Cover Image: Ara Oshagan, “Nor Sis, Bourj Hammoud, 2016”, from “displaced” series
I remember Chtaurah* as if it were yesterday. In my mind Chtaura is a sepia toned film that plays back a lost time and place from my childhood on a spool, over and over again in my mind. This Chtaurah, like childhood itself, is unchanging, ever good. How can Chtaurah seem so close when for me it happened over forty years ago, before I was a teenager and my body and mind first began to mature and morph, before the Civil War broke out in Lebanon and the rest of my extended family fled once again—this time to join us in America, before my grandparents Vartanoosh and Antranig passed into another world, before cell phones and text messaging existed and the internet had been invented and linked one person to the next in virtual time and space?
Chtaurah unwinds slowly like the ticking on an antique grandfather clock. For me Chtaurah meant family and a few friends who came and went over glasses of arak and backgammon games played as others looked on with worry beads clicking between their fingers and pistachio shells split open and thrown onto the ground, in this Chtaurah the only things that existed were the things that you could experience in a real tactile way, things that you could see and touch and taste and feel and hear and then embellish and relate to others like a story teller from a fable long ago.
Chtaurah was the silver star-studded Middle Eastern night sky that sparkled and seemed to bend under my very gaze. Chtaurah was the old Armenian woman who baked lavash bread in a tonir oven inside a hut that took 30 minutes to reach through the same arid fields and dirt roads bordered by Lebanese cedar trees and small creeks filled with salamanders and snakes that my older cousin Bedig would crush with glee using large heavy stones. Chtaurah was also a gift seemingly fallen from heaven, a sign of our success—though I only realize this today as I replay the reel over and over again in my head.
My grandparents had survived the Armenian Genocide in Adiyaman and Shabin Karahissar—their lives had been filled with death, deportation, orphanages and displacement. They had lost everything, yet with the small arak distillery that my grandfather had managed to buy with the kurush that he had made performing silversmithing jobs as he fled the Turkish gendarmes through Turkey and Syria to Mount Lebanon, their children had all managed to study and acquire a profession and pooling their resources had bought this small one-story house in Chtaurah.
There was no air conditioning, no garden, no pool that I can remember but that mattered little. We had a country house, a small place where we Armenians could gather and be at peace and perhaps even look down at the local villagers who were poorer and less privileged educationally. But surprisingly perhaps I spoke no Armenian, and attended a French school in Manhattan and was brought up mainly by my Swiss mother, so these proud, always anxious Armenians I only partially recognized as being my own flesh and blood.
To rise so quickly in a new country one must have experienced near annihilation, in order to do so one had to completely repress one’s true desires whatever they may be, to do everything for the benefit of the family and the nation—this form of self-abnegation was both our gift and our curse. And ruling over my Chtaurah was my ever-present Tante Reine or Queenie. In her tight beehive hairdo and dress she ordered everybody and everything around as if she held dominion over inanimate and animate objects both, ordering her son Bedig to practice his piano, to study for his exams, to fix his collar, to speak proper French without rolling his r’s, to date the pretty Armenian girl next door because her father owned a prosperous jewelry concern in Bourj Hammoud.
Chtaurah was also my Swiss mother’s demure presence in the background watching over me and her angelic gaze, as she saw me take in Chtaurah like one takes in life itself. And yet I was a New York City kid born in Hell’s kitchen, gritty like the city’s crime filled streets, overlaid by the gentility of the Upper East Side which we had moved to when I was four or five years old—this thanks to an Armenian landlord who offered us a 3-bedroom $300 dollar-a-month rent controlled apartment with a doorman that it took my parents about a decade to fully furnish.
What did I know of genocide and survival and starvation and the millennial mores and traditions of the Middle East and the beauty of the Arabic tongue which I could not understand? And yet I remember loving Chtaurah as if I had walked into one of Sheherazade’s tales in 1001 Nights.
I relished its exoticism, its way of making you feel that everything you needed in life was contained here in a small plain stucco house and in the lavash bread and the labne and kibbe and baklava that my aunts prepared as if by magic, and the gentle encouragement of my otherwise aloof Oncle Dédé who tried to teach me to ride a bicycle in spite of my fear, over and over down the dirt road in front of our house until finally I could fly like the wind. Mabrouk! Bravo! Hachogootiun!, the family cried, then turned to other more important matters again. And then there was Badiyya.
Badiyya was no more than eight or maybe nine years old at the time, with dark black eyes like a raven and thick hair that she held back in a knot and a plain white dress and shoes that my Tante Reine insisted she wear whenever she worked—which was pretty much all day when she wasn’t eating or sleeping. Morning till night she labored like a latter-day Cinderella under my aunt’s imperious gaze and orders, cleaning floors, making beds, doing our laundry and cleaning our dishes. At lunchtime, Tante Reine magnanimously granted her an hour’s reprieve from her labours, during which timeshe would sit in a corner eating some bread and hummus and olives, or whatever else had been made for available to her that day.
This type of work was considered a privilege at the time in Lebanese society, as if young girls could have no greater aspiration or kinder fate than to clean other people’s floors and toilets. And so Badiyya would continue serve us day in and day out, wipe down tables, and lending a hand in the kitchen, while girls from wealthy families wore all the glass slippers and attended every ballroom celebration. Any chance I got I would stay by her side and talk to her, trying to lighten her burden, sometimes surreptitiously helping her with her chores. Tante Reine’s wrath was such, and her temper so terrible that I made sure never to get caught by Badiyya’ side, though I would inevitably be discovered:
“Khalas! Khent ess!” my Tante Reine screamed. “Guh paveh!” she added in Armenian. “Arrête de parler avec Badiyya. Stop speaking to Badiyya. For God’s sake she’s the maid. She has work to do.” She always used three languages in her short missives, as if to somehow make her point more empathic. From the first time I saw Badiyya cry due to Tante Reine’s wickedness, I knew that somehow, come what may, I must save Badiyya from her fate. I would not have wished a life of answering to my stern Tante Reine, may she rest in peace, on even my worst enemies.
So in the middle of the night with a flashlight and a French fountain pen and Jeanne d’Arc lined notebook from the Lycée Français de New York in hand, I hatched my plan: I would kidnap Badiyya and together we would escape to Beirut. What we would do once we reached the great metropolis, of course, I could not fathom, but that was one of the charms of childhood: not thinking past the immediate, and seemingly not being beholden to consequences. I would be Badiyya’s Prince Charming and swoop down and save her from her misery, to carry her into a better, brighter world.
One particular Saturday, I had had just about all I could take. As I saw Badiyya almost buckle under the weight of the scalding hot water pail that she carried, I ran up to her and grabbed it from her and spread the water out myself on the front porch.
“Mais, what are you doing, we pay Badiyya to do that!” my aunt exclaimed.
“She’s just a child.” I countered.
“Ah, you like Badiyya, Kristapor, don’t you?” Tante Reine cackled, using the Armenian version of my name to address me.
I ignored my aunt’s taunt and replied in the same flash of Middle Eastern anger that I had inherited from my father.
“What does that have to do with anything. She’s not your slave!”
“She’s dirt poor and the money she makes helps her whole family. We feed her, give her a warm place to sleep and pay her family,” my aunt retorted drily.
“It’s child labor. It should be illegal. Badiyya is beautiful and smart and should be in school, but instead she works for you year-round.”
“Mon enfant, you sound like someone two or three times your age with all your noble intentions…But answer me this: how will she buy food to eat or oil to heat her house without us? You are a child—let me tell you, you can’t change the world. Nothing in this world is fair.”
“Only because it’s full of phonies and people like you!” I exclaimed to my aunt’s surprise, as I ran out into the cool evening air and continued to run as fast as I could until my lungs almost exploded.
While this exchange took place, Badiyya had taken refuge behind the kitchen door. She couldn’t understand what was being said, yet she knew that we were arguing about her, especially as my aunt kept pointing in her direction as she screamed louder and louder. When I returned home an hour later somewhat chastened, I ran to the kitchen and grabbed Badiyya’s hand. Then summoning up all my energy to face my steely willed Tante Reine, I exclaimed:
“I am going to marry Badiyya and take her back to New York City.”
Instead of laughing or humoring me, Tante Reine’s eyes narrowed as if some an evil djinn had lodged itself behind them:
“Are you insane? You can’t marry Badiyya. She’s the maid!”
“So what?”
“And she’s not Armenian and she can’t even read or write. Enough of this silliness. She will think you’re serious.”
The next day at dawn, I decide to throw caution to the Lebanese wind and set my plan into motion. I snuck into the room where Badiyya and my aunt slept. Tiptoeing so as not to wake Tante Reine, I reached Badiyya, grabbed her gently by the arm and putting my finger up to my mouth motioned for her to stay silent and follow me. Earlier that morning, I had packed bastirma sandwiches and tann for the road. Once we had successfully snuck out of the house, I tightened my grip on Badiyya’s hand and bolted.
Running as fast as we could, we made it as far as the lavash baker’s hut and then down the hill to the other side of the field. We ran and ran and ran seemingly for hours over hill and dale, past a herd of goats being shepherded by a lone boy with a stick, and a simple dome-shaped mosque, and then down the next hill. We stopped to eat one of the sandwiches and washed it down with tann, letting the salt and yoghurt tickle the back of our throats. We both knew at this point that we were in trouble, that our flight was mere folly, but we would not stop.
We hiked over the next hill and valley until suddenly we hit the main road. I had no compass on me and Google Maps was decades away from being invented: I could not make out which direction Beirut or the Mediterranean even lay and so we sat by the roadside, despondent and waiting for fate to have its turn at us. Luckily, about two hours after we had first fled Chtaurah and my aunt’s wickedness, my cousin Bedig arrived seemingly out of nowhere. As he came to fetch us, he was humming a particularly annoying song that he liked to tease me with that feminized the name Christopher and placed me squarely on top of dung heap:
“Christinette oui oui oui, Christinette non non non, Christinette sur un tas de fumier.”
I stood up and quickly confronted my cousin: “I’m not going back with you. Badiyya and I are getting married.”
“Okay khalas my American cousin. Your Tante Reine will cook you alive like a shish kebab if you aren’t back at the house for lunch. She is furious.”
Then Bedig softened, showing for the first time that he was perhaps on my side of things:
“I told her that you and Badiyya had gone to fetch the lavash for the week and that I gave you a few lira to buy it, but that you must have gotten lost okay, mon petit cousin romantique? As for Badiyya, I told her that she had taken ill and was with her parents.”
Then he barked something in Arabic at Badiyya, who had been hiding behind me during the previous exchange. Dejected, she looked down at the ground all the way home. She never once lifted her eyes and would not give me her hand again, past all the valleys and hills that he had navigated during our aborted escape, and the past the small dome- shaped mosque, until we reached the lavash baker’s hut, and crossed the dirt road and snake-filled creeks all the way back to our house.
All day until evening came, I tried to catch a glimpse of Badiyya and somehow communicate with her and tell her how sorry I was that my half-baked idea had not worked out—but my aunt kept watch over her even more guardedly than usual, as if she somehow suspected that something were amiss.
“I know the two of you have been up to something,” she told me after a dinner of tabbouleh and lule kebab: “I just don’t know what.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Tante Reine,” I answered looking down at the floor, my skin almost burning with guilt. In the coming days, we went on trips to Jounieh to the Bird’s Nest orphanage, to Ainjar to feast on harissa and to visit the Ummayid ruins. When we returned a few days later, Badiyya was gone. Where had she gone, I wondered but dare not ask at first. Later that day, my aunt claimed offhandedly that she had sent Badiyya early to Beirut in order to prepare for the coming fall season of work but in all likelihood she decided to temporarily rid herself of her Arab Cinderella until I was no longer around to meddle in her affairs.
As is also the case when one is a child, my sadness soon dissipated and my thoughts turned to other things. I never did save Badiyya or marry her, for within a week the summer was over, and my mother and I had to drive down to Beirut and board the plane back to New York. Years later, even today, whenever I think of Chtaurah, my thoughts turn to the dark ochre dirt road that ran past our house, to the beautiful star- filled silver sky that bent like magic under my gaze, to the smell of fresh lavash, and the feeling of being lost in time and space. And I remember my aunt screaming at me: “Khent ess! You can’t marry Baddiya, she’s the maid.” I often wonder where Badiyya is today and hope that she no longer cooks and cleans from morning to night. Perhaps one day like a character in a Borges novel she simply ran away from Tante Reine and cleaning floors and kept running and running and running until she finally found happiness.
* Chtaurah is a small town in Lebanon’s fertile Bekaa valley.