Dreams of Bread and Fire (24 page)

In the kitchen the white Formica kitchen table with silver legs and the matching red and silver chairs gleamed with memory. White sheers stirred in the windows over the sink. Ani moved through the front rooms, her eyes catching homely objects: a bowl of waxed fruit on the sideboard, a porcelain figurine of a girl driving a flock of geese on the end table, a gold Depression glass bowl filled with hard candies on the polished coffee table. She wanted it always to stay the same—like a museum of bygone days—so that no matter how complicated or confused her life should be, there would be a place of rest and comfort.

Nostalgia.

An aching in the heart for the homeland.

Was this Ani’s homeland?

As soon as the family passed under the lintel, Grandma would shout from the kitchen that Ani should shut the front door before all the dust blew in from the street. Violet would loudly tell her mother not to shout. Baba would settle into his old wine-colored armchair and snap the newspaper open in front of his face. After a few minutes he’d fall asleep, and his snores would rumble through the apartment.

She carried her suitcase to the basement room. On the wine crate that served as a nightstand stood a framed color photograph that Asa had given her. Wearing a red bandanna and green shorts, Asa was stretched over a craggy cliff face while a red rope dangled from him like an umbilical cord. Ani considered tossing the picture, frame and all, into the trash basket but instead wedged it into a corner of the old footlocker where she stored toys and souvenirs. She searched until she found the white cigar box—Van’s gray quartz stone was still in there and her father’s marbles. Replacing them inside, she closed the trunk’s lid.

From her suitcase Ani pulled an envelope filled with small slips of paper and a few folded notes that Van had written. It was funny how few physical mementos she had from their five months together: just these bits of paper with his handwriting and the pocket dictionary. Van Ardavanian had slipped in and out of her life like a magician. She imagined him walking backward on the sand, erasing his footsteps with a palm frond as he went.

The next morning Ani walked to the bicycle shop on Mount Auburn Street and bought a used three-speed Schwinn and a wicker basket. She pedaled up Boylston Street, around the back of the junior high school, past the front of the elementary school, and down Hazel Street. As she approached the Ardavanians’ house on Dexter Avenue she slowed the bike. There wasn’t anyone out front, but a light shone in the downstairs living room. She wanted to knock on the door and ask if she could see Van’s bedroom. Had they kept it as a shrine, with a pair of bronzed baby shoes on a shelf next to his sports trophies? Would he have left a Red Sox pennant tacked to the wall or a poster of Che? Ani picked up speed and turned toward home.

She started a summer job in the children’s room at the East Branch Library. Ani loved the cool basement room with its low tables and small chairs. This was where she had learned to read. As she shelved the young adult novels she offered suggestions to a twelve-year-old girl—an Armenian girl, Ani guessed, from the look of her—who was picking through for something good. At the end of her first shift she climbed the cast-iron spiral staircase to the adult reading room, where she paged through back issues of English language Armenian newspapers. She was looking for mention of
ASALA
and its “operations.”

As she read the coverage of
ASALA
’s September 1981 siege of the Turkish Consulate in Paris, she scrutinized the photos carefully. A Turkish security guard had died of a heart attack and one commando was wounded, but the rest of the hostages were released. Next she scrolled through microfilm of
The New York Times
for the same dates and found several articles. One of the reports explained the context for the present-day attacks against Turkish targets by citing the past:

In the period around 1915, Turkish authorities scattered the Armenian nation, killing 1.5 million people according to most historical accounts and driving others from their homeland in Eastern Anatolia.

Ani checked out a stack of books on the Armenian Genocide, squeezing them into her bicycle basket. Carrying the cache of books to the basement, she sat cross-legged on her bed and read until the letters blurred. She attempted to take the information in with dispassion. This was something that had happened decades before in a distant and foreign place to people she didn’t know. Despite her resolve, a little knot of grief worked its way from the pit of her stomach up to her throat.

The number 1.5 million was repeated again and again. The only way she could take in the enormity of it was to choose one person out of that 1.5 million and try to list the losses and terrors that particular person had suffered before dying a gruesome death. Then multiply it by 1.5 million. Add to that the hundreds of thousands who somehow survived with the horrors etched in their heads and who dispersed themselves over the globe like the seeds of a rare plant slated for extinction.

This sum of suffering was totaled without figuring in the fields confiscated, the vineyards appropriated, the houses occupied, looted, or burned, the handwoven carpets carried off, the dish sets smashed or stolen, the pocket watches and earrings traded for scraps of food, the words torn from mouths and not passed to the next generation and the one after.

Violet called from the top of the stairs. “Ani, dinner time.” When there was no response to her second call, Violet descended.

Ani didn’t hear her mother until Violet was standing over her.

“Mom, you scared me,” Ani said, springing up.

Waving her hand at the books on the floor, Violet asked, “What are these?”

“Books,” she said.

“Ani, I can see that. I mean, what are you reading them for?”

“Research,” Ani replied.

“You’ve been acting strange since you got back. Are you depressed?”

Ani knit her eyebrows, considering for a moment. Was that the right word to describe her current state?

She answered, “I don’t think I’m depressed. Depressed is when you can’t get out of bed because gravity weighs too much on you. I think this is called
bummed out
.”

“Maybe you’re still sad about Asa. But I don’t think shutting yourself up in the basement with morbid books is going to help you, Ani, I really don’t.”

“Mom, this has nothing, I mean
nothing,
to do with Asa.”

Her mother couldn’t have been further from the truth. But who could blame Violet? Ani had promised Van not to tell, and now that he had dematerialized she felt she couldn’t even mention his name for fear the whole story would come spilling out.

“Just do me a favor and don’t leave those lying around where your grandmother might see them. A friend of mine is coming over for supper tonight. Someone special I want you to meet.”

“Who?” Ani asked.

“Nick Mavrides. He lives at the top of the hill. His wife died three years ago.”

So her mother had a boyfriend, a Greek widower. Good for her, thought Ani. “How did you meet him?”

“He’s a patient at the office,” Violet said. “And he’s a contractor, for your information.”

“How did you know that was my next question?” Ani asked.

Nick Mavrides was a little taller than Violet and a little older, although not much, and had a full head of short graying hair and a small potbelly. He brought yellow garden roses with their stems wrapped in aluminum foil for Grandma.

Grandma carried the roses into the kitchen, saying to Ani in Armenian as she passed, “Look what Violet’s Greek boy gave me.”

“I understand you’re just back from Paris,” Nick said to Ani, after they were all seated at the table.

“Uh-huh,” Ani responded.

“When I was in the army stationed in Germany, I went to Paris on leave a couple of times. Great city,” he said. “New York’s a great city too. Maybe sometime this year your mom and I could drive down to visit you at school. One of my sons lives in New Jersey, on the other side of the bridge. We could stay with him.”

“That would be nice,” Ani said. She looked across the table at her mother, who was beaming happily.

After supper, as Ani toweled the dishes, she asked Grandma, “You like Nick?”

“Good boy. Not like
Baron
White Cadillac.”

“Do you think it’s serious?”

Grandma nodded. “Sure. Last time he brought me candy.”

Ani returned to her reading, but Baba knocked on the basement window, beckoning for her to come outside. Baba’s vegetable garden glistened in the sun’s last rays.

“Can you spray your grandmother’s flowers?” Baba asked, handing Ani the hose. “Your mother told me you’re reading about the Massacres.”

“That’s right.” The long family tradition of silence almost kept her from saying more. “What happened to your family, Baba?”

Baba sat down heavily on the picnic bench, running his fingers through his thick white hair. “We lived in Marash. My father was massacred in the street so my mother was left alone to care for four children. My brother Vahan was the oldest. Next my sister Satenig, and then me. The smallest was Tovmas. Because we were Protestants we were under the protection of the American missionaries, but one day a deportation order came for Vahan and me. We took it to the missionaries. They went to the governor, who told us to ignore it and move to another house. My mother’s family had already been deported so their house was empty. We moved there.”

The story poured out of him as though he had told it a thousand times, yet Ani had never heard him say a word about it before. Maybe he had told himself this story again and again. Maybe he had been waiting all this time for her to ask.

He continued. “Everyone was hungry all the time. People ate anything they could put their hands on: a dog, a cat, any poor bird you might get with a slingshot. Vahan and I went out to the fields with a basket, a string, and a stick. We made a trap and caught sparrows. Can you imagine that? Such a tiny bird, hardly any meat on its bones. We spent the whole afternoon catching them. But compared to the others, we were kings. They were driven out into the desert where there wasn’t so much as a crumb. They died like flies. Some of the orphans were picked up from the desert by the missionaries and brought back to the orphanage.

“That’s how your grandmother came to Marash. She had no family left. When she first got there she must have been about fourteen, maybe fifteen, but she was so tiny with her bones sticking out all over that she looked to be nine years old. You wouldn’t have liked to see it, Ani. She wouldn’t talk to no one. I was working for the missionaries, fixing things. They had a car and a truck, and I learned how to repair them. I would see Mariam sitting to one side by herself, and little by little I came closer to her. I carved a whistle from a piece of wood and gave it to her. I made up a song for her. She one day finally smiled at me. I wanted that girl to be my wife, but I had to wait until she was a little older.

“Finally Mariam said she would marry me. We guessed she was about sixteen. The American
badveli
married us with my family there. My uncle was in America and they decided that Mariam and I should go there. We would send for my mother and my sister and brothers later. A few months after we got to Watertown we heard that the French and British troops had left Marash. After that the Armenians still in Marash were deported and massacred. The American missionaries had no power anymore. My whole family was killed.”

Baba’s story stopped there. He was staring past Ani, his eyes fixed on the past. Ani noticed that the hose was at her feet spilling water into the grass. She reached to turn off the spigot.

“What about Grandma’s family?” Ani asked.

He shrugged. “She told me about their house in Mersin. She had a brother and younger sisters who were twins. Her father was a tailor. She would only say that they all died except her. She doesn’t like to talk about it, Ani, and after so much suffering, why should she? She wants to forget the misery she saw in that place. No one’s eyes should have witnessed that. America is very far from there. Come on,
aghchigess,
that’s enough of that terrible tale. Let’s go inside.”

The next day Ani found an old tape recorder on a shelf in the hall closet. She bought new batteries and a cassette tape, testing the machine to make sure it worked.

Late on Saturday afternoon, when Grandma was settled on the back porch couch reading her Bible, Ani sat down next to her with the tape recorder.

“Ve missed you,” Grandma said.

“I missed you too,” Ani replied.

“I heard that boy Esau give you trouble,” Grandma said.

Ani didn’t bother to correct her. “Dumped me.”

“He don’t know nothing. Spit from you mouth. You are jewel for prince.” Grandma picked her pocketbook up from the couch beside her. “You need dollar?”

“Thanks, no. I don’t.”

They sat in silence for a while.

“Grandma,” Ani ventured, “you know, I was wondering about your life in the old country.”

Grandma examined her wedding band.

“Baba told me about his family. Do you have any stories from your childhood you want to tell?” Ani asked.