Holding the newspaper only a few centimeters away from his face, he would sit there reading sometimes for hours without uttering a single word. Only the sound of his breathing, the rustling of the newspaper pages and the buzzing of the flies broke the silence of those hot Summer days, mornings in the small courtyard and afternoons in the living room. That’s how I remember my maternal grandfather Boghos…my silent grandfather. He was one-eyed, wearing an eyepatch covering his other eye. Throughout all the summers that we went on vacation to Ras Al-Ayn to visit my grandparents, I only saw him once without it. He had removed his black eyepatch thinking he was alone. But I was there in a corner of the living room and I saw his other eye. It was like a deep hole covered up with a wrinkled eyelid. That one time, after noticing me in the room, he just rubbed his blind eye with his handkerchief and then covered it with the patch. He did not say anything, avoiding my eyes even though he must have felt that I wanted to take the opportunity and ask him how he had lost his eye.
The tragedy had happened long before I was born. My mother told me the story one day when I asked her. She herself was a young teenager when the accident had happened. One day when she and my grandmother were doing some laundry in the courtyard, they heard a terrible big bang, something like a pistol shot coming from the kitchen. Mother and daughter rushed there and found my grandfather lying on the floor soaked in blood. He had shot himself in the temple with a pistol. Well, to keep the story short, apparently he had failed in blowing his head off. Instead, the bullet had only pierced through his eye.
My mother told me that when she was older, one day she had asked my grandfather as to why he had wanted to commit suicide. He had been reluctant at first to open up the past but as she persisted, he told her that for a long time before the attempt he had been feeling a certain hopeless despair. Poverty and joblessness had made him feel a useless father and husband. Every time his children or wife looked at him, he felt they were looking down on him. He had felt there was sarcasm and double meaning in anything they said to him. He had felt useless and humiliated. The only way out, he had concluded, was to put an end to this hopelessness with a bullet. But even the bullet had betrayed him.
Ever since that day, I guess my grandfather had little to say to anyone. Yes, he was a gentle soul, and he did some chatting but overall, he was a minimalist as far as participating in daily talks. Actually, I have no memory of witnessing any kind of dialogue or argument on his part. He was just there, I think with a heavy soul full of a sad past...a kind of regret for the way his world had turned out to be. His world, as I remember it now, must have become very small. I do not even remember if he worked. I do know that he was a blacksmith. I have a blurry flashback memory from when I was very very small. One of my brothers or cousins was showing me a shop and they told me that it was our grandfather’s workplace. All I remember is a dark space with some metal items hanging on the wall.
My memory of him is only at home. He was almost invisible, in the sense that you knew he was there but without making any noise. I can say that he was not affectionate. He never hugged or kissed me. But I always feel that of my two grandfathers, I have a stronger love for him. Maybe because he never chided me or interfered with whatever I did. I remember accompanying him sometimes when he went shopping for food or bread. He would walk in front, and I would follow behind him. On the way back, he would always get tired and run out of breath. He would always stop in front of the Armenian school and sit on the steps to rest. He would tell me to go but I always waited for him. I always had a sense that something bad might happen to him if I left him like that on his own.
He has gone for a long time now but somehow, I think of him sometimes with longing. Lingering in my mind is an image of him reading intensively in the courtyard and I sitting somewhere close to him, flipping through Armenian magazines to look at the pictures and read the captions. A sweet memory, as if life is full of peaceful blessing... as if life is eternal.
