A witness rests

Fresno

She had lived long enough to bury her husband and bury her son and watch the family’s 40-acre vineyard, planted with grapes from the old country, give way to housing tracts.

Vera Gajarian had seen almost everything life had to show in her 92 years. Too much good had happened, she said, to dwell on the bad. She was old and gnarled now and, like the vineyard, ready to go. One thing, though, still tugged at her.

As a child in what is now eastern Turkey, she had witnessed the murder of her father and mother and four brothers and sisters in the death marches of a forgotten genocide. She had waited decades for Turkey to admit its guilt. She had waited for a reckoning that never came.

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Now, more than 85 years later, her history was being acknowledged in a way she never imagined. As she sat in a movie theater a few days ago, her grandson on one side and her granddaughter on the other, images of the Armenian massacres flickered in her face. A new motion picture, “Ararat,” the major feature film about the genocide to make the big screen, had come to her hometown.

There was only one problem. Gajarian was 20 years blind. “My eyes don’t work so well, honey,” she said, leaning in on her cane. “I will hear what I can no longer see.”

As far back as the 1930s, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was set to make a movie depicting the 1915-18 massacres that killed more than half the Armenian people and drove the rest from their ancient homeland near Mt. Ararat. But the Turkish government, refusing to admit to the genocide, pressured the U.S. State Department. MGM killed the movie.

There it languished until an Armenian Canadian director named Atom Egoyan, whose brilliant but quirky work had earned him an Oscar nomination, decided to fulfill a promise he had made to himself as a kid.

In the three weeks since its release, his $15-million movie has received critical acclaim. But “Ararat” is no epic. Although Miramax is billing it as “the movie they don’t want you to see,” the company has released it in only a handful of big cities.

Fresno, deemed too small and middlebrow, cried foul. Letters asking “How can you leave out Fresno?” were sent to Miramax President Harvey Weinstein. No city in America, after all, has been shaped more by the survivors of the genocide. The refugees who arrived here by the tens of thousands in the 1920s and ‘30s built the raisin industry and became this valley’s judges and poets.

Like Vera Gajarian, most were too busy raising new families to pass along any memories of the atrocities they left behind. Their children often grew up without knowing the reasons why a silly Armenian song, “Lie, Lie, All the World Is a Lie,” would incite a mad dance. Or why a simple pomegranate would be hoarded like a jewel.

Now nearly all of those old-timers were gone. Only Gajarian and a handful of survivors were left to see a film woven around the themes of memory and denial. “I have met some Turks who are the nicest people. I don’t feel resentment,” she said. “But for their government not to admit this for how many years -- 80, 90? They can deny, but I’m here to tell them that I saw it with my own eyes.”

Without pity

A week before the film’s premiere here, she sat in her ranch house now ringed by suburbia and talked about the obligation to tell her story. As one of the last living witnesses, she said she wanted to tell it without pity or embellishment.

Gajarian landed on Ellis Island on the Fourth of July, 1920. She boarded the train to Fresno, where her uncle had a farm on the outskirts of town. When it came time to attend church, she joined not the Armenian parish, but the First Baptist Church of Clovis. She read Twain and Steinbeck and Hemingway and every word of Upton Sinclair.

But at night, when she took a deep breath, all she could smell was the village of Keghi, its goats and grain fields, and all she could taste was the flat cracker bread, the lahvosh, that came out warm and sweet from her mother’s clay oven.

Keghi had been carved into the side of a mountain along a river. The 2,500 Armenians lived in four neighborhoods, each with its own church. Below, beside the small valley planted with wheat and walnuts, lived 1,000 Turks.

It was a strange give and take.

The Armenians, who arrived 800 years before the Turks, were barred from the Ottoman government. The Turks ran the jail, court and City Hall. No Armenian could possess a firearm, but the town’s shops and banks were firmly in Armenian hands. The men, Turks and Armenians, mingled in the central bazaar, where they threw back shots of licorice-flavored moonshine and jousted in endless duels of backgammon.

“If there were any problems between the Armenians and Turks, I didn’t see it. I was just a little girl.”

Her father, Khoran, was a cobbler who owned a dry goods store. She doesn’t remember her mother, Alem, ever sitting. She had auburn hair and fair skin and kept her slim figure even after five children.

The oldest child, Vasken, 12, had polio and couldn’t walk. Gajarian was the third child, after Stella and before Harry. Then came the baby boy, Onig. He had been born just two months before that night her father walked through the door with terrible news: World War I had edged closer. The Turkish soldiers said they needed to move the Armenians to a safe area. A convoy was leaving in 24 hours.

The next morning, they set out on foot as soldiers led the way on horseback. It was late May 1915. Her father carried crippled Vasken, her mother clutched little Onig. They walked day and night, through mountains and high desert, heading south toward the Euphrates River. She said the Turks stayed poker faced all the way to the town of Palu, 75 miles into the deportation.

“We were sitting down, finally resting, and on a hill there were 50 Armenian men tied together and marching. The next thing we heard were gunshots. We knew then they were trying to get rid of the men.”

As they marched toward the city of Diyarbekir, she saw her father talking to a friendly soldier. That night, her father handed the coins from his belt to the soldier. He was going to rescue her father and a few male friends.

“I remember my dad leaving. He told us to be good and mind Mother and always to pray. He said he would meet us soon in a safe area. That’s the last time I saw him. The next day, the soldier came back. He was wearing my daddy’s jacket.”

Diyarbekir had become an open pit of torture, rape and murder. Historian Christopher Walker, in his 1980 book, “Armenia: Survival of a Nation,” wrote that 570,000 Armenians had been killed there in a spasm of ethnic cleansing.

So many dead Armenians were floating in the Euphrates that the river had changed course. Vasken couldn’t hold on to a cousin’s shoulders and was swept away. “Thank God, I didn’t see him drowning.”

The family trudged on with no food or water in the desert sun. The skin on baby Onig’s face was burned. His tongue had turned charcoal. He was already dead. Their mother just didn’t know it. “He died in her arms. She was so weak that she wrapped him in a blanket and handed him to me and my sister Stella. ‘Go bury him,’ ” she said.

A few days later, they were herded to a railway station, where 3-year old Harry died in Gajarian’s lap. The soldiers packed the remaining Armenians from Keghi -- fewer than 100 -- into railway cars. They were headed to a concentration camp at the edge of the Ottoman Empire. Before they arrived, her older sister Stella died of starvation.

At some point the soldiers at the camp disappeared, and she and her mother were left to wander like beggars. She remembers being on the second floor of a bombed-out hotel with four or five families. Her mother was lying on the floor and Gajarian was trying to talk to her, but Alem wasn’t answering. “They sewed her up in a white sheet like a mummy. The wagon came and two men picked her up and I followed them to the stairway. When they got to the bottom, they just threw my mother into the wagon. Like a block of wood.”

She said she was crying when she felt a hand on her shoulder. It was her father’s sister, Aunt Derouhi. She remembers the words like it was yesterday.

“Mother died. I’ve got no one.”

“I’ll take care of you now,” her aunt said.

Derouhi was jarbig, resourceful. She took the leftover wool from a shearing house and crocheted little girls’ dresses that they sold to the Arabs. It was those dresses that bought their train fare to Constantinople. Her father’s brother and his English wife had made it to Fresno. She would set sail on an ocean liner and join them. She would marry their son, her cousin Sarkis. They would have a child named Stanley, who would become a fruit broker, like her husband.

In Fresno, there were two rival Armenian churches, two competing picnics to bless the grapes and two ceremonies to remember the genocide. There was one cemetery, Ararat.

Last week, Gajarian’s two grandchildren took her to see the movie “Ararat.” She was joined by a congressman, a state senator and Fresno’s mayor, Alan Autry, a B-movie actor. She listened to the haunting flute made from the wood of the Armenian apricot tree. She heard the gunshots, the cries of marchers and the word “genocide” uttered without equivocation.

“What happened to my people angers me, but I hold no bitterness against the Turks,” she said, leaving the theater. “We have our books and finally we have our movie. I pray that the Armenians will now put this away. What’s done is done.”