All the Light There Was Page 10

  “Like I’ve been walking around for months with a sack of bricks over my shoulder, and now that it’s gone, I might just float up to the clouds.” I shaded my eyes to look into the sky. “Except today there are no clouds. And it won’t really be over until the results are posted.”

  “You’re at the top of the class.”

  “Denise was always first. If she were still here, her name would be above mine on the list. I wonder where she is right now, and her parents, and Henri. And the Lipskis.”

  Zaven frowned. “This war is crap. And now with Barkev called up for the STO . . .”

  Barkev was scheduled to take a train from the Gare de l’Est; he was in the Germans’ new mandatory work program, the service du travail obligatoire, or the STO. All Frenchmen aged twenty to twenty-two were required to go to Germany. Exceptions were made only for those involved in agriculture and other essential industries, although the wealthy and the well connected would surely manage to find ways around it for their sons. Thankfully, Zaven and Missak were too young to be called up.

  “Barkev won’t go,” Zavig said flatly.

  “What will he do?” I asked.

  “Disappear. I’m thinking of doing the same.”

  I knew as soon as he said it that the decision had been made. The ground beneath my feet dropped away. “Where would you go?”

  “Out of the city. Or into hiding.”

  “You’ve been considering this for a while?”

  He rubbed his forehead. “Yes.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  He said, “It wouldn’t be for long. The Germans are losing. It’s only a matter of time.”

  “You and my father are optimists.”

  “You think Barkev should make guns for the Nazis?”

  “No. But that doesn’t mean you have to run off with him.”

  “It doesn’t feel like a choice,” he said.

  “I saw in the paper the other day—on the same page as the questions from this year’s bac—a message from the editor about the STO. His recommendation, of course, was to obey the call. According to him, murderous Communists run the Resistance. One day they will turn their arms against France as part of the international Communist revolution. It’s odd that they printed that. I would think they would worry it might put ideas into people’s heads.”

  He said nothing.

  I asked, “Are you going underground?”

  His silence was an answer.

  “You promise you won’t leave without saying goodbye?” I asked.

  “This is goodbye,” he said.

  I stiffened as he put his hand on top of mine.

  “What does your mother think?”

  “My parents agree that Barkev shouldn’t go to Germany. I haven’t told them about myself. I probably shouldn’t have told you, but how could I not tell my fiancée?”

  “I never said I would marry you.”

  “Yes you did!”

  “Well, if I did, I’m having second thoughts.”

  “Don’t be like that, Maro,” he said. “Don’t make it harder than it already is.”

  That night I couldn’t fall asleep. I lay twisting in my bed thinking about the terrible fates that might await Zaven and Barkev. Finally I sat up, turned on the lamp, and found my fountain pen. I didn’t want to use the cheap wartime paper that filled my notebooks. Thin and gray, it ripped easily under the nib, and the ink bled so that the letters blurred. I rifled through the cards and notes in my top drawer and plucked out an old sketch of me that Missak had made on sturdy drawing paper. On the back I wrote:

  Dear Zavig,

  Please forgive me for being so disagreeable. Please come back soon. I’m waiting for you.

  Maro

  Feeling a little foolish, I drew a heart with our initials in it at the bottom of the page, and I put the message into an envelope that I slid in the Kacherians’ letterbox the next morning.

  When Missak came home the next Sunday, I asked if he knew where Zaven and Barkev were.

  He answered, “They’re gone.”

  “Are they still in the city?”

  He shrugged.

  “I wish I could throttle all of you! Then I wouldn’t have to worry about the Germans doing it first.”

  “I have something I’ve been meaning to give you,” he said.

  I trailed behind my brother to the front room. He pulled out his sketchbook and opened it to the back, where there were several loose sheets. He sorted through them, selected one, and handed it to me.

  I looked down at the drawing Missak had made of Zaven and me at the kitchen table during the afternoon of the snowstorm. Zavig’s face was handsome and full of life. I remembered the details of that afternoon—the downy feathers falling from the sky, the troop of neighborhood friends, the snowball fight, and drops of red blood in the snow. It seemed a world away.

  “Remember how you both wanted the picture?” Missak asked. “You both blushed.”

  “We were so young,” I said.

  “You’re still young, sister. It’s just the war that’s old.”

  15

  THE REST OF THE SUMMER was like a dry crust of bread too hard and stale for a sparrow. I took up knitting for Auntie Shakeh’s old boss, sitting in the stuffy apartment making fine-gauge wool sweaters. My mother was in the same room running up vests on her sewing machine and doing the finishing by hand, still wrapped in wordless sadness. For the months that I had been focused on Zaven and exams, I had not felt the full weight of my mother’s gloom. Now that we worked in a shared space for hours each afternoon, it was almost crushing. If I asked a question, my mother would give a monosyllabic answer, and then the room would again fall silent except for the sound of the machine and the clicking of the needles. During the month of August, the front room felt like an airless tomb.

  One afternoon, I wanted to escape, so I told my mother I was going to see if my father needed any help. She nodded and turned back to her work.

  When I arrived at the shop, the front counter, where a jumbled pile of shoes had accumulated, was untended. My father was visible in the back at his workbench hammering at a heel. Paul Sahadian, Jacqueline’s fifteen-year-old brother who had started as an apprentice when school let out, was at the finisher polishing shoes.

  “Anything I can do to help?” I called over the whirring of the motor.

  My father paused in his work and pointed with the hammer toward the broom standing in the corner.

  I swept the floor in the front of the shop. There was no more talk here than there was at home with my mother, but at least it was alive with noise and industry. I worked my way to the back and, careful to stay out of the way of my father and Paul, swept up the sawdust, bits of wood, scraps of leather, and bent nails. Paul looked at me and grinned as he grabbed another pair of shoes to polish. He had grown tall and thin, but his ears were still like sugar-bowl handles.

  “So now you’re a cobbler?” I asked him.

  “I’m learning. He’s a good teacher,” he said, gesturing toward my father with his head.

  My father, who heard nothing, put down the hammer to run his thumb around a wooden heel, making sure the fit was tight. I glanced at my father’s hands, callused and stained with shoe polish in the fingers’ cracks and creases. It occurred to me that they were Armenian hands: whether repairing shoes, sewing, knitting, or drawing, our hands were deft and industrious. It was a national attribute. In Zaven’s case, his intelligent hands gave him an almost magical ability to repair any machine.

  It seemed that every stream of thought led back to Zaven. I wondered where he was and what he was doing in the shadowy world I could only half envision. How long would I have to wait for him? Would he be back before the holidays? The tide had turned against the Germans—my father was jubilant when the Americans invaded Sicily, and he was sure that in Kursk on the eastern front, the Soviets were poised to defeat the Germans. But it didn’t seem to me that the war was anywhere near its end. I was already dreading another frigi
d, starving winter, and the idea of facing it without Zaven made it even worse.

  When it was time to close the shop, Paul turned off the finisher. He and my father carefully wiped their hands with rags dampened with witch hazel. After they hung their aprons on hooks on the wall, my father switched off the lights. Standing on the sidewalk, I watched Paul use his full weight to drag the iron shutter down over the store window.

  “Tell Jacqueline I said hello,” I told him as he turned into his building.

  “You should come visit,” Paul said, smiling, his large ears turning red.

  “Maybe on Sunday,” I told him.

  “Good night, Maral. Good night, sir,” Paul said respectfully.

  As my father and I headed into the courtyard of our building, he said, “That boy is a hard worker. He’s not yet as skilled as your brother, but he’ll learn.”

  “It’s good of you to teach him,” I said.

  “It works out for everybody. Your brother didn’t want what I had to offer, and Paul is eager to learn,” he said. “I need the help. With new shoes so hard to come by, I’m putting patches on patches.”

  In September, food rations were decreased again. The grumbling on the food lines grew louder. The German potato bugs were stealing our food. The black-marketers were getting fat while the rest of us wasted away. When I arrived home from the store, my mother peered into the half-empty sack and shook her head.

  “Meghah! This was once the land of baguettes and butter. Now it’s the land of turnips,” she said.

  “The Germans are trying to starve us into submission,” my father responded. “But they forget the French Revolution was started over loaves of bread. An eating dog is silent, but a hungry dog bares its teeth.”

  Our family continued to scrape by, our official tickets supplemented by the ones Missak brought home from time to time. Through the autumn, the windowsill garden, the plot in the courtyard, and my mother’s bartering skills added to our meager fare. Still, I often went to bed hungry, glad to forget my gnawing stomach in sleep.

  But when I slept, my dreams were a theater of yearning, and Zaven was the elusive star in each scene. I would catch a glimpse of him as he disappeared into the gloom of a dark alley. I would run after him, but he was always around the next corner and just out of reach. I would wake with my heart pounding as though I had been chased up the hill by a pack of dogs. Then I’d lie in bed and catalog all the catastrophes that might have befallen him.

  Over the objections of my mother, one Sunday I rode alone to Alfortville on the old bicycle. I was even more careful about the potholes, because at this point the bicycle’s fender was held together with bits of twisted wire, and the tires were balding. Since the last time I had visited, the Nazarians had expanded their backyard chicken coop, and now it took up half their garden. Their thriving poultry business kept them well fed, and Cousin Karnig, almost discomfited, said that he was making a better living now than he had as a carpenter before the war. I arrived home with a chicken—not a live one, but one ready to go straight into the pot—and a dozen freshly laid brown speckled eggs.

  “Thanks to Cousin Karnig, king of the henhouse,” my father said at dinner.

  “Thank God,” my mother said as she passed around the bowls of thick soup. “These children are looking like scarecrows.”

  “We’re not children anymore,” Missak corrected her. “And we have more to eat than a lot of other people.”

  “Thank you, Grandfather,” I said.

  That evening, feeling lonely for Zaven, I unraveled a gray throw blanket Auntie Shakeh had made and used the yarn to begin a V-neck sweater for him. The knitting became a ritual for ensuring his safety. Each stitch was a prayer; each hour we had spent together was a bead on a string of remembrance. I didn’t ask myself how I would manage to get the sweater to him once it was finished.

  In October, school started, and I donned my smock for the final year at Victor Hugo. The animated faces of my classmates, the crowded corridors, and the heavy books in my satchel were a relief after my lonely summer. In the middle of the morning, we all lined up to get our government-issued vitamin biscuits. I tried not to gag as the biscuit turned into a grainy paste in my mouth. At least it helped quiet my stomach until lunch.

  In English class we were reading Jane Eyre, and I escaped into its dramatic landscape. I sighed over the book’s dark and difficult hero. Against all logic, Rochester reminded me of Zaven, but then, everything reminded me of him.

  One afternoon in early November as I rounded the corner toward home, Zaven fell into step beside me.

  I gasped. “What are you doing here?”

  “Don’t make a fuss.” He slipped his arm through mine. “Let’s go.”

  “Where?” I asked. “How long can you stay?”

  “For a walk.” He put his face into my hair. “You smell good.”

  “Not here,” I told him, looking over my shoulder. “The school monitor is on patrol.”

  He laughed. “You’re worried about the school monitor.”

  I glanced around again. “Is someone following you?”

  “No,” he said. “It’s okay.”

  He led me toward the place de la République, but we skirted the square where German troops were garrisoned, taking back streets instead.

  I said, “I’m so happy to see you. I want to ask you a million questions . . .”

  “Don’t ask me a million questions,” he said.

  “Are you going to visit your parents?”

  “So you’re going to ask anyway? I’m not going to visit my parents. Have you seen them?”

  “Your father finished the shoes he was making for me and I went to pick them up.”

  He glanced down at my feet.

  “They’re too nice to wear every day,” I told him. “I wore them on Sunday when I went to church with your mother.”

  “You went to church with my mother? That’s new. What for?”

  “She goes to pray for you and Barkev. I went to light a candle for Auntie Shakeh.”

  “You’re not getting religious, are you?”

  “Don’t worry, you godless Communist.”

  “I’m more of an agnostic.”

  “Oh, Zaven, I’ve missed you so much.”

  “Four months is a long time.”

  “You look thin,” I said.

  He shrugged.

  “We’re not far from our house. Can I get you something to eat?”

  “Can’t risk it,” he answered.

  “Let me go and bring something back.”

  “I have only a short time and I want to spend it all with you. I have a proposal.”

  “Yes?”

  “There’s an apartment nearby. If you want, we could go there.”

  Even though he didn’t put it into words, I knew what he was asking. I paused for a moment to consider.

  He said, “Don’t worry. If you don’t want to . . .”

  “Let’s go.” I took his hand. My mother, my father, my teachers, my dead aunt, even Jane Eyre—none of them would have approved, but I didn’t care.

  We weaved our way through narrow streets that were unfamiliar to me but that he navigated easily. The wind picked up, rustling the last of autumn’s leaves on the sidewalks and in the gutters. I noticed the way his eyes inspected the street as we rounded each corner, and how he checked behind to make sure no one was trailing us. We entered a modest building on a small side street and took the back staircase to the top floor. Zaven felt around above the door frame and lifted a piece of wood to retrieve a key.

  It was a small room, furnished with washbasin, a narrow bed, a table, and a single wooden chair. The white walls were bare, and there was no rug on the red-tiled floor. The casement window gave out onto the roof, and cold white light cut like a knife across the facing rooftops.

  He pointed out the location’s advantages. “There are two staircases. The roof is connected to the one on that building, which also has a front and a back entrance.”

/>   “That’s good to know.”

  “The electricity is off.” He dragged the blackout curtains across the window and then struck a match in the dark to light a candle. Its flame flickered in a draft that stirred the curtain.

  Zaven sat down on the bed and I sat beside him on the scratchy wool blanket, leaving a little space between us. He slid closer.

  “This is okay?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “You know, if you don’t want to be here, we can leave,” he said.

  I shook my head.

  “Do you have any yarn with you?” he asked.

  It seemed like an odd request. “In my satchel, I have a piece I’m working. There’s some in there.”

  “Can I have it?” he asked.

  I opened my bag and pulled out the ball. “How long?”

  With his pocketknife he cut two red strands. After handing back the ball and putting away the blade, he faced me holding up the yarn.

  “Will you marry me?” he asked.

  “I will,” I said.

  “Give me your left hand.” He took one piece of yarn, wound it around my ring finger twice, and carefully made a small bow. “You are now my wife.”

  He handed me the other piece of yarn, and I tied it around his ring finger.

  “You say it,” he instructed.

  “You are now my husband.”

  He leaned to blow out the flame, and the room went black.

  No one had ever talked with me about what to expect or what to do. That was the way it was for us then. Armenian modesty and shame—the word for it was amot—shrouded these things in silence. And while I never spoke of that afternoon, in my heart I never was ashamed.

  By the time we stepped out onto the street, night had fallen, and moonlight angled between the buildings. Zaven insisted on accompanying me partway home. We walked in silence until we reached the edge of our neighborhood.

  I asked, “Will you let me bring you something to eat?”

  “I’ll wait at the park. But you have to be quick. And you can’t say a word.”