Olive Senior - PEN International

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WORDS ... ESTHER HEBOYAN
Astrig, you know, the girl from the Adana orphanage, the one who was married
to her foster parents’ son?
To my utter amazement, not one Aghavni Tchamitchyan leaped out of the
yellowing pages. Further research proved necessary in the homes of friends and
relatives, all transplanted to distant lands with sets of photographs. To write
a simple story, I thought, one goes a long ways off. Apparently luck, or fate, or
whatever you call it, never quite fits the time and place a storyteller selects.
Therefore I had Nazar Nazarian of Paris come across the snapshot of Aghavni
Tchamitchyan by pure chance. A travelling friend of his, having journeyed all the
way to Salonika, had been so enamoured with Aghavni’s picture that he handed it
over to Nazar as a proof of their manly friendship. At the time, Nazar was regaining
the confidence to want a second wife. The quest took the form of a long letter, plus
a black-and-white photograph of the awaiting groom in front of the Eiffel Tower.
‘That one?!’ howled the intended bride. ‘You can let him rot, in Paris or not!’
Whereupon her parents tss-tssed in their parental manner and passed the pictured
groom to relatives in Tarlabas Tarlabasi, , who were evidently cursed with a worse case in
their own home.
At the other end of the postal route, Nazar Nazarian of Paris kept up his
expectations. Never a womaniser like his cousin Garo, a near twin, to whom he
had been inevitably compared all those years – forty-three years, if one wished
to keep track – he grew adamant about finding his other half, she palatable like
dough cut into halves and laid on the kitchen counter before kneading, a herald
of festivities. Nazar loved Aghavni’s picture: a young Armenian woman from
Constantinople, a face daintily chiselled, a full-fledged body in modern dress, which
modestly covered her knees and shoulders. A perfect match, he thought to himself.
What Nazar liked about Aghavni most: she was born almost the same day as he,
a sure sign of fate; she lived in Constantinople, he on the Rue de Constantinople by
Gare Saint-Lazare; she had been christened ‘Aghavni’, like his ailing mother, and he
was also very fond of the aghavnis that flew to his balcony – every day he would
feed those birds, contemplating them, talking to them and playing his saz to on
drowsy Sunday afternoons.
It was on one such afternoon in Paris that Nazar’s mother, who lived in a
two-room apartment below his, after hearing her son strum the saz listlessly,
encouraged him to hunt for another wife in their city’s Armenian circles. But Nazar
would have none of it. The second-generation Armenian girls in Paris did not speak
Armenian, or cook Armenian. Many smoked, wore miniskirts and ran around with
French men. Like his first wife. A whore, according to his mother. Gone with their
shop assistant, after eight months of conjugal life.
From his mother’s vengeful fury, Nazar had salvaged a snapshot taken on the
beach at Saint-Raphaël, a picture of happy newlyweds in summertime. It had been
their only vacation: she left him in the fall. Nazar didn’t miss her as a person, or as a
wife (how could he?). But he missed her warmth, her brown body, her laughter, too.
‘Too loud, too loud, she laughs like a whore,’ his mother would harp. Nazar winced
at the memory.
‘Well, well, well, show me that would-be bride of yours,’ intoned Nazar’s
mother at teatime, settled in her armchair by the window. ‘Oh, my! Look at all the
excrement on the balcony! My son, are you building Noah’s Ark, with pigeons up
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