The Gimmicks

by Chris McCormick

  “If it weren’t for me,” Tigran said, “you all would have caught some fish by now. Maybe I should have stayed back with the women and the children. Next year, that’s what I’ll do.”

  “You said that last year,” Dev said, and laughed. “And it was just as stupid a thing to say back then as it is now. Come on! You’re still young!”

  “Last year I said it as a joke,” Tigran said, throwing his elbows over his cane, which he’d rested on the back of his neck.

  By the time they arrived at the inlet, it was late afternoon. The mosquitoes wouldn’t attack for another hour. In the meantime, there was plenty of shade, and some pilchard to hunt. The inlet worked as a kind of funnel from the sea, collecting unusually large numbers of typically deeper-dwelling fish. The men stood on the rocks surrounding the inlet, throwing their lines into the water one by one. Tigran fished from his seat on the icebox and had to stand every now and then for the caught fish to be stored. When twilight arrived, and when the mosquitoes searched their skin for space between day-old bites, the group put away their rods and followed Dev to a farther piece of shore.

  “The lobsters live in hollowed rocks along the submerged cliffs,” Dev said. “You can hand-fish for them any time of day, if you don’t mind diving down there and putting your hand into a dark hole under the sea. Otherwise, you can wait until sundown, when they come out of their caves and cling to the rocks here. Look—I see one already!”

  Soon the rocks were crawling.

  “How many can we take?” Avo asked.

  “As many as we can carry,” Dev called from the water. He and his father were already on the hunt.

  Avo moved to join them on the rocks, but Ruben stopped him. “Who do you think’s carrying the icebox back to camp?”

  Avo remembered who had carried it on the walk out. “Us.”

  “So let’s not get carried away,” Ruben said. “A few lobsters, not to mention all this fish we have already, will be enough for everyone for a week.”

  Already Dev and Tigran were bringing back two lobsters apiece, one in each hand, hollering about how many more they could fit in the cooler.

  “We’ve never been able to carry more than a few,” Tigran said. “But with this big beast of a boy here, we can probably take twenty!”

  They dropped off their catches and went back out for more.

  “Greedy,” Ruben said. “Have you noticed how they’re the only ones who seem to know about this place? This place where fish catch themselves? You’d think we’d be among a swarm of lazy bastards.”

  Avo watched the men out in the water take large, careful steps from rock to slimy rock. “Tigran told me he found this place by accident on his honeymoon,” Avo said, keeping his eyes on the men. The sky was going orange behind the clumsy, crouching bodies. “Forty years, and no one else has found it. No one knows it’s here.”

  “We should get back, then,” Ruben said. “That means no one knows we’re here.”

  Tigran slipped on one of the rocks. He caught himself before falling, though, and bellowed a laugh into the great clouds. “There it is again—my youth! Never mind what I said back there, Dev-jan! I can do this every year for another decade, at least!”

  “What did you say?” Avo asked Ruben.

  “We should go back to camp before it gets dark, if no one knows we’re here. Imagine if the old man had actually fallen just now. What would we do, with no one around to find us?”

  Avo believed he understood what was being said to him. He rolled up his pants. Almost ran to the old man on the rocks. The idea wasn’t his, and it wasn’t Ruben’s—it seemed to belong to nobody. Seemed to have existed before people could think it up. Or maybe it had been transmuted to him by a mosquito bite, some other man’s blood carrying the idea, mingling with his own.

  “Oh, good,” Tigran said, seeing Avo approaching. “Dev is around the bend there, and I needed some help picking this monster up. Come, give me a hand.”

  “Okay,” Avo said, his heart swelling. “I’m on my way.”

  He imagined looking back to the shore to see Ruben, but the truth was he didn’t. Dev was around the bend, out of sight. Only the mosquitoes and the lobsters were watching. Avo pretended to slip on the rocks. Reaching out for balance, he knocked Tigran down. The old man fell more violently than he’d expected. He fell as fast as a young man.

  “Jesus,” Avo said, getting low to offer a hand. “Tigran-jan, I slipped, I’m sorry!” It was surprising how convincing he found his own act. Only after admiring his own ability to act clumsy and sound sincere did he realize he was, in fact, both. “I’m sorry,” he said, waiting for Tigran to respond. But Tigran didn’t get up. A wisp of color—which Avo thought at first to be a bit of reflecting sunset—floated at the surface of the water near the head.

  Then came the splashing. Ruben was running into the shallow water toward them, avoiding the rocks. Hollering for Dev. “He’s had a fall,” Ruben shouted, bending to pick the head up from the rocks. He seemed to understand that Avo would not be of any help getting the body to the shore. When Dev arrived, he started crying immediately. Avo had never seen a grown man sob before. “To the shore,” Ruben said, and he and Dev lugged the body slowly through the water.

  Bloody seawater fell into the corners of the dead man’s lips. Little twigs clung to his beard. Somehow Avo found himself on the shore beside Dev, who was crouched over his father’s body, pressing his shirt to the gash in the skull. The blood looked too thin to be real, which somehow proved it was real. Ruben brought a hunk of ice from the cooler to apply to the wound. Useless.

  Dev knew it, too. He dropped the bloody shirt and laid his face on his father’s chest. The sun had dropped below the horizon. Some stubborn bit of light lingered a while longer. Then Dev sat up and asked what happened.

  I killed him, Avo wanted to say, but didn’t. He wanted to tell the truth—that’s the truth. If he’d been able to weigh his options and decide that lying would be the smarter choice, that lying would protect him, he would’ve walked into the darkening sea and kept going until he drowned. But his lying didn’t appear to be a decision. He felt physically incapable of telling Dev the truth. He could conjure in his mind the simple sentence—I killed him—and envision himself saying it aloud. He could do that much. He could imagine the words and the sounds of them, imagine what would happen next, a lunge from Dev, maybe, a fight. Avo would be able to handle that. Could kill Dev, too, put him in a wrestling hold he hadn’t used since childhood and send him to the grave alongside his father. And would Ruben intervene? If he did, would Avo kill him, too? Three bodies on the shore, and Avo climbing the cliffs into the Georgian wilderness, running toward roads and towns, hopping a train to Russia, assuming a new identity, living as anonymous a life as possible for a man as big and guilty as he was. That ridiculous melodrama, he could imagine. But Dev had asked a simple question: what happened? And suddenly, the simplest of sentences—this happened—was impossible for Avo to say. How easy it was, once he decided the truth was impossible, to go on living his real life.

  The stars were perfectly scattered. Under them, Ruben and Dev carried the body back to the camp. One at the arms, one at the legs. Avo brought up the rear, dragging the icebox. Inside, the lobsters crawled over the dead and dying fish.

  7

  Kirovakan, Soviet Armenia, 1974

  What was called a caravan on the way to the Black Sea—the same group of cars, the same set of bodies—was called, on the way home, a procession. The corpse lay in one of the Volgas like a vacationer who’d had too much to drink, driven alone by Dev at the front of the line. He kept a wild pace all the way from Batumi to Kirovakan, taking cliffside turns so recklessly that, on one particularly thin stretch of the road, the passenger door seemed almost to unlatch, threatening to unload Tigran’s body over the edge of the world. But the door held, and the road straightened, and Dev kept at his headstrong pace, as if home were a place that could disappear if not returned to quickly enough, as if the speed
of a return could undo the having left.

  The body had come from the sea. Unearthly, the matted foaming beard and the gloss of the skin. Remembering it, Ruben chewed on the temple tips of his glasses. The body had been wet and full of sea things, little twigs, and Ruben told Mina he would pray for the courage to remember it.

  There had been a moment, just after Tigran had overlooked him to choose Mina for the tournament, when Ruben had imagined his teacher’s death. In the imagined version, Ruben had felt little more than a sense of justice being served. Now that the real thing had happened, all Ruben could remember—aside from the twigs in the beard—was the gift Tigran had given him. Not his old collection of dice—though he’d given those to Ruben, too—but the way Tigran had always seen Ruben’s seriousness as a sign not of humorlessness but of promise. He was the only one, besides Avo, who’d given Ruben that.

  So it wasn’t that Ruben—as Avo seemed to believe—felt nothing, but actually, that he felt so much that the surprise at his own pain confounded him, contorted him inward. His silence, his refusal to cry out loud or otherwise perform his pain, might have been mistaken for an incapacity to feel, but Ruben began to think of it as a kind of reverence. An attempt to record the physical memory of the disaster, to remember the precise dullness in his arms as he helped haul the corpse from the cove to the camp. To recall exactly the arrangement of twigs in the matted beard, the scraping of the icebox dragged along the sand. The number of rests he and Dev had to take—twenty-four—setting down the body. The way the wet corpse picked up granules of sand. The way Dev tied the cane to the body’s chest with fishing line. The way the body looked nothing at all like a flower skimming along the Euphrates.

  As for Avo, he could hardly remember a single detail. He’d dragged that icebox back to camp, knowing he wouldn’t be able to speak to Mina. After seeing her reaction to the news, he couldn’t even look her in the face, let alone reach out to comfort her. He couldn’t imagine holding her while she cried, knowing that he would never tell her the truth of what he’d done. And so, for the first few days back home, Avo avoided walking past the tallest building in Kirovakan. He avoided the ski lift and the nearby lemon trees. He stayed in the village in the hills with Ruben’s parents, who asked why he wasn’t out in town with their son.

  “I’m tired,” Avo said, but the truth was he couldn’t be with Ruben because Ruben was with Mina. What they were doing together, Avo couldn’t say. Surely Mina’s participation in Paris had been canceled, so if they were playing backgammon, they were doing it in the memory of Tigran, not to practice for the tournament. Fine, Avo thought. They were the only two people in the world who shared Tigran in that way, and it made sense to Avo that they would look to each other in the wake of his death.

  He wouldn’t bother them, he decided. He would let them do their grieving. He would wait for them to return to him.

  But as he waited, the same nagging thought kept occurring to him, that they would never finish their game.

  As for Mina, she decided to put her grief to use. She continued training for the tournament and begged Ruben to stay on for their practice sessions. Ruben, in what she believed was an act of respect for Tigran, agreed to help. They tried to concentrate, but no matter how many times they set up the board, no matter how many times they rolled the dice and moved the checkers slot by slot, their focus drifted, and they traded stories about Tigran. She was in the middle of the story of the day he’d given her an old journal as a gift when she stopped herself. She said, “I want to win the tournament for him, but I don’t think I can go to Paris alone.”

  She spoke with her eyes on the board, but afterward she crossed the two cascading sides of her black hair along her nose and looked up at him.

  Ruben said, “I want you to win for him, too.”

  They played the next few moves in the longest silence between them since Tigran’s death.

  “I haven’t seen Avo in days,” she said. “I think he feels responsible for what happened, and I’d really appreciate it if you could tell him how wrong I think he’d be to feel that way. Or for you to feel that way.” Across the board, she touched his hand. Ruben looked at her hand on his hand.

  “You’ve always been kinder to me than most,” Ruben said. “I’m not as good with people as Avo is, but I want you to know I appreciate you. You’re a good person.”

  Mina said, “You’re my friend. So is Avo. I’d like to see him again.”

  Ruben dropped the dice. He fixed the glasses on his nose. “I’ll let him know,” he said.

  She thanked him and played her turn, rolling exactly what she needed to win. Clearing the board, she said, “What if you took Tigran’s place? In Paris, I mean. Wouldn’t he have liked that?”

  Ruben put his hand over his heart. “I’d be honored,” he said.

  And then came the paperwork.

  A leak tore through the roof, and of course the dripping fell directly over Ruben’s father’s pillow. He was the kind of man who could never be woken gently, who took every birdcall or creaking plank as a blight or a warning, who woke shouting “Who’s there!” or “What!” no matter how sweetly he’d been nudged awake. The leak began in the middle of the night, and the entire village rumbled.

  “What is it!” Ruben’s father shouted. “Who now!”

  In the morning, Avo was sent up to fix it. He dragged an old crate to the outer wall of the house, tossed the tools from there to the roof, and climbed up to join them in one long step. The rain held off just long enough for him to pry up the faulty shingles, to remove the nails underneath, and to affix the new shingles he’d asked the carpenter to spare.

  Below, Siranoush was lighting the tonir, singing. No one else was around, and she didn’t notice Avo watching her from the roof. She sang for herself: “White dough, white dough, what do you know, where is the fire, down below.”

  Then came the smell of the coals burning deep in the well. “Where is the fire, down below.”

  She knelt at the edge of the well, which was really nothing more than a meter-wide hole in the ground. Beside her was a large wooden cutting board, covered in white flour like paint on a palette. While the coals heated, she rolled and separated the dough, and when the well grew hot enough, she slapped the dough piece by piece between her hands, flattening it. She dressed the flattened dough over an oven mitt the size of a pillow, and spread the dough to the corners as if making a bed. Then she slapped the pillow against the walls of the well and started flattening another piece of the dough. By the time she finished covering the pillow with a new sheet of flattened dough, the baking dough was finished, bubbled black, and she peeled it from the wall of the tonir and laid it at her side. Soon she was sitting beside a tall stack of these flat black-bubbled loaves of bread, with no sign of slowing down. She must have been ninety years old, and Avo—legs dangling from the edge of the roof—marveled at her work. Roll, flatten, spread, and slap. Roll, flatten, spread, and slap.

  “Black bubbles, black bubbles, what do you see. Where is the fire, inside me.”

  Avo meant to stay on the roof and watch her longer, but when his pry bar slipped and landed on the crate below with a thud, Siranoush looked up and saw him.

  “Tall boy, tall boy, what do you want. Where has your brother, Ruben, gone. Hey—that wasn’t bad, right? For something off the top of my head.”

  “Very impressive,” Avo said.

  “Come down here,” she said.

  Avo leaped down and came to sit with her at the tonir. He sat on the other side of the oven and saw her as a blur through the heat of the well. She continued her work as they spoke.

  “You’ll see him again,” Siranoush said.

  She meant Ruben—of course she’d noticed his absence from the village. Almost two weeks had gone by since Avo had met him, uninvited, at the train station, to wish him luck. Ruben was there with his mother and with Mina’s parents. After a night of rain, the morning had turned unusually clear, and pools of rainwater between the tracks gleamed
white and nearly blinding. Mina had already taken her seat aboard the train, ready for departure to Yerevan and the flight from there to Paris. Her parents seemed to be keeping Ruben, whispering words of advice, maybe, on how to keep their daughter safe. Ruben’s mother was the one, loitering several steps away from the group, who noticed Avo watching. But when she waved him over to join, Ruben spun so quickly toward the train that his glasses fell from his face. Avo expected them to fall and shatter on the wet cement, but Ruben—surprising even himself, it seemed, by the way he examined the frames before lodging them back on his nose—caught them deftly in midair.

  “You’ll see him again,” Siranoush said, but there was a little loftiness in her tone, hued red and mysterious as her hair, and Avo let himself believe she meant someone else, perhaps the supernatural, that he would see his father again, or Tigran, or the Almighty Himself at the day of judgment. So it was with all the solemnity of a guilt-ridden eighteen-year-old boy that Avo said, “I don’t believe in God, Siranoush, if that’s what you mean. And I don’t want to disrespect you, but I don’t believe in those angels in your story, either. I don’t think there’s any justice in this world except the justice we make.”

  Siranoush yawned. “You’ve spent too much time with that brother of yours,” she said. “You used to have a sense of humor, if I remember correctly. Besides, you should at least have the decency not to pretend you’ve had an original thought.”

  Roll, flatten, spread, and slap.

  “Well,” Avo said, “that story of yours. Do you believe it yourself?”