“Room 1203,” she says. “But it’s lunchtime, so they’re all in the dining hall now. Go down this main hall and turn right. You’ll see the sign.”
Orhan walks a maze of corridors and hallways before finding the dining room. He pauses just before the glass-paneled French doors. The room is filled almost entirely with old women. A handful of men sit at a rectangular table, huddled together for camaraderie or protection. They roll dice into wooden backgammon trays, the way men in his village have done for centuries. Women in mint green scrubs roam the room, adjusting wheelchairs and spoon-feeding hesitant mouths. He steps over the threshold and is immediately confronted by a din of noise coming from a television in one corner of the room. On the screen, a man with perfectly coifed white hair and matching teeth is presiding over a game show of sorts. The contestants stand before an enthusiastic crowd shouting out prices of things ranging from a blender to a new car. Orhan stares at the screen, marveling at the spectacle of garish colors, a celebration of consumerism and wealth accompanied by shiny smiling people and loud music. Distracted, he does not at first notice the robed and slippered woman approaching him. She cradles a plastic blue-eyed doll and calls out to him in what he assumes is Armenian.
Oh God, please don’t be Seda. He never considered the Melkonian woman might be senile or suffering from some kind of dementia. He gives the woman with the doll a cautious smile. She points an accusing finger at him, and holds the matty-headed doll tight in her other arm. It stares at him too, its rosy lips and cheeks in direct contrast to its shorn locks and tattered dress. Orhan tries to ignore the woman, but she points her crooked finger straight at him.
“Don’t mind her. This is Mrs. Vartanian,” says a hefty black woman, wearing a uniform. Her name tag is decorated with stickers of puppies and reads “Betty.” She takes the woman with the doll gently by the arm.
“She thinks you’re a soldier,” says Betty. The woman presses her plastic doll to her chest before spitting at Orhan’s feet. He looks down in disbelief, his ears burning with disdain.
“She don’t mean nothing by it,” says Betty. “Do you, Mrs. Vartanian?”
“It’s okay. I understand. She’s . . .” He fishes for the appropriate English word and finally settles for “old.”
“We like to call it mature,” Betty says.
Orhan nods, making a mental note to look up the word mature later in his English-language dictionary. “I am here to see Seda Melkonian,” he says.
She scans his face for a moment.
“She is expecting me,” he adds.
“Right over there,” Betty says, pointing to a woman with short hair the color of unpolished steel. She is bent over a piece of needlework. Orhan can see her gnarled fingers, hooked like a great eagle’s talons, working diligently at a delicate piece of fabric. He takes a few steps toward her, then stops. Unlike the woman with the doll, Seda Melkonian is impeccably dressed. She wears a navy blue cardigan with a violet silk scarf around her neck. Orhan takes a deep breath and continues toward her, stopping only when his feet are planted right in front of her chair. She smells strongly of jasmine.
“Mrs. Melkonian?” His voice is smaller than it’s been in years.
The old woman raises her head. She has a lovely face, despite its creases. Her eyes have a haughtiness to them. Greenish gray with flecks of gold, they take him in, starting at his shoes and pausing at his shoulders before finally coming to rest on his face.
“Orhan Türko?lu,” Orhan announces, extending his hand. When she doesn’t take it, he clears his throat and fixes his eyes upon her, looking for a clue about her identity. She looks nothing like his father but a bit like himself with his own hazel eyes and tawny skin. Could this woman hiding in a nursing home in Los Angeles be flesh of his flesh? Orhan’s grandmother had died of tuberculosis within a year or two of his father’s birth. Her sister, Auntie Fatma, arrived shortly after to take care of Orhan’s father, the young Mustafa. No photographs survive of his paternal grandmother. But then, few in Anatolia could have afforded such things back then.
When Orhan’s own mother died in childbirth, Mustafa watered the repressed seeds of his anger with large amounts of raki. And later, when he found God, he replaced the raki with a stronger cocktail of theology and nationalism. Mothers birthed, then died, in the Türko?lu family. Not even their ghosts stayed behind. Perhaps this is why Orhan is almost thirty and unmarried.
Suddenly, Orhan is eager to get beyond the awkward introductions. He considers how best to explain his presence. A flock of generalities swirl in his head about the importance of his mission, but all he can manage is “I sent you a letter.”
She does not respond.
“I speak perfect English,” he says.
The old woman raises an eyebrow at this.