Black Dog of Fate: A Memoir

By extensively quoting Morgenthau’s memoir, Peter starts providing gruesome details of the numerous ways that Turkish officials tortured Armenians. He notes, “the Young Turks […] did not have the Zyklon gas and large ovens the Nazis would, and so the business of genocide was carried out by hand” (168). The government and police orchestrated sweeping deportations (“death march[es]” (174)), moving Armenians into the Syrian desert as a thinly-veiled death sentence. Exile meant poverty, rape, and disease. Other Armenians faced wanton execution.

Peter reads Morgenthau’s memoir as he rushes around New York City to collect and deliver checks for a summer job. It is among the regular hustle-bustle of the modern city that he absorbs this horrific, close-to-home history. He can’t concentrate on his job but is only vaguely aware of his mistakes.

The rest of the chapter is a collection of historical sources, all first-hand accounts of acts of genocide, that Peter collected after reading Morgenthau’s memoir. Peter himself does not offer much commentary, instead featuring the historical voices that chronicled the violence as it happened.

On a vacation in Paris with his Aroosian aunts, Peter hears sensitive family history for the first time. Aunt Gladys tells him about a trauma reaction Nafina had following the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. The act of war convinced her that Turks were coming to collect and kill her family.

It was the first time that her daughters had heard Nafina talk about the past, about Turks, and about dozens of family members who the authorities killed during the genocide. To help Nafina overcome the crippling terror that was ruining her, Aunt Gladys took her to get electroshock therapy in New York City, which apparently cleared up the condition, though it did not fully absolve her of fear.

The episode with her mother’s trauma prompted Gladys to remember images and sensations from their exile even though she was only a young child at the time. She remembered acrid smells, tents, crowds, and her mother’s savvy means of collecting money for the family’s passage to America.

This was an unexpected and sudden rupturing of the silence that the author always experienced. He prompts Aunt Gladys to continue her story as her sister looks on in shock and admonition. The stream of information indicates to Peter that “each thing she pulled out was hooked onto something else” (190), vivid but fractured repressed memories of suffering.

Peter processes the information by writing a surrealist poem that recasts Nafina’s suffering in the context of mid-century American suburbia, a place where the author says he “could bring the two of [them] together again and create what she had in her encoded way told [him]” (195). It is an important realization for Peter that she left him with her story, even if he had never recognized how she packaged it. He says, “When I was a boy, she had showered me with love; now as a man, I could return that love” (195). 

In this short chapter, Gladys tells Peter a short story about his grandfather that she says he never shared; she heard it from one of his friends much later. “Papa,” as she calls him, left Armenia after the massacres in the 1890s, relocating to New Jersey to work in the silk mills there. He used his earnings to bring his siblings over from Armenia.

He made 500 pairs of shoes with the intention to bring them to Turkey, sell them, and return to New Jersey with enough money to start an Oriental rug business. He took a ship to Constantinople with the shoes in several large crates, but the crates never emerged with his luggage. He boarded a return ship the next day and never spoke of the way “he had been duped,” even though it “broke him” and crushed all the hope he had developed in nearly two decades of aiding his family’s escape (198).

Peter relays a long “legal document, filed by [his] grandmother against the Turkish government” requesting reparation money on the order of nearly 125,000 US dollars (199). Peter reproduces many of the files in the text itself, displaying the sources themselves, and periodically interjects to reflect on some of the details he discovers: his grandmother had a first husband, killed; sisters and brothers, killed; young nieces and nephews, killed. These discoveries come as a shock to Peter, who says, “The names of the dead. A generation. Not a passing allusion to them in our family, ever. Was I dumb enough to think my grandmother was an only child—in an Armenian family?” (208). He also realizes that his mother and his aunts are only half-sisters. These are stark realizations. 

The file also contains Nafina’s written account of her family’s forced deportation from their home, which she said lasted 32 days. Most deportees died from systematic execution, fatigue, and hunger (210-211). Only a small group made it to Aleppo, Syria, where they apparently got help and support from the American Consulate. Peter expresses incredulity over the onslaught of new, tragic information.

He also gets mad and demands to know why no one ever said anything about their experiences and all their murdered family. His aunt, who gave him the file to look at, defends the long silence, saying that the information was too gruesome for a child’s ears, and proposes, “Maybe some mystery to life isn’t so bad” (214). She tells him that the events and the lack of justice following them was “a pain too bad to feel” (215), and therefore simply too hard to talk about and relive. She shows him a picture of his grandmother’s family. It was the only picture she took with her on her march across the desert. They all died in the genocide in the place that was “Once Armenia” (216).

Aunt Gladys, since the conversation in Paris, “had opened up in a new way and she seemed to evince a kind of authority in talking about these things that had been kept secret for so long” (217). Over coffee one morning, she relays the story that her mother’s cousin, “Dovey,” shared with Gladys when Dovey was in the hospital about a year before this conversation. Her story is by far the most detailed and shocking account of the genocide provided in the book.

Dovey recalled the terror that overtook the city of Diarbekir when the deportations and genocide began. Before the violence touched her own family, the stories felt like “rumors of the unbelievable” (219). She went outside one day to explore an odor, and Turkish men pelted her with rocks and verbally abused her. She remembered, “We were stoned often, and mostly on Sundays when we walked to and from church, but this time it was worse” (221). The men severely injured her, and she stumbled home where it took weeks to recover.

Turkish police, called gendarmes, came to the house at night and brutally murdered Dovey’s father in a gory perversion of Jesus’s crucifixion, since Christianity was so central to Armenian culture and life. The next week, in despair-induced apathy, Dovey left her house and found the source of one of the horrid odors in town: Turkish soldiers tortured a group of Armenian women and young children, forcing them to dance and clap while whipping them, before dousing them in kerosene and lighting them on fire.

The next day, Turkish officials arrested the remaining Armenians in the city and sent them on a deportation march. It only took a few long days of walking to kill many of the marchers, including Dovey’s mother, as they did not have food or water, only the constant abuse from the accompanying gendarmes. Bands of Kurds living on the plateau also “came down from the ravine on horses, with axes and rakes and other objects” to attack, rob, and rape the caravans of Armenians (227). A soldier urinated on Dovey’s face, which was covered in open wounds. Another raped her. She apparently recounted these details with blunt simplicity, as they were commonplace events.

The government forced so many Armenians into the desert that “for miles and miles you saw nothing but corpses” mutilated by the gendarmes and harsh elements or half-eaten by scavengers (230). Dovey escaped the open desert only because a Kurdish nomad kidnapped her and kept her as a wife for five years, during which time she had two children. She escaped from him on horseback. She found her cousin, Nafina, unexpectedly in New York in 1925 and the two relatives “fell into each other’s arms crying” (232). 

When Peter starts publishing poems about Armenia, his Aunt Anna gets upset with him and demands to know why is writing on the topic. She tells him that it isn’t appropriate subject matter for poetry (234).

Disturbed by her hostile reaction, Peter reflects on his aunt’s family and her own past. Her father, Diran Balakian, was born in the small Turkish city of Tokat but attended secondary school over the Russian border, which provided safety. He then went to medical school in Germany before returning to “Russian Armenia” to participate in an archaeological excavation of the ancient Armenian city, Ani. He eventually started a medical practice in Cairo, Egypt but relocated to Constantinople a few years later. He was lucky to evade the initial period of massacres carried out by Ottoman Turks against Armenian Christians in the late 19th century, and no one knew that genocide was on the horizon when the Young Turks overthrew the sultan.

The glimmer of hope for Armenians anticipating new freedoms faded quickly as violence surged in places like Adana, where Turkish counterrevolutionary forces “descend[ed] upon a defenseless Armenian population, butchering and burning them alive by the thousands per day” (242). Diran Balakian went to Adana to treat survivors. He documented atrocities in letters to family.

Many details of his personal history were lost to time, but he married Peter’s grandmother in Constantinople in 1913, migrated between Western Europe and Turkey before the 1915 genocide, and served as a physician in the Turkish Army, when he was “scissored between the Hippocratic Oath and the knowledge that those [he was] saving might be committing genocide” against his own people (251). After a few years, he was able to move his family to Vienna (where they tried in vain to treat Aunt Nona’s tuberculosis that disfigured her spine), France, and eventually to the United States in 1926.

Aunt Anna finished a doctoral degree and supported the family when her father died. Peter reasons that her passion for French surrealism came from her refugee experience: France “took [them] in” when others wouldn’t (257), and surrealists wrote about universal possibilities that transcended national boundaries or even the material world. Peter, however, still values poetry rooted in politics and place. 

Peter’s friend sends him a clipping from a French magazine about Bishop Gregoire Balakian who made his career in Marseilles, France. Peter knew only a little about this man—that he had performed marriage ceremonies in the family and written a book about churches in Ani. The article mentioned his unlikely survival among “the 250 martyrs arrested in the night of 24 April 1915 in Constantinople” (263), the event that launched the genocide and one that Peter knew well and which resonated deeply. His journal chronicled the genocide. This information of his family member, however, is news to Peter.

With the help of an Armenian-speaking friend, Peter quickly tracks down a copy of the journal. He obtains it in only a week, but he cannot read the Armenian document. His friend is able to quickly translate the Table of Contents, and Peter says that reading through it:

was like reading a skeleton […] Clues to a man’s life. A man who had been sentenced to death by the Turkish government because he was an Armenian leader. A man who escaped his execution and spent four years in the killing fields. An eyewitness. Perhaps the only man of the famous 250 who survived, and survived to write down his story (263).

Peter also learns that Bishop Balakian gave testimony at the famous German trial of Soghomon Tehlirian, who “assassinated Talaat Pasha, the mastermind of the Armenian Genocide” (264). Eyewitness testimony from Balakian and others led the jury to acquit Tehlirian. A book about the trial included long excerpts from Balakian’s testimony, which Peter reproduces in this chapter. The Bishop provided further information about the systematic executions of the death marches. A Turkish officer told him that they tricked women and children into thinking their vanished husbands and fathers were waiting for them, safe in Aleppo, only so the families would gather their valuable belongings and voluntarily walk from their homes in the caravans they didn’t know would be their death sentences. Peter weeps and reflects, “Against odds, his words had reached me here in central New York near the end of the century” (269).