Letters PAR AVION

Act XI

In Armenia, a remote corner of the world, also considered the cradle of civilization, cultures influenced by Russian and Ottoman imperialism clashed, creating an amalgam that melded tolerance and resentment, love and hatred, reality and dreams, tradition and innovation, past and present, and emerged as survival, pride, and resilience. 

Our postman arrives on Saturday afternoons. We do have a mailbox, but I run up to receive the mail from him. If there is a postcard or an interesting stamp on an envelope, I always beat my brother in claiming it for myself.  Occasionally, instead of handing the mail to me, the postman asks, "Is your grandmother home?" That's when I know he has a special delivery. 

I walk him inside and wait until he takes out the rectangular, white envelope with slanted red and blue marks around the edges and an airplane stamped in the corner. The caption in blue print reads 'Par Avion'; it comes from overseas.  

My Ne՛ne՛ takes out paper money from the pocket of her apron and hands it to him. They exchange blessings in Turkish. The postman puts the cash in his pocket and leaves. 

Ne՛ne՛ hands the envelope to me and says, “Who is it from? Read it aloud.” 

The handwritten script is in Armenian, but the sentences are in Turkish. I take it as a challenge to read fluently, even though I don’t understand some of the words. I listen to my own voice and make sure that I sound like I understand what I say, and feel a sense of accomplishment when I figure out the meaning of the words on my own. 

Sometimes the letters are from my Aunt Angel or Uncle Hagop in Aleppo. Other times, they are from Aunt Verzhine or Uncle Poghos in Lebanon. They are my grandmother’s children who were married and had extended families in 1946. They have stayed behind.

Every letter begins with the same greeting, 

Dear Mother, Brother, and Family…

They tell about marriages, births, baptisms, and deaths. They express feelings of longing and wishes for reunification someday. By the time I get to the closing, which almost always reads "I kiss my mother’s hands," my Ne՛ne՛ is drying the tears in her eyes with a handkerchief. I can’t help but cry with her. 

Almost always, Ne՛ne՛ asks me to check the date and do the math. I know by now-- it takes fifteen to thirty days for the air mail to reach Armenia from a neighboring country. It does not come directly. Mail from overseas makes a stopover in the central post office in Moscow. In other words, it travels twice the distance north before it returns halfway down south. 

Much later, I learned that the response letters my grandmother dictated to me and I wrote down contained code language. When she said, “Our former neighbor, Varujan, died in 1946 and left his family grieving,” she meant that many, like herself, arriving in Soviet Armenia in 1946, lost their dreams and became hopeless since their arrival.

They were the Armenians who survived the Genocide by the Ottoman Empire in the early 1900s and found refuge in the neighboring countries like Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, and Iraq. Longing for the homes they were driven out of in Zeytoon, Marash, Malatya, Sebastia, Kilikia, and other areas, they were enticed by the Soviet government to come and rebuild a homeland for themselves after World War II. Little did they know that, like all other citizens of the USSR, they too would fall under the rule of the authoritarian regime and become captives behind the Iron Curtain.