The Gimmicks

by Chris McCormick

  She never looked up from working the dough. “Look,” she said, “those angels are no less believable than the hell I saw as a girl. You understand? You see murder and torture with your own eyes in the open streets, and you get a choice. You get to react in one of two ways. Either you spend your life worshipping a God who allowed it to happen, wondering what mysterious good might come out of that evil, or you decide that people are alone, and basically animals. Still new, I mean, to civilized life. I was saved by a Turk—the biggest, ugliest fez-donning Turk you could imagine. He saved my life, and I was grateful. And yet when I asked him what had happened to my family, to my friends, he said I never had any. They were all a dream I’d had, he said. He was my brother, he explained. My family was his family. There was no past but his. I said he saved my life, but really, all he did was keep me living. My life, he tried to erase. I escaped before that happened. When I think of God, I think of him. Thanks for the air in my lungs, you know, but also, go to hell.”

  Through the blur of the heat, she winked. Roll, flatten, spread, and slap.

  “I still have a sense of humor,” Avo said, though he wanted to punch himself for the syrup of self-pity the sentence came out dripping with. He hadn’t meant to sound so alone; then again, he hadn’t meant to kill Tigran, either. If he could wreak lasting damage without meaning to, then the value of his intentions seemed increasingly hollow, and that line of thinking could lead only to the nearest deadly height from which to jump. Avo peered up at the roof he’d just leaped painlessly down from, and then he asked if Siranoush needed help with the lavash.

  “My way might seem like a sad way to view the world,” Siranoush said, shooing his help away, “but I promise you, it’s not any sadder than trying to justify what happened to us. I always kept up appearances while Yergat was alive, because he was a believer. But I watched a man beheaded in the street with a dull blade. Six whacks and a final sawing. I watched four men hold my neighbor down and light her hair on fire. For what? So that some mysterious good may come of it in the end? No. No, thank you.”

  Roll, flatten, spread, and slap.

  “But above all that, I hate when people tell other people how to live. I’m not doing that, Avo-jan. I’m not telling you how to live. Just that you should continue living for as long as you can. You are one of the better trained animals, it seems to me. Go on living, and help others live as long as they can, too.”

  He would tell her about Tigran, he thought. He could never tell Mina, who loved Tigran like a father, and so Avo would have to tell this woman instead, a surrogate Mina, with the heat between them turning her just invisible enough to mistake, a curtain of rippled air as heavy as the truth itself. But the truth wasn’t simply a weight to bear. It felt more like a small room he was locked inside, alone, while a party went on in the rest of the house. He couldn’t tell the whole truth to Siranoush—that would be like ruining the party by crying out—but maybe if he hinted at the story of his crime, a little hint at what he’d done, maybe that would relieve some of the pain of being alone in that room all night. It would feel like a visit during the party, a prying open of the door just enough so that she could bring him a piece of cake and let him know she was thinking of him.

  “Siranoush,” he said through the heat. “I hurt someone, accidentally.”

  She didn’t look up. “I’ve always thought you’re too tall. Your brain is so far away from your hands that miscommunications are to be expected.”

  “It wasn’t an accident, actually.”

  She said, “Did you know, we used to make lavash like this for money. My mother did, anyway, and I helped. We used to bring it to the market in Kars every week. I never made it myself, but the steps came back to me after Yergat died. I thought about selling it myself. I’d hire you to take it down to the city for me. Give you something to do—you look like you need something to do.”

  “I have a job lined up at the textile factory,” Avo said, which was true. “An old friend of my parents works there.”

  “Well, my job would’ve been better for you. More sociable. You’re sociable, I think, or you can fake it, anyway, which is all you need. Plus, this job would’ve put fewer chemicals in your lungs. Fewer accidents. Less chance of an early— Well, you know what can happen in those factories.”

  Avo said, “I do.”

  “In any case, I’m giving these away for free. I’ve been supplying the whole village for about a month now. You’ve been eating my bread, probably, and not even knowing it. I thought about selling it, but the truth is, I only make them because it reminds me of my mother. I play the duduk because my father taught me, and I do this because my mother taught me. I think every person should practice one thing he learned from each of his parents. It— I was going to say it keeps your parents alive, but nothing does that. No, it does something more peculiar than that. It keeps you alive. Not just surviving but alive. Do you know the difference? Besides, I enjoy slapping that dough against the side of the tonir too much to profit any further from it. The dough just sticks there, like a big thumbprint, which is fun. And the loaves never crisp exactly the same way twice, so there’s something unique about each one. Nobody should profit more than that, I think.”

  “Do you eat it yourself?”

  Siranoush scrunched her face so severely that her bottom lip almost kissed the wrinkles in her forehead. It was like her skin was made of rubber.

  “My stomach,” she said. “I haven’t been able to keep anything down recently but dried fruit. Here,” she said, peeling a fresh loaf off the side of the tonir. “Tell me how it tastes right off the wall.”

  Avo took the lavash, hot as coals, and juggled it between his hands. He managed to rip a piece off from the whole, letting out steam, and stuffed it in his mouth without blowing on it first. He had to chew with his mouth open to keep from burning himself.

  “He put you up to it,” Siranoush said while his mouth was full. “Your brother told you to hurt that person, didn’t he?”

  Avo couldn’t speak. He couldn’t lie or equivocate. The look on his face must’ve told the truth.

  “What am I saying?” she said, turning back to her work. “He’s not really your brother, is he.”

  For the next few days, Siranoush’s stomach problems seemed, almost miraculously, to resolve themselves. She started eating full meals again, kufte and pilaf and tabouli—foods she’d loved all her life and hadn’t been able to enjoy in years. She kept regular and had none of the trouble she’d grown resigned to bearing at night, the panicked waddles to the toilet or the sharp paralyzing pains. It was as though the conversation with Avo had cleared her entirely out. And then one afternoon she fell asleep on the sofa she’d had dragged outside for her husband to die on, and died on it herself.

  After Tigran’s, it was the second memorial service Avo had gone to in a short span, and he had to laugh. The laughter not only drew strange looks from faces in the crowd of mourners, it also served to tighten the screws of his guilt so that he almost broke down, right there and then, and cried. He supposed the crying might be more explicable at an event like this than laughing, but as soon as he was aware of his desire to cry, he felt entirely incapable of tears. Instead he looked over the heads of the other, shorter mourners, wishing he would find his friends. As the service began to wind down, and as families began to huddle into the line of black and beige cars awaiting them, a familiar voice spoke up at him.

  “I used to shovel the path to the old woman’s door,” said Mr. V, his old teacher. “Today I shoveled her grave. How’s that for symmetry, huh? Seems almost designed.”

  “Almost?” Avo said. “You took the shovel out of the gravedigger’s hands. I heard him telling people all about it near the back of the procession.”

  “Dammit,” Mr. V said. “You and your buddy, Levon’s little son, won’t let me tell one story in my life, will you? Where is that little friend of yours, anyway? Isn’t he usually holding your tail with his trunk?”

  “You’re get
ting funnier as you get older,” Avo said. “And braver.”

  “Oh, that’s right, he’s off in Paris. Sophisticated, right? Probably eating fine cheese.”

  It was the first time Avo had heard Mr. V mock Ruben since the incident in the classroom all those years ago, but this time Avo didn’t come to Ruben’s defense.

  “I only feel worried for the young lady who’s gone with him,” said Mr. V. “How her parents allowed her to go to France with that strange little boy, I’ll never know. I’ve had four sons, but if I ever have a daughter, she’ll live like a train on whatever tracks I lay out for her. School, home—where else does a girl need to go? Not France, that’s for sure. In fact, if I had a daughter, I’d probably name her Train, just to remind everybody that she’s on a track not to be diverted.”

  “I can’t imagine any jokes about a girl named Train.”

  “Agh—say no more. At an old woman’s funeral, you’ll say filth like that? You Leninakan folks will find the dirt in everything. A perfectly good name, and you’ll find the dirt in it. It’s a funeral, you don’t have to be funny.”

  But after the service, when the last of the living souls abandoned the graveyard for the village in the hills, Avo went to the state-paid headstone at the freshly turned plot, bent to his hands and knees, and whispered a long and loving joke.

  8

  Glendale, California, 1989

  Wednesday morning, after merging from one freeway to the next, Fuji and I reached the Glendale address listed on the business card of The Brow Beater’s old English teacher. Expecting a school or a home, I double-checked the address three times before heading upstairs to a little jewelry store on the second floor of a strip mall called Hi Plaza.

  The stucco building, studded with seven or eight small businesses, glowed like a church in the morning light. I didn’t want to make Fuji wait in the truck again, so I carried him in the crook of my arm up the steps to the jeweler’s door. Before I could even read the hours listed in the front window, the door came open with the sound of bells, and an old woman started shooing me away with a broom. She was old and round, a walnut with teeth, and her short gray hair fell in two clean swoops from the top of her head to the crown of her jowls. She muttered at me in her own language.

  “Valantin,” I said, “are you Valantin?” And the old woman’s face shifted. She gestured for me to stay put outside, and locked the door behind her as she disappeared again into the store.

  From the second floor of the strip mall, I turned and showed Fuji the view. Between the parked or passing cars on the palm-lined avenue, I counted three tailors, four bakeries, a liquor store, five restaurants with outdoor furniture, a church, a gallery, two markets, and another church. Outside one of the restaurants, a group of white-haired men sat at a table with their faces hung over wide, steaming bowls.

  “My aunt thought you were homeless,” a new voice said, and I turned to see a tall woman of about my age framed in the jeweler’s doorway. Valantin was wearing a series of golden bangles on either wrist and rings of different colors stacked on many of her fingers. Her hair, dyed burgundy, rested in a knot at the top of her head, and she spoke from between two flat lines of lipstick the color of wine.

  “You’ve got a cat,” she said.

  “I do,” I said, swaddling Fuji.

  “And you asked for me? You want something for your cat? A jeweled collar?”

  “No, no, nothing for the cat.”

  “Oh, thank God. I can’t stand jewelry on an animal.”

  I looked around her to the door she was blocking. “Well, I’m sure this guy would love the opportunity to change your mind about that, but I’m here to pick your brain about someone we both used to know, if you’ve got a few minutes.”

  “My aunt’s waiting for me inside, actually, because—I don’t know if you’ve noticed—we’re a business, we sell things, and we’ve got to set up shop for the day, you understand.”

  “Can we come in with you?”

  “We?”

  “Fuji here is hypoallergenic, doesn’t shed or stink. He’s cleaner than I am.”

  Valantin adjusted her rings and said, “You’ve set me up for some easy jokes.”

  I smoothed the wild hairs out of my ponytail. “How’s this,” I said. “You can make an exception for my cat, just like Longtin used to let your dog into The Gutshot. He was the one who introduced me to an old student of yours. Avo Gregoryan?”

  At that, Valantin seemed to see me differently. No longer was my hair the sign of a sixty-two-year-old’s desperate grip on his youth, but the proof of persistence, a record of growth. The scars in my forehead, the tattoos on my skin—they weren’t the results of a story but the beginnings. I explained how I’d found her address, and how I was in town for a few hours by accident and curious to see if she knew where Avo was located nowadays. I missed the kid, I said, and she invited me in.

  After I told The Brow Beater about my brother, he started to see Gil everywhere. I’d described Gil the way I remembered him in early 1950. Soon The Brow Beater was nudging me to check out fans in the audience, young men at the gas pumps, porters at the hotels, and college kids at the bars after shows. Everywhere he looked, The Brow Beater could find a young man who looked to be the identical clone of my brother. Same square jaw, same blond waves glued back with Brylcreem, same knit shirts and rolled-up cuffs at the boot. These coincidences may not have been miraculous in 1950, when the styles were in fashion, but in 1979 and 1980, the resemblance sent my heart jumping. The strangers even had cowlicks in the back-left corners of their heads, just like Gil’s, but whenever I approached to gain a closer look, the stranger—backing away, asking me if there was a problem, telling his girlfriend or his friends to keep back, as if I were some sort of menace—proved to be nothing at all like my brother. It was amazing, how much these boys could’ve passed for Gil until the moment they began to move and speak. It was the exact opposite of The Brow Beater, whose appearance bore no resemblance at all to Gil’s, but whose movements—the way he blinked in twos, the funny way he chewed, back to front—seemed to channel my brother completely.

  Even some of The Brow Beater’s behaviors—carrying that red fanny pack of his, for example, full of all his cash—brought Gil to mind, and I told The Brow Beater so. “Just because you’re checking that bag every two minutes doesn’t make it a checking account,” I said. “You don’t trust banks, is that it? You know, Gil used to do the same damn thing. Hid all his money in an old record player. Speakers full of cash, turntable covered in coins like the bottom of a wishing well. You would’ve liked Gil, I think. I think Gil would’ve liked you.”

  You’d think by the way the strangers backed away from me that I was some sort of creep, an obsessive, but you should’ve seen the way The Brow Beater lit up anytime we talked about my brother. For a long time, it was the only conversation we could sustain.

  After a volleyed argument with her aunt in a language I didn’t understand, Valantin led me inside the jewelry store. The display cases surrounding us were filled with yellow and white gold, platinum and pearls, emeralds and topaz and lapis lazuli, which reminded me of a pair of earrings my ex-wife always used to wear. Through a plated door, we passed the register and the vaultlike walk-in safe, outside of which her aunt kept guard, eyeing me, and on to a little back room with a Victorian-era chaise longue and a coffee table lined with plates of sweets and cups of coffee with steam drifting forth. I said, “Tell me she didn’t make all of this right now, just for me.”

  “We keep the sweets and coffee on hand.”

  Her old aunt stayed at the safe, tipped at an angle so as to keep an eye on both the front door and us. “Tell her I feel like a teenager at my girlfriend’s house,” I said, and Valantin translated. The old walnut said something back, and Valantin, keeping the translation for herself, laughed.

  When I asked why she gave up teaching English for a career in the jewelry business, Valantin explained that the store had belonged to her husband, who died in
1976. She’d been running the jewelry store as her day job ever since, teaching English in what she called “the margins” of her day. Eventually, she said, her grown sons would inherit the store. In the meantime, she enjoyed the challenge of owning a small business in the age of shopping malls. She said it was a new obstacle for her but an old one for Armenians, who’d kept a small nation alive in the face of several empires. “A national identity is a kind of small business,” she said, and I confessed I didn’t know much about national identities that weren’t my own. She did me the kindness of pretending to be surprised.

  “So you’re a jeweler and a teacher,” I said. “Busy lady.”

  “It’s not so bad,” she said, “since all my work is here. Before my husband died, I used to teach in a classroom at the Glendale Community College. But something was off—absences were high, and, well, something essential was missing. After some trial and error, I figured out what it was. Trust. So I started bringing them here. I like using this space for my students, especially the young ones, the teenagers, who come from across the border. They come here after the store is closed, and we’re the only people here, surrounded by very expensive objects and a safe full of—who knows how much money, how many priceless diamonds, are in there. My students come, I make coffee, they bring food. I want them to feel, right away, trusted. Not only do they learn better, but it’s good for their self-esteem, too, when they’re new to this country, which doesn’t, generally speaking, you know, trust anyone except people who look and speak like you.”

  “Trust me,” I said, “no one trusts a guy who looks like me.”

  Fuji wandered off to the safe, where I thought maybe he smelled a dog’s trail. He rested against the aunt’s shoes, and the aunt bent to scratch him gently on the head.

  I said, “You still have that dog of yours that drank at The Gutshot?”

  “No,” Valantin said mournfully. “Daria. I couldn’t imagine replacing her.”