Dreams of Bread and Fire

by Nancy Kricorian

  She tore the page out of the paper, although there would be no need to look at the article again. The words were seared into memory. She folded the page smaller and smaller, then tucked it into the back pocket of her jeans.

  When the Bartons drifted into the kitchen for breakfast, Ani mechanically performed the morning routine, listening to the pleasantries she thought impossible until they came out of her mouth. The sight of the food they were eating made her queasy, so she stood at the counter sipping a cup of tisane.

  After the Bartons left, Ani went to her room, where she sat on the couch. She imagined that the French police would momentarily be pounding on her door. Madame Spinelli would triumphantly lead the flics to the top floor and down the hall to her room. They would handcuff Ani and escort her to the Palais de Justice. She would be marched to a grimy interrogation room in a turret. There a sneering investigator would question her for hours about Van Ardavanian and the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia.

  But Ani didn’t have any answers for him. What did she know about ASALA?

  The bombs had gone off in the early hours of the morning. What was the travel agency director doing at his desk at that hour? Ani was sure that Van had been counting on the offices being empty. He didn’t intend to hurt anyone. He was aiming for property damage to the Turkish Embassy’s Information Office. It was full of colorful pamphlets about vacationing in Turkey. No reference was made to Armenians or the Armenian homeland in the photo captions. The pamphlets flew into the air when the bomb went off, raining down like confetti in the street.

  A law-abiding citizen had a responsibility to report whatever little she knew to the proper authorities. Was she law-abiding? Think of that NO TRESPASSING sign outside the train yard in ­Denver. Or the sign behind the bookstore cash register: SHOP­LIFTERS WILL BE PROSECUTED TO THE FULL EXTENT OF THE LAW. Think of all the illegal drugs she had ingested over the three years she had been with Asa. It had never occurred to her that she should report Asa to the police for having a stash of pot or a bag of hallucinogenic mushrooms. But none of those things had resulted in bodily harm to anyone else.

  Her mind circled around the injured man. If he was badly hurt in the attack, he must be in the hospital. His wife was at his bedside. He was wrapped in gauze. There was a coin of blood on the bandage around his head. Did they have children? Were the children crying at home with the grandmother?

  “Vhy babum, Ani. Vhat kind of trouble did you make?” It was Grandma’s voice, the one inside Ani’s head.

  Well, Grandma, you’re the one who wanted me to find a nice Armenian boy. How could he be both a “nice Armenian boy” and a “leftist terrorist”? Whatever he was, she would not betray him.

  Where was Van? Maybe he was in Venice wearing a false mustache and dark glasses, riding gondolas up and down the canals. Maybe he was in Nicosia or Beirut or Yerevan. Where did a secret army keep its troops and store its ammunition? Who paid the soldiers’ salaries? Ani envisioned Van in fatigues with an assault rifle slung over his shoulder. He was handing out pay envelopes to a bunch of similarly clad Armenian men.

  The next week Ani headed toward American Express as Hratch had instructed. As Ani walked the avenue she felt that at any moment violence might tear through the fabric of the ordinary afternoon. A man raised his hand to strike his whining son and the child cringed. On the corner cops were hassling African street vendors. There were troopers with black bulletproof vests and submachine guns standing outside a synagogue.

  After entering the office, she descended to the basement mail desk and waited in line. Wiping her sweaty palms on her jeans, she willed her heart to slow its frantic thrashing. When her turn finally came, the man at the desk handed her a padded envelope with her name written on it. The package, which bore Dutch stamps, had been postmarked four days earlier in Amsterdam. Ani tucked it into her bag and hurried home.

  Ani slit the end of the package to find a small worn clothbound pocket English-Armenian dictionary. Inside the front cover Van had inscribed: To Ani, with devotion, from Van.

  There was no letter, no apology, no explanation, and no promise of his return. Was there some kind of coded message inside the dictionary that she would have to decipher? Half the entries were printed in the Armenian alphabet, which she couldn’t even read.

  Two days later in the Bartons’ kitchen as Ani sorted her dirty clothes she picked up a faded denim work shirt that Van had left behind. She was tempted to seal it unwashed into a Ziploc bag. She held it to her face and shut her eyes, reinventing for a moment Van’s presence: his mouth on her skin, his breath in her ear. Her throat tightened and tears smarted into her eyes. She cast the shirt into the washing machine and opened the newspaper to scour its pages—in vain—for mention of Van, the wounded man, or ASALA.

  She counted ten days on the calendar until her flight home. She calculated ten days and ten nights to be two hundred and forty hours to fill. She should deduct eight hours a night for sleep, but she wasn’t sleeping much. She’d drift off only to awaken several hours later, her mind muddied with crazy thoughts. Satan was lying on the floor under the bed, planning to reach his arms around to grab her ankles. Van was hurt. He had dragged himself to her building with his last bit of strength. His blood was pooling on the tiles outside her door.

  She turned on the light. There was no devil. There was no blood. There was no rat on the shelf chewing open the box of crackers. The clock’s face was set in a mocking smile. Wasn’t it laughable, really, how naive she was?

  Had there been a secret agenda on the trip to Corsica? Maybe his friends there were actually members of the FNLC and he was sent by his group to make contact with them. There was a connection between these groups, these national liberation struggles, as he called them.

  Of course his face had gone ashen when the cops stopped them outside Lyon. Of course any dealings with the police would be dangerous for a member of ASALA.

  When Ani saw Van again—if she saw him again—she would conduct a formal interrogation.

  She had to go to sleep. She would make herself sick otherwise. She numbered her breaths, one count in and one count out. The breath through her nostrils made this sound: he is lost, he is lost, he is lost to you. With each exhalation she pushed the thoughts out of her head until it was empty, empty of everything but dark space.

  The alarm clock knocked her awake. Daylight. Sydney’s breakfast and lunch to be made. After Sydney was hustled off to school, Ani packed her course books and notes into yellow postal boxes. She stood in a long line at the post office waiting to send the boxes to herself by boat. On the street she drifted slowly while a stream of people jostled past her on the way to the important business of their lives. She walked through the Palais-Royal garden, where in the blue sky clouds paraded like headless sheep.

  The day before her flight home, Ani took Sydney for a farewell ice cream at the gilt café on the place Colette.

  “I didn’t want vanilla ice cream,” the child whined. “I said I wanted chocolate.”

  Ani, who had heard the child order vanilla, exchanged sympathetic glances with the waiter as he took the offending dish away.

  Sydney pouted. She kicked the table stand. “I hate this place. It’s not nice at all. You should have taken me to Fauchon.”

  “Do you think maybe you’re just in a bad mood because you don’t want me to leave?” Ani asked.

  “You are so stupid,” Sydney said. Then she burst into tears.

  Ani, without warning, felt the banks of the river overflow. She took Sydney on her lap and kissed the child’s wet cheek.

  “It will be okay, sweetie,” Ani said, through brimming eyes.

  But how would anything be okay again? Sydney would have to stay in the palace apartment with her selfish and bigoted parents. And Van had become an ambiguous, scary figure and then vanished.

  That evening Ani opene
d Van’s pocket dictionary and flipped through its small pages again. She couldn’t decipher the Armenian letters, but in the center of the book there was a section in English filled with conversations and phrases that a recently arrived Armenian immigrant might need in America. The entries were broken into categories such as AT THE POST OFFICE, LOOKING FOR A TENEMENT, and AT THE GROCERY STORE. The final category was labeled FOR THE EMIGRANTS.

  What is your name?

  My name is Mardiros.

  What is your last name?

  My last name is Giragosian.

  How old are you?

  I am thirty years old.

  Where were you born?

  I was born in Harpoot, Turkey.

  What is your occupation?

  I am a carpenter.

  I am a blacksmith.

  I am a watchmaker.

  I am a tailor.

  I have no trade. I am a student.

  Are you married?

  No, sir, I am single.

  Yes, sir, I am married.

  What is your wife’s name?

  My wife’s name is Mariam.

  Mariam was Ani’s grandmother’s name. And Baba was called Mattheos.

  Ani saw them suddenly, a young man in a black cloth coat standing beside his diminutive dark-haired wife. They were at Ellis Island being questioned by an immigration official. The man tapped his pencil impatiently on the desk. Mattheos repeated his last name slowly and the man wrote the letters down. He showed it to Mattheos.

  Is that it? the man asked.

  Yes, that’s it, Mattheos said.

  Mariam, following the proceedings skittishly, didn’t understand English, so Mattheos translated for her. She gave the name of her town and the approximate year of her birth.

  The vision faded.

  Had Baba known English when he arrived? How had he learned it? Why did they come to America? When they emigrated, whom had they left behind?

  Her grandparents drew a curtain of silence over their early lives. And Ani, growing up amid Old World shadows, had never thought to ask.

  where a nail was driven, there will always be a hole

  Violet’s black hair was shot through with silver and the lines on her face were deeper than Ani remembered. Grandma, wearing a white summer hat and a pink paste brooch in the shape of a dahlia, was thin and pale. When Ani hugged Baba she noticed he was now wearing a hearing aid.

  Grandma said, “Meghah! Skin and bones. They didn’t feed you nothing, Ani?”

  “Ma, leave her alone,” Violet admonished. “You look tired, honey. Haven’t you been sleeping?”

  “Ahrr,” Grandma said, pulling an Almond Joy candy bar out of her purse and shoving it into Ani’s hand. “I made manti for supper. And fresh madzoon.”

  They left the airport with Baba at the wheel and rolled up their windows as they entered the yellow tiled tunnel. They drove along the glittering Charles River, where small sailboats and sculling shells raced over the water. Sunbathers were strewn on long ­towels in the grass along the riverbank.

  “You see those girls in bikinis,” Baba said. “They cause lots of accidents. I read about it in the Globe the other day.”

  “They don’t cause accidents, Pa,” Violet said. “Men who can’t keep their eyes on the road do that.”

  Along Mount Auburn Street, Ani saw the same storefronts, made strange by her absence but bathed in a wash of recollections. There was the corner grocery where she and Van had picked small enamel tiles off the crumbling facade while waiting for their grandmothers. She saw Van’s shadow falling over the school field. His feet had trod every block of pavement along this street.

  They pulled into the driveway on Spruce Street. In Baba’s vege­table garden the tomato plants were staked up with broken hockey sticks. Grandma’s zinnias and marigolds were blooming. Mr. Narboni called a greeting over the hedge and the Kersamians stopped to chat with him. After a few minutes Ani excused herself and walked up the back steps, lugging her bags.

  In the hall Ani let herself be swept away by the distinctive combination of smells—lamb and onions, lemon furniture polish, Grandma’s liniment, Violet’s perfume. The atmosphere of her childhood rose up around her like a dense cloud. A slide show flickered past: Baba’s hands tying the laces of Ani’s shoes; Ani at the kitchen table with Grandma rolling out snakes of yeasty dough; Violet calling from the front porch as Ani rode her bike down the darkening block.

  In the kitchen the white Formica kitchen table with silver legs and the matching red and silver chairs gleamed with memory. White sheers stirred in the windows over the sink. Ani moved through the front rooms, her eyes catching homely objects: a bowl of waxed fruit on the sideboard, a porcelain figurine of a girl driving a flock of geese on the end table, a gold Depression glass bowl filled with hard candies on the polished coffee table. She wanted it always to stay the same—like a museum of bygone days—so that no matter how complicated or confused her life should be, there would be a place of rest and comfort.

  Nostalgia.

  An aching in the heart for the homeland.

  Was this Ani’s homeland?

  As soon as the family passed under the lintel, Grandma would shout from the kitchen that Ani should shut the front door before all the dust blew in from the street. Violet would loudly tell her mother not to shout. Baba would settle into his old wine-colored armchair and snap the newspaper open in front of his face. After a few minutes he’d fall asleep, and his snores would rumble through the apartment.

  She carried her suitcase to the basement room. On the wine crate that served as a nightstand stood a framed color photograph that Asa had given her. Wearing a red bandanna and green shorts, Asa was stretched over a craggy cliff face while a red rope dangled from him like an umbilical cord. Ani considered tossing the picture, frame and all, into the trash basket but instead wedged it into a corner of the old footlocker where she stored toys and souvenirs. She searched until she found the white cigar box—Van’s gray quartz stone was still in there and her father’s marbles. Replacing them inside, she closed the trunk’s lid.

  From her suitcase Ani pulled an envelope filled with small slips of paper and a few folded notes that Van had written. It was funny how few physical mementos she had from their five months together: just these bits of paper with his handwriting and the pocket dictionary. Van Ardavanian had slipped in and out of her life like a magician. She imagined him walking backward on the sand, erasing his footsteps with a palm frond as he went.

  The next morning Ani walked to the bicycle shop on Mount Auburn Street and bought a used three-speed Schwinn and a wicker basket. She pedaled up Boylston Street, around the back of the junior high school, past the front of the elementary school, and down Hazel Street. As she approached the Ardavanians’ house on Dexter Ave­nue she slowed the bike. There wasn’t anyone out front, but a light shone in the downstairs living room. She wanted to knock on the door and ask if she could see Van’s bedroom. Had they kept it as a shrine, with a pair of bronzed baby shoes on a shelf next to his sports trophies? Would he have left a Red Sox pennant tacked to the wall or a poster of Che? Ani picked up speed and turned toward home.

  She started a summer job in the children’s room at the East Branch Library. Ani loved the cool basement room with its low tables and small chairs. This was where she had learned to read. As she shelved the young adult novels she offered suggestions to a twelve-year-old girl—an Armenian girl, Ani guessed, from the look of her—who was picking through for something good. At the end of her first shift she climbed the cast-iron spiral staircase to the adult reading room, where she paged through back issues of English language Armenian newspapers. She was looking for mention of ASALA and its “operations.”

  As she read the coverage of ASALA’s September 1981 siege of the Turkish Consulate in Paris, she scrutinized the
photos carefully. A Turkish security guard had died of a heart attack and one commando was wounded, but the rest of the hostages were released. Next she scrolled through microfilm of The New York Times for the same dates and found several articles. One of the reports explained the context for the present-day attacks against Turkish targets by citing the past:

  In the period around 1915, Turkish authorities scattered the Armenian nation, killing 1.5 million people according to most historical accounts and driving others from their homeland in Eastern Anatolia.

  Ani checked out a stack of books on the Armenian Genocide, squeezing them into her bicycle basket. Carrying the cache of books to the basement, she sat cross-legged on her bed and read until the letters blurred. She attempted to take the information in with dispassion. This was something that had happened decades before in a distant and foreign place to people she didn’t know. Despite her resolve, a little knot of grief worked its way from the pit of her stomach up to her throat.

  The number 1.5 million was repeated again and again. The only way she could take in the enormity of it was to choose one person out of that 1.5 million and try to list the losses and terrors that particular person had suffered before dying a gruesome death. Then multiply it by 1.5 million. Add to that the hundreds of thousands who somehow survived with the horrors etched in their heads and who dispersed themselves over the globe like the seeds of a rare plant slated for extinction.

  This sum of suffering was totaled without figuring in the fields confiscated, the vineyards appropriated, the houses occupied, looted, or burned, the handwoven carpets carried off, the dish sets smashed or stolen, the pocket watches and earrings traded for scraps of food, the words torn from mouths and not passed to the next generation and the one after.

  Violet called from the top of the stairs. “Ani, dinner time.” When there was no response to her second call, Violet descended.

  Ani didn’t hear her mother until Violet was standing over her.

  “Mom, you scared me,” Ani said, springing up.