All the Light There Was Read online

  “Let me fix that for you.” Jacqueline adjusted the ribbon so the bow was just above my left ear. “That’s better. But you really should cut your hair.”

  “Denise cut hers last week. I’m the only one in our class with long hair. My mother says a woman’s hair is her crowning glory. And so on and so forth.”

  “Is Denise coming?”

  “I didn’t ask her. She’s too scared for this kind of thing.”

  Jacqueline asked, “Are you scared?”

  “If my brother and Zaven are going to be there . . .”

  “Whatever the Left Shoe and the Right can do, the Right Glove and the Left can do,” Jacqueline answered.

  These were the nicknames my father had for the four of us. Jacqueline, who was my best friend, had been in and out of our apartment since her mother had first allowed her to cross the street. Missak and Zaven, who were inseparable, had ranged the neighborhood with a gang of local boys since they were old enough to tie their shoes.

  We went down the steps into the Métro, where the platform was thick with gray-green uniforms. When the train doors opened, people quickly pressed into the car. Jacqueline and I ended up seated between two German soldiers. I inched my foot away from a well-polished black boot on the floor. We sat in silence, staring at our laps, as the train rattled from one station to the next. I could see in my peripheral vision that the soldiers on either side of us were looking us up and down and winking at each other.

  Suddenly, the soldier next to Jacqueline leaned toward her and said with a heavy German accent, “S’il vous plaît, mademoiselle.”

  Jacqueline turned away from him, grimacing at me.

  I said in Armenian, “Pretend you don’t understand.”

  “S’il vous plaît, mademoiselle,” he repeated. After a brief pause he said it again. “S’il vous plaît, mademoiselle.”

  Jacqueline shook her head no and said to him in Armenian, “I don’t understand.”

  He tried once more. “S’il vous plaît, mademoiselle.”

  Jacqueline muttered to me in Armenian, “He sounds like a parrot.”

  “It’s probably the only sentence he knows in French. He tries it on all the French girls he sees. Let’s get off.”

  The train pulled into the station and when the doors slid open, Jacqueline and I bolted onto the platform. We hurtled up the stairs, not pausing until we reached the street.

  When I looked up at the Naval Ministry and the Hôtel de Crillon, I felt as though someone had knocked the wind out of me. The towering white facades were draped with scarlet banners scarred by black swastikas. The Germans rarely ventured into our neighborhood, and in the first months of the war, if you ignored the propaganda posters and the hunger, you could forget sometimes for a few hours that the city was occupied.

  We walked along the Champs Élysées, where most shopkeepers were in the process of rolling down their metal shutters in anticipation of trouble. We saw dozens of girls walking arm in arm by twos or threes, many of them dressed in one of the colors of the tricolor flag. French police patrolled the boulevard, warning groups of young men to disperse and go home. There were also clusters of gray-green uniforms sitting in cafés and strolling along the avenue as though they were on holiday.

  Jacqueline and I approached the Étoile and joined a stream of young people—thousands of lycée and university students—filing toward the Arc de Triomphe. A boy passing through the crowd with an armful of flowers wordlessly handed Jacqueline and me each a red carnation. Ahead of us, the monument dwarfed the tiny figures pausing to drop blooms at the foot of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

  Spying a group of German soldiers lined up on the far side of the Étoile, I told Jacqueline, “Let’s stay at the edge and go around to the other side.”

  It was the first time since the start of the Occupation that there had been such a gathering; public assemblies of any kind were forbidden. Jacqueline and I threaded through the crowd while more and more students poured into the Étoile, flocking toward the monument. I noticed that in our vicinity the boys outnumbered the girls by at least ten to one and that Jacqueline and I were among the youngest students there. I scanned the faces streaming past us, hoping to find my brother and Zaven, but I didn’t recognize anyone. More German soldiers arrived at the intersections of the broad boulevards leading to the circle, where they lined up in neat rows. As I surveyed the troops, I sensed that they were poised for action, merely awaiting the order. The tension rippling through their ranks seemed to me a warning, like the smell of ozone before a storm.

  “Jacqueline,” I said, “we should go to the cathedral.”

  She looked at me quizzically. “Now?”

  Just then, German military vehicles roared into the intersection, some of them rolling onto the sidewalks, forcing pedestrians to scatter. Soldiers leaped out of their trucks and were met by others who came trotting in formation toward the crowd. Shouts of “Les Boches!” rose up from all sides. Within seconds students were running pell-mell away from the Germans, jostling and shoving one another in the panic. Jacqueline and I were in a cluster that moved as though pushed by invisible hands. But we were headed in the wrong direction, away from, not toward, the Armenian cathedral. Someone shouted “Vive la France!” and soon the call echoed around the vast roundabout. Then I thought I heard gunfire.

  I grabbed Jacqueline by the hand, not wanting to lose her, and struggled mightily against the crowd that flowed around us. I pressed ahead until we made passage to a side street, where I paused to get my bearings.

  “That way,” I said, pointing toward the rue Vernet.

  As we started running, a boy raced by carrying two long fishing poles, one of which hit me in the head as he passed. When he turned to apologize, he bumped into Jacqueline, knocking her to the ground. I tripped over her legs, twisting my ankle as I fell, and landed beside her. The boy charged ahead, calling back over his shoulder, “So sorry!”

  Jacqueline leaned forward to examine her knees. “Do you know how long I saved to buy these stockings? They’re ruined.”

  “Oh, Jacqueline, there’s no time for that.” I stood up and pulled her to her feet.

  On my next step, I felt my ankle buckle a little, but ran on despite the pain. When we reached the courtyard of the Armenian cathedral on Jean-Goujon, we doubled over and panted for air.

  Jacqueline said, “My knees are skinned and my only pair of stockings are torn. Where are those stupid boys?”

  I sat heavily on the stone bench, wincing as I took the weight off my foot. My heart was pumping wildly in my chest. “I’m sure they’ll be here soon.”

  “What if they aren’t?” Jacqueline sat beside me on the bench.

  “They will.” I untied the ribbon in my hair with trembling hands.

  “What the hell was that boy doing with those fishing poles?”

  I found out later that they were a reference to General de Gaulle, the leader of the Free French movement, whose surname was a homophone for the French words meaning “two poles.”

  The courtyard was dark, the bench was cold, and my ankle throbbed. I had no wristwatch, and we may have been waiting only a few minutes, but it felt like hours. We could hear sirens wail in the distance. My gut was clenched like a fist. I chewed on the inside of my lip, imagining my brother and Zaven thrown into the back of an army truck with a dozen other students. In that moment it occurred to me for the first time, with all the wisdom of my fourteen years, that the Occupation might inflict more on us than inconvenience and hunger.

  Jacqueline shivered. “God, I’m freezing.”

  “Me too.” I turned up the collar on my coat.

  Just then I heard the sound of churning gravel as my brother and Zaven sped into the courtyard.

  Missak, puffing for air, spat angrily, “I shouldn’t have let you two come. We were in the middle of the crowd when they moved in and started grabbing people. We had to circle around to avoid getting nabbed ourselves.”

  Zaven said, “They must have
rounded up at least a couple hundred.”

  “Crap.” Missak turned and vomited into the bushes, then wiped his mouth on his sleeve.

  Zaven laughed. “Crap is right. We are up to our ears in their crap.”

  Jacqueline retorted, “I don’t know what you think is so funny, Zaven Kacherian.”

  “Let’s go,” I said. When I tried to stand, I groaned from the pain in my ankle and sank back to the bench.

  “What’s the matter with you?” my brother asked.

  “It’s my ankle. I tripped.”

  “Can you stand?” Zaven asked.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  Missak kicked the gravel and cursed under his breath. He knelt down to examine my ankle.

  I winced. “Not so hard.”

  He said, “It’s not broken. Do we have anything to bind it?”

  “Give me the ribbon.” Jacqueline wrapped it tightly around my ankle like a bandage.

  Zaven said, “Put one arm around my neck, and one around your brother’s.”

  We slowly made our way along the dark street. Zaven’s cheek was close to mine and I could feel the muscles in his shoulders shift under my arm. But I needed to focus on keeping the weight off my ankle. I feared that we might run into a German ambush around the next corner. There were echoing footfalls on the opposite sidewalk, but we couldn’t make out anything more than dark figures. Finally we filed down the Métro stairs at Alma-Marceau. The train was packed with soldiers dressed in gray-green wool uniforms with shining silver buttons, their guns in leather holsters. There were no seats available, so Jacqueline gestured at my bandaged ankle and said to one of the Boches, “S’il vous plaît, monsieur.”

  Two of them leaped to their feet, gratified to show us a courtesy. These polite, deferential young men or ones just like them had, less than an hour earlier, charged into a crowd of unarmed students with trucks and jeeps, brandishing loaded weapons. Jacqueline and I sat while Missak and Zaven stood rigidly over us, their faces hooded with anger. Finally, when we changed train lines for the last part of the trip to Belleville, there were no more soldiers. The knot of fear in my belly released while my ankle began to pulse with pain.

  We left Jacqueline at her building across the street from ours, and then Missak and I headed to our place, along with Zaven. When we reached the bottom stairs of our landing, where I could use the banister for support, Zaven said goodbye.

  As we started up the flight, Missak whispered, “Don’t tell them anything. I’ll explain. You tripped on the curb when we were on our way home.”

  “Do you think I’m a fool?”

  “You’re not stupid, but you can’t lie to save your life.”

  I put my hand on his arm. “Missak . . .”

  “What?”

  “I was afraid that you and Zavig had been arrested like all those others. What will happen to them?”

  “There’s nothing we can do. Come on, up the stairs.” He gestured for me to go ahead.

  When we entered the apartment, my mother and aunt were setting food on the table.

  “Let me guess,” Missak said in Armenian, sniffing the air. “Turnips?”

  My mother smiled grimly. “Turnips with—”

  He interrupted. “Turnips with bulgur.”

  I was awed that my brother could slip so easily into kitchen banter.

  My mother and aunt noticed my limp, and there followed a good fifteen minutes of agitated clucking while the two of them attended to the injury with cold, damp towels. Missak explained how it had happened, and my mother and aunt were impressed at our good fortune that Zaven was on hand to help us get home.

  We sat down at the table for dinner, my foot propped up on a stool, and I had a strange sensation as I listened to my father talk about the details of his day at work and heard my mother recount some bits of gossip reported by a neighbor while they were in line at the market. The words sounded as though they were coming from far away. I kept seeing the trucks rolling onto the sidewalk as students scattered in terror. We are up to our ears in their crap, Zaven had said. Crap, so much crap.

  “Maral, I asked you a question,” my mother said.

  “What did you say?”

  “Are you sure you’re not coming down with something? You just don’t seem like yourself these past few days.” My mother put her hand to my forehead.

  “I’m fine, Mairig, really. It’s just the ankle, and it was a long day at school,” I said. The second lie was easier than the first.

  3

  THERE WAS A SNOWSTORM that first winter of the Occupation that marked for me the last day of my childhood. I think it was a Sunday; it must have been, because my father was home, or perhaps he had decided not to open the shop because of the inclement weather. I drew back the curtain in the front room and stared out at the downy flakes dancing on currents of air. Swirls of white dust blew above the snowy sidewalk, and tall drifts were forming along the street. The snow had been falling for hours and showed no signs of stopping. A thick layer of down camouflaged the uneven cobblestones, the overflowing trash cans, and the propaganda posters.

  After lunch, Zaven came to our apartment. He joined Missak and me at the table, where I was working math problems and my brother was bent over his sketchpad. My father was in his armchair reading the paper, and Zaven’s presence inspired him to put down his newspaper for some verbal jousting.

  In those days, my father and Zaven enjoyed a running semi-joking dialogue that ranged over the political philosophies that had cast the continent into misery: fascism, Nazism, communism, and socialism, with a detour through the various warring Armenian political parties. My father and Zaven agreed on their antipathy for Hitler, but my father loathed the Soviet leader, whom he referred to as Stalin the Assassin, just as much. My father was fond of ribbing Zaven about the pact between Stalin and Hitler, which had posed a dilemma for the Communists of France, including Zaven’s father.

  I wasn’t following their banter, having heard it all before, but Zaven’s physical proximity, with his knee barely inches from mine under the table, was more interesting than the math problems. Meanwhile, Missak finished his sketch, tore it from the pad, and held it up.

  “Any takers?” he asked.

  It was a drawing of Zaven and me, and while I thought it was skillfully rendered, and a handsome likeness of Zaven, I was shy about asking for it right away.

  After a brief pause, Zaven said, “My mother might want that.”

  “I’ll take it,” I said.

  Missak scrutinized the picture anew. “No. I like this one. I think I’ll keep it.”

  By midafternoon, the wind had died down but the snow was still falling. Missak, Zaven, and I bundled into our winter clothes. As we raced out, my mother called after us, “Be careful that you don’t slip and break your necks! And be back before dark.”

  We crossed the street to Jacqueline’s building. Mrs. Sahadian, a small, stocky woman wearing a flowered apron over her gray coat, leaned out the door of their apartment and said in Armenian, “Your mothers let you out on a day like this?”

  “It’s beautiful outside, Auntie,” I answered. “Please tell Jacqueline we’re here.”

  Mrs. Sahadian asked, “You want to come in?”

  “No, thanks.” Missak pointed to the puddles forming around our boots.

  She withdrew into the apartment, shutting the door against the draft.

  Within minutes Jacqueline appeared with two of her younger siblings in tow: thirteen-year-old Paul, whose ears stuck out like handles on a sugar bowl, and twelve-year-old Alice, who was wearing a green wool hat that I had passed down to her. The three siblings had used twine to tie burlap over their school shoes.

  We stopped at the Kacherians’ to collect Barkev and Virginie, who was the shortest by more than a head. Next we gathered the three Meguerditchian brothers, the two Kostas girls, and Denise Rozenbaum and her older brother, Henri. Under gray skies and a curtain of thick-falling snow, we returned to the side street near our building.
I started rolling a snowball, and Jacqueline helped me push it when it got big. The other girls joined in, and soon we had three big snowballs that we stacked into a human form.

  I turned from our sculpture as Zaven raced by. He smiled as he scooped up some of the heavy snow and pressed it between his mittens into a fist-size ball. He pitched it at my brother, shouting, “Take that,” and hit his target square in the chest.

  Missak responded, “You dare attack me?” He launched a missile at Zaven, who turned to take it in the shoulder.

  Soon all the boys were pursuing one another up and down the block, the snowballs whizzing by, thudding against their marks.

  Henri Rozenbaum aimed at Missak. “That one is for you!” The ball flew wide and slammed into a wall.

  “You need glasses, Henri. This one is for the honor of France!” Zaven hurled a ball toward Henri.

  “Get out of the line of fire,” my brother warned me.

  I ducked too late. The snowball slammed into my nose like a hard, cold punch. When I looked down, there were bright red drops staining the snow at my feet. Suddenly I had a premonition that not all of these boys would survive the war. I was filled then with a sense of dread, as though the game the boys played was a rehearsal for things to come.

  Henri said, “Let me see.”

  I moved my sodden mittens away from my face, tasting blood as it trickled over my lips.

  Henri carefully touched my nose. “It’s not broken.”

  Barkev said, “You should tip your head back.”

  Missak pulled out his handkerchief to wipe my face and then he pinched the bridge of my nose.

  Zaven said, “Sorry. That wasn’t meant for you.”

  When the bleeding stopped, Barkev picked up a handful of snow. “Hold this to your nose. I know it’s cold, but it will keep the swelling down.”

  Henri commented, “That’s going to be pretty.”

  Jacqueline pushed her way past the boys. “Haven’t you done enough?”

  Virginie sidled up behind her. “Are you all right, Maral?”

  I glanced at tiny Virginie and saw that her lips had gone purple from the cold.