The Ghosts of Bingöl

(This is an older article that I touched up and sent out to magazines for publication. I had to take it off my blog while it was in circulation--they said no, and it's important, so I am sticking it back up here.)

The Ghosts of Dersim, Lost and by the Wind Grieved

By Jeff Gibbs

Waterfalls at Bağın

The moon is full. That’s how you know you’re smack in the middle of Ramadan. It floats like a balloon in the daytime sky over the western walls of the canyon.

Here, down below on earth, the sun is white bright in the east and the temperature is over 90 degrees and climbing. Desert mountains. Mesopotamia. We are dancing the halay, sweating and sweating and sweating as we weave sunburned bodies around tables of kebab eaters, pushed along by the long-haired hippy DJ singing guerrilla songs into the microphone. There’s a gypsy drum and pipe (the davul and zurna). A few of the men are shirtless, the girls in tanktops and bathing suits. Everybody’s turning red. The kebabs on the tables are served on huge platters heaped with sizzling chicken, beef, and lamb, peppers, tomatoes, and spiced onions. A group of men play cards and drink beer after beer.  Another group has a Turkish mahjong set (Okey) and are smoking so vigorously a small stormcloud whirls around their table. Gluttony and boozing and hedonism.

Naughty Sin #1

Naughty Sin #2

            None of this should be happening in Ramadan.  From the rowdy music, to the beer, to the cigarettes and skimpy clothing—it’s all haram, forbidden in the somber holy month of fasting and reflection. You’re not even supposed to swim for fear that a little water might slip between your lips. (There’s also no kissing or sex allowed for similar reasons—even a tongue is a no-no.)

But this is Tunceli, stronghold of the Alevi faith, and most of these people couldn’t give a rat’s ass about Ramadan. And they take pride in that irreverance, wearing it on their sleeves. Or in this case, their naked shoulders. Of course, the guerilla songs, while not against anyone’s religion, would certainly rile up any mainstream Turk who heard them back in Istanbul.

We are being naughty in every way imaginable in Atatürk’s Turkish Republic.

            That morning, we awoke at six and boarded the only means of public transport in Conag, my wife’s Kurdish village—a minivan managed by cranky neighbor Şerafettin who, on a daily basis, rounds up all the travelers in the surrounding villages and takes them to Karakoçan—the nearest city at thirty-five miles south. There some go shopping (food, clothes, furniture—there are no shops in Conag), some go visiting, and some, like us, head farther afield toward one of the hot springs. We’re going to Bağın. Or Bagen, or Bagin, or Bağen. I’ve seen all four spellings on different signs and on different websites and God knows, in this very mix-and-match land of Zaza and Kurmanci Kurds, Turks and Islamicized Armenians, Sunnis and Alevis and hidden Christians, the uncertainty is understandable.  Whose language do you use and whose letters do you use to spell it with? Who cares! Use all of them at the same time!

From Conag to Karakoçan, we have nearly twenty-two bodies rammed into a car built for a maximum of fifteen. Cousin Hussein rides up front sandwiched between the driver and the driver’s side door. But from Karakoçan to Bağın, it’s just the Mala Memli—the house of Memli, my grandfather in law, which today consists of my wife Delal, her sister Zelal, Hussein, me and of course, Dede (Grandfather). Just last year, this journey could have taken a couple of hours because between us and our destination were five army checkpoints where we would have had to stop, show our IDs, unpack our luggage, and undergo interrogation. These checkpoints have mysteriously been lifted despite the rise in guerrilla attacks and the more than five hundred arrests of Kurdish activists in the last six months.

            Bağın is downstream from two dams that block the Peri River. It is a local-run resort with a restaurant, a picnic area, and a pool that teeter on the edge of a small canyon. The cliffs following the river look like the walls of a cave turned inside out, with stalagmites and stalactites and waxy formations of limestone melting into the water below. Water trickles off the red stone into the bright blue-green rapids. Mountain sheep climb the rocks, skipping across the precipice as if it were a flat grassy meadow.  In short, the scenery is electrifying.

            They may be ignoring the most holy of Muslim months, but people are still on the conservative side here. To wit, the hot spring pool is segregated according to gender. From 8 to 10 it’s the women’s turn, from 10 to 12, the men’s. Thus, come ten o’clock, Hussein, Dede, and I mosy over to the baths with towel and shampoo (for washing the smelly ‘therapeutic’ minerals out of our hair). Both warn me repeatedly about how hot it’s going to be, but to be frank, with my expectations founded on the scalding volcanic springs of Japan (which sometimes can be used to boil eggs!), the water here feels like a slightly tepid bath. Probably a good thing considering the heat. The water is bubbly and reddish orange. Boys are doing cannon balls. Old men hog the spring jets.

After swimming, I pull one of the chaise lounge chairs over to the cliff edge and stretch out in the sun. I could easily spend the whole day just lying here and gazing out over this incredible scenery. If only they let beer in the pool area!

A rather hairy guy walks up to the fence just in front of me and looks out over the desert vista toward a gnarled mesa of red rock.

            ‘What do you think of the scenery?’ he asks.

            ‘It’s unbelievable,’ I say.

            He nods at the cross around my neck and the Arabic tattoo on my back. His brow wrinkles.

‘Are you Christian?’

            ‘Well, yes, I guess.’

            ‘My brother is a Christian, too’ he says. ‘He converted a while back and now runs the evangelical church in Kadikoy, for converted Turks.’

‘I live in Kadıköy!’

‘Maybe you know the one I mean, then. Across from the Limon Cafe? Have you been?’

            The Limon Cafe is where Delal and I met. The owner, the mutual friend who introduced us, is also from Dersim. We’d gone to the very church this guy was talking about last Christmas Eve and found a group of Turks in a circle singing ‘Silent Night’ in Turkish. I am liking this conversation so far—none of the usual yabancı stuff. No ‘Can you drink tea? Do you like Turkey? Are you a married?’

            ‘I know the church,’ I say. ‘Your brother converted?  That’s...unusual.’

            ‘Not really. Our great-grandmother is half Armenian. Her mother had to convert to Islam but we always knew about our Armenian roots. I think it’s his way of getting back to that.’

            ‘Why not join an Armenian church then?’

            ‘Maybe he was afraid? You know how it is.’

He rocks back on his heels and then gestures out across the desert expanse.

‘Look at that castle over there, for example. It’s Armenian.’

I squint at what I thought was a gnarled mesa and make out doors and walls running along the ledges. How hadn’t I noticed them before?

Bağın Castle

‘This whole area used to be an Armenian city, I’m told, a long time ago. Then they got rid of them. Some of them were locked up in the old rooms of the castle and burned. They tied others together, shot one of them, and then let him drag the rest down into the river to drown. You know about the massacres.’

            It’s not a question.

‘Yes, I know.’

I have read hundreds of stories about groups of Armenians marched out to remote places on the pretext of relocation and then murdered near a river. The government followed the same pattern when it came time for the Dersimlis themselves to go in ‘38. For one second, being on site of one of these massacres, I get a shiver. I can almost see the bodies flowing down the Peri’s blue waters, accumulating in places to form dams of dead (another phenomenon described in countless accounts).

‘When the Armenians left,’ he continues, ‘the Kurds came and built a village.  You see the walls at the base of the mountain?’

‘Yep.’

‘That was the old Kurdish village. They burned it in the nineties. Now these Kurdish boys have built this resort here, but they get harassed too. On the crest of that hill over there are nine graves. They are relatives of the people who built this resort. They were shot by the gendarmes as a warning to the owners, though they accused them of terrorism or whatever excuse they needed to feel okay with what they’d done. But really they just want no trace of Kurdish life in this area, certainly not a flourishing business like this. Why do you think they built two dams up river?’

‘Money?’

He frowns and then looks at me. ‘They want to flood us out of here.’

He grimaces and we are silent for a few minutes.

‘Do you like the music here? I saw you doing the halay. You’re really good!’

Meanwhile, back in the picnic area, Delal has been having a conversation with a woman who is apparently my guy’s mother. She was looking out over the river when bescarved Mom came up beside her and pointed up toward a line of watch towers on the cliffs above.

‘They got their gendarme station up there. It’s disgusting. Can you believe they’d put one in a place like this? Why are they watching us here? First they kill all the Armenians. My own grandmother was Armenian, you know. Yep, she converted and hid with a Kurdish family to save herself. Then in 1938, back the soldiers come again. You know what they did this time? They kidnapped a local girl and locked her up in a barn for ten days. That’s right. God knows what she went through, but when she was let out, she took her two children and hurled them in the river, then killed herself. Animals. That’s why I say never marry an outsider. Speaking of, my son is here and he’s single. He’s got a good job and doesn’t gamble. Let me introduce you.’

‘Actually I am married,’ Delal says quickly. ‘But look, my sister is right over there and she’s single!’

A circle of halay dancers is carrying the unsuspecting Zelal ever closer, and as the woman looks up, Delal makes her escape. From genocide to matchmaking in two minutes or less.

These topics are the small talk of this region. I hear or have one every day, sometimes more. The memories are part of daily life to a degree that would drive Turks back in Istanbul into a frothing rage. There, you deny even the existence of the Armenian church just across the sidewalk. Why that’s just a rather ornate souvenir shop that is open only on Sunday! In Istanbul, even your foreign friends married to Turks follow the official line of the military controlled governments that have been in power for decades. ‘Genocide? Millions of Armenians vanishing into the deserts? Silly you, it was just all part of a civil war, if it happened at all. There were never that many Armenians there anyway. But millions died just from the trauma of war. It certainly wasn’t organized, but if it was, they deserved it because they were rebelling.’ In my high school, the denial goes so far as to force units on a made-up Turkish genocide at the hands of the Armenians (though there were undoubtedly revenge massacres, a people without access to state power cannot use all the organs of government to murder a race). Or, as was in the Radikal newspaper this month, the Turkish government can issue orders to its ambassadors across the world to do everything in their power ‘to hinder or halt’ a proposed compilation of original documents of the genocide, and somehow not look ridiculous or sinister. The Armenian journalist Hrant Dink is assassinated for ‘insulting Turkey’ though he never once said the forbidden G word. Orhan Pamuk and Elif Şafak are sued in Federal courts for suggesting large massacres of Armenians (to my knowledge neither have said the G word either).

Yet here, the topic is a living part of every day conversation.

Here is my wife’s home region on the border of Bingöl and Tunceli (all of it the old defunct province of Dersim). I figure the people make no bones about it because the memories come down from first hand sources—their grandparents. Plus, the results of the killings are all around them. They literally live on the ruins. Not to mention, they’ve gone through a similar process of torment and denial themseives—in Dersim, several times. Holy Mt. Silbüs that looms over Conag like a guardian was a pilgrimage site for Armenians. Forty miles north, the city of Kiğı where Delal was born has an Armenian castle on a hilltop and the ruins of two Armenian churches. In at least eleven of the surrounding villages, and I stress ‘at least’, you can find churches dating back to the 14th century. ‘All so vividly preserved,’ boasts a locally published guidebook on Bingöl, ‘that you get the feeling they were just built!’ None of these ruins are tended or officially recognized. All are falling into ruin. (One in the village of Eskikavak is called ‘an architectural masterpiece known in its day as the second Aya Sofia!’) In other villages people have take the stones from the ruins and used them to constructs their own houses and stables. Crosses are carved haphazardly in kitchen walls.

Bağın has its Armenian ruins. Across the canyon from Conag is the village of Kilise (Church), bombed all to hell in the 90’s. It, too, was once Armenian and there are old Armenian graves in the village of Hasköy just down the road from Conag itself. The village of Herdif may still be Armenian—not impossible. Rakel, the wife of Hrant Dink, came from Varto, an entire village that pretended to be Kurdish to the point of forgetting Armenian. Her mother was named Delal, Kurdish for ‘Of great worth’.

The whole area around Conag, before 1915, was said to have 19, 859 Armenians, 45 churches, and 5 monasteries according to census records at the time. Walk through the mountains and you stumble on crosses carved into rocks. Kurds and Turks alike search them out and dig for the legendary buried gold. That Bingöl guidebook stops to condemn treasure hunting—‘Every sort of historical artifact has been plundered here. Hunters after gold and jewels and money have broken walls and dug up foundations until nothing remains. The presence of Armenian gold in the hills is simply taken for granted. There’s so much of it and everyone knows.

And everyone has a secret Armenian relative, including Delal, whose uncle’s grandmother, Makrik, escaped from under a pile of dead with her sister and made her way to the nearby village of Zenan to hide among sympathetic Kurds. As a memorial, her cousin was named for Makrik’s sister, herself shot during their flight to Zenan. Many Kurds today are rebuilding new village houses from the bombed out rubble of the old. So our uncle was rebuilding his ancestry with the old names. Of course, the name had to be Turkified for public consumption. It could not rouse the suspicions of the Turkish government. A kılım hand woven by Makrik still lies on the floor of our uncle’s bedroom in Istanbul.

Conag itself has its own famous Armenian shrine—Ziyaret (Kurmanci Kurdish for ‘The Visit’).

On our first few days in Conag, Delal is swamped with housework, and feeling cooped up, I embark with cousin Hussein on a tour of the village. On a winding dirt path downhill, we stumble, literally, into a square of broken foundation stones. The side facing the downward slope has a pile of blocks burned black with soot. Half melted candles are stuck in the sand at their base. What startles me are the carvings, an ornate cross entwined with vines and several smaller crosses radiating outward. Husein bends down and touches his forehead three times to the crucifix and kisses it. Then, he takes a pinch of sand from where the candles sit and eats it. Finally, he leaves a few coins. It’s an extraordinary ritual—a Muslim Kurd kissing the cross and then eating dirt.

            ‘Okay Hussein,’ I ask. ‘What’s the deal here?’

            He explains, as best he can, for no one seems entirely sure what the Ziyaret was. Its past is a murk of legend and speculation, a crumbling symbol of what’s been lost.

‘The Armenians were smart,’ Hussein says, ‘And the Muslims around them superstitious. When they were taken away, they buried their gold and jewels to keep the soldiers from stealing them. They thought they would come back for it one day. To scare off any Muslim treasure hunters, they piled all these religious stones wherever their money was buried. They thought people would be too afraid to touch them, but they were wrong. People have dug up a lot of gold here, but I know there’s still more buried under those rocks. I know.’

            This is the refrain I hear from all the young men. They come sometimes and roam the hills with metal detectors. It’s still there, if only. But Dede says that he remembers seeing the last of the gold plundered decades before.

            ‘Even so,’ Husein says, ‘There’s treasure everywhere in these mountains. You see rocks out in the middle of nowhere marked with crosses. A Turkish officer came here to the Ziyaret one night and started digging. He made off with a ton of gold. There are soldiers digging everywhere in these mountains.’

            If this is true (and why wouldn’t it be? The stones are out in the open and the stories widely known) then it reveals the official line for the cynical bullshit that it is. Basically if you don’t believe your government tried to wipe them out, then don’t go digging for the evidence just because you think it might make you rich.

            The Ziyaret is not unusual in the Dersim region. Hüseyin Aygun, an expert on the Dersim massacres of 1938, says that Kurds and Armenians had long shared each other’s holy sites. ‘In the village of Vank near Dersim City,’ he writes, ‘both Kizilbash Kurds and Armenians made pilgrimages to the church there. The Kurds revered it so much that they took their sick there for miracle cures. Sick children would wash themselves in the water of a fountain found at the church called ‘Mezele Tor’. The old people even believed that the fingers of the Imam Hussein (grandson of the prophet Ali sacred to Alevis) were on the hands of the monks.’ There was a monastery on the western edge of Dersim (now Kayseri) called Surp Garabet—and it was one of the most important centers of pilgrimage sites in the Ottoman Empire, rumored to house the relics of Saint John the Baptist.  I found a description of the Monastery written by a 19th century Armenian traveler. ‘People made donations to the monastery each according to his means. Those having made vows or pledges also brought gifts, such as silver items. ‘Madagh,’ the Divine Liturgy, and various services were held. Candles were lit on the grave of Soorp Garabed and lame, blind and crippled persons, as well as those suffering from other afflictions, would kiss the ground, hoping for miraculous cures.’

            The kiss, the candles, the coins. Just like Hussein at the Ziyaret. Was this the grave of an Armenian saint?

            ‘The earth is supposed to have certain powers,’ Husein explains. ‘You eat it for blessings. It’s perfectly clean and is delicious. Really.’

            I bend down, touch my head to the stones, kiss the sooty surface and take a pinch of dirt. It certainly tastes clean.

            ‘Sometimes people sleep here. It’s supposed to cure mental illnesses. One time, the daughter of one of the villagers went mad. For weeks, she would run out of the house and roam around naked, tearing at her hair and shrieking and jumping at people. No one could do a thing with her. Then one night she fell asleep here at the foot of the Ziyaret. I don’t know what dreams she had, but when she awoke the next morning, she stumbled up the hill trying to cover herself—actually ashamed that she was nüde! She was calm for the first time in months. There are spirits here, really. Something really holy.’

            According to Dede, the Ziyaret had been a religious school for the training of priests. Some say it was a monastery, others just a church. Whatever it was, when we visit the fabled Akdamar church in Van a few weeks later, I see the same carvings on stones over the entrance to the sanctuary. But we’ll probably never know for sure. Ghosts are the only thing that walk here now, and they don’t give interviews or pose for cameras.

            We walk back up the hill toward Dede’s house, plucking mulberries off trees as we go. There’s a white-stone house to the left and Huseyn points.

            ‘That used to be the shop of an Armenian guy, the last in the village.’

            Husein himself doesn’t know the story so I ask that repository of stories, Dede.

            ‘There was a store there,’ he confirms. ‘That was back when Conag was the center of this whole region. We had a police station, shops, everything. He was the last Armenian in Conag. One day the gendarmes came and told him that a letter had come from his brother. He had to travel with them to Kiğı to pick it up. Now this was back in the day when letters came once a year and only in emergencies, and why did he need the gendarmes to escort him? When they told him to make sure he packed all his gold and jewels, but to leave his store as it was, he was sure what they were up to. They led him off, and as they were crossing the Peri River, he told the guards, ‘I know why you’ve brought me here, but if you shoot me, you’ll never get my gold. I’ll jump in the river and it’ll be lost forever.’ They started to take out their guns and the Armenian jumped. His body was lost in the river and he was never seen again.’

            I hear the same story from all the older men (maybe because they all get it from Dede) but it raises as many questions as it answers. Could there really have been only one Armenian in a village that sported a religious school? Where were the others and why was this one allowed to remain? How does anyone know his fate after he left the village? It has the air of apocrypha—a legend forged from phantoms of a bigger truth that the authorities have stamped out. But that story told at Bağın, of people being lead away on some pretense or another and then shot at rivers is so widespread that perhaps for the villagers his fate was a foregone conclusion. They knew because it was happening everywhere.

            According to the cranky minibus driver, Şeraffetin, there were seventeen Armenians in Conag before the genocide. They were lead away in a kafile (a ‘file’) in 1915 and never seen again. People here refer to this period as the sefalet, the time of Wretched Poverty.

            We have stopped at Şerafettin’s house for tea. His pet sheep is trying to nibble at his pants legs and belt buckle. Şerafettin has served us fresh cucumbers from the garden and to placate the ravenous animal, he collects the peels into a bowl and sets them on the floor. Voila, the sheep is distracted momentarily. Munch munch munch.

The topic, at first, is how things ain’t what they used to be. The beekeepers, these days, are feeding sugar to their bees for a quick yield, but cheap flavor.

            ‘Ah when the Armenians were here, it was different,’ Şerafettin says wistfully. ‘They were a clever people, educated and cultured. We had seventeen here until they rounded them up during the sefalet.’ He pauses and shakes his shaggy head. ‘When they left, one of the mothers had two baby boys. She gave them secretly to a woman who lived a few houses down that way,’ he points, ‘to save them from the killings. The woman adopted them as her own, and they grew up here in the village. One day, when they were older, they were out in the fields playing with some other village boys. They had a pellet gun, and one of the Armenian boys accidentally shot a Kurdish boy in the leg. They were all afraid of getting into trouble so they agreed not to tell anyone, but when the Kurdish boy got home, his father noticed and demanded to know who’d done it. So the father marched to the gendarme station and demanded something be done. The police went to the woman’s house and asked for the ID of the two brothers. No one had bothered to change their ID cards. We were in a remote village, who needed to bother? The woman started to cry, ‘Please!’ she said. ‘Take me! I’m the one who committed the crime! I hid these boys!’ The gendarme seemed to agree. He told the two boys to run. They left the house and took off across the field. Then, before they got too far, he raised his gun and murdered them both.’

            He scowls. ‘These were Kurds that did this!  Kurds!’ And I’m not sure if he’s talking about the woman who adopted the infants or the man who turned the boys in. Is it shame or is it frustration at a foiled good deed? And like the other story, it has a lot of strange implications. If the boys had grown up a bit, for instance, then this happened long after the 1915 genocide—and shows that killing Armenians was still a priority years later.

            Another story floats around. One of the villagers tells about Armenians hiding in caves on Mt. Silbüs from murdering soldiers and then being killed by the bombs of the Turkish airforce. This, he says, was in 1938, at the time of the Dersim massacre. ‘Are you sure?’ I ask. ‘Armenians? Not Kurds?’ ‘Armenians,’ he insists. By some estimates, over 40,000 were sheltered in Dersim during the genocide. The mountains had made it nearly impassable for Ottoman forces to get at them. Aygün says that part of the government’s motive for destroying the Dersimlis was to punish them for saving Armenians—just twenty years after the fact, there could have been many still living there. I imagine they would have seen the writing on the wall when the soldiers came and told them they were being ‘relocated’. There are even some stories of Dersim men being made to prove they had been circumcised—as if the soldiers were hunting for Christians.

But again, this story of Silbüs’s caves just kind of floats untethered to any past. Names? Dates? It’s all a mystery. Just enough to tantalize. Years and years of censorship and suppression consign it to a perpetual legend. The Holocaust researcher William Schulman describes denial as a way of killing a people twice. First you take their lives and then you take the memories of them.  Here in Turkey the memory of the Armenians (and the Kurds who followed) has almost been wiped clean, the second murder nearly complete.  But clearly memory cannot truly be stamped out. It pops back up as local legends, told to neighbors and friends, kept alive in the oral tradition.

Nothing can make up for the sin of denial. But perhaps the stories I have heard occupy a niche in this history. This is a land of unparalleled natural beauty and cultural richness, but it is also one of unremembered loss—by Kurds and Armenians alike. The tale of the Armenian merchant who took his gold into the Peri River. Of the Armenians who dodged the first genocide only to wander into another one—slaughtered finally on a mountain holy to both them and the Kurds. These are the new myths, perhaps, that help define a people and how they are feeling today—abused, ruined, but tough and not easily rooted out or forgotten. And above all, bound to this land, to the rocks and mountains and rivers. So much so that they eat its body in a different kind of Communion.

Far away in Istanbul lives one of our aunts. She never returns to Conag because she has to stay in her inlaws’ house instead of her childhood home, and it’s unpleasant apparently. Yet she misses the village profoundly. Mentioning Conag can make her cry. I filled a Ziploc bag with Ziyaret sand and brought it to her the other night on a dinner visit. She took the bag,’hugged my neck’ as we Southerners say, and held on tight. ‘Ay canım benim!’ Oh my dear one!

 I like to think that some of the resilience and loss buried in that sand, some of the healing magic, can comfort a little a soul that longs unceasingly for home. The Armenian musician and poet, Komitas, wrote:

Sweet spring

Flower and bud

The merry stream,

Sparkling babble,

Green bloom,

Delightful dew,

Refreshing brook

Where did you leave all these?

I see a lost look on our aunt’s face. Maybe she asks herself that last question, away from Conag, an exile here in Istanbul. Maybe all of Conag’s exiles ask themselves the same.

END

Interview with Mamoste Part 2

Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth

            Here is the long delayed second part to the interview with my father-in-law, Kemal Seven (Mamoste) from the Özgür Gündem newspaper—translated into English.

I started this right after my journey to the South and I couldn’t help but notice the connections between the South and the Kurds—first and foremost the 20,000 strong Kurdish community we visited in Nashville (more on that later), but also the Civil Rights movement where an entire race of people threw off the chains of a century of oppressive politics.

 I mailed a postcard to Mamoste that I picked up while I was at the Civil Rights Institute in Birmingham, Alabama. On the front was a picture of Reverend Shuttlesworth, the preacher of the 16^th Street Baptist Church. He was instrumental in the legendary Freedom Rides—the bus trips across country by mixed white and black opponents of segregation.  The busses were attacked in Anniston (another Alabama town) and Birmingham, the activists beaten nearly to death. (The institute shows a rather nauseating film of the battered and pulpy face of one young white activist after the Anniston beatings)  Many bus companies refused to let them ride out of fear. Shuttlesworth’s moral support was instrumental in their continuation and success.

Protesters were met with tear gas and tanks—like the protesters of  Diyarbakır. In the museum I saw a police tank like the ones that patrol the streets of Southeast Turkey. Apparently they were used profusely by Birmingham’s mayor. The infamous Children’s March—when unarmed child protesters were attacked with German shepherds and fire hoses galvanized the whole nation.

And then the terrorism.

Whites bombed Shuttlesworth’s home and his church for daring to speak out against segregation. The church bombing killed four little girls. Show trials and kangaroo courts ensued—the last of the terrorist bombers was only tried in 2001.  Looking at Turkey’s kangaroo courts today, the struggle on the streets, the violence, one cannot help but be reminded a little at least of the South, of the United States at that time.

Ah, and just what are those kangaroo courts up to these days?

Journalist Ece Temelkuran wrote rather eloquently in a recent article in Al Akhbar English about the Silivri Prison in Istanbul working hard to add new cells. Clearly they are looking forward to more guests. Our aunt is visiting from Şırnak at the moment and says new prisons are under construction there as well. As the CHP’s Kılıçdaroğlu says, the country is becoming an open air prison.

Temelkuran also writes about Turkey’s journalists being driven out of work when they dare to criticize the government. She herself was fired from Haber Türk. Most recently Nuray Mert was let go by the Milliyet newspaper, who couldn’t take the government pressure any longer (Mert was widely known for drawing attention to the state’s increasingly autocratic bent).

I found it curious that Mamoste referred to the ‘Sultanate’ in his interview. It seemed a throwback in an age when you have a wide variety of dictatorial examples to draw from (everyone in America causes everyone else ‘Hitler’ for example) But I think the term is more than mere name-calling—he’s bringing attention to something the Republic denies, a continuity with the dictatorial, old world Sultans who came before, a connection which Kemalists claim was forever obliterated by their hero. But how could there NOT be a continuity? You cannot sever centuries of history from your country’s soul.

Before I get to the second part of Mamoste’s interview, take a gander at what Mark Twain had to write on his visit to Istanbul in Innocents Abroad during his travels after the Civil War in the final connection I will draw between mamoste and the South. This was published over one hundred and forty years ago—when Sultan Abdul Aziz the First was in power, a relatively progressive time with the Tazminat Reforms struggling to modernize the creaking Empire. Tell me what’s different. Tell me that Mamoste’s reference to the Sultanate is not still germaine today.

‘There is one paper published here in the English language--The Levant Herald--and there are generally a number of Greek and a few French papers rising and falling, struggling up and falling again. Newspapers are not popular with the Sultan's Government. They do not understand journalism. The proverb says, "The unknown is always great." To the court, the newspaper is a mysterious and rascally institution. They know what a pestilence is, because they have one occasionally that thins the people out at the rate of two thousand a day, and they regard a newspaper as a mild form of pestilence. When it goes astray, they suppress it--pounce upon it without warning, and throttle it. When it don't go astray for a long time, they get suspicious and throttle it anyhow, because they think it is hatching deviltry. Imagine the Grand Vizier in solemn council with the magnates of the realm, spelling his way through the hated newspaper, and finally delivering his profound decision: "This thing means mischief --it is too darkly, too suspiciously inoffensive--suppress it! Warn the publisher that we can not have this sort of thing: put the editor in prison!"

The newspaper business has its inconveniences in Constantinople. Two Greek papers and one French one were suppressed here within a few days of each other. No victories of the Cretans are allowed to be printed. From time to time the Grand Vizier sends a notice to the various editors that the Cretan insurrection is entirely suppressed, and although that editor knows better, he still has to print the notice. The Levant Herald is too fond of speaking praisefully of Americans to be popular with the Sultan, who does not relish our sympathy with the Cretans, and therefore that paper has to be particularly circumspect in order to keep out of trouble. Once the editor, forgetting the official notice in his paper that the Cretans were crushed out, printed a letter of a very different tenor, from the American Consul in Crete, and was fined two hundred and fifty dollars for it. Shortly he printed another from the same source and was imprisoned three months for his pains. I think I could get the assistant editorship of the Levant Herald, but I am going to try to worry along without it.’   

Part 2—Interview with Kemal Seven, Özgür Gündem.  February 1st, 2012

What is the response to the arrests of academicians like Professor Büşra Ersanlı on the justification that they were giving lessons at the academies?

Our academies, which are legal as far as they are lawful, have become the focus of interest in the world of knowledge, opening their doors to people of knowledge like Professor Ersanlı.  As we proceed, our intellectuals, writers, and scientists will have a positive influence and the door will be opened to an increase in both the participants and in the respect our academies command among the public. The result? The strengthening of our push toward an alternative education, an alternative politics, an alternative system which unsettles those who want to maintain the status quo.

With that in mind, what is the significance of the reaction shown by the academic world against this?

Sadly, the organizational level of our civil society is not effective enough to transform itself into a source of democratic pressure. Even under the existing conditions, however, the efforts on behalf of Professors Ersanlı and Zarakolu are reason enough for positive reactions. The press conferences, media activities, and marches organized by supporters from the faculty, from different foundations and other sectors is a positive sign. A group of professors have even given symbolic lessons at the academies in the name of not keeping silent. We are very grateful to them. We want that similar reactions and support through different actions continue to grow without delay. In order that we do not fall into the helplessness of that German priest who did not speak up against the policies of Hitler, every sensitive person must take their place in the organized struggle. Lovers of democracy, good-hearted academics like Professor Bursanlı are not easy to come by.

How must the academies go on in light of these operations?

I have full faith that a new and different model for living, of Kurdish origin, will be found soon--one that will warm us and light our way in this darkest and coldest of nights. Neither the global capitalist powers, who every day make the world more and more unlivable, nor those segments given to  betrayal and hypocrisy will make us give up our ideology which binds us by the heart and which we see as the salvation of humanity. Democratic Autonomy will enable the majority of society--a revolutionary, free, equal and ecologic society--to understand and take command of their lives to such a degree that it will open a new path to humanity. Our political academies, which are our hope for this utopia, must now reach a wider segment of society in a more planned, conscious, organized, decisive, and all-embracing way. With our strengthened teaching staff and new mechanisms, we must continue to widen our efforts, never forgetting our mission to become centers of knowledge and enlightenment for the people.

A Wake--Part 2 Guest Blogger, Julie Novotny

I asked friends who knew Hide as I did for memories and got this rather thoughtful piece from Julie so I am posting it here...with pictures of the man himself.  Julie was smart enough to get photos of him...This is a continuation of mine below

Photo by Julie

It was late and the house was quiet.  The boys had already been ushered off to take their nightly bath, and Kuniko was rousing Sachi from beneath the kotatsu (I loved those heated tables on cold winter nights) to go to bed.  With cigarette smoke curling around his face, in halting, clear English Hide said, “She loves you,” and motioned to Kayo, then five years old, who lay curled up on my lap.  I looked at her, my eyes instantly misty, brimming with love, and busied myself by wrapping my arms and a blanket around her as she slept.  I nodded back at him and smiled, not saying anything for fear of waking her.  He continued, “Thank you.”  The words seemed to hang in the air with the billowing smoke as he looked at me full of gratitude, and I remember being amazed that he was thanking me … for bonding with Kayo and her brothers and twin sister?… for reading bedtime stories to them and playing in the park?… for piling in the van with the family, Hide at the wheel, and having Kayo snuggle into my lap while on the way to and from long, leisurely picnics on Sundays when the weather was nice to see cherry blossoms, temples, festivals?...  for the pleasure of staying up all night talking and drinking wine with Kuniko?...  I knew it was me who needed to thank him for sharing his beautiful family. 

And with Hide I felt a quiet bond.  Perhaps it was not as clear as with the rest of the family, but it was still there…  Like when I would sometimes sit back and enjoy listening to the lively banter at dinner, he would often smile and nod at me once we noticed our shared amusement.  Or for my birthdays with the family-- now years and years ago--- he would usually give me pottery, which I still use and love, after mentioning to him once that I loved Japanese ceramics.  Or when a relative sent the family baked crickets as a delicacy, and while even the kids could eat them without any hesitation, he was greatly amused by the expression on my face as I ate only one (the crunchiness was okay, but I did not like the scratchy legs).  Or when the family would drive me to the airport—after so many times it is hard to count-- he would always drive and would tear up with the rest of us when it was time for me to leave. 

Yet, perhaps I felt this bond because I could also be quiet, so I sometimes understood his struggle to connect with the people around him.  There were many nights at the house when he retreated into his own world, trying to drink away his sorrows, and shared stories about himself and the past to the person sitting next to him.  In the beginning I was frustrated that I could not follow his stories, and often felt trapped by their length, but nonetheless, I could feel the sadness or anger behind the words.  As my Japanese improved, I came to understand his childhood stories, and the resulting pain and loss from which he still suffered.   

Over the course of 20 years, I’ve watched the family grow, sometimes with years apart, but I was lucky enough to reunite with them several times before Hide became ill.  I would go to lunch with Kuniko and Hide, and he was fully engaged in our conversation, something that I had not always felt when I was living in Japan.  He asked about me, my husband (he seemed amazed each time I saw him that I was married), and in return, simply updated me on how he was doing.  Had my Japanese improved?  Definitely not... but I felt that I could understand him better, that he was happy to see me and made an effort to reach out, and that touched me.  The last time I saw him he told me, beer and cigarette in hand, that he had just been to the hospital seeing various doctors and was awaiting test results.  He looked fine, perhaps just a little tired, so I did not worry.

Two years ago, while visiting Jeff, Kuniko and Megumi in Turkey, Kuniko learned of the news... by phone that Hide had cancer.  I could only offer hugs and hold Kuniko’s hand for support at the time, but with my eroding Japanese, I never did reach out to Hide.  I heard from Jeff when he visited Japan later that year that Hide was in remission and in good spirits ... and in my mind that’s where he remained... in good spirits. 

I wish I could have been there to see him one last time and to be there with the family.

I miss you, Hide.  You and your family are so interwoven in me and my life... I hold all those memories, and feel lucky to have been there to share those moments... so many beautiful moments.  Perhaps all those years ago I didn’t say “thank you” and express the gratitude I felt as we sat in the family room around the kotatsu with Kayo in my arms.  I hope you knew how much I cared, how much I loved all those shared moments. 

You will always be in my heart...    

love,

Julie

A Wake

(I am indeed going to put part 2 of my father in law's interview--however, the death of a friend a couple of days ago shifted my focus a bit and I've written here about him.)

The last trip to Japan to see Hide-san

When one person dies, a whole world is lost, they say. I say whole worlds are lost—This is a wake for the universe I knew as Hidekazu Tsuchiya—whom I called Hide-san (Hee—Day). I knew only small patches on one world around one tiny star.  

1

We were eating dinner around the kotatsu in the living room. (Ahh, the kotatsu, those heated little tables—in winter you could stick your feet underneath until they were toasty and lounge there all night—or at least until the wine and beer ran out).  I had finished off a bowl of rice and set it on the table top with the mandatory ‘gochisoosama deshita’ to close off the meal.  I started to stand up, but Hide batted me back down with his hand flopping at me like a bird wing.

‘You see those rice grains?’ he asked. There were several little white bits of rice sticking to the side of the bowl. ‘My dad used to tell me that in each grain of rice there were seven gods and if you left even one grain uneaten, it was wasting the lives of seven gods.’ As the kids stealthily slipped away en masse, I dutifully sat down with my then meager chopstick skills and tried my best to get the lone grains into my mouth. Ahh! I was the new kid! A blank slate to teach the ancient ways!  This was the penalty of being the gaijin—you had to learn the traditions the family blew off.  Everyone laughed at me after that, ‘Dad caught you!’ But I have never forgotten those seven gods.

2

Summertime night—the same room. He was in his white tank top. I think Kuniko was hanging up laundry out on the balcony—the screen door was open, wet clothes hung heavy on the line. We were both sweating, drenched. He had a white towel around his neck and was explaining some horrible incident from his past. In the background was the washing machine noise and street cats yowling from outside.

‘When I was a young boy in Yamagata, things were very difficult.’ He explained,  a few beers already knocked back by then.  ‘One night, my mother took me by the hand and walked with me down to the banks of the river. I don’t remember where my father was. Sometimes he hit her when he drank.  ‘We should kill ourselves,’ she said. ‘Life can’t ever get better for us.’ She was crying and...’

He stops mid-sentence. The cat yowling has risen to a passionate crescendo. He lifts a finger like Confucius about to deliver a lecture, points out the window and says, suddenly switching to very carefully enunciated English, ‘Cat sex.’

3

Yamagata—in northern Honshuu one summer. The town of Shirataka (White Hawk).  It’s in a valley surrounded by mountains so that all the humidity pools like a sauna in the streets. I learn a few words in Yamagata-ben (the dialect of the area).  Atsugunee ga—for ‘It’s not hot,’ a phrase I am not in urgent need of. I learn that here you have to do the full on-the-floor-bow sometimes, with your face in the tatami mats. In the van, as Hide takes us on a tour around his prefecture, Anne, one of my fellow Floridians, puts Eiichiro’s toe in her mouth and bites down. Eiichiro is the oldest son—fourteen at the time. He’s talking about that bite for years afterward.  Why did she do that? he asks in wonder. I think it was the first time a girl put his anything into her mouth. Not that we mentioned such things to Hide—he drove us to a caldera lake, a beautiful bright turquoise disk of water in an ashy volcanic cone.

His mother did the on-the-floor bow sometimes at neighbors’ houses—she had a garden and took me , Anne, Brenda, and the kids out to clip cucumbers and peppers. She cooked for us—it was the first and only time I had bear meat. Hide and his mom were both surprised I didn’t flinch when I heard what animal I was ingesting. This was the woman Hide had stood with on a river and planned a mother-child suicide.

4

Yamagata—one winter. My roommate Aaron and I go up to Yamagata during Winter Break with the family. Dai (second oldest son), Aaron, and I build a giant igloo outside. Sometimes the others help, but it is to the three of us that Hide brings the little grill, and it is him that takes pictures of us as we roast mochi cakes inside our ice house. I remember we had a hamster—the girls’ pet I guess? His name was Uncle Crunchy.

Hide’s ancestors were Christian, part of the first group of Christians that went into hiding in the mountains after the Shogun made the religion illegal. He showed me a rainbow ball of colored string once, the threads falling into a pretty pattern—this was a secret symbol of Christians back in the day I am told. Despite this, there was a Buddhist/Shinto shrine to his father in the house. Sticks of incense in front of a picture. Food sometimes. Lots of snow. More and more snow. His father died just before I met them. It’s strange to think—I saw that picture everywhere, and now it will be his I see instead.

5

Kuniko has planned the funeral just for family but people are coming from everywhere—work friends (the whole sale vegetable market in Tsukiji), Eiichiro’s friends, Dai’s friends, the girls’ friends, neighbors, University friends, friends from Shirataka.

One winter, Hide and Kuniko’s old college friends came to visit, bringing their young son Yuki. I saw a different Hide than I had ever seen before—laughing constantly, from the gut, shouting off color jokes, teasing, confident, full of bravado. He was like a young college boy. I stayed up with them just to marvel at this transformation. Who knew he could open this kind of face to the world? He could be so sad and morose and self flagellating most of the time. This was someone else. I felt privileged to meet him, to meet his friends. And I never forgot from that day on that somewhere under all that ‘but what about tradition’ grumbling, there was this other man. I remember we went with them to a hula course somewhere in downtown Tokyo, and he danced.

I saw this Hide another time—my calligraphy teacher’s son was an actor, and she got us tickets to the opening night of her his play, Furusato (Hometown). Hide and Kuniko decided to take me along. I learned that they had once been in theater club together. For the first time since I had known them, they acted like a couple. Years seemed to fall of them as we entered the theater. We were all the same age when we sat down. At the end of the play, all these sad middle aged people climb off a train and go skipping through a meadow of rabbits and squirrels toward their long lost furusato. When we left, Hide said he had been really moved. Kuniko found the play a sappy, maudlin—all that whining about the old hometown of yore.  ‘Look forward!’ she said. ‘Look to the future!’ And Hide seemed lost in thought. What was there he missed in his furusato? All those sorrow thoughts...

6

Two years ago, in the summer, the doctor said that the cancer would be quick. He expected no more than six months. Kuniko was in Istanbul when the call came—visiting me. We were on a rooftop in Kadıköy sipping drinks with the Bosphorous blue in front of us. The ships, the vista of the mosques on the other side.  We both cried suddenly, and suddenly stopped.

 I flew to Tokyo to see him that November. The cancer was in remission—he was a bit sickly—bald and thin from the chemo--but in fairly high spirits. We took a bike ride together through Urayasu on a hunt for him another pet—his beloved dog Gabi had just died. The pretty trees in the fall—those golden leafed gingko raining yellow everywhere.

We never did locate a new house hound, but we did a bit of touring. He was never one for spontaneous trips—he got left out so much on this sort of thing, but that day, because he missed me maybe, because I had come so far, when I said ‘Let’s do something we’ve never done before!’ he agreed (though I could see him hanging back a bit inside). We visited the Urayasu Historical Museum and did a tour. We learned how they farmed seaweed in the old days. It was just the two of us there that day in the whole museum—they were closing—and the man talked us through the process.  I remember screens floating in the water covered in deep green sprouts, the old wooden house, the sky outside burning with autum lava colors.

7

The day I went back to Istanbul, he had a doctor’s appointment. Me to the airport, him to the cancer center. The cancer had been in remission for a while, and now there was a possibility it might be coming back. Test results were coming in today, those ghastly mestasizing cells.

When we said goodbye, I felt as clueless as I do now. What to say—they didn’t make set little phrases for this. You’re dying, but not as soon as I thought,  I’m going thousands of miles away, and may not be able to come back in time, and it’s always been a little awkward between us despite all the affection.’

‘Mata ne,’ I said as I left the house. ‘Not goodbye, but see you later.’

‘Thanks for coming,’ he told me. ‘I wanted to drop you off but I have to go to the hospital again.’

‘I’ll be fine.’

‘You know, I’ve always considered you one of my sons.’

Eiichiro told me the same thing, ‘My dad thinks of you as one of us.’

I remember his garden that day. He always had a garden—plants grew like mad things in his hands. Pink azaleas, bright purple four-o’clocks, marigolds, daisies, a burst of blue morning glories, an arch way of vines at the gate.

8

His sons. Eiichiro and Dai. My brothers.

It was some years ago during the Urayasu Festival and his sons were running a bit wild.  Eiichiro had just started working at a bar with Yakuza connections, I was hearing stories of his few weeks as a small-fry paint thinner addict. Tattoos, a drunken motorcycle accident. Dai, at 17, had just accidentally gotten a girl pregnant. The boys were a bit dodgy that summer—at least to someone as longing for the old order as Hide was, whenever parental fealty and soldierly respect were in fashion among Japanese kids.  We were walking home from a festival, aching from carrying around the mikoshi festival shrines all day and he said, ‘You know, Jeff, everything that my sons have become is thanks to you.’

A mikoshi festival picture borrowed from Eiichiro...

 I choked, then laughed.  ‘I hope you mean that in a good way, right now...’

‘No, no,’ he said. ‘They are wonderful boys. I mean in the long view of things, they are good boys, and I wanted to thank you.’

 I thought he could also thank himself and his wife and the boys themselves, but it made me supremely happy.

The festival—with thirty other men and a smattering of women we carried our mikoshi through the streets of Urayasu—the shrine itself balanced on two gigantic logs which we in turn balanced on our shoulders, all day long for three days.  It was as heavy as a redwood—Hide and I stayed together the whole time on our neighborhood team, but Eiichiro had his own team of rowdy boys that he was managing and was flitting about, directing this or that. We shouted sore sore sore, maida maida maida!’ and gave the shrine god the best ride of its eternal life. That night we ached so badly I couldn’t move an inch. We dragged ourselves to the public bath right next door and melted into the steam and hot mineral water. The bath was closing forever when the festival was over—the soak was free. ‘Something important will be lost,’ Hide told me and I agreed.

We sank into the huge tub with the other shrine bearers. A man with a dragon tattoo down his back was there as well—yakuza. We glanced knowing at each other and tried to look nonchalant about it. I groaned and moaned at the muscle pain. Hide laughed at me—but he was in just as sad a shape. That night he’d bought a platter of sushi and sashimi, and of course sake and beer.

9

When my father died, Hide sat down at the end of the kotatsu with a glass of sake and in that somewhat lecturing way of his told me about his father’s death.  I didn’t tell him all the details of mine at first—but he seemed to guess it wasn’t a clean death. He said he wanted to help. We’d both lost our dads. They had been heavy drinkers. We resented and loved them all at once. We shared something now. We understood how easy it could be to get stuck thinking about those things—getting stuck in the thorns when we tried to pull ourselves out.

One spring, during my first year in Japan, he drove me, the boys, and Matsuge (a family friend) down to Tokyo Bay for some fishing. I remember the worms that bit—they even had spikes along their body that stuck out when you touched them. They tried to clamp onto the end of your finger when you stuck them on the hook.  He chuckled softly at my squeamishness—I remember that chuckle there, a bit exasperated, a bit withdrawn. He baited his own hook and shook his head.

10.

This is all a bit of a lie because so many of the details of these memories I don’t have anymore—I am filling in the blanks with parts that don’t matter as much. It’s been twenty years since we became part of each other’s lives and fourteen years since I left Japan and two years since I last saw him. And there were nearly 11,000 miles between us at the end, and in those two years since my last visit, I didn’t call him once, though for my wedding gift, he had the idea of having each family member write the character for ‘Love’ in their own unique style, which was perfect—his meticulously careful   AI   was first--and I would like to have introduced him to Delal. And I don’t know why I didn’t call him. Part of it was I feared what I might find out how bad things had become, part of it was it made me sad how much of my Japanese was going and how much I couldn’t say anymore. Of course, now I can’t say anything at all to him.

Ai--'Love' in Chinese/Japanese calligraphy

But this is a wake. I imagine myself there, drinking beers with the kids—all grown and married now except for Eiichiro who is most likely leading the party. And he’s being loud and we are all sharing memories and I am right in the thick of things telling stories, too. And it’s late, but there’s no sign of slowing or stopping. Eiichiro will announce he’s going out for more Kirin or Sapporo, and Dai and I will go, too.

11

That last visit, someone I knew desperately wanted some work pants he’d seen in a You Tube video of Japanese construction workers. I don’t remember who it was anymore—a Turkish friend, a foreign one, no one at all important. Hide drove me all around town looking for those pants—I had just mentioned it in passing, imagine someone ordering of all things, construction worker uniforms from the Far East, and Hide made it a crusade—store after store.  And when I expressed some interest in a pack of glove like socks—they had spaces for toes!—he bought me a huge pack of the things.

12

And I think of him like this. I think of planet sized Japanese nashi pears. I think of Fuji apples and bokchoy and mountain yams and sweet potatoes and trefoil and a hundred varieties of fruit and vegetables, some of which I had never seen anywhere else but Japan. He brought them home from the wholesale market. Watermelons and canteloupe and pumpkin and yuzu and aloe. He had this weakness for snake oil cures. One year it was eating raw aloe dipped in soy sauce (maybe it helped, who knows?) The next year it was acerola juice. The next copper bracelets which kept away all sorts of illnesses according to the marketing campaign hawking it.

13

I see him like this.

He had a big helmet of silver hair, streaked a bit with black. There was a small chip in his front teeth. He left before dawn for work and came back late and went to bed early (on Saturday, too) and he mourned the time he missed with everyone, but never seemed to know how to really let himself go. He was sometimes like a big log fallen across the river, the water rushed past him and he trembled where he lay but never moved.

He looked like his mother. Sometimes he dyed his hair black, or grew a moustache.

It feels funny that I am here in Istanbul where no one knows who’s been lost. You lose a friend and it gets swallowed quickly in the current of an every day life that never included him. Not just dead, washed out of existence.

I think he was outside of things a lot. I felt bad about that sometimes.  He’s in so few of the pictures I have from Japan. I have only one at the house here in Istanbul—it was taken that winter in Yamagata. We are all sitting around the kotatsu. He’s got his hair dyed black, a moustache, he’s grinning and eating a tangerine. Eiichiro is wearing my glasses. I’m blind but have Uncle Crunchy the hamster and Kayo is cutting her eyes in my direction as if I might suddenly try to eat it. Dai is making a silly face. Sachiyo looks dazed or ill. It’s clearly cold—we’re in sweaters and hugging the kotatsu.  I have lots of other pictures from Japan, but he’s in none of them.

‘I feel left out,’ he told me once.

He was a lonely man, but didn’t need to be maybe. Maybe he didn’t know how to just let go and become a part of things. To forget all those hang ups. I sometimes know how that feels. Don’t we all?

Is this all I’ve got? All the memories?

I’ll miss you Hide. I’m sorry I didn’t call. I’m sorry I can’t be there now to say good bye.

We’ll light some incense here, Buddhist style.

And I’ll say a Christian prayer.

And I’ll recite the poem that I recited for my own father.

Ample make this bed

Make this bed with awe

In it wait till morning breaks

Excellent and fair

Be its mattress straight

Be its pillow round

Let no sunlight yellow noise interrupt this ground

And maybe a poem in Japanese—something about the snow of winter, and how the flakes look like cherry blossoms, and the melancholy, and how the spring flowers are long gone but the memory remains, and it falls outside and gathers in every growing drifts.

A link for the seven gods...http://www.seiyaku.com/reference/seven/shichifukujin.html

The Mogami River--courtesy of the Tohoku Kanko website