All the Light There Was Page 3

  Alice Sahadian was shivering in her thin coat. The snow had stopped falling, and as the skies darkened, the air grew colder by the minute. It was time for us to go home.

  When I think back to that afternoon, I see us as though we are in a group photograph. It’s black-and-white; not posed, but a moment suspended in time. My friends are clustered around me, concern etched on their features. With a black pen, someone has drawn circles around the faces of those whom we were soon to lose.

  4

  OUR NEIGHBORS THE LIPSKIS, who were Yiddish-speaking Jews from Poland, lived in the apartment across the landing. The father worked in a tailor’s shop, and the mother did piecework at home so she could take care of their three-year-old daughter, Claire. Occasionally, I watched the little girl for a few hours while Madame Lipski did errands.

  On one such afternoon, Claire and I sat on the day bed in the parlor where Missak slept at night. Between us was a circular cookie tin filled with spare buttons that my mother had amassed over her years as a seamstress. Claire thrust her hands deep into the buttons, lifted two fistfuls, and let them slip through her fingers. The buttons rained back into the box.

  “Do you want to dump them out?” I asked.

  Claire turned over the tin, laughing as the buttons cascaded onto the bed. We spread them out to examine them more carefully. There were buttons with two holes and those with four, plus metal and leather shank buttons. The colors were varied: shiny gold, red, all shades of white and brown, and thin disks made from shimmering mother-of-pearl. I had spent hours playing with them when I was small, sitting on the carpet near my mother’s feet while she worked at the sewing machine.

  When Claire tired of the buttons, I suggested that we make a doll. We searched the ragbag in the kitchen and found an old white sock. She watched as I cut and sewed, then she helped me stuff the form with bits of cloth and fluffy cotton. Claire selected yellow yarn for hair and two pearly gray buttons for eyes. I stitched on a red mouth with embroidery floss and made a simple jumper from a scrap of calico.

  “Does this dolly resemble anyone you know?”

  “She looks like me,” Claire answered.

  “What are you going to call her?”

  “Her outside name is Charlotte. And her name for inside is Sheindeleh.”

  “Both of those are beautiful names,” I told her.

  I knew the system of double names. Inside I was Maral and outside Marie. Missak was Michel. Zaven was Stéphane. His brother, Barkev, was Bernard. And Jacqueline’s original name was Iskouhi, but no one called her that except for the priest who had baptized her, and her mother when she was in a fit of rage. We had two languages as well—Armenian in the house and French outside. My excellent grades, neatly ironed clothes, and well-polished shoes made me popular with the teachers, but my strange surname marked me as the child of foreigners, the stateless Armenians. I glanced at Claire, who sat playing with her doll. She was too young to be able to read the yellow signs on the park entrances saying FORBIDDEN TO JEWS.

  While Claire was absorbed with Charlotte, I cleared up the materials left from our work. I slid my hand under the day bed to search for stray buttons, a few of which I retrieved and dropped into the cookie tin. Then I reached under again and pulled out a small bundle wrapped in brown paper and tied with a bit of twine. Inside were two thick sticks of white chalk. I knew immediately what they were.

  As part of a campaign that was launched over the BBC and soon spread by word of mouth, Paris had been chalked with V for victory. The walls of Belleville were marked with Vs, and I had seen them also in the Marais, near my school.

  That evening, I had no chance to talk with my brother out of earshot of the family, so the next morning as Missak and I left our building, I said, “I found the chalk under your bed.”

  “There’s no chalk under my bed,” Missak answered.

  “So I suppose now it’s in your satchel.”

  “It’s not your business,” he snapped.

  When my brother used that tone of voice, I knew better than to badger him. Sometimes, if I held my tongue, he would offer things up on his own. So we walked a few paces in silence.

  “It’s nothing to worry about. We do it after dark, with one person to draw and one to stand watch,” he said.

  “You and Zaven?”

  He shrugged, and from the steely look on his face, I knew the conversation was over.

  We reached the corner of the rue de Belleville where Denise Rozenbaum was waiting. Denise and I attended a lycée in the Marais, and Missak and Zaven were students at a technical school in Belleville.

  “See you later,” Missak said jauntily as he headed toward Zaven’s building.

  Denise and I turned down the hill. We walked because the buses were no longer running, due to lack of gasoline, and the Métro was too expensive to take both ways.

  I ran my fingers under a row of Vs along the wall we were passing. I looked at Denise, who had been my classmate since we were six and with whom I had gone to lycée at the age of eleven. Both of us had scholarships that helped pay for the materials we needed and for lunch at the school canteen. We both loved the Lycée Victor Hugo for its notebooks, French dictations, and even the exams, at which we excelled. I enjoyed wearing the required hat and gloves and putting on the beige smock with my name and the name of the school embroidered on it. The smock kept anyone from knowing if the dress underneath was fashionable or not or if the same dress was worn several times in one week.

  The war had marred the closeness of our school community. One of the most unsettling aspects of the Occupation was the way it made you suspicious of your neighbor. How could you truly know where people’s loyalties lay? When we had returned to school that fall, the noticeable absence of Mademoiselle Lévy, the beloved Latin and Greek teacher who had been dismissed because she was a Jew, had upset us all, but our dismay had been muted. We found out after the war that Mademoiselle Lévy had joined the Resistance soon after leaving us and that eventually the Nazis had decapitated her with an ax in Germany.

  I was sure the Rozenbaums felt the way our family did about the Occupation, but even so, it was important to be careful about what one said.

  “Seems as though there are more of these each morning.” I gestured at the chalk marks on the wall.

  Denise took my arm, moving her head closer to mine. “I’ve been counting them while we walk. I’ve passed eighty-six so far. Better than the stupid posters the Boches plaster on all the walls. ‘Put your trust in the German soldier.’ Not even Pétain believed that one.”

  “What would you think if you found chalk hidden under your brother’s bed?”

  “Or if he came home with chalk dust on his jacket cuffs? There are thousands and maybe tens of thousands of these marks. That’s a lot of chalk.”

  I imagined an army of boys deployed in pairs, moving through the lightless streets and scrawling defiantly on walls in each neighborhood.

  “You know what I dream about?” Denise asked after we crossed the boulevard.

  “Chocolate?”

  “I do dream about chocolate, but no—I dream about writing traitor on each photograph of Pétain in the lycée.”

  “That would be an all-day job.”

  “Some of the teachers admire him, you know,” Denise said. “He has made of his person a gift to the nation, and so on and so forth.”

  “Some of them seem to admire German efficiency.”

  “It can’t be more than a few,” Denise answered.

  “And it’s not the concierge!”

  The concierge of our lycée, the only man in the building, had lost a leg in World War I. Since school had opened in September, he had been stomping around on his wooden leg, grumbling under his breath about the Boches.

  “Not him. But I wonder about Madame Bourdet,” Denise said.

  Madame Bourdet, our math teacher, had a razor for a tongue. No one talked out of turn or daydreamed in her class. She berated offenders in the most elegant French.

>   “Is it something she said?” I asked.

  Denise shook her head. “It’s just a feeling I have. I don’t think she likes Jews.”

  I said, “Oh, Denise. It’s not particular to Jews. She doesn’t like anyone.”

  One night a few weeks later, Missak was uncharacteristically late for dinner. My mother insisted on waiting, but after an hour my father ordered us to the table, where I stared down at my plate without appetite. Throughout the meal my aunt and my mother exchanged glances, and at the sound of footsteps on the landing, my mother flew from her chair to the door. It was only Mr. Lipski arriving home.

  My father threw down his fork. “I’ll go look for him.”

  He returned alone an hour later. “Zaven hasn’t seen him since they left school. Missak went off with a few other boys and Henri. I went to the Rozenbaums’, and Henri was home. He said he had left Missak and a boy named Marcel at the Parc de Belleville some hours ago. The park was empty. God only knows what mischief they’ve gotten themselves up to.”

  My mother slapped her forehead. “Mischief? This isn’t like when he was seven and brought home a stray goat.”

  At that moment there was a knock on the door, and we all rushed to the front hall. My father opened to find Missak and Officer Godin standing on the landing. My brother’s shoulders were slumped and he stared down at the floor, so it was difficult to read the expression on his face.

  “Good evening, Monsieur Pegorian,” the officer said. “This boy I believe belongs to you.”

  “Thank you so much, Officer Godin,” my father said. “Please come in.”

  “No, thank you. I’m here to drop him off. Some colleagues picked him and another boy up this evening. They were defacing the walls with antigovernment symbols. Fortunately, when I arrived I recognized him and saved him from a trip to La Santé, where people would have been much less understanding. We let the other boy go too. But I’m afraid you might not be so lucky next time, young man.”

  “Thank you, Officer,” my mother said. “It will never happen again. We are so sorry for the trouble he caused.”

  My father asked, “How can we show our gratitude?”

  Godin shrugged. “I do have a pair of shoes that could use new heels . . .”

  “Bring them,” my father said, “bring them all: your wife’s, your children’s. Your mother’s, and your neighbors’.”

  The officer smiled. “Generous offer, but I have in mind just one pair.”

  The minute the door shut behind Godin, my mother and aunt wept as though a great calamity had arrived rather than been narrowly averted. Their wailing exasperated my father, as did Missak’s monosyllabic responses to all questions. The main emotion that played across my brother’s face that night was irritation as my father harangued and my mother tearfully cajoled. It took me years to understand that anger was my brother’s primary defense against the guilt that flowed through our household like an open brook. My mother managed to extract from him a promise that he would never, ever write on the walls again. It might have been wiser for her to be less specific in her demands.

  5

  I PEDALED QUICKLY TO keep close behind my brother as he navigated his bicycle easily through the streets. German military vehicles and a few private cars passed us on the broad boulevards. We weaved through a crowd of bicycle taxis and other cyclists. Because replacement parts for bikes were so hard to come by, a flat tire would have been a disaster, and we took special care to avoid the potholes.

  Once we were outside the city’s limits, Missak picked up speed and I struggled to keep up. The skies were blue and cloudless. There were colorful flowers in the window boxes of the pale stucco houses that we passed. The short plane trees were bright with new green leaves.

  When we wheeled our bicycles up the drive and into the backyard at the Nazarians’ house in Alfortville, the two parents and their three teenage children were outside working in their garden. Karnig Nazarian was my mother’s distant cousin and the only other surviving member of the Nazarian clan from the Old Country town of Aghn. As the children of two orphans, Missak and I knew no grandparents; we had no uncles and no aunts, aside from Auntie Shakeh, so the Nazarians were our only other family.

  When Cousin Satenig saw us, she dried her hands on her apron and pulled my face in for a kiss. “What a surprise!”

  Cousin Karnig propped his rake against the fence, wiped his brow with a white handkerchief, and shook hands with Missak.

  “Maro,” sixteen-year-old Akabi exclaimed, “will you take my sandals to your father so he can fix them?”

  “It’s time for a break. Let me go make some tea.” Cousin Satenig hurried into the house.

  Karnig sat down on the bench. “Show your cousins,” he told his son, gesturing toward the garden.

  Vasken, who was thirteen and had a shadow above his upper lip that hadn’t been there the last time I’d seen him, gave us a walking tour of the garden: tomato plants covered with yellow flowers and a few green fruits, beans growing on a trellis, onions, carrot tops, lettuces, beds of mint and parsley, green peppers, cucumbers, and eggplants.

  I thought about the narrow window boxes my father had built for my mother; she was growing tomatoes and parsley on our sills. People in the city, unless they were rich enough for the black market or had relatives on farms in the countryside, ate so much worse than those who had a bit of earth to tend.

  Vasken pointed to a small wooden coop in a corner of the yard. “That’s where my father keeps his chickens.”

  “Chickens?” I asked. “Do you have eggs?” An egg was an almost unimaginable luxury.

  Cousin Karnig came up behind us. “We had the first two eggs this week. The pullets are going to start laying regularly any day now. I helped the Varjabedians build a new room on their house for their son and his bride, and they gave me some fertilized eggs.”

  Akabi said, “He paid more attention to those eggs than he ever has to us. If he weren’t afraid of crushing them, I think he would have sat on them himself.”

  “Go ahead and make fun of your father,” Karnig said. “But it’s thanks to me that every one of those eggs hatched. One will grow into a rooster and then we’ll have even more. Maybe I’ll give up carpentry and go into the chicken business.”

  Cousin Satenig carried out a tray of tea and cups that she placed on the wooden table. “Come sit down. No sugar today, but we have dried peaches. Oh, you’re admiring your cousin’s new business. How are we going to keep those birds alive come winter, Karnig? They’re going to freeze.”

  Karnig answered, “I’ll make a pen in a corner of the kitchen. They are my queens, and they can sleep in our bed if that’s what it takes.”

  An hour later, as Cousin Satenig, Akabi, and I were chatting while Missak loaded a box of vegetables onto the back of his bike, Cousin Karnig approached with a pullet under one arm.

  “This is for Maral.”

  He held the bird out to me. I took her gingerly in my arms, and the chicken cocked her head to the side and looked up at me with a beady eye.

  “What’s her name?” I asked.

  “This one is Takouhi. She laid the first egg.”

  “This is too generous. I can’t accept.” I tried to hand Takouhi back to him, but he put his palms up and shook his head.

  Cousin Satenig said, “Yes, you must. It’s your birthday gift.”

  “No, it’s really too much,” I insisted.

  “Don’t argue,” Karnig said.

  “But I can’t.”

  “Sweetheart,” Karnig said, “now you’ve said no three times and we’ve said yes three times, so it’s finished.”

  Missak used wire mesh to secure the chicken in the front basket of my bicycle.

  As Missak and I pedaled back to the city, I drew up alongside him and asked, “What do you think they’ll say when they see the chicken?”

  “The first thing out of Babig’s mouth will be ‘Is that chicken going to shit all over the floor?’” He pulled out ahead and grinned
at me over his shoulder.

  “I’ll bet he won’t say that at all!” I called, pedaling quickly behind him.

  We reached the rue de Belleville, dismounted, and pushed the bikes up the steep hill.

  Missak said, “Tonight I’m going to tell Babig that I’ve found a job.”

  “What? You aren’t going to work in the shop?” I asked.

  Missak was to graduate from technical school in July, and it had been assumed that he would take a place alongside my father at the cobbler’s bench.

  Missak said, “I’ve been working in the shop since I was six and I’ve had enough.”

  “I started when I was six too,” I said.

  “You swept the floor and lined up the finished shoes on the shelves. But nobody ever thought you were going to be a cobbler. You’re the scholar.”

  I winced at the tone he used for the word, as though it were at once a royal title and an insult. But he had been allowed to roam the neighborhood while I was confined to home, with my hair neatly plaited down my back, and my head bowed over my books. I was the one whose primary-school teacher had come to the apartment to speak with our parents. In preparation for the expected visit, my parents had put on their Sunday clothes and taken the dust cover off the sofa. My mother had served the teacher coffee and fresh paklava, and my father had seated her in his sacred armchair.

  I had sat quietly in the room while they talked about me over my head as though I were a piece of furniture. The teacher said, “The child is at the top of her class. It would be a waste if she didn’t continue. She must take the exam, and if she does as well as I expect, she will be admitted to a lycée for girls.”

  Later that night, after my aunt had fallen asleep, I tiptoed into the hall and stood listening outside my parents’ bedroom door.

  “If it were the boy, I could understand,” my father said.

  “But it’s not the boy. It’s your daughter.”

  “And what use is Latin going to be to her? No one speaks this language.”