“Nancy, I have to tell you this story,” Mumma said on the phone.
She and my father had just made a trip to Maine where my father had an appraisal job. It was 2001, and my parents were in their late 60s, my father semi-retired. Mumma had trouble finding a motel at the last minute, until she contacted a place in a tiny town. “The man on the phone sounded a bit strange,” she said.
They arrived late and Dad dropped off Mumma at the office. She checked in with the man who had spoken with her on the phone, then came back outside and said to my father, “He might be Turk.”
“Why do you say that?” my father asked.
“He looks Middle Eastern,” Mumma said.
“Just because he looks Middle Eastern doesn’t mean he’s Turkish.”
“I have a feeling,” Mumma said.
“Well, what are you gonna do.” Dad said. He drove over to the machine company and went to work.
The next morning, while my parents were choosing their continental breakfast in the motel lobby overlooking Penobscot Bay, my mother said to the man, “You sound like you have an accent. Where are you from?”
“Turkey,” he said.
“Oh, I’m Armenian,” she said, smiling sweetly. “We can’t be friends.”
“Why not?” the man asked.
By now Daddy had approached and was standing behind Mumma and said, “You know what happened to the Armenians in 1915.”
“Oh, yes, but it happened such a long time ago,” the man said. “You have to forget those things and move on.”
“Yes it did happen a long time ago,” my mother said. “Those were different times then. My grandparents were from Istanbul, and they had to leave because conditions were bad for them.”
The man didn’t say anything. “So I just left it,” Mumma told me. “But, I was discussing it with your father, because I didn’t want to not say anything like a soft soap. So when we were checking out, your father asked him, ‘where in Turkey are you from?’”
“North Central Turkey,” the man said.
“Do you know where Sivas is?” Dad asked. Imagining my father asking such a question caused me to choke up a little bit.
“Yes, in fact my family is from the next town over from Sivas,” the man said.
“My family owned farmland there,” my father said, “and livestock. They had a livelihood, but they were forced to leave, like many other Armenians. My mother’s family was killed. That’s why we have hard feelings for the Turkish people.”
“Listen,” the man said. “I’ve been in this country for thirty years, and I went to a demonstration for the Armenian Genocide in Cocituate when I first got here. And at that time they said 100,000 Armenians were killed. And now every year they say it’s more and more until 1.5 million. My family took in Armenians. In fact, Armenians used to visit my grandfather and thank him for helping them.”
“Yes,” my father said. “We know there were some Turks who helped Armenians.”
“When I was sixteen” — Daddy estimated the man must have been about 50 — “an Armenian man in our neighborhood died, and when we went into his house we found ammunition boxes in the rafters filled with Russian rubles. He was a spy for the Russians.”
Mumma couldn’t take it anymore. “Have you heard of Henry Morgenthau? He was the U.S. Ambassador to Turkey, and he compiled statistics on how many Armenians there were; after 1915 they were all gone.”
“How could there by 1.5 million Armenians when there were 18 million people in the country?” the man asked.
“The country wasn’t all Turks. There were other ethnic minorities there. You don’t know because there is nothing in the Turkish history books about them or the Genocide,” Daddy informed.
“That’s because the government doesn’t want people to feel badly and not be friends.”
Finally Daddy said, “You can deny it all you want, but the government has to admit what they’ve done, hopefully in my lifetime, just like the Germans, and then they can go on. Until then they’ll never move forward.”
Mumma and Daddy made their exit. My mother said she could still hear the man ranting and raving to his wife as they slipped into their car.
“So we left with a little hard feelings,” Dad joked. “Your mother didn’t want to go away mousy, she wanted to have her say. But I’ll tell you, if we really wanted to make a stand, we should’ve just not stayed at his motel for three nights.”
“He knew we were Armenian, because when I told him, he said ‘I thought so by your name.’ He wasn’t going to say anything. We made our point,” Mumma said.
I wondered if it was futile for my parents to cast their anger at the Turkish government onto a Turkish-American motel owner, searching for acknowledgment from someone who would never give it. It was like they were being like me when I demanded that they accept me and acknowledge my bisexuality. When would I be able to separate my reality from theirs? It was ironic that I was now learning from them: their action had served to inform the man, and I admired them for not hiding themselves, instead choosing to reveal who they were, to tell the truth, to speak their piece.