Ararat

The DVD of the movie Ararat whirs in its player. Outside the late evening suns makes the red tile Parisian roof look redder. The sky is still blue at 9:30.

Christopher Plummer playing a customs official holds up a pomegranate. “You can’t bring this in,” he tells Charles Aznavour playing a film director. He is about to make a film of the Armenian massacre of 1915.

Aznavour cuts it open and eats part offering the customs official a piece. “The seeds bring me luck, I carry them in my stomach.”

My hostess carries a blue and yellow checked plastic tray into the room piled high with parsley for tabouli that she will make the same way as generations of Syrian women make it.

As she arranges each stalk, a softer filter on the camera lens shows an Armenian artist in New York painting. His inspiration is a photo taken of him and his mother taken shortly before the death march, who tells him to hold flowers over the missing button on his coat. Throughout the film in a number of vignettes he cannot get her hands the way he wants them, the same hands that sewed the button back on. Finally he whites them out.

As my hostess chops the parsley their subtle fresh aroma enters the room. As her knife clicks against the board, on the screen Turkish soldiers stab victim after victim after victim. “No one will remember,” an actor from the set says. "It is now, the past isn’t important."

Now. Somewhere as I sit in the comfort of this adorable apartment, an American is killing an Iraqi or vice versa. In Tamil a family is dying. When I watch a rape of an Armenian woman with her daughter hidden under a cart, I know a rape is going on in Dafur of a woman walking back from gathering water. I have seen their faces on CNN.

Aznavour is on the way to the film’s premier in a limo with an actor, director and consultant. He shares pomegranate seeds. “When my mother was on the death march, she had one pomegranate. She ate a seed a day and pretended it was a meal.” They each take a seed from a round silver box and eat it as if it were a meal.

The movie ends. We sit at the tiny table eating the tabouli. “I don’t understand how people who survived, survive.” I mean it for all the needless tragedies caused by man.

I know so many people who are trying to make the world better. Edgar who has helped people in the jungles of his native Philippines and is now working in Afghanistan. Karen who is working on legal issues in Asia or Linda who is begging old computers for schools in Africa. I am angry at myself for my luxuries. I walk along Lake Geneva, the Mediterranean or the Seine at will. I do not worry about being dragged from my bed in the middle of the night. At the same time I know I have not called enough Senators with their smug faces safe being driven in their big cars from their homes to the capital where they will appropriate more money for more deaths.

“It doesn’t begin with governments, it only begins with what each person can do,” my friend says. But it also begins with what each person doesn’t do, including myself.