Although the man with the cross had offered him free passage in exchange for his labor, he also folded a few bills into Avo’s shirt pocket when he said goodbye, and Avo used the money to buy a gyro at an outdoor café on 5706 Sokak. He ate slowly. Across the way, in front of the shops lining the road, he saw a woman peeling an orange. She had long white hair, and almost every article of clothing she wore was made of brown leather. She was speaking to a man and digging her thumbnails into the flesh of the orange, pulling long, curled strands of skin to the ground as she spoke.
When she was through with the man—a customer, Avo realized—she kicked the discarded peels into a gutter in the road, swallowed the naked orange in several enormous bites, and pulled a bottle of water out of her back pocket to rinse her hands beneath. Then she turned and stepped into one of the shops.
Avo followed her inside. To his surprise, he found himself not in a shop but in a gallery, with framed art on the walls and odd mechanical installations roped off in the center of the space. There was no sight of the woman. At the very back, a set of stairs led him up into a book-lined studio apartment, and there she was, hanging her coat, studying him like a sculpture in need of restoration. When he asked in Armenian if her name was Kami, she said, “Were you born with that face, or is that what happened the last time you followed a woman into her bedroom?”
When Avo laughed, covering his face gingerly with both hands, Kami seemed to understand how long it had been since he’d laughed. She told him to wait for her downstairs.
One painting caught his attention so sharply, he couldn’t believe he’d walked past it on the way in. It was a portrait, blue and green, of a woman in a long-sleeved dress holding a handkerchief to her face. With her other hand, she cradled the opposite elbow. A long nose cast a teal shadow down her face, which looked angry and solemn all at once. The woman bore such a strong resemblance to Mina, Avo realized he’d been covering his chin.
“You found the Avetisyan,” Kami said, coming down the stairs. “Armenians are drawn to each other, I guess.”
“Is it a forgery?”
“You know, you’re just like that pig I was yelling at earlier. I stopped doing forgeries a long time ago. Everything I sell here is real.”
He might’ve been intimidated by her, but before coming downstairs, she’d tied her white hair back in just the way Angel Hair used to do, and this other resemblance comforted Avo enough to say exactly what he’d come to say. He was returning to Armenia after a long time away, he told Kami. He’d be traveling east through Turkey and would need papers to cross the border back home. He’d heard she might be able to help.
Where had he come from, she might’ve asked, or how had he landed in Mersin, of all places?
But she didn’t ask a thing. Whether due to a free artistic spirit, a cultural understanding, or a dangerous naïveté, Avo couldn’t say. All he could do was marvel at the way Kami turned and started walking, waving over her shoulder for him to follow, and announced along the way to the telephone that the restoration shop could always use some muscle, what with all those heavy works of art coming and going, as long as the muscle was careful and precise. She added that the money wouldn’t be much, but it was something, which he’d need if he wanted to make the trip across the country, and there was an apartment beside hers that was vacant, where he could stay for half the cost of what he’d pay elsewhere in the city, and really, she should be thanking him, what a godsend he was, what a favor he would be doing for her.
“And at the end,” she said, “when you’ve earned them, I’ll set you up with your papers.”
Would he have agreed to the arrangement had he known he was to spend two years in Mersin? It was impossible to say. Like a gas, time seemed to take the shape of its container, and two years in Kami’s gallery flitted by in less than a heartbeat compared to the two years he’d spent on the road with Angel Hair, or even the one day he’d spent strapped down in Martik’s bed.
In many ways, the job was repetitive—loading and unloading trucks, reasoning with unruly artists and buyers—but he took pride in the combination of power and touch needed to move the art correctly, which reminded him of the way Angel Hair had taught him to handle men in the ring. He also admired Kami’s restoration talents—he’d bring in a statue of a cat with a missing ear, and he’d send it off a few weeks later with every hair in place. Watching her at work enthralled him, the way she approached every medium differently, the aggressive way she stalked a statue, circling it before getting up or down to its level, or the coaxing way she put her face as close to a canvas as possible, peering into it for the miscellaneous adventures of a brushstroke. And he enjoyed making stupid small talk with her, little nothing jokes like pointing out a dancer in a painting, a man in slim yellow tights, and claiming that his father had the same pair back home. The jokes were meaningless except they caused her to laugh, and the air in the room seemed fresher for the fun, and the hands on the clock moved so fast sometimes he thought she’d turned them all forward as a prank, a way to get back at him for joking that he, too, used to have long gray hair, before he shaved his head bald, and maybe she should do the same.
The dealers he met were sophisticated people who wore glasses with colored frames. They were polite, if not kind, and happy to ask about his scar and nod solemnly when he answered that he’d rather talk about the art. He did enjoy learning about the art, though not much of it stuck, and of course all of it had to do with this peculiar friendship he’d forged with Kami, consensually temporary and therefore honest and headlong and impossible to explain.
The closest he’d ever come to this was with Angel Hair, only Avo had never told the truth about his plans to leave. One of the few silver linings of being found by Ruben, in fact, was that it had happened while Avo was separated from Angel Hair, and so Avo had never had to say goodbye.
Although Kami hadn’t asked him a single question about his life when he’d first asked her for help, they felt practically transparent to each other in a few months’ time. She told him the entire saga of the drunk Greek he’d met on The Wise Man, and Avo told her about the death of his parents, and he told stories about Angel Hair and his brother, Gil, and he went on and on about Mina, who was the reason he was returning home.
Once, while he helped Kami arrange the latest exhibit, she took a seat on the bottom step of the staircase and said, “You’re still young, but I’m at the age now where I can’t help considering the legacy I’ll leave behind. It’s indulgent and morbid and sentimental, but it’s true! My mind obsesses over the question.”
“You give artists a space,” Avo ventured, and although Kami made an agreeable sound, she returned to work and let the conversation end there.
From then on, Avo wondered what the right answer might’ve been. He got sick during this time, missing Mina, whose legacy had always appeared clearly tied to his, and his to hers. A legacy was a group project, it seemed to Avo, and so he’d given Kami an answer that involved the only group he’d seen her associate with, her community of artists.
Maybe Kami understood the problem, too, because she began to talk almost exclusively about her mother, who was nearly eighty years old and living in an orange grove some twenty miles away. Despite the proximity, they hadn’t spoken in many years.
“Maybe I’ll go see her,” Kami would say every other week or so.
When Kami asked if Avo had given any thought, despite his youth, to the question of his own legacy, Avo hesitated: he’d given the question thought, but the answer embarrassed him. Still, to his surprise, the impulse to lie was replaced by the impulse to restore, and rather than putting on a mask, he pulled out a version of himself he’d almost forgotten he once believed in.
“You know,” he said, “I always wanted to be a poet.”
“I think you’d be a great poet,” Kami said.
“Yeah?”
“Well, you’ve traveled the world, haven’t you, collecting material?”
Soon a collector brought
his teenage son to the gallery, looking for “the poet.” The boy, having published in a small literary journal at his school, asked Avo to read his work. Avo stared down at the kid, the first living poet he’d ever met, and said, “Sure, sure.”
“I thought he could pick your brain,” Kami explained to Avo later.
How else did the two years go so quickly? Painfully, sometimes: the shoulder he’d dislocated in Toledo—and again in Newark—tended to slip from its socket whenever he lifted a heavy piece of art. Jolts of strange electricity sometimes shot up his spine with no trigger at all, and he’d have to hold his head under a dark cover for ten minutes if he looked too directly into the lights strung up above a portrait.
Mostly, though, those years rushed comfortably by. Sometimes Kami would invite him to gallery openings with a group of friends, or else dinner or a movie, always in groups, and he became known around the community as the big young scarred poet. One acquaintance happened to know the culture editor of a local newsletter, and nearly demanded that Avo send her one of his poems for publication. He said he’d think on it. He wouldn’t want to send something lying around in his journals. He would want to honor the generous offer with a new poem written specifically for the publication, and that would take time.
The next day, Kami purchased a notebook for him from the café across the street, inscribed with the message: “Thus begins your legacy.”
One day, late in their friendship, Kami showed up outside the gallery with a pair of bicycles. Together they rode to the outskirts of the city. They parked their bikes by a grove of orange trees.
On foot he followed her down a dusty aisle between the trees. Hundreds of oranges were popping from their leaves like bright round bulbs. She pointed at one high in a tree and asked Avo to pluck it for her. Avo told her about Mina and the lemon tree near the ski lift back home, and Kami said, “These are oranges.” She was not like a lover or an aunt or a sister or a cousin, but a friend, the holiest love there was in the world, and he reached and plucked one of the fruits. “This one? Are you sure?” The orange in question was ripe to blackening.
Kami took the orange and peeled it for them to share. Little triangles of meat on the unfurled rind.
“My mother lives there,” Kami said, pointing to the house at the end of the rows. She didn’t need him for the final walk to the door. He waited for her among the trees.
In the end, Kami gave him the papers she’d forged, and they embraced for a long time. It was funny. The story of his friendship with Kami seemed so disconnected from the moving stream of his life.
Even to himself. Her name would never come out of his mouth again, not even to his deepest love. And yet Kami was important. For many years before his friendship with her, Avo had been brutal and brutalized in return, and had considered loyalty a thing made entirely of stone. He had come to a different understanding by the end of his stay in Mersin. And if somehow he’d been able to return to Mina without it, he would’ve failed, unable to love her well.
18
Kirovakan, Soviet Armenia, 1983
Tomorrow, Mina decided, she would take the children to the ski lift. She could see the lift from here, the roof of her building, and even Araksya, two years old, had pointed out the rising chairs in the distance. Her daughter seemed older than that—sturdier and more talkative—and ready to enjoy great heights. Already she was pointing from the roof of the tallest building in Kirovakan toward the hills beyond the city and calling every little cliff in the distance Masis, which was the peak of Mount Ararat. Two years old. Mina squeezed her, said she loved her so much she would eat her.
The girl covered her mouth with both hands when she laughed. It was as though she had a limited supply of laughter and was trying to keep as much of it inside as possible. She did that with food, too, slowing down and savoring her last bites. It really was, Mina thought, as if her baby girl were old already and had learned somewhere to fear spending the last of anything. Like she was somehow heightened.
Mina didn’t let her get too close to the roof’s steel railing. She kept her in the center, in or near the chairs at the backgammon table. It was hard to get Araksya to focus for longer than a few dice rolls, but that was okay. Her breaks in attention gave them a chance to take strolls around the table to stretch their legs, to hold hands, to talk. They pointed at and named the places in the distance, the church, the train station, the city square, the mountains with their patches of snow. “There’s a village there,” Mina said, “where it rains almost every day. And you see the snow up above? There’s the ski lift there.” She mimed a skier, planting her feet and her imaginary poles, shifting her weight from one leg to the other, making whooshing sounds through her teeth. The girl covered her mouth with both hands and shook, absolutely shook.
Tomorrow, Mina decided, she would take her girl and her sister’s children there. The snow was patchy, melting before its time. She would take them tonight, right now, if not for the recital. January, and the snow melting already in patches.
The miming wore her out, so she made a big show of feeling exhausted and plunked herself down in a chair.
“Talin,” Araksya said.
“That’s right, soon we’re going to see Talin sing and play music. Are you excited to see your cousin onstage?”
Araksya nodded so hard her teeth clattered, and then she laughed and covered her mouth.
They should be getting back inside. Galust would be home soon from work, and they’d have only a little bit of time to eat before needing to leave for the recital. She hadn’t even chopped the cabbage for the borscht. What could she throw together if it came to that? There was lavash, and hummus she’d made for Araksya and her mother-in-law in the afternoon. Eggplant and lemon. Simple. Galust could snack on that while he waited for the soup, she thought. No rush, then, to leave the roof just yet.
“Masis,” Araksya said, pointing again to the northern mountains. Mina corrected Araksya by directing her finger to the west. “Masis is over there,” she said, “far, far away. Masis is much, much bigger than our puny village hills. It used to be part of our country, but now the border has moved.”
The girl looked to the western horizon, saw nothing, and then turned back to their puny village hills. She said, “But these are bigger.”
Perspective, Mina thought. How does any parent teach it?
They took another handheld stroll and sat down again at the backgammon table. Araksya rolled the dice. Mina showed her how to move the checkers. One die for one checker, the other for another.
Araksya liked the dice more than the checkers. She rolled them repeatedly and knew to keep them on the board. “Wow!” Mina said from time to time. The girl covered her mouth with both hands.
January, and the snow melting already. Mina had bundled Araksya in a winter coat and scarf, but she herself felt warm in just a light sweater. Could she remember the last winter like this?
Wishfully, maybe, or—not at all.
Her sister claimed she couldn’t remember anything of her life before children. Mina wouldn’t go that far, but she was beginning to understand her sister’s point of view. Her perspective. The truth was Mina remembered less and less about her life before Araksya. It hadn’t vanished, not entirely. More like the way the snow was melting—not at once but in swaths.
For example, Tigran and his wife used to have her over for dinner. His wife was a beautiful cook who’d worked, in her youth, in the kitchen at the consulate in Yerevan. And yet Mina couldn’t remember a single dish from those dinners. They all seemed to merge in her mind as one ongoing feast. She couldn’t remember any specific conversation they enjoyed at the table, either, only the old joke Tigran liked to make at grace: “Thank you, Lord, for allowing an old ape like me to dine with geniuses.”
Was it after one of those dinners that Tigran gave her Shirakatsi’s journal? No, that must’ve happened in the daylight—she remembered shadows on the page. He’d taken her to the forests in the foothills, not far from the railro
ad tracks, and told her Byzantine and medieval treasures lay buried there.
With everyone else, she was constantly aware of her sloping chin, her beaklike nose. But not with Tigran. Genius, he used to call her, and she believed it. She believed, at least, that he believed it.
That day in the forest when he’d brought her the journal, he’d pulled it from inside his coat. Shirakatsi’s proofs. Passed from master to star pupil for hundreds of years, went the story. And she was the first girl to thumb those pages. He had chosen her.
“Another gift to a girl with many,” Tigran said. They walked in the shadows of tall pines and larches. Daylight, then. She was young and grateful. She was alone. Her music was foreign and illegal, and her sister—who used to love the album Pet Sounds so much she would hum the melody to “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and tell their parents she’d invented it—had thrown away her records before marrying a regional deputy of the Party. Mina was, she’d started to believe, a genius trapped—in Armenia, in girlhood. She stepped into the old man’s coat and kissed him terribly on the mouth.
Then she started to remove, at the shoulder, her shirt.
“Oh,” Tigran said, and with just a syllable, he exposed the falseness of her escape. She was so ashamed she started running. Only when she was out of breath did she stop and sit on a felled tree. She’d done something clumsy and melodramatic and whorish, and she was afraid he’d take back all the confidence he’d given her. She was afraid he’d take back the book and give it to the other top student, that dour kid she’d known but not known for all her life.
She wasn’t crying. She was licking her thumb to turn the pages. Was there anything more beautiful than an ancient stanza of math? She read those beautiful proofs over and again. Eventually, she heard Tigran rustling toward her.
“When I was young and crazy with impatience for love,” he said, “I once kissed my sister like that.” He sat next to her on the log.
The Gimmicks Page 23