Dreams of Bread and Fire (27 page)

Ani and Grandma sat at a picnic table with ice creams that dripped in the late-summer heat. A crowd of high school kids sat at the other table, smoking cigarettes and flirting noisily. Ani didn’t know any of them. When she was in high school she would have died rather than be seen in public with her old Armenian grandmother. Grandma’s polyester flowered dress was hanging off her thinning shoulders, and there were several rhinestones missing from the tips of her cat’s-eye glasses.

“You going to come visit me in New York?” Ani asked fondly.

Grandma swatted at the air with her free hand, dismissing Ani’s idea. “I’m too old for that. You come home.”

“Of course I’ll come home,” Ani assured her.

“Not too long,” Grandma said sternly.

“Soon,” Ani promised.

“You are my girl,” Grandma said. She patted Ani’s hand and said in Armenian, “Intelligent, beautiful—”

“
Khelatsi, keghetsig,
” repeated Ani, adding, “
yev khent
.”

Grandma laughed. “Crazy too.”

Ani thought she had to be crazy to still be pining for Van. Was it folly to believe he loved her and not only that he loved her but that he would return to her? How would the ballad of Ani and Van finish: with biblical weeping and gnashing of teeth or with formulaic wedding bells?

She was named for the Armenian city of a thousand churches that was now in ruins within Turkish borders. He was named for a lake and a city that were no longer Armenian and, despite his quixotic plans to the contrary, would never again be Armenian.

“
Aghchigess,
” Grandma said, laying a hand on Ani’s arm, “I’m tired, honey. Let’s go home.”

Around midnight, Ani lay on the futon in the basement listening to the sounds of the oscillating fan as it moved through its arc. She stared above her at the thickness of the night. When she was little she used to hang her head over the side of the bed and gaze at the hall light, imagining what it would be like to walk on the ceiling. She had liked seeing the world upside down, including her mother’s bottom lip, which then appeared as her top lip and moved strangely over her sharp teeth as her mother had said, Put your head on your pillow, young lady, and go to sleep. . . .

“Ani,” her mother called. “Wake up.”

Ani sat up in bed, shielding her eyes with the back of her hand. Violet stood framed in the door, light falling in behind her.

“What’s going on?” Ani asked.

“It’s Grandma. She’s having a heart attack.”

Ani followed her mother up the cellar stairs to the kitchen. They went to the hall, where Grandma, whose hair was undone, was seated at the telephone table. Her face, Ani noted, was the same color as a frozen turkey defrosting on the counter. The muscles in her neck stood out like wires. Her head was large and strange. Her mouth worked the air as though she were trying to talk, but no words came out and she grimaced in frustration.

Baba, who was pacing the tiny hall, stopped to pat Grandma on the shoulder. In Armenian he said to her, “Don’t talk, Mariam. Don’t try to talk. Save your strength.”

Violet shouted, “The ambulance will be here any minute, Ma!” as though deafness were the problem.

Grandma closed her eyes, resting her head against the wall.

It felt like forever that they waited under the hall’s bleak light.

Finally the fire truck and the police cars arrived, followed closely by the ambulance. Many tall uniformed men stood around, their large hands empty. Ani looked down, noticing how short her cotton nightshirt was. She glanced up and saw a cop ogling her legs.

The paramedics loaded Grandma onto a stretcher. Baba and Violet trailed behind them to the sidewalk. By that time Ani was in the corner of her grandparents’ bedroom. She curled up in the small armchair with her cheek against the faded flowered slipcover. Ani saw behind her eyelids her grandmother’s gray face, stricken with the speechless animal terror of great pain. Ani couldn’t imagine anything lonelier than that—except death.

When Ani arrived at the door of her grandmother’s room in the cardiac ward the next afternoon, her mother and grandfather were in the hall conversing with the doctor.

Ani kissed her grandmother’s cheek, which was as smooth and soft as an apricot. She was relieved to see that the old woman, although pale and weak, was smiling.

“How’s it going, Grandma?” Ani asked.

“
Akh,
food here is terrible,
aghchigess. Anham eh.
They don’t let you get no sleep neither. Every five minute, take temperature, check this, check that.”

Baba and Violet entered the room.

“You two, I want to talk to Ani. You leave,” Grandma said in Armenian, as she waved them away wearily.

“I’ll go to the cafeteria and get you some chocolate pudding, Ma,” Violet said.

After they were gone, Grandma said to Ani, “Get pocketbook.”

Ani fetched the black leather handbag from the sill, where it was propped between two vases filled with flowers. It was from the forties, with a stiff handle and a gold clasp.

Ani handed the bag to her grandmother. “I don’t need any money, you know.”

“No money.” Grandma snapped open the clasp.

Ani perched on the edge of the bed, watching her grandmother rummage in the purse.

“You looking for an Almond Joy?” Ani asked.

“
Ahrr,
” the old woman said, as she thrust a cassette tape into Ani’s hand. “Don’t say nothing about it to nobody.”

Ani wondered how long Grandma had been carrying the tape around. “Not even to you?”

“That’s right. Nothing to nobody.”

“Okay,” Ani said. “Can I keep it?”

“It’s for you. Why anybody would want,
chem keedehr.
”

The old woman closed her eyes. Her face was pale and drawn.

Grandma opened her eyes and asked, “When you getting married, Ani? I want to see you wedding before I die.”

“I’ve got to start from scratch, Grandma, so it might take me a while.”

“Good riddance to Esau. What you need is nice—”

Ani interrupted. “Nice Armenian boy.”

Grandma smiled weakly. “That’s right, honey.”

“I’ll work on it,” Ani said.

A nurse came in bearing a large arrangement of pink roses and white lilies. “These are for you, Mrs. Kersamian. Aren’t they beautiful?”

“Thank you, honey. Very pretty,” the old woman said.

“Is this your granddaughter?” the nurse asked, as she placed the flowers on the windowsill. She extracted the card and handed it to the old woman.

“This is my Ani,” Grandma said proudly. She glanced at the card, tossed it aside, and sighed. “When you dying even people who don’t like you send flowers.”

The nurse clucked her tongue. “Mrs. Kersamian, you are not dying. The doctor says you will be going home in a few days.”

“Don’t worry,” Ani assured the nurse. “She’s been saying that she’s dying for as long as I can remember. Right, Grandma?”

“
Bidi mernim,
” Grandma responded on cue.

“That’s Armenian for
I’m dying,
” Ani explained.

Violet came in with the pudding and Baba beckoned for Ani to join him in the hall.

Baba said, “I forgot to tell you in all the commotion. Vahram called last evening. They heard from Van a few days ago. He’s in Canada.”

This news jolted through her. Van in Canada? He was on the same continent. He had now contacted his family twice and she hadn’t heard a word from him since Paris.

“Did Van ask Vahram to call us?” Ani asked.

“I don’t know,
anoushig,
” Baba said, shrugging. “I thought I should tell you. But Canada isn’t so close. Plus, you’re supposed to be looking for that Armenian dentist, right?”

The bike ride from the hospital to home wasn’t far, but the late-afternoon sun was fierce and the air thick. Ani didn’t want to think about Van. She didn’t want to know that he was on the same land mass only hours away. She didn’t want to twist his nose and yell at him for all the anguish he had caused her. She didn’t want to smell sweet loam and spices. She didn’t want to kiss him.

When Ani arrived at the house, she located the tape recorder on the shelf in the hall closet and went downstairs to her room.

She rewound the tape and as it began to play she heard her own voice for a moment: “And when you’re finished you push down this one. . . .” Then there was a patch of scratchy air between when her grandmother had turned on the machine and when the old woman started to talk.

Ani closed her eyes and listened to Grandma’s small, affectless voice begin.

“The Turks told us to leave our house. All the Armenians left their house. We had only clothes on our back. We start walking.”

There was a pause.

When Grandma’s voice started again it was smaller still.

“My mother fell by road.”

Silence.

“We left her.”

Silence.

“My sisters died because we didn’t have nothing to eat.”

Silence.

“My father died of broken heart.”

Silence.

“A Kurd took my brother.”

There was a long silence as the tape rolled on. It seemed that the fragmented, telegraphic narrative was finished.

But then Ani heard her grandmother’s voice, barely above a whisper.

“Jesus says love your enemy.”

Pause.

“What they did to us I never can forgive.”

better to be the village cat than a foreign aristocrat

These were the things that Ani hated about the city: cockroaches that scuttled into cracks when she flicked on the kitchen light; the crash, whine, and grind of buses, ambulances, and garbage trucks at all hours of the night and day; litter spilling out of overfilled trash cans where rats nosed about at dusk; and the rank smell of urine at the far end of the subway platform.

She counted the beggars panhandling up and down the avenue near the university. There were at least two on each block—people with dirt-streaked faces and grimy clothes. Hardened city dwellers walked past, deaf to their pleas, but Ani looked at each and every one. She said, “Sorry,” after she ran out of change. One man, his face twisted with hatred and his red and swollen ankles showing over unlaced oversized sneakers, said, “You’re not sorry, you goddamned bitch.”

It was true. How sorry was she really? She wasn’t sorry enough to do anything useful, such as volunteering in a soup kitchen or getting a degree in social work, or even something idealistic like joining the Spartacus Youth League, for which pale dour students handed out jargon-filled newspapers at the college gate. Workers of the world unite to throw off the chains of capitalist oppression. She tossed the newspaper onto a heaped trash receptacle and headed up the stone steps to a seminar on nineteenth-century French literature. Now that was a useful topic.

After class she dashed across the campus toward the subway station to meet Elena on the platform. It had turned out that Elena’s lover was a young woman named Daisy, a former varsity soccer captain who was in a training program at some big Wall Street investment firm. Daisy lived in Greenwich Village and they were headed to her apartment for dinner.

Ani asked, “What do your parents think about Daisy?”

Elena’s mother was a devout Catholic.

Elena replied, “I thought I’d wait until Christmas to drop the bombshell.”

Ani found it baffling that Elena had disavowed all her previous heterosexual encounters as “inauthentic.” Elena claimed that she was now and had always been—even before she knew it—a lesbian. Ani wasn’t convinced. She remembered Elena’s passion for her college boyfriends. Elena said this was the effect of a lifetime of brainwashing, which she had now overcome.

Elena had posted on the refrigerator in their apartment a list of the famous women who had been lesbians. There was a second column with a question mark above it for women who were rumored—but not yet confirmed—to belong to this group. It reminded Ani of the way her grandparents could catalog the name of every Armenian, half Armenian, and quarter Armenian who had attained any degree of acclaim.

Ani and Elena slid into seats in the train’s second-to-last car.

“How was the day?” Ani asked.

“Kind of sucked. I spent all afternoon in the library, and none of the books I needed were on the shelves. I put recall notices on all of them, but I’m sure professors have most of them, which means it will take months to get them back. How about you?”

Ani answered, “I think we’re going to suffer horribly through our twenties, and then settle into dull complacency in our thirties.”

“Are you depressed?” Elena queried.

Ani asked, “Do I seem depressed?”

“Well, you haven’t had sex in months. You’ve made sure that you’re up to your eyeballs in work. You have big dark circles under your eyes.”