Lice, Hazro... two names that were ever-present throughout my childhood. Both sides of my family come from one of these two places in Diyarbekir. On my mother’s side, it is all Lice. When I was a child, they used to say that pretty girls all came from Lice and Hazro men often married them. That’s what happened in my paternal family...a grandfather from Hazro and a grandmother from Lice. They also used to say that people from Hazro were tough and domineering while the ones from Lice, soft and submissive. That might be partially true if I were to judge from my very first visits to Lice and Hazro. It is the way the townspeople in either place related to a stranger like me searching for family traces. The ones in Hazro were more critical of me because I had not many details about my father’s family history. They persisted in questioning me as if it was my fault. In Lice, it went smoother. It was as if they understood my blindlike search about the past. Still, when I think about my father’s parents, I question these characteristics about the two towns. The opposite happened with my grandparents. My grandfather Khacho seemed the soft one and my grandmother Verjin, the tough one.
My kind, lovely grandfather Khachadour. They say he was a strict and harsh man. My mother also has told me many sad stories about how unjustly he had treated her the first few years after arriving as a new bride. But she also would tell about how respectful he had become with her as time passed. In fact, I think he must have loved her quite a bit because whenever he wanted to visit our house, he would say to my grandmother Verjin, ‘Let’s go to Markrid’s tonight’ and not ‘to Antranig’s’, his son. All I remember is this short old man, in a dark overcoat, a beret and a hitler-style moustache who never made any noise. I remember him just sitting at the desk in my uncle(amca) Hossep’s shop in the last years before we moved to Beirut. Like all retired fathers in the Middle East, he would come often to his son’s shop and watch how business was going. I remember him like that because for one whole summer I was an apprentice at my uncle’s shop.
Whenever I see a long-stemmed red rose, my grandfather comes to my mind. It is a memorable scene that I can not forget. I am maybe five or six years old and have just come for my lunch break to my grandparents’...their house was a couple of blocks closer to school than my home. Often I would go there instead of home. Everyone is in the courtyard and there is an older man whom I am seeing for the first time. He looks like a barber, with the white top he is wearing. My grandfather is standing there in a sparkling white shirt with his left sleeve rolled up, waiting next to the rose garden. He and the barber are chatting and laughing. Everyone looks like they are anticipating something dramatic with very serious faces. Then the man asks my grandfather if he is ready and my grandfather nods a “yes”. He extends his left arm towards the man, who takes out something metalic that looks like an oversized nail clipper from his pocket. With the clipper he cuts into a vein in my grandfather’s arm and crimson red blood starts gushing upwards from his arm, falling down on the ground and streaming into a sewer hole.
At that age I never understood the reason for that blood ceremony. I remember being told that my grandfather had too much blood in his body, when I had asked my grandmother. Only decades later my paternal aunt Bejo explained that it was actually a treatment for the high blood pressure that my grandfather had been suffering from when I was young.
I know that I witnessed the same procedure a second time months or a year later, but this first one has always stayed with me. What was remarkable about that were the visuals. From my height, my grandfather’s elbow looked as if it was resting on top of a red rose in the garden. The rose and the gushing blood were the same colour and it seemed as if that redness was flowing from the rose into my grandfather’s elbow, shooting upwards with a violence and then colouring the shiny surface of the ground, slowly heading towards the sewer hole. I was horrified by the blood streaming from my grandfather but I must confess that I was also mesmerized by the crimson redness coming out of his sparkly white shirt-sleeved arm. A memorable contrast of colours! Fortunate, I would say. How else would a child like me learn about peotic imagery?
