Speaking to One Another - The International Raoul Wallenberg ...

A man of economy, he didn’t use matches“Gevorg was a well educated, wise man. He also played the violin. He knew the Latin alphabet and theArabic alphabet. It was always Gevorg who read the letters that came from Istanbul, the letters fromthose who worked there. In those days he rolled his cigarettes with filters, I don’t know how. He smokedtobacco, but with filters. Why he did it, how he did it, we can’t know. We were children then. He didn’tuse matches. In sunny days—he was a man of economy—you know the glass lenses, he used to takethe cigarette in his hand and we watched. He held the lens like that, he smoked when smoke was comingout of its tip. Then, they used to take the sick, the children, to Gevorg for him to pray over them. Youknow, how we take them to the preacher for prayer or to a sacred tomb. They took them to Gevorg justlike that and made him pray, for the gavur’s breath is a strong one.”Despite the good qualities Salih attributes to Gevorg, there is a story of corruption told about the oldman. Gevorg works as a supplier for the monastery, he takes care of the students’ needs. According,again, to Salih’s grandmother, “Armenians persistently say that he is eating our money.” This does notreduce the admiration Salih has for Gevorg: “This happens, we still do it now. For instance, the one whobuys for the medrese [religious school] makes an agreement with the greengrocer, let’s say he buys thelettuce for thirty cents, but he makes him write fifty cents. It’s not a big deal, he pockets the twenty. Andthis is what they thought about Gevorg.” So Gevorg, according to a bizarre local narrative, “is afraid ofthe Armenian community because the Armenians might kill him,” and therefore doesn’t join the deportation,staying instead in the village and converting to Islam. He changes his name to Ismail and goesto the mosque. But after some time he stops going to the mosque and when the villagers ask why hedoesn’t come, he answers with a riddle: “In the pen the chicken, everybody for their own religion.”Gevorg’s grandson is Vasak, and Salih says that they have been through everything together. Vasak isterrified of being called to the army because his father, the ironsmith Gavrik died in the military and hisuncle died after having been sent home from military to convalesce. Because of this fear, without tellinghis family, he gets circumcised to hide his Christianity at the age of seventeen. He doesn’t go to schoolthat day and sleeps in Salih’s bed. When Vasak returns in 2003 “as a tourist” from Beirut, where he hadmigrated in 1958, he opens up to Salih for the first time: “Listen Salih, I never told anyone before. I ranaway because I was afraid of the military.”In addition to neighbors, there is also an Armenian craftsman in the village. Artisanship, one of the mostvaluable qualities attributed to Armenians, is expressed in Gavrik’s art:“I got into carpentry in 1953 so as to learn the craft. A big cinema was being constructed in Kayseri then.My master did some work for it. Who will do the polishing? They said Gavrik would. This is the ArmenianGavrik. He was the one and only artisan in Kayseri. There was no other master like him. I say nowif there were five such masters as in Turkey, he was one of those five. Architect, engineer. He had technicaldrawings.”50