“Just one?” Jacqueline reached toward the tray on the table. “The girls don’t need them. I’m the bride and I’m hungry.”
Her mother swatted her hand away. “Go find a bread stick.”
On a sunny, hot July day, Missak and Jacqueline, and Barkev and I, were married at the mairie of the Twentieth Arrondissement with our families in attendance. Afterward, we spread out a feast on blankets near the lake in the Buttes Chaumont. All the Sahadians, Kacherians, Nazarians, and Meguerditchians were there. So were Jacqueline’s lawyer boss and his wife, Missak’s boss and his wife, and several neighbors. Hagop brought along his oud and two musician friends, so after the meal there was dancing.
“Do you want to dance?” I asked Barkev when the playing started. We were sitting together on a blanket on the grass. He had taken off his suit jacket and loosened his tie.
He shook his head. “You go ahead.”
“Are you sure?”
“You go with them.” As he gestured toward the forming lines of dancers with Missak at the head of one and Jacqueline at the head of the other, the gold wedding band on his finger glinted in the sun.
I thought briefly of joining the dancers, but when I glanced back at Barkev, I saw a shadow pass over his face.
“I want to sit with you,” I said.
“It’s miserable that he’s not here, but then if he were . . .” His sentence trailed off.
“Don’t,” I told him. “This is our day.”
“He told me about the red yarn.” He looked down and plucked a blade of grass.
“Oh,” I said. “So you know.”
Just then Jacqueline passed by at the head of the line of dancers. She waved at me with her free hand.
“Come on, Maral!” she called.
“I’m watching you!” I called back.
Barkev leaned toward me, pushing a strand of hair out of my eyes. “Sorry to be such an old man.”
“But you are my old man now, aren’t you?”
That night, when we closed the door on our new, shared bedroom, I carefully arranged the set of gilt-edged combs and brushes my parents had given me as a wedding gift on the top of the dresser. With my back turned to Barkev, I slipped on the lace-trimmed summer nightgown my mother had made, and in the dresser mirror I saw Barkev, with his back turned to me, change into a pair of striped pajamas. We had so little privacy, with his parents and sister in the same apartment and with the whole neighborhood’s windows flung open because of the summer heat. But now there was a gold ring on my left hand, and a gold ring on his, and no one could disapprove.
I folded back the sheet and lay down on the bed. He stretched out beside me, running his fingers down the side of my face. It was like a chord strummed on an oud’s strings, full of longing. When we kissed, I felt a hot tear slide from his face onto mine.
26
SOME MORNINGS AS I was just waking up, in the anteroom between dreams and day, I thought I was still in my family’s apartment in the bedroom I had shared with my aunt. Then I would open my eyes: the dark-haired man whose head was on the pillow beside me was my husband. Once, for a second, when Barkev’s back was to me, I mistook him for his brother, but then I remembered. I glanced around the room, from the water stain on the ceiling over the bed to the walnut dresser with a mirror above it to the wooden chair next to the dresser, on the seat of which a pair of work pants were neatly folded. The closet door was ajar, and inside it my dresses hung next to Barkev’s Sunday shirts and his wedding suit. I reminded myself: My name is Maral Kacherian. I am married and I live with my husband’s family.
I had imagined that becoming a wife would overnight turn me into a more serious and substantial person. But no such transformation had occurred. I didn’t feel like a grown woman—it was as though I had moved from being a daughter in my own family to being a daughter in his. His mother ruled in the kitchen, and his father presided at the dinner table.
Even though Barkev and I had known each other for as long as I could remember, I was still discovering my husband. I had always thought that Zaven, the younger and shorter brother, was the handsomer of the two, even though their features were similar. I realized on closer study that the main difference between them was that Barkev’s face was asymmetrical, making his smile crooked and one nostril flare a little more than the other. His eyes were a lighter shade of brown, and he was quieter and more thoughtful than Zaven. If we went for a walk, he noticed before I did that I was hungry and offered me roasted chickpeas from a paper bag he carried in his pocket. He liked playing backgammon with his father in the evenings after dinner. He was a restless sleeper and had frequent nightmares that woke us both.
One morning about six weeks after we married, I opened my eyes and what I wanted more than anything was to stay in bed all day. And it wasn’t just Barkev’s turning, muttering, and grinding his teeth at night that left me tired. My blood was sluggish in my veins, my head hazy, and my stomach queasy.
I was soon to start my second year at the university, but it didn’t make sense to continue if there was a baby coming in the spring. Deep down, I wasn’t even sure what I was doing at the university; I just craved the books and the praise that came with being a student. I felt I should ferret out the knitting needles and apply to Auntie’s boss for work again.
I sighed.
“What’s the matter?” Barkev asked.
“Sorry,” I said, turning to him. “Did I wake you?”
“No. It’s time to get up. What do you see in that spot on the ceiling? You spend a lot of time staring at it.”
“That’s how I think.”
“What were you thinking?”
“That I’m going to have a baby,” I answered.
“Are you sure?”
“Let’s not say anything until I see the doctor.” I studied the dark circles under his eyes. “Are you pleased?”
“I’m happy about the baby. The world the baby comes into is another thing.”
Barkev didn’t talk about it, but I could sense when he was remembering the camp. I couldn’t even think of the place’s name without the newspaper images floating up like bloated corpses in a river. He must have felt alone here among people who had very little idea of what he had lived through.
Now Barkev’s eyes were fastened on me, but he wasn’t seeing me.
“What are you thinking?” I asked.
His eyes slowly focused. “If it’s a boy, we could name him Zaven.”
I recoiled inside. It was too heavy a burden to put on an infant—that he must be both himself and a loved one lost to war. There were children in our community named for fathers, mothers, or siblings killed during the Deportations, but it was not a tradition I had wanted to continue.
“You don’t like the idea?” he asked.
“Not much,” I admitted.
He seemed almost relieved.
My stomach suddenly lurched and I jumped from the bed, grabbing my robe as I made for the toilet on the hall landing.
“Are you all right?” Barkev called after me.
I raced past the startled faces of my mother-in-law and Virginie.
Crouching before the porcelain toilet bowl, I heaved up mostly bile. I stood and pulled the toilet handle, feeling lightheaded as the water noisily churned through the pipes. I had never fainted, but I imagined this was what it must feel like just before you did. I leaned heavily on the wall behind me taking slow deep breaths until the dizziness passed.
When I returned to the kitchen, they were all at the table having breakfast, and my mother-in-law raised one eyebrow.
Virginie asked, “Are you okay?”
My father-in-law asked, “Are you coming down with something?”
I shook my head. “It’s nothing. I’m fine now.”
“Sit down, honey,” Shushan said with a knowing smile. She pulled out a chair at the table. “Let me make you some toast and tea.”
After Virginie left for the lycée and my husband and father-in-law headed off to work, m
y mother-in-law asked, “Should you and I go see the doctor this week?”
“I thought I could keep it secret for a little while.”
“A secret? In an apartment this size?”
After Dr. Odabashian had confirmed our suspicions, I confided in my mother and Jacqueline. My mother was initially elated and then doubt flickered across her face.
“What about the university?”
“I’m done with that,” I said.
“You are sure?” my mother asked.
“Yes. I’m sure.”
As the weeks went by, the nausea subsided and I began to have dreams that the baby had been born—a tiny baby, sometimes so small it would have fit into the palm of my hand. Nightly the baby suffered one calamity after the next. In one dream it was born with no arms and legs, and I planted it like a bulb in the dirt of a flowerpot; I accidentally knocked the flowerpot off the window ledge and it smashed in the courtyard below. I didn’t tell my mother-in-law about the dreams because she was superstitious.
Shushan Kacherian was known for her skill in reading the future in coffee grounds at the bottom of a cup. My mother frowned on this practice because Father Avedis disapproved, but other women in the community sought Digin Shushan’s readings. My mother-in-law was also a great believer in dreams as bearers of signs and portents. She consulted a small worn book with lists of objects and happenings and what they signified. If you dreamed that a person recovered from illness, this surely meant the person would die. If you wore a ring in a dream, that was bad luck, unless the ring was silver, and then it was good. I didn’t want my mother-in-law to suspect what an absent-minded, neglectful mother I was in my dreams, because this could only be a bad omen.
I started knitting again—most of it piecework for Auntie’s old boss that I did while sitting in the front room with my mother during the afternoons. It was like old times—I knit and my mother ran up vests on the machine. Sometimes we talked, but for long stretches we worked in companionable silence. I had plenty to occupy my thoughts—a new husband, a baby on the way, and fragmented memories from childhood and my school years that flickered across my mind’s eye. Occasionally I thought of Andon. Was he sitting in the back of his cousin’s shop repairing a rug? Then I would imagine Barkev at his bench, his head bent over an elegant woman’s shoe with a fine hammer as he tapped tiny nails to hold the sole in place. He had told me that sometimes still his hands trembled so badly that he couldn’t do his work, but it seemed this happened with less frequency.
In the late afternoons, I returned to help my mother-in-law prepare dinner. After the meal I sat with Barkev and my in-laws in the living room listening to the radio. Using slim needles, I worked baby sweaters and booties out of balls of whisper-thin white wool. I held a bootie in my palm, trying to imagine the tiny foot that would fill it.
My mother-in-law said, “Because you had such bad morning sickness, I’m sure it’s a boy. If it was a girl, you would hardly have been sick at all.”
My father-in-law said, “Enough of these Old Country superstitions. The baby will be what it is, and none of your predictions will have any influence.”
Shushan replied, “Really, the best way to tell is how she carries the baby. Wait until her belly gets a little bigger. If it’s sticking way out, that will prove it’s a boy.”
“And if it isn’t sticking way out?” I asked.
“Well, if you’re carrying lower down and broader, that means it’s a girl,” my mother-in-law said.
Vahan shook his head. “The only thing that will prove anything is taking a good look at the baby when it’s born.”
27
ONE AFTERNOON WHEN I was working at my mother’s, the doorbell shrilled unexpectedly. Through the peephole, I saw on the landing a dark-haired woman with fair skin holding the hand of a light-haired child, a girl of about eight years old dressed in a blue coat.
I opened the door. “Claire!”
The girl smiled shyly, holding up a frayed rag doll with yellow yarn for hair.
“And Charlotte! You’ve come back. And this must be your aunt Myriam.”
The woman held out her hand. “Myriam Galinski. I am so glad to meet you. Claire has told me so much about you and your family.”
My mother was behind me. “Girl, what are you doing keeping these people shivering in the cold,” she said in Armenian. In French she added, “Please come in.”
“Madame Galinski—” I started to say.
“Please, call me Myriam.”
“Myriam, this is my mother, Azniv Pegorian.”
“Let me make you some tea,” my mother said. “Maral, hang up their coats, give them slippers, and take them to the front room.”
“I see you are expecting,” Myriam said. “When is the baby due?”
I answered, “In the middle of April.”
“So nice to have a new baby in the spring. You have the whole summer to be outdoors. My twins were born in May.”
“How old are they?” I asked as I led them into the apartment.
“Seven. A boy and a girl,” Myriam said. “I left them in Nice with my husband. You miss them, don’t you, Claire?”
Claire nodded, holding her doll, face out, against her heart.
I asked, “But Claire, what happened to Charlotte’s eyes? Now she has one black one and one gray. Should we try to find another gray one?”
Claire nodded.
“Or maybe you can pick two buttons of any color you want,” I said. I went to my mother’s sewing corner and found the tin of buttons. “Do you remember when we used to spill these on the bed and sort them?”
I remembered the overcast summer morning when Claire and I stayed in the bedroom pretending to play with the buttons while her parents were taken out of the building. I wondered how much Claire remembered from that day and the days that followed.
I plucked a gray button from the tin. “Look, it’s the same as the ones we used the first time. Should we sew this on?”
“Charlotte would like that,” she said.
My mother came into the room with a tray of tea, a pitcher of milk, a platter of homemade cookies, and four plates.
“Little one,” my mother said, “when you were with us before, we had nothing to offer you but toast. Do you remember? No milk, no nothing. We still have rationing, but it’s possible to find the things you need now.” She set the tray on the table and continued, “Look what I have for you, sweetie.” She held the platter out to the child and said, “Take as many as you like.”
Claire glanced at her aunt, who nodded her assent.
Claire placed two cookies on her plate. “Thank you very much, madame.”
“What beautiful manners you have, Claire,” my mother commented as she slipped three more cookies onto the child’s plate. “And look how long your curls are now. It must be a job for your aunt to brush them out in the evening. When Maral was your age, her hair was down to her waist, and at night I brushed and brushed until her hair was shiny.”
After my mother poured out the tea, an uncomfortable silence settled on the room. Should we talk about what happened to Claire’s parents in front of her, or should we not? I snipped the thread holding the black button onto the face of the doll. I began to sew the gray button in its place.
Finally, my mother said, “We always wondered about what happened to Claire after they invaded the Free Zone.”
“It wasn’t too bad until the Italians left. After that, we thought it best to move from the city. Claire, my husband, the twins, and I went to a small village in the mountains north of Nice. It was a difficult time,” she said. “I came here to thank you for keeping Claire and for sending her to us. I know that wasn’t easy. We are also here to see what we can learn about my sister and her husband. We found out the number of the convoy they were on and the camp they were sent to, but as yet nothing more.”
I turned to the child and handed her the doll. “There. Two gray eyes, just like yours. But Charlotte’s hair is a bit of a mess, don’t yo
u think?”
Claire straightened the ragged yellow yarn.
“Want to look in the yarn bag? You could pick a new color, but I think I might still have that yellow if you like.”
Claire and I pulled out a selection of small yarn balls in an array of colors, lining them up on the table: the bright yellow, black, an improbable purple, and several shades of brown.
Her aunt said, “It will take time, I suppose. But we’ve made the inquiries.”
“I like this one,” Claire said, selecting a light tan. “My hair is almost this color now.”
With a few deft clips of the scissors, I made Charlotte bald and then quickly sewed on a new mop of hair.
My mother said, “It shocked us, it shocked us all that they would take Sara in her condition. And they were rounding up the little children as well. It was disgraceful. We told Sara and Joseph to leave Claire with us.”
Myriam said, “We will always be grateful for what you did.”
I said, “Charlotte is still wearing the dress my mother made her for your train trip.”
“Charlotte and I had matching dresses,” Claire said. “But mine doesn’t fit anymore.”
“How long will you stay in Paris?” my mother asked.
“Just a few days. Claire can’t miss too much school, and my twins are waiting,” Myriam said.
“I want to make you and Charlotte matching sweaters. Let me measure your shoulders and your sleeves. I will mail them to you,” I said.
Claire bit her lip and looked at me intently. I sensed what she was thinking.
“Auntie Shakeh got sick and went to heaven,” I said.
Claire nodded. “Yes. Probably my parents and the baby went there too.”
After the door closed behind Myriam and Claire, my mother whispered in Armenian, “Vahkh, vahkh. The shame is on all of us. Think if we hadn’t saved that child how stained our souls would be.”
We were clearing the dishes from the front room when Jacqueline dashed into the apartment, breathless from running up the stairs. Her cheeks were flushed with cold and her eyes were flashing.
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