All the Light There Was Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

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  31

  32

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2013 by Nancy Kricorian

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Kricorian, Nancy.

  All the Light There Was : A Novel / Nancy Kricorian.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-547-93994-0

  1. Armenians—France—Fiction. 2. Families—France—Fiction. 3. France—History—German occupation, 1940–1945—Fiction. 4. Historical fiction. I. Title.

  PS3561.R52A79 2013

  813'.54—dc23 2012040359

  eISBN 978-0-547-93996-4

  v1.0313

  For Nona and Djuna

  1

  BY THE TIME MY brother and I arrived at Donabedian’s Market, our mother was waiting on the sidewalk outside the shop, having commandeered the grocer’s wooden handcart, which was loaded with gunnysacks of bulgur, net bags of onions, liter tins of olive oil, along with miscellaneous brown-paper parcels tied with red string.

  From behind the plate-glass window, Baron Donabedian waved to us as he and his assistant were busily ringing up sales. Half the neighborhood’s housewives had joined the effort to empty his shelves.

  “Missak,” my mother said, “you and your sister take this cart home. I have more errands to run. Maral, help your brother carry everything up the stairs.”

  My brother asked, “What’s all this?”

  My mother said, “Food.”

  “Right,” he answered. “Are we starting a restaurant?”

  “Don’t be smart.” She tugged at the sacks on the bottom, checking that the pyramid of goods was securely settled on the cart.

  “How did you pay?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “The money in the cracker tin.”

  My brother and I exchanged glances.

  For as long as I could remember, at the end of each week my mother had climbed the step stool in our tiny kitchen to put coins and small bills into the gold and red cracker tin on the top shelf of the cupboard. She was saving to buy an electric sewing machine that would replace the ancient and venerable Singer pedal machine she used to do piecework as a vest maker. She had a newspaper advertisement showing the different electric models, one mounted on extravagant marble, one with an elegant sewing table, and the one she had set her heart on, which was a simple black model on wood that came in a leather-covered carrying case. She coveted the small electric light affixed to the body of the machine.

  My mother said briskly, “After you take everything upstairs, Missak, you return the cart to Donabedian as soon as possible. Maral, put the spices in the jars, and the sugar on the top shelf. The rest goes wherever you and Auntie Shakeh find space.”

  That was how our war began. It didn’t start with blaring newspaper headlines announcing a pending invasion, nor was it signaled by the drone of warplanes overhead. Our war commenced that afternoon when my mother stockpiled groceries so that, no matter what this new war might bring, her family would have something to eat.

  As the trickle of people fleeing Paris turned into a torrent, my father decided we would remain in our apartment in Belleville, an eastern district that at the time still retained some of its character as an outlying village. Schools across the city were closed, and at the order of the authorities, children were being bused out of town to safety. Many stores were shuttered, and their owners loaded cars and streamed toward the peripheral exits. My father wagered, however, that remaining where we had a roof over our heads and where he could keep an eye on his cobbler’s shop was safer than wandering across the countryside to God knows where. As he said, “We’re staying put. The last exodus we saw led straight to hell.”

  That afternoon Missak and I pushed the handcart up the hill on the sidewalk past our neighbors—the French from the Auvergne and other rural provinces, along with Armenians, Greeks, and Eastern European Jews who had flocked to France for its promised liberties, and all of them looking for employment in Belleville’s factories, shoemaking ateliers, and tailoring workshops. We wended our way through half a dozen languages as street vendors and their customers engaged in commerce at the end of the workday. As the war moved ever closer, most of the residents of Belleville chose not to join the mass flight from the city.

  My brother and I made a number of trips up the five flights to our apartment, where we deposited the provisions at Auntie Shakeh’s feet. She stood in our front hall wringing her hands. While Missak went to return the hand truck, I climbed on the stool to put the sugar on the top shelf, as my mother had instructed. Next my aunt and I dragged the sacks of bulgur from the front hall to the bedroom that we shared. With much effort, we wedged two of them under my bed and the other two under hers.

  “That’s a lot of bulgur.” My aunt wiped perspiration from her face with a hankie.

  “Enough to last until we won’t be able to stand the sight of it on our plates,” I said.

  “Don’t talk like that, Maral. We will be grateful for every bite.” My aunt’s tone was uncharacteristically severe.

  Missak stumbled back in, panting under the weight of more packages, having made his final trip up the stairs with my mother at his heels. My father arrived just behind her.

  “Do you feel better now?” my father asked my mother.

  She nodded. “I found some more rice, and I bought machine needles, hand needles, and three dozen spools of thread. But I know there’s something I’ve forgotten.”

  “The animals,” my brother said.

  “What animals?” my mother asked.

  “You know, the pairs of animals two by two,” Missak answered.

  My mother dismissed him with a toss of her hand. “Talk to me in two months, Mr. Wise Guy.”

  That night my mattress, which usually dipped in the middle, hit up against the hard bulk under my bed. I turned from side to side, trying to find a position that felt less as though I were lying on top of a boulder. I slept fitfully, waking a number of times in the night worrying about the sacks of bulgur that seemed in the dark as sinister as carcasses. Some time toward morning I dreamed that I was standing over a cooking pot someone had left on the stove in the kitchen. I watched a bubbling lamb and tomato stew that rose and rose until, to my horror, it overflowed the pot and like scalding lava spread over the kitchen floor.

  Ten days later, when the Germans marched down the rue de Belleville, Missak and I watched through the slats of the closed blinds of the Kacherians’ apartment, on the third floor of a building two blocks from ours. Missak; his best friend, Zaven; Zaven’s brother, Barkev; and I were crowded around one window, while Mr. and Mrs. Kacherian with ten-year-old Virginie between them were at the other.

  As the first tank rolled down the hill, none of us breathed. The t
anks were followed by armored trucks, and behind the trucks came tall German soldiers in black uniforms, their boot heels hammering the cobblestones in cadence. When Zaven leaned toward the window for a better view, his shoulder pressed against mine. I had never been so near to him before. I glanced at him sideways, so close that I could see the beads of perspiration on his temple. I stayed perfectly still, prolonging the contact between us and wondering if he felt what I did. When I noticed that his older brother, Barkev, was staring at me, I was ashamed. I quickly turned to peer through the slats at the columns of troops.

  Suddenly Virginie exclaimed, “How handsome they are!”

  Her father, who never raised a hand to his children, unthinkingly slapped her face. “Handsome? They are the Angels of Death.”

  At dinner that evening, my mother said, “You have no consideration for anyone else. How do you think we felt when we realized you were gone?”

  My brother said, “We only went two blocks, to the Kacherians’.”

  “Only two blocks? You could go two steps at a time like this and have disaster fall on you,” my mother said. “I know you think you are a grown man because you have a few wisps to shave, but let me remind you that you are sixteen years old, and your sister is even younger.”

  My brother rolled his eyes.

  “And it’s done?” Auntie Shakeh asked.

  “Not a shot fired,” my father answered. “Paris is an open city. I couldn’t see the Germans from the shop, but I heard the boots. That’s a sound you will never forget.”

  And the sound of those boots reverberated in my head for months and then for years, and sometimes even still. This is the story of how we lived the war, and how I found my husband.

  2

  WHEN WE RETURNED TO school that autumn, there were portraits of Maréchal Pétain hanging in all the classrooms. He was promoted as a French war hero, but you could sense the strings of the German puppet masters behind his uniformed shoulders. There was a new uneasiness circulating in the halls and classrooms. But our teachers, their eyes ringed with sadness, strove for normalcy. We girls soon settled into the routine of our studies.

  In early November, as my brother and I paused on the landing outside our apartment, he thrust a slip of paper into my hand. It said The Boches will not honor the 11th of November; meet at 6 p.m. at the Arc de Triomphe.

  “Are you going?” I asked.

  “Zaven too,” he whispered.

  “Then Jacqueline and I will go,” I whispered back. “Will you say anything?”

  “Are you crazy? And not a word from you either.”

  I tucked the paper into a notebook inside my school satchel.

  “I know how you like to tell your mother everything,” he added in a low voice. “But you’re not six years old anymore.”

  As our father’s heavy tread started on the stairs below, my brother opened the door to the apartment.

  “We’re here,” Missak called, switching from French to Armenian.

  We dropped our school bags, hung our coats on wooden pegs by the front door, and changed our shoes for slippers.

  Our mother swept past wearing an apron and carrying a towel-wrapped pot. “Your father should be here any minute now.”

  My father arrived and announced, “To the table. I could cleave a spit-roasted lamb and eat the whole thing myself.”

  Missak said, “I could eat a lamb, a pig, a small cow, and wash it down with a liter of milk . . .”

  “Azniv, this boy isn’t getting enough food,” my father said.

  “No one is. That poor Jewish baby across the way is this thin.” My aunt held up her pinkie finger in demonstration.

  We sat down to supper in the cramped front room that served as dining room, parlor, and workroom, as well as Missak’s bedroom. Around the wooden table, which had leaves that folded down so it took up less space between meals, were arranged three straight-backed chairs and two stools. Covering the uneven floorboards was an Oriental carpet that had once been claret-colored. The two windows that looked out over the street were dressed with heavy blackout curtains.

  My mother spooned food onto the plates. “All I have left are bulgur, a liter of oil, and the spices. Thank God for the Nazarians’ onions . . .”

  Our dinner conversations now revolved around food: how hard it was to get it, the long lines at the shops, the often-empty shelves, and schemes of how to find more and different things to eat. Missak had used his slingshot in the Buttes Chaumont to bring down a few ducks, but with the arrival of cold weather, the game birds had disappeared. Our father sometimes bartered his services for food, but not often enough to make much of an improvement in the daily ration. Earlier in the season, I had bicycled to Alfortville a few times to see the Nazarians, my mother’s cousins, who grew vegetables in their backyard. Before I headed home, I loaded the bicycle’s basket with shoes that needed repair, and I attached to the back fender a box filled with tomatoes, peppers, onions, and fresh mint. But we ate mostly what we could purchase with our ration cards: tasteless items such as rutabagas that were customarily fed to barnyard animals, ersatz coffee made from chicory, and a sticky mess concocted from wine-press grapes that was optimistically called jam.

  In addition to long conversations about food or its lack, dinner featured my father’s nightly diatribe against the maréchal, whom he referred to as “that lying goat.”

  “It isn’t enough that the Germans are stealing our wine and chocolate—people can live without wine and chocolate, but now”—here he slammed his hand on the table—“that lying goat is letting them make off with our wheat and potatoes.”

  My mother pleaded, “Be careful, you’re going to knock over the glasses. And not so loud.”

  “You don’t think the Lipskis agree with me?” he shouted.

  After the dishes were done, I sat at the table with my books in a stack beside me. Across the table, Missak scratched on his sketchpad with a pencil. In another corner of the room, my mother worked the foot pedal of the sewing machine, and its arm stuttered up and down, thrusting the needle in and out of the fabric. Auntie Shakeh’s metal knitting needles ticked against each other as a sweater grew from a fat, round ball of wool. The volume on my father’s radio was turned so low that he had to lean forward in his armchair to catch the words that were an indistinguishable murmur a few feet away.

  I pulled out the slip of paper Missak had passed to me.

  Missak slid another scrap across the table to me: Get rid of that paper. And if there’s trouble on Monday, go to the cathedral.

  At bedtime that night, my mother, aunt, and I were in the room that I shared with Aunt Shakeh. All three of us wore the white flannel nightgowns that my mother had sewn. My mother had let her long hair down from its tight bun, and it made a dark cascade on the back of the white gown. No matter how many times I saw my mother’s loose hair at night, there was always something shocking about it, as though my prim mother had turned into another woman. But her oval face remained domestic and familiar.

  My mother took a seat behind me on the bed and started to brush out my long, heavy hair.

  “Did the teacher give back the math exam?” my mother asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Top of the class?”

  I said, “Denise Rozenbaum was number one.”

  “Next time.”

  “This year I haven’t bested her once. I need to study harder.”

  My mother paused the brush. “You work hard enough already, my smart girl.”

  Auntie Shakeh, who was sitting on the other bed, added, “Our girl is smart, and she’s beautiful.”

  A snake of guilt lay coiled behind my ribs. They both thought I was their good, smart, beautiful, nice Armenian girl. However, not only was I jealous of Denise Rozenbaum, who was my best school friend, but I was hiding from them our plans to attend a student rally. I was becoming the char aghchig, the bad girl my mother had always warned me about.

  At the breakfast table Monday, my father said, “I’d like
you two to come by the shop this evening so I can measure you. Vahan Kacherian gave me some leather from his workshop, a little more than enough to make you boots, I think, unless your feet have doubled in size.”

  “Eh, Babig, today is no good,” Missak said. “Tomorrow could work. Or Thursday I’ll be at the shop anyways.”

  “And you?” my father asked me.

  “Me?” I responded.

  “Yes, you. Can you come by the shop after school?”

  “Babig, she’s going with me to the library,” my brother deftly lied. “We’ll come by tomorrow.”

  As she poured mint tea into my cup, my mother remarked, “You’re being quiet this morning, anoushig. Are you okay?”

  Missak eyed me in warning.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “Are you sure you aren’t coming down with something?” My mother put a wrist to my forehead and peered into my eyes.

  I lifted the cup of tea, turning from her gaze. “I’m okay. I’m just tired.” I was relieved and saddened that she believed me.

  That afternoon when I exited the wooden portals of the lycée, Jacqueline was waiting across the street. I noticed that her wrists were sticking out of the sleeves of last year’s winter coat. Jacqueline Sahadian was the eldest of five children. Their father was a manual laborer, their mother took in laundry, and there had rarely been an extra franc, even before the war. Despite her too-small coat, Jacqueline looked stylish, with a royal blue tam at an angle on her dark, wavy hair, which she had cut to a fashionable chin length.

  “Beautiful hat.” I fell into step beside her as we headed toward the Métro.

  “I borrowed it from a girl in my typing class.”

  “My hat was the wrong color, so I brought this.” I pulled a thick length of red ribbon from my satchel. Pausing on the sidewalk, I took off my hat, slid the ribbon under my thick, black braid, and made a bow at the top of my head.