Dreams of Bread and Fire

by Nancy Kricorian

“Nobody’s going to see anything,” Ani told her. “Besides, I have no shame. I’m American.”

  Odile laughed, showing small white teeth. She had a graceful neck and porcelain skin. Her fawn-colored hair was upswept in a loose bun.

  Ani and Odile sat on the floor in the middle of the classroom with their legs in first position. To the left, to the right, to the center. And once again. A sea of arms moved in unison and legs scissored closed with a swish over the wooden floor. At a flick of the teacher’s palm, Ani folded down, resting her face on her knees.

  She was six years old, climbing a narrow staircase with a black patent-leather bag banging against her leg. The changing room was aflutter with girls and their mothers, clothes strewn on benches along the wall. At home after the first class, Violet and Grandma quarreled in Armenian over Ani’s head, but she understood what they were saying.

  Amot. Shame, said Mariam Kersamian.

  I’m not going to talk about it with you anymore, Violet ­replied.

  My granddaughter is walking around before everyone with no clothes on.

  I’m not listening. Violet walked out of the room.

  The body is God’s temple! Grandma called after her.

  Sitting on the back porch, Violet sewed silver sequins onto the edge of Ani’s tutu. Ani and Baba spread newspaper on the driveway and spray-painted the tap shoes silver. Grandma watched these preparations grimly without a word.

  The day before the recital Ani modeled the whole outfit, including a silver tiara. She pirouetted around the living room, where Baba, Grandma, and Violet were sitting. Ani tied on her tap shoes and moved to a spot of bare floorboard between two carpets to make a series of clattering taps.

  Grandma muttered loudly, Amot.

  Baba said, Those shoes sure make a racket.

  Amot. Amot kezi, Grandma said, a little louder.

  Violet demanded, What is shameful about it? Would you tell me?

  You let you daughter on stage in naked legs with his vorik hanging out? Grandma spoke in English so Ani wouldn’t miss her meaning.

  Violet heaved a sigh. Ma, she’s six years old. All the girls are dressed like this.

  How should child have no shame unless mother teach him? Mariam Kersamian asked darkly.

  Ani puzzled over her grandmother’s sentence. What was the mother supposed to be teaching? That the child should have shame or have no shame? Was Ani’s bottom really hanging out of her costume? Ani suddenly felt like her torso was made of big, yeasty dough rising from the leotard in all directions.

  She didn’t take another dance class until she was in college. The first day of the term she had arrived twenty minutes early to the makeshift dance studio on the stage of the old assembly hall. Stripping to her leotard and tights, she stood in front of the mirrors. Amot. Amot kezi. She shook her head, but failed to dislodge the whispering voice from her ears. Anamot. Shameless.

  In the dressing room after class, Ani told her friend, “Don’t worry, Odile, I’m going to change out of this leotard. It’s soaked.”

  Odile asked, “You have time for a coffee?”

  Seated in the café, Odile talked quickly while her thin hands were as stately as swans. Her family would spend the upcoming holidays at their farmhouse in the country. She would be out of town for ten days. She and her boyfriend Pierre were throwing a party—un boum, she called it—at their apartment on New Year’s Eve. She hoped Ani would come. What was Ani doing for Christmas?

  The Bartons had left for Connecticut that morning so Ani would be alone in the palace for two weeks. Christmas dinner would be brown rice and a chocolate bar. Ani cast around for a story.

  “My friend Michael and I are going to Bretagne for a few days,” she lied.

  Since the backgammon night, Ani had avoided Michael. She had even gone so far as to unplug the telephone. The day after her conversation with Odile, she arrived late to Sondage’s seminar. Michael, who was at the other side of the room, tried to catch her attention. Ani tucked her chin and scrutinized her notebook. After class he chased down the hall behind her.

  “Come drink a coffee with me,” he said, piloting her by the elbow. “I’m taking the train to Munich in the morning. You want to go to the cinema tonight?”

  “I can’t. I have to baby-sit.” She looked pointedly at her watch. “I’ve got to run or I’ll be late.”

  “As you wish.” He gave her the Parisian quatre bises. “But we should talk after the holidays. I’ll telephone when I get back.”

  Ani sat on the metro glancing at the people around her, their faces very French and inexplicably sad. Everyone seemed to be on the verge of tears. She put her head against the window and peered out at the dark tunnel.

  During her final term in the college dorm a basketball player who lived in a single in the basement had died in his room. He had returned drunk late one night and thrown up, choking on his own vomit. After about four days, when the smell had begun to seep up the stairwells of the dorm—Ani had noticed it in the hall—a janitor had traced the odor to the guy’s room. His name was Bob. He was a friend of a friend, and Ani had once eaten lunch with him in the dining hall. She found it strange how people’s lives might intersect at one point and then, like billiard balls, bounce off each other and go in different directions. Bob had dropped into God’s side pocket.

  It was while she was living in that dorm—not long after Bob’s death—that Ani and Asa had started going out. About a month into their relationship they had hitchhiked to Cambridge for the weekend. It was the first time she had met his parents. Peggy Willard, a thin fair woman with long copper hair tied back with a blue velvet ribbon, smiled brightly at Ani and warmly shook her hand. Ben Willard was tall and sallow with a handsome lined face. The four of them sat at a long oak table in a formal dining room with oak wainscoting and salmon-colored walls. Asa and Peggy did most of the talking. There were long quiet pauses during the meal that Ani didn’t dare fill with chatter. She observed Ben Willard refilling his glass with wine until the bottle was empty. He went to the pantry to get another.

  Asa tells me you’re from Watertown, Ani, said Peggy. You’re Armenian?

  My mother’s Armenian.

  Ben returned to the dining room. You know what George Orwell says about Armenians, son? he asked, winking at Asa.

  Ani’s breath halted in her throat for a few seconds while she waited for Ben to drop the blade.

  Don’t trust them. They’re worse than Jews or Greeks. Ben Willard smiled.

  Asa colored deeply. Dad, what kind of thing is that to say?

  Ben, that’s not very nice. Peggy’s voice was edged with false cheer.

  Can’t anyone around here take a joke? Ben asked darkly.

  In the library’s stacks Ani had scoured Orwell for the line and found it: Trust a snake before a Jew and a Jew before a Greek, but don’t trust an Armenian.

  She wrote the phrase in the small notebook of quotations she carried with her. But even before she copied it down she had committed it to memory.

  As she passed the gilt café on the place Colette, Ani noticed couples leaning over small white cups. Long shadows striped the garden. Ani’s heels struck the cold stone arcades and then hushed across the runner in the hall. In the attic she swiftly turned the key in the lock, switched on a lamp, and opened a book. The room was silent but for the clock. Ani felt condemned by its small judgments.

  the lid rolled and found its pot

  Christmas Eve was a lost day. Ani stayed in her nightgown until late afternoon, when she threw on some clothes and headed across the river. In an austere macrobiotic restaurant not far from the university she treated herself to a meal of brown rice and vege­tables. The only condiments were toasted sesame seeds and tamari. It was early, she was the sole customer, and the bald waiter gazed at her sternly as she chewed. She felt like a loser.

/>   The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

  Christmas alone in Paris isn’t any disaster.

  An unlucky star.

  Baba said, The star of some is bright, of others blind.

  Ani had harbored the idea that when she left for college she could make herself into a new person. The house on Spruce Street with its fractured English and coupons clipped from the news­paper was far away. No one would know anything about her past except what she related. She didn’t have to mention that she was on financial aid. And in her freshman term she was lucky to be assigned to the hidden dish room in the dining hall where none of the other students—except other charity cases like herself and Elena—would see her in the beige polyester work shirt scraping garbage into the pit.

  At the end of her first shift, Ani stopped into the basement lavatory near the gray locker room. As she sat in the stall two local women who worked the cafeteria food line entered the room. Ani caught a glimpse of them through the door crack.

  Those goddamned stuck-up kids with their wiseass cracks, one said.

  If I didn’t need the money, the other one responded, I would have fucking spit in that shit’s eye.

  Ani slowly unwound toilet paper from the roll.

  They’re looking for chambermaids at the Inn, the first offered.

  Same fucking pricks there, just thirty years older, the second quipped.

  Ani flushed the toilet and unlocked the stall. She kept her head down and strode out of the room, hearing their chuckles behind her.

  With money she had saved up from her summer job, Ani went shopping on Main Street near the campus. She bought a fine-gauge red cardigan with gold buttons and a pair of wide-wale corduroy pants. Her mother would have gasped at the price tags, but Ani hardened herself against guilt. Next she stopped at the shoe store for a pair of clogs and rag wool socks.

  Ani wore this outfit on a date with a junior from a suburb of New York City. Steve Hecht was surprised she had never heard of Scarsdale, where his family belonged to the country club. When she mentioned that she lived near Boston, he suggested Newton and she didn’t argue. It didn’t work out with Steve. He stopped calling when she wouldn’t have sex with him after the third date.

  Asa had disliked the corduroys and the yoked sweaters. Once he asked her, Why are you pretending to be somebody you’re not? He preferred the peasant blouse and a red flowered Afghan skirt: bohemian chic. He also liked her in flannel and jeans: woods woman. It turned out, though, that changing identity wasn’t as easy as changing costume.

  The word for destiny in Armenian is jagadakir: what is written on your forehead. God inscribed your fate on your brow in vanishing ink while you were yet in your mother’s womb. You cannot erase what is written on your forehead.

  Not only had she now lost Asa, but also gone was the life he would have given her. She would never have a refrigerator that dispensed ice cubes. She would never drive a silver Volvo station wagon. Soon she’d be living on Spruce Street, using the bus to commute to the dull job she would need to pay back her student loans. But for now, she was in exile. Ani felt faceless and almost invisible, as though the filaments attaching her to the surface of the world had torn loose. She was a kind of ghostly balloon bobbing through a translated sky.

  Ani pushed the plate of tasteless food aside and opened her bilingual copy of Rimbaud’s poems. She had purloined it from the campus bookstore during her final week as an undergraduate.

  Je suis au plus profond de l’abîme, et je ne sais plus prier.

  Rimbaud had renounced his faith when he was young. His life and his writings were about transgression. But he had been a sinner who finally repented on his deathbed, calling for a priest. Will there come an hour when you pray for forgiveness, Ani Silver, or will you die an outlaw?

  A light snow was falling as Ani emerged from the restaurant. She drew a paisley wool shawl—a Christmas gift from Tacey Barton—over her head. People hustled by carrying baguettes and bright shopping bags. Ani turned off the boulevard onto a side street, walking without a destination.

  On the other side of the street she saw a bookstore with a buttery light spilling out its windows. The sign across the storefront said LIBRAIRIE SAMUELIAN: an Armenian name. Crammed shelves spanned from floor to ceiling, and there were several customers with their heads bent over display tables. Ani had stepped off the curb toward the store when a dark-haired man strode out of its front door and hurried down the sidewalk.

  His head was down and his shoulders were hunched against the cold. He wore a dungaree jacket over a bulky cable sweater, jeans, and running shoes. His gait reminded her of someone familiar, but who? She was always seeing people who reminded her of far-off friends. Only a few days before, she was certain she had seen Elena in a passage of the metro. But even as she hurried to overtake the woman Ani knew that the face would be a stranger’s. Was it loneliness that conjured up resemblance? Who was this man a stand-in for?

  Suddenly she smelled the waxy smoke of blown-out candles, tasted pink sugar roses, and heard the laughter of children.

  “Van!” she called.

  When he paused and glanced back, Ani could almost make out his features. He didn’t see her in the dusk and continued on his way.

  “Wait,” she called, as she ran after him. “Van. It’s me. Ani Silver.”

  He turned. “Ani?”

  They stood under a streetlamp, the falling snow dissolving on the pavement at their feet. He was shorter and darker than Ani remembered. His shiny ebony hair was cut close to his head and he no longer had sideburns. She studied the black eyes under jet brows and the strong, straight nose. His jaw was shadowed by a day’s growth of beard. He looked like a man now, serious and grown.

  “What are you doing here, Van Ardavanian?” Ani asked.

  “Me? I was looking for a book. What are you doing here, Ani?” His broad smile had a warmth that came from the depth of his eyes.

  Éblouissant, thought Ani. Dazzling. On a dark December night his smile is like the sun.

  They went to an old-fashioned café with a gleaming mahogany bar and lace curtains in the windows. Ani hadn’t seen Van since high school, and now they were sitting at a corner table in a Paris café.

  Ani said, “Last thing I heard was that you went to Beirut after you graduated. Your grandmother wasn’t thrilled about that.”

  Van shrugged. “Nobody’s grandmother would be happy.”

  “What were you doing?”

  “Working for a relief agency. Armenian Refugee Aid Association: ARAA.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Same thing. ARAA has a Paris office. It’s been around since World War One. First they helped Genocide survivors. Now it’s Lebanon and Syria. But what about you, Ani? What have you been up to?”

  “Nothing so noble. I got a ba. Hopped a freight train. Climbed a mountain. I’m studying literature at the university.”

  “What are you doing for Christmas?” he asked.

  “My boyfriend—ex-boyfriend—was supposed to be here, but that fell through. So I’m on my own.”

  “Too bad,” Van said, shaking his head with a sympathetic frown that turned into a wry smile. “I’ve got no plans either.”

  On Christmas morning in the Bartons’ kitchen Ani tied an apron over her skirt. By the time the buzzer rang at minutes after one, the fish was in the broiler and the rice pilaf was steaming in its pot.

  Van followed her through the grand apartment. She had assumed he would be impressed, but his brows moved closer together and she sensed his disapproval.

  “This place is huge,” he said. “What’s that garden?”

  “Palais-Royal garden,” Ani told him.

  “You live in a palace?” he asked incredulously.

  “I live in a chambre de bonne that comes with the apartment. T
he Bartons live here.”

  “How do they pay for this?”

  “He works for some bank. It’s a company apartment.”

  “A French bank?”

  “No, a big multinational. They were in the Philippines before Paris, and before that in South America.” Ani didn’t mention Tacey Barton’s nostalgia for Manila, where she had been able to afford a full-time staff of six. And they were happy servants. Apparently the dollar didn’t go as far in France. Beatrice, the current part-time housekeeper, was neither cheerful nor servile enough to suit Tacey.

  “Roving predators,” Van said bitterly. “They get their wealth from exploiting Third World countries.”

  Ani was surprised by his harshness. The Bartons weren’t Ani’s people, but she hadn’t thought of them as evil.

  She looked around the room, trying to see it through Van’s lens. On the gleaming twelve-foot table where Ani had set two places with the Bartons’ ornate silver and china, the crystal wineglasses glittered with menace.

  Still, she couldn’t view either Tacey or Sydney as a roving predator. They were consumers. Tacey was a professional shopper and Sydney was a shopper in training. Ani had gone with them once to the avenue Victor Hugo, where the minks and sables outnumbered the little dogs shivering in their sweaters. In an elegant boutique Tacey had opened her leather wallet and dropped a fan of francs on the counter.

  Tacey’s money came from her husband, and her husband’s money came from his work at the bank, and the bank’s money came from extracting wealth from poor countries. Or at least that’s what Van had just said. Ani had no idea what banking entailed and had little interest in the subject. What exactly did Le Con do all day at his office? Ani avoided him as much as possible, but when he passed through the apartment he left behind an ill will that almost smelled.

  Van asked, “What’s it like being a servant to the ruling class?”

  “I’m not a servant. I’m an au pair.”

  “Seems like a question of semantics to me.”

  “Maybe it’s just an attitude. I couldn’t afford to be here if I didn’t have this job. The kid’s kind of sweet.”