The Gimmicks

by Chris McCormick

  In the next room, a door slammed. An unbreakable thing—a pot? a hammer?—was thrown to the floor.

  “You sleep through this?” Avo asked.

  And that’s when Ruben told him about his midnight walks into the city.

  Ruben had spent a lot of his time alone, those years before Avo arrived, avoiding school whenever he could, and leaving the house whenever his parents fought. Those were the days of long walks past the village into the forests in the daylight, the long walks into the city at night when it seemed he was the only person awake in Kirovakan. Those were the days of imagining the pain that awaits the damned, the nights when he sat alone at the foot of the city’s namesake, Sergey Kirov, and spoke to the statue as if he were real. As if he were a friend.

  His mother had caught him once, talking to the statue. She’d left the house in a flurry, having been driven out by her husband, who’d thrown a book at her and was threatening to burn himself with his cigarette. Enough, she thought, and though she’d never tell anyone, it really did feel as though she’d made up her mind, that she would take her son and move back to Yerevan to live with her brothers and parents. It was late, and she was tired. But she would go. Pick up and go.

  But Ruben was not in his bed, and even as a flit of panic rose in her, even as she ran through the rain and mud down to the city where Ruben’s backgammon teacher lived—where else but to Tigran could Ruben have gone?—she knew she would return home, that the window had closed, that the one time in her life she could have left her husband had come and gone, and that Ruben—his absence, his not being present and ready—was to blame.

  Still, having found him sitting alone under an umbrella, conversing with a statue like the loneliest little boy she’d ever seen, she pitied him. Growing up with a father like his in a country like this, in a body as fragile and small as that. Alone. Two generations ago, the strongest of her people had been slaughtered, and her son was the proof. Later, she thought she should have confronted him at the statue and ordered him to cheer up. Ordered him to laugh at himself, the way people in Leninakan did. Talking to a statue—it could be funny if it weren’t so sad. But she didn’t tell him that. She didn’t tell him anything. Instead, she hid behind a tree, hoping he hadn’t seen her.

  He hadn’t. And she never—not once—spoke of it.

  Now Avo had arrived, and Ruben took to bringing him to the statue in the city square at night. This late, when the streets were vacant, Avo found the unlit stone buildings against the backdrop of dark hills eerily archaic, as if he’d sprung to life inside a historian’s memory. And as Ruben went on and on about his different backgammon strategies—priming and holding and blitzing and all the rest—Avo wondered if that feeling of his had ever been written down in a slim volume of poems, and he wondered what those words in those poems might look like, if he’d even be able to identify them.

  It was after one of those long walks into the city that Avo and Mina met for the first time. The boys had stayed at the statue later than usual, well after the sun had come up over the hills to the east.

  People on their way to work crossed the city square in droves, and from the crowd came a girl with a black ribbon in her hair and a lacquered backgammon set tucked under her arm. She was waving awkwardly as she stomped past them down the street.

  “Who’s that?” Avo asked.

  “Nobody,” Ruben said, packing up his board.

  “She waved at you. She has a board, too. You didn’t think it was worth mentioning a real-life friend you could introduce me to?”

  “She’s not a friend. She’s a fellow practitioner. A competitor.”

  “You like her?”

  “I don’t have feelings one way or the other.”

  “For you, that’s liking. What’s her name?”

  “Aren’t you hungry? Don’t you need to eat all the time? Haven’t you missed a meal?”

  “Everyone in this city’s so sensitive,” Avo said, deciding that friendship with this little naysayer wasn’t in the cards, that he’d tried as well as he could, but they were incompatible as friends. They walked the whole way back to the village in silence, sleepless and irritated and—yes, Ruben was right—ready for food.

  The previous year, a Yerevan-based recruiter at the Ministry of Education had invited Ruben on a visit to the Armenian capital and a tour of the university there. The recruiter had sent the note to his school based on test scores, and his teacher, Mr. V, had been asked to deliver the note in person.

  The problem, Ruben told Avo, was that Mr. V had cheated in a game of backgammon with Ruben’s father some twenty years earlier, and had turned his shame into petty vengefulness. On the day Mr. V was supposed to deliver that letter to Ruben—stamped “From the Department of the Mobilization of Scientific Forces”—he instead kept it himself, unfurled the note from its envelope at the head of the class, and read the invitation aloud. He put on an ostentatious voice, so that any joy or pride Ruben might have experienced at the honor was washed out with irony.

  When Ruben told him the story, Avo tried to make a sound like understanding. But the truth was he’d met kids like Ruben back in Leninakan—strange, humorless kids who seemed born to the wrong place or time—and he’d felt very little sympathy, had done very little to help. It was impossible, if you were relatively well liked among your peers, to suggest ways a disliked kid could improve his standing, because essentially, the only advice worth giving was impossible to give: be less like you.

  The truth was, Avo looked forward to the start of school, a chance to meet new people. It hurt to admit it—even to himself at home, lying on the floor under the sound of bickering rainfall—but when he imagined his forthcoming social life in Kirovakan, it did not include the strange and gloomy fifteen-year-old in the bed above him. Just the thought of abandoning Ruben struck guilt into his heart and shrank his conscience like plastic over a flame. But the split seemed inevitable. Avo would find a group to join, and he would leave Ruben behind, send him back to whatever peculiar existence he’d been surviving so far without him, and in their old age they would hardly remember each other.

  At first, he was right. When the other students heard he came from Leninakan, they asked Avo to tell his best jokes. He told the ones he could remember overhearing at the Poloz Mukuch restaurant and beerhouse, where his coaches would take the wrestling team to celebrate after practice, regional jokes about the idiocy of people from Aparan, about the drunks of Kamo, about the naïveté of the people from Kirovakan.

  “A farmer asked a doctor in Aparan if it was possible to give his sick cow an abortion, and the doctor said, ‘I didn’t realize you’d grown so lonely.’”

  In Leninakan he’d been a middling joke-teller, but in Kirovakan he found himself surrounded by a crowd of his peers after school, all of them laughing and asking for more.

  Except for Ruben, who folded his backgammon board under his arm and disappeared after class into the city.

  They saw less of each other, even at home. Ruben would miss dinner, and his mother would blame Avo, and Avo would make a joke, and Ruben’s father would watch him eat as if tallying every grain of pilaf his family was sacrificing.

  New friends invited Avo to their homes for dinner, and he slept many nights in the new condominiums in the city, and returned to the village in the hills less and less often.

  Once in a while Avo caught glimpses of Ruben in far corners of the village, up near the home where the survivors lived, where the old woman with red hair would play her duduk like a grass harp, where even the sheep and the chickens seemed to stop and listen.

  And there was Ruben, sitting on a tree stump with one of those big history books in his lap, pages as thick as the stump he was sitting on.

  Mina continued seeing Ruben at Tigran’s place. One night, after one game turned into four, the grandmaster looked at his watch, blanched, and asked if Ruben would do the gentlemanly thing by walking his rival home. “It’s a short walk to her building,” Tigran said, helping the girl int
o her coat.

  On the street, Ruben walked beside her in silence. Her legs were longer than his, and he kept having to jog a little to catch up. They didn’t speak. When they arrived at her building, the tallest in all of Kirovakan, he was in the middle of remembering the day she noticed that he’d parted his hair in the opposite direction of how his mother used to comb it. “Your face looks brighter,” Mina had said, and he hoped she’d say something now, parting at the door of her building, that would go humming on similarly in his heart. Instead, she only mumbled a quick thank-you and then left.

  All those Soviet buildings, the slate upshot of progress. The city had its charms, but it was the surrounding villages and mossy hills that felt most like home to Ruben, that came closest to the authentic Armenian life he’d been reading about in his father’s books. The Kingdom of Cilicia—chivalry and knighthood and Armenian independence. He wished he could make it so again, and with this wish in mind he strutted through the city square, tipping his glasses to the statue of Kirov, a passing nobleman on the road.

  From Kirov’s shadow came the sound of laughter. A group of three young men Ruben recognized as classmates emerged and then surrounded him. They’d seen him saluting the statue. One member of the little mob pushed him, knocking his backgammon board to the pavement and spilling its checkers and dice across the city square. Another grabbed him by the shirt collar, calling him the drunkard’s son and mocking the recruiter’s note from Moscow. The third stole and wore his glasses and cavorted around, twittering, “I am important, I am significant.” He ripped off the glasses and threw them to the ground. Crunched them under his boot. “Maybe the Ministry will take him to Yerevan,” he said, “and maybe they’ll even take him to Moscow. But wherever he goes, he’ll always smell like rain.”

  Finally, he was left alone to find and collect his things, the empty frames of his glasses, blind as a statue.

  The next morning, he stayed in bed.

  “Don’t you have school?” his mother said, but he pretended to sleep. She made him breakfast, eggs with tomatoes and cheese, and left it on the table next to his pillow. He ate the food, adding salt, and then fell asleep for real.

  He woke again to the sound of his parents yelling.

  “Then stop drinking, idiot,” his mother shouted from the doorway as his father stormed in and out of the house. Ruben followed him to the smoking tonir next door. His father was throwing all his books into the burning well where the bread was baked.

  “They don’t appreciate my work, they’ve cut off their funds, they’re giving all the work to those cock-sucking bums in Yerevan,” he said, carrying pile after pile of books to the fire.

  Ruben checked the nearly empty bookshelf. All that was left was the big textbook he loved—an Armenian national history published during the brief window of independence after the Ottomans and before the Soviets—and a stack of two or three slim volumes of poetry.

  In one of the genocide stories Ruben had heard from the survivors, the Turks torched Armenian villages to the ground. For the survivors, there was enough time only to save some of what was being destroyed, and some chose to save historical records rather than the children being burned alive inside. Life could begin again, went the thinking, but the history, once lost, would be lost forever.

  His father’s shouting was growing louder. He was coming back for the last of the books. The history he loved and the poetry, which his cousin’s cousin seemed to enjoy. If Avo were home, they could have saved all the books from the fire without having to choose, but Avo was nowhere to be found.

  When his father returned, he burned the last of what Ruben had left on the shelf.

  When Avo got home that night for dinner, Ruben ate silently beside him. His father had gone to sleep already, and his mother went on apologizing for him. “He’s worked so hard all his life, and he’s a good man, he’s got a good heart . . .”

  When Avo asked what had happened, Ruben’s mother explained the terminated translation work, the tonir, the book burning.

  “All the books?” Avo asked.

  “Except for some of the poems in Ruben’s bed.”

  Avo looked to Ruben from under that big eyebrow of his. Studied the wire holding the broken glasses together at the nose.

  “I was using them to swat flies,” Ruben said, looking down at his food.

  “His father has got such a good heart,” his mother said, returning again to what she wanted to believe was true. “Never in Armenia has there been a bigger heart.”

  And with all the history burned up deep inside the tonir, no one could check whether or not that claim was true.

  “Look who’s joined us,” said Mr. V the next morning, tapping his watch. Little crack-ups filled the classroom. “And would you leave the mud outside, please? Everyone else brings in rain, and you bring in mud.”

  Ruben stomped as much of the black gunk from his boots as he could before making his way to his desk. Every step a slosh, a squeak. Every squeak another chuckle from the group.

  “As I was saying,” said Mr. V, as though accessing some deep well of valor within him to continue despite the interruption, “it’s impossible to have a hypotenuse shorter in length than one of the other legs. Go on—try to imagine it. Try to picture in your mind a triangle with a shorter hypotenuse than leg. In order to do it, you must swivel the dangling hypotenuse to one side, thus turning the longest leg into the new hypotenuse. In other words, you have to cheat.”

  Ruben braced himself. The word cheat was a Pavlovian beckon to the story Mr. V loved to tell of that old backgammon match he’d played against Ruben’s father.

  “And I didn’t even need to cheat!” shouted Mr. V at the end of his story. “I was the better player, I only let the fear of losing distract me from playing my game, and there’s a lesson there for all of us, isn’t there? I mean, I should have won. Look at my opponent now! He can’t even get his tiny little son to school on time!”

  Laughs again, only now transformed into a great roar. Ruben pricked the tip of his pencil into his palm, and suddenly, the racket stopped. The classroom got so quiet he could hear the rain dripping from his clothes onto the floor beneath his desk. Everybody, including Mr. V, had turned to look toward the back of the room.

  One classmate who’d been laughing a moment ago, who’d broken Ruben’s glasses a few nights earlier, was bent into a strange and impossible shape. Avo was holding him. He had the boy horizontally across his waist like a belt. The outstretched boy looked like he wanted to shout, but there wasn’t any air in his lungs to do it.

  “Put him down!” said Mr. V. “Put him down right now!”

  But Avo was bigger than the teacher and kept the boy entangled. Mr. V could only yell from a safe distance, pacing back and forth, sweating so much he looked like he’d been caught in the rain himself. The boy gurgled out a cry, accompanied by a foamy spittle at the mouth. The other students backed away, marveling at the big jokester’s strength.

  “Put him down! Put him down! You’ll break him! You’ll break him!”

  Avo said, “I’ll let him go as soon as Ruben tells me to.”

  “Ruben?” said Mr. V. “To hell with Ruben! I’m the teacher! I’m telling you to put the boy down!”

  Avo tightened his hold on his victim, whose tears fell sideways from his eyes.

  “Okay!” Mr. V said, surrendering. “Ruben, for the love of peace, order him to stop!”

  Ruben looked up at his cousin’s cousin, big as a statue come to life. “That’s enough, Avo.” And Avo dropped the crying boy.

  “What is the matter with this generation?” said Mr. V, moving carefully past Avo to attend to the kid on the floor. But the matter seemed to be with him, and he seemed to know so, because from then on he never brought up the old backgammon story, and never made a show of Ruben’s coming to class late. In fact, he never said another disparaging word to Ruben ever again.

  After that, Ruben and Avo were no longer cousins of cousins but brothers. That was how alm
ost everyone in Kirovakan talked about them. Brothers: one big, one small. One doing push-ups between meals, the other carrying a backgammon set under his arm like a toolbox. They’d be seen rolling dice together after class and on the weekends at the city square like a pair of old men. Sometimes, in lieu of the game, they’d walk up the muddy path through the village and listen to the survivors tell stories. Siranoush would play her music, and the duduk in her lips made the unimaginably old woman seem somehow even more ancient, as if she were a castle wall, as if every strange freckle were a year she’d burned into her skin. On torrential days, Ruben and Avo had to follow the sound of the duduk over the plunking rain just to find the house. She played the duduk longer and louder, helping the boys find her. When the boys arrived, they peeled off their wet socks—one big pair, one small—and laid them out to dry against the hot clay of the tonir. Then they’d spread flat on their bellies to drink tea and eat salted cheese and listen to the old woman play. Every now and then Siranoush dumped the collected spit from her mouthpiece onto the sizzling clay.

  Whenever one of the other old survivors died, Siranoush would play the duduk at the funeral. She finished a song and pointed the instrument at the other mourners. “They call the duduk a double-reed,” she said, “because two canes vibrate against each other inside. Not one cane but two. Without both, no music.”

  When her husband died, the body was dressed in a fine suit and lowered into the ground. Avo followed Ruben’s lead and dropped a handful of mud into the grave. Ruben crossed himself. He leaned to Avo and said, so softly Avo had to bend to hear him, “We can be like that. A double-reed.”

  The village had arranged for a priest to arrive, swinging his thurible and sweeping incense over the grave. Ruben fidgeted with the wire holding his glasses together. A double-reed—how easily Avo could have punished him, half his size, for saying something so tender as that. And he didn’t.