Like Water on Stone by Dana Walrath

enough
    to start a new life
    in a new land.
    I know it is true
    because I saw it.

Author’s Note
    This story began, as many stories do, with a conversation. A sentence from that long-ago conversation has haunted me since I was a little girl. I asked my mother about her mother’s childhood in western Armenia. She replied, “After her parents were killed, she hid during the day and ran at night with Uncle Benny and Aunt Alice from their home in Palu to the orphanage in Aleppo.”
    My grandmother Oghidar Troshagirian died long before I was born. My grandfather Yeghishe Mashoian, also a genocide survivor, died when I was six. Uncle Benny and Aunt Alice were colorful characters in my childhood, but I knew little about their lives. In my family, we didn’t speak about the genocide. My mother married an American, so my brother, my sister, and I grew up speaking English. By the time I thought to ask the serious questions, that generation was gone.
    I know little of how my grandmother and her siblings survived. I know that from Aleppo, with the help of a keri , a maternal uncle, they made it to New York. Somehow, a pot came with them — my American relatives argue over who has it. I know that they were millers from Palu. One older brother escaped to the east. An older sister was married to a Kurd.Her grandson now owns a Turkish restaurant in The Hague, in the Netherlands, and a hotel in Antalya, Turkey.
    Long before I ever imagined that I might write this story, I filled in the gaps of my family history by reading everything I could about the Armenian genocide: accounts by eyewitnesses, such as Henry Morgenthau, the United States ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1913 to 1916; oral histories; memoirs; academic tomes; and works of historical fiction. Still, I wanted more.
    In the summer of 1984, my husband and I traveled to Palu. An unmarked Armenian church perched on the top of the hill above the town, its roof missing and its walls defaced. In town, vendors peddled ayran , the cool yogurt drink Armenians call tahn . We asked if there were any mills nearby and were sent across a modern bridge, built next to one of crumbling stone with eight arches. We followed the river’s bank to a fast-flowing stream, then headed up the stream into the woods until we reached a mill with a series of attached buildings running up the slope.
    On the rooftop of the largest building, the head-scarfed lady of the house served us sweet tea in clear glass cups. A half-dozen children with big brown eyes watched and listened. Mounds of apricots dried in the sun. She said that the mill had been in her family for sixty years; before that, it had belonged to Armenians. With anti-Armenian stories running in Turkish newspapers that summer, and all visible traces of Armenian inhabitants systematically denied or destroyed, I had kept my identity hidden as we traveled. But I told her the truth. We held each other’s gaze as the water hit the millwheel and the stones of the stream. The official Turkish policy of genocide denial evaporated for one brief moment on that rooftop.
    The form of this story chose me rather than the other way around. Everyday language cannot express the scale and horror of genocide. Severed heads, rape, rivers red with blood, stinking heaps of dead bodies; the living emaciated, naked, sunburned, marching through the sand — we all turn away. I could only put it onto paper in fragments that slowly accumulated into a story. The eagle, Ardziv, and his magic came into the story to make it safe for me, for the reader, and for the young ones as they traveled. Three-quarters of the total Armenian population, about 1.5 million people, died in this genocide. Only luck, miracles, and perseverance saved the few who managed to survive. More than just a magical being, Ardziv embodies the strength of spirit that lives inside us.
    If magical realism makes up this story’s warp, then historical facts are woven into its weft, starting with the