Dreams of Bread and Fire

by Nancy Kricorian

  Waving her hand at the books on the floor, Violet asked, “What are these?”

  “Books,” she said.

  “Ani, I can see that. I mean, what are you reading them for?”

  “Research,” Ani replied.

  “You’ve been acting strange since you got back. Are you depressed?”

  Ani knit her eyebrows, considering for a moment. Was that the right word to describe her current state?

  She answered, “I don’t think I’m depressed. Depressed is when you can’t get out of bed because gravity weighs too much on you. I think this is called bummed out.”

  “Maybe you’re still sad about Asa. But I don’t think shutting yourself up in the basement with morbid books is going to help you, Ani, I really don’t.”

  “Mom, this has nothing, I mean nothing, to do with Asa.”

  Her mother couldn’t have been further from the truth. But who could blame Violet? Ani had promised Van not to tell, and now that he had dematerialized she felt she couldn’t even mention his name for fear the whole story would come spilling out.

  “Just do me a favor and don’t leave those lying around where your grandmother might see them. A friend of mine is coming over for supper tonight. Someone special I want you to meet.”

  “Who?” Ani asked.

  “Nick Mavrides. He lives at the top of the hill. His wife died three years ago.”

  So her mother had a boyfriend, a Greek widower. Good for her, thought Ani. “How did you meet him?”

  “He’s a patient at the office,” Violet said. “And he’s a contractor, for your information.”

  “How did you know that was my next question?” Ani asked.

  Nick Mavrides was a little taller than Violet and a little older, although not much, and had a full head of short graying hair and a small potbelly. He brought yellow garden roses with their stems wrapped in aluminum foil for Grandma.

  Grandma carried the roses into the kitchen, saying to Ani in Armenian as she passed, “Look what Violet’s Greek boy gave me.”

  “I understand you’re just back from Paris,” Nick said to Ani, after they were all seated at the table.

  “Uh-huh,” Ani responded.

  “When I was in the army stationed in Germany, I went to Paris on leave a couple of times. Great city,” he said. “New York’s a great city too. Maybe sometime this year your mom and I could drive down to visit you at school. One of my sons lives in New Jersey, on the other side of the bridge. We could stay with him.”

  “That would be nice,” Ani said. She looked across the table at her mother, who was beaming happily.

  After supper, as Ani toweled the dishes, she asked Grandma, “You like Nick?”

  “Good boy. Not like Baron White Cadillac.”

  “Do you think it’s serious?”

  Grandma nodded. “Sure. Last time he brought me candy.”

  Ani returned to her reading, but Baba knocked on the basement window, beckoning for her to come outside. Baba’s vegetable garden glistened in the sun’s last rays.

  “Can you spray your grandmother’s flowers?” Baba asked, handing Ani the hose. “Your mother told me you’re reading about the Massacres.”

  “That’s right.” The long family tradition of silence almost kept her from saying more. “What happened to your family, Baba?”

  Baba sat down heavily on the picnic bench, running his fingers through his thick white hair. “We lived in Marash. My father was massacred in the street so my mother was left alone to care for four children. My brother Vahan was the oldest. Next my sister Satenig, and then me. The smallest was Tovmas. Because we were Protestants we were under the protection of the American missionaries, but one day a deportation order came for Vahan and me. We took it to the missionaries. They went to the governor, who told us to ignore it and move to another house. My mother’s family had already been deported so their house was empty. We moved there.”

  The story poured out of him as though he had told it a thousand times, yet Ani had never heard him say a word about it before. Maybe he had told himself this story again and again. Maybe he had been waiting all this time for her to ask.

  He continued. “Everyone was hungry all the time. People ate anything they could put their hands on: a dog, a cat, any poor bird you might get with a slingshot. Vahan and I went out to the fields with a basket, a string, and a stick. We made a trap and caught sparrows. Can you imagine that? Such a tiny bird, hardly any meat on its bones. We spent the whole afternoon catching them. But compared to the others, we were kings. They were driven out into the desert where there wasn’t so much as a crumb. They died like flies. Some of the orphans were picked up from the desert by the missionaries and brought back to the orphanage.

  “That’s how your grandmother came to Marash. She had no family left. When she first got there she must have been about fourteen, maybe fifteen, but she was so tiny with her bones sticking out all over that she looked to be nine years old. You wouldn’t have liked to see it, Ani. She wouldn’t talk to no one. I was working for the missionaries, fixing things. They had a car and a truck, and I learned how to repair them. I would see Mariam sitting to one side by herself, and little by little I came closer to her. I carved a whistle from a piece of wood and gave it to her. I made up a song for her. She one day finally smiled at me. I wanted that girl to be my wife, but I had to wait until she was a little older.

  “Finally Mariam said she would marry me. We guessed she was about sixteen. The American badveli married us with my family there. My uncle was in America and they decided that Mariam and I should go there. We would send for my mother and my sister and brothers later. A few months after we got to Watertown we heard that the French and British troops had left Marash. ­After that the Armenians still in Marash were deported and massacred. The American missionaries had no power anymore. My whole family was killed.”

  Baba’s story stopped there. He was staring past Ani, his eyes fixed on the past. Ani noticed that the hose was at her feet spilling water into the grass. She reached to turn off the spigot.

  “What about Grandma’s family?” Ani asked.

  He shrugged. “She told me about their house in Mersin. She had a brother and younger sisters who were twins. Her father was a tailor. She would only say that they all died except her. She doesn’t like to talk about it, Ani, and after so much suffering, why should she? She wants to forget the misery she saw in that place. No one’s eyes should have witnessed that. America is very far from there. Come on, aghchigess, that’s enough of that terrible tale. Let’s go inside.”

  The next day Ani found an old tape recorder on a shelf in the hall closet. She bought new batteries and a cassette tape, testing the machine to make sure it worked.

  Late on Saturday afternoon, when Grandma was settled on the back porch couch reading her Bible, Ani sat down next to her with the tape recorder.

  “Ve missed you,” Grandma said.

  “I missed you too,” Ani replied.

  “I heard that boy Esau give you trouble,” Grandma said.

  Ani didn’t bother to correct her. “Dumped me.”

  “He don’t know nothing. Spit from you mouth. You are jewel for prince.” Grandma picked her pocketbook up from the couch beside her. “You need dollar?”

  “Thanks, no. I don’t.”

  They sat in silence for a while.

  “Grandma,” Ani ventured, “you know, I was wondering about your life in the old country.”

  Grandma examined her wedding band.

  “Baba told me about his family. Do you have any stories from your childhood you want to tell?” Ani asked.

  The old woman stared at her turned-up palms, which were resting on her lap.

  Ani went on. “You could say it into this tape recorder when you’re alone. All you have to do is push this
red button here. You push it down and talk. The microphone is built in.”

  There was no response.

  “So you push this one to start”—Ani pressed down the RECORD button—“and when you’re finished you push down this one at the end.”

  Gesturing toward the grapevine growing up over the porch railing, Grandma said, “Those yaprak are too tough to cook. If you vant me to make yalanchi you have to get jar at Kay’s ­Market.”

  Ani stood, leaving the tape recorder on the seat next to her grandmother. “Okay. I’ll pick some up.”

  “Let me give money.” Grandma pulled a small plastic change purse from her apron pocket, opened it, and pulled out a crumpled ten-dollar bill. “Buy some banir. And halvah if you vant. You like that.”

  After Ani came home with the groceries, she checked the porch. The tape recorder was nowhere to be seen.

  better to go into captivity with the

  village than to go to a wedding alone

  A month after Ani arrived home from Paris, a bomb exploded in a suitcase at the Turkish Airlines counter in Paris’s Orly Airport, killing five and wounding fifty-six. It was on the front page of the morning paper. When Ani saw the photos of the bewildered blood-spattered travelers, her stomach lurched and the nerves under her skin contracted into little pins of pain. The Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia had claimed responsibility for the attack.

  Not Van. It couldn’t have been Van. He would never do something like that.

  Why would ASALA do it? As far as Ani could see, the people who had been killed had nothing remotely to do with the death of 1.5 million Armenians. Their only fault, if you could call it that, was to have bought a ticket to Istanbul from the Turkish national airline.

  The queasiness that Ani felt was worsened by the small part of her that thrilled at the idea of revenge. Let them suffer. Let them know how we suffered. Our blood ran in the gutters, our dead filled the streams, our women wept for their murdered husbands, and our mothers watched their children starve. The pain of my people sears my heart.

  This kind of thinking frightened her.

  If you wanted revenge for what had been done to your grandparents, whom should you target? What was the difference between an innocent victim and a guilty one? If you were guilty, did that make you not a victim? Who was guilty now?

  Ani distractedly shelved the picture books in the children’s room of the library. Every time she thought of Van, her stomach wrenched into a little ball. Was it possible that he had returned to France? Maybe he had been ordered to plant the bomb at Orly by the head of his organization. No. She couldn’t ­tolerate that thought. He must be thousands of miles away,on Cyprus or in Lebanon. The bomb in Brussels had been bad enough.

  Can you explain it to me? Can you tell me how you can be so sure about what you believe that you can put explosives outside a travel agency?

  She imagined his explanation.

  You are in a war zone, Beirut for example. You are responsible for protecting a neighborhood. You learn how to take the ­weapons apart and put them back together. You hear the planes overhead and the shelling. There is fighting on the street. You see someone you know shot and killed by a sniper. One day you kill someone in combat. Eventually the war inhabits you. Then you translate it outward.

  Go on, Ani urged. Don’t stop there.

  You can see the same forces at work everywhere. Different faces but the same body, like some mythical monster. You look around and see what is happening to people, your people, and think the only way to fix it is to fight the system.

  And the system is a hapless tourist at an airline counter? Ani asked.

  The beast chews up and spits out tens of thousands of people a day. Pick any spot on the globe and there are hundreds of dead bodies lying at its feet.

  It’s too big for me, Van. I can only see the individuals and not the pattern.

  All you have to do, Ani, is connect the dots.

  She heard his voice so clearly, but those were her words and not his. She didn’t know where he was or what he was thinking. She only prayed he was safe.

  When her shift in the children’s room was over, Ani went upstairs to pore over the newspapers. Baba arrived and sat down next to her.

  Baba pointed to the headline with his forefinger. “Now these boys are killing the wrong people.”

  “Who are the right people?” Ani asked.

  “I never held a gun in my life. But if I was going to shoot somebody I think it would be those guys in the Turkish government who say the Genocide never happened. You know after the war, some Dashnaks went and hunted down those Young Turk leaders and shot them one by one: Talaat, Djemal, Enver, and a few other big murderers. Operation Nemesis it was called. I could be wrong, but I think even your grandmother’s God gave his blessing to that. But this?” Here he tapped the newspaper and shook his head. “In the end I’m afraid this will be bad business for the Armenians.”

  Ani made photocopies of the Orly newspaper coverage, putting them into a manila file folder labeled ASALA. On her day off she went to the Boston Public Library to read the French newspapers, pained by the descriptions of the people who had been injured and especially those who had been killed in the bombing.

  Among the dead: a small French boy and a Greek-American student who was about to leave on a flight to Istanbul with his Turkish fiancée. Surrounding the figures of the dead Ani imagined widening circles of family and friends, their mouths contorted with grief.

  One of the books Ani had come across in her reading was by a Turkish writer who claimed her son had been killed by Armenian terrorists. The writer, in idiosyncratic English, described the Armenians as a “community of nonappreciatives.” In the book there were photos of dead Turks who had apparently been killed by Armenian revolutionaries.

  With pictures of corpses the captions always instruct you on whom to blame.

  “Don’t you think you’re dwelling too much on this stuff, Ani?” Violet asked her. “If you’re not depressed yet, you’re certainly pushing yourself in that direction.”

  Ani groaned. “Mom, would you give me a break? Knowledge is power.”

  She heard Van again, his voice small behind her ear: No, actually a gun is power and a bomb in a suitcase gets you a banner headline. It’s called armed propaganda. No one cares what happened to the Armenians, Ani. No one remembers what was done to us. We have to make them remember.

  When she lay in bed she closed her eyes and saw Van on a street corner standing in a lighted phone booth. He hadn’t shaved, his clothes were rumpled as though he had slept in them, and his duffel was at his feet. After he pulled a handful of foreign coins from his pocket, he pumped them into the slot and began to dial her number. The phone didn’t ring and the image faded.

  One afternoon about a week later, Baba was waiting in the car outside the library for Ani when she got off work. He gestured her in.

  “Put the bike in the trunk. We’re going visiting,” he told her.

  Minutes later they pulled up in front of the Ardavanians’ house. They walked around the side to the cellar door, where Baba knocked. Vahram Ardavanian, a frail man wearing an ancient gray cardigan despite the summer heat, opened the door. Ani noticed milky cataracts around the edges of the old man’s brown irises.

  “Come sit down,” Vahram invited them.

  In the paneled basement room, a narrow bed took up one corner and there were stacks of yellowed Armenian newspapers against a wall. A frayed couch was covered with a crocheted afghan. As she sat down, Ani glanced at a cluster of photographs in gilt frames that were arranged on an end table. Four generations of Ardavanians were represented. Ani picked up a photo of smiling Van in his Red Raiders football uniform, holding his helmet in the crook of his arm.

  Ani remembered watching Van loping down the long aisle in the high school auditori
um as the cheerleaders chanted, Van Ardavanian, he’s our man, if he can’t do it, no one can.

  “Can I get you something to drink?” Vahram asked. “How about some candy?” He lifted the cover of a yellow cardboard box filled with chocolates that had gone white with age.

  “No thanks, Vahram,” Baba said.

  Vahram lowered himself carefully onto a wooden side chair. “I understand you saw our Van in Paris,” he said to Ani.

  What did Vahram Ardavanian know? She couldn’t tell anything from the look on his face or his tone.

  “We ran into each other on Christmas Eve,” Ani replied. She kept her own voice neutral.

  “He called yesterday,” the old man said. “I was the only one home. He asked me to tell you hello.”

  Ani wanted to ask if there was any other message. Had he said, Tell Ani I love her?

  “Where is he?” Ani asked evenly.

  Vahram shrugged. “You never know with that boy. He doesn’t say. We’re just happy to hear his voice.”

  From the floor above, Sophie Nahabedian called in Armenian down the basement stairs, “Vahram, is Mattheos Kersamian there with you?”

  “Come down, Sophie. Mattheos and his granddaughter are here,” Vahram called back in Armenian.

  The old woman slowly descended the steps, gripping the railing. “Hello, hello. Mattheos, don’t get up.” She settled carefully into an armchair, then smoothed the skirt of the paisley housecoat she was wearing over her dress. “We hear you saw our Van,” she said to Ani. “How did he look?”

  “He looked fine, Auntie,” Ani responded.

  “Was he eating enough?” the old woman inquired.

  “Eating, sleeping, exercising. He’s in good health,” Ani assured her.

  Auntie Sophie shook her head. “I pray every night that he will come home to us in one piece.”

  “Sophie, Sophie, don’t start,” said Vahram. “In a war there have to be soldiers.”

  “Vhy, vhy, vhy,” Auntie Sophie said. “The Turks murdered us, stole everything we had, and keep killing us with their lies. Now we have to give up our grandsons too.”