Dreams of Bread and Fire

by Nancy Kricorian

  “It’s Grandma. She’s having a heart attack.”

  Ani followed her mother up the cellar stairs to the kitchen. They went to the hall, where Grandma, whose hair was undone, was seated at the telephone table. Her face, Ani noted, was the same color as a frozen turkey defrosting on the counter. The muscles in her neck stood out like wires. Her head was large and strange. Her mouth worked the air as though she were trying to talk, but no words came out and she grimaced in frustration.

  Baba, who was pacing the tiny hall, stopped to pat Grandma on the shoulder. In Armenian he said to her, “Don’t talk, Mariam. Don’t try to talk. Save your strength.”

  Violet shouted, “The ambulance will be here any minute, Ma!” as though deafness were the problem.

  Grandma closed her eyes, resting her head against the wall.

  It felt like forever that they waited under the hall’s bleak light.

  Finally the fire truck and the police cars arrived, followed closely by the ambulance. Many tall uniformed men stood around, their large hands empty. Ani looked down, noticing how short her cotton nightshirt was. She glanced up and saw a cop ogling her legs.

  The paramedics loaded Grandma onto a stretcher. Baba and Violet trailed behind them to the sidewalk. By that time Ani was in the corner of her grandparents’ bedroom. She curled up in the small armchair with her cheek against the faded flowered slipcover. Ani saw behind her eyelids her grandmother’s gray face, stricken with the speechless animal terror of great pain. Ani couldn’t imagine anything lonelier than that—except death.

  When Ani arrived at the door of her grandmother’s room in the cardiac ward the next afternoon, her mother and grandfather were in the hall conversing with the doctor.

  Ani kissed her grandmother’s cheek, which was as smooth and soft as an apricot. She was relieved to see that the old woman, although pale and weak, was smiling.

  “How’s it going, Grandma?” Ani asked.

  “Akh, food here is terrible, aghchigess. Anham eh. They don’t let you get no sleep neither. Every five minute, take temperature, check this, check that.”

  Baba and Violet entered the room.

  “You two, I want to talk to Ani. You leave,” Grandma said in Armenian, as she waved them away wearily.

  “I’ll go to the cafeteria and get you some chocolate pudding, Ma,” Violet said.

  After they were gone, Grandma said to Ani, “Get pocketbook.”

  Ani fetched the black leather handbag from the sill, where it was propped between two vases filled with flowers. It was from the forties, with a stiff handle and a gold clasp.

  Ani handed the bag to her grandmother. “I don’t need any money, you know.”

  “No money.” Grandma snapped open the clasp.

  Ani perched on the edge of the bed, watching her grandmother rummage in the purse.

  “You looking for an Almond Joy?” Ani asked.

  “Ahrr,” the old woman said, as she thrust a cassette tape into Ani’s hand. “Don’t say nothing about it to nobody.”

  Ani wondered how long Grandma had been carrying the tape around. “Not even to you?”

  “That’s right. Nothing to nobody.”

  “Okay,” Ani said. “Can I keep it?”

  “It’s for you. Why anybody would want, chem keedehr.”

  The old woman closed her eyes. Her face was pale and drawn.

  Grandma opened her eyes and asked, “When you getting married, Ani? I want to see you wedding before I die.”

  “I’ve got to start from scratch, Grandma, so it might take me a while.”

  “Good riddance to Esau. What you need is nice—”

  Ani interrupted. “Nice Armenian boy.”

  Grandma smiled weakly. “That’s right, honey.”

  “I’ll work on it,” Ani said.

  A nurse came in bearing a large arrangement of pink roses and white lilies. “These are for you, Mrs. Kersamian. Aren’t they beautiful?”

  “Thank you, honey. Very pretty,” the old woman said.

  “Is this your granddaughter?” the nurse asked, as she placed the flowers on the windowsill. She extracted the card and handed it to the old woman.

  “This is my Ani,” Grandma said proudly. She glanced at the card, tossed it aside, and sighed. “When you dying even people who don’t like you send flowers.”

  The nurse clucked her tongue. “Mrs. Kersamian, you are not dying. The doctor says you will be going home in a few days.”

  “Don’t worry,” Ani assured the nurse. “She’s been saying that she’s dying for as long as I can remember. Right, Grandma?”

  “Bidi mernim,” Grandma responded on cue.

  “That’s Armenian for I’m dying,” Ani explained.

  Violet came in with the pudding and Baba beckoned for Ani to join him in the hall.

  Baba said, “I forgot to tell you in all the commotion. Vahram called last evening. They heard from Van a few days ago. He’s in Canada.”

  This news jolted through her. Van in Canada? He was on the same continent. He had now contacted his family twice and she hadn’t heard a word from him since Paris.

  “Did Van ask Vahram to call us?” Ani asked.

  “I don’t know, anoushig,” Baba said, shrugging. “I thought I should tell you. But Canada isn’t so close. Plus, you’re supposed to be looking for that Armenian dentist, right?”

  The bike ride from the hospital to home wasn’t far, but the late-afternoon sun was fierce and the air thick. Ani didn’t want to think about Van. She didn’t want to know that he was on the same land mass only hours away. She didn’t want to twist his nose and yell at him for all the anguish he had caused her. She didn’t want to smell sweet loam and spices. She didn’t want to kiss him.

  When Ani arrived at the house, she located the tape recorder on the shelf in the hall closet and went downstairs to her room.

  She rewound the tape and as it began to play she heard her own voice for a moment: “And when you’re finished you push down this one. . . .” Then there was a patch of scratchy air between when her grandmother had turned on the machine and when the old woman started to talk.

  Ani closed her eyes and listened to Grandma’s small, affectless voice begin.

  “The Turks told us to leave our house. All the Armenians left their house. We had only clothes on our back. We start walking.”

  There was a pause.

  When Grandma’s voice started again it was smaller still.

  “My mother fell by road.”

  Silence.

  “We left her.”

  Silence.

  “My sisters died because we didn’t have nothing to eat.”

  Silence.

  “My father died of broken heart.”

  Silence.

  “A Kurd took my brother.”

  There was a long silence as the tape rolled on. It seemed that the fragmented, telegraphic narrative was finished.

  But then Ani heard her grandmother’s voice, barely above a whisper.

  “Jesus says love your enemy.”

  Pause.

  “What they did to us I never can forgive.”

  better to be the village cat than a foreign aristocrat

  These were the things that Ani hated about the city: cockroaches that scuttled into cracks when she flicked on the kitchen light; the crash, whine, and grind of buses, ambulances, and garbage trucks at all hours of the night and day; litter spilling out of overfilled trash cans where rats nosed about at dusk; and the rank smell of urine at the far end of the subway platform.

  She counted the beggars panhandling up and down the avenue near the university. There were at least two on each block—people with dirt-streaked faces and grimy clothes. Hardened city ­dwellers walked past, deaf to their p
leas, but Ani looked at each and every one. She said, “Sorry,” after she ran out of change. One man, his face twisted with hatred and his red and swollen ankles showing over unlaced oversized sneakers, said, “You’re not sorry, you god­damned bitch.”

  It was true. How sorry was she really? She wasn’t sorry enough to do anything useful, such as volunteering in a soup kitchen or getting a degree in social work, or even something idealistic like joining the Spartacus Youth League, for which pale dour students handed out jargon-filled newspapers at the college gate. Workers of the world unite to throw off the chains of capitalist oppression. She tossed the newspaper onto a heaped trash receptacle and headed up the stone steps to a seminar on nineteenth-century French literature. Now that was a useful topic.

  After class she dashed across the campus toward the subway station to meet Elena on the platform. It had turned out that Elena’s lover was a young woman named Daisy, a former varsity soccer captain who was in a training program at some big Wall Street investment firm. Daisy lived in Greenwich Village and they were headed to her apartment for dinner.

  Ani asked, “What do your parents think about Daisy?”

  Elena’s mother was a devout Catholic.

  Elena replied, “I thought I’d wait until Christmas to drop the bombshell.”

  Ani found it baffling that Elena had disavowed all her previous heterosexual encounters as “inauthentic.” Elena claimed that she was now and had always been—even before she knew it—a lesbian. Ani wasn’t convinced. She remembered Elena’s passion for her college boyfriends. Elena said this was the effect of a lifetime of brainwashing, which she had now overcome.

  Elena had posted on the refrigerator in their apartment a list of the famous women who had been lesbians. There was a second column with a question mark above it for women who were rumored—but not yet confirmed—to belong to this group. It reminded Ani of the way her grandparents could catalog the name of every Armenian, half Armenian, and quarter Armenian who had attained any degree of acclaim.

  Ani and Elena slid into seats in the train’s second-to-last car.

  “How was the day?” Ani asked.

  “Kind of sucked. I spent all afternoon in the library, and none of the books I needed were on the shelves. I put recall notices on all of them, but I’m sure professors have most of them, which means it will take months to get them back. How about you?”

  Ani answered, “I think we’re going to suffer horribly through our twenties, and then settle into dull complacency in our thirties.”

  “Are you depressed?” Elena queried.

  Ani asked, “Do I seem depressed?”

  “Well, you haven’t had sex in months. You’ve made sure that you’re up to your eyeballs in work. You have big dark circles under your eyes.”

  This seemed to Ani like the moment to unburden herself—to tell the sorry tale of her failed love affair with Van Arda­­­vanian—but she couldn’t bear the scalding light of Elena’s anthro­pological curiosity. And, more importantly, she had pledged silence.

  Ani asked, “Does it seem to you that almost everyone on campus is wearing black? It’s like they’re all on their way to a wake.”

  “Black’s in fashion,” Elena responded. She was wearing black jeans and a black sweater.

  “But what is the fashion about? What’s behind it? I think it’s a generation in mourning,” Ani observed.

  “In mourning for what?” Elena asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know. The demise of the planet. The threat of nuclear war. The end of love.”

  “You are depressed,” Elena stated, as they stood to exit the train.

  They walked along the narrow tree-lined street past brick townhouses.

  Elena said, “You know, you can go to the student health service and talk to a shrink for free. Then they refer you to another shrink for treatment. The one I’m seeing now has a sliding scale. It’s almost affordable.”

  As she listened, Ani noticed Elena making eye contact with a woman who passed them on the sidewalk.

  “You’re seeing a therapist?” Ani asked.

  “Oh, my God, Ani, everyone I know in New York has a shrink,” Elena replied.

  Ani watched as two older women with matching leather ­jackets went by. When Elena raised her eyebrows at them, they smiled in return.

  “Why do you do that?” Ani asked.

  “Do what?” Elena said.

  “Make weird faces at women on the street.”

  Elena laughed. “It’s a secret signal we use to acknowledge members of our tribe.”

  While Ani wasn’t interested in joining this particular tribe, belonging to one sounded like a good idea. There were millions of people in the city. Someone had told Ani that if everyone in Manhattan came out of their apartments at the same time there wouldn’t be enough room on the sidewalks for all of them. Yet Ani had only one friend and twelve acquaintances. When Elena stayed at Daisy’s over the weekend, Ani might go for two days without having a meaningful conversation.

  Daisy’s second-floor apartment had five spacious rooms with tall windows. Daisy, who was dressed in a black cashmere sweater and black jeans, gave Ani the tour. There were matching dishes and a complete set of flatware in the gleaming kitchen. Daisy’s bedroom featured a queen-sized bed with a brass headboard.

  Daisy gestured at the other bedroom door. “That’s Jackie’s room. She’s a slob, so we keep the door closed.”

  “Wow,” Ani said. “You’ve arrived. This is real life. Our furniture is all stuff that Elena dragged home on trash day.”

  “That’s because Daisy has a job and brings home real money,” Elena said, ruffling Daisy’s cropped blond hair.

  While Daisy was in the kitchen, Ani and Elena set the dining room table for four.

  “Who’s Jackie?” Ani asked.

  “The ex,” Elena said curtly.

  “Her ex-girlfriend lives here?” Ani asked incredulously.

  “Listen, Ani, we’re all grown-ups now.”

  Ani couldn’t imagine giving that kind of leeway to a recently split heterosexual couple.

  Jackie breezed in as they were carrying serving platters to the dining room. She had a pretty oval face, short black hair, and there was a silver ring through her right eyebrow. She too was wearing a black sweater and black jeans.

  “Jackie, this is Ani,” Daisy said.

  “Hey, Ani, are you my date for the evening?” Jackie winked at Ani.

  Ani tried to keep her face immobile but felt the flush creeping up her neck.

  “You slut,” Daisy said.

  When Daisy and Elena laughed, Ani realized it was all in jest and she smiled stiffly.

  Ani took the subway home alone, surprised to find the car almost full at midnight. Two Polish carpenters with their tools in canvas bags sat next to Ani. Across the way was an older black woman wearing a nurse’s aide uniform and reading a copy of the Watchtower. At Times Square a ragged white man with a matted beard and dirt in the creases of his face entered the car and started shouting at his fellow passengers as the train hurtled through the dark.

  He yelled, “Cesspools, you’re all fucking cesspools. Do you understand that? Not a grain of decency in a single one of you. Like fucking animals. Do you hear me? Fucking animals, all of you.”

  When she stepped onto the platform at her station, Ani felt the knot behind her forehead loosen slightly. She walked across the campus, past the gleaming facades of the neoclassical buildings. The moon sat in the satin sky like a crooked bowl. God ladled sadness into the bowl until it spilled from the heavens like bitter milk. Ani caught the milk in her cup and drank it down.

  Where was Van? She wished she had pierced his nose with a golden ring and threaded a silken cord through it. She could lead him around like a prized calf. Except maybe the ring should be through
the heart. Her heart had been ground to a fine meat that could be mixed in a bowl with onions and parsley for baking onto a lahmejun. Love was at its core a kind of cannibalism.

  The next morning Ani went to the Armenian language class she had signed up for, despite the fact that it had no relation to the degree she was meant to be taking. The class met four times a week and was led by a thin bearded graduate student from Beirut named Zaven. The four women students all spoke some Armenian, and the other three already knew the alphabet, so Ani would have to work hard to keep up.

  That afternoon Ani skipped a lecture sponsored by the French department and sat in instead on an Armenian history seminar. In the departmental office, Ani slid into a seat at a carved mahogany table with twelve students around it.

  Professor Avedikian, who was short and portly with iron-gray hair and a white goatee, strode in and took his place at the head of the table. He lectured for two straight hours, speaking deliberately in impeccable English with a slight hint of an Armenian accent. As the minutes went by he slowly turned the yellowed leaves of his notes without once appearing to consult them.

  After the lecture Ani headed to the student health service for a consultation. The therapist was a tall woman with frizzy ­shoulder-length brown hair and a row of silver bangles up one of her forearms.

  “What brings you here?” she asked, her long face calm and expectant.

  Ani twirled a lock of hair at the nape of her neck. “Well, people keep asking me if I’m depressed, so I started thinking maybe I’m depressed.”

  “About anything in particular?”

  “I’m kind of unhappy.”

  “And what do you think is the cause of your unhappiness?”

  Ani blurted out, “I have no idea what I’m doing. My best friend has joined a lesbian secret society. My college boyfriend dumped me like last night’s table scraps. The next boyfriend was a childhood buddy, practically a cousin, who lied to me about almost everything and then disappeared. The Turks tried to wipe out my grandparents and the rest of the Armenians like they were so many cockroaches, and did a damned good job. My father was killed by a hit-and-run driver about a block from here when I was four years old. His family had disowned him when he married my mother and I’ve never met any of them, including an aunt who probably still lives on West End Avenue.”