Gissag Jamanakian was killed at Verdun, Vaharam Vaharamian at Chateau-Thierry, and the Kasabian twins, Krikor and Karekin, at Belleau Wood. All under twenty-five years of age, all brought to Fresno from Armenia when they were still babes in arms or small boys. But there were many others, too—killed in action in France, in Flanders Field, in Normandy, or somewhere else. A number of unlucky fellows died at Camp Curry of influenza, almost as if they hadn’t been in the war at all. Two or three went over the hill from that camp to San Francisco, but after a week or two returned, were given medical examinations, and then were only mildly punished. A half-dozen boys of the neighborhood were gassed, but survived. And Hovsep Lucinian, hit by shrapnel and left for dead in an area under bombardment called no-man’s-land, made his peace with himself and considered himself as good as dead when somebody came crawling and dragged him to safety. This turned out to be the one man in his company Hovsep hadn’t liked, had in fact considered an enemy—an Assyrian boy from Turlock named Joe Assouri. They became friends for life, although they had frequent fallings-out, whereupon Joe would shout, “I was a damned fool to risk my life to save yours.” And Hovsep would shout back, “I am only waiting for the day when I shall be able to save your life. After that, forget it.” These outbursts were at poker games, when both men had large families of kids by American girls. Kids who spoke neither Armenian nor Assyrian but kept their names and looked for all the world precisely as they should—altogether Assyrian and Armenian, but with just a little something unaccountable added.
In Guggenheim’s, early in October of 1918, Kristofor’s mother Aylizabet said to her best friend, Arshaluce Ganjakian, “Is it true that the war will soon end?”
“Yes,” Arshaluce said, “Yedvard reads about it in The Evening Herald every night. Soon now our boys will all come home. I shall see my Mihran soon, and you will see your Kristofor, I’m sure, wherever he is. Have you still had no word?”
“None,” Aylizabet said. “Almost two full years, not one word.”
But for longer than a year the whole neighborhood had had word about Kristofor, which they both believed and disbelieved. It came about because of something said by Ash Bashmanian, who, after selling papers every evening, went to the Liberty Theater because admission for him was only a copy of the paper handed to the ticket-taker, and did not leave until after the last show, which for Fresno was rather late, a little before midnight. When Ash got home and sat down to his supper he told his father, “I saw Kristofor tonight.”
After a few minutes his father said, “I wasn’t listening. I’m worried about you at the movies every night. What did you say?”
“Kristofor,” Ash said. “I saw him.”
“Kristofor Agbadashian?”
“Yes. The Cooper’s menswear man.”
“You imagined it,” the father said. “From seeing so many movies.”
“No, I saw him.”
“He’s been gone almost two whole years. How could you see him?”
“He came back, I guess,” Ash said.
“From where?” the father said. “Was he in uniform?”
“No, he was wearing the same clothes he always wears.”
“Where’d he go?”
“Home.”
“What home?”
“On M Street. I saw him go into his house, and I came on home.”
“Keep this to yourself, please,” the father said.
“Why?”
“Just keep it to yourself. You can’t see straight from seeing movies, and Kristofor is wanted by the government. Let’s forget all about it. You didn’t see anything. I’ll give you a dollar.”
“I don’t want a dollar,” Ash said. “I sell papers every day to bring home money, to help out. I won’t tell anybody, but I did see him.”
Somebody else must have seen him, too, because it was soon all over the neighborhood that Kristofor Agbadashian was home. He had either run away and come back, or he had been hiding in the house at 123 M Street all the time, until finally it had become too much for him and he had taken to going out to walk late at night.
“Where’s he been?” the joke went.
“Under the bed,” came the answer.
And so, of course, the word of the neighborhood had reached Kristofor’s mother’s best friend, Arshaluce Ganjakian, if, in fact, it had not also reached Kristofor’s mother herself.
A few days after their talk about the probability that the war would soon end, Aylizabet Agbadashian said to Arshaluce Ganjakian, “Arshaluce, my dear friend, I must tell you something on our way home from work tonight, or I’m afraid I shall die.” On their way home, when she was sure no one else would overhear them, she said, “Kristofor did not go anywhere. He has been home all this time. It is my fault. I told him I would die if he went away. His father died when he was still a small boy. I could not bear to lose the only man remaining in my family. But now what shall I do? What will happen to him when the war ends and everybody comes home? It is all my fault, not his, I swear it. Help me. I know I can trust you not to tell anybody, but please help me, and someday I will help you. What shall I do? What shall we do?”
On November 11, 1918, the war ended. And that was that, except for the drowned boy in Kingsburg, the dead of the neighborhood in France, the dead from influenza at Camp Curry, and the disgraced Kristofor Under the Bed, as he came to be called by everybody. But nobody looked down at him, and nobody looked down at his mother. Only Kristofor and his mother knew what they had done and why they had done it. Nobody else could even guess. Whatever it had been, however it had been, it was something between themselves and God alone, not the government, which of course had much, much more between itself and God alone.
For weeks and months, as the boys of the neighborhood came home and got back into their proper clothes, there was happy confusion in Armenian Town, with only an occasional outbreak of sorrow, and almost always on the part of the strongest men, such as Shulavary Bashmanian, who, when he was asked for whom he was crying, since he had had no son in the war, said, “For Kristofor. Crucified for his bravery. Coward he was, no doubt, but how much more brave a man must be to be a coward. It is easy to be a soldier of the government with all of your comrades. But it is very hard to be yourself, all alone under the bed in your mother’s house. I am crying for the bravery of Kristofor. The war is over. Whoever won, won without Kristofor. May God forgive the winners and the loser alike, they each have their dead. May God protect Kristofor Under the Bed, wherever he may be or wherever he may go.”
As a matter of fact, several weeks before the signing of the Armistice, he went to Sacramento and under the name of Charles Abbott took a job in the menswear department of Roos Bros., who soon invited him to take a better job at more money at the store in San Francisco, where he stayed for three years, at which time he opened his own store on Post Street.
It was there six years later that the government caught up with him. He was married to a Scotch-Irish girl from Boston, a graduate of Smith, and they had had three sons and a daughter. Two of his sisters had married, one had died, and his mother lived alone in the house at 123 M Street, now and then visited by her daughters and their husbands and kids.
The man from the government, who was in his late sixties, by name Battaglia, said, “What we want to do most of all is close out these cases and forget them. You are Kristofor Agbadashian, then?”
“Yes,” Kristofor said, “although, as you know, I have been using another name—Charles Abbott—for about ten years. I had always had in mind making the change in any case, as my true name is difficult for the American tongue, and my maternal grandfather’s name was Ahpet, which is very nearly the same as Abbott.”
“Yes, that’s sensible,” Battaglia said. “A case of amnesia, would you say?”
“No,” Kristofor said. “It wasn’t amnesia. I hid, in my own house, because I didn’t want to go. I knew what I was doing. My mother and my sisters begged me every day to give myself up and go into the Army, but I refused. I
haven’t forgotten any of it. There has been no amnesia. And my life has proven itself too well for me to feel embarrassed about, or ashamed of, it. In my hometown I’m still remembered by a handful of very decent people as Kristofor Under the Bed. I am beginning to tell my kids about it, too. So far they think it’s very funny.”
“I understand,” Battaglia said. “Under this line, Cause of Failure to Present Self, I have been putting down Amnesia, in case anybody takes it into his head to examine these forms, which isn’t very likely. What do you suggest I put on your form?”
“Coward,” Kristofor said.
“That would be as inaccurate as Amnesia,” Battaglia said. He wrote in the space, and said, “Father. That’ll do it, I’m sure. The case is closed.” He left the shop, as if he had gone in to buy something and hadn’t seen anything that suited him.
Cowards are nice, they’re interesting, they’re gentle, they wouldn’t think of shooting down people in a parade from a tower. They want to live, so they can see their kids. They’re very brave.
THE LAST WORD WAS LOVE
A LONG TIME AGO when I was eleven my mother and my father had a prolonged quarrel.
The quarrel picked up the minute my father got home from work at Graff’s, where he was a forty-seven-year-old assistant—to everybody. Graff’s sold everything from food to readymade clothing, animal traps, and farm implements. My father had taken the job only for the daily wage of three dollars, which he received in coin at the end of every twelve-hour day. He didn’t mind the nature of the work, even though his profession was teaching, and he didn’t care that it might end at any moment, without notice.
He’d already had the job six months, from late summer to early spring, when the quarrel began to get on my brother’s nerves. I didn’t even begin to notice the quarrel until Ralph pointed it out to me. I admired him so much that I joined him in finding fault with my mother and father.
First, though, I’d better describe the quarrel, if that’s possible.
To begin with, there was my mother running the house, and there was my father working at Graff’s. There was my brother, Ralph, at the top of his class at high school. There I was near the bottom of my class at junior high. And there was our nine-year-old sister, Rose, just enjoying life without any fuss.
All I can say about my mother is that she was a woman—to me a very beautiful one. She had a way of moving very quickly from a singing-and-laughing gladness to a silent-and-dark discontent that bothered my father. I remember hearing him say to her again and again, “Ann, what is it?”
Alas, the question was always useless, making my mother cry and my father leave the house.
During the long quarrel my father seemed hopelessly perplexed and outwitted by something unexpected and unwelcome, which he was determined nevertheless to control and banish.
My brother, Ralph, graduated from high school and took a summertime job in a vineyard. He rode eleven miles to the vineyard on his bicycle every morning soon after daybreak and back again a little before dark every evening. His wages were twenty-five cents an hour, and he put in at least ten hours a day. Early in September he had saved a little more than a hundred dollars.
Early one morning he woke me up.
“I want to say good-bye now,” he said. “I’m going to San Francisco.”
“What for?”
“I can’t stay here any more.”
Except for the tears in his eyes, I believe I would have said, “Well, good luck, Ralph,” but the tears made that impossible. He was as big as my father. The suit he was wearing was my father’s which my mother had altered for him. What were the tears for? Would I have them in my own eyes in a moment, too, after all the years of imitating him to never have them, and having succeeded except for the two or three times I had let them go when I had been alone, and nobody knew? And if the tears came into my eyes, too, what would they be for? Everything I knew I’d learned from my brother, not from school, and everything he knew he’d learned from my father. So now what did we know? What did my father know? What did my brother? What did I?
I got out of bed and jumped into my clothes and went outside to the backyard. Under the old sycamore tree was the almost completed raft my brother and I had been making in our spare time, to launch one day soon on Kings River.
“I’ll finish it alone,” I thought. “I’ll float down Kings River alone.”
My brother came out of the house quietly, holding an old straw suitcase.
“I’ll finish the raft,” I said. I believed my brother would say something in the same casual tone of voice, and then turn and walk away, and that would be that.
Instead, though, he set the suitcase down and came to the raft. He stepped onto it and sat down, as if we’d just launched the raft and were sailing down Kings River. He put his hand over the side, as if into the cold water of Kings River, and he looked around, as if the raft were passing between vineyards and orchards. After a moment he got up, stepped out of the raft, and picked up the suitcase. There were no tears in his eyes now, but he just couldn’t say goodbye. For a moment I thought he was going to give up the idea of leaving home and go back to bed.
Instead, he said, “I’ll never go into that house again.”
“Do you hate them? Is that why?”
“No,” he said, but now he began to cry, as if he were eight or nine years old, not almost seventeen.
I picked up the raft, tipped it over, and jumped on it until some of the boards we had so carefully nailed together broke. Then I began to run. I didn’t turn around to look at him again.
I ran and walked all the way to where we had planned to launch the raft, about six miles. I sat on the riverbank and tried to think.
It didn’t do any good, though. I just didn’t understand, that’s all.
When I got home it was after eleven in the morning, I was very hungry, and I wanted to sit down and eat. My father was at his job at Graff’s. My sister was out of the house, and my mother didn’t seem to want to look at me. She put food on the table—more than usual, so I was pretty sure she knew something, or at any rate suspected.
At last she said, “Who smashed the raft?”
“I did.”
“Why?”
“I got mad at my brother.”
“Why?”
“I just got mad.”
“Eat your food.”
She went into the living room, and I ate my food. When I went into the living room she was working at the sewing machine with another of my father’s suits.
“This one’s for you,” she said.
“When can I wear it?”
“Next Sunday. It’s one of your father’s oldest, when he was slimmer. It’ll be a good fit. Do you like it?”
“Yes.”
She put the work aside and tried to smile, and then did, a little.
“She doesn’t know what’s happened,” I thought. And then I thought, “Maybe she does, and this is the way she is.”
“Your brother’s bike is in the garage,” she said. “Where’s he?”
“On his way to San Francisco.”
“Where have you been?”
“I took a walk.”
“A long walk?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I wanted to be alone.”
My mother waited a moment and then she said, “Why is your brother on his way to San Francisco?”
“Because—” But I just couldn’t tell her.
“It’s all right,” she said. “Tell me.”
“Because you and Pop fight so much.”
“Fight?”
“Yes.”
“Do we?” my mother said.
“I don’t know. Are you going to make him come home? Is Pop going to go and get him?”
“No.”
“Does he know?”
“Yes. He told me.”
“When?”
“Right after you ran off, and your brother began to walk to the depot. Your father saw the
whole thing.”
“Didn’t he want to stop him?”
“No. Now, go out and repair the raft.”
I worked hard every day and finished the raft in two weeks. One evening my father helped me get it onto a truck he’d hired. We drove to Kings River, launched it, and sailed down the river about twelve miles. My father brought a letter out of his pocket and read it out loud. It was addressed to Dear Mother and Father. All it said was that Ralph had found a job that he liked, and was going to go to college when the fall semester began, and was well and happy. The last word of the letter was love.
My father handed me the letter and I read the word for myself.
That Christmas my father sent me to San Francisco to spend a few days with my brother. It was a great adventure for me, because my brother was so different now—almost like my father, except that he lived in a furnished room, not in a house full of people. He wanted to know about the raft, so I told him I’d sailed it and had put it away for the winter.
“You come down next summer and we’ll sail it together, the way we’d planned,” I said.
“No,” he said. “We’ve already sailed it together. It’s all yours now.”
My own son is sixteen years old now, and has made me aware lately that his mother and I have been quarreling for some time. Nothing new, of course—the same general quarrel—but neither his mother nor I had ever before noticed that it annoyed him. Later on this year, or perhaps next year, I know he’s going to have a talk with his younger brother, and then take off. I want to be ready when that happens, so I can keep his mother from trying to stop him. He’s a good boy, and I don’t mind at all that he thinks I’ve made a mess of my life, which is one thing he is not going to do.
Of course he isn’t.
THE DUEL
Fresno Stories Page 6