All the Light There Was

by Kricorian, Nancy

I shook my head.

  “He was a hero of the Russian Caucasus Army during the First World War, and he saved many Armenian lives during the Deportations. He was the first defense minister of the Armenian Republic, and a leader in the Dashnak Party. When he came to the POW camp, he said, ‘Men, we do not know how this war will end, but when it does, Hayastan will need you, so put on this German uniform.’ The Germans had promised an independent Armenia if the Soviets were defeated. A few of the Dashnak leaders, including General Dro, thought this was their best hope. It is now evident that they wagered wrongly.

  “In that camp, they had us on a diet that didn’t kill you right away. I calculated a man could last perhaps two years on the rations they provided, if he found a way to avoid hard labor and managed to steer clear of the illnesses that felled the weaker ones in droves. I had already been in the camp for sixteen months, so I put on the German uniform. But this is a kind of reasoning for which I assume Stalin has no patience.”

  “My father says that Stalin is an assassin.”

  “Yes, well, I don’t want to speak more about Stalin, but I should like to meet your father sometime. What is his profession?”

  “He was trained as a shoemaker in the orphanage workshops in Lebanon, and now he has his own cobbling shop.”

  “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

  “One older brother. Missak. He works for a printer. He forged documents for the Resistance.”

  “I should also like to meet this brother,” Andon said. “Your mother is an admirable woman. And you . . .” He stopped.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m not sure whether it is the proper way to address a friend,” he said.

  I knew I shouldn’t, but I wanted him to say it. “I’ll be the judge of that.”

  “Nothing original. It is an old Armenian expression. Perhaps you have heard it before: You are so beautiful that you shed light on dark walls.”

  “No, I don’t believe that’s proper to tell a friend, even though it might be the most poetic thing anyone has ever said to me.”

  “Will you forgive me?” he asked with a smile.

  23

  I CONVINCED MYSELF THAT as long as I didn’t plan to meet Andon, there could be nothing wrong with our chance encounters. My decision to go to the cathedral each Sunday, I reasoned, had nothing to do with him. Nor did the time I spent in front of the mirror on Sunday morning arranging my hair six different ways before finding the one that suited.

  My father asked, “How did an atheist like me end up with a child who goes to church every week? Is she turning into a religious fanatic?”

  “Don’t call yourself an atheist,” my mother admonished.

  “What do you think I am?” my father asked.

  “I don’t know what you are, but don’t call yourself that. It can’t bring anything good,” my mother replied. “And she’s not a religious fanatic. She used to go to church with Shakeh all the time when she was a little girl, and Shakeh wasn’t a fanatic.”

  Missak asked, “Did you fix your hair like that to impress the priest?”

  I said, “I’m leaving now. Feel free to continue this discussion without me.”

  “Will you be back for lunch?” my mother asked. “The Kacherians are coming, and Auntie Shushan is bringing kadayif.”

  I entered the cathedral and anxiously scanned the parishioners. I saw the back of Andon’s head halfway down the nave, recognizing him by his black Sunday suit, his crisp white collar, and the straight hair that dipped a bit at the center of his neck. I reached the pew directly across from him and settled into the aisle seat. He turned to smile at me and then turned back, and for the rest of the service we both faced forward, though each of us occasionally stole a glance at the other.

  Afterward, we stood talking in the wintry churchyard until I started to shiver.

  “You are cold. We should go,” Andon said.

  I nodded reluctantly.

  “May I accompany you home?” he asked.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. My parents are having guests today.”

  “I hope you did not assume that I was inviting myself to your home. I meant only to take you to your door.”

  “There’s no reason for you to go that far out of your way,” I said, worrying that the Kacherians or some curious neighbors might see us.

  “Except that it would give me pleasure,” he answered. “May I at least walk you to the Métro?”

  Despite the cold, we walked to the nearest station slowly.

  “How were your classes this week?” he asked.

  “Fine. The English-novel seminar is my favorite, but the books are so long and we have to read one a week. I am up late most nights reading. How is your work?”

  “My cousin is a good man, and I enjoy showing the carpets to customers, but I must admit that the days are long. When I am alone in the shop and the repairs are finished, I study French grammar. I have written some sentences and I was hoping to trouble you to correct them for me. If it is too much bother and you don’t have the time, I understand.”

  “It’s no bother at all,” I said.

  He pulled a folded sheet of paper from his coat pocket and handed it to me. As I started to open it, he objected. “Oh, not now. Later. When you are at a table with a pen in your hand. I am serious. I want you to correct my mistakes so that I may learn.”

  The train came, and as the Métro rattled from one station to the next, I read his paragraph. My name is André Shirvanian, he wrote in French. He had already given himself a French name. I was born in Leninakan, Armenia. I have one sister and one brother. I have brown eyes and black hair. I live in Ivry with my cousin. The weather today is cloudy. They were all short, declarative sentences. His handwriting was meticulous, as though he had copied the printed letters exactly. There were only a few small mistakes with the articles, accents, and pronouns, which I would correct, as he’d suggested, with a pen in my hand.

  When I reached our apartment, everyone, including the Kacherians, Missak, and Jacqueline, was already seated at the table in the front room.

  “Where have you been?” my mother asked as she paused in the hall holding a steaming pot of rice pilaf with a dishtowel. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

  “Sorry I’m late,” I answered.

  I followed her to the table, and when I looked at the Kacherians, I saw Zaven’s dark eyes in his father’s face, and I felt a spasm of remorse. Quickly I assured myself that there was no reason to feel guilty. Andon Shirvanian was simply my friend.

  Winter gave way to early spring, and the Sunday ritual remained the same, except that instead of walking to the closest Métro station, we strolled to the one on the place de la Concorde. Each week Andon would give me another paragraph to correct, and in that way I learned more about him: he had no favorite color; his sister’s name was Anna; his brother’s name was Samvel; and his beard grew so quickly that he often shaved twice a day. As his French improved, he began to practice using tenses other than the present, and he wrote small stories about his childhood that were amusing and sometimes touching. He asked me to tell him an anecdote about myself in exchange for each one he wrote. As the plane trees and the chestnuts came into leaf, I looked forward all week to our Sunday promenade on the Champs Élysées.

  Then one Sunday, he wasn’t in the cathedral when I arrived. I sat in the pew glancing over my shoulder as the latecomers straggled in. When he hadn’t appeared twenty minutes into the service, my mood darkened, and the droning liturgy was so tedious I wanted to weep. What if something had happened to him? Perhaps there had been an accident. Or maybe he had decided he was tired of wasting his Sundays on me.

  I realized then how much I had come to depend on him. I liked the way he listened with his full attention, as though each word that came out of my mouth were a revelation. I enjoyed the way that he talked—the formal diction and the precision of his descriptions—and what he had to say about people, ideas, and books; it turned out that he liked to read. As his French im
proved, he had started to make his way through the fables of La Fontaine and other simple classics.

  At the sound of footsteps in the aisle, I turned and saw Andon slip into the pew across from me. He offered an apologetic smile.

  After nodding my head in acknowledgment, I stared straight ahead, my face stern with annoyance. But with whom was I annoyed? Was I angry with him for being late? No, I was angry with myself. I couldn’t pretend anymore that we were merely friends. What I felt toward him was more than friendly and I knew my feelings were reciprocated. I would have to stop going to church on Sunday and pretending that I was interested in something in that cathedral other than Andon Shirvanian.

  After the service, I agreed to walk with him, but only to the closest Métro stop.

  He said, “I am so sorry that I was late. I overslept because I was reading until the early hours, and then there was a problem with the train. I apologize if I disappointed you.”

  “It’s nothing that you’ve done. It’s me.”

  “And what could you have possibly done?” he asked.

  “I’m going to be honest with you: I’ve made a mistake. I thought we could be friends, but I realized just now that it wasn’t possible.”

  “Why can we not be friends?”

  “Don’t make me say it. The war will be over any day now. I’ll be expecting Zaven back. And it’s not right that I should let myself have these feelings about you. It’s not fair to Zaven, or to you.”

  “But what if he does not return, Maral? What then?”

  “I can’t think like that.”

  We had reached the Métro entrance.

  “I have to go,” I said.

  “And you will not be at the cathedral next Sunday?” he asked.

  “I won’t,” I told him.

  “If I had been on time today, perhaps this would not be happening?”

  “Maybe not today, but one Sunday soon.”

  He frowned. “You know, it is possible to have these complicated feelings, Maral, and also be a friend. I will always be your friend, and should you ever need anything, you can find me at my cousin’s shop. May I still give you the story I wrote?” He held out a folded sheet of paper.

  Sitting on the bench on the Métro platform, I read his last story.

  When I arrived in Paris dressed in a hated uniform, I met a pretty girl who was kind to me. The entire time that I was near the sea, I thought about that girl. Perhaps she was only someone I had imagined to make myself feel less alone. But when my war was over, I hoped to meet her again. I did find her in the cathedral and she was just as beautiful as I remembered. As time went by, she was no longer simply a pretty girl, but my friend. In a strange country and in a new language, she was my companion.

  I sat on the bench for a long time, letting one train after the next pass through the station before I finally boarded one to go home.

  The following Sunday, when I was still in my nightgown and robe after breakfast, my father asked, “What? Have you lost your religion? You aren’t going to the church to commune with your God and His hooded henchmen?”

  My mother said, “Can you please keep your blasphemy to yourself?”

  “I have too much studying to do,” I answered. And once again I turned to my books.

  24

  AS I WAS WALKING HOME along the rue de Belleville, I saw a crowd gathered around the corner newsstand. I crossed the street and threaded my way to the counter, where I caught sight of the paper that had drawn people’s interest. On the front page there were pictures of skeletal men in striped uniforms standing behind barbed wire, emaciated men lying on wooden shelves stacked from floor to ceiling, half-naked bodies piled like cordwood, and charred bones in what were called human ovens. My mind flinched away from the images—they were too horrific to be real. With trembling hands I put down a coin, folded the paper, and tucked it into my satchel.

  When I entered the apartment, my mother took one look at my face and said, “Yavrum, what is it? What’s the matter?”

  I held up the paper. “Buchenwald.”

  My mother glanced at the photos, put her hand to her cheek, and whispered, “Aman.”

  Sitting at the table in the front room with the paper, I studied the black-and-white faces of the gaunt, haggard survivors, not sure that Zaven and Barkev would even be recognizable.

  My mother sat nearby, shaking her head and moaning. “Ahkh, ahkh, ahkh. Vhy, vhy, vhy. Stop looking at those pictures, Maral. You will make yourself sick.”

  I threw the newspaper to the floor. “You’re right. It’s sickening.”

  My mother said, “God should rain down fire and destroy us all.”

  When my father and Missak arrived from work that evening, both of them were grim-faced. My father glanced from my mother’s drawn countenance to my red-rimmed eyes. He sighed heavily, but said nothing.

  At the end of dinner, my father said, “I’m going to the Kacherians’.”

  Missak said, “I’ll go with you.”

  “Should I?” I asked. In fact, I couldn’t imagine anything I wanted to do less than visit Zaven’s mother on the day she had seen those pictures.

  My father shook his head. “You stay with your mother.”

  I went to bed early and lay staring at the children in Missak’s sketch, which was still tacked to the wall. When I closed my eyes, the photographs from the paper were etched inside my eyelids.

  I fell asleep and dreamed that Zaven was lying in the mud on a torn blanket next to a barbed-wire fence. He was staring at me with enormous, pensive eyes. He was so thin that I could see the pulse beat in his temple, so thin that his upper arm was smaller than my wrist. I gently picked him up as though he were an injured child. “You’re too late,” he whispered. I started up the steep hill with Zaven in my arms, and as I walked he grew smaller. Finally he was no bigger than a doll made from a castoff sock.

  The next evening, my mother and I paid a call on the Kacherians. When we entered the apartment, we saw that the work of grieving had begun in earnest. In the parlor, Auntie Shushan moaned on the divan; my mother joined her, while I sat in a chair next to pale and solemn Virginie. The hard rations of the war had kept her from growing tall—she was diminutive and thin—but at almost fifteen, she was no longer a little girl.

  Virginie said, “They’re coming back, Maral. I know they are.”

  A few weeks later, we heard that the first deportees had started returning from the camps. Missak found out that the Red Cross had set up a service for returnees at the Hôtel Lutetia, so Auntie Shushan went there every few days to look for her sons. Our two families agreed it was unwise for her to make the trek alone, so my mother, Virginie, and I took turns accompanying her. The routine was the same. We combed the lists for Zaven’s and Barkev’s names, and then scoured the halls for their faces. We didn’t find them the first week, or the second, or the third. By the fourth week, I began to give up hope of ever seeing Zaven among the frail and worn survivors in the hotel’s corridors.

  One evening toward the end of May, Missak strode into the front room, where my mother and I were setting the dinner table, and announced, “Barkev arrived this afternoon.”

  “Thank God,” my mother said.

  “Did you see him?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “I saw him.”

  “And Zaven?”

  He shook his head. And then Missak sank into a chair, dropping his face into his hands.

  My mother started with the litany: “Ahkh, ahkh, vhy, vhy, vhy.” And I stood behind my brother with one hand on his heaving shoulder. I didn’t know what to feel or think. I observed the three of us from above, small people in a small apartment, bent with grief. This scene was playing itself out in apartments and houses all across the city, all across the continent, and all around the world. The war was a great factory of suffering, all of it fashioned by human hands.

  I said suddenly, “I have to see him.”

  Minutes later, Virginie opened the door of their apartment. “Com
e in. He’s in the parlor.” She spoke in the hushed tones customarily used when there was an illness in the family.

  As I entered the room, Barkev looked up from where he was seated, his face all angles and planes, his jaw muscles visible beneath taut flesh, and a shadow of a beard across his cheeks. There were charcoal-colored rings under his eyes. He said nothing, but he pushed on the arms of the chair and slowly stood up.

  His mother and father, whom I had barely noticed were there, slipped out of the room.

  “Oh, please sit down,” I said. Even though I had seen the photos and all the returnees at the Lutetia, still I was unprepared.

  He looked like a sick old man, and he was barely twenty-three years old.

  “I’m so sorry, Maral,” he said. “Don’t cry.”

  I saw the distress in his face, so I pulled my own countenance into what I hoped was a neutral mask.

  “You cut your hair,” he said, carefully settling back into his chair.

  “I did,” I replied, taking a seat on the end of the sofa near him.

  “It looks nice.”

  This conversation about my hair was banal and absurd, but I didn’t know what else to say. We said nothing for a while, the air heavy with unspoken questions. It didn’t seem right to ask about Zaven yet, but Zaven was all I could think about at that moment.

  “Maral, I’m sorry that Zaven didn’t come back,” he said, as though reading my mind.

  “I’m sorry, Barkev. I’m so sorry for both of us.”

  When I put my hand on his skinny forearm, he dropped his head, and something wet fell onto the back of my hand.

  Just then his parents and sister came into the room, and I saw a wave of exhaustion pass over Barkev’s face.

  “I should go,” I said.

  “Please come back tomorrow,” Barkev said. “We can talk more, and maybe take a walk.”

  A few minutes later, I sat on the bench in the courtyard of my building under the round moon’s harsh light. Long shadows moved over the ground and walls of the courtyard. Only the chirping of a few crickets in the bushes and the sound of an occasional passing car interrupted the stillness. Finally I trudged up the stairs to our apartment, thinking my family would all be asleep, but my mother was sitting in the front room in her robe with her long hair down.