PRIVATE FACES, PUBLIC SPACES : A Women’s Ritual, Ravelling the Web of Memory

In a quiet apartment building on a quiet Westwood street, Aida Ley knits through busy days and soundless nights. Customers come by appointment. She writes their patterns, finishes collars, binds seams. The women come early. They sink onto sofas against a bank of soft pillows. On a table, too sweet pastries, too strong coffee.

Women have always knitted--plain, tough garments to be warm, to last. Aida Ley’s knitting is of another kind--plump yarns everywhere, scarlet, sapphire, jewel-colors and earth tones, weightless Angora, shimmering silks, wools, cottons. The clothes are full of imagination, beautiful, useless.

And yet even in this luxury, the fellowship of knitting survives--a plain, close fellowship speaking of a thousand nights in stone cottages before an open fire. Aida Ley’s customers--elegantly and expensively arranged--draw together in an old, old intimacy. Grandmothers, mothers, wives, defined not by themselves alone but by others whom they have tended, loved, lost, mourned.

Ley is tiny, vibrant, unexpectedly young and alone. Curls tumble down her back; she wears indoor clothes, impractical chiffons and golden slippers. In this circle of women, she lacks edges. The hard brightness of the city outside has not sharpened her. The accent is elusive: Iranian, perhaps? Israeli or Latin American? Something of a darker key.

How ignorant we are of one another; we turn away from clues, grant no history. Aida Ley mentions a childhood in Brazil, a jumble of brothers and sisters, cousins and uncles. She touches on a move with her family to Montreal as a grown young woman, of spending a year in Beirut and of the 90-year-old aunt there who taught her how to knit.

In her memory, a line of women knit before the television set, and she, the child between them, tries not to be noticed, to be sent off to bed. Grandmother, mother, aunts, sisters, cousins--a family re-created in this creamy Westwood living room, older women, younger women, talking, knitting.

Because the image now is of richness and comfort, it is assumed she has known only ease. No haunted corners, no dark terrors. Slowly, shadows emerge. She talks of leaving Beirut in 1947 because “everyone was going to Brazil then,” of moving on to Montreal in 1967 because “Canada was fashionable.” Gliding around the corners of estrangement. It is the visiting card, light, carefully designed, that betrays her: Aida Ley, it announces--a camouflage, a “stage” name.

Aida Leylekan as a young Armenian girl in Sao Paolo: an Orthodox Christian at a school run by Roman Catholic nuns--just as her ancestors were Christian in a land of Muslims. Even now, she remembers the “shame” of being different, of talking Armenian at home, of other ways and alien customs. The cutting quips about “rug dealers,” the casual cruelty of prejudice. Hating oneself for having to laugh back, to pretend that all is jest.

She was named by the grandfather who was “crazy for opera,” who remembered evenings of elegant music and of massacres. Unspeakable cruelties are documented in 600 pages of a dry British report--a report that Armenians have no reason to read, for it lives within their hearts and tears. Massacres, we say lightly, we who are not Armenian: 20 years of terror, of priests crucified, children flayed, a whole people hated unto death.

Armenians have fought Romans, Persians, Arabs, Mongols, Turks, Russians--Armenian memory holds all those struggles close. And in the last few years, earthquakes, massacres in Azerbaijan, more flight, new exile. And this, we say, is Armenian and think no more of it.

Here is Aida Ley: Her family fled to Syria, to Lebanon, across oceans. In Sao Paolo, her father made plastic tiaras, beach sandals, onion choppers--the outsider, always adapting. What insecurities drove him north, to another, cold land, another language? In the end, he lost his life savings in a wheat mill in Quebec.

“He survived then,” says his daughter, “because my mother had the great will to say, “So, we have survived. We go on.’ ”

As survivors have said across centuries.