Here’s Looking for You

Dad in the beige easy chair, a precursor to the blue chenille chair. Los Angeles, California. 1980s
Photo courtesy of the author

The morning after my father’s first heart attack, I took the train from San Diego to Los Angeles to see him. It was December, near the end of my first semester in college.

At the hospital I found him in a lively conversation with his business partner. I lingered in the doorway of his room and watched them talk. My father’s face was animated as he told the story about how they took arteries from his leg and attached them to his heart, replacing the blocked ones. I imagined his heart was a car engine and the arteries were new hoses. They spoke in Armenian, so I didn’t know for sure what they were saying, but my dad said asank―these― pointing to his leg, and then asank again pointing to his chest, so I got the gist.

He sure has a lot of energy for someone who had emergency triple-bypass surgery less than forty-eight hours ago, I thought. A closer look and I could see that this act was taking a lot out of him. His body looked small in the industrial bed; under the sheet, his legs splayed out like a puppet with cut strings.

His business partner swept by me on his way out with a polite “parev.” My father’s head sank back onto the pillow. He rolled his head to the side to face me in the doorway.

“Come in,” he said, his voice hoarse.

I took a few steps toward him. The card I had made for him crinkled between my fingers. After getting the call from my mother, I had “borrowed” a piece of printer paper from my roommate, folded it in half and, using a set of Pentel markers I had brought with me from home, covered the front with rainbow swirls. The news must have sent me to a younger version of myself, who more openly yearned for a connection with him. I had written some generic message inside, like: Get well soon, Dad. I love you. Love, your daughter.

To have written a more specific message would have required a different sort of relationship. We were family and made from the same stuff—in that sense, we were close. But by any objective measure, we barely knew each other. He had always been a distant figure, never letting himself be known, at least not by me.

“Sit here,” he said, pointing to the bed next to him.

The last time I saw him, at Thanksgiving break, he wasn’t dying, not exactly. He had been a heavy smoker for most of his life. From the time I could remember he was regularly wracked by intense coughing that invoked the specter of future illness. So, the call from my mom was one I had always expected.

Still, it was a lot to take in. He had almost died, but here he was—alive, given a second chance. Could it be a second chance for us, too? Maybe it was an opening to have the kind of relationship with my father that I had seen my friends and people on TV have.

“Sit,” he said, patting the bed beside him. I sat and placed my hand on his. His skin felt dry and cold. I wasn’t sure if that was a result of what he’d been through or what his hand always felt like. Seconds later, his hand flew up from under mine, flapping upward like a panicked pigeon.

“No,” he snapped, his wiry black and white eyebrows lowering to form a V-shape. “The other way.”

He grabbed the remote from the tray next to him and pointed it toward the TV mounted in an upper corner. I was confused about what he wanted me to do. I stood up and then sat down again with my back to him, facing the TV as it whirred to life. On screen a soap opera played with the sound off.

He turned up the volume, but I wasn’t listening. I watched the actors’ mouths moving, observed the way their limbs propelled them from one side of the screen to another. I had just finished taking Introduction to Acting, the college class I had been most looking forward to. I had been doing theatre since I was twelve years old, but it was the first time I had learned about Constantin Stanislavski, about objectives and beats. I wondered who the soap opera characters were, what they each wanted from the other.

My dad and I sat like that for a while, the actors on screen doing all the relating.

*

My father’s distance was extreme.

For most of my childhood and adolescence, he, my mother, sister and I lived in a three-bedroom apartment unit on a busy street in West Los Angeles. Both of my parents were immigrants of Armenian descent. My dad came to the US on a student visa in 1950 to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he earned a degree in mathematics. I was always hearing from his relatives about how he was top of his class at the American boarding school he had attended in Cyprus, Greece. My mother said that he had a genius IQ. He worked as an electrical engineer, and it seemed to me that he was living a more ordinary life than he had expected or wanted.

American Academy photo: Dickran Yeghiayan—most likely my father’s high school graduation photo. American Academy of Larnaca in Cyprus, Greece. 1950 | Photo courtesy of the author

He was a father who fulfilled his role, but was never quite filled in, at least not at home. At home he was more like an outline of himself. When he was with his relatives, with acquaintances or even with strangers, he was unrecognizable to me: warm, talkative, a storyteller. But, not at home. At home, he was silent and stern. He didn’t invite questions, and I rarely asked them.

He went to work every morning dressed in a shirt and tie, carrying a worn leather satchel that had belonged to his father. He returned each night, looking tired, the satchel full of papers. While my sister and I were at school, my mother cleaned. She was there for us when we got home. She made us dinner every night. My dad was a foodie before the term was coined so he occasionally cooked something special, like lobster or clams. At night, we watched TV together: All in the Family, Fantasy Island, Family Ties. On the weekends, we visited family members, some who had been in the US for decades, others who were more recent arrivals. We ate meals with them, walked around a nearby mall or outdoors. Sometimes we went to Newport Beach and ate at a restaurant called The Crab Cooker. I loved eating the round breadsticks they had there, and seeing my dad relax and enjoy himself.

About six years after that first heart attack, my father’s heart beat for the last time. He was sixty-two years old. I was twenty-four and had been out of college a little over a year.

The morning after he died, I once again took the train to Los Angeles from San Diego. Walking into my parents’ house, it hit me hard: the chilling presence of absence, nothing where a person used to be. My chance to know him had ended.

I touched the well-worn leather satchel that he brought to work every day. I knew it belonged to his father, but I had never asked him to tell me more. Looking through his wallet, I was surprised to find his draft deferment card. He had kept it in his wallet for forty years. Why? What did it mean to him? He was no longer there for me to ask.

In his wallet I also found school photos of me and my sister from ten years earlier. It was touching, but also confusing. What did it mean? Did he miss the time when we were kids? Or did he only clean out his wallet every ten years or so?

Later, in my thirties, I was compelled to fill in the missing pieces of him. I had reached a certain turning point in my own life. I had hit my own limits without really knowing why. It was unconscious, this drive to know more about the past. All I knew was that it felt necessary to do in order to move forward.

I searched for clues about who he was, piecing him together from conversations with family members and my own memories. There was not much to go on. The image of my father fixed most in mind is him sitting silently in his blue chenille easy chair, feet up, staring into the middle distance or at the stock ticker on TV through the haze of his cigarette smoke. On the weekends, he watched old movies from the 1930s and 40s.

Me and Dad in 1979 or 80. Los Angeles, California. | Photo courtesy of the author

I would occasionally watch those old movies with him. The one I remember best, because it was the one he watched the most often, was the 1942 black-and-white Hollywood film Casablanca. Certain scenes made him sit up, cheeks ruddy, wiry black-and-white eyebrows wiggling; his breath would push out through his teeth in a series of quick, airy hee hee hees, a smoker’s laugh that would morph into a crescendo-ing cavalcade of congestion-filled coughs turning his face red, then purple with effort. It seemed like he might die right in front of me. But then the coughing would subside with a few sputters, until it stopped, and he leaned back onto the headrest, spent.

*

For years I wondered, in fleeting moments, why he was drawn to Casablanca. Then it occurred to me that it is a story about refugees who flee persecution and find themselves thrust together in the capital city of a welcoming northern African nation. That was my father’s story too.

He was born in 1932 into an Armenian family who had settled in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. They had been expelled from the Ottoman Empire during World War I. His mother’s family had left after the massacres of Armenians in the late nineteenth century but before the attempted genocide of the Armenians that began in 1915 when the Young Turks planned a “Turkey for the Turks.”

My father’s father had no family. My grandfather was orphaned at nine years old. He eventually made his way to Addis Ababa as an adult.

This attempt to explain a complex era of world history and map the geography of my family’s migration reminds me of the opening of the movie. Set during World War II, Casablanca begins with a history lesson and the image of a spinning globe. The camera slowly pushes in on a map of Europe while an animated line traces the “refugee trail” through France and a newscaster-like voice explains how Europeans crossed the continent to escape the invading German forces to flee “ . . . across the rim of Africa to Casablanca in French Morocco.”

What had my American public-school education taught me about the World Wars? Very little, other than that the entrance of the United States had made all the difference.

Why were the refugees in Casablanca? I needed the lesson of that opening scene. A little googling and I learned that Morocco, separated from the European continent by the narrow Strait of Gibraltar, was a French colony. During the time period in which the movie is set, Morocco is a country in the midst of resisting German occupation, with Casablanca the center of that resistance.

Another theme in common: During much of my father’s childhood, also in the lead up to World War II, Ethiopia was a country resisting Italian occupation.

In the movie, the refugees in Casablanca gather at Rick’s Café Americain while they wait for their chance to get to America and the freedom to create themselves anew. The cafe’s owner is a mysterious, mercenary American with a fake-sounding name, Rick Blaine. Played by Humphrey Bogart at his brooding, deadpan best, Blaine is a central figure in this fictional wartime Casablanca. He is a cynic who says he sticks his neck out for no one and is only loyal to himself. We know he is nursing a broken heart. We see flashbacks of Rick a year earlier in Paris, falling in love with Ilsa Lund, played by a luminous and sepia-toned Ingmar Bergman. We see the couple at their happiest, toasting to their future together with champagne and Rick’s line: “Here’s looking at you, kid.” They make plans to leave Paris to avoid the oncoming Nazi invasion. We see Rick at the train station in Paris, alone. Ilsa never shows.

The newscaster narration that opens the film continues, further setting the scene at Rick’s Cafe: “Here the fortunate ones, through money or influence or luck, might obtain exit visas and scurry to Lisbon on the way to the New World. But the others wait in Casablanca. And wait, and wait, and wait . . . ”

*

It was my father’s decision to raise me and my sister as Americans. I cannot emphasize enough how unusual this path was among diasporan Armenians, especially those who had settled in Los Angeles, the largest concentration of Armenians outside of the country of Armenia.

After being forced from their ancestral lands, Armenians had recreated their communities wherever we had ended up. Key to holding on to our Armenian identity was staying together, keeping our language, our traditions alive and trying to resist influence from the dominant culture. We were used to it, having been minority subjects of Empires for centuries.

But my father didn’t have much use for the past. I heard him say many times that he didn’t want us to grow up “in the ghetto,” the Armenian-dominated neighborhoods of Los Angeles: Glendale, East Hollywood, North Hollywood. I asked him once why he and my mother didn’t teach us to speak Armenian since it was both of their first languages and one they continued to speak.

“Why learn Armenian?” he responded. “We are not going back.”

Now I understand this was likely related to his own desire to be American, to remove for my sister and I the obstacles that he had faced during his own assimilation experience. It can’t have been easy fitting in among the sons of New England’s upper crust at MIT, or to climb the corporate ladder, a foreigner despite speaking perfect English. His perfect pronunciation might have been the giveaway, actually. He articulated the “t” sound in words like “little,” for example.

His own father may have also factored into it. Perhaps it was my grandfather’s idea to send his sons to the American Boarding School of Larnaca to help escape the limited opportunities of Ethiopia, a monarchy under siege by the Italians.

I recently acquired some typewritten letters from my grandfather written to my father during his senior year in boarding school. They are in Armenian. I was so eager to learn more―really, anything―about their relationship that I hastily cut and pasted them into Google Translate to get even a small taste of what they contained. The letters mostly focus on reminders to my father to uphold his obligations to the family and to look out for his brothers. There are also pages and pages of my grandfather going over the many details and arrangements he made to get my father to get to America.

*

The displacements on both sides of my father’s family are profound. But it is my paternal grandfather’s story that likely had the greatest impact on shaping my father, even though it remained unspoken. My father and his brothers were mostly in the dark about their father’s harrowing escape from the genocide. They learned crucial details only after their father’s death. My grandfather had buried his trauma. Perhaps his memories were like a bomb that he hoped to explode underground, that the residue might decay, like nuclear radiation, or shame, losing its power to hurt.

I always knew that my grandfather was “orphaned by the genocide.” One consequence of being raised outside of a diasporan Armenian community was that I was not indoctrinated into hating the Turks―the perpetrators―not in any way that stuck. Of course, I grew up hearing about the genocide, so I knew that my grandfather was not an orphan like, say, Annie from the musical. Still, so much is obscured by the word “orphan.”

The facts, as I have learned them, are these: when my grandfather was nine years old, his parents Yeghia and Macrouhi, and his four sisters, Marie, Anahid, Veronica and Siranoush, were killed.

They were from Isparta, in the Armenian province of the Ottoman Empire called Konya. Searching online, I recently came across a video, filmed a few years ago, of a ninety-something year old survivor from Isparta. He said that he and his family were forced from their homes and sent to march across the Syrian desert. When they started, he had eleven family members. By the end it was just himself, his mother, and one sister. Perhaps that’s what happened to my grandfather too. He was the only member of his family of seven to walk out of the desert alive.

My father’s father―at nine years old―survived for years in the company of Bedouins who took him in and hid him from the Turkish soldiers who had orders to kill. He ended up in Aleppo, eventually making his way to Istanbul and attending Roberts College before emigrating to Addis Ababa in 1929 to take a job at the Seferian Company. He changed his name from Boghos Kevorkian to Boghos Yeghiayan as a tribute to his dead father.

All of this came to me third hand. I read this story about my grandfather in a profile of my uncle, a lawyer of some renown who shared it with the reporter. I gleaned additional facts about my grandfather from a half-page biography of him that my other uncle, my father’s youngest brother, put together. That half-page was passed on to me only after that uncle died.

My grandfather died before I was born. What I see in black and white photos of him from the 1940s is a man dressed sharply, in a suit and fedora, like Rick Blaine. He looks formidable, mysterious, stern. I have heard about Baron (“Mr.”) Yeghiayan from other relatives who were children in Ethiopia during this time period. They describe him with respect, a little awe. A certain gravitas comes through in the photos, as well as an unexpected sweetness, even a boyishness to his face. He has the same close-lipped expression in every photo, a faint Mona Lisa smile.

In the article, my uncle describes how, looking through his father’s wallet after he died, he and his brothers discovered a black-and-white photo of him dressed as a girl in shepherd robes. The brothers had never seen the photo before or known that their father had been disguised as a girl to survive. My uncle goes on to say that in Addis Ababa, my grandfather was surrounded by a community of genocide survivors who would sometimes get together, seal themselves off in a separate room, to talk about what they had experienced. According to people who were there, says my uncle, my grandfather sometimes joined them, but he never said a word.

My grandfather had lost his entire family and was at the mercy of strangers for survival for years. He had walked out of the desert, alive. How could his psyche possibly have been intact? He went on to have a very successful life, but he must have been a shell.

Perhaps outlines were all my father knew of fathers.

*

Growing up, it was almost impossible for me to sustain an understanding that my father was from Africa.

Yet, Ethiopia permeated my childhood. It was in the ivory statue standing sentry over my father’s ashtray; in the elaborate Ethiopian crosses in my mother’s jewelry box; in my father’s delight at surprising strangers whom he suspected were Ethiopian by speaking to them in Amharic, the official language of Ethiopia; in my grandmother’s gossip about “Ee-tee-yop-ya”; in the jar of pepper, an alarming shade of red, tucked between the jam and the ketchup in the fridge. My father cooked dinner with it once or twice, spooning a blood-red-sauce-soaked chicken leg onto my plate over a slice of Wonder bread, to my horror.

He had grown up there but shared little about it. Now that I have children myself, I understand how difficult it is to try to bring the past into the present, how challenging it is to give your kids a sense of what came before them, when nothing that can be seen or touched remains.

For my father, it must have seemed even more challenging. The context he grew up in was so different from the one he was raising me and my sister in. Where to even begin?

His mother had been born in Addis Ababa because her father and mother had fled the Ottoman Empire in 1914, mere months before the genocide began in earnest. In other words, in the nick of time. My great-grandparents arrived in the capital city of Ethiopia at the tail end of the first major influx of Armenians settling in Ethiopia. They had their first child, my grandmother, in 1916.

There had long been a connection between Ethiopians and Armenians. Each practiced a similar form of Christianity to the other and the similarity of their Orthodox Churches bred kinship. There is also a clear connection between the written characters of both languages. Mesrob Mashdots, who created the Armenian alphabet in 405 AD in order to translate the Bible, was likely influenced by the written characters of Amharic.

Armenians had played important roles in the royal courts of Ethiopian Emperors Yohannes and, later, Menelik II, providing weapons to help the royal leaders fend off the invading Italians. Under the leadership of Emperor Haile Selassie―de facto ruler of Ethiopia beginning in 1916―the Ethiopian-Armenian connection grew even stronger.

Armenians who had settled in Ethiopia brought their professional expertise to the royal court: jewelers famously made the coronation crowns for both Emperor Selassie and his wife Empress Menan Asfaw. Armenians played prominent roles in government and the police force; they also opened medical practices and other businesses.

Mr. Darakjian and Emperor Haile Selassie—this photo is of a prominent Armenian businessman, Dr. Stepan Darakjian, with Emperor Haile Selassie. Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. (year unknown) | Photo courtesy of the author

And, my great-grandfather was Emperor Selassie’s dentist. My grandmother, born the same year Emperor Selassie began his rule and christened the god-daughter of Empress Asfaw, grew up in luxury. She was practically royalty when she married my grandfather, an orphan.

The wealth and privilege that my father grew up in is difficult for me to fathom and must have been difficult for him to explain. He did tell me once that, growing up, he and his brothers each had their own servant. I grew up solidly middle class in a way that I always understood was only made possible through my father’s hard work. For most of my childhood, my father was employed as an electrical engineer, designing early semiconductor technology for an American corporation with defense contracts.

My father’s childhood in the 1930s coincided with the heyday of the Emperor, the Armenian community of Addis Ababa. The Empire and the Armenians thrived together; and, later, fell together when the Emperor was overthrown in 1974. But most of my father’s family were long gone by then. My orphaned grandfather had ensured it.

Photo named Armenian Leaders of Ethiopia: Back row, left to right: Boghos Yeghiayan (my grandfather), Garbis Ebeyan, and Manoug Khoudanian. Front row left to right: Amasia Soukiasian, Avedis Sevadjian, Archbishop Mampre Sirounian of Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia, Samuel Behesnelian, and Haroutun Nalbandian. Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Mid-1940s  | Photo courtesy of Aida Khoudanian Shahbaz

It is not difficult to see what might have motivated my grandfather to ensure their escape route, sending his sons to an American boarding school in Cyprus, Greece. He probably knew it could not last, had seen firsthand the fall of an empire. This one would fall too, as all empires. He made plans to get his family to America.

*

My father loved every scene in Casablanca in which Police Captain Louis Renault appeared. Every line uttered by Claude Rains, the actor who plays Renault, made my father laugh. And, with good reason. Rains delivers an impeccable performance as a crucial foil for our hero and the film’s would-be villain, if there were no Nazis.

Renault, a Frenchman, is the head of Casablanca’s police force. He works for Nazi-occupied Vichy France and must enforce its laws, though, like our hero Rick, he has no stated loyalty to anyone other than to himself. Renault pretends loyalty to whoever is in power. Captain Renault, more than any other role in the film, depicts the day-to-day reality―albeit exaggerated and played for laughs ―of an existence where survival depends on demonstrating loyalty to whoever is in power.

This moral flexibility makes for some great comedy.

I can only imagine that Addis Ababa of the 1930s and 40s was filled with characters like that. Many of the Armenians who had settled in Addis Ababa served the Emperor and his court. But, in 1936, the Italians invaded, occupying the country for five years while the Ethiopians fought them off. Emperor Haile Selassie fled, returning in 1941 when the Italians were defeated. Somehow my family continued to thrive no matter who was in power.

During my childhood in Los Angeles, I occasionally caught a glimpse of what it must have been like. It was when we visited my father’s relatives, who were more recent arrivals from Ethiopia than he was. After a dinner of overcooked spaghetti and sauce laden with Ethiopian pepper, in the crowded dining room of their Beverly Hills apartment, my father and his aunts, uncles and distant cousins would sit for hours, talking, drinking Armenian coffee and cognac, laughing, telling stories and reminiscing, in Armenian, about the old days. I would peek my head in and see a room filled with smoke from their cigarettes, hear the sound of poker chip stacking, and catch sight of that different public version of my father now bloomed into full color, laughing, talking, connecting.

Addis Ababa mid-1940s: Left to right: Dickran Khoudanian (sitting). Standing: Manoug Khoudanian and Boghos Yeghiayan (my grandfather). Seated on the right is Mr. Babayan. The two children are (left) Vartkes Yeghiayan (my uncle) and (right) Dickran Yeghiayan (my father). Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Mid-1940s— around the same time that Casablanca was released in theatres. | Photo courtesy of the author

In one of father’s favorite Captain Renault scenes, the Gestapo is in town and Nazi Major Heinrich Strasse is on the lookout for Victor Lazlo, leader of the Hungarian Resistance and recent concentration camp escapee. Victor has come to Casablanca with his wife, Rick’s former lover Ilsa (surprise!) to implore Rick to help them obtain exit visits, so they can get to America and safety. It is the only way Victor will be able to continue his work.

Major Strasse suspects Victor is hiding out in Rick’s Cafe. Rick refuses to produce him, so the Major orders Captain Renault to shut the cafe down.

Captain Renault has to find a pretext to follow orders. When Rick asks him why he is shutting down the club, Renault answers with the famous line: “I am shocked, shocked to find there is gambling going on in here . . . ” Just then a club employee hands Renault a roll of bills: “Your winnings for the evening, sir.” Renault replies with a cordial “Oh, thank you for very much” and quickly pockets the cash.

My father clutched his chest, nearly doubling over, he laughed so hard at that.

*

Exit visas: the entire plot of the film revolves around them. In the world of Casablanca, they are called “letters of transit.” All the exiled are waiting to get their hands on them, the hottest item on the black market. People kill to get them. In fact, the inciting action of the story, which takes place before the movie begins, is the murder of two “German couriers” and the disappearance of the two “letters of transit” they were carrying.

The “letters of transit” end up in Rick’s hands. It will be up to him to decide who gets to use them to escape. Meanwhile, he and Ilsa have rekindled their love affair. Will it be Rick himself who gets to leave Morocco with Ilsa? Or will he let Victor and Ilsa use them, sacrificing his own happiness to help the resistance and give the world a chance at a better future?

MIT graduation: My father’s graduation from MIT. Left to right: Arousiag Yeghiayan (my grandmother), Dickran Yeghiayan (my father), and Boghos Yeghiayan (my grandfather). Cambridge, Massachusetts. 1954
Photo courtesy of the author

My father’s “letter of transit,” his exit visa, was his acceptance into that venerated American institution, MIT. His education would take him to Cambridge, Massachusetts and, eventually, to American citizenship. This would be his family’s ticket out. His mother and two younger brothers would soon follow. His father, the genocide survivor, would die in Addis Ababa, having succeeded at getting his family out.

*

Rick chooses to save the world during an ending scene that my father loved dearly.

Near the end of the movie, Ilsa tells Rick that she wants to be with him but asks him to decide what they should do. Everything we know about Rick tells us he will choose himself, that he will use the “letters of transit” to get him and Ilsa on a plane out of Casablanca.

The Gestapo on their heels, Ilsa and Rick arrive at the airport. But on the tarmac, (surprise!) Victor is there too. Rick insists that Ilsa get on the plane with Victor. The resistance needs her more than Rick does.

He tells her: “The problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” The viewer can see the pain in Ilsa’s eyes but also acceptance. She knows he’s right. They have a mission that is greater than themselves.

“Here’s looking at you, kid,” he adds, reminding Ilsa that they will always have Paris. There is pain in the loss, but also beauty. They will always have their memories.

*

There was no scene in Casablanca that my father got more of a kick out of than the one where the German couple, Herr and Frau Leuchtag, sit down to have a drink with Carl, a fellow German expat and the manager of Rick’s Cafe, to celebrate the Leuchtags’ impending departure to America.

The Leuchtags are a charming middle-aged Jewish couple and regulars at the club. At first, the three speak in German. Then Herr Leuchtag switches to English encouraging his wife to join him to show off their mastery of the language of their soon-to-be new home:

“Which watch?” Herr Leuchtag asks Frau.

Frau makes a show of looking at her wristwatch.

“Ten watch,” she answers.

“Such much?” he says.

“You will get along beautifully in America,” says Carl.

My father laughed so hard at that, the knowing laugh of someone who had come a long way to become American himself, a foreigner despite his perfect English.

I can still hear the metal joints of his blue chenille chair squeak with his body’s movement as he starts to chuckle, a faint scent of his 4711 cologne in the air. His legs are up, his face animated, wide mouth smiling, revealing rows of small, perfectly-straight capped teeth (being the grandson of the Emperor’s dentist conferred little benefit on the teeth front). I see tears form in the outside corners of his eyes, hear his smoker’s laugh, the congestion breaking up in his chest, the air spraying out the sides of his mouth like raspy bellows, that unvoiced hee hee hee. I see his hand―gold wedding band around a thick finger, wrinkly knuckles covered in wiry black and white hairs―float up, see it spread flat over his chest as if it could penetrate the cloth of his shirt, reach underneath his skin and through the cage of his ribs to stop his heart from bursting.

 

References

Aslanian, Ani. “In The Company of Emperors: The Story of Ethiopian Armenians.” The Armenite, October 6, 2014. https://thearmenite.com/2014/10/company-emperors-story-ethiopian-armenians/

Einashe, Ismail. “Letter from Africa: Ethiopia’s lost Armenian community.” BBC, March 1, 2020. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-51672965

Ghaloosian, Arman. “Ethiopian-Armenians: Ancient Allies and Imperial Confidants.” EVN Report, August 16, 2022. https://evnreport.com/raw-unfiltered/ethiopian-armenians-ancient-allies-and-imperial-confidants/

Sevadjian, R.P. “Remembering the Armenians of Ethiopia.” Armenian Weekly, May 6, 2015. https://armenianweekly.com/2015/05/06/remembering-the-armenians-of-ethiopia/.