Chance Meetings Page 3

  About once a week he finished a new drawing.

  The paper cost about a penny a sheet and came in a book of fifty sheets, glued together at the top: after you finished a picture, you separated it from the tablet.

  He generally took the picture straight to my father’s kid brother Mihran, and together they looked at it for a long time.

  Pipe organ pictures, I called them. There was deep in each of them a large bellowing approximation of a sorrowful moan.

  Sarkis Sumboulian had a nervous breakdown, but he was said to have gone mad. At the age of twenty-four, he left town.

  One day Mihran told me, “He’s in London. Sarkis Sumboulian is in London, he is drawing pictures in London, he sent me this letter in Armenian.”

  And that was it. I never found out what finally happened to Sarkis Sumboulian in London, or anywhere else. Maybe he only died.

  Chapter 11

  I have frequently sung Bitlis, for it is the highland city of my people, and in a sense a nation by itself, in which the three peoples living there side by side felt closer related to one another than to others of their own tribes in other cities: the Armenians, the Kurds, and the Turks.

  I place the Armenians first because Bitlis is a part of ancient Armenia. I place the Kurds second because Bitlis has also been a part of the geography of the Kurdish people. And I place the Turks last because they were the last to arrive.

  Now, when a great many of the Armenians of Bitlis saw that the future for them in Bitlis was at best only heroic, with violent death almost inevitable, the alternatives were carefully considered—to stay and die Armenian, or to go to America and die old. Many Armenians voted to die old, and went to America: New York, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Illinois, Michigan, and most of all to California, although there are Armenians in every state of the union, and in all probability in every country of the world.

  This is quite a large fact when it is remembered that in 1915 there were scarcely three million Armenians in the world, counting half-Armenians and quarter-Armenians, a kind of counting that Armenians tend to do. It is never imagined that the English, German, Russian, Assyrian, Greek, French, Italian, Irish, Spanish, Portuguese, or American half will be preferred by the half-breed over the Armenian.

  Now, in singing Bitlis I can only say I have been helpless, for that seems to be the truth.

  Whenever I met somebody in Fresno whom I considered especially brilliant I immediately asked him to tell me his city, the city of his people, and more often than not I was told, “We are from Bitlis.”

  This always pleased me, and I thought, “Another member of the family.”

  One of the greatest characters in Fresno in the second, third, and fourth decade of this century was a large burly man with a huge open smiling face—the whole face smiled, not just the lips and eyes—whose name was Aram Joseph, which means that his full and proper name in Armenian was Aram Hovsepian.

  He was one of the better local wrestlers, and was frequently the headliner at the Friday night matches at the Civic Auditorium.

  If the matches were fixed, nobody seems to have dared to ask Aram Joseph to lose, for he won every one of his matches. This was wise, for many of the ticket-buyers were Armenians, but not necessarily from Bitlis, for the people of Bitlis don’t like to throw money around foolishly. That is something that is done by the less sensible people of Van, Moush, Sassoun, Dikranagert, and a dozen other Armenian cities.

  Whenever Aram Joseph was scheduled to wrestle, he would hand out two or three dozen free passes to members of his own family, and to a number of other good friends, mostly from Bitlis. He had a blonde appearance, blue eyes, and a kind of early California style of movement: powerful, swift, loud, hearty, generous, and in a street fight deadly.

  Selling papers, I saw him one day pick up and heave onto the sidewalk from a small real estate office in which he had a desk three very big Americans, as they were referred to in those days. If one of them got up and didn’t run, Aram Joseph gave the poor man a clout with the edge of his hand upon the neck that sent him flying. Three big men, tough guys, the kind of characters who in television westerns these days would be regarded as killers. Aram Joseph ignored all threats upon his life until the moment it appeared to be in operation, whereupon he would take a pistol or a knife from somebody, knock him down and keep the weapon, which under the circumstances he was legally entitled to use upon the would-be assassin, but never did. But he did have a good assortment of weapons.

  One day only a few years before he died, Aram Joseph stopped me on Eye Street in Fresno and said, “Willie, I want you to know your father was my teacher in Bitlis. Armenak Saroyan was the best man I have met in this world.”

  That was one of the proudest moments of my life.

  One of the funniest was watching Aram Joseph back up a Kissel Kar three blocks on Van Ness Avenue at 60 miles an hour in 1919.

  Chapter 12

  On ninth avenue in San Francisco between Irving and Judah Streets there used to be a cabinet-maker 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 cabinet-maker, 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 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 cabinet-making 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 hearty 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 eat 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 cabinet-maker’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 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 and human, and incredible, not for a cabinet-maker 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 through at last, 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 the poems of the good cabinet-maker were never published, heaven help us one and all.

  Chapter 13

  But everybody who is brilliant, or at any rate slightly more brilliantly stupid than other people, doesn’t come from Bitlis, although the people who do come from Bitlis like to think that everybody who is brilliant does come from Bitlis, especially the big oafs, who are invariably eager to uphold the Bitlis tradition for superiority in all things, including loud vulgarity, and in this ambition are unfailingly successful.

  The only trouble is that in the end one or another of the big oafs turns out to be really only a shadow less intelligent than the most enormously famous intelligent man in town, Armenian, Christian, infidel, or Anglo-Saxon.

  My own branch of the Saroyan family has its share of both kinds, and I seem to represent a kind of combination of them: the wise man, and the fool, or at any rate the lunatic.

  But it must be stated, so that it may be understood, that the word for lunatic in the Armenian language, khent, is used without scorn and in some cases with admiration, if not indeed even with reverence.

  David of Sassoun was khent, for instance, and if you don’t happen to know what he did, let me sum it up by saying that he did everything.

  Not all of the great, exciting, or only moderately interesting people of Armenia come from Bitlis. Sassoun for instance is about forty miles slightly northwest of Bitlis, and there have always been some fascinating people in that mountainous city.

  On the other hand, there are cities whose fame lies almost exclusively in the commercial talents of its people. These people are businessmen, merchants, shippers of precious merchandise, bankers, money lenders, building construction financiers, and rug merchants. And of course it is expected of such people that on the one hand they will be ruthless in their exploitation of people, including widows and children, and on the other hand that they will donate enormous sums of money to heroic charities. In their wills they arrange that their fortunes shall go for the establishment of Armenian Schools all over the world, with fresh milk provided for little children at all times.

  My mother’s father, Minas Saroyan, had a kid brother named Garabet who went to Istanbul (which was called Constantinople in those days) and got into so much trouble over Greek girls and insults directed to officers of the Turkish Navy that he was hustled out of town to avoid arrest, and then sent to America, arriving in Fresno sometime in 1898, the earliest Saroyan in America.

  In 1918 he donated a large sum of money for the Armenian orphans, including possibly many blood relatives who did not even know they were Saroyans. When the everlasting collectors of such funds presented themselves to him in 1932, he said, “Didn’t those orphans grow up?”

  He was one of the people I am glad I knew. I was just a little surprised ten years ago, long after Garabet had been dead and buried and all but forgotten, that a number of members of my family, seeing me suddenly after a year or two, said, “Why, when you came in here, I could have sworn it was Uncle Garabet.”

  Well, yes, we do have the same forehead and moustache, at any rate.

  One day after I had had two books published I walked past the cabinet-maker’s shop on Ninth Avenue in San Francisco, and he asked me to come in. He lifted a sheet of lined paper covered with writing, and said, “This is a poem I wrote two weeks ago. I have been waiting for you to pass by, so I could read it to you. Each line begins with a special letter. We do that kind of poetry writing in Armenia, you know. We also use this system as a code for the sending of messages to our people wherever they may be. All of our poets wrote poems with concealed messages in them: Unite, Armenians. Fight, Armenians. And so on. Well, this poem’s concealed message is your name. I hope you like it.”

  And he read the poem.

  I was embarrassed of course, because it was not only about me, but about my father, Armenak, and my mother, Takoohi, and about Bitlis, and Fresno, and San Francisco, and America.

  I thanked him, and I left the shop.

  Years later I heard that he had had a nervous breakdown and had been put into a hospital. And finally I heard that he had died, but I was glad to learn that at least he had died at home, in the flat over the cabinet-maker’s shop.

  I suppose it figured that he would first have to go mad, and then die.

  Chapter 14

  The people you like when you meet them and while you know them, and the people you remember fondly, are invariably people who have a sense of comedy, not just a sense of humor. They are a people who can make you laugh, who do so deliberately because they like to hear you laugh. They like to see you feeling amused enough to forget that you really feel terrible about the whole thing, as many people do, from the beginning to the end of their lives, outraged first because they have been born, and then outraged because they must die. And, of course, it is just such people, with an addiction to outrage, who most enjoy laughter, and who in turn are most effectively able to make others laugh.

  All comedians are people who really deeply consider the human experience not only a dirty trick perpetrated by a totally meaningless procedure of accidents, but an unbearable ordeal every day, which can be made tolerable only by mockery in one form or another. And the comedian’s method is to notice that the joke is steadfast in everything, there is nothing in which the joke is not centered, including (or especially) in all of those things which are ordinarily, even to the comedians, plainly sacred.

  Now, the comedians I am thinking of are not the stand-up comedians of the world of entertainment, although I have known, and still know, many of these comedians. I find many of them good to know, too, although most of them are bores who, away from the act they do in front of an audience which responds to their work and thereby expresses approval of them, which they need incessantly and abundantly, most of the comedians, when they are away from their performance, when they are themselves, are intolerable egomaniacs, totally devoid of imagination. And they have the most unbelievable and unbearable order of pomposity known to the human race.

  They actually believe everybody knows them and loves them, and some of them, as they approach eighty, and as they move nearer to ninety, believe God has directed the flowers to open in the morning to express God’s own love for them, and for the butterflies to come flying directly to their noses, in another expression of God’s love.

  These professional comedians aren’t really members of the human race at all, if the truth is told: when they are great, they belong to the angels, and when they are sick, as most of them are, they belong to the apes.

  The comedians I am thinking about are the comedians of the world, not of the stage.

  These world comedians entertain their friends and their families, and they do it all the time. My own family has been full of them, but only the men have been great comedians, although my mother, Takoohi of Bitlis, daughter of Lucy and Minas Saroyan, and married to Armenak, son of Hripsime and Petros Saroyan (whose original name was Hovanessian and took the name of his stepfather), my mother had the greatest skill of mimicry, of impersonation, of caricature, I ever saw in action: every person she ever met she nailed instantly to his mark: in appearance, stance, movement, speech, silence, gesture, and quality.

  It was great family entertainment to see her in action, and she went i
nto action because she had to, it was fundamental with her to acknowledge the peculiar reality of everybody she met, or saw from a distance—or on the stage, or in movies or newsreels.

  And while she enjoyed laughter and lightness of spirit, she deeply felt the sorrows of the human race, as revealed in herself, and in those members of it whom she knew, all her life.

  Every now and then, she would look up from reading, and say to herself more than to anybody else, “How sad it is.”

  Chapter 15

  So many members of my immediate family have been “touched,” I hesitate to write about them for fear their children will feel that a family secret has been let out.

  As for the remote branches of the family, they also have their mad people, but I don’t know them very well, and they have managed somehow to keep the madness well within the confines of family privacy.

  My father’s side of the family is given to a kind of abstract sorrow that sooner or later impels any member to flip his lid, or to have a ferocious struggle in order not to do so. Almost everybody in the family is a fault-finder, beginning with God, who can be awfully unimpressive at times, and at others the kind of idiotic practical joker who in human terms would be instantly killed by those who have been his victims. After God, these Saroyan mad, or khent, quarrel with the human race, especially that branch of it which goes under the genetic, national, or cultural heading of Armenian.

  And then the fault-finding comes home to the specific family within the body of that nation, the Saroyans. And then to that specific branch of the Saroyan family to which the brooding man belongs; and then to his father, that strange mixture of fool and nobleman; and then to his mother, that poor ignorant proud woman; and finally this fault-finding goes out to the animals of the fields, the birds of the trees, and to the fish of the sea.

  Very seldom does it come home to the man himself, but when it does, watch out, that’s all I can say, because then you have a man not only depressed but violently depressed. And what he wants is for everything to change—God, the human race, the Armenians, the Saroyans, and the miscellaneous large bodies of authority, such as the Supreme Court of the United States of America.