Miadzin

The Cabinetmaker

On Ninth Avenue in San Francisco between Irving and Judah Streets there used to be a cabinetmaker who lived above his shop. He was called in the old country manner, Barone Gapriel, or Mr. Gapriel. His family name was Jivarian, and he, also, was from Bitlis. He wrote poems.

I asked him how it happened that he took to the writing of poems, since he was a cabinetmaker, and a very good one.

He said, “Well, now, my boy, Mr. William, when I am standing here at my bench, doing my work, my mind does not have very much to do, it is a matter of hand, and eye, so my mind speaks to me, saying things, and pretty soon I listen to my mind. I hear my mind say one word, two words, one line, another line, and so in the evening after work I write down what my mind has told me. That is how it happened.”

He was a man of medium height, heavy set, with something about him that suggested the trunk of a large tree. His shoulders were broad, his hands large, his fingers well shaped and very strong. His eyes had in them a mixture of terrible sorrow and continuous dancing amusement.

His kids were away at college, for that was the one thing he believed he was his responsibility to them, to see that they were as well prepared for sensible living as anybody might be: two sons, one daughter. His wife he had found in America, but again she was from the city of Bitlis. Every afternoon around three she took him a brass tray, upon which rested a small cup of Turkish coffee, one piece of lokhoum, and a glass of cold water.

She smiled and said softly, “A moment of refreshment for you, sir.”

She left the tray on a clear place of his workbench and went back upstairs, for she knew that when he was in his shop he was an artist, a thinker, and did not want any kind of small talk to intrude on his own cabinetmaking and poetry-thinking.

Now, in those days there was a famine in the land, one might say in the manner of the writers of the Old Testament. There was certainly a shortage of money, and many poor families became poorer. All the same, they managed to sit down to heart meals of very simple and very inexpensive fare, including my own family, in the second floor flat at 348 Carl Street, about eight blocks from the shop of Barone Gapriel Jivarian. I was twenty-two years old and felt just slightly desperate about not having a steady job. Also, about not having become a published writer, although I worked at writing every day, and pretty much also every night.

Thus, being without income and therefore also without cash, I did a lot of walking, and a lot of water drinking, until suppertime, when great mounds of bulghour pilaf cooked with cut-up brown onions was heaped upon plates, so that my brother and I could ear heartily if not elegantly, so to put it.

I loved the stuff, and I still do. And long after I was rich, I frequently asked somebody to cook a big pot of it for me, or I asked a chef at a restaurant to make a special big pot of it for the following day. And finally I myself learned how to fix the dish, and so I have it whenever I want it, wherever I happen to be.

On my walks I frequently passed the cabinetmaker’s shop, and once or twice he saw me and waved at me to come in, whereupon he would say, “Well, now, you’re just the man I want to see, Mr. William. You are also a writer, although not yet famous. You use the English language. I, also, am a writer — well, perhaps not quite a writer, but at any rate I write my poems. And I use the Armenian language. This is the poem I wrote last night.”

And then he would read a poem that I thought was wise ands human, and incredible, not for a cabinetmaker to have written, but for any man to have written.

And I thanked him and went on to the beach where I walked and picked up pebbles, as if they were words, or coins of money.

Four years later, I broke though at least, and my first book was published, let me even now, almost forty years later, say praise heaven, praise God, praise Jesus, praise the sun, praise everything and everybody. While to poems of the good cabinetmaker were never published, heaven help us one and all.

Chance Meetings

Chance acquaintances are sometimes the most memorable, for brief friendships have such a definite starting and stopping points that they take on a quality of art, of a whole thing, which cannot be broken or spoiled. And of course a sort of spoiling is the one thing that seems to be inevitable in an enduring friendship — new aspects of the person become revealed, and that which one had believed to be the truth about a person must be revised. The whole reality of the person must be frequently reconsidered, and so instead of having the stability of art or anything like art there is a constant flux, a continuous procedure of change and surprise, what at its best, if both people are lucky, is far more appealing than art is, for this is the stuff from which art is to be made, from which art is to be continuously enlarged and renewed.

An acquaintanceship, if all goes well, can linger in the memory like an appealing chord of music, while a friendship, or even a friendship that deteriorates into an enemyship, so to put it, is like a whole symphony, even if the music is frequently unacceptable, broken, loud, and in other ways painful to hear.

One encounters acquaintances endlessly, especially on one’s travels.

There is always somebody on the train, ship, bus, or airplane, who wants to tell you his story, and in turn is willing to let you tell yours, and so you exchange roles as you listen and tell. If the duet works well, you say so long at the end of the ride, and you remember the occasion with a pleasant satisfaction with yourself and with this other person who was suddenly as part of your story and of yourself.

Now, if you play your cards right, and this acquaintance is a pretty girl or a handsome woman, you can risk trying to extend the chance meeting to a non-chance meeting, but the rules of this sort of thing, although unwritten and unstated, do not tend to even permit either party to think in terms of anything less than absolute purity, absolute impersonality, total awareness that each represents the whole human race at its courteous best.

You have been thrown together accidentally, total strangers, in order to pass along as if to Truth itself, or to God, or to Memory, or even to Yourself and to Your Family, the essence of your own story and reality. You are not there to acquire more story, to have more material to carry with the rest of the material that still hasn’t been really understood, or certainly hasn’t been used, and you are there anonymously.

The game does not work if you let the other acquaintance know your name or who the people are in your inner life.

What you share is a kind of gentility, sympathy, and charity, not so much for one another, not so much each of you for the other, but rather for the unnamed people in your lives who have been stupid, wrong, unfair, cruel, and altogether human.

And so while the carrier moves steadily toward where you are going, you speak to one another, and you say things you wouldn’t say to any other people, and you know everything you say I understood and will not be used against you, and then when the carrier arrives you look at each other and smile, and say good-bye, good luck, and you move along, and that’s it, and you aren’t sorry that that’s it, you are pleased that it is.

I have had many such acquaintances — literally hundreds, but I remember best going back to San Francisco from New York in January of the year 1929, after I had failed to take the big city by storm, after I had not started my career as a writer just twenty years old. I traveled chair car the whole distance and the whole time, about eight days, I believe it was, it might have even been longer. And then all of a sudden during the last two hours of that long train ride a little girl joined me in a sip of coffee from the Candy Butcher’s urn in the corner of the parlor car, and we got to talking. She was married, she was pregnant, her husband was an office worker in Denver, they had no money, she was on her way home to her mother in San Francisco until he could get a proper one-room apartment, with bath and kitchenette, but she was in love with everything, especially the baby, and her husband, and life. And with me, as well, as I was in love with her. And I may say passionately if also totally impersonally.

Hovagim Saroyan

I remember staying overnight at your vineyard on the north side of Fresno, to which my brother Henry and I traveled with you in a carriage drawn by an old horse. I know the distance from our house at 2226 San Benito Avenue to your vineyard was only four miles, as I have made the journey recently several times, but it seemed to us a far greater distance.

Henry and I sat in the back like passengers, and you sat on the higher seat up front, none of us speaking, perhaps because your language was Armenian and ours was English, although we could speak Armenian, too. But mainly we were not speaking because we were glad to be together, traveling. It was late in the afternoon of a hot day, and you came to our house and said to our mother, “Takoohi, let me take the boys to the ranch, I will take them jackrabbit shooting, we will have supper, we will listen to old country records, and I will bring them back tomorrow in time for church. I don’t want to ride home alone.” And my mother said. “Hovagim, if you want them to go with you, take them.” And so we went.

It was 1917, exactly five years ago, perhaps this very same month, July, and you were alone out there on the vineyard. Your wife and two sons were in Bitlis or near there or far from there, if they weren’t dead, if they hadn’t been killed, or hadn’t died of hunger and thirst on the long march from Bitlis to the desert which so many others made and in which so many died. But even if they were alive, you hadn’t heard from them or from anybody who had seen them. Perhaps the boys were alive, but didn’t know who they were, having been too little to remember, having been taken to an orphanage and given new names.

I used to know you were alone, even before I heard about what had happened, heard my mother telling somebody.

You came to America, to work, to send money to your wife, so she and your sons could come, too, but it didn’t work out that way. You sent money and letters, and your wife replied, and then she didn’t reply, and a whole year went by, and then another whole year went by, and you didn’t know what had happened. You had an idea, but you didn’t know for sure. You were alone everywhere I saw you, even in the Arax Coffee House full of card players. I knew you were alone the first time I saw you sitting in our parlor sipping a cup of coffee, so when you said, “I don’t want to go home alone,” I knew what you were talking about, the way a small boy will know such a thing and never be able to talk about it.

Riding in the back of your carriage, on our way to your vineyard and your little house there, I kept wondering what it was that had most made you alone, and I thought it must be from not having your father with you, because that’s how we think, I guess, out of what is true for each of us, out of whatever each of us knows that makes us alone. Your father and my mother’s father were brothers, and I knew my mother’s father had died in Bitlis and, dying, had said to my mother’s mother, “Get the family out of here, leave this place, go anywhere else, but do not stay here any longer, go to America if you can manage.”

And of course she did manage, although it wasn’t easy: the people who control the papers and the rubber stamps had to be bribed with gold one by one, and then transportation had to be paid for, first by donkey train over high mountains along narrow roads from Bitlis to Erzeroum, where my brother Henry was born in 1905, and from Erzeroum to Trabizon, where a ship carried them to Constantinople, and then to Marseilles, where they all; had to work to raise money for the train ride across France to Le Havre, where again they had to work until there was enough money to put everybody on the ship that sailed to New York — a long crossing, far below in the ship, in steerage, where hundreds of families prepared their own meals and made sleeping places on the floor, followed at least by the fear and terror of Ellis Island. Everybody was “bono” except Lucy, my mother’s mother herself, and somebody with a rubber stamp said she would have to go back to Bitlis. The whole family went mad. The situation was unbelievable for hours, in which the heard died in everybody, and the old woman, then scarcely forty years of age, said, “Do not despair. God will put forth his hand.” And the next day her eyes were examined again, and almost as if it meant nothing, nothing at all, somebody else with a rubber stamp stamped her papers and said, “Bono.” And thus the family was not deprived of its force, authority, intelligence, wisdom, and faith.

What had made you so alone? I kept wondering what had made us all so alone, even when many of us were together, and what it was, I felt, was at least partly the people with the power, with the paper, with the rubber stamps, the enforcers of the rules and regulations, a whole world full of such people. They scare a man. They are killers.

After we finally arrived at your vineyard you took us to your cow and milked her and invited us to drink fresh milk. It was warm and seemed all right, but an hour later, while we were out jackrabbit hunting, we both threw up. We saw a couple of the big loping jackrabbits but they were too far away to shoot, and then we came back to your little shack house, and you served us a good dinner of stuffed tomatoes, bell peppers, and cucumbers, with flat bread and yogurt. Ad then we sat down in your parlor while you played Armenian records on the wind-up phonograph. The music was proud, beautiful, and lonely. And then we both began to fall asleep and you took us to our beds.

Hovagim, sleeping in your house was something I couldn’t understand when I woke up in the morning. There was a smell of sorrow and loneliness in my nostrils, and I couldn’t remember where I was, but I knew I wasn’t in my own bed in my own home. And then I remembered, I was at Hovagim’s house. I got dressed and went out and ate figs straight from the big tree, and them my brother Harry came out, and he ate some figs, too. And he said, “It feels funny sleeping on somebody else’s house, doesn’t it?” And I said, “Did you feel it, too?”

Pretty soon we saw you coming from tour ditch where you had been guiding water to your vines, and you said in English, “All right, boys, now we eat.” And you fixed us tea and fried dough, or new bread, into which we stuffed white cheese, and we ate boiled eggs and slices of dried beef, and lots of parsley and mint and fresh tomatoes and cucumbers sliced lengthwise.

And then you harnessed the hold horse to the carriage ad we set out for home. That’s all, Hovagim. But it was one of the great experiences of my life, don’t ask me why. It just was. I guess it was your kindness and aloneness. It certainly wasn’t the milk fresh from the cow — that stuff’s poison.

I saw you around town for a couple more years, and then all it was was a matter of remembering.

I hope both of the boys got out of it alive, even if they lost their names, because under any name I think they would be O.K.

Lucy Garoghlanian by William Saroyan

My grandmother came into the room and stared bitterly at everything, grumbling to herself and lifting a book off the table, opening it, studying the strange print and closing it with an angry and impatient bang, as if nothing in the world could be more ridiculous than a book.

I knew she wanted to talk, so I pretended to be asleep.

My grandmother is a greater lady than any lady I have ever had the honour of meeting, and she may even be the greatest lady alive in the past-seventy class for all I know, but I always say there is a time ad place for everything. They are always having baby contests in this crazy country, but I never heard of a grandmother contest, and I like her very much, but I wanted to sleep. She can’t read or write, but what of it? She knows more about life than John Dewey and George Santayana put together, and thats plenty. You could ask her what’s two timers two and she’d fly off the handle and tell you not to irritate her with childish questions, but she’s a genius just the same.

Forty years ago, she said, they asked this silly woman Oskan to tell about her visit to the village of Gultik and she got up and said, They have chickens there, and in calling the chickens they say, Chik chik chik. They have cows also, and very often the cows holler, Moo moo moo.

She was very angry about these remarks of the silly woman. She was remembering the old country and the old life, and I knew she would take up the story of her husband Melik in no time and begin to shout, so I sat up and smiled at her.

Is that all she had to say? I said. Chik chik chik and moo moo moo.

She was foolish, said my grandmother. I guess that’s why they sent her to school and taught her to read and write. Finally she married a man who was crippled in the left leg. One cripple deserves another, she said. Why aren’t you walking in the park on a day like this?

I thought I’d have a little afternoon nap, I said.

For the love of God, said my grandmother, my husband Melik was a man who rode a black horse through the hills and forests all day and half the night, drinking and singing. When the townspeople saw him coming they would run and hide. The wild Kourds of the desert trembled in his presence. I am ashamed of you, she said, lolling around among these silly books.

She lifted the first book that came to her hand, opened it, and stared with disgust at the print.

What is all this language here? She said.

That’s a very great book by a very great man, I said. Dostoyevsky he was called. He was a Russian.

Don’t tell me about the Russians, said my grandmother. What tricks they play on us. What does he say here?

Everything, I said. He says we must love our neighbours and be kind to the weak.

More lies, said my grandmother. Which tribe of the earth was king to our tribe? In the dead of winter he went to Stamboul.

Who? I said.

Melik, she shouted. My own husband, she said bitterly. Who else? Who else would dare to go that far in the dead of winter? I will bring you a bright shawl from Stamboul, he said. I will bring you a bracelet and a necklace. He was drunk of course, but he was my husband. I bore him seven children before he was killed. There would have been more if he hadn’t been killed, she groaned.

I have heard he was a cruel man, I said.

Who said such an unkind thing about my husband? said my grandmother. He was impatient with fools and weaklings, she said. You should try to be like this man.

I could use a horse all right, I said. I like drinking and singing too.

In this country? said my grandmother. Where could you go with a horse in this country?

I could go to the public library with a horse, I said.

And they’d lock you in jail, she said. Where would you tie the horse?

I would tie the horse to a tree, I said. There are six small trees in front of the public library.

Ride a horse in this country, she said, and they will put you down for a maniac.

They have already, I said. The libel is spreading like wildfire.

You don’t care? She said.

Not at all, I said. Why should I?

Is it true, perhaps? She said.

It is a foul lie, I said.

It is healthful to be disliked, said my grandmother. My husband Melik was hated by friend and enemy alike. Bitterly hated, and he knew it, and yet everybody pretended to like him. They were afraid of him, so they pretended to like him. Will you play a game of scambile? I have the cards.

She was lonely again, like a young girl.

I got up and sat across the table from her and lit a cigarette for her and one for myself. She shuffled and dealt three cards to me and three to herself and turned over the next card, and the game began.

Ten cents? She said.

Ten or fifteen, I said.

Fifteen then, but I play a much better game than you, she said.

I may be lucky, I said.

I do not believe in luck, she said, not even in card games. I believe in thinking and knowing what you are doing.

We talked and played and I lost three games to my grandmother. I paid her, only I gave her a half-dollar.

Is that what it comes to? She said.

It comes to a little less, I said.

You are not lying? She said.

I never lie, I said. It comes to forty-five cents. You owe me five cents.

Five pennies? She said.

Or one nickel, I said.

I have three pennies, she said. I will pay you three pennies now and owe you two.

Your arithmetic is improving, I said.

American money confuses me, she said, but you never heard of anyone cheating me, did you?

Never, I admitted.

They don’t dare, she said. I count the money piece by piece, and if someone is near by I have him count it for me too. There was this thief of a grocer in Hanford, she said. Dikranian. Three cents more he took. Six pounds of cheese. I had five different people count for me. Three cents more he has taken, they said. I waited a week and then went to his store again. For those three cents I took three packages of cigarettes. From a thief thieve and God will smile on you. I never enjoyed cigarettes as much as those I took from Dikranian. Five people counted for me. He thought I was an old woman. He thought he could do such a thing. I went back to the store and said not a word. Good morning, good morning. Lovely day, lovely day. A pound of rice, a pound of rice. He turned to get the rice, I took three packages of cigarettes.

Ha ha, said my grandmother. From thief thieve, and from above God will smile.

But you took too much, I said. You took fifteen times too much.

Fifteen times too much? Said my grandmother. He took three pennies, I took three packages of cigarettes, no more, no less.

Well, I said, it probably comes to the same thing anyway, but you don’t really believe God smiles when you steal from a thief, do you?

Of course I believe, said my grandmother. Isn’t it said in three different languages, Armenian, Kourdish, and Turkish?

She said the words in Kourdish and Turkish.

I wish I knew how to talk those languages, I said.

Kourdish, said my grandmother, is the language of the heart. Turkish is music. Turkish flows like a stream of wine, smooth and sweet and bright ion colour. Our tongue, she shouted, is a tongue of bitterness. We have tasted much of death and our tongue is heavy with hatred and anger. I have heard only one man who could speak our language as if it were the tongue of a God-like people.

Who was that man? I asked.

Melik, said my grandmother. My husband Melik. If he was sober, he spoke quietly, his voice rich and deep and gentle, and if he was drunk, he roared like a lion and you’d think God in Heaven was crying lamentations and oaths upon the tribes of the earth. No other man have I heard who could speak in this way, drunk or sober, not one, here or in the old country.

And when he laughed? I said.

When Melik laughed, said my grandmother, it was like an ocean of clear water leaping at the moon with delight.

I tell you, my grandmother would walk away with every silver loving cup and gold ribbon in the world.

Now she was angry, ferocious with the tragic poetry of her race.

And not one of you opegh-tsapegh brats are like him, she shouted. Only my son Vahan is a little like him, and after Vahan all the rest of you are strangers to me. This is my greatest grief.

Opegh-tsapegh is untranslatable. It means, somewhat, very haphazardly assembled, and when said of someone, it means he is no particular credit to the race of man. On the contrary, only another fool, someone to include in the census and forget. In short, everybody.

And when he cried? I said.

My husband was never known to weep, said my grandmother. When other men hid themselves in their houses and frightened their wives and children by weeping, my husband rode into the hills, drunk and cursing. If he wept in the hills, he wept alone. With only God to witness his weakness. He always came back, though, swearing louder than ever, and then I would put him to bed and sit over him, watching his face.

She sat down with a sigh and again stared bitterly around the room.

These books, she said. I don’t know what you expect to learn from books. What is in them? What do you expect to learn from reading?

I myself sometimes wonder, I said.

You have read them all? She said.

Some twice, some three times, I said. Some only a page here and there.

And what is their message?

Nothing much, I said. Sometimes there is brightness and laughter or maybe the opposite, gloom and anger. Not often, though.

Well, said my grandmother, the ones who were taught to read and write were always the silliest and they made the worst wives. This soft-brained Oskan went to school, and when she got up to speak all she could say was, They have chickens there, and in calling the chickens they say, Chik chik chik. Is that wisdom?

That’s innocence, I said in English.

I cannot understand such an absurd language, she said.

It is a splendid language, I said.

That is because you were born here and can speak no other language, no Turkish, no Kourdish, not one word of Arabic.

No, I said, it is because this is the language Shakespeare spoke and wrote.

Shakespeare? Said my grandmother. Who is he?

He is the greatest poet the world has ever known, I said.

Nonsense, said my grandmother. There was a traveling minstrel who came to our city when I was a girl of twelve. This man was as ugly as Satan, but he could recite poetry in six different languages, all day and all night, and not one word of it written, not one word of it memorized, every line of it made up while he stood before the people, reciting. They called him Crazy Markos and people gave him small coins for reciting and the more coins they gave him the drunker he got and the drunker he got the more beautiful the poems he recited.

Well, I said, each country and race and time has its own kind of poet and its own understanding of poetry. The English poets wrote and your poets recited.

But if they were poets, said my grandmother, why did they write? A poet lives to sing. Were they afraid a good thing would be lost and forgotten? Why do they write each of their thoughts? Are they afraid something will be lost?

I guess so, I said.

Do you want something to eat? Said my grandmother. I have cabbage soup and bread.

I’m not hungry, I said.

Are you going out again to-night? She said.

Yes, I said. There is an important meeting of philosophers in the city to-night. I have been invited to listen and learn.

Why don’t you stop all this nonsense? She said.

This isn’t nonsense, I said. These philosophers are going to explain how we can make this world a better place, a heaven on earth.

It is nonsense, said my grandmother. This place is the same place all men have known, and it is anything you like.

That’s bourgeois talk, I said in English.

These philosophers, I said in Armenian, are worrying about the poor. They want the wealth of the rich to be shared with the poor. That way they claim everything will be straightened out and everybody will be happy.

Everybody is poor, said my grandmother. The richest man in the world is no less poor than the poorest. All over the world there is poverty of spirit. I never saw such miserliness in people. Give them all the money in the world and they’ll still be poor. That’s something between themselves and God.

They don’t believe in God, I said.

Whether they believe or not, said my grandmother, it is still a matter between themselves and God. I don’t believe in evil, but does that mean evil does not exist?

Well, I said, I’m going anyway, just to hear what they have to say/

Then I must be in the house alone? She said.

Go to as movie, I said. You know how to get to the neighborhood theatre. It’s not far. There is a nice picture to-night.

Alone? Said my grandmother. I wouldn’t think of it.

To-morrow, I said, we will go together. To-night you can listen to the radio. I will come home early.

Have you no books with pictures?

Of course, I said.

I handed her a book called The Life of Queen Victoria, full of pictures of that nice old lady.

You will like this lady, I said. She was Queen of England, but she is now dead. The book is full of pictures, from birth to death.

Ah, said my grandmother looking at an early picture of the Queen. She was a beautiful girl. Ahkh, ahkh, alas, alas, for the good who are dead, and my grandmother went down the hall to the kitchen.

I got out of my old clothes and jumped under a warm shower. The water was refreshing to the skin and I began to sing.

I put on fresh clothes and a dark suit. I went into the kitchen and kiss my grandmother’s hand, then left the house. She stood at the front window, looking down at me.

Then she lifted the window and stuck her head out.

Boy, she shouted. Don’t be so serious. Get a little drunk.

O.K., I said.

Part II of ‘The Living and the Dead’ Three Times Three, 1936