Olive Senior - PEN International

WORDS ... ESTHER HEBOYAN 31
where my own mother insisted on taking my sister and me. The occasion
was our first – and last –homecoming trip. My sister and I both fainted, almost
simultaneously. Our Europeanised bodies had not been ready for the vaporous,
racy damp heat of a Turkish bath. To this day the sight of a tin bowl with its
pageantry of frothy nudeness churns my heart, bones and guts to nausea.
The only other time I felt disgust for exhibited female flesh was in an Iowa City
open-air swimming pool where sturdy women, mostly students, shaved their legs,
forelegs and armpits in a frenzy. Never before had I witnessed such a collective
ritual to eliminate what was, after all, body hair. Were those American girls made
of rubber skin, to resist the stinging chlorine of the pool? And if not, was selfinflicted
torture the rule for baiting a partner in the lounge or water area?
There is no telling who among the Midwestern bathing beauties was about to
catch a date, a mate, a long-lasting love, as Aghavni Tchamitchyan, followed by her
dutiful mother, no less dutiful godmother and her impeccable twins, walked into
the hammam on that October morning. There is no telling. But that seems beside
the point.
‘What extraordinary skin you have, my Sweetie, so smooth, so light,’ said the
godmother to Aghavni. ‘Yes, so smooth, so light,’ she repeated, as they all stepped
into the steamy, slippery inner bath chamber, wobbly in their borrowed takunye
that clanged on the tiled floor of the hararet; and as though there was a need for
a second emotional outburst, the godmother again said: ‘What an extraordinary
skin you have, my Sweetie, so smooth, so light.’
Aghavni never took such remarks for compliments. They expressed persistent
jealousy on the part of the godmother whose own daughters, the twins Verjin and
Mari, had darker skin, indeed dark as dark can be, inherited from their father’s side,
of course, a point no one failed to highlight at baptisms and at the birthdays that
followed baptisms.
Aghavni had always dreaded those moments of flattery that inevitably led
the godmother to fondle and sometimes pinch – yes, even pinch – with hands
heavily fleshed and ringed, that alien white skin of hers. Verjin and Mari, inclined
to imitate their mother in all fields of life (and one could foresee a future of bulky
ruby fingers, God bless all coffee-readers’ souls) would also cajole and pinch her: in
childhood, playing their vicious parts at playtime, and in adolescence, vying with
their long-designated rival to the point of stupid cruelty. (‘Go to Hell! Both of you!
You mean little misses!’ Aghavni had slapped the twins when they once tried to
kiss her on the mouth.)
Sitting on the curve of the navel stone, Aghavni was in no mood to remove her
pestemal and expose her nakedness to the other women. At that very moment,
she felt exposed enough in her perspiring vulnerable whiteness of leg, arm and
shoulder. The godmother’s phrase oozed through her head as though coming from
many a tedious year: What extraordinary skin she has, our Aghavni, so smooth, so
light. As time elapsed, the twins, Aghavni sensed, had developed such a deep dislike
toward their fairer relative that she never confided in them. For one second, though,
she wished she could.
‘Come on, don’t be such a mourner!’ bleated one of the girls, who was being
scrubbed by an attendant. Aghavni ignored the invitation to lie down on the
heated marble, and looked at her belly under the white towel. Not much roundness.