War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning - Chris Hedges [51]
In the empty street below, Huso Kovač, fifty-eight, swung himself forward with the help of hand-held aluminum crutches. He said he disliked spending days in his apartment, which previously belonged to a Serb. He moved laboriously about the neighborhood, resting at times on the cement walls and staring at the road.
Before the war Kovač worked in Sutjeska, the national park that was the site of a major Partisan battle against the Nazis in World War II. When he spoke of the yearly anniversaries, which always saw the arrival of Tito, the dictator, his eyes lit up. It was the only time he smiled.
He lost his leg in 1993 as he and his Muslim neighbors fled under mortar fire from Sutjeska over Mount Igman to Sarajevo. His only son died in the war. His daughter’s husband was also killed. She cared for their two small children alone on her widow’s pension.
“I don’t trust anyone anymore,” he said. “This is what the war has taught me, not to trust.”
He shifted his hands to grip the handles of the crutches and moved away.
5
THE HIJACKING AND RECOVERY OF MEMORY
Our people’s lives pass, bitter and empty, among malicious, vengeful thoughts and periodic revolts. To anything else, they are insensitive and inaccessible. One sometimes wonders whether the spirit of the majority of the Balkan peoples has not been forever poisoned and that, perhaps, they will never again be able to do anything other than suffer violence, or inflict it.
•
IVO ANDRIĆ
Conversation with Goya: Signs, Bridges
HAGOB H. ASADOURIAN, LIKE MANY SURVIVORS OF genocide, communes with shadows. Some are dark and frightening, like the shades of Turkish soldiers, who in 1915 herded him and his family from his Armenian village, leaving him to watch his mother and four of his sisters die of typhus in the Syrian desert. Some are sweet, revolving around the raucous Armenian-language plays performed in the 1920s at the Yiddish Theater at Madison Avenue and Twenty-seventh Street in Manhattan. And some are poignant, like the reunion with his sole surviving sister, thirty-nine years after they lost each other one night near the Dead Sea as they fled with a ragged band of Armenian orphans from Syria to Jerusalem.
But his battle to preserve memory, the theme of his fourteen books, did not save him or his generation from the destructive march of time. And time, to the rapidly vanishing community of exiled Armenians, will soon finish the work that, he says, was begun by the Turkish army more than eighty-five years ago.
The Turks have spent most of the past century denying, with rather startling success, the Armenian genocide of 1915, when the Ottoman Empire, fearing a nationalist revolt, forced two million Armenians into the Syrian desert to die. The few surviving Armenians no longer ask to go home. They do not ask for restitution. They ask simply to have the memory of their obliteration acknowledged. It is a moral obsession, the lonely legacy passed onto the third and fourth generation who no longer speak Armenian but who carry within them the seeds of resentment that will not be quashed.
Asadourian’s latest book, The Smoldering Generation, was, he said, “about the inevitable loss of our culture.”
“No one takes the place of those who are gone,” the ninety-seven-year-old writer said when I visited him at his home in Tenafly, New Jersey. He was seated in front of a picture window that looked out on a carefully groomed garden. “Your children do not understand you in this country. You cannot blame them.”
As he spoke, his middle-aged son, John, who has used a wheelchair since a stroke, jerked himself into position behind his father. He listened, his head cocked slightly to one side, with a grimace.
Although there were once ten major Armenian-language daily newspapers in the United States, there is just one left, published in California. Armenian clubs have closed, social societies have been disbanded, and cultural events have