“This is it, Iskender, efendi. The end,” Aram Bohjalian, an old friend of the Agha Boghos family, tells his buddy as the Turks capture the Armenian quarter in Ourfa and the whole city goes up in flames. “The one person who could save Ourfa is dead and our hopes have died with him,” adds Aram. One wonders if it can be anything but “the end” when the only home one has ever known is left behind, one’s entire possessions lost, family members and dear friends killed or disappeared. This sense of an ending is repeatedly evoked in Victoria Harwood Butler-Sloss’s The Seamstress of Ourfa, (Armida Publications, 2018), a novel set in the later years of the Ottoman Empire, when the entire Armenian population living in what is present-day Turkey were forcibly removed from their ancestral lands, deported into the desert, and massacred at the hands of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, labeled the “Red Sultan.”
Nonetheless, the novel ends with a new beginning for the eponymous seamstress Khatoun Agha Boghos and her family who, having crossed the border into Syria with the help of an Arab friend, arrive in Aleppo late one evening to start their “new life.” Khatoun leaves behind a flourishing sewing business and her dream house, with its many rooms and a patio filled with ferns “elegantly grouped around the stone fountain.” When she has difficulty falling asleep on the first night in her new home, “a room up a rickety staircase they were to sleep in,” she climbs to the rooftop, preferring to “enjoy the time awake rather than fret in bed.” “Halab. Alep. Aleppo. City of song. I am ready,” she sings out to the city with “the glorious skyline.”
The story centers around the character of Khatoun, a seamstress whose magic and generosity make life for her four children and all those around joyful. Khatoun rejoices in the newfound love of her daughter Alice and of young Sarkis, while Digin Tatou calls off the engagement as a “ridiculous fantasy,” breaking the hearts of two youngsters who, the woman who “sews stars into the world” knew, clearly loved each other. Her husband recognizes that it is his wife’s “small stitches that will keep us together.“ While he stays cloistered at home, smoking and drinking—“Her lover. Where did he go?”—the delicately built woman takes to the road to find material for coats and dresses to delight the Pasha’s wives. Digin Agha Boghos, whose insights “come from another place,” understands that if her husband’s presence were gone the house would be strange and empty.
Years later, in Nicosia, Cyprus, when Nene Khatoun puts her seven-year-old great-granddaughter Vicky to sleep, she comforts her with, “Don’t worry about us. We’ll all be here in the morning . . . and the next day, and the next and the next. And always.” Nestled into her heart, the little girl feels “the safest I have ever felt in my life.”
A dreamer like her great-grandma, Vicky describes her nene as “the rain….with me now and for always.” It is with her poetry and her images that Harwood Butler-Sloss conveys the reassuring presence of Nene Khatoun, who tells her great-granddaughter to “Open your eyes and you’ll always be able to hear me. I have many stories to tell.” The child knows Nene Khatoun tells her “important stuff.”
