Getting together with Abu Harut and his family was warm and intimate. They received us with love and friendship. Umm Harut didn’t stop talking, explaining, describing, kissing and hugging me on one side while hugging and kissing my siblings on the other, until we felt safe and at home. With the same impulse, she didn’t hesitate to push us off her lap if she heard bullets whizzing by or the thundering of a faraway explosion. She would rush over to the window, pointing with her hand, saying loudly in her heavy Armenian accent: “Aman, my Lord Aman, how can he say one day there is a cease-fire?... Aman, this radio lies and the television does too, anyway... far... far, let’s go, Umm Majd, come up to the kitchen with me. I am making lahmajoun for you all, the boy must be hungry...”
Not long after that day, it became clear how relationships would be in the future: my father + Abu Harut, my mother + Umm Harut, these people would be our only relatives. Harut and I took over a corner of the living room and started talking like old friends, monitoring our parents with wide smiles and watching how our siblings played together in harmony. I had seen his little brother Kevork before, but for a while I couldn’t stop looking at Tamara’s face. Tamara is his sister, about whom I almost called out to my father the very first moment I saw her, “This is the gazelle, it’s her. Why don’t you believe me when I tell you that I saw her jumping in front of me, soft, redheaded, and luminous, in Marjat al-Zaarour? She stopped for a moment once and stared right into my eyes before disappearing in a fog like a thick cloud of incense.”
I remember very well the day I saw Harut for the first time in our village, together with his father who used to come to our farm regularly — sometimes for work and other times to drink a glass of ‘araq with my father. Because of his work, Abu Harut used to know the livestock traders in our area as well as the owners of the farms. That day, Harut told me that they owned a butcher’s shop in Bourj Hammoud and were among the most famous makers of basterma — a traditional Armenian dish of cured meat with a mix of spices — which I hadn’t heard of before. It later became one of my favorite dishes, along with patsha, sujouk, and other delicious Armenian foods that my mother began cooking as a consequence. Harut didn’t inform me at the time that I would see my gazelle again many years later at their house.
I don’t know why Abu Harut preferred always dealing with my father, since he owned such a small herd. He remained a loyal friend, visiting us whenever the opportunity arose, sometimes bringing Harut with him, even after my father had to sell his little herd to Abu Jawwad, who devoured everything and everybody, totally destroying the livelihoods of the smallholders.
My father didn’t belong to a party and I’d never felt that he paid attention to politics or anything other than fulfilling our requests, preserving the stability of our family life, and securing everything we needed. We were the world to him, our mother and us. I contemplated his face while he was drinking coffee with Abu Harut, neither of them pausing their conversation at all except to drink what was in their cups. At the time, a naive hunch made me guess that my father didn’t want to either blend in on the East Side of the city, or to melt into the West Side (that’s what the two halves of divided Beirut were called at that time). It was perhaps for this reason that he rang his Armenian friend asking for help.
I remember what he whispered to my mother after Abu Harut left: “In Lebanon, there are nearly a hundred thousand Armenians, scattered all throughout its different regions. Many live in Bourj Hammoud, Anjar, and Antelias and have gotten Lebanese citizenship. They have a number of representatives in the parliament distributed between three main parties: Tashnag, Henchag, and Ramgavar. Armenians have played an important role in Lebanese society for a long time, holding a certain weight in political life. Today they keep the same distance from all of the sects that the Lebanese people belong to. They haven’t retreated from these ethical principles and they are liked and respected by everyone. That’s why their area of Beirut has remained safer than others.”
Amer continued: “Abu Harut, like all Armenians, will always remember what happened to his ancestors: the great massacre that began on April 24, 1915. On that day, the Turkish forces imprisoned six hundred Armenian leaders in Istanbul and proceeded to liquidate them, killing all their boys and men. Every soldier in the Turkish army of Armenian origin was discharged, sent to do hard labor, and then killed. The Armenians in Eastern Anatolia were given a notice to evacuate their houses within twenty-four hours or else be killed. When they left their villages, the liquidation of all the healthy men was complete, and only the women, children, and old people were allowed to flee, walking hundreds of kilometers on foot without food or medicine.”
Every time he tells it to me, the story makes him cry, as though he doesn’t want to forget how on that road women were raped, others were tortured, until almost all of them perished in one way or another. Or how the Kurdish and Turkoman tribes joined the Ottoman soldiers in torturing the Armenians. So that in roughly a year, no less than a million Armenians were killed — that is to say, half of the Armenians living in the shadow of the Ottoman Empire. Abu Harut would tell me that the Turks, despite the abomination of this tragedy, didn’t recognize the murder of more than three hundred thousand people and refused to admit that this operation had been planned, intentionally and resolutely.
In any case, arranging a place for us to live was not difficult for Abu Harut. My father had money and some savings, enough for us to not need support from anyone else, and moreover he could get a license to use the Honda as a taxi.
No shape before me was clear, everything seemed like a mirage, an unreal world covered by a thick blue fog, which I carried with me from my village between the mountains and the plains. At this time, the houses in Beirut would empty and fill with people in strange ways, sometimes without good reason. Areas had not yet become definitively entrenched or their sectarian identities absolutely clear. But the singularity of Bourj Hammoud — where Abu Harut and his family had lived from the time his father had come to Lebanon, and whose landmarks are preserved in my memory and my heart — was reflected in its houses, alleys, and markets, populated by large families, most of whom the war couldn’t budge from the property they owned, despite all of the displacement happening in Lebanon. Shops and pharmacies were spread throughout their neighborhoods, carrying the names of their home regions in Armenia in two languages — Armenian and Arabic — reflecting their attachment to their mother tongue and an identity that had not faded away in its owners’ souls, despite the passage of time. What was notable was that the people of Bourj Hammoud’s refused to be grouped within a special segregated “ghetto,” off-limits to others. I heard Abu Harut speak disapprovingly about this, stressing, “We will never form a closed society, this region of ours reflects a model of coexistence between different sects, and this naming — ghetto — advances political goals. Look, Abu Majd, look next door to the Armenian shops and you’ll find Muhammad’s shop, Joseph’s shop, or Sacco’s...”
That area has its own special scent; I can still almost smell the fragrant mix of hot spices which flavored their delicious food, and hear Harut’s voice in my ear saying cheerfully, “There are many kinds of food which we brought to the Lebanese that they like — sujouk and basterma — just as we took tabbouleh, kibbe, and stuffed vine leaves from them.” He saw a kind of fusion and reciprocity in this. He followed up, imitating his father: “We took hospitality and generosity from you, baba, and you took from us many kinds of arts and crafts, like jewelry and shoemaking... and don’t forget fixing watches, baba, ha ha ha!”