How Can You Shame a Donkey?

A STORY

by MARJORIE ANAÏ’S HOUSEPIAN

THERE was a time when the Excel Plumbing Fixture establishment on East 27th Street was the site of Pousant’s Armenian Specialties, a restaurant that my great-uncle Pousant started upon his arrival in the States in 1925. My most poignant memories of the restaurant are of that summer when, because of a trip my parents Wwere forced to make, I lived in a small room off the kitchen. There could not have been a pleasanter location for a ten-year-old with a gargantuan appetite.

During my visit I was theoretically under the guardianship of Uncle Pousant’s wife, Hadji, a raucous lady with tattoos acquired while on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem some twenty years before. “Hadji" was a title given anyone fortunate enough to make the trip, and the tattoos, depicting the Crucifixion on one arm and Mary Magdalene washing the Lord’s feet on the other, had at one time been marks of great distinction. Hadji’s given name was Astghik, meaning “little star,” and had obviously been bestowed by a shortsighted parent, for she towered over her husband and weighed close to three hundred pounds.

Hadji was a wonderful guardian. For one thing, she operated on the theory that life is short and God is good, and that if you concentrated on food and wore a bit of camphor under your dress, He and Uncle Pousant would take care of the less pleasant details. This seemed to me to be a very sensible attitude. For another, she was fervently devoted to midnight snacks, and it was tacitly understood that I might join her if I were awake.

Sometime after midnight I would be awakened by Hadji making a great clatter as she descended the stairs, with many feigned groans and exclamations of “Ssssh” to imaginary cats and dogs. My door would be open, and her huge form bundled in yards of white flannel and bright blue shawl would throw a mountainous shadow on the wall beside me. Tossing on my bathrobe, I would run to the kitchen, where she would have already set two places.

“What!” Hadji would exclaim. “ You are awake at this hour!”

“I couldn’t sleep, Hadji, the truck noises—”

Hadji would cluck her tongue several times. “We-ll, as long as you are up now, how about a little dolma?”

We would devour what seemed like bowls of leftover grape leaves stuffed with rice, and dozens of paper-thin pastry envelopes filled with melted cheese, and many skewers of shish-kebab, topped off with any number of desserts soaked in syrup, and all washed down with creamy yogurt. It might have been exactly what we had for dinner, but it always tasted infinitely better at that daring hour, with Hadji’s sleeves rolled and her elbows resting on the table so that I might study the tattoos, while she would try to explain what had made Mary Magdalene a nasty woman — something which had never been cleared up satisfactorily in Sunday school — and obligingly flex her muscles, making the foot-washing scene come to life. The artist had outdone himself on the Crucifixion, and long after I had gone to bed I would be haunted by the agonized expressions on the faces of the two thieves.

When I awoke one morning, sunlight was filtering through the fire escape, casting stripes on the mottled brown wallpaper. My room was furnished with bizarre accessories which suited Hadji’s taste and mine perfectly. It was a strange combination of Coney Island and the Jerusalem pilgrimage, so that ornate crucifixes and incense burners vied with fuchsia-colored feather dusters and a highly rouged doll in a peach taffeta overskirt. The doll was Madame Bon-Bon and we were on a strictly “How are you this morning?” relationship, carrying on our formal conversation until Uncle Pousant stood in the doorway hammering the bottom of a very large frying pan with a wooden spoon.

Hadji was sleeping off a third helping of halva, so that now I shared the kitchen table with Uncle for a breakfast of fried eggs and a spoonful of Turkish coffee in a glass of milk. I thought his handle-bar mustache the longest and fiercest in the world, and watched admiringly as he wiped the ends with a paper napkin after each sip of coffee. Uncle Pousant was not in a communicative mood at that early hour. He was absorbed in planning the day’s menu, and he mumbled to himself about stewed eggplant and remembering to order onions, staring all the while through the burners on the coal stove. After the menu was arranged to his satisfaction he tilted his chair, raised his feet to the stove, and lit the stubby remnant of a cigar which had been left over from the previous morning.

Uncle Pousant’s shoes were almost as interesting as Hadji’s tattoos. It was not merely that they were large or very black or turned up at the toes and wrinkled at the ankles, or even bulbous where the bunions must have been, but possibly because of all these things, and because they were high — the only high ones of similar size that I had ever seen — and shaped to his feet, that the poor things had a distinct and melancholy character. I could almost hear them carry on forlorn conversations with each other, moaning and complaining about being tired, while Uncle Pousant looked intently at the toes.

2

UNCLE POUSANT was never so happy as when he was pondering problems, great or small. In the evening it would be the Prime Minister of Great Britain or the foreign policy of Yugoslavia. In the morning it was usually the price of artichokes and the janitor.

Uncle Pousant’s relations with the janitor had been deteriorating for many years. The origin of the feud had long been forgotten, but at the time of my visit it was concentrated on the question of who was to sweep the courtyard behind the restaurant. This was a rectangular area directly outside our kitchen door which faced the rear of a six-story apartment building apparently tenanted entirely by families who owned no garbage cans. Setrag, the dishwasher, had been sweeping it each morning, until the day came when Uncle Pousant began enumerating the janitor’s offenses and decided that the courtyard was the janitor’s responsibility. Setrag was on his way out the door with the broom when Uncle Pousant called him back. “Setrag,” he said, “you are forbidden to sweep the courtyard.”

Setrag stared blankly for a moment and then began to clear his car with his index finger. “What say, boss?” I had heard him mumble to himself on many a hot morning about the indignity of the assignment.

“I said you are forbidden to sweep the courtyard!” said Uncle Pousant firmly.

Setrag smiled until his gold tooth showed. “Hokay, boss!”

In a very few days the courtyard was littered with bits of paper, orange peels, broken beer bottles, and several thousand cigarette butts. It was obviously a question of days before the tide would rise to the level of our doorsill. Hadji, who was casual in all things except matters of cleanliness, began to threaten to clean it herself, one morning, when the janitor appeared at the kitchen door.

“JahneeTOR!” cried Uncle Pousant, using the word as though it were a proper name. “That yard is a disgrace to my establishment.”

“You’re damn right, it’s disgusting,” said the janitor. He had a slight cast in his left eye which gave him a shifty-eyed look. I could see that it made Uncle Pousant uncomfortable too, for he glared first at one eye and then at the other. “I came here to tell you to get your man after it. It ain’t my garbage!”

“Are you a statue that you cannot attend to your tasks, you indolent son of a ne’er-do-well father and a slothful mother whose nose-holes should be looking down in shame?” Uncle, in his excitement, spoke mostly in Armenian, but the janitor caught the general tone of his remarks.

“Watch your language, buddy,” he muttered, unable to stare down Uncle Pousant any longer, and he walked away, kicking an empty tin can lying in front of the door.

“I’ll just go out this once and the man will feel ashamed,” said Hadji, easing her way toward the door with the broom.

“Shamed!” said Uncle. “Shamed! How can you shame a donkey? A miserable idiot of an excuse for a human being! I will not give in. I would be shamed.”

“I will give in, not you,” said Hadji, but Uncle Pousant firmly took the broom from her hands.

“Pigs!” said Uncle Pousant, referring to our neighbors. “May they spend all eternity cleaning the ashes from the hell fires.”

“We will have mice,” said Hadji, but Uncle Pousant was now deep in thought. We waited while he puffed his cigar furiously for a few seconds, a sign that a solution would soon be offered. In a few moments he threw the cigar butt into the stove and slapped his thigh.

“Eshalah!”

“All right,” said Hadji, “what are you going to do? ”

“I am afraid,” said Uncle Pousant, “that I shall have to take this matter to the highest authorities. I shall write to the Board of Health!” Uncle Pousant considered this agency on a par with the United States Senate. “The Board of Health!” Uncle Pousant repeated. “Anaïs, get some paper and write this. I will tell you, I will toll you,” he added as I began to protest. “Go on, go on, get the paper.”

I ran to my room and came back with a pad and pencil.

“Write!” said Uncle Pousant. “But translate it well. ‘My Honored Sirs.'”

I interrupted. “My teacher says that you begin letters ‘Dear Sir,'" I said.

“Your teacher comes from peasant stock,” said Uncle Pousant. “Also, she was not considering that you would be writing to the Board of Health. Write as I tell you, ‘My Honored Sirs.’” I wrote.

“My Honored Sirs.

“Forgive me for crossing upon your noble paths with my small problems. Your work is of the Highest Order and may your two eyes never grow cold in the performance of your duties.”

“In English this sounds silly,” I said.

“Write!” said Uncle Pousant. “This is poetry, not prose.

“Eight years have I stood upon your glorious soil and breathed your free air. Eight years have I labored in the restaurant business — Pousant’s Armenian Specialties, 125 East 27 Street — in your land of purity and sunshine. Eight years have your inspectors found fit to smile upon my spotless kitchens.

“But now, in my happiest days, misfortunes are creeping to my very doors. Darkness is coming upon me and a blackness such as I have never seen before is beginning to engulf my establishment. I implore your aid.

“May the lights always shine in your eyes to the great glory of the United States of America. May I remain always, your obedient servant in the restaurant business, Pousant Kaymakamian, Proprietor, Peasant’s Armenian Specialties.”

“Is that all?” I said.

“Read it to me,” said Uncle Pousant. “I will not understand all of it but I will get the thoughts.”

I read it to him.

“It has not the beauty of the Armenian,” said Uncle Pousant, “but what can you do? It’s their language.”

“You haven’t told them about the yard,” I said, “or the janitor, or the orange peels or anything.”

“My girl,” said Uncle Pousant patiently, “this is the Board of Health. Do you have to say ‘One and one is two’ to the Board of Health? Go on, go on, send it.”

“It sounds very good,” said Hadji, “what I can understand. But I think you should have mentioned the janitor.”

“You don’t understand about such things,” said Uncle Pousant, and he went back to the artichokes.

3

A FEW days later, around seven o’clock in the evening, eight or nine relatives newly arrived in America had gathered for dinner as usual at the long banquet table at the far end of the restaurant. Uncle Pousant would at night become extremely talkative, though I never quite understood these nightly discussions. The talk always centered on revolutions, each relative having lived through at least one in some part of the globe. At the time, I thought that the Armenian for “revolution” meant the equivalent of earthquake, and I arrived at the conclusion that they were all rather foolish to have sat around in places where the earth was prone to quaking. Uncle Pousant was the revolutionary authority in the family. He had, by some quirk of fate, been present at no fewer than four — two in Turkey and two in Russia — and this seemed to make him a savant on subjects political ranging from the Republican primaries to the trouble in Alsace-Lorraine.

Uncle Pousant felt it his duty to impart some of what he considered his broad knowledge of American politics to his newly arrived relatives. At some time during the evening he would be holding forth on one subject or another, as oblivious of the scattered customers intent upon their meals as they were of him. Most of these were regulars and often joined the family for dessert and Turkish coffee, but occasionally a stranger or two, probably drawn by the seductive smell of the frying koeftas, entered the restaurant, and Uncle would stop his fist-pounding long enough to shout “Welcome, welcome,” and wave them to a cozy side table.

“Odar — foreigner,” he would whisper to Minas, the waiter, indicating that these must receive the special treatment. This meant bringing the clean linen, fetching the good silver and untarnished saltcellars, and, no matter what the order, serving pulaki — layers of lamb, tomato, and eggplant baked in a cheese sauce — which never failed to elicit rapt expressions from the diners.

This night, after the dinner was over and while the Turkish coffee was being served, a policeman entered the restaurant and asked to speak to the proprietor. The officer was a mild enough looking soul — even seemed a bit startled when he saw Pousant. All he wanted, he told me, was to sell some lotteries for the Police Force Relief Association. But Uncle might have been confronted with the President himself. He bowed several times and, as usual in his excitement, spoke entirely in Armenian.

“You honor me, sir,” he said. The policeman looked puzzled, and since no one was offering to help out, I volunteered.

“You honor him,” I told the officer.

“For what?” asked the policeman.

“For what?” I asked Uncle in Armenian.

“For what! For doing me this honor, as a representative of the government, for coming to my aid as its lawful emissary. I, who came to this country eight years ago; I, who —” It began to dawn on me that Uncle believed the officer had been sent by the Board of Health.

“He wants to sell some chances,” I broke in.

“What in hell is he talking about?” asked the officer.

“He thinks you’ve been sent by the government,”

I said, trying to condense it a bit.

“I’ll be damned,” said the policeman. By this time Uncle had raised his glass of raki and was heatedly toasting the officer and the United States of America. The policeman scratched his head, then turned around and started to leave. But Uncle Pousant was not one to let an emissary of the government slip through his fingers. As soon as he saw that the officer was leaving, he rushed in front of him, blocked the exit, and proceeded to usher him to his own seat, shouting all the while for Minas to fetch the linen and set a new place. The officer began to wipe his forehead with a large polka-dotted handkerchief. He looked around and seemed relieved when he spotted me. “Tell him thanks, but I’ve got to be getting along,” he said. I conveyed the message, but Uncle waved his hand back and forth and laughed knowingly, taking these protests as mere politesse.

“He has not yet seen the yard,” he whispered to me in Armenian. “He thinks that he is intruding on us tonight and must return on his business in the morning. We must show hospitality.”

“He’s selling some lotteries,”I said.

“He is?” said Uncle Pousant. “Then I must buy some. It is the same in every country; the man must earn a little something extra if he has a large family to support. Tell him I will buy three books.”

“He wants to buy three books of chances,”I said to the officer, whose face lit up immediately.

“Three just happens to be what I’ve got with me,” he said; and apparently relieved beyond words at this transaction, he shrugged his shoulders and plunged a fork into the dolma. We all watched expectantly as he chewed and swallowed. “Say, this stuff’s all right!” he said. Uncle immediately put the entire platter before him and waved to Minas to bring the raki.

“Sorry,” said the officer wistfully as Minas began to fill his glass, “tell him I can’t drink in uniform.” I passed this word along to Uncle Pousant, who then turned to the relatives.

“Do you see what scrupulous officials they have in America? he said, and added, Minas, bring some Turkish coffee for the gendarme.”

An hour later, as I trudged reluctantly to bed, Uncle was teaching the officer an old Armenian toast, while the policeman stared incredulously at Hadji’s arms.

I must have eaten even more than usual that night because I didn’t wake up for a midnight snack with Hadji.

Uncle Pousant was in a splendid humor the next morning. He hummed the Marseillaise as he lit the stove, and nodded his head and smiled when I asked him about the policeman, He didn’t speak until he had finished stirring the coffee and was sitting at the table with me. “My girl,” he said, “have you looked at the yard this morning?”

I ran to the kitchen door and looked out. The courtyard was perfectly clean except for two cigarette butts and a small scrap of paper. Uncle Pousant surveyed the scene proudly.

“Who swept it?” I asked.

Uncle Pousant became impatient. “Who swept it? Who could have swept it? Last night I show it to the officer; this morning it is clean! That is the United States Government for you — action!”

A few moments later Hadji came slowly down the stairs a step at a time. She looked as though she had been anticipating our news.

“Look!” said Uncle Pousant, pointing to the yard.

“I saw, I saw,” said Hadji, “from the window. Your uncle is a genius.”

“Genius!” said Uncle Pousant, “although most Armenians, it is true, do not know how to handle these matters.”

“Of course not,” said Hadji.

The letter from the Board of Health came a week later. I ordinarily read the mail to Uncle Pousant as soon as it arrived, but I took this one to my bedroom and opened it when I was alone. It, read: —

Pousant’s Armenian Specialties
125 East 27 Street
New York, XA .
DEAR SIR: —
We are in receipt of your letter of September 1, and suggest that you contact your Consolidated Edison Company representative for help in solving your problem.
Yours very truly,
JAMES B. SIMONS
Complaint Department