“The old country. That phrase came up now and then. A phrase that seemed to have a lock on it. I knew it meant Armenia, but it made me uneasy. If I asked about the old country, the adults would change the subject. Once my mother said, ‘It’s an ancient place, it’s not really around anymore.’ Where had it gone? I asked myself.” 

When the book opens, Peter has no conception of Armenia or Armenian history—only the glimpses of cultural traditions or phrases of Armenian language that he picks up from his grandmother. He expresses curiosity about his family’s background, but he senses from his family that there is a secret surrounding it. Peter poses this rhetorical question in the first chapter, and throughout the book, he unveils what he learned about “where [Armenia] had […] gone.”

“I came to realize that my grandmother’s stories were part of time and not part of time, part of place and not part of place, part of the stuff that is stored in the mind’s honeycomb.” 

Peter’s grandmother influenced him in ways that took years of reflection to fully understand and appreciate. Her stories seemed bizarre but were actually snippets of memories and articulations of her suffering in her past life. Peter particularly emphasizes her stories (for example, the story of the Black Dog of Fate) that were elusive in his youth but steeped him in Armenian culture and consciousness.

“My grandmother’s hands floated like wings of bone in the dark, then they were birds, then small disks of light and then bones again, and then it was dawn.” 

Peter delivers this poetic line to describe the uneasy night he spent after learning that his grandmother died. He had previously distinguished between the clinical realism and Americanness of his immediate family and the ethereal qualities of his grandmother. This moment in the narrative comes before Peter has any knowledge or understanding of the Armenian Genocide or his grandmother’s young life, but the writing echoes her