The Candidate

by Zareh Vorpouni

  He started to walk faster to make up for the lost time. And maybe to avoid feeling time pass, he started to go over the letter in his head. The whole night his brain had been so hazy, so scattered, yet the letter was somehow etched in his mind from beginning to end. But he couldn’t get past the first line. How could he have written something so stupid? “Have I lost my mind?” he said to himself, smacking his forehead. “Have you gone crazy, Minas? Don’t you know what you’ve done? How are you going to get out of this now?” He knew it was possible to get a letter back from the post office, but by the time he finished work, the letter would already be halfway there. Impatient and upset, Minas felt his heart tighten. He sensed that there was no fixing this big mistake of his. Just then he started to run after the train. There was no other way. The train whistled as it sped up, free and unencumbered, belching clouds of smoke and fumes into the open air. It charged forward into the distance, which it devoured inch by inch, neighing and whinnying like thousands upon thousands of horses. The earth trembled, terrified by its thrusts. Minas caught his breath for a moment and regained his sense of calm. The way the train cars were arranged on the Dijon-bound platform made them look like an army of hostages. The train panted slowly, as though forbidden from making a sound. Once Minas caught up to it and pulled himself onto the back of the train, it suddenly started moving again. The train was now speeding away on a rampage, laughing and taunting the crazy fellow who had the audacity to start racing it.

  When Minas looked up and saw the Jardin des Tuileries around him, he felt as though he had just been pulled out of a dream. Shoulders hunched, he looked like a little boy who had just been beaten. It already seemed like he had walked into a trap. With the very first word of the letter, he had given that girl the chance to snare him. And why wouldn’t she? What would she have to fear now that she had lost her lover? Now here she has his friend standing in front of her with his arms open wide, saying “Dear Mademoiselle Arshalouys,” as if it were some kind of plea, some kind of invitation. Vahakn is gone; but don’t worry, I’m here. “Dear madam,” as he had written in the first draft, would have been just fine. Yes, that way would have been safer. So what point was there in using her name? “Dear Mademoiselle Arshalouys.” The first version had a restrained, neutral air to it. It was cold and distant, like the instinctively self-conscious tone of the last paragraph, in which he had opted to write only “mademoiselle,” since it was her name that disrupted everything. It was her name that corrupted the official tone of the “dear,” appearing almost ingratiating and clinging to the name as if in an attempt to possess her. It might as well have read “My Arshalouys.” Why hadn’t he realized that the union of adjective and noun introduced into the sentence an emotional intimacy, despite the particular care he took to steer clear of just that?

  As if this weren’t enough, the envelope read “Mademoiselle Arshalouys Aghvorigian, Usine de Papier, Lancet, Isère.” In an official letter, the recipient’s first name would never be used. It would imply a certain closeness, which might even be read as off-putting. Isn’t this why, in the top right-hand corner of a letter, under the date, we write the recipient’s first name, last name, and address? As for the letter itself, we would start it with a simple “sir” or “madam.” At most, we might throw in a “dear” or something more formal. He burst into laughter, but didn’t understand why he was laughing; just that it put him in a good mood. He found some of his old cheerfulness and teased himself—in his own head, of course—about going over the nonsense he had written. No, the last thing he needed was to be seen talking to himself on the street, even if it was empty at that hour.

  Now and then people would rush past, the sidewalk rumbling like an empty barrel under their feet. At that moment, the street—like a watchdog opening and closing its eyes—would wake up with a start, only to lazily fall back asleep. Most of the people on the street were busboys, waiters, or cleaners who worked in banks or government buildings. In their haste, none of them had time to care about Minas’s mindless laughter. As they glided almost surreally like shadows through the shadows, his laughter boldly twisted into the sound of their footsteps and the sound of the trees along the boulevard that were beating the stone façades of the buildings, echoing and lingering in his ears. Her name—so undesirable, yet enlivened, nourished, and enriched by the association of ideas—had become an entire world in which he—Minas Yerazian—was being held prisoner. Of course, Arshalouys—Dawn—is a beautiful name. Yes, beautiful. He could admit to himself that it was in fact a beautiful name, undeniably beautiful, and no doubt it was because of its beauty that it had forced itself out of Minas’s pen. Out of his pen, mind you, not out of him. There was a distinction to be made and in the distinction was the reason he didn’t feel the need to chide himself. The pen was at fault, plain and simple. Be that as it may, the problem lay elsewhere. The problem was that her name and the halo that hovered over it worked its secret charms on him and drove him to defend himself against the laughter, which the passersby thought mindless, but which, through the underhanded and stubbornly persistent bidding of the name, was like a dagger cutting into its charm. The laughter swelled on its own and grew with a feverish desire to expel the name, but the word—stubborn and simple like the beauty of dawn itself—could barely stifle it in a powerless attempt at self-defense. And then, all of a sudden, he stopped. Why hadn’t he thought of this earlier? True, in life, some law of irony dictates that things usually mean their opposite. The name Aghvorigian does not necessarily imply that the person bearing it is aghvor or aghvorig.1 He once knew a French woman, Madame Lebœuf, who was as lovely as a doe and wore a bright smile across her thin, red lips, whereas Monsieur Lechat, the supervisor at a house where Minas once worked, barked like a dog all day.

  What if it wasn’t like that and Arshalouys turned out to be a dark-eyed or fiery-eyed Armenian girl? Who knows? Perhaps that principle doesn’t apply to the Armenians as it does to the French. Vahakn had good taste. He couldn’t bear ugliness. The proof was in his impossible coexistence with it in his own life. It was this thought that sent a jolt through Minas’s heart. Nicole came to mind. Nicole, the object of his affection, was the dream that fed his thoughts and made him run through the streets of Paris in his free time. Minas couldn’t imagine the streets without Nicole. They didn’t dream without her and Minas passed through them feeling hollow, like a dry leaf that the slightest breeze could make sway back and forth, sad and lifeless.

  He had already reached Opéra. He had left behind the long, wide boulevard, but it seemed to follow him, teasing him all throughout the walk. The kiosk in front of Café de la Paix was open. He bought a newspaper and kept walking. Without reading it, he tucked the newspaper under his arm and continued on with his head hung, sighing. Work hadn’t even begun and fatigue was already weighing on him. More than fatigue, it was the burden that weighed on him—that small envelope with just a half-page letter inside felt so heavy. Thoughts must have their own weight to them, he mused, and in comparison, the idea of working seemed lighter. He picked up the pace, but soon stopped short again. He finally made his decision: “I’ll write another letter tonight to let her know that obviously there would be no use in replying to the first one.” With this, his steps grew lighter as he headed toward the corner of Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre, a few steps away from the hotel where he worked.

  The hotel was on a dead-end street. At one time, it had probably been the home of an aristocrat. Bas-reliefs framed the windows and on both sides of the door rose pillars crowned with caryatids who took the entire weight of the hotel onto their shoulders, though their faces bore no trace of their burden. On the contrary, they seemed to take pleasure in their responsibility. It seemed that, at the time, maybe a century or so ago, the people who had had the door built valued work, or at least hoped it could be a source of satisfaction, like when people make a toast as they take a sip of wine. This was not an illusion, because you only needed to say the word and the caryatids would immediately start sin
ging. Maybe they would even dance, too, or sing as they danced or danced as they sang. It didn’t matter which. It was as if from morning till night for a century, all they had been doing was waiting for the order and pretending the wait didn’t exhaust them in any way. Maybe the very right to feel exhaustion was denied to them from the start by the house’s first owners. The temperament of the caryatids hadn’t been enough; the owners sought and found a stirring kind of contentment in silence. It must be said that they couldn’t have done a better job of creating that kind of environment. Whenever the four arms of the front door trembled and the silence, crouching in the foyer, fled up the stairs in terror, nobody knew where it went. But as soon as the door stopped trembling, the silence would return and carefully reclaim its place, guarding its surroundings like a dog stretched out and resting its snout on its paws, so that the next time it couldn’t be tricked. The employees were also careful to speak in whispers, fearing the vengeance of the silence. Here silence was not an abstraction. It was palpable to the extreme, if not almost visible. Seen from the outside through the glass windowpanes on the front door, the interior of the hotel was an aquarium filled not with water, but with silence. Whatever it was, Minas owed his success to that silence. When he saw a woman coming down the stairs—inching step by step into the lake of silence and growing taller and more stately with each step—Minas, shy as he was, felt his tongue fall back into his throat and land in his stomach. In that moment, he couldn’t have guessed that that slight woman—yes, slight, though she had seemed so tall as she was coming down the stairs—would become his teacher in love. At that time, Minas was still an inexperienced boy who blushed when he spoke to women, at best managing to mutter, “Your cheeks are the color of trout,” like he had once told a girl selling fish in Marseille.

  As the woman stood in front of him, barely reaching his chin, and stared up at him with olive-shaped pupils, he yearned to say, “Your eyes are like black lights,” had his tongue not disappeared into his throat.

  He realized that she was talking to him: “Are you the one Apkar told me about?”

  He couldn’t answer. He only managed a grimace, before the concierge came up and said: “Maybe he doesn’t understand French, Madame. You know they’re foreigners.”

  She shot the concierge a harsh look and puffed out her lips: “Shush, be quiet!”

  Minas finally regained the power of speech. As the woman was reprimanding the concierge, Minas detected some concern for him. He told her that he didn’t really know anything about the work.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “Apkar will show you. It’s nothing, really. Tomorrow at six, then. Six on the dot.”

  For the first time, he was fifteen minutes late.

  “That bitch has already been in and out,” Apkar told him, as he walked into the kitchen.

  “Already?” Minas said, indifferently. Now it seemed that nothing could be more upsetting than what had happened in those past few hours.

  “Be careful,” Apkar warned him. “Don’t be fooled by her kindness. One day, out of the blue, she could give you the slip and send you packing.”

  He was a strange guy, that Apkar. He was funny and lighthearted, but there was always something mocking in his laughter. It was as if words to him were like arrows that, once they had been shot into the air, sniffed around in search of a chest to pierce. He saw evil and filth in everything except his own laughter, which oozed bile every time he posited an opinion on humanity and raised his fist above his head to shriek obscenely: “Long live the Revolution!” After these incidents, Apkar would cool down and relax. He felt satisfaction in having taken revenge. Nobody knew on whom. His laughter bulged and widened, distorting the muscles in his craggy, hideous face, which lit up to almost become beautiful. On the street, Minas, pretending to be busy lighting a cigarette, would often let Apkar, always in motion, walk ahead of him. Through the flame of the match in the hollow of his two palms, he would watch Apkar’s unsightly body move on his lame leg. Apkar didn’t take kindly to those who let him walk ahead of them. He would feel their gaze like a knife splitting his spine open and would suddenly stop, turn around, and wait for them with his nose upturned. Then a flood of curses would spill from his lips. They were so powerful that it would be impossible to recall them here without feeling shame. That’s how Apkar, born and raised in Smyrna, smeared his father and mother with all kinds of shit, not only without the slightest hesitation, but with a perverse kind of delight. Dark destitution ruled their home. His father was a drunk who had gone blind from his addiction. Every night he would come home with a single goal: to beat his wife, who would, in turn, beat Apkar all day long. The beatings would start when they were all fuming around the dinner table, where the scores would be settled. One of the issues that often came up had to do with the bread Apkar had eaten. The boy would swallow the crusts, still unchewed, as the blows rained down on him. One day, his father roughed him up and sent him tumbling down the stairs, where he caught his foot and was left with a crippled leg.

  “Bastards!” Apkar would hiss. “They left me no choice but to turn to these whores.”

  True, seeing the state he was in, it was no wonder that only venom could flow out of him. Not a single kind word ever slipped from his lips. No woman would smile at him or glance in his direction and his indifference toward them found its expression in rude comments. “Come on! You reek—fuck off!” he would grumble. He often threw in his favorite word, “bitch,” which he fired at everyone, including, for example, an unsuspecting woman who happened to have accidentally elbowed him in a crowd. His face reserved bitter disdain for beautiful women, whom he knew he could never have. But he showed the girls on the street a special kind of affection and friendship whenever they passed by. He loved wandering through the neighborhoods where prostitutes were lined up on the sidewalk, taking Minas along with him as though they were headed to some kind of carnival. He would stop, talk to the girls and laugh with them, displaying a kind of intimacy that made it look as if they were old friends who belonged to the same tribe, to the same family. Apkar felt at home with them. He would call them “my sweet” or “my love.” For that man who wished with all his heart for the downfall of humanity and the destruction of the world, revolution was not a force that would save the world, as the song went, but one that would shatter everything with one decisive blow. But you should have seen him whenever they were short-staffed at work. He would run to Saint Michel, dragging his lame leg behind him, storm into the Billard, thrust his fist into the air, shout “Long live the Revolution!” like a soldier at full attention, and announce that the hotel needed someone.

  Finding that someone and ordering him around made bliss fall like a cascade down his face and a smile bloom out of the dimples on his cheeks. It was in that exact moment that Minas realized that Apkar must have been handsome at one time. The coarseness of his face and form was the result of the sharp slopes that his handicap had imprinted on them. The shoulder on the side of his limping leg slanted downward, while the other shoulder was hiked up to his ear, creating an asymmetry in his features. Still, among the boils and depressions on his ravaged face, his eyes remained inextinguishable. Nothing could change them, even if they blazed and made their presence known when rebellion raged in him. This would happen when he yelled the most threatening line of a revolutionary song right in the face of a person passing on the street: “Les bourgeois, on les pendra . . .”2

  During the catastrophe in Smyrna, he got on a ship and left the city.3 What gave him the biggest thrill was not his escape, but the way he tricked his parents.

  “Yes!” he sneered. “What, they thought I was going to go on feeding them until the end?”

  He finished the story triumphantly, clapping his hands and punctuating it with yet another “yes!” One time, Minas asked him what exactly happened to his parents.

  “The Turks must have slaughtered them like animals long ago,” Apkar replied, gnawing at the inside of his cheek.

  More than a year
ago, Minas and Vahakn were sitting and having a cup of coffee outside at the Billard when Apkar stopped in front of them, laughing.

  “Let me introduce you,” Vahakn said. “Here’s ‘Long live the Revolution!’ If you want work, he’ll get you a job right away.”

  “That’s right,” Apkar told Vahakn. “This time, I’ve got one for you at the hotel.”

  “Since when do you take me for a slave?” Vahakn asked. “Work is for revolutionaries, isn’t it?”

  “I, Minas Yerazian, am a slave. I want to work and become a revolutionary one day, too,” Minas said, inserting himself into the conversation.

  Minas didn’t understand why he was thinking about this now. Vahakn’s death, Arshalouys’s letter. Yes, since the moment he put that letter in the mailbox, everything had gone haywire and was now looking to return to normal. The past, the present, the future. The future being Nicole, whom his heart suddenly ached for like a mother who has just lost her child. He had buried Nicole’s face in the tedium of the day. Someone tried to snatch her away from him, but he kept pulling her back. What was Nicole doing right now? It was early, so she’d probably be asleep, right? He tried imagining her in bed: her eyelids forming domes over her eyes, her mouth sealed, her chest rising and falling steadily in time with her breath. It was the peacefulness of a will disarmed by sleep, a serenity that kept her from seeming unattainable, crushed her resistance, and turned the assassin she became whenever she passed through the Jardin du Luxembourg into a victim. Now she was a wounded bird crouching in the shadows of a shrub. All he had to do was reach out and catch her. But how would he do it? Nicole, Nicole . . .