Every two weeks or so I am publishing an essay from an emerging writer. This week, we are publishing “The Pomegranate Tree” by Vartan Koumrouyan. Vartan was born in Lebanon, has lived in Manila and on the island of Palawan in the Phillippines, and has resided in Paris since his teens. The BBC once produced a short story of his, “Down on the Levee Vosky,” as a short film. He is currently in the process of finishing a manuscript about his travel from Paris to his jungle house on Palawan.
I remember the pattern of the tiles on the floor, all the same, in the rooms, kitchen, the salon. Those on the balcony outside lost their marble luster and turned yellowish due to the variation of the seasons, hot summer dust and soot from the Centrale Electrique when no sea breeze pushed the chimney smoke away. The smoke stuck between the tiles as particles and formed a crust around the gutter opening when we washed the balcony to moisten the air at the peak of the summer in August.
The tiles were small, rectangular with irregular black and white broken pebbles in them; the idea was perhaps to copy ancient mosaics, like those found around the Mediterranean coast from Turkey to Tunis when the Roman empire had its eastern capital in Constantinople during Julius Caesar’s reign. They seemed to retain all the freshness of the night in summer and were ice cold when the weather changed and we had not rolled the carpets yet; I would tiptoe barefoot to my grandfather’s bed to listen to his stories in Anatolia as a boy of 14, in 1919, a refugee of the first world war.
That was my morning escape, looking at the sky at dawn through the branches of the pine tree near the patio by the window, listening to his tales, galloping with him on a horseback, hiding in caves by big oak trees, eating raw onions for days.
The table was against the wall by the door where I installed it, when I sat down to read. I had the view of the street and the balcony on the right, the balustrade in wrought iron on the knee-high wall, the almond and the pomegranate trees in the garden, their lower branches pruned in successive years when they were only saplings and had grown to eye level.
The view extended beyond the neighboring house, between two buildings, to the vastness of the Mediterranean sea, visible without interruption from the north all the way to “Manar,” the lighthouse in Beirut.
At night, when the breeze had cleared the sky in the spring, the small lanterns of feluccas swayed up and down to the movements of the swell on the choppy water as if playing, clearly visible despite the distance, perhaps a mile, the only focus of attention in the darkness.
The fishermen who manned those boats walked up the road next morning calling “samak, samak” to sell their catch of sardines, picking the fish from under a damp jute sack on a wicker tray in fistfuls, dry silver scales on their creased brown fingers, and my mother bought them to fry at noon, when Waddad, the wife of Monsieur Joseph and Seidé, the wife of Monsieur Selim, the barber, came to drink coffee with her.
My study table had a command position in the house, above the staircase with the outside grated door locked. It provided the view and concealed the viewer, like a moucharabieh, when I sat to read, and when I had visitors, I would sit still and pretend I was not there. I was annoyed when people interrupted my seclusion. The sudden interruption severed my reveries and awakened me to a world I did not want to be part of. I did not share with them a common belief about the country or the war. I shied away from contact, knowing from experience it would draw me back to where I did not wish to be.
I was living alone at that time in the house. In the corridor, there was the westerly morning breeze from the sea and the view to take me to Valparaiso; I was reading The Great Railway Bazaar, with the description of the arid landscape from the train Paul Theroux was traveling on, and it made me wish I was with him. No one paid attention to the war anymore. It didn’t affect my outlook of Lebanon. The “troubles” were just the ordinary things of every day. It was the repetition of the ceasefires, the failure of the gunmen to honor their pledge, the inability to think of something else, the routine of the days that were difficult to bear. On the news, it was not reported like it was unethical or barbarous. It was factual reporting because it was thought of as being imported from outside and wasn't really the product of the native inhabitants of the country. Reading helped maintain another reality that removed the stagnation and provided me a parallel world to contemplate. The war didn’t have a reason to happen at all. People were passionately attached to it only because it gave them a reason to live. It was the only way to live, and it had no limit. The war was so simple to understand, as there was no shortage of hate, and its sudden eruption separated Beirut between East and West, Muslims and Christians, and this division went back to the Crusades. It was better to let those who were involved in it by themselves. Why bother, I thought. They would not listen to me if I told them to stop it.
At that time, my understanding of world history was not accurate. But before there was Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Jordan, there was Mesopotamia, Babylon and Palestine, the Sumerian Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the Roman Empire, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Hannibal, all the great men who wrote history, bad or good or unsatisfactorily. Two thousand years before Darwin's Origin of the Species, Pliny the Elder had already written Natural History, and his nephew, Pliny the Younger, his marvelous letters. Was it not the actual east-west division these brave men wanted to unite? They had a plan to marry Asia Minor, the Mediterranean and Europe, from Carthage to the Black Sea, draw a new map to end divisions once for all, make the Élyseaen Fields of Ancient Greece real, Caesar’s Pax Romana, a gift until the end of times, pave imperial roads, build aqueducts, baths and palaces and designate Octavian, his adopted child, the heir, the Augustus of the entire known world.
But there was a war, interrupted by bogus ceasefires, and it lasted years. “Special Envoys” came to Beirut from around the world to solve the problem. I did not understand the love and care of my parents when they gave me advice and told me what to do and what not to do. I took it for granted they would always be here to support me. That there will be no deaths, no wars, no bad news. My parents did not know and only embraced Lebanon's hope for the future for us in the Levant, sitting by the wall on the patio at night covered by sandbags near the pine trees when the rockets exploded and we slept in the shelter. We were just kids and didn't know what it was all about. I wanted something else, beyond what was happening in my country.
I was reading Desolation Angels again, hiding in my corner from the world. I was taken by the sad melancholia of Kerouac's prose, searching in vain for truth he only found in writing, and I was satisfied with the meaning of his difficult words. I searched in Webster’s, thinking about all the mess I didn't understand. The war will end one day, I thought, and life will go back to what it was. But it didn't stop. Peace was for other people in other countries.
The childhood days are the best, and when they say “it was better in the past,” it was certainly so, if only for the lost innocence that we had and want to maintain as we grow old.
When my father Noubar bought his Mercedes, he used to bundle all of us in it early Sunday mornings and take us to Baalbek to buy winter provisions: lentils, beans, honey, vegetables of all kinds, yogurt in clay jars, figs in a wicker basket, grapes and pomegranate by the dozen. My grandfather would open the car's window when we passed Dahr el Baidar and started our descent, the entire Bekaa plains a giant mosaic of colors shimmering in the summer midday heat, and he would say “clear your lungs, fresh air of the mountains,” and, breathing to show us how, he would smile, as if he recognized an ancestral connection in the dry air of the plains in their different shapes, sizes and colors, as if it made him remember his birthplace in the Anatolia desert, near the mountains of Ararat.
He was a man of the nineteenth century and thought the mountain air healed, and most probably it did, because that's what they had back then. It made old people like him firm decision makers and self-made men, two times over, after two world wars. It was like a conversation he had with his surroundings that reflected his personality: as soon he woke up, he would fold the newspaper and put it under the pillow with his glasses to go and shave in front of the mirror, then to the garden still wearing his pajamas to collect a bouquet of jasmine, lilac and roses. He would take it to the church as a sacrificial offering to the painting of Mary Magdalene holding baby Jesus, their faces in the halo of the candles in the chapel at the entrance of the Sourp Kevork Church in Hadgin. He would add a stem of pomegranate to the bouquet, which was a mystery, because it didn't have flowers but only the small buds of future fruit. It was an instinctive pagan belief, perhaps, that predated Christianity with the idea of fire and sacrifice; even if he crossed himself looking at the painting, perhaps he still had faith in an ancient Roman or Greek God, because the pomegranate represented throughout history fertility and wealth, and to the ancient Babylonians, chewing its seeds before the battle made them invincible.
He would stand in front of the autel as if he was still an unruly young man, a Chetnik on the road to exile from Eastern Turkey at the fall of the Ottoman Empire when the maps of Asia Minor, Middle East and Mesopotamia were redrawn, his thoughts lost in the flickering of so many candles. He gave me the impression that the celebration renewed his beliefs and everything had a reason to be and be done: when he was in the garden with his trees and flowers, when he played backgammon in the patio with Monsieur Selim or Monsieur Mounir, when he harvested honey from the hives he kept under the vine trellis on the roof, or when he arranged his rusted tools in his shed.
He seemed to spend more time with the pomegranate tree, as if it represented more to him than the other trees. It meant a continuity, a renewal, the roots of life in the fertile soil of the Mediterranean, that life will not stop because of the war, Nietzsche's Eternal Return, perhaps, as he survived two previous world wars.
He looked at the new shoots near its main stem, pruned the low branches to make it easier to harvest, cut branches of the almond and the mulberry to free the necessary space around it, and sprinkled yellow sulfur from a jute pouch on the tomato plants nearby to forbid the insects and slugs to come near his favorite fruit, forbid the insects to ruin the perfection of the serried grains of ruby, a jewel of his making.
Once a year, we visited the cemetery in Furn-el-Chebbak where my grandmother and aunt are buried on All Saints’ Day, following Orthodox tradition to remember the deceased. On those days, he took flowers from the garden: lilac, roses, adding a stem of the pomegranate and a laurel at the last minute that grew near the cypress next to the old stone wall of the cemetery with shrapnel dents on it, and before giving the nosegay to the marble slab where the names were carved, he would sweep the dry needles and pour water on it and wait for the thirsty soil to absorb, scratching the remains of last year’s melted candle to light a new one and burn a drop of frankincense, thinking perhaps of the ashes of those who have died here in Lebanon, in Cappadocia or the Anatolian desert in Sivas, thinking of how he survived the folly of wars, to remember this dust, as Livy wrote, “the mother of us all.”
Congrats! Beautiful write. I love the series, Roxane!!
Thank you to Roxane and Megan for editing.