“Jack, yavrum, you have to share,” I told him.
He screeched and threw another block at Joy. It grazed her eyebrow, and she began to shriek, all the while keeping a tight grip on the block he wanted. Jack howled louder. Moses sat up, rubbing his eyes.
Toros shouted from the front seat, “Jack, you hush up or I’m going to pull over and give you a spanking.”
Vartanoush twisted her head around, glaring through her bifocals. “How is Toros supposed to drive with all this racket?”
I thought I might shrivel up and die from exhaustion, and then the babies would be orphans with only Toros and Vartanoush to look after them. They’d lock Joy in the closet at night and tie Jack to a chair during the day. Moses would come to put roses on my grave. Poor Moses. Who would check that he washed behind his ears? Who would choose his clothes for school each morning?
I closed my eyes. A red velvet curtain descended around me. He makes the storm calm, so that the waves are still… I went down into the valley to see whether the pomegranates had budded, … Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun….
When I opened my eyes, Jack was asleep on the floor, placid as an angel. The baby sucked her thumb and grasped the coveted block in her other hand. Moses had moved to the far window and sat with his cheek against the glass. Out my window I saw a road sign: “Worcester, 10 miles.”
Easter in Worcester. We would miss services at the Saint James in Watertown—the church Toros and Peter Manoogian had helped to found the year before. From the church steps, our Der Hayr would release twelve white doves. Probably the priest in Worcester would do the same.
We pulled into the driveway of a white three-decker house. Two women—a round woman with graying hair and a skinny young one with a big nose—hurried onto the front porch, untying their aprons as they came.
The older woman called, “Baron Chahasbanian, it’s so good to see you!”
Toros shook her hand vigorously. “Aghavni, don’t be so formal! Hello, Anahit!” He shook the young woman’s hand.
“You look more like your father than ever. Except you have your mother’s velvet eyes.”
I glanced at Toros out of the side of my eyes. I had never heard him be so poetic.
“This is my mother, Vartanoush. My wife, Zabelle, the children, Moses, Jack, and Joy, in order of appearance.”
The two women laughed.
Since when did Toros make jokes?
The smell of simmering onions had made its way to the dark entrance hall, where we hung our coats. Oriental rugs covered the floors of the front room. The overstuffed furniture was upholstered in plush, wine-colored fabric. Theirs wasn’t so different from our house, except for the clocks. A cuckoo clock hung on the wall, a gold clock gleamed under a crystal dome, there was a massive grandfather clock in the hall. In all, I counted fourteen clocks. The ticking, ringing, and gonging made me nervous.
We climbed to the second-floor apartment with skinny Anahit, who lived there with her husband. Anahit and her husband had a crib in their second bedroom, plus a double bed and a cot. Vartanoush, Jack, the baby, and I would stay there. Toros and Moses would sleep in the spare bedroom on the first floor.
Aghavni wouldn’t allow us to help in the kitchen, so we waited in the living room. Toros read his paper, Vartanoush opened her Bible, and Moses kneeled at the coffee table, writing sums with a thick yellow pencil. I sat with Joy and Jack, who attempted to roll a ball back and forth between them. In the dining room, Anahit added extra leaves to the table.
When Boghos Boghosian arrived home from work with his son and son-in-law, I was still on the floor with the babies. I stood to be introduced and suddenly found myself staring into a face from my past. My head began to spin with a kaleidoscope of images—Baron Ohanessian’s mustache, hands spread on the wooden table, button, needle, spool of thread. Thimble. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, I was lying on the carpet staring at a circle of faces above me. Moses Bodjakanian leaned in from behind a man with an enormous nose.
Moses Chahasbanian asked, “Ma, are you okay?”
I’m fine.” I sat up slowly. “I just got up too fast, and all the blood rushed to my head.” Toros helped me stand, then I sank to the couch, pulling Joy onto my lap.
I had no idea what to do next. I added up the hours we would spend with the Boghosians and the meals we would sit down to with Moses Bodjakanian and his hawk-nosed wife. Should I pretend I’d never met him before? For a minute I wished I were Arsinee.
Arsinee would say, “Moses and I knew each other years ago at Ohanessian’s. I fainted because of the shock of seeing he’s lost half his hair.” Moses’s hairline had climbed so far up his forehead that his head looked like an egg. But I kept my mouth shut.
At the crowded dinner table, the conversation sounded like the twittering of birds. I avoided staring at Moses but couldn’t stop myself from examining his wife anew. Anahit had an oversize dolma of a nose, which she had inherited from her father. A nose like that on a man could be noble, but on a girl it was a curse. God had scrimped on her mouth, which was the size of a postage stamp. I had to admit she had pretty eyes—large and deep with long, curling lashes—which helped draw attention away from the eggplant anchored between them. If Anahit turned sideways in the wind, that nose would be a sail pushing her down the street.
I forced down a spoonful of soup and some pilaf. Moses was silent, pushing pieces of chicken from one side of his plate to the other.
Vartanoush came up to me after the meal and said, “Don’t tell me you’re pregnant again.”
I wanted to say, “You’ll be burying me nine months from now if I am,” but I wouldn’t give the old woman the satisfaction. Instead I snapped, “I’m tired.”
The evening dragged on. The clocks stretched each minute to its limit. The little cuckoo was horribly cheerful. I barely said a word, except to address the children. Twice I felt the heat of Moses’s eyes on me, but I didn’t glance up.
Finally it was time to put the children to bed. Then I realized I would be sleeping in the room next to Anahit and Moses’s bedroom. What choice was there?
Little Moses came upstairs with me and the babies. Anahit handed Vartanoush a stack of towels and showed us the light switch in the bathroom. Moses Bodjakanian disappeared into his bedroom with an almost inaudible “Good night.”
Once the door was shut behind them, Vartanoush said, “What’s the matter with that girl’s husband? He didn’t open his mouth all night. Do you think he’s an imbecile?”
“Ma,” said my Moses, “do I have to sleep downstairs?”
“There’s no place for you here, honey,” I said.
“There are too many clocks in that room. One of them’s in the shape of a polar bear. And Pa snores so loud, it’s like sleeping in a room with a motorcycle. Can’t I stay in the bed with you and Jack?”
“You’re too old to sleep with your mother,” growled Vartanoush, who sat in the cot in a white flannel gown. She went back to reading her Bible. Her eyesight was so bad, even with glasses on, she held the book three inches from her face.
“Go on.” I pushed him gently toward the door. “I’ll come down and tuck you in after the babies are asleep.”
Moses bowed his head and slunk out of the room.
I settled Jack with a bottle and his blanket by the wall in the double bed. He fell asleep immediately. I nursed Joy, and after her eyes closed, I put her in the crib. Vartanoush had dozed off. I removed the Bible from her chest, and the glasses from the bridge of her nose, and turned out light.
I slipped out of the room and down the back stairs. When I crossed the first-floor kitchen, I saw my husband and his friend seated in armchairs in the parlor. In the lamp’s gold light, they leaned toward each other like conspirators. Toros laughed, throwing his head back, slapping the arm of his chair. I glimpsed him as a man in that moment—not my husband, not my children’s father, not a grocer or a church deacon, but someone whose inner workin
gs I could never know.
I found my Moses kneeling on the floor by his bed, his hands clasped.
“I prayed that you would come soon,” Moses said.
“Sometimes God answers prayers.”
I sat beside him, stroking his hair, as he lay in bed. There were no shadows in his eyes, and his face was smooth as an apricot. My love for this child had roots that spread through my veins and into the capillaries. It moved like blood.
“Tell me a story, Ma.”
“What kind?”
“My story.”
I began, “Once there was, there was not, there was a boy named Moses. He was a handsome, intelligent boy with blond hair, a strong nose, and two eyes that were meant to see the gates of heaven. One day Moses packed a small suitcase, complete with a lunch his mother had made him, and set off down the street to have an adventure.…” That was as far as the adventurer traveled, because Moses had drifted toward dreaming. I thought of an Easter dove, its soft downy body in the priest’s hands the moment before flight.
When I opened the door to the darkened second-floor apartment, the light fell in behind me. Moses Bodjakanian was seated at the kitchen table with his head in his hands.
I stepped inside and shut the door, feeling older than the moon outside the window. I closed my eyes, and images sped by like passing roadside trees. Moses carrying a stack of button-less white shirts. Moses sitting next to me at lunchtime. The flash of his smile. His hands on the rough-grained table. The hands reminded me of my father’s, how they reached down a bolt of cloth from the shelf in his shop. Once I let that image in, black rags blew across desert sands. Flesh-covered bones rotted in the sun. A Turkish soldier held a bloody bayonet.
Moses glanced up at me and spoke quietly. “The wire factory failed. My mother died. Boghosian hired me part-time, and trained me. When business picked up, I started working full-time. His daughter was ready to marry, and I needed a wife.”
His head was still bowed. I wanted to hear his story, and I didn’t want to hear it. He didn’t owe me any explanation. I hardly remembered him.
“I gave her the ring,” he said.
The silver thimble was in my sewing basket.
Looking up at me, and as though reading my mind, he said, “I gave you the thimble, because you already wore a ring.” Then he held out his hand and said, “Do you recognize these?”
In his palm were two large mother-of-pearl buttons from Ohanessian’s.
“I took them from your tray the last day you were there,” he said. “Here, one of these is for you.”
He took my hand and closed the button in my fist. Then his arms were around me, I felt his shoulders under my palms, and our mouths found each other.
I thought the world would crack open and swallow us. That we would fall into a fiery furnace and burn, and not even Jesus could have saved us. I never told anyone, not even Arsinee.
Still holding me, Moses whispered into my ear, “God will forgive us for one moment of happiness.”
He paused, then asked, “You named the boy for me, didn’t you?”
I didn’t answer.
“Moses?” It was Anahit calling from their bedroom.
Moses stepped back quickly. He looked into my eyes and then away. “Yes?”
“Are you coming to bed?” Anahit’s tone was plaintive and threatening at once.
“I’m coming.” Moses turned to his fate.
In the silence, I heard my own breath thunder like waves on the shore. After their door clicked shut, I returned to our room. I stood over the crib, looking at Joy, who slept peacefully, then covered Jack with a blanket. Their small bodies were so full of hope and possibility, and I wished I could protect them from disappointment.
After dropping the button into my pocket, I pulled off my dress and slip and dragged the nightgown over my head. I plucked the pins from my hair and let the braid uncoil. Trying not to disturb Jack, I slid into bed and felt gravity pressing me to the face of the planet. The earth was spinning slowly under me. I didn’t want to think about Moses sleeping in the next room with his queen of beauty. I didn’t want to think of Toros a floor below in blue striped pajamas that I had ironed the wrinkles from.
Ghosts from the desert were clamoring at the edge of my dreams. To get any rest at all, I’d have to drive out those memories. There was an old woman in our church in Water-town who was known for riding a white stallion in the old country. She wielded a long, leather whip and a big sword she had inherited when her husband was killed. It was said that during the massacres, she saved her family by chasing down Turks on that horse. When the fear overtook me, I closed my eyes and imagined I was old Digin Boyajian as a fierce warrior on a white stallion. She had the same family name I was born to.
Maybe Moses was right, and God had already forgiven us. God’s face appeared before me, but it was not a kind face. I blotted it out. I pushed everything out of my head—the way I flung a basin of dirty water over the porch railing—and fell asleep.
“Ma,” Moses whispered. “I can’t sleep. Move over.”
Without waking entirely, I shifted closer to Jack, and Moses climbed into the bed beside me.
“Tell me a story.” He nestled into me like a spoon.
I remembered where I was and what had happened. “There was, there was not, there was a girl named Zabelle…”
“That’s you,” he said.
“She lived in the old country, where sheep danced down the streets and birds nested in the old ladies’ hair.”
“You’re making that up,” he commented sleepily.
I hugged him closer. “Yes, I’m making it up. True stories are too sad for little boys.”
There was no response, and his breathing was slow and measured. For a long while I lay holding my sleeping son.
The next morning, I woke up between my two boys. How would it feel to see Moses and his wife? Would Toros take one look at my face and know that I had betrayed him? I heard Arsinee’s voice in my head: “Toros wouldn’t notice if you shaved your head bald, how is he going to see that glint of guilt in your eye?” She was right. My husband didn’t pay much attention to the weather on a person’s face. It was Moses Chahasbanian who knew when clouds traversed my brow. And Moses Bodjakanian who could read my heart.
My tolerance for Vartanoush’s snide comments had evaporated. If she criticized me for letting Moses sleep in my bed, I would bark back at her. Fortunately, as soon as she woke up, the old woman shuffled downstairs to help prepare breakfast.
I dressed the children in their best clothes. It was Easter, the church would be full, and Christ was seated at the right hand of God. Even if God was a harsh judge, I knew Jesus would intercede on my behalf. He had been a man himself and knew about temptation and frailty. I imagined myself as Mary Magdalene, throwing myself at his feet.
As I led the children down the flight of stairs, a small voice whispered in my ear.
You could have died in the desert, but you didn’t. You could have been taken as a slave, or been married to a vicious man. Your table is laden with food. Your children are healthy, and they have many choices ahead of them. What purpose is there in imagining another life any more than closing your hand over apiece of broken glass?
That wasn’t Arsinee’s voice. I wasn’t sure who it was giving me such advice. Maybe Jesus. Maybe the spirit of my mother.
We sat at the dining-room table with the Boghosian family. I put the baby into the high seat, while Jack’s chair was rigged up with a wooden crate and a belt. We ate eggs and toast and jam on white plates with hand-painted violets. Conversation moved around me like currents of air. Not a word out of Moses. I didn’t look at him. I didn’t look at Digin Big Nose.
“Last night was the first time Joy slept through. There must be something magic about the crib.” I was surprised by how calm and natural my voice sounded.
“My husband hasn’t managed to give us any purpose for that crib. I’m glad someone can use it,” Anahit said bitterly.
There was silence around the table. No one chewed the food in his mouth. Moses stared at his lap. His ears were red. I felt his humiliation as if it were my own. Why didn’t Moses slap that small, cruel mouth? How could Boghos Boghosian allow his daughter to speak that way? We continued to eat in wretched silence. Jack began to squirm in his seat, then slid so the belt came up under his armpits and his feet dangled. I rescued the child and dropped him in Vartanoush’s lap.
After excusing myself from the table, I proceeded to the kitchen, with my Moses close behind.
“Ma, what did she mean? How come everybody got so mad?”
Sometimes I wished that Moses had taken after his father, instead of being so attuned to the ebb and flow of adult emotion. I sighed. I spied a basket of colored eggs on the kitchen counter. “Do you want me to teach you the secret of picking a winning egg?”
My son was not usually so easy to divert, but he had been badgering me about how I always won the Easter egg-cracking contest. “Tell me!”
Just then Moses Bodjakanian walked into the kitchen. There were dark circles around his eyes, and his shoulders sagged under an invisible weight. There was almost nothing in him of the boy from Ohanessian’s, with his quick step and easy laughter.
My sympathy surged into anger. What kind of man would allow his wife to talk to him like that? How could the boy with beautiful hands have turned into this henpecked bald fellow? I picked up an egg. It was all I could do to keep myself from throwing it at Moses Bodjakanian.
“You have to find where the air bubble is,” I told my son. “It depends how the egg was lying in the pot. The best is to find an egg with a small air bubble on one side, not on either end.”
“How can you tell where it is?”
“Like this,” I said. I tapped the end of an egg against my front tooth. “You can hear and feel the hollow spot.” I handed the boy the egg.
“Who taught you?” asked little Moses.
“My father,” I replied, “when I was much smaller than you are now.” As the words left my mouth, the image of an egg in my father’s palm floated back to me.
Zabelle Page 9