At The Bottom of the Fifth Box

There’s a non-zero chance I regret posting this publicly but frankly, this is far less vulnerable than weeping gently in naught but a paper gown all the way through a routine gynecological exam. Nothing and love and respect for my NP, who understood that losing an estranged father is difficult but rescheduling a routine check-up might just be worse.

Sitting hunched in my mom’s basement alcove hurriedly sitting through photos was somehow even less comfortable, and I was clothed for that.

At this point I’m convinced that my step-dad’s side of the family is the second-most photographed gaggle of Armenians in the contiguous United States. Two reusable grocery bags and three boxes are full to the brim with photo albums, film strips, and prints that span at least a hundred years and three continents worth of family history, none of which I can piece together other than what I was alive and present for. This is a task for another day.

I was looking for a picture of me and my dad, the only one I knew to exist. I had found it some years ago and recognized myself, but not the man whose lap I was sitting on. I can’t remember if he had a mustache in the photo or not — either he did, and it was what tipped me off that this might be my dad, or he didn’t and that’s why I had no idea who he was. I clearly hated the mustache very much because it’s the only thing about his face that I remember: a horrible mustache floating over a blue-and-gray striped robe, pattering around my grandma’s apartment.

My mom remembers the robe, my aunt does not. “That must have been during the Moscow years,” she said. I am now piecing together a timeline: in Baku, my dad wore sports jackets. In Moscow, the robe.

Strangely, my clearest memory of him is a nightmare. In it I am hiding behind a doorframe — in the same spot I had stood at some other point in my waking life, listening to a heated argument between him and my mom. In the dream, there is no argument. Instead, bandits burst in and begin to beat my dad, but before my subconscious could conjure blood they instead turn him into a small golden statue, featureless but vaguely man-shaped, and hand him to me.

I only learn anything about my dad when the steely Soviet women that raised me burst into brilliant, blinding flashes and offer me snapshots of a troubled man: he drank, he gambled, he stole, but he was so kind. Everyone remembered him to be kind. He drove my mom to the brink. She described him as having a swagger but I remember an awkwardness. In the months before he died, he apparently said that no one has wronged him more than he has wronged himself. He wanted to make amends.

I wanted to let him. Until this past Sunday, running into him was a matter of when, not if. Just as soon as things settled down I would go visit my aunt in Azerbaijan and I would get a chance to see him, if I felt up to it. I'd study his face across some cafe table, and I’d marvel at how old he was. Maybe I’d still hate the mustache, if he had it. Twenty-three years estranged and rarely the first-hand victim of his many, many misfortunes, I found it hard to hold a grudge.

After his heart surgery he had apparently asked if he could call. I wish he had asked someone who would think to text me and just ask. I don’t know what we’d talk about but there are questions only he could answer. Unfortunately, now that he’s dead I’ve only got more of them.

I can’t remember your face or your voice, but today I learned that we both have an aptitude for music and languages. I played a concert the day you died and in it, a funeral march. Did you know Beethoven’s 3rd? Would you have at least appreciated the irony? Did you ever think that I would grieve you?

Two grocery bags and two boxes in my mom’s basement are full of photo albums. My step-dad was well-enough traveled and loved to pose shirtless or with a guitar, or holding a guitar while shirtless. He was jovial and swaggy and the life of the party. There are several albums full of my brother's photos, including school photos and photo key tags erroneously ordered and never handed out. My middle school emo phase is sparsely documented. There is one particularly striking picture of my grandparents from the 80s that I wish had a second copy I could have grabbed.

The fifth box of photos is a Karl Lagerfeld shoebox that's lost much of its structural integrity, full of hundreds of unsorted prints of different sizes piled face-down and in no real order, some of them duplicates of prints in other boxes. The further I dug into the stack the more panicked and bleary-eyed I became: I had pulled photos of my childhood dog, my grandma, my cousin, and a very 2000s JC Penney family portrait, but could not find the one picture that had me hunched half-weeping in a basement alcove. The thwip, thwip, thwip of prints being stacked kept time.

At the bottom of the fifth box I found a picture of me with a man I feel like I should recognize, because I kind of have his face. He is barely smiling, and looks older than he ought to have looked in 2001. Based on his posture, I wonder if he, like me, doesn't love being touched. Most shockingly, and I do hate to admit this — he could do with a mustache.

I took a quick snapshot of the print, checked the time in Baku, and sent a two-word text to my aunt with the image attached:

это он?

this him?

At least now I have a face to put to the grief handed to me like a statue in a dream, heavy and gold. I will never get to ask him a thing, so instead I’ll forgive, I’ll forgive, I'll forgive.