we are always asked
to understand the other person's
viewpoint
no matter how
out-dated
foolish or
obnoxious.
one is asked
to view
their total error
their life-waste
with
kindliness...
-- from Be Kind by Charles Bukowski
“Now that it's become spring-like Yerevan is much better.”
-- from an e-mail from Josh (March
11, 2004)
When I was pregnant with my
daughter, who is now nineteen months old, I used to think about Stalin and
Hitler a lot. Actually, about their parents, more than anything. Especially,
Hitler’s mother. I was wondering how much of who Stalin and Hitler became was
something their parents did, unknowingly poisoning them. And I was thinking How can we, as parents, know how not to slip
and trigger some Hitlerness or Stalinness in the beautiful person we think we are
bringing to this world?
Sometime in mid-fall of 2004, long
before parental anxieties snuck up on me, I was crossing Sayat-Nova street to go towards the opera
House in Yerevan.
Yerevan can
sometimes look mellow and momentarily clean and beautiful in the fall as well.
Downtown can. After a gentle rainy touch, you know, to dust the streets and
turning leaves, yet not giving the drivers a chance to re-paint pedestrian
clothing with mud or splash. So it was on a day like that, when I saw a young,
bald man crossing the same street from the opposite side, coming towards me. Joshua? I thought squinting, shocked.
Was as tall, as thin, as balding, with as short hair. Everything was right,
until the man passed me by. How important
is chronology? I ask myself.
I did not know much about Joshua.
Only what he had told me as we would meet in our program office at our school, one
of the many Yerevan
universities in the fall of 2003. We would meet to discuss the forthcoming
online class that we were thinking of co-teaching.
He was always on time. So when he
didn’t show up for his last class with my students on May 18th, 2004,
a class that he had been covering for me for three months as I was away on an
exchange program, I was
hoping that the shocked student walking into the office and later the newspaper
that I bought (with a photo of Josh lying on the ground, his usually neat
clothes tumbled in dust and blood) were instances of a mass hallucination. Murdered?!
I only knew that Josh was from Minnesota, that he liked
to travel and teach; that everywhere he went it was hard for him to leave
friends and landscapes that he got to like behind. I only knew that he had
adopted a stray dog, after having seen that the dog had been mistreated; that
he loved and missed his family. He was going to go back a few days after that
mid-May day. Linearity of time!
Unweaving the fragile and frail layers
of the thick smog of my memory has no temporal precision. I didn’t know much
about Joshua. Only what he had told me. And some of what I had seen. A gentle
young man in his early thirties, with a kind and warm smile, gently touching
people around him. Humble, almost as though uncomfortable to be the tallest in the
constantly moving group of thirty plus small female English instructors hanging
out, sitting, standing, walking through, in and out of a smoke and conversation
woven room that could probably sit 10-11 people at most.
Sometimes, we would talk standing,
sometimes, when there was room, we would sit, and one of the program assistants
would smile broadly at Josh offering him fruit and coffee. I can’t remember if
he drank coffee. Sometimes, a couple of young instructors would discuss him
after he left. How handsome he was, how shy, polite. Does chronology matter?
After May
2004, I used to see Joshua very often: crossing a street, or smiling, or looking
on, talking to me, while I could not hear a word he was saying… in my dreams.
Then I would wake up to the next moment of the linear chronology.
I was in Germany in the summer of 2004. Not
in a dream. I was going to be a witness at friends’ wedding. So I was walking
with my soon-to-be-spouses friends in Hannaford. Suddenly, Joshua materialized
in the crowd. Then the linearity of time shook me, reminding me of the futility
of my efforts to fight time, or rather the time underused, the time not lived
with presence in the moment, I guess. Witnessing.
The thick smoke of our program
office, or was it the thick smoke of a human shock, is making the events in my
memory un- untangleable in terms of the linearity of time.
I remember the face of the police officer who asked for
instructors and students that Joshua had worked with to be gathered in a
particular room. And so we did. Actually, I don’t really remember his face. I
remember his physique and his approach to masculinity. He was asking us
questions about Joshua. What kind of
person was he? Did you know the kind of places he liked to go? When did you see
him last? Did you know that he was, you know…? Through the smog of my
memory that is now also layered by the sensitivities sharpened through my
entrance into parenthood, I cannot remember, what word, exactly, the police
officer used. But he communicated to us very clearly that Josh was not
heterosexual. And he communicated it to us lightheartedly and with a grin, in a
lower voice, not much emotion, but in a way that one of the female students
felt she had to stand up for Josh: “He was NOT!” (rolling her eyes, confident
of the accuracy of her knowledge).
It
all started in his apartment. He was stabbed in his apartment. He had opened
the door for the killer. It must have been someone he had known. From his inner
circles. Then he had run out, seeking help. I always thought the police try
to get as much information from you as possible not the other way around. This
was weird. We were all shocked in different ways. At the same time our faces
looked like different parts of the same question Why? And here there was the police officer with his technical
questions. And comments that seemed too much for the first police encounter. Too much too little.
And yet, this first police
encounter opened the can of the rumors and fed them well. Rumors like whispers,
It was a passion crime. His partner
didn’t want Josh to leave Armenia.
Rumors, like innumerable and creeping worms that gradually turned into boa
constrictors, It was a hate crime. It was
the father of a student who was unhappy with his or her grade. It was a student’s
father who believed he [Joshua] had molested his child. Rumors, whispers,
constrictors. Rumors, like thin layers of thick cigarette smoke in a program
office, a café, a restaurant, or a bar in Yerevan, the smell of which you take
home in your hair and clothes. They [US Embassy] know far well what
happened, that’s why they are not commenting on it publicly. It was done at the
hands of their own.
Many social scientists call this us vs. they, their, them, he, his, him “othering,” or, in other words, distancing
oneself and marking boundaries between oneself, one’s own group and those whom
we exclude from our in-group. Washing hands off, even when you had nothing to
do with anything or anyone involved. This hand washing was, perhaps, meant for
a third party and had less to do with the outside others it was pointing to on
the surface. Others on the inside. You
want to keep them unsuspecting and at a safe distance. So washing hands off through
the rumors was, perhaps, an attempt to stay safe.
With the smell of the rumor smoke
in my hair and clothes, I went to Joshua’s memorial service at the American University
of Armenia.
I realize now that it was my first memorial service experience of the kind. In Armenia, when
someone passes on, you usually go to the wake or vigil in the person’s house or
apartment. And she or he is usually lying there in an open casket, on a table,
in the middle of the living or dining room. And you can see their neatly
dressed body peacefully silent, seemingly asleep. There is usually a lot of
crying out loud. LOUD. SCREAMING. WAILING, especially if the diseased is young.
Instances of intense silence dotted by the “Tsavaktsum em” (My condolences) of
all the new comers, whose flowers are picked up by someone at the entrance to
the living room, and whose entrance triggers more WAILING. There are also some
technical conversation bits on the margins, in the kitchen, hallways, usually
travelling as mumbles, unless you get really close. And this loud wailing used
to get on my nerves. Much like the linearity of time.
At the memorial service, however,
there was only Josh’s picture. He was not there. Silence on the margins. And
people were reminiscing and talking about him softly, publicly, from a podium.
There was no SCREAMING. No WAILING. And that’s when for the first time in my
life I wanted to digest the reality through seeing the seemingly asleepness.
Through my traumatized and shocked
memory, I remember mostly female voices at Josh’s memorial service. Very
humbling, warm words. Humbling and warm, much like him. I remember wishing
really hard to go speak and trying hard not to cry too much, albeit quietly,
sitting next to one of my male students. I remember I wanted to talk about
Josh, wanted to partake of the experience more actively, but didn’t have much
to say. So I didn’t. My previous Armenian experience of a wake, my active
participation through being silent with those whose family member had just
passed on did not translate into this new mode of active participation.
Five months later Josh’s colleagues
and students were asked to gather again. Remember the room with the police
officer? That was where we were asked to gather again. This time Josh’s mother
and brothers wanted to meet with us. It was strange to be in the same room, see
them sitting at the same place where the police officer had been sitting five
months prior. They were also asking us questions. But the only question I
remember is: What is the professional
background of your parents? And it turned out that 90 per cent of us had
parents who were engineers (there you have it: the overproduction of Soviet
prestige on the margins of the empire). We all grinned or laughed. Awkwardly. Short.
Was Josh’s family trying to re-gather, re-materialize, re-touch, re-hug,
re-communicate with Josh through us, through our eyes that had seen him more
recently? In Armenian I would ask Karotn ein
arnum? One of the brothers was videotaping. The other was sitting there and
looking at us, a group of strangers in whose eyes Josh had reflected on a
weekly basis until mid-May. Unlike the police officer, they did not give us
details into what happened. Couldn’t.
A friend and colleague of mine
whispered in my ear that the sitting brother was wearing Josh’s clothes. I
looked at his black shoes, a bit Yerevan
dusty; grayish pants on his crossed legs, grayish-black sweater, light colored shirt
underneath, and longish hair. He looked very different from Joshua and seemed
to be looking for him in our eyes. I remembered a scene from a French movie I
had seen a decade prior to that meeting, where the daughter was wearing her
father’s clothes (whom she didn’t see much of), because she was missing him. Missing! I was looking at Joshua’s mom
looking at our faces and into our eyes.
I am re-remembering Joshua’s mother
now, through a mother’s mind. The way she was looking at us. Asking us
questions that seemed to have nothing to do with Josh, unlike those the police
officer was asking. His physique and
approach to masculinity.
They never found out anything. The
police. Case closed. Period. Inner
circles. The rumor had it.
In my confused memory cocoon, the
rumor had it that the police, the offspring of Sovietness, with some of its
parental upbringing still intact, had one direction. If for the Soviets it was
the uncatchable, ever-elusive socialism, for the police of 2004 it was the
ever-elusive gay guy, sought for among the many that had to experience police
officers with similar physique and approach to masculinity that we did, but
much more directly (perhaps intensely). The rumor had it that much like the
Soviet Union long gone, the police involved in Josh’s investigation ended up in
the same place with the same diagnosis: deadlock, due to self-imposed
misguidance. Was it a systemic failure?
I’ve been trying to understand why
I keep having these visitations from a gentle, kind, smiling colleague that I
did not know well. Perhaps seeing Josh in the streets of different countries
and in different dimensions, is a human’s desperate attempt to exert control
over the irreversible caused by another human, to whom we are often asked to be
kind. Or is it a naïve attempt to restore the unserved justice? Or is it a
futile attempt to have my own Groundhog
Day?
What if, as Bukowski reminds me
elsewhere, the killer looks just like us, drinking coffee, reading a newspaper,
sitting in a café, at a table across from someone who knew Josh? Perhaps, some
of us have smiled at that person, talked to that person, or perhaps known that
person a little. Without knowing. So,
like Josh’s reflection, we carry the reflection of his killer in our eyes. Without knowing.
And perhaps, the Justice and Peace
scholarship in Joshua’s name, for deserving students from different parts of
the world is the way to be kind. But
how do we reshuffle the linearity of time, so that there is no systemic failure?
The linearity of time, does it irritate you too?
Note: Joshua Haglund was teaching English in Yerevan, Armenia,
as part of a U.S. State Department funded English Language Fellow program
(ELF). He was found murdered outside of his apartment in Yerevan on May 17th, 2004.
February, 2010
