All the Light There Was (21 page)

When I went to visit with Barkev and his family later that afternoon, I was unable to keep up the cheerful banter I thought of as a remedy for him. I wasn’t in the mood to tell an amusing story about a street musician with a four-stringed guitar and a small white dog dancing on its hind legs.

“Are you all right?” Barkev asked.

“Just a little tired. I was up late studying. You look tired too.”

“I don’t sleep so well.”

I felt a rush of sympathy, and I put my hand on his arm. “Maybe we’ll both sleep better with company.”

I threw myself into preparations for the wedding. My mother and I worked to turn my bedroom into a home for Missak and Jacqueline. We pushed the two narrow beds together, cleared the bureau, and put down new shelf paper in the drawers. As I swept and mopped the floor, washed the window, and laundered the curtains, I assumed that at the Kacherians’ apartment, Auntie Shushan and Virginie were doing much the same in the room Barkev and I would share. I couldn’t quite imagine what my new life would be like.

For the wedding dresses, my mother chose white chiffon fabrics—Jacqueline’s had purple flowers, and mine had pink ones. Jacqueline and I pored over a fashion magazine looking for a style that she could copy. The sewing machine whirred in the evenings as my mother pieced together first one dress and then the other. Finally Jacqueline and I stood on chairs in the front room while our respective mothers pinned up our hems.

“
Peh!
They both look very beautiful,” said Sophie Sahadian, leaning back on her heels to gaze up at us. “What a good job you did, Azniv. The dresses fit perfectly.”

“We have to hem them tonight. Can you believe it’s only two more days until our girls will be married?” my mother said.

“I can’t get used to the idea that my baby is going to be moving out.”

“Your baby? Don’t worry, you have plenty more babies to keep you company, and I’m not going far! Just across the street,” Jacqueline said. “And believe me, I’m looking forward to sharing a bed with just one person. We’ve been three sisters to a bed for too long. It was okay when we were little, but now I have bruises from all those knees and elbows.”

“Enough talking. Go take those off. We have to hem them.” My mother shooed us out of the room.

In the bedroom, as we shimmied out of the dresses, Jacqueline said, “Are you ready for your wedding night?”

I glanced at her. “Are you?”

Jacqueline laughed and bounced onto the bed in her white lace-trimmed slip. “We’ve been practicing.”

I pulled a robe over my own white slip. “I don’t want to hear about it.”

Jacqueline asked, “Haven’t you and Barkev—”

“That’s none of your business,” I interrupted.

“Oh, don’t be such a prude,” Jacqueline said. “You’re almost a married woman.”

“No, we haven’t, as a matter of fact.”

“Well, if you want any advice, let me know.”

I swept up the two dresses from the bed. “I’m a nice Armenian girl and I have nothing more to say to you on the topic.”

The next day, the women from the three wedding families gathered in the Kacherians’ kitchen and started cooking. Food was still rationed, but Donabedian the Magnificent had produced a lamb shank, as well as dates, apricots, and almonds for the wedding pilaf. The Alfortville cousins had offered up several chickens, a dozen eggs, and a pound of butter. My mother rolled out phyllo dough for the pastries. Sophie Sahadian dusted a tray of crescent-shaped butter cookies with powdered sugar.

Jacqueline asked, “Can I have one?”

“Of course not,” her mother said. “If you have one, your sisters will want them too. Then we might not have enough for the guests.”

“Just one?” Jacqueline reached toward the tray on the table. “The girls don’t need them. I’m the bride and I’m hungry.”

Her mother swatted her hand away. “Go find a bread stick.”

On a sunny, hot July day, Missak and Jacqueline, and Barkev and I, were married at the
mairie
of the Twentieth Arrondissement with our families in attendance. Afterward, we spread out a feast on blankets near the lake in the Buttes Chaumont. All the Sahadians, Kacherians, Nazarians, and Meguerditchians were there. So were Jacqueline’s lawyer boss and his wife, Missak’s boss and his wife, and several neighbors. Hagop brought along his oud and two musician friends, so after the meal there was dancing.

“Do you want to dance?” I asked Barkev when the playing started. We were sitting together on a blanket on the grass. He had taken off his suit jacket and loosened his tie.

He shook his head. “You go ahead.”

“Are you sure?”

“You go with them.” As he gestured toward the forming lines of dancers with Missak at the head of one and Jacqueline at the head of the other, the gold wedding band on his finger glinted in the sun.

I thought briefly of joining the dancers, but when I glanced back at Barkev, I saw a shadow pass over his face.

“I want to sit with you,” I said.

“It’s miserable that he’s not here, but then if he were . . .” His sentence trailed off.

“Don’t,” I told him. “This is our day.”

“He told me about the red yarn.” He looked down and plucked a blade of grass.

“Oh,” I said. “So you know.”

Just then Jacqueline passed by at the head of the line of dancers. She waved at me with her free hand.

“Come on, Maral!” she called.

“I’m watching you!” I called back.

Barkev leaned toward me, pushing a strand of hair out of my eyes. “Sorry to be such an old man.”

“But you are my old man now, aren’t you?”

That night, when we closed the door on our new, shared bedroom, I carefully arranged the set of gilt-edged combs and brushes my parents had given me as a wedding gift on the top of the dresser. With my back turned to Barkev, I slipped on the lace-trimmed summer nightgown my mother had made, and in the dresser mirror I saw Barkev, with his back turned to me, change into a pair of striped pajamas. We had so little privacy, with his parents and sister in the same apartment and with the whole neighborhood’s windows flung open because of the summer heat. But now there was a gold ring on my left hand, and a gold ring on his, and no one could disapprove.

I folded back the sheet and lay down on the bed. He stretched out beside me, running his fingers down the side of my face. It was like a chord strummed on an oud’s strings, full of longing. When we kissed, I felt a hot tear slide from his face onto mine.

S
OME MORNINGS AS I
was just waking up, in the anteroom between dreams and day, I thought I was still in my family’s apartment in the bedroom I had shared with my aunt. Then I would open my eyes: the dark-haired man whose head was on the pillow beside me was my husband. Once, for a second, when Barkev’s back was to me, I mistook him for his brother, but then I remembered. I glanced around the room, from the water stain on the ceiling over the bed to the walnut dresser with a mirror above it to the wooden chair next to the dresser, on the seat of which a pair of work pants were neatly folded. The closet door was ajar, and inside it my dresses hung next to Barkev’s Sunday shirts and his wedding suit. I reminded myself:
My name is Maral Kacherian. I am married and I live with my husband’s family.

I had imagined that becoming a wife would overnight turn me into a more serious and substantial person. But no such transformation had occurred. I didn’t feel like a grown woman—it was as though I had moved from being a daughter in my own family to being a daughter in his. His mother ruled in the kitchen, and his father presided at the dinner table.

Even though Barkev and I had known each other for as long as I could remember, I was still discovering my husband. I had always thought that Zaven, the younger and shorter brother, was the handsomer of the two, even though their features were similar. I realized on closer study that the main difference between them was that Barkev’s face was asymmetrical, making his smile crooked and one nostril flare a little more than the other. His eyes were a lighter shade of brown, and he was quieter and more thoughtful than Zaven. If we went for a walk, he noticed before I did that I was hungry and offered me roasted chickpeas from a paper bag he carried in his pocket. He liked playing backgammon with his father in the evenings after dinner. He was a restless sleeper and had frequent nightmares that woke us both.

One morning about six weeks after we married, I opened my eyes and what I wanted more than anything was to stay in bed all day. And it wasn’t just Barkev’s turning, muttering, and grinding his teeth at night that left me tired. My blood was sluggish in my veins, my head hazy, and my stomach queasy.

I was soon to start my second year at the university, but it didn’t make sense to continue if there was a baby coming in the spring. Deep down, I wasn’t even sure what I was doing at the university; I just craved the books and the praise that came with being a student. I felt I should ferret out the knitting needles and apply to Auntie’s boss for work again.

I sighed.

“What’s the matter?” Barkev asked.

“Sorry,” I said, turning to him. “Did I wake you?”

“No. It’s time to get up. What do you see in that spot on the ceiling? You spend a lot of time staring at it.”

“That’s how I think.”

“What were you thinking?”

“That I’m going to have a baby,” I answered.

“Are you sure?”

“Let’s not say anything until I see the doctor.” I studied the dark circles under his eyes. “Are you pleased?”

“I’m happy about the baby. The world the baby comes into is another thing.”

Barkev didn’t talk about it, but I could sense when he was remembering the camp. I couldn’t even think of the place’s name without the newspaper images floating up like bloated corpses in a river. He must have felt alone here among people who had very little idea of what he had lived through.

Now Barkev’s eyes were fastened on me, but he wasn’t seeing me.

“What are you thinking?” I asked.

His eyes slowly focused. “If it’s a boy, we could name him Zaven.”

I recoiled inside. It was too heavy a burden to put on an infant—that he must be both himself and a loved one lost to war. There were children in our community named for fathers, mothers, or siblings killed during the Deportations, but it was not a tradition I had wanted to continue.

“You don’t like the idea?” he asked.

“Not much,” I admitted.

He seemed almost relieved.

My stomach suddenly lurched and I jumped from the bed, grabbing my robe as I made for the toilet on the hall landing.

“Are you all right?” Barkev called after me.

I raced past the startled faces of my mother-in-law and Virginie.

Crouching before the porcelain toilet bowl, I heaved up mostly bile. I stood and pulled the toilet handle, feeling lightheaded as the water noisily churned through the pipes. I had never fainted, but I imagined this was what it must feel like just before you did. I leaned heavily on the wall behind me taking slow deep breaths until the dizziness passed.

When I returned to the kitchen, they were all at the table having breakfast, and my mother-in-law raised one eyebrow.

Virginie asked, “Are you okay?”

My father-in-law asked, “Are you coming down with something?”

I shook my head. “It’s nothing. I’m fine now.”

“Sit down, honey,” Shushan said with a knowing smile. She pulled out a chair at the table. “Let me make you some toast and tea.”

After Virginie left for the lycée and my husband and father-in-law headed off to work, my mother-in-law asked, “Should you and I go see the doctor this week?”

“I thought I could keep it secret for a little while.”

“A secret? In an apartment this size?”

After Dr. Odabashian had confirmed our suspicions, I confided in my mother and Jacqueline. My mother was initially elated and then doubt flickered across her face.

“What about the university?”

“I’m done with that,” I said.

“You are sure?” my mother asked.

“Yes. I’m sure.”

As the weeks went by, the nausea subsided and I began to have dreams that the baby had been born—a tiny baby, sometimes so small it would have fit into the palm of my hand. Nightly the baby suffered one calamity after the next. In one dream it was born with no arms and legs, and I planted it like a bulb in the dirt of a flowerpot; I accidentally knocked the flowerpot off the window ledge and it smashed in the courtyard below. I didn’t tell my mother-in-law about the dreams because she was superstitious.

Shushan Kacherian was known for her skill in reading the future in coffee grounds at the bottom of a cup. My mother frowned on this practice because Father Avedis disapproved, but other women in the community sought Digin Shushan’s readings. My mother-in-law was also a great believer in dreams as bearers of signs and portents. She consulted a small worn book with lists of objects and happenings and what they signified. If you dreamed that a person recovered from illness, this surely meant the person would die. If you wore a ring in a dream, that was bad luck, unless the ring was silver, and then it was good. I didn’t want my mother-in-law to suspect what an absent-minded, neglectful mother I was in my dreams, because this could only be a bad omen.

I started knitting again—most of it piecework for Auntie’s old boss that I did while sitting in the front room with my mother during the afternoons. It was like old times—I knit and my mother ran up vests on the machine. Sometimes we talked, but for long stretches we worked in companionable silence. I had plenty to occupy my thoughts—a new husband, a baby on the way, and fragmented memories from childhood and my school years that flickered across my mind’s eye. Occasionally I thought of Andon. Was he sitting in the back of his cousin’s shop repairing a rug? Then I would imagine Barkev at his bench, his head bent over an elegant woman’s shoe with a fine hammer as he tapped tiny nails to hold the sole in place. He had told me that sometimes still his hands trembled so badly that he couldn’t do his work, but it seemed this happened with less frequency.