All the Light There Was Page 5

  My aunt wasn’t the only one in the family who was suffering. Takouhi was looking skinny and bedraggled as well. Her feathers were falling out in clumps. She had stopped laying eggs. I didn’t know anything about chickens and suspected that she was ill with a disease particular to barnyard fowl. One day I took her down to the courtyard for fresh air and a change of scenery, but the weather had turned cold, so we soon retreated to the apartment.

  After two weeks with no eggs, Missak began to lobby for chicken soup.

  “That bird is on her way out, Maral. Anyone can see that. Why let good chicken meat go to waste?”

  “You ingrate. That bird has given this family about a hundred eggs we wouldn’t otherwise have had,” I said.

  “Well, if you’re counting, she hasn’t laid one in fifteen days,” Missak pointed out.

  “The boy makes some sense,” my father interjected. “And this is the perfect weather for chicken soup.”

  “I have two onions left. You know what they say. Eat lamb in the spring and chicken in the fall,” my mother said.

  I wasn’t surprised that my father had sided with my brother, but I knew that without my mother’s support, poor Takouhi would soon be in the pot.

  I argued, “We didn’t have lamb in the spring, so why should we have chicken in the fall?”

  Missak replied, “Because we’re hungry, that’s why.”

  “You think one meal of chicken soup is going to fix that?” I asked. “What if she starts laying eggs again?”

  “What are we going to do with that bird in this freezing apartment all winter, Maral? The poor thing will be shivering in the corner, all her feathers fallen out, getting skinnier by the day so in the end there won’t be an ounce of meat on her bones,” my mother reasoned.

  “She can sleep in my bed,” I said.

  “You are not taking a filthy bird into your bed,” my mother said.

  “It sounds like we know the menu for tomorrow’s dinner,” my father concluded.

  Aunt Shakeh stared at me dolefully. I looked down at Takouhi, who was pecking at the rug under the table. She cocked her head and peered up at me with one eye.

  When I arrived home from school the next evening, I smelled chicken soup. My mouth watered despite my resolve, and I took the bowl my mother offered me. But when I dipped the spoon in and pulled up a half-formed egg, I dropped it in disgust.

  “If only we had waited two more days.” I jumped up from the table and ran out of the room.

  “Maral,” my father called after me. “Come back here. Your mother worked hard to clean that chicken and make this soup.”

  “I’m not hungry,” I shouted, and slammed the bedroom door behind me.

  The following evening, Missak placed a set of forged ration tickets on the table. My parents exchanged tense glances but asked no questions. My father laid our authentic tickets on the table alongside the fake ones.

  After scrutinizing them carefully, he announced, “They look the same to me.”

  “Of course they do,” Missak said. “The only way you could see any difference is with a magnifying glass, and even then you’d have to know what you were looking for.”

  “Bread is expensive, and death is cheap,” my father said.

  “I wouldn’t dare use them,” my mother said.

  “Maral will go,” said Missak. “Right?”

  I pretended more courage than I felt. “It’s my turn to do the shopping.”

  “Oh, sweetie, I don’t like the idea. What if you get caught?” my mother asked.

  “She won’t get caught,” Missak said.

  The next day I walked quickly up the hill away from our immediate neighborhood. I had not considered going to Donabedian’s Market; I headed to shops where my face was unknown. I wouldn’t do all the shopping in one place—I planned to go to several different stores for our supplies. If we had been less hungry, Missak wouldn’t have brought home fake tickets, and my father would never have allowed me to use them. I stood in the first line, trembling from the cold and shifting from foot to foot.

  When I reached the counter, I fought an impulse to bow my head and lower my eyes, forcing myself to look up at the grocer’s long, graying mustache and smile.

  After I walked out of the shop with a sack full of apples, I exhaled hard. It was a little easier in the next shop, and easier still in the third. When my basket was full, I crossed the threshold of the last shop, stepped onto the street, and sped down the hill toward home as though the Devil himself were trying to step on the backs of my shoes.

  “Thank God,” Auntie Shakeh cried as I walked in the front door.

  My brother took the heavy basket and carried it to the kitchen.

  “Was there any trouble?” My mother followed behind me.

  “No one noticed a thing,” I said.

  “I told you,” Missak said.

  As my mother unpacked the basket, she started to laugh.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked.

  My mother shook her head and smiled. “It was silly of me, but I thought because we had black-market tickets, there would be black-market food. I imagined butter and meat, isn’t that crazy? But it’s the same root vegetables . . .”

  “Only more of them,” Missak said tersely.

  8

  “LIKE CARTHAGE, ENGLAND WILL be destroyed.” The radio commentator made the same pronouncement at the end of each of his nightly broadcasts. I braced myself for my father’s reaction—he snapped off the radio and shouted, “That fool will be the first one shot as a traitor when this cursed war is over.”

  My mother said, “Not so loud. If he bothers you so much, why do you listen?”

  “Don’t you think I’d rather hear ‘This is the French speaking to the French’? But the Germans have the BBC so jammed I can’t make out anything they’re saying,” my father replied.

  “We could just keep the radio turned off. After all, Maral is trying to do her homework.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” I said.

  My mother said, “Between that man’s foolishness and your father’s bellowing, I don’t know how you can work.”

  My father snorted. “Speaking of fools, where is that son of yours?”

  My mother answered, “He’s out with Zaven. I think they went to the cinema. They should be back soon.”

  I glanced up from my book and smoothed my eyebrows with the tips of my fingers. The mention of Zaven made me worry about my appearance. I had developed an unfortunate habit of pulling at my brows when I studied. I went to the bedroom to check in the mirror that I hadn’t plucked out half an eyebrow without realizing.

  I took a moment to straighten my sweater, and then I picked up my brush from the top of the dresser. I was sure my hair would wave nicely if it was cut to chin length, the way all the other girls wore theirs, but because my mother disapproved, I was stuck with hair that fell to my waist. I turned sideways to the mirror to examine the part of my figure I could see without climbing onto the bed.

  “Are you expecting company?” my aunt asked.

  I jumped. “Auntie, you scared me.”

  “I didn’t mean to scare you, yavrum. I thought you knew I was here. I’m not feeling well, so I came to knit in bed.”

  I heard voices in the front hall.

  “Missak is home,” observed Auntie Shakeh. “And is that Zaven with him?”

  “It sounds like it.”

  “Will you make my excuses, honey? I’m too tired to say hello. Can I ask you a favor? Would you get me an extra blanket? It’s not even so cold outside, but there’s a chill in my bones.”

  I pulled a wool blanket from the dresser’s bottom drawer, spread it over the bed, and tucked it around my aunt.

  “Is that good, Auntie?”

  “Is there maybe another one?”

  I looked in the drawers of the bureau and found a large woolen shawl, which I held up. “How about this?”

  “That’s good.”

  “I hope this keeps you warm.” I l
aid the shawl on top of the blankets.

  “Thank you, yavrum. I’m going to sleep now.”

  “Good night, Auntie,” I said, leaving and closing the bedroom door behind me.

  I went into the front room, where my brother was sitting at the table with his sketchpad.

  “Where’s Zaven?” I asked.

  “He stopped in to say hello. We thought you had gone to bed.”

  I suppressed a sigh. “No, I still have more work to do.”

  For a few minutes, the marks on the page of my math notebook were stick figures gesturing at me with tiny raised fists.

  It had been three weeks since I had seen Zaven. He and I hardly ever crossed paths, and when we did, my brother, if not a whole crowd, was always there too. The few times I’d noticed him looking at me, I had felt too shy to meet his gaze. Once, I was briefly alone with him in the courtyard while he was waiting for Missak, and we had stood in excruciating silence. Or at least I was uncomfortable; maybe he was just distracted.

  I wanted to blame my awkwardness on my parents’ Old World ways, but Jacqueline’s parents were much like mine, and she had boys and even men trailing behind her. Some of the older lycée girls met their boyfriends after school around the corner and out of sight of the street monitors. I noted with envy the effortless way couples laughed and chatted together at café tables and sat with their arms around each other on park benches. One afternoon when Denise and I were heading home, I saw a girl in the class ahead of ours kissing a German soldier full on the mouth. They were half hidden behind a tree in a small, fenced garden not far from school, but it wasn’t as private a spot as she assumed. I stopped, unable to tear my eyes away, and when Denise tapped my arm to get my attention, my face burned with shame.

  Now I glanced back at the notebook on the table before me. The numerals were legible again, and I worked for another hour before going to bed.

  In the middle of the night, the sounds of distant blasts and the drone of airplanes overhead awakened me. Air raids near Paris had started a few months earlier, and outings to the designated shelter had become part of our routine. That night, pilots of the Royal Air Force were dropping bombs somewhere on the outskirts of the city. The air-raid sirens had failed to give advance warning, so we stayed in our apartment, standing by the windows with the lights out and the curtains opened. We listened to the explosions and watched far-off flashes above the building across the way. Giving up on getting any sleep, we closed the curtains, turned on the lights, and took our usual places in the front room. I distractedly flipped through an old movie magazine Jacqueline had loaned me.

  Auntie Shakeh, tightly wrapped in the shawl, rocked from side to side in her chair. “Lord have mercy,” she whispered, closing her eyes.

  Missak jumped up from where he was perched on the side of his bed. “I can’t stand it anymore. You can probably see the whole thing from the park. I’m sure Zaven and Barkev are already there.”

  “What kind of an onion head are you?” my mother asked.

  “They’ve been dropping bombs for over an hour; they’re all in the same place, and it’s miles from here,” Missak said.

  My father said, “I think it’s Boulogne. The English must be hitting the Renault factory.”

  “Can I go?” Missak asked.

  “I’ll come with you,” my father said.

  They hurried to the front hall and took their coats from the hooks.

  “What about me?” I leaped from my chair.

  My mother said, “Maral Pegorian, you are not leaving this apartment. If your father and brother are crazy enough to think there is some kind of show to watch, I won’t stop them. But my daughter is not going into the street at this hour of the night while bombs are falling. And what about the curfew?”

  Missak said, “The Germans almost never come this far out, and who would be patrolling during a bombing raid?”

  “Good point, my boy,” my father said.

  My mother threw up her hands. “Impossible.”

  After they left, I sat back down near my mother, who began sewing buttons on one of the vests she had run up earlier on the machine. She stabbed the needle through the cloth as though it were an enemy. My aunt picked up her knitting needles, and the sound of them competed with the clock that noisily ticked the minutes. Was this to be my lot? Stuck in an apartment knitting or sewing or cooking while waiting for the men to come back from some adventure? It made me want to take the kitchen plates and throw them out the window just to hear them smash into a thousand pieces on the cobblestones below.

  I sighed heavily.

  My mother said, “Why should you want to be out there watching bombs fall? It’s not like fireworks, you know.”

  “Maybe because it’s more interesting than sitting like a hen in a coop.”

  “You think war is interesting? I saw a war once and there was nothing interesting about it. Better a hen in a coop than a bloody pile of feathers by the side of the road.” My mother drew her eyebrows together and pressed her lips thin, jabbing the needle through the hole of a button.

  Auntie Shakeh said, “May the good Lord watch over us and protect us from ever seeing such things again.”

  It was strange that I knew so little about what they had gone through, especially as it seemed to loom like a vast, amorphous shadow over our lives. My mother and my aunt referred vaguely and ominously to what they called the Massacres or the Deportations. If I asked a question about that period in the Old Country, my mother would say darkly, “It’s better not to talk about those times.” Auntie Shakeh would go pale and invoke God. So after a while, I stopped asking, and it was all I could do to keep from rolling my eyes when they made their dire, cryptic references.

  My father and brother returned a half an hour later, saying they hadn’t seen anything but bright flashes along the skyline. But the Kacherians had been there, as well as other neighbors. Once the British planes had flown off, people dispersed.

  “No one complained about the English going after Renault,” my father said.

  Missak laughed. “You might even say they were happy.”

  My mother said, “I promise you, the people of Boulogne are not happy tonight. And all I’m feeling is exhausted.”

  The night was almost over as we wearily returned to our beds.

  I lay in the dark listening to the soft wheezing of my aunt, who had fallen asleep immediately. I was unhappy because I had missed seeing Zaven twice in one night. I wished it didn’t matter so much to me, but there were so few chances for romance in my life, and I had pegged my heart on this particular boy.

  When finally I fell asleep, I dreamed that I was walking along the lake in the Buttes Chaumont. Zaven strolled beside me. It was a beautiful afternoon, the skies clear and the trees adorned with flowers. He slipped his arm through mine as though we had walked like this a thousand times, and he smiled into my eyes. My heart beat its feathered wings. I looked down at our feet. There were ducks and swans lying at the edge of the water. They were lifeless, their necks twisted at awful angles, their eyes staring up without seeing. Shuddering, I hid my face against Zavig’s shoulder.

  9

  I STOOD ON THE STOOL in my bedroom while my mother pinned the hem of a new dress. The fabric was ruby taffeta, and my mother had managed to hide the discolored folds in such a way that no one would guess the dress was made from a pair of flea-market curtains.

  “Hold still,” my mother mumbled through a mouthful of pins. “If you keep moving, it’s going to be crooked.”

  I glanced at myself in the mirror. The dress had three-quarter-length sleeves, a tight bodice, and a full skirt that made my waist look tiny. I wished that I had someplace special to go, and someone to take me there.

  “Done,” my mother said. “Give it to me so I can hem it.”

  “Can I wear it to Sunday dinner at the Kacherians’, or do you think it’s too fancy?” I undid the buttons and pulled off the dress.

  My mother draped the dress over her arm. “You
can wear this to church, to Sunday dinner . . . Speaking of Sunday dinner, I promised Shushan that your aunt and I would help her make manti on Saturday. So we might not be here when you get home from school.”

  “Manti?” I could almost smell the meat dumplings swimming in broth. “She can get lamb?”

  “Chicken, but you’ll hardly be able to tell the difference,” my mother said. “In times like these, you make do. In the Old Country, no one ever made manti alone. The whole neighborhood gathered, and we each brought a rolling pin. You didn’t have to sit alone in your kitchen and do it all by yourself. You should have seen the times when they made phyllo dough for paklava. My mother could roll it out so it was thinner than a sheet of paper.”

  Saturday was my sixteenth birthday, but there was no cake that evening at supper. My gifts were the dress from my mother, a pair of leather-soled black pumps from my father, and a hand-knit summer sweater from Auntie Shakeh.

  “Babig, where did you get the leather?” I asked my father.

  “From Vahan. No wooden soles on my daughter’s birthday shoes.”

  The last and best gift was a bar of lavender soap that Missak gave me.

  I held the smooth bar cupped in my hands and put it to my nose, breathing in. “It smells beautiful. Where did you manage to find it?”

  My brother just smiled.

  On Sunday morning after the breakfast dishes were done, I barricaded myself in the kitchen and boiled water for a bath in the large zinc tub we kept under the sink. Using the soap, I lathered my hair and then, with a rough washcloth, scrubbed my skin until it was pink. Wrapped in a towel, I rinsed my hair under the cold tap so that it would shine.

  I spent the rest of the morning sequestered in the bedroom. First I filed my fingernails, and then, using a pair of tweezers, I carefully shaped my eyebrows, making them narrow and sleek. I studied my face in the mirror, smiling and pouting and frowning, then sticking out my tongue at my vanity.