Garni-Geghard

The summer before I turn eighteen, I fly back to the country of my birth because that is what you do when you're Armenian. You watch the capital city of Yerevan appear from outside your dark airplane window and you lean back into your seat as your mother reaches across your body to put her palm over the pane in desperation. As the plane begins to descend, she brings that same hand to her mouth, kisses the tips of her fingers, and then crosses herself left to right.

I wanted to write an essay about the Armenian faith, but I see that I've begun, yet again, with my mother. So be it: there is a natural order in place, after all. If there is such a strange thing as Armenia, and such a strange thing as God, let it be written that, for me, they each came to exist first through my mother.

But there are other women here, in this origin story. Three others, to be exact, not including me, for I am not yet eighteen. Seated between my mother and my motherland, separated by metal invention and human impossibility, I am a child.

So there are three other women: my aunt, and my aunt's two sisters-in-law. Three unrelated women married to three brothers. I will give the women's names in due time. And then there are the other women, the other women whose names and faces I do not know, have never known, but certainly know to exist (or to have existed, God rest their souls). Mistresses, undoubtedly beautiful.

And there are ghosts, three of them: these three women's husbands, these other women's lovers. Three dead men. Real ghosts, with graveyards to show for it now. The summer before I turn eighteen, two are still alive but ready to go, to follow the first one into the unknown—to heaven I hope, as they must have hoped.

Once there were three brothers, you see, and now there are three widows.

But let us return to the beginning, and start again. My mother crossing herself with pinched fingers. My country outside the window. Prayers for a safe landing. Ground hard beneath my feet.

________

We are staying with my Aunt Vergine, my father's sister. Her twenty-something-year-old son is barely home—he is roaming the streets of his city with a cigarette in his hand and young male confidence in his blood—so we are really staying only with my aunt. Her husband has been dead for three years. My uncle was a big man around town, director of the local conservatory, very bourgeois in this small country that spent most of its recent history under Communist rule. He was the eldest of the three brothers, and they were all big men, with big booming voices, but my uncle was an artist—a musician and a poet, a man who loved to drink and toast. I knew this from the videotapes, from the pictures, from my parents' stories, and from my older sister, who, at thirteen, traveled with my paternal grandmother to Armenia as a gift from my parents for being valedictorian of her middle school. My parents encouraged me to go too, then—I was twelve—but I feared the plane would crash because my mother was not on it. This was the kind of simple, strange logic I carried with me in secret those years. When my uncle died three years later, I was asked—in one of my mother's cruelest moments—how I was going to live with that regret.

My uncle had loved us when we were young and lived in Armenia, and he loved us from afar as we were growing up in America. He had gotten the chance to love my sister again, more deeply, but I would never know the force of that love. When my parents talk about this man, there is a kind of awe directed at him that I can never quite share.

He was a womanizer, my uncle...