are the people who perpetrated all of the war’s massacres?
It’s as if the earth has swallowed them up. As if the earth has swallowed the witnesses, the evidence and the perpetrators. “They are all still here,” Yvette says, tormented. “But you won’t know who they are. They’ve become something else. They have new faces and we’re not allowed to remember or even remind them of their old faces.”
It is as if there’s no place here for someone who silently witnessed the death of Beirut. No place for someone fleeing from death in Beirut. No place for someone coming back to search for a lost memory. Beirut is a devastated threshold. How can I cross over it? How can I return when I’m constantly moving from one place to another?