Bezjian: The Day the Black Dog Died
Nigol Bezjian
We lived in an old church that was converted to a house located on a narrow street, so narrow at certain points that an adult could not stretch his arms horizontally without touching the walls. [...]
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The Armenian Weekly
We lived in an old church that was converted to a house located on a narrow street, so narrow at certain points that an adult could not stretch his arms horizontally without touching the walls. In fact, when I had no keys to our main door, I’d simply stretch out my arms and legs and scale myself upwards by the walls like a spider until I reached the roof of my dwelling. I’d maneuver my young and flexible bones to make the leap and descend to our courtyard, silently entering the room I shared with my grandmother and two younger brothers. The street called Makhlouta by the residents was a shoot off from a small gate of the main cobblestone-paved street located near the historical Bab al-Nasr (Victory Gate), with its giant wooden panels covered with iron casing still hanging after centuries. Near and around the gate was an ice factory, woodworkers, dairy product vendors, pastry shops, dozens of bookstores, and one unrated cinema called Saaid where you had to bring your own chair, stool, or pillow to watch—not films but—flickering images sliced together from unnamed and unheard of films on a patched dirty white screen. And unforgettably, there was the underground gym with its countless neon light tubes where our young lads practiced lifting weights, hoping to be the next Dan Vadis, Steve Reeves, or Mickey Hargitay. A few even practiced “dancing like a butterfly and sting like a bee” to be the next newly found boxing hero like Muhammad Ali.

At the far opposite end was the Jdediah market (named after the Biblical Jedadiah) full of butchers, fruit and vegetable vendors, bakeries, tweezers makers, and live poultry shops that slaughtered a hen only after you handpicked her. It was the best of the old-fashioned grocery store that sold anything you wished, be it lamb wool, olive oil, honey, sheep butter, spices, canned goods, hardware, rope, incense, an assortment of cheeses, candies, or nuts. It was where bees and flies in buzzing hordes would meet the crowds of men and women flocking into the Armenian-owned shops hoping to be the first to purchase the best merchandise.

Between Victory Gate and kaleidoscopic Jdediah was the diminutive entrance that led to Makhlouta, a cul-de-sac with many branches and twists, a fun-providing maze for kids and a confusing labyrinth for visiting adults—unless accompanied by neighbors to usher them to the heavily cast metal doorknob to strike a call and awaken the residents from their sleep.

For the many years we lived there, our neighbors mostly remained the same. Every now and then, though, fresh families would take up the empty spaces left by those who had relocated to better neighborhoods—like Ovsana’s Armenian family who moved to Azizieh, or the Akkads who said they were moving to Switzerland. Years later I learned that my neighbors were related to Moustapha Akkad who went to UCLA film school way ahead of me. He was the man behind “The Messenger of God, Lion of the Desert” and produced the horror film “The Halloween”; I met him in 1978 in Pinewoods Studios near London asking him for a job. At the age of 75, on Nov. 11, 2005, Moustapha and his daughter Rima were tragically killed in a suicide bombing in a hotel in Amman, Jordan, during young Rima’s wedding reception, aborted in horror and gore.

Next to us was another Christian family. Joseph Al Mukhtar, a notary public with a large belly, friendly smile, and welcoming manners, lived with his coquette and petite wife, who adorned a sculpted pompadour. And there was Josephine with her skeleton-like aged husband and her semi-tamed white poodle Jojo, who one day attacked my three-year-old brother, snatching the sandwich roll of tomato paste, sprinkled red pepper, dry mint powder, and olive oil he was enjoying on the limestone step of our front door. Jojo’s assault frightened my brother, rendering him speechless for the following several days and leaving him with a stutter for many years in varying degrees. Josephine, feeling terribly guilty, sent white Jojo away for good, hoping in vain that my brother would regain his normal speech. After Jojo’s eternal asleep, Josephine followed her dog and died in her afternoon siesta tucked under a white blanket. Her skeleton company, one day we noticed, was never seen again. Not much later, Notary Joseph and his wife moved out of Makhlouta, turning us into the only Armenian and the only Christian family to last the testing tolerance of our neighbor’s lenience at large.

There were several Kurdish families. One was Abu Hamid’s, who cleaned carpets with the aid of his wife Um Hamid and their three sons, Hamid, Haviz, and Walid. Then there was Ibrahim, known as Abu Subhi, and Malakeh’s family. He was married twice and worked in a hospital as a helper; in his free time, he performed circumcisions, chopping off the extra sensitive penile foreskin of young Muslim boys of the neighborhood to make some extra money (he purchased the first black and white television set in our neighborhood). The young and old of Makhlouta would gather in Abu Subhi’s courtyard to watch the American TV series “Combat,” starring Vic Morrow, and us kids would read allowed the Arabic subtitles for the illiterate adults. The beautiful, tall, and thin Malakeh worked as a housemaid while raising her own sons, Farouq, Abdo, Ra’ouf, and Saeed while keeping up with the much older Sabah she inherited from her husband’s first wife. There was another Kurdish family with countless children whose names I do not remember, except that they had a teenage daughter slightly older than me with huge breasts that drove us insane. She had milk-white, smooth skin and knew perfectly well how to expose the upper part of her breast and shake them just enough through her colorful shoulder-to-toe dress to attract our attention, and drive us mad wondering if she was carrying three breasts instead of two. If I am not wrong, her name was Khadija. Not longer after Josephine’s coffin was carried away, another casket came out of Khadija’s house, which was next door to Jojo’s mother. The stillborn baby in a white coffin was carried on his sister Khadija’s shoulder with the help of other family members and the neighboring Kurds ululating a tragic Kurdish loss.

Ovsanna’s family lived across from Joseph. They shared the upper part of a house with a Muslim family, whose matriarch was an Armenian who had survived the genocide. She was the second wife to Abu ‘Azz al-Din and had given birth to Nadir, Nadia, and Found. Above them, Ossian lived with her children Garabed, Nazareth, and Ankine, who fashioned her hair like Hollywood stars did, and was a close friend of my maternal aunt Arsine; together they sang duets of Adamo’s songs. Her husband, baron Barkev, with a round head, simple eyes, and grey hair, always had a pair of scissors, a comb, and eyeglasses in a leather pouch inside of his shirt’s chest pocket, ready to give a haircut to anyone at anytime and any place. His barber shop was located in the historical Bab El-Faraj city center, a bustling oriental plaza with a clock tower crowded with Armenian money exchangers, basturma sellers, lavash bread bakers, and taxi and bus stations that transported travelers to long-distance locations and gathered innumerable variety of transients selling and buying things beyond anyone’s imagination.

Next to the later-famed Akkad family was the Amin family. The man of the clan was a high-ranking officer in the army, and later his close relative became president of Syria for a brief time when the presidential office seemed to be a revolving door due to countless coup d’etats. At the time, few new families were moving in, and interestingly both had a son named Jamal. I became close friends with both Jamals, particularly with Jamal Attly who was younger with a twin sister—a beautiful girl with long black hair and hazelnut eyes in the shape of almonds named Jamila. She took an important place in my youth by being my first kiss. At that age, we didn’t know the terms boyfriend-girlfriend, but with today’s understanding we could have been identified as such. We were inseparable particularly in the hot scorching Aleppo summer afternoons, when most adults slept and we slipped away to exchange kisses and hold hands.

The Attlys were a large family with many offspring to count: Ali, Mouhssen, Mehdi, Zakaria, Yahya, Housain, Hassan, and the twins Jamal and Jamila. Ali, Mouhssen, and Mehdi were much older than us, and then came Zakaria, a handsome young man who took it upon himself to protect my family and our friends who visited us. He worked in butcher shops at day and in restaurants at night, grilling meet skewers of shish kebabs. Yahya was a troublemaker always fighting with neighbors, street vendors, and the authorities. Housain always had a book in his hand, looking like a teenager interested in becoming an intellectual. Hassan was my rival and we mostly fought over boyish matters. Jamal was partners with me since we were both close to Jamila.

The other Jamal belonged to a smaller family in comparison to the Attlys, and we didn’t know much about them. We didn’t even know if they were Arab, Bedouin, Kurdish, Turcoman, Chechen, Cherkez, Daghstani, or Tabarasas. Jamal had older and younger brothers, but none were about when we played our street games; they all seemed to work the entire day. Except for Jamal, that is, who joined us once or twice a week, always wanting to be my teammate regardless if the game dictated having a team or individual challenge. Otherwise, Jamal toiled as a boy from early morning to late night, and all of our neighbors knew when he had returned home at midnight. Walking through the dark and barren streets, he used to perfectly sing the songs from the Indian films that had swept the city back then. Jamal’s favorite Indian songs were from the film “Junglee” starring Shami Kapoor, and the title song of the film went “Aai, aai yaa sukoo, sukoo, aai, aai, yaa karoon main kya sukoo, sukoo.” This loud singing served to both announce that he was back home from work, and as a defense mechanism of a frightened child who was walking alone in total darkness and in the absence of streetlights. The lively “Aai aai yaa sukoo sukoo” reflected his joyous and happy mood; otherwise he would sing the melancholic, melodramatic, and older but enduring “Awaara hoon, awaara hoon, ya gardish mein hoon aasman ka taara hoon” from the film “Awaara-Vagabond” starring Raj Kapoor and Nargis.

Most significantly, there was the physically absent but omnipresent mythical Jamal Abdul Nasser from Egypt, who sent shivers down my spine. Every Friday in those days, Makhlouta Street would go silent behind closed doors with the distasteful odor of fried onions filling the sky above. All the radios in our neighborhood would be on, with the volume increased to the max, to hear the speech of Nasser broadcast from Cairo via electromagnetic waves. His oratory covered the fried onions-and-garlic airspace, and the absolute silence and calm frightened me to death. Without fail my grandmother would say, “There goes the Black Dog again.” Later I learned that Armenians who were intimidated by any non-Armenian leader unfriendly to them would refer to him as the “Black Dog.” When I asked my grandmother if the nickname of the frightening man was due to his dark skin, she said, “No, black dog is a bad sign,” a premonition she could not explain. In fact, Peter Balakian used it as a title for one of his books, Black Dog of Fate.

We’d learn in school when the doors were open that there was no coup d’etat, and would play plenty of marbles, hide and seek, seven cities, belt hunting, toush, uzun eshag, spinner, and many other games on the cobblestone streets. I had moved from Jamila to Souraya, to Muna, Huda, Thoumaia, and Amina, tasting the flavors of my neighbors’ young lips.

“Awaara” and “Junglee” were followed by “Mother India,” “Diwana,” “Around the World in 80 Days,” “Love in Tokyo,” “Boot Polish,” “Baarsat,” and “Tersi Manzil”—to name a few of the films from Bombay starring Shami, Raj, Shashi Kapoors, Joy Mukherji, Saira Banu, Nargis, and the Kumar clan. The films stayed in the cinemas for months and Aleppo’s population went there in droves, holding cloth and paper kerchiefs ready to cry. The 1967 Arab-Israeli six-day war had already taken place on June 7 and Nasser had resigned on June 9 after his catastrophic loss. His resignation with a famous speech was rejected by the masses, forcing him to stay in office while we heard the news and left the worry to the adults. Until it was Friday again, and my Jamila and her brother Jamal went to their dwelling, and I locked myself up with my mother, grandmother, and two younger brothers. Our nearby Jamal kept on singing “Sukoo Sukoo” at nights and when we saw him in the daytime he was ever-ready to perfectly mimic Shami and Raj Kapoor with a load of gel in his coal-black and abundantly curly hair, just like his heroes manufactured in faraway Bollywood.

Time accelerated as we played between classes, without understanding any of the political turmoil. Until suddenly one morning, when there was a commotion on Makhlouta Street. I was drudgingly preparing myself early in the morning to go to school when I heard all sorts of cries and shouts from outside, sending us into a jolt: Something very unusual was happening. With my spunky energy I ran to the door, unbolting the safety lock to see what was going on.

To my shock I saw the entire population of Makhlouta chaotically marching in a pack, shouting slogans and chanting, “Al Fatiha! Bil-rouh Bil-dam Fidak ya Jamal. Jamal Bihmna Israel Ma’byieninah and La Ilaha illalah, Ya Jamal Bi-maoutak mnshouf Amal.” “What is going on,” I asked Housain, Hassan, and Jamal Attly, who were part of the passionate, emotional, and loud procession. “Jamal Abdul Nasser has died,” they said hurriedly, without disconnecting from the collective behavior. “But what is going on now!” I shouted above the crowd as they moved away from me, by a meter now. “Sukoo Sukoo committed suicide drinking a mixture of detergent powder of Tide,” Hassan replied while being pushed ahead by the crowd. “Why,” I asked hurriedly, and before I finished my admonishing question he replied that he had taken the news badly—he had believed he was named after Abdul Nasser, whose death prompted his decision to join the pan-Arab leader in the afterlife, as he had in real life. Seconds later, Jamal Awaara Hoon’s corpse, dressed in a black shirt and black trousers, looking cold and pale like a white Italian marble statue of a Roman emperor, came into my view and was being carried on raised arms without the Islamic burial white shroud. His black hair was combed away from his forehead with plenty of “Brilliant” gel cream true to the idols he animated and inflamed with mostly made up words. Now he was silent and lifeless, and I imagined that Raj and Shami Kapoor would look like this if they were dead.

Jamal Sukoo Hoon, a boy laborer, took his own life early on the morning of Sept. 28, 1970. He was getting ready to attend his daily work when the emergency radio bulletin turned the course of his life—up to then, only 12 or 13 summers—on that fine early spring day. He took his life with a chemical used to clean his clothes. An innocent boy burdened with a namesake hugely popular in the Arab world had assumed a grave responsibility to end his life and leave me with unanswered questions. What was the connection between the boy who always wanted to befriend me and play games and who toiled away day and night to bring bread to his poor family’s table, with the one in Cairo who scared me to death?

That day a black silence hung over Makhlouta as we remembered my friend with the sweet face, sad eyes, thick charcoal black hair, and prematurely wrinkled olive skin. Sweet-voiced Jamal was not going to sing Indian songs at midnight; he was not going to help his family with his childish earnings; he was not going to enjoy a game or two on his spare time; he was not going to grow into a real adult; and he was not going to understand that his life and name had really nothing to do with the Egyptian man, except for his father’s naive and illiterate reading of politics and primitive patriotic sentiments symbolized in Nasser.

I did not go to school that Monday, in sorrow of Jamal. But the schools would be closed for many days in mourning of the senior Jamal “Black Dog” who, by once calling “Masr, Um El Dunya” (Egypt, Mother of the World), confused Egypt, foremost, and the Arab world, in general, for years to come.

I’d be in shock after losing friends at such an early age. The first was my kindergarten classmate, who died when he accidentally slipped over a fence that protected the statue of a saint. Then came the death of six classmates in a school bus accident. And the death of Vicken Barsoumian, who fell while climbing to his balcony via a rain drainage pipe; no one was home when he had returned from school, and he didn’t have the key to the main door. And now Jamal. I was only 15 then, and am not taking into account Josephine’s funeral and Khadija’s stillborn brother!

The day the “Black Dog” died is the day Jamal’s corpse passed through the view of our doorway—brought in from the left and exiting from the right side of my mind’s eye, lifted above on raised arms. I did not follow the procession and have no idea where he is buried. I do not know if any of the remaining Makhlouta residents still recall the scene, but the sad episode is forever fresh in my memory.

Weeks later, Jamal’s family moved out as swiftly as they had moved in. We had learned nothing about them when they arrived and learned nothing when they departed. One early morning, his older brother Jamil surprised me by knocking on my dark brown wooden door. When I faced him he said, “The whole thing was stupid but thank you for befriending my brother. May God rest his soul. We are moving back to our home.” The news surprised me as we had taken a liking to Jamal’s quiet family. “Where is home, where are you going to?” I asked Jamil, who had limited contact with everyone. “Allah bya’aref wen (God knows where),” he said, and went away.

Less than two years later, we’d moved out of Makhlouta and eventually to the United States. I saw the few neighbors who had remained in Makhlouta when I visited it in 1999, but that’s another short story with a long tale.

Before then, I met Raj Kapoor real and alive at UCLA, when the film archives had launched a sweeping program of screening Indian films and Raj was invited to attend. In our class, led by Teshome Gabriel, I was the only one who knew about Raj’s films, obliging me to be the conversant with this idol of Indian cinema who had swept the Asian continent—this idol who was now dwarfed in Los Angeles despite the fact that there was a retrospective of Indian cinema on our campus with many of the films carrying the banner of his family’s name. He had VHS copies of his famed films mentioned above with sloppy English subtitles. Talking with me, he found comfort and solace that at least someone recognized his personality—which seemed to be a giant on the screen, but in reality was a short and heavy man who still adorned his trademark pencil mustache.

I told him about Jamal and how he’d made up the words for “Awaara hoon.” He was touched and showed his sensitivity in his now-aged but still charming and inviting eyes, recognized by millions upon millions in Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and North Africa, while remaining unrecognized in Hollywood. One of the VHS tapes he had was inserted into the player; it was the black-and-white “Awaara.” When my classmates walked out in complete disinterest and disrespect, it was more shocking and embarrassing to me than to Raj. During our ensuing and intimate conversation, he told me he was preparing a film about the Ganges River. I remember thinking how small he was in reality and how large he had appeared on the screen, although by then I was familiar with the magic of film-making and turning a petite person into an impressively giant image, and a giant image into a remarkably diminutive icon.

I purchased DVD copies of “Junglee” and “Awaara” for a few dollars each yesterday from the internet, from an online company based in Delaware. I bought them in memory of Jamal, hoping to understand what it was about these films that had caught his imagination, and how in private he could so closely identify with the “Black Dog” in Cairo. One had made him sing and the other made him commit suicide.

And so it goes…