Dreams of Bread and Fire (10 page)

Ani had harbored the idea that when she left for college she could make herself into a new person. The house on Spruce Street with its fractured English and coupons clipped from the newspaper was far away. No one would know anything about her past except what she related. She didn’t have to mention that she was on financial aid. And in her freshman term she was lucky to be assigned to the hidden dish room in the dining hall where none of the other students—except other charity cases like herself and Elena—would see her in the beige polyester work shirt scraping garbage into the pit.

At the end of her first shift, Ani stopped into the basement lavatory near the gray locker room. As she sat in the stall two local women who worked the cafeteria food line entered the room. Ani caught a glimpse of them through the door crack.

Those goddamned stuck-up kids with their wiseass cracks, one said.

If I didn’t need the money, the other one responded, I would have fucking spit in that shit’s eye.

Ani slowly unwound toilet paper from the roll.

They’re looking for chambermaids at the Inn, the first offered.

Same fucking pricks there, just thirty years older, the second quipped.

Ani flushed the toilet and unlocked the stall. She kept her head down and strode out of the room, hearing their chuckles behind her.

With money she had saved up from her summer job, Ani went shopping on Main Street near the campus. She bought a fine-gauge red cardigan with gold buttons and a pair of wide-wale corduroy pants. Her mother would have gasped at the price tags, but Ani hardened herself against guilt. Next she stopped at the shoe store for a pair of clogs and rag wool socks.

Ani wore this outfit on a date with a junior from a suburb of New York City. Steve Hecht was surprised she had never heard of Scarsdale, where his family belonged to the country club. When she mentioned that she lived near Boston, he suggested Newton and she didn’t argue. It didn’t work out with Steve. He stopped calling when she wouldn’t have sex with him after the third date.

Asa had disliked the corduroys and the yoked sweaters. Once he asked her, Why are you pretending to be somebody you’re not? He preferred the peasant blouse and a red flowered Afghan skirt: bohemian chic. He also liked her in flannel and jeans: woods woman. It turned out, though, that changing identity wasn’t as easy as changing costume.

The word for destiny in Armenian is
jagadakir:
what is written on your forehead. God inscribed your fate on your brow in vanishing ink while you were yet in your mother’s womb. You cannot erase what is written on your forehead.

Not only had she now lost Asa, but also gone was the life he would have given her. She would never have a refrigerator that dispensed ice cubes. She would never drive a silver Volvo station wagon. Soon she’d be living on Spruce Street, using the bus to commute to the dull job she would need to pay back her student loans. But for now, she was in exile. Ani felt faceless and almost invisible, as though the filaments attaching her to the surface of the world had torn loose. She was a kind of ghostly balloon bobbing through a translated sky.

Ani pushed the plate of tasteless food aside and opened her bilingual copy of Rimbaud’s poems. She had purloined it from the campus bookstore during her final week as an undergraduate.

Je suis au plus profond de l’abîme, et je ne sais plus prier
.

Rimbaud had renounced his faith when he was young. His life and his writings were about transgression. But he had been a sinner who finally repented on his deathbed, calling for a priest. Will there come an hour when you pray for forgiveness, Ani Silver, or will you die an outlaw?

A light snow was falling as Ani emerged from the restaurant. She drew a paisley wool shawl—a Christmas gift from Tacey Barton—over her head. People hustled by carrying baguettes and bright shopping bags. Ani turned off the boulevard onto a side street, walking without a destination.

On the other side of the street she saw a bookstore with a buttery light spilling out its windows. The sign across the storefront said
LIBRAIRIE SAMUELIAN
: an Armenian name. Crammed shelves spanned from floor to ceiling, and there were several customers with their heads bent over display tables. Ani had stepped off the curb toward the store when a dark-haired man strode out of its front door and hurried down the sidewalk.

His head was down and his shoulders were hunched against the cold. He wore a dungaree jacket over a bulky cable sweater, jeans, and running shoes. His gait reminded her of someone familiar, but who? She was always seeing people who reminded her of far-off friends. Only a few days before, she was certain she had seen Elena in a passage of the metro. But even as she hurried to overtake the woman Ani knew that the face would be a stranger’s. Was it loneliness that conjured up resemblance? Who was this man a stand-in for?

Suddenly she smelled the waxy smoke of blown-out candles, tasted pink sugar roses, and heard the laughter of children.

“Van!” she called.

When he paused and glanced back, Ani could almost make out his features. He didn’t see her in the dusk and continued on his way.

“Wait,” she called, as she ran after him. “Van. It’s me. Ani Silver.”

He turned. “Ani?”

They stood under a streetlamp, the falling snow dissolving on the pavement at their feet. He was shorter and darker than Ani remembered. His shiny ebony hair was cut close to his head and he no longer had sideburns. She studied the black eyes under jet brows and the strong, straight nose. His jaw was shadowed by a day’s growth of beard. He looked like a man now, serious and grown.

“What are you doing here, Van Ardavanian?” Ani asked.

“Me? I was looking for a book. What are you doing here, Ani?” His broad smile had a warmth that came from the depth of his eyes.

Éblouissant,
thought Ani. Dazzling. On a dark December night his smile is like the sun.

They went to an old-fashioned café with a gleaming mahogany bar and lace curtains in the windows. Ani hadn’t seen Van since high school, and now they were sitting at a corner table in a Paris café.

Ani said, “Last thing I heard was that you went to Beirut after you graduated. Your grandmother wasn’t thrilled about that.”

Van shrugged. “Nobody’s grandmother would be happy.”

“What were you doing?”

“Working for a relief agency. Armenian Refugee Aid Association:
ARAA
.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Same thing.
ARAA
has a Paris office. It’s been around since World War One. First they helped Genocide survivors. Now it’s Lebanon and Syria. But what about you, Ani? What have you been up to?”

“Nothing so noble. I got a BA. Hopped a freight train. Climbed a mountain. I’m studying literature at the university.”

“What are you doing for Christmas?” he asked.

“My boyfriend—ex-boyfriend—was supposed to be here, but that fell through. So I’m on my own.”

“Too bad,” Van said, shaking his head with a sympathetic frown that turned into a wry smile. “I’ve got no plans either.”

On Christmas morning in the Bartons’ kitchen Ani tied an apron over her skirt. By the time the buzzer rang at minutes after one, the fish was in the broiler and the rice pilaf was steaming in its pot.

Van followed her through the grand apartment. She had assumed he would be impressed, but his brows moved closer together and she sensed his disapproval.

“This place is huge,” he said. “What’s that garden?”

“Palais-Royal garden,” Ani told him.

“You live in a palace?” he asked incredulously.

“I live in a
chambre de bonne
that comes with the apartment. The Bartons live here.”

“How do they pay for this?”

“He works for some bank. It’s a company apartment.”

“A French bank?”

“No, a big multinational. They were in the Philippines before Paris, and before that in South America.” Ani didn’t mention Tacey Barton’s nostalgia for Manila, where she had been able to afford a full-time staff of six. And they were happy servants. Apparently the dollar didn’t go as far in France. Beatrice, the current part-time housekeeper, was neither cheerful nor servile enough to suit Tacey.

“Roving predators,” Van said bitterly. “They get their wealth from exploiting Third World countries.”

Ani was surprised by his harshness. The Bartons weren’t Ani’s people, but she hadn’t thought of them as evil.

She looked around the room, trying to see it through Van’s lens. On the gleaming twelve-foot table where Ani had set two places with the Bartons’ ornate silver and china, the crystal wineglasses glittered with menace.

Still, she couldn’t view either Tacey or Sydney as a roving predator. They were consumers. Tacey was a professional shopper and Sydney was a shopper in training. Ani had gone with them once to the avenue Victor Hugo, where the minks and sables outnumbered the little dogs shivering in their sweaters. In an elegant boutique Tacey had opened her leather wallet and dropped a fan of francs on the counter.

Tacey’s money came from her husband, and her husband’s money came from his work at the bank, and the bank’s money came from extracting wealth from poor countries. Or at least that’s what Van had just said. Ani had no idea what banking entailed and had little interest in the subject. What exactly did Le Con do all day at his office? Ani avoided him as much as possible, but when he passed through the apartment he left behind an ill will that almost smelled.

Van asked, “What’s it like being a servant to the ruling class?”

“I’m not a servant. I’m an au pair.”

“Seems like a question of semantics to me.”

“Maybe it’s just an attitude. I couldn’t afford to be here if I didn’t have this job. The kid’s kind of sweet.”

“This room gives me the creeps,” Van said.

“Okay,” Ani said. “We can eat in the kitchen if the décor bothers you that much.”

“It’s not a question of aesthetics, Ani.”

“I know, I know. It’s a question of ethics.”

They set the everyday dishes on the table in the long narrow kitchen. The room was large by Parisian standards, but it was the smallest in the apartment. Ani opened a bottle she had filched from the Bartons’ wine cellar. As she went to pour some into Van’s glass he covered it with his hand.

“Not even a little wine on Christmas day?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Since when do you drink?”

She shrugged. “A glass of wine on a festive occasion seems okay to me. What are you, a teetotaler like my grandparents?”

“All right,” he said. “I won’t be dogmatic. Give me a splash so we can make a toast to old friends.”

“I thought we were cousins,” Ani said.

He raised his glass. “Friends, cousins, compatriots.”

Ani had once asked her grandmother how she and Van were related.

Grandma had answered in Armenian. His grandmother Sophie is Sourpouhi Nahabedian. My family name was Nahabedian. Sourpig’s husband’s father and my father were first cousins.

The blood tie was remote. It occurred to Ani that only an Armenian would think of Van as her cousin.

This conversation had taken place in the Ardavanians’ crowded living room. It had been Van’s high school graduation party. Ani roosted next to her grandmother on the couch while Baba sat in a corner with Van’s grandfather, Vahram. The two old men leaned their heads together like conspirators.

In the car on the way home Baba said fondly of Vahram Ardavanian, That guy is a hard-boiled egg. Still a Hunchak.

What’s a Hunchak? Ani had asked.

Baba said, There are three main Armenian political parties: Dashnak, Hunchak, and Ramgavar. The Hunchaks are Communists. The Dashnaks go to Saint Stephen’s Church and the Ramgavars go to Saint James.

Ani asked, Where do the Hunchaks go?

Straight to hell, Baba said.

When he had stopped chuckling at his own joke, Baba continued. Van’s family goes to the First Armenian Church. They’re
poghokagan,
but not so Protestant as your grandmother.

What are we? Ani queried.

Chezokh,
he replied.

What’s that?

I vote Democrat and your grandmother votes Party of God.

Grandma had swatted at him with her handbag. God’s listening to you, Mr. Smart Pants, she had said.

“You want some tea?” Ani asked, beginning to clear the plates from the table.

“Sure,” Van replied.

As Ani filled the teakettle from the tap, Van asked, “So who was the boyfriend?”

“Asa Willard: mountaineer and pothead. He dumped me for someone more exotic.”

“Sounds bad,” Van said.

“Yeah, well. In upbeat moments I comfort myself with the fact that I’ll never have to listen to the Grateful Dead again.”

Van laughed.

“You have a girlfriend?” Ani asked. She wanted him to say no.