I narrowed his topic somewhat, focusing on the Armenian Nationalist movements that had in large part provoked the Turkish massacres. Hunchak and Daschnak, organized in 1885 and 1890 respectively, had worked to develop a national consciousness and pressed for liberation from the Ottoman Empire. The minor Kurdish massacre of 1894 led to an absorbing parade of Big Power manipulations and was followed a year later by Abdu-l-Hamid’s mammoth slaughter of eighty thousand Armenians.
But it was during World War I, when Turkey fought on the Axis side and feared her Armenian subjects as a potential fifth column, that the Armenian massacres reached their height and the phrase “Starving Armenians” found its way into our language. In mid-1915 the Turks went berserk. In one community after another the Armenian population was uprooted, men and women and children were massacred indiscriminately, and those who were not put to the sword either fled the country or quietly starved.
After the war the Soviets took Armenia proper, establishing an Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic. The areas that remained Turkish had largely lost their Armenian population. The last large concentration of Armenians to suffer en masse were those in the city of Smyrna, now Izmir. The Greeks seized the town in the Greco-Turkish War that followed close upon the signing of the armistice. When Ataturk recaptured Smyrna, the city was burned, and the Greeks and Armenians were systematically destroyed. An earthquake further reduced the city in 1928, but by that time there were few Armenians left in it.
Smyrna, then, was an afterthought, a sort of footnote to the whole business. My main focus was on the Nationalist movements, their organization, their development, their aims, and their ultimate effects. I expected to finish the thesis well ahead of schedule and I expected to go no further with the study of the destruction of Smyrna. But I had not then met Kitty or her grandmother.
Kitty and I met at a wedding in the Village. My friend Owen Morgan was being married to a Jewish girl from White Plains. Owen is a Welsh poet with no discernible talent who had discovered that one could make a fair living by drinking an impressive amount, spouting occasional poetry, seducing every comely female within reach, and generally behaving like the shade of Dylan Thomas. He startled me by asking me to be his best man, an office I had never before performed. So I stood up for him in a drab loft on Sullivan Street at the ceremony performed by a priest friendly to the Catholic Workers. Neither of them was Catholic, but Owen had lived at the CW settlement on Christie Street for a few months before he discovered the potential of the Dylan Thomas bit. (I’m a member of the Catholic Workers myself, although I don’t give them as much of my time as I probably should. They’re a wonderful organization.) I stood up for Owen and passed him the ring at the appropriate time, and afterward Kitty Bazerian danced at his wedding.
She was small and slender and dark, with fine black hair and huge brown eyes. She stood demurely, garbed in a wisp of diaphanous fluff, and someone said, “Now Kitty Bazerian will dance for us,” and the house band from the New Life Restaurant began to play, and her body sang in the center of the improvised stage, music in motion, silk, velvet, perfection, adding a wholly new dimension to sensuality.
Afterward I found her at the bar, dressed now in skirt and sweater and black tights, which was about right for Owen’s wedding.
“Alexandra the Great,” I said.
“Who told you? They promised not to say.”
“I recognized you myself.”
“Honestly?”
“I’ve watched you dance at the New Life. And at the Port Said before that.”
“And you recognized me right away?”
“Of course. I never knew that Alexandra the Great was an Armenian.”
“A starving Armenian right about now. Aren’t they having anything to eat?”
“It would spoil Owen’s image.”
“I suppose we have to respect his image. But I already had too much to drink and I’m starving.”
“May it never be said that Evan Tanner let an Armenian starve. Why don’t we get out of here?”
We did. I suggested the Sayat Nova at Bleecker and Charles. She asked me why I was so very hipped on Armenians. I told her I was writing a thesis on Armenia.
“You’re a student?”
“No, I’m just writing a thesis.”
“I don’t…wait a minute, you’re Evan Tanner! Sure, Owen told me about you. He says you’re crazier than he is.”
“He may be right.”
“And you’re writing about Armenians now? You ought to meet my grandmother. She could tell you all about how we lost the family fortunes. She makes a good story out of it. According to her, we were the richest Armenians in Turkey. Gold coins, she says; more gold coins than you could count. And now the Turks have it all.” She laughed. “Isn’t that always the way? Owen insists he’s a direct descendant of Owen Glendower and the rightful King of all of Wales. The Sayat Nova sounds fine, Evan. But I warn you, I’m going to be expensive. I’ll eat everything they’ve got.”
“I don’t remember what we had or how it tasted. There was a good red wine with the meal, but we got drunker on each other than on anything else. It does not happen often for me, the special magic, the perfect harmony. It happened this time.
She talked some about her dancing. I was delighted to discover that she had no higher ambitions. She did not want to become a ballerina, or get a guest shot on the Sullivan show, or found a new school of modern dance. She just wanted to go on dancing at the New Life for as long as they wanted her.
I, on the other hand, have many ambitions and I told her of them. “Someday,” I confided, “we’ll restore the House of Stuart to the English throne. The Jacobite movement has never entirely died out, you know. There are men in the Scottish Highlands who would rise at any moment to throw out those Hanoverian interlopers.”
“You’re putting me on-”
“Oh, no,” I said, wagging a finger at her. “The last reigning Stuart was Anne. She died in 1714 and they brought over a Hanoverian, a German. George I. And ever since that day the Germans have sat upon the English throne. If you think about it, it’s an outrage.”
“But the House of Stuart-”
“There have been attempts,” I said. “Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1745. All of Scotland rose to support him, but the French didn’t do all they were supposed to do, and nothing came of it. The English won the Battle of Culloden Moor and thought that was the end of it.” I paused significantly. “But they were wrong.”
“They were?”
“The House of Stuart has not died out, Kitty. There has always been a Stuart Pretender to the English throne, although some of them have worked harder at it than others. The current Pretender is Rupert. Someday he’ll reign as Rupert I, after Betty Saxe-Coburg and her German court have been routed.”
“Betty Saxe-Coburg…oh, Elizabeth, of course. And who is Rupert?”
“He’s a Bavarian crown prince.”
She looked at me for a long moment and then began to laugh. “Oh, that’s beautiful! That’s priceless, Evan. I love it!”
“Do you?”
“Replacing the…the German usurpers with…oh, it’s great…with the crown prince of Bavaria-”
“The true English claimant.”
“I love it. Oh, sign me up, Evan. It’s better than a Barbara Stanwyck movie. Oh, it’s grand. I love it!”
And outside, a breeze playing with her marvelous black hair, she said, “I live with my mother and my grandmother, so that’s out. Do you have a place we can go to?”
“Yes.”
“But Owen said something about you not sleeping. I mean-”
“I don’t, but I have a bed.”
“How sweet of you,” she said, taking my arm, “to have a bed.”
Chapter 3