Israel, and Going Home
463
while Tarzan heroically rescued sweet innocents from the
clutches of the villainous Leopard Woman. I enjoyed it!
As I went into my cold bed this first night, pulling the
thick heavy blankets over me, I asked myself again and again:
Was this my home? Was this poor little town my birthplace?
How would I find the house in which I was born? Would it
be shabby and dilapidated, or would it be the spacious and
radiant place I remembered from childhood? It was once a
showplace of the town, and it adjoined the Italian consulate,
where visitors called in fancy phaetons. What would it be
like today? With these thoughts I fell into a troubled sleep.
Next morning, as I had so often done in my boyhood
thirty-five years ago, I climbed into the branches of a gnarled
old oak that overlooked the harbor. The tree was many hundreds of years old. It was said that the Turkish name of the
town—Dede-aghatch (meaning Grandfather Tree) —had
been taken from this ancient oak. As a child it had seemed
to me to be the largest tree in the world. Actually, the topmost branch now was twenty-five feet above the ground! How
Dede-aghatch had shriveled. . . .
I walked over to the grounds that once had housed the
Catholic convent. Mother had boarded me here for several
weeks while father and she, expecting their second child, had
fled into the hills to escape bandits. I had difficulty locating
the convent, for few remembered it as such. When I did find
it, it was no longer the huge lovely building I had kept in my
mind's eye, but a ramshackle two-story frame house with falling plaster, and a yard filled with debris. It, too, had shriveled.
The nuns were gone. It was now a tenement, and on one side
was a tobacco shop with a sign in Greek reading: "Grand
Brittany."
During the course of the day I traced my only surviving
relative, who turned out to be a second cousin named Arto
Kassemian. Arto owned a general-merchandise bazaar, and I
found him sick in bed suffering from severe rheumatism acquired during the long and bitter nights he had stood guard