"You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilization from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn" /John Buchan

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The way to start a fairy tale in Armenian is this:

Կար ու չկար–there was, there was not.

When you say these words, the child on your lap knows they are entering a world that is in atemporal space: the young stay young, the bad are conquered only to return again, and to be conquered once more. The good prevails through every iteration.

The way to end a fairy tale in Armenian is this:

Երկնքից երեք խնձոր ընկավ:

Three apples fell from the sky.

One apple, we say, is for those who saw.

One apple is for the teller.

And one apple is for the listener who believes the tale.

***

The little Azerbaijani girl in the image looks like me as a child.

My Tati put my hair in the same tight braids, looped over my shoulders in thick, brown cords. Her baby hair escapes around the soft shell of her ear, curling around a perfect, oval face. She must be five or six, my niece’s age. She is laughing, her arms extended in front of her.

Her hands are too small, but she still tries to wrap them around the thick neck of a grotesque mannequin in military garb. The mannequin faces her in profile, chained to the floor of a jail cell by its ankles. She is just his height this way, the mannequin on its knees, her face a few inches away from his. Choking him.

At their feet, spent bullet casings and empty magazines flower into a metallic field.

I zoom in on the mannequin, its skull disproportionate to its body, a heavy neanderthal brow covering a single black eyebrow, its big, cow-eyes dark-lashed, rimmed in red. Underneath the ushanka and the cockade on its head, exaggerated ears stick out of black disheveled hair, its aquiline nose hooks and protrudes a few sizes too big for its face.

This apeish face is meant to belong to an Armenian prisoner of war.

When I cover this half of the picture, the girl could be outstretching her arms on a swing, could be reaching out to her father to carry her, could be racing toward the outstretched arms of her mother.

When I cover the girl, there is only the mannequin, its mouth pulling down at the edges, its eyes fixed and hopeless.

Alone forever at the moment of death.

***

The Spoils of War Museum opened on April 12, 2021 to great fanfare in the heart of downtown Baku, five months after the peace treaty on November 10, 2020 ended the 44-Day War with Artsakh (September 27–November 10, 2020). The museum showcases amongst its exhibits 300 artifacts captured from the dead and imprisoned Armenian soldiers, the bodies of many yet to be returned. Of its most controversial exhibits are the wax mannequins of Armenian soldiers staged in progressively dire situations, ending with them dead and chained to the floor.

At the entrance is the sign: "Karabakh is Azerbaijan!" accompanied by a wall adorned with over 2,000 Armenian license plates.

At its inauguration, Ilham Aliyev, the president of Azerbaijan, was the first to enter. In the picture, he walks proudly through an arch in his camo, flanked by the helmets of dead Armenian soldiers. The helmets are strung on chains driven through the center of the skull.

Row after row, horrible windchimes.

***

The fairy tale “How Some Children Played at Slaughtering” was only included in the earliest version of the Grimm Brothers’ tales Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales) in 1812. All subsequent versions of the tales omit this one.

A group of young children gathered in play. They were no more than five or six years old.

Quickly, they assigned roles. One boy would be the butcher. Another, the cook. One girl took the role of cook’s assistant, and another was to help prepare the meat.

And finally, the last boy was chosen to be the pig — not a glamorous part, but he accepted it, though with a bit of a pout.

For who would want to be the pig when they could be the butcher?

The game began. The butcher took up a small knife — the kind used to whittle sticks. They had all seen how it was done on the farm.

The “pig” lay down on the ground, oinking and giggling. The assistant cook held out a little bowl to catch the pretend blood, ready to make pretend sausages.

Then the butcher brought the knife to the boy’s throat and cut.

The giggling stopped.

The bowl filled, not with pretend, but with real blood.

Within the hour, the city council gathered. They were unsure what justice could mean in such a strange case.

The boy had killed — yet it was a game.

For a long time, they debated. Then one of the oldest councilmen stood.

“Let the judge take a beautiful red apple in one hand and a golden coin in the other — a fine Rhenish gulden. Call the boy before you, and hold out both hands. If he chooses the apple, he will be set free. If he chooses the coin, he knows the world too well, and must answer for it.”

So it was done. The judge knelt before the boy and held out both.

And the boy? The boy laughed and took the apple from his hand.

***

November 10th was declared Victory Day in Azerbaijan, but was later rescheduled to November 8th because November 10th coincides with Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s Day in Turkey–a celebration that both countries share in remembrance of the man who created the Turkish Republic as we know it now.

When speaking of the relationship with Azerbaijan, the president of Turkey, Tayyip Erdoğan calls it:

Bir millet, iki devlet.

One nation, two states.

To create the Turkish Republic out of the Ottoman Empire, Atatürk had to rebrand the actions of the empire, or more specifically, the actions of the Three Pashas. During WWI, Talaat Pasha, Enver Pasha, and Djemel Pasha orchestrated the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians in a genocide as the triumvirate of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), the central committee of the Young Turks. Atatürk’s interventions created a secularist, nationalistic republic–a homogenous ethnostate that denies to this day the rich history of Anatolia which was the home of Armenians, Greeks, Kurds, and Assyrians for centuries before the Ottoman Empire.

It was Lenin who said the empire is “the prison of peoples.”

Like any empire, the republic denies the bones on which it was created.

This denial continues to this day. Instead of the Young Turks, we now have Grey Wolves.

The only way the UN Genocide Convention could be applied to the Armenian Genocide is if the Republic of Turkey is deemed the successor of the Ottoman Empire through the London Agreement which provides that “‘the Tribunal may declare (in connection with any act of which the individual may be convicted) that the group or organization of which the individual was a member was a criminal organization.’” Essentially, in order to have any legal case against the Turkish Republic, there would need to be proof of the Turkish republic's inheritance of the perpetrators of the Ottoman Empire.

And what is our inheritance?

From July 29th to August 10th of 2020, Turkey and Azerbaijan held joint war games in Baku, Nakichevan, Ganja, Kurdamir and Yevlakh. We understood that this was in response to what media called “border skirmishes” in the Tavush District in Armenia and the Tovuz district in Azerbaijan, the division, a thread, a sheet of glass. A line in the sand and two letters.

So we told a story.

The story we told was this one:

Կար ու չկար–there was, there was not.

There were the People of the Garden. Artsakh, garden. They watched with quiet dread. Their scribes wrote letters in trembling ink. Their envoys whispered at distant courts, saying:

“Look, they sharpen blades not just on borders, but on memory.”

But few listened. The Flame of Azerbaijan burned brightly with gold and oil.

The Grey Wolves had long tongues in far kingdoms.

The Garden wept for justice, but justice had grown deaf in that land.

There is another common saying in Armenian:

Ասողին լսող է պետք

A speaker needs a listener.

***

I did not have many friends in private middle school. An awkward, swarthy Armenian girl whose mother still clothed in turtle necks and vests, I did not look like the affluent tweens whose fathers lived in McMansions, directors and CEOs. So it was with great relief that I met another girl with a similarly difficult last name to pronounce in my second semester. She was Turkish.

I told my mother about my friend and she told me she was happy for me, though with obvious unease. It was my aunt, less diplomatic, who recoiled. When she was 18 years old, the neighbors she grew up with had formed mobs in the night, their faces lit by torches, chanting "Ermənilərə ölüm,” Death to Armenians.

She escaped the Baku pogrom, but many of her friends did not.

I rolled my eyes: it was the early aughts, before 9/11, and we were both then considered Middle Eastern in a mirage of orientalism–exotic, but not deadly, yet. We laughed about our xenophobic cultures, empires, borders. We had the same lunches packed and the same parents who would not let us have sleepovers with our seemingly emancipated friends, whose parents went on ski trips and whose nannies slipped them drinks.

We danced the same. We looked the same.

And then one day we argued. I don’t remember what–something silly, I’m sure. All I remember is this moment, in the midst of arguing, that she looked me in the eye, and with great gravity, said:

“I wish we’d killed the rest of you.”

***

In a 2020 speech about COVID precautions, President Erdogan used the phrase “leftovers of the sword,” a phrase commonly used to describe those Christians who the Ottoman Empire did not manage to kill–with pride and with an ongoing commitment–a reminder that many were slaughtered and the rest will follow.

“We do not allow terrorist leftovers of the sword in our country," he said, "to attempt to carry out [terrorist] activities. Their number has decreased a lot but they still exist."

Today, the Republic of Artsakh no longer exists.

It was dissolved after Azerbaijan used Israeli weapons, Syrian mercenaries, Turkish armies and white phosphorus to flush out the Armenians, who, like my family, had ancestors who’d been living there since 484 AD.

Today, the Grey Wolves and the Flame circle. They raise their children with Victory marches and wax mannequins of dying Armenian soldiers.

In a video that went viral during the 44-Day War, an Azerbaijani school teacher points to a map on the wall:

“And who are our enemies, children?”

Azerbaijani children that look like me, like my nieces and nephews, shout back:

“Ermeniler!” Armenians.

What is our inheritance if not the remnants of the sword?

***

“How Some Countries Played at Slaughtering”

Կար ու չկար–there was, there was not.

A group of younger countries gathered in play.

But since they were younger, they were pushed around. Persecuted, one might say.

No matter, they thought, they’d play amongst themselves.

They had seen how their elders did it in Britain, France, Spain, Belgium, Germany, in Turkey, and later, in the United States, and so they knew how. They had seen how their elders spread disease and famine, killed the wild Buffalo, leveled the potato crops, chained nations to the bows of ships, paid five dollars for the scalps of women and children. How they created encampments, filled them with people, with gas. How they walked them through deserts without bread or water and shot them dead when they fell.

And the people, the people who had once lived in these countries and now died in these countries, entered a world that was in atemporal space: the young stayed young and dead, the bad conquered, and were sometimes conquered themselves, only to return again.

Then they took up the knife, didn’t they.

Who wants to be the pig when they can be the butcher, instead?

***

The first apple is for us, who witness.

The second apple is for me, who tells.

And the third apple is for those who believe.

Those who know that the answer is the same whether we take the apple or the coin.

Those who know the world too well, and must answer for it.

***

Now you, reader:

Stretch out your hand.