A COPSE OF AVAKIANS

by Pamela E. Apkarian-Russell

Spider webs, mice, bats, buzzing biting bugs, odoriferous smells, mold, animal

droppings, decayed and skeletal carcasses of small critters...You name it, and it is

included in the grand tour to which antique dealers are subjected, and pray will

hopefully turn into a cache which will pay the day's wages.  

Sometimes, the time spent renders up salable items and even treasures. But

often as not, years of neglect, and disrespect have reduced many of the items

beyond salvage. Abandoned in sheds, attics and cellars, time has not been kind to them.

Initially, it's always exciting. You never know what you will find stored away in

corners, cupboards, trunks, boxes, and in the rafters. Sometimes your adrenaline

is so great that no gambler could possibly experience such a high, even if they hit

the big jackpot. Sometimes we leave empty-handed. And sometimes even we are not prepared for what we find.

The Englishman and I had been called in to look at what we thought was a

collection of vintage postcards that a woman's mother-in-law, recently deceased,

had collected over a period of years. We hadn't realized that we had known the

mother-in-law until we arrived at the house... and we certainly had no idea what

we were about to get involved in.

It was an impressive postcard collection. Not very large, but consisting of quality

local views, dressed cats, Santas, animals, and pretty babies and little girls.

There were also many real photo cards of a spiritualist's gathering in a beautiful

Victorian home. It also included ghost figures manifesting themselves among the

guests. These particular cards were choice and worth between $50 and $100

each. They were not only identified, but were signed by many of the participants,

 some of whom were famous mediums and writers at the turn of the century

through the 30's. Names that are still impressive in occult circles even today.

After explaining to the woman, a tall, strikingly handsome Mediterranean type in

her mid-sixties, whose name was Nina Avakian, that the Spiritualist cards had

historic significance and were worth more than the balance of the collection combined, I made them an offer.

We were therefore, quite surprised to learn that it wasn't just the postcard

collection we were being offered, but the entire estate at terms pre-set in hermother-in-law's will.

It seemed like a dream come true, to be offered an estate with so much prime material, with no money down, and told to sell it and then present them with acheck. Most dealers are stock rich and cash poor, and we were no exception. "According to my mother-in-law's will, the money will go to aid the half-Armenian, half-Azari orphan children of Nogorno Karabagh. You will make out the check to this fund that is being set up. She trusted you and said that the entire contents of the attic were yours outright, and it was so stated in her will.

Everything else, you are to dispose of at the best price you can obtain, taking a

fair percentage for yourself. She said that you should handle everything.

"We have packed most of those items we want already, and will be taking them

back to New Jersey day after tomorrow. I'll give you the keys then so that you can

work at your leisure. Are these terms, the terms of the will, acceptable to you?"

Nina asked this question as if she were afraid we would turn the estate down.

Chris and I had all we could do to keep from throwing ourselves into each other's arms and hugging each other. We had only met the elder Mrs. Avakian once at an antique show and had

spoken at length about the Armenian genocide and an article I had recently

written about my grandmother, who had been a survivor. Mrs. Avakian had

seemed so sad, so weary, like she was fading and fragile like a butterfly when the

cold weather comes, but after all, she was an elderly woman.

I was more than surprised that she had not only remembered us to appraise and

sell her estate, but had actually willed part of it to me. We assumed the latter was

as payment for cleaning the place and putting it in marketable condition. We

assumed that what we found up in the attic would just be a bit of frosting on an already sweet cake.

No cake ever had icing like we were about to be served.

Early Tuesday afternoon, the English- man, who is my husband and partner,

Chris, but who everyone affectionately refers to as "The Englishman", and myself,

met Nina at the house. It was a lovely old house with a picket fence, rose arbors,

and wildflowers and climbing roses smothering the land- scape with shades of

pink and red, and an aroma that filled our nostrils with the attar of romance.

Rather like the English gardens Chris remembered as a child. He held my hand.

Nina handed over the keys.

"I'm going to miss this garden almost as much as I'm going to miss her," she said.

"This garden was her love and her life. She worked her heart out here.

Sometimes I think it was the only thing that kept her alive."

She sighed, and we walked in silence down the cobblestone walk toward her car.

Wishing her God speed to her destination, we headed back into the house to start work.

The interior was easy enough, as it consisted of furniture, baskets, small oriental

scatter rugs, kitchen things, and some sweet statues of little girls, some in marble,

some in bisque, some in china. Nina had taken a few pieces of china and three

pieces of Wedgwood. Other than that, most things were exactly as we had seen

them, waiting to be carefully packed and carried out to our vehicle. It always

makes me sad, thinking about the previous owner and how their lives were

entwined with these bits and pieces of pretty bric-a- brac. It makes you think of

your own mortality, and what will happen to the bits and pieces you cherish.

We worked till about ten o'clock that night, then headed home, which was

forty-seven miles as the crow flies. The next three days found us working from

nine in the morning until ten at night to clear the house...and we still had the

garage, shed and attic to empty. Items like the newspapers were taken to the

recycling section of the dump, clothing and cooking utensils were donated to the

Salvation Army, and all the furniture with the exception of a few bookcases were

taken to my favorite auctioneer who agreed not to take his fifteen percent as the

money was going to charity. He'd make his costs on the buyers, he said.

The garage was full of empty and full paint cans, dead tires from cars that had

been sold years before, and a variety of boxes full of Life magazines. The shed

was worse, every clay flower pot in creation had come to live in this shed, along

with their poorer plastic cousins. I called a nearby organic farm I found in the

 local phone book and asked if they could use, what looked to me like a lifetime

 of puttering. I explained it was an all or nothing deal and they must pack it up.

 "The price? How about some flowers sent to the local old age home in her

 memory?"

 The boys that came to pick up the pots were between ages 14 and 17; lanky,exuberant, friendly, and very good workers.

"We live and work on my grandparents farm and Bigmum will be thrilled with allof this stuff," they told me. I even threw in most of the rakes, hoses, and other items we had located in the barn that the boys thought Bigmum and Grandpa Kostos could use. The items had very little value on the second-hand market, but if you can use items, and don't have to purchase them, it is a great blessing. We were as pleased as they that they could use them.

"I don't suppose you guys want to make a little money carrying stuff down fromthe attic?" Six eyes brightened and expressed great interest. "It's hard labor,dragging dirty and maybe heavy, stuff down from the attic and it's pretty dingy up there," I explained. "It also smells bad, and the stairs are narrow. I can only pay five dollars an hour each." The six eyes became as large as owl's.

 "If I can call Bigmum and she says it's okay, we'd love to."

 His name was Spiros and though the youngest of the three boys, he was obviously the leader. Ten minutes later the boys, Sam, Gabe, and Spiros, were filling the front room with dirty, dusty and cobweb-covered boxes, which they were dragging down faster than we could stack them. Three hours later, I made them stop and wash as we had ordered steak and mushroom subs that The Englishman had gone out to pick up, along with, soda, fruit, and potato chips, for our quick lunch break.

 "I think we've got half of the attic cleared," Spiros said.

I looked at the piles of picture frames and wooden boxes, and sighed. We had a lot of work ahead of us, even with the boys' help. "Okay guys, breaks over, back to work," I ordered. I went back to sorting boxes. Picking up a nice Ogee mirror, I looked at it and then at myself. Cobwebs in my hair and a dark smudge on my cheek as well as a smaller one on my chin. I turned around to see Gabe behind me.

 "Everything okay?" I asked.

"I think you better come upstairs. There's a coffin and it's occupied." If he hadn't looked visibly shaken, I wouldn't have taken him seriously.

 "Go get the Englishman!"

 I went up the stairs and reached the attic at a dead run to see Spiros and Sam just standing there looking at the open coffin. Pushing them aside, I looked down and saw a desiccated mummy of a very young child, a babe of less than a year, dressed in white with dried crumbling roses in her hands, which were crossed over her chest. The auburn hair on the rotting silk pillow made it even more gruesome to look at. In the casket were small bags, which we later found out were the cremated ashes of various Avakians.

Chris told the boys to go down- stairs when he arrived. "Well, this is a pretty fix. I should have listened to my mother," I said. The Englishman looked at me. "Why, what did she say?"

 "I wasn't listening, but I'm sure I should have been." He groaned, that groan I knew so well, which meant he didn't think the situation called for funny remarks.

 "You had better go downstairs and call the police," I told him, "and then call Nina. I'll stay here."

Sighing with resignation, he went downstairs to perform the unhappy task of calling the police.

I pulled the coffin across the floor under the light and stared at it. It was a small coffin, definitely not large enough for an adult, nicely dovetailed, and dating from the twenties. It looked homemade but well done. On one side, a large, fat, browning manila envelope was tucked in the silk lining. For some reason I didn't want anyone else to see this and I tucked it in my pants under my shirt. It was almost as if it were important for me to secrete it; that this was for my eyes and not for the police. I stared at the baby, mesmerized by its ugliness. How had this child died? How had it gone from a living being to an emaciated hollow, shrunken, grotesque covering of skin over bones, let alone part of the contents of an attic of which I was now the owner. Silently I said a prayer for its peaceful repose and softly closed the lid of the coffin.

 Paying the boys, we told them to leave before the cops arrived and that we were sorry if they had been frightened. They were real nice about it all, and wanted to stay as they thought it rather exciting. We convinced them it wasn't a good idea. Chris paid them for an extra hour and told them if we needed more help, he'd call them.

 A half hour after the boys left, the police showed up, all seven of them. What ensued after that was a three-ring circus. At one point it was as if we were dealing with the Three Stooges, only there were seven of them.

 "Look, I don't know who it is. How many times do I have to tell you the same information?"

 It got to the point, I put out my wrists and begged, "Go ahead arrest me, Officer Krupke. I'm a bad girl. I killed this person who looks like she's been dead longer than I've been alive."

 Police Chief James didn't think it funny in the least, and I was losing patience. The coroner from a neighbor- ing town arrived, photos were taken, and the casket was removed from the house. Finally all of the Keystone Cops stopped poking and taking pictures and left. We were told not to leave the state.

"Give me a break! We live over the line." The chief looked at me and said like a character in a Damon Runyon story, "Look, I don't care where you live, I said don't leave the state. And don't remove any more stuff from the house."

 When they left, we locked up and got into the van, heading for home. "I'll be damned if I'm going to have that creep tell us what to do."

 The Englishman looked at me. "Are you sure we really want to do this?"

 "So what are they going to do, extradite us? I have no intention of spending money on a lousy motel. Besides, there aren't any in this town. He's just being a jerk. You saw how he was parading about like a peacock. This is probably the most exciting thing that's ever happened to him. Besides, he's a heavy drinker, and gives me the creeps. When we get home, I'll call someone and get some advice."

 Two days later the coroner's office called and confirmed the fact that the body had been dead since before 1920, and the bags were named relatives of the old lady, whose cremated remains she had kept. The child had died of dehydration and starvation. We were given the ashes of the various relatives, but had to wait for the mummified remains and casket.

Purchasing seven Rowan trees, we planted them in our yard with a different Avakian under the roots of each one. Each tree had a tag on it with the name of the donor of the ashes. We were allowed to finished our work in the house and the chief decided, after we made a well-placed phone call, that he had better not harass us. There were many plants in the house and I kept them all, along with a few small oriental rugs, some books and photos on spiritualism, and five stoneware crocks I found in the basement.

 It was just before we finished the house that I realized we had not checked the cellar. For some reason I was loath to go down there. It had a cement floor, an oil burner and many empty shelves, plus a few nice old Norton stoneware pieces with blue flowers and birds on them. Nothing else, just a regular basement.

 Nothing else, that is except a beautifully tinted photo of a cute little girl about 8-month's old with curly auburn hair and big blue eyes. With it was a stick-on note that seemed to have just been written, which said "Thank You for taking care of my family."

 Chills went down my spine. This was the child in the attic and it seemed the ghostly Mrs. Avakian was manipulat- ing us from beyond. We took the remaining items and got out of there as if lions and tigers were after us. Then we locked up the house, hid the key where the real estate broker would find it, and headed home with more than a sigh of relief.

 I realized while Chris was driving that the photo and the note were in my purse. I couldn't even remember put- ting them in there. I tossed them on the seat between us.

 "You know, it's almost as if this was planned. Don't you think it's time you opened that envelope you pulled out of the coffin."

 I looked at Chris in amazement.

 "How did you know about the envelope? I thought I had been so discreet about it."

 "About as discreet as a cat with a bird in it's mouth. We haven't been married all these years so that I don't know when you're acting weird. This was obviously meant to be. You were chosen. Don't you want to see if you have achieved your task and what it was about?"

 "I wasn't acting weird. Things were acting weird around me and I got stuck in the middle." By the look I was receiving, I knew my Englishman didn't quite believe me.

 We stopped at the lake where the ducks are which I enjoy feeding so much, and gave them all the bread I had saved up for them. I looked at the picture and the note which I was convinced were written by a dead person and then slowly opened the large, fat envelope I had hidden in the glove compartment days earlier. The writing was the same as on the note. The pages went from brown and crumbling, to yellow, to only a few years old. It told of a woman who had only been married for a few years when the genocide of the Armenians took place. On the day she was rescued from the death march to the desert known as El Zor, her child died of starvation.

 She could not bear to be parted from the child, so she hid it in her clothes and carried it with her. She actually smuggled the body from one country to another. Parts of the story were disjointed, and the Englishman and I held hands as I read this, while tears flowed down our cheeks and my voice broke as I choked on the words that painted pictures of rape, murder, and starvation. That she was not in her right mind while many of these events took place is not surprising. She did not remember escaping from the Turks and the death march, or landing up in a refugee camp in Syria run by the Red Cross. Her first lucid recollection was of meeting her cousin Anahid, who insisted that she should emigrate to America with her and her son, Boghos.

 On the boat coming over, she met a woman who she referred to as "the Eagle", who had been on the same death march and had lost her child to the horrors of the genocide. This woman touched her eyes and removed the dark curtain that had settled over her mind. After awhile, she was able to start a new life, remarry, have a child. Her husband, who had lost his family during the genocide, made the coffin that the child was laid out in, which sat in the attic all those years. When a relative passed on she would place the ashes in the coffin. Eventually, Mr. Avakian's ashes were placed in this receptacle with the child he had never know, but was so dear to his wife. What he thought of this obsession, this secret dark dream of his wife's, we shall never know. He died ten years before her. And so the years passed. In her mind she was preserving her family, keeping them together for when she could join them.

 She couldn't bring back those who had been bayoneted or beheaded or starved, but she could keep together the American remnants of her family.

 Chris and I sat in the vehicle and cried and hugged each other as we struggled through the fragmented, tortured life of this poor woman. When I spoke to Nina about it, she felt her mother-in-law had done this deliberate- ly and that she had meant for me to inherit her family. It seemed a very strange thing to inherit a customer's family remains. Nina and I decided her husband's half-sister should be cremated.

 On April 24th of the next year, the anniversary of the day that the Turks had decreed for the extermination of the Armenian people, Mrs. Avakian's ashes were brought to our house by Nina and her husband Toros.

 "You have the rest of the family growing in the garden. Now my mother-in-law will have her ashes with the others, and the daughter she said she wanted to be buried with. We couldn't understand what that was all about. Now we know."

 She laughed an ironic little laugh. "We've brought her here, along with the Mountain Ash tree to be planted over her. Guess this will make her happy, and how apropos that your home used to be a church years ago. She will like it here with all her relatives and the daffodils and lilacs. It's almost as if she planned it all. You know, we knew almost nothing about her life in the old country. She never spoke of it. When you sent me copies of what she had written, we were shocked. Sure, we knew about the genocide, but never thought about it because she seemed so much a part of America, so removed from the old country compared to all her contemporaries. It's like the old country never existed.

 "Toros feels badly she never told us," she added. "Her whole family killed in front of her, escaping, being on the death march. God, what she must have gone through. Maybe that is why she never went to church and always went to the Spiritualists and the gypsies. She was very superstitious."

 Chris and Toros buried Mrs. Avakian's ashes and her daughter's, down deep with plenty of fertilizer and the Mountain Ash on top. We now had a copse of Avakians growing in our garden, along with one we had planted years before in memory of a friend who had committed suicide.

 "Now my poor friend Ellen will have company," I told Nina.

 Nina and I had become friends as we talked on the phone for hours about the entire incident.

 "Well, I'm glad you made money on this deal as you now harbor our family cemetery! What I still don't understand is why she picked you. Why not me? We were very close, and yet she never told me anything. I hadn't any idea what she had been through, let alone of this burden she carried with her."

"Maybe she couldn't talk about it to anyone. It probably hurt too much. Perhaps she felt if anyone else knew, she would be made to part with her daughter."

 "But why drag an outsider into this mess? I now know why she wouldn't let us ever go up in the attic, but why dump all this on you?" I poured her a cup of Earl Grey, as we sat waiting for the two tree planters to join us.

"I think she chose me because I was so close to "the Eagle," I explained. "You see, my grandmother was referred to as "the Eagle" because of her incredible memory. They both came over on the R.M.S. Pannonia. My mother was born on that boat.

 "My grandmother was a wise woman a healer; she probably drew her back to sanity on the boat. I don't know, as I don't remember Grandma ever speak- ing of the incident or mentioning her. The only way we know anything about this is the papers she wrote and kept in the coffin. How painful it must have been for her all those years keeping such a secret. In a way I feel honored, but I hope and pray no one ever honors me so again. The only thing I can't figure out and spooks me is the thank you note."

 Nina looked at me, clearly surprised.

"What thank you note? You didn't tell me about any thank you note."

 I found and showed her the note.

 "I found this with the photo in the cellar when I was taking out the crocks."

"Crocks? I took all the crocks out of the cellar with the peach preserves. There wasn't anything left in the cellar, especially crocks. I know because I collect them and that was the first thing I removed from the house."

I took Nina into my kitchen and pointed to a large batter jug with loads of blue on it, and some other nice pieces of Norton stoneware.

 "You missed a few," I remarked.

Nina's black eyes widened, the way a collector's eyes will when they've seen something they really want.

 "Okay," she said, "Name your price."

Pamela E. Apkarian-Russell is an author and a leading authority on Halloween.

She is available for lectures, interviews, consultations, and appraisals.

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