Dickin Hasmik sits opposite me caught mid-way between incredulity and numinous induced by the opulence of her current showy surroundings; stylised architecture consisting of Saffavid-esque oriental arches draping down from nearly extinct painted Byzantine ceilings meshed with the scent of Habsburg coffee houses. All these sights and smells conspire to create a true fusion of colours and styles to house the peculiarly Venetian take on east meeting west. This is the sumptuously affluent Hotel Danieli.
The childlike adoration that enshrouds Dickin Hasmik’s happy face competes with her youthful excitement. In the ensuing tussle her face shines out aloud amongst the warmly dark reds and declining shades of brown. Her presence here has taken on all the aspirations and meanings of a saintly halo. I don’t know if I’m conversing with her anymore, or worshipping the very ebb and flow of her words with the clucking agreement of my inept failing tongue. I’m somewhat intimidated by her presence. She fits here, she belongs here...I, however, am out place.
The palpable animation of her words leaves them floating mid air like dwindling spires of smoke. Her words hang momentarily before accompanying the wafting wordless play of a corner-residing lounge pianist who, of all songs, and all people, has chosen to drip an Aznavour classic across ivory and ebony. Sounds intermingle with the smell of luxurious Italian cheesecake and the scent of good, strong, honest coffee breezing in from the Adriatic; the blueness of which just about pokes through the corner of an ornately stained glass window. I stare intently, and although I can smell it, for my nose is large, I can’t quite see my estranged, beloved Lebanon.
I should return to where I began…
Dickin Hasmik sits opposite me in a leather armchair that wouldn’t be out of place in an eccentric professor’s study. She’s that excited by her surroundings that the seat, which would normally drown a woman of her petite frame with its domineering armrests instead frames her like a queen resplendent upon her throne.
From behind her glasses eyes leak invisible tears of milkable wonder. Her lips part every so often, revealing pearly white teeth through which she sieves a tiredly proud exhalation of an exile’s exaltation of the footsteps of an ancestor’s greatness. Hotel Danieli was built by an Armenian named Danielian.
I sit opposite her waiting on her bated breath of amazement with my own bated breath of word waiting. I’m willing the gaps of her teeth to part, their now seemingly like the bars of a prison cell, and release the conversation brewing the whirs and whirls of her mind that are so faintly hidden from the naked eye.
She sighs. That unsayable, indescribable, unsellable sigh. The Moor’s last as he peels his teary eyes away from Granada’s greenery to stare at the long dusty yellow trail of exile that leads to Morocco’s lonely deserts. That sigh that blows through the streets of a Palestinian’s Jaffa and Israel’s children’s quarters, now silent forgotten museums, like a vengeful wind clawing at the nape of memory’s neck. That heartfelt, horrible sigh that churns the waters of Lake Van and whips a wind that howls in mourning of the memory of Armenia. The very same sigh that stokes the fires of exile into the rapacious demand for greatness with which to dull the killing grind of Diaspora and cure the sickness of assimilation. The wretched sigh of not belonging whose only consoling consort is a quote by Nabokov; “in exile one lives by genius alone.”
I return to where I began...
Dickin Hasmik is so feminine; her hair is delicately done, but roughly ready, her gestures are playful and the way she walks, carries her frame, her arm interlocked with her husband’s, steady and gracefully nimble upon her feet she speaks with them the lost art of walking daintily. Take heed and lessons lesser mortals. She holds a cigarette in such a way one forgets the death it instils and her grip upon a wine glass, so delicate it seems to float beside her palm.
Her carriage and presence reminds me of those women one expects to see in the old black and white films; or desirously smoking in Parisian boutiques, sipping coffee in Vienna discussing politics, enraptured in the disenfranchisement of an interwar Bohemia, or forwarding the lost cause of Bolshevism in some forgotten committee room of Stalin’s epic Russia.
That’s what she is, a Russian. She looks like an Armenianised version of the Russian poetess Anna Akhmatova – my lyrical queen. She sits opposite me and all I can see is the portrait of Akhmatova by Nathan Altman. I realise that I can’t describe Dickin Hasmik anymore. Look at the picture instead.
I return to where I should have begun...
Our other two companions are drinking lattes and engrossed in the mutual parent-child/child-parent sycophancy. Dickin Hasmik and I therefore fall in and out of our own conversation. Her pianist hands, every inch a feminine Rachmaninov’s depress keys belonging to an imaginary piano as she plays along to the music. Every so often she pauses to sculpt something in the air, nothing in particular, yet they are fantastic shapes born of passion loaded conversation and remain permanently etched in my recollection.
We speak together in Russian. That is not to say that we speak together in the language. No, alas my Russian’s not up to that. We speak instead in the language of Russian culture but use the words from Armenian, our one mutual language. My Armenian is halting, failing and filled with wrong conjugations and declensions; hers is patient and perfect, she distils it into simplicity that I might understand better, but she’s careful not to boil it down into patronising minimalism. Instead she supplants complicated terms and too-many-syllables-long words with analogies and metaphors. She plays with the language filling it with sweetly cooed aphorisms and pouring inflections of poetry.
We litter our shared Armenian language with Russian culture to better understand one another; she the daughter of forgotten Leninakan and me, the forgotten Londoner. A line of Mandelstam, a saying of Dostoyevsky’s, a title by Tolstoy says it all and every so often we hum a tune from Shostokovitch or Rimsky-Korsakov and our conversation progresses in the absence of dictionary.
“Vay” Dickin Hasmik utters the Armenian expression of disbelief and shakes her head accordingly. We turn to her pure Armenian. A language she’s passionate about, she doesn’t say words, she chews them – eats them in fact, this appears her only food. She sweetens the language with variations in tone and the flow of her gesticulation. I can’t help but sit up, lap it all up and remain hungry still.
Her delicate hand waves across the room to accompany the “vay”, it sweeps across her audience; the door, the roof, the upholstery, the silent waiters and half-empty coffee cups.
“Ara jan” she begins and asks a question that ends this anecdote, heavily laced with fiction, but begins a history we shall return to another day when, to Venice, we shall return without Dickin Hasmik, alone.
The childlike adoration that enshrouds Dickin Hasmik’s happy face competes with her youthful excitement. In the ensuing tussle her face shines out aloud amongst the warmly dark reds and declining shades of brown. Her presence here has taken on all the aspirations and meanings of a saintly halo. I don’t know if I’m conversing with her anymore, or worshipping the very ebb and flow of her words with the clucking agreement of my inept failing tongue. I’m somewhat intimidated by her presence. She fits here, she belongs here...I, however, am out place.
The palpable animation of her words leaves them floating mid air like dwindling spires of smoke. Her words hang momentarily before accompanying the wafting wordless play of a corner-residing lounge pianist who, of all songs, and all people, has chosen to drip an Aznavour classic across ivory and ebony. Sounds intermingle with the smell of luxurious Italian cheesecake and the scent of good, strong, honest coffee breezing in from the Adriatic; the blueness of which just about pokes through the corner of an ornately stained glass window. I stare intently, and although I can smell it, for my nose is large, I can’t quite see my estranged, beloved Lebanon.
I should return to where I began…
Dickin Hasmik sits opposite me in a leather armchair that wouldn’t be out of place in an eccentric professor’s study. She’s that excited by her surroundings that the seat, which would normally drown a woman of her petite frame with its domineering armrests instead frames her like a queen resplendent upon her throne.
From behind her glasses eyes leak invisible tears of milkable wonder. Her lips part every so often, revealing pearly white teeth through which she sieves a tiredly proud exhalation of an exile’s exaltation of the footsteps of an ancestor’s greatness. Hotel Danieli was built by an Armenian named Danielian.
I sit opposite her waiting on her bated breath of amazement with my own bated breath of word waiting. I’m willing the gaps of her teeth to part, their now seemingly like the bars of a prison cell, and release the conversation brewing the whirs and whirls of her mind that are so faintly hidden from the naked eye.
She sighs. That unsayable, indescribable, unsellable sigh. The Moor’s last as he peels his teary eyes away from Granada’s greenery to stare at the long dusty yellow trail of exile that leads to Morocco’s lonely deserts. That sigh that blows through the streets of a Palestinian’s Jaffa and Israel’s children’s quarters, now silent forgotten museums, like a vengeful wind clawing at the nape of memory’s neck. That heartfelt, horrible sigh that churns the waters of Lake Van and whips a wind that howls in mourning of the memory of Armenia. The very same sigh that stokes the fires of exile into the rapacious demand for greatness with which to dull the killing grind of Diaspora and cure the sickness of assimilation. The wretched sigh of not belonging whose only consoling consort is a quote by Nabokov; “in exile one lives by genius alone.”
I return to where I began...
Dickin Hasmik is so feminine; her hair is delicately done, but roughly ready, her gestures are playful and the way she walks, carries her frame, her arm interlocked with her husband’s, steady and gracefully nimble upon her feet she speaks with them the lost art of walking daintily. Take heed and lessons lesser mortals. She holds a cigarette in such a way one forgets the death it instils and her grip upon a wine glass, so delicate it seems to float beside her palm.
Her carriage and presence reminds me of those women one expects to see in the old black and white films; or desirously smoking in Parisian boutiques, sipping coffee in Vienna discussing politics, enraptured in the disenfranchisement of an interwar Bohemia, or forwarding the lost cause of Bolshevism in some forgotten committee room of Stalin’s epic Russia.
That’s what she is, a Russian. She looks like an Armenianised version of the Russian poetess Anna Akhmatova – my lyrical queen. She sits opposite me and all I can see is the portrait of Akhmatova by Nathan Altman. I realise that I can’t describe Dickin Hasmik anymore. Look at the picture instead.
I return to where I should have begun...
Our other two companions are drinking lattes and engrossed in the mutual parent-child/child-parent sycophancy. Dickin Hasmik and I therefore fall in and out of our own conversation. Her pianist hands, every inch a feminine Rachmaninov’s depress keys belonging to an imaginary piano as she plays along to the music. Every so often she pauses to sculpt something in the air, nothing in particular, yet they are fantastic shapes born of passion loaded conversation and remain permanently etched in my recollection.
We speak together in Russian. That is not to say that we speak together in the language. No, alas my Russian’s not up to that. We speak instead in the language of Russian culture but use the words from Armenian, our one mutual language. My Armenian is halting, failing and filled with wrong conjugations and declensions; hers is patient and perfect, she distils it into simplicity that I might understand better, but she’s careful not to boil it down into patronising minimalism. Instead she supplants complicated terms and too-many-syllables-long words with analogies and metaphors. She plays with the language filling it with sweetly cooed aphorisms and pouring inflections of poetry.
We litter our shared Armenian language with Russian culture to better understand one another; she the daughter of forgotten Leninakan and me, the forgotten Londoner. A line of Mandelstam, a saying of Dostoyevsky’s, a title by Tolstoy says it all and every so often we hum a tune from Shostokovitch or Rimsky-Korsakov and our conversation progresses in the absence of dictionary.
“Vay” Dickin Hasmik utters the Armenian expression of disbelief and shakes her head accordingly. We turn to her pure Armenian. A language she’s passionate about, she doesn’t say words, she chews them – eats them in fact, this appears her only food. She sweetens the language with variations in tone and the flow of her gesticulation. I can’t help but sit up, lap it all up and remain hungry still.
Her delicate hand waves across the room to accompany the “vay”, it sweeps across her audience; the door, the roof, the upholstery, the silent waiters and half-empty coffee cups.
“Ara jan” she begins and asks a question that ends this anecdote, heavily laced with fiction, but begins a history we shall return to another day when, to Venice, we shall return without Dickin Hasmik, alone.
© Ara Iskanderian
