Nonfiction from Lori Yeghiayan Friedman

Original Photo: Umanoide

The Emperor’s Dentist

Something propelled this great-grandfather of mine to leave.

With dental instruments strapped to his back, the sandstone spires of Cairo dusted, he headed southward on horseback with a third wife, a son from a former marriage, and six strong donkeys laden with rugs and silver, soon arriving in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in the nick of time, saving us.

Was it luck? Smarts? Daring? Prophecy? Madness?

This is diasporic memory where facts have been lost. Mythology is all I’ve got.

I know him through his descendants. Plus, I am one of them. We are emotional and charismatic, with a flair for the dramatic, periodic optimism that could dip into euphoria, usually followed by a considerable fall. I have seen this expressed in the gene pool in different ways, mine appear as a depressive hum they call dysthymia.

My grandmother, his first-born daughter, got the mania. She used to talk talk talk talk talk—and people found it annoying or charming, or alternated between finding it annoying and charming. I preferred it over the silence of her first-born son, my father. I learned a lot about things from her talk that no one mentioned, like her postpartum depression—after giving birth to my father—that saw her get sent off somewhere for fear she’d hurt the baby.

It was 1914 when my great-grandfather rode out, mere months before the massacres began, an escapee unaware of what he would escape. Maybe he was just done with empires, and possessed a skill and a desire to serve (an empire-less emperor) and a shit-ton of nerve. My great-grandfather—born in Constantinople (now Istanbul) in 1873 (or maybe 1874)—had a knack for marrying. He got hitched in Yozgat, and then again in Alexandria, and then again in Cairo, riding each marriage further south toward his destiny.

There is gold in them thar hills, is what I imagine he said to himself, “Old West” mythology being the mythology I know best. Prospects, that’s for sure. Why not try to get a piece of it?

Anatolia was yesterday’s news. If a man wanted to get somewhere, he needed to strike out, not be afraid of the unknown. He wasn’t one for holding onto the past. Who needed it? Armenians like him had done well for themselves in the capital city of Ethiopia, the only African nation to evade colonialism. The country welcomed them, and they brought their skills as jewelers, carpenters, lawyers and engineers to this fellow Christian nation. Some were arms dealers, which helped them fight off the Italians. And some were dentists.

Upon arrival, this great-grandfather of mine set about making an empire of his own, fathering child after child. Of the five that lived, the first was my grandmother—a beauty married off at 15 to a survivor twice her age, whose parents and four sisters had been murdered in the genocide. A gift for all he’d endured? A useful alliance?

This is diasporic memory where you learn your family history via Wikipedia, adding a little conjecture, and then combining it with things you heard as a child listening in on the adults speaking their foreign language with creatively-conjugated English words peppered throughout and, then, sprinkling in your imagination now that you’re interested and everyone’s gone, continually going back to this great-grandfather who crossed the Caucasus motivated by…something.

Dead babies haunt this story. Tell them about the emperor’s dentist’s wife, they say. She left her home in Cairo at the age of twenty riding on the back of his horse. Did she regret it? Do any of us make our best decisions at the age of twenty? Either way, there were no takesies-backsies.

When I was twenty-something and finishing college, I visited a psychic before a summer trip to Europe. The psychic said my ancestors traveled with me, that they think I drive too fast on the highway, and that there was something waiting for me at the home of my dad’s relatives in Italy, fellow descendants of the great-grandfather. She said to take it, that they had left it for me, that it was mine.

I remember wandering around my dad’s relatives’ apartment in Genoa listlessly picking up objects (I was depressed). This jade-egg paperweight on the mantle: is this it? What about this art deco silver cigarette case? I like this picture frame. Could it be what my ancestors wanted me to have? I finally found it. A bible that belonged to my great-grandmother. On the last day of my trip, my father’s cousin and I flipped through it while we sat at her kitchen table. At the back, a list of names, in Armenian, followed by dates. Her babies. Stillborn. I took it, and tucked it carefully inside my heart. Mine.

My great-grandmother died at 39; her destiny not quite as storied as his, though who knows what sorrow sat, cross-legged, at the center of the real man.

This is diasporic memory where we spin tales, as if predicting the future, by reading the patterns left by wet coffee grounds in an overturned demitasse cup: There will be a wedding soon, we say because of the lacy designs the grounds make on the sides of the cup, or You will soon embark on a journey, because of the mountain-like shapes the grounds leave behind.

I see a journey long past, propelled by luck, smarts, daring, prophecy or madness, that got us out of the Ottoman Empire in the nick of time, forever binding me to my great-grandfather—a man who was at least mad enough to volunteer to be the one to pick up a call from the palace in the wee hours, enter through the gates clutching a glorified set of pliers in one hand and a half-full bottle of Arak in the other, and climb inside the lion’s maw to yank a bone out by the root, from the skull of a living god.
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Lori Yeghiayan Friedman‘s most recent work has appeared or is upcoming in Mizna, Longleaf Review, Lost Balloon, Pithead Chapel, Memoir Monthly and the Los Angeles Times. Her creative nonfiction has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She earned an MFA in Theatre from UC San Diego and attended the Tin House Winter Workshop 2023. Follow her on Twitter: @loriyeg