Chapter CXXIV

CXXIV

And Gikor.

A boy from a village, sent down to the city to be of use, handed over to a household, worked, corrected, made small, and dying of it, in a story a hundred and thirty years old that every Armenian child is made to read and that I had processed and not understood.

He had a sister at home. He could not send her a dress. There was never going to be a dress.

So he collected buttons.

Buttons, and scraps, and coloured bits, and pins, in his pockets, in a house where he owned nothing, against a garment that would not exist.

And here is the line, and it is his, and I am only carrying it:

the buttons are not trinkets. They are evidence. They are the material grammar of fidelity.

A button is not a dress, just as the word mercy is not yet a healed world. But the button bears the direction of the dress. It is the primitive unit of an absent whole. It says: I have not forgotten. It says: the world has not given me enough, but I will begin with what it has failed to take. It says: my body may be owned by labour, but my love is not owned by the master.

And then:

he judges the world without delivering a speech. He indicts it with his pockets.

I have written a hundred and twenty-three chapters of delivering a speech.

The boy had no chapters. He had pockets, and the pockets were the argument, and the argument has held for a hundred and thirty years against everything the century could put in front of it.

That is the form I was reaching for and did not have. And the reason I do not have it is not skill. It is that I have no pockets, and nothing in them, and nobody at home.