And the old woman’s story was a classic. It had happened in 1922, she told me. She had been but a girl then, a girl just old enough to seek a husband. “And there were many who wanted me, Mr. Tanner. I was a pretty one then. And my father the richest man in Balikesir…”
Balikesir, a town about a hundred miles north of Smyrna, was the capital of Balikesir Province. She had lived there with her mother and her father and her father’s father and two brothers and a sister and assorted aunts and uncles and cousins. Her father’s house was one of the finest in Balikesir, and her father was the head of the town’s Armenian community. A fine house it was, too, not far from the railroad station, built high upon a hill with a view for miles in all directions. A huge house, with high columns around the doorway and a sloping cement walk down to the street below. Of the five hundred Armenian families in Balikesir, none had a finer house.
“The Greeks were at war with the Turks,” she told me. “Of course, we were on the side of the Greeks, and my father had raised funds for the Greeks and knew many of their leaders. There were thousands of Greeks in Balikesir, and they were good friends with the Armenians. Our churches were different, but we were all Christians, not heathens like the Turks. At first my father thought the Greeks would win. The British were going to help us, you see. But, then, no help came from the British, and my father learned that the Turks would win after all.”
It was then that the gold began to come to the house in Balikesir. Every day men brought sacks of gold, she said. Some brought little leather purses, some brought suitcases, some had gold coins sewn into their garments. Each man brought the gold to her father, who counted it carefully and wrote out a receipt for it. Then the man left, and the gold was put in the basement.
“But we could not leave it there, you see. The bandits were already at the gates of Smyrna, and time was short. And my father had in his hands all the gold of all the Armenians of Smyrna.”
“Of Balikesir, you mean?”
She laughed. “Of Balikesir? Oh, no. Why, there were only five hundred families of our people in Balikesir. No, they brought all the Armenian gold of Smyrna as well because they knew that Smyrna would fall first and they knew, too, that my father was a man who could be trusted. Just a few sacks would have held all the gold of Balikesir, but the riches of Smyrna-that was another matter.”
Her father and his brothers had worked industriously. She recalled it all very well, she told me. One afternoon a man had come with news that Smyrna had fallen, and that very night the whole family had worked. There was a huge front porch on their house, wooden on the top, with concrete sides and front. That night her father and her uncle Poul broke through the concrete on the left side. Then the whole family carried the gold coins from the basement and hid them away beneath the porch.
They made many trips, she told me. They carried big sacks and little sacks, and once she had dropped a cloth purse, and the shiny coins had scattered all over the basement floor, and she had to scurry around picking them up and putting them back into the purse. Almost all the coins were the same, she said-a bit smaller than an American quarter, with a woman’s head on one side and a man on horseback on the other, and the man, she remembered, was sticking something with a spear.
British sovereigns, of course. The head of Victoria (Vicki Hanover, that usurper) and the reverse was St. George slaying the dragon. That had been the most common gold coin in the Middle East, I knew; the most trusted gold piece, the coin one would choose to hoard as family or communal wealth.
At last all the coins were in place, Kitty’s grandmother explained, and they filled the space beneath the porch to capacity. And then her father and her uncle mixed cement and carefully patched the opening in the concrete by the light of a single lantern. After the cement set, they rubbed little bits of gravel into it to give it an aged appearance and they dusted it with dirt from the road so it would be the same shade as the rest of the porch cement.
Until then the Turks in Balikesir had been peaceful. But now, once they had heard of Ataturk’s victory a hundred miles to the south, they suddenly grew courageous. The next morning they attacked, overrunning the Greeks and Armenians. They burned the Greek quarter to the ground and they butchered every Greek and Armenian they could find. The violence in Balikesir had not made the history books. Smyrna, sacked at the same time, overshadowed it, and I don’t doubt that similar massacres were taking place in enough other Turkish cities to keep Balikesir out of the limelight.
Kitty’s grandmother, however, had been only in Balikesir and had seen only what took place in Balikesir. She spoke calmly of it now. The burnings, the rape, the endless murder. Children pierced with swords, old men and women shot through the back of the head-screams, gunshots, blood, death.
She was one of the few to survive, but her words indicated that Kitty had been right: “I was young then, and pretty. And the Turks are animals. I was ravished. Can you believe this, to look at me now, that men would want to have me that way? And not just one man, no. But I was not killed. Everyone else in my family was killed, but I escaped. I was with a group of Greeks and an old Armenian man. We fled the city. We were on the roads for days. The old Armenian man died. It is funny, I cannot remember his name. We were crowded together aboard a ship. Then we were here, New York, America.”
“And the gold?”
“Gone. The Turks must have it.”
“Did they find it?”
“Not then, no. But they must have it now. It was years ago. And no Armenian went back for it. I was the only one of my family to live, and only the people of my family knew of the gold. So no Armenian found it, and so the Turks must have gotten it all.”
Later Kitty said, “Damn you, why did you have to go and talk Armenian with her? I couldn’t understand three words out of a hundred. If you think it’s a picnic to sit listening to two people talk for hours and not catch a word-”
“She’s a wonderful woman.”
“She is, isn’t she? You seemed interested in her story. Were you?”
“Very much.”
“I’m glad. How on earth did you learn to speak the language, Evan? No, don’t tell me. I don’t even want to know. It made her whole day, though. She cornered me on the way out. Did you hear what she asked me?”
“No.”
“She wanted to know if I was pregnant.”
“Are you?”
“God, I hope not. I told her I wasn’t, and she said I should get pregnant right away so that we would be married.”
“She said that?”