All the Light There Was (24 page)

“You are in a wretched mood,” I said. “And I don’t like the way you are talking to me.”

The only sounds in the room were the noise of the baby snuffling as he nursed and the clock ticking. A few minutes later, I put Pierre in the crib. I changed into my nightdress and climbed past Barkev’s legs to my side of the bed.

Barkev switched off the nightstand lamp.

“You tell me you want me to talk, and when I do, you say you don’t like the way I’m talking,” he said into the dark.

“You are so miserable lately. Is it something I’m doing?”

“It’s not you.”

“What is it?”

“Now that my son can carry on the family name, my duty’s done.”

“Barkev, what would I do without you? And what about your son?”

“You should be able to find someone else to make you happy.”

“Your suffering has made you unkind.”

“I’m sorry.” He reached out for me across the dark.

A few weeks later, my mother-in-law and I were at the kitchen table rolling out dough for
cheoregs
when Paul Sahadian knocked at the front door.

“What is it?” I wiped my buttery palms on my apron. “What happened? My father?”

“They called your father’s shop. There’s been an accident.”

I felt sick, my heart swooping down inside my body as though it had been dropped at the end of a long rope.

“What happened?” asked my mother-in-law, who came up behind me in the hall.

Paul said, “It’s Barkev. There’s been an accident.”

Shushan Kacherian pressed her hands to her heart. “God help us.”

“What happened?” I asked again.

Paul finally answered, “He was hit by a truck.”

“But he’ll be okay?” I asked.

Paul’s face was grim. “By the time the ambulance got there . . . I’m sorry.”

My mother-in-law groaned and her eyes rolled back in her head. Paul and I caught her before she hit the floor and carried her to the sofa in the living room. Just then the baby woke from his nap and cried from the crib in the other room.

“Paul, I don’t think I can take care of both of them. Will you please get my mother?” I asked.

“Your father went first to tell her—she should be here any minute now—and then he went to meet Mr. Kacherian at the hospital. I’ll sit with her until they arrive.”

I went to the bedroom and reached for Pierre. I laid him on the bed to change him. He stared up at me, kicking his legs and waving his arms as I pinned on the new diaper. Somewhere in a corner of my mind, I understood that Barkev was gone, irrevocably gone, but it didn’t seem real. Here was the bed that we shared, and there was the pillow on which his head had rested that morning. Here was our child, a little boy whose bright, dark eyes were much like his father’s.

The poor thing,
I thought as I lifted Pierre from the bed,
he’s not even five months old and already fatherless. He won’t remember Barkev. He won’t know anything about him except what’s in the stories we tell.

By the time my father and father-in-law arrived, I was in the front room with Paul, my mother, my mother-in-law, and the baby. Shushan Kacherian’s eyes were rimmed with red and she held a sodden handkerchief to her cheek. My father gave the orders, telling us who would go where and do what. My assignment was to take care of the baby. Paul was dispatched to find Virginie at the lycée. My father-in-law went in search of the undertaker, and my father went back to his shop, where he could make the necessary call to the priest from the recently installed telephone. Once the men had left, my mother and mother-in-law wept in each other’s arms, and their sobs were soon joined by those of Virginie, Sophie, and Alice Sahadian.

By evening, the front room was jammed with family and friends. Vahan Kacherian recounted the story of what had happened to Barkev several times for the benefit of newcomers. The story went like this: Barkev was having one of his bad days, and as he was unable to assemble the uppers of the shoes, the boss decided to send him on errands, including buying some skins from a leather merchant in the neighborhood. Barkev left the atelier, and according to people who were walking by, a few blocks away from the shop he stepped into the street to cross as a delivery truck came barreling down the hill.

“Oh, my sons, my sons,” my mother-in-law wept. “How is it possible that God took both of them? Why? Why? Why?”

There was a fresh round of weeping each time the story was told, but I was dry-eyed. I sat in the corner holding the baby, having instinctively pulled some kind of hard, protective shell over myself for the sake of Pierre. He was tense and fretful, so I bounced him up and down. As the evening gave way to night, I carried the baby into the bedroom, away from all the commotion, changed and fed him, and then laid him in the crib. I leaned over the rail and rubbed circles on his back until he fell asleep.

Finally Missak and Jacqueline arrived. They had borrowed the Nazarians’ car and driven from Alfortville with little Alex. When Jacqueline handed the baby to my brother and put her arms around me, I leaned into her.

“Oh God, sweetie,” Jacqueline said into my ear. “I’m so sorry.”

“I think my heart is breaking, but I’m not sure because I can’t feel a thing.” Only then did I start crying.

When people finally cleared out of the apartment, I was wooden with exhaustion. In the bedroom, I pulled on my nightgown and climbed into the bed with sheets that smelled of Barkev. I turned onto my side, and when I slid my hand under the pillow, I felt it—the pencil stub. It had been to Buchenwald and back and was always in his pocket, but he must have put it under the pillow before he’d left for work that morning. Since the night of the party in Alfortville, he hadn’t mentioned any problems, and I had hoped his situation was improving. He had carried his burden alone to the end. His farewell message was wordless and it was for me alone, a last secret between us.

The next day Father Avedis came to the apartment to preside over the home service. Barkev’s mother had insisted on all three offices: the home, the church, and the cemetery services, and not only for Barkev but also for Zaven, who according to her had never been properly laid to rest. I didn’t think Barkev would have wanted all this, but he would have shrugged and gone along for his mother’s sake. And, as my father pointed out, funerals were for the living and not the dead. The open casket was in the front room. All the injuries, I had been told, were on his torso, where they didn’t show, except for a small bruise on his right cheek. His face was smooth and he looked younger than he had in a long time. All the worry was gone, and all the memories erased. No more nightmares. No more trembling hands. His war was over.

After the liturgy at the cathedral, we made the trek to Père-Lachaise. The sun was pitiless, and the climb up the hills of the cemetery left me panting and sticky with sweat. Barkev was to be buried not far from Auntie Shakeh. On the simple gravestone, the names and dates were carved:

Barkev Kacherian, b. 1922–d. 1946

Zaven Kacherian, b. 1924–d. 1945

After the forty or so black-clad mourners reached the gravesite, Father Avedis intoned the ritual hymn.

Let Your loving compassion flow over me. Wash my sins from Your spring of life. O wise Physician and Architect; our Hope and Savior, heal the sickness of my soul.

I was transported back to the cold, snowy day of Auntie Shakeh’s funeral and remembered how, when I had slipped on the steps, Zaven had caught me by the elbow. A wave of sorrow swept over me like nausea and I closed my eyes.

The period of ritual mourning at the Kacherian apartment was like being locked in a dark, airless closet. In the morning I put on a black dress and black stockings before going out to the kitchen, where my mother-in-law had already started the day’s weeping. Virginie poured tea for her mother and handed her a plate of toast, which her mother wouldn’t touch. Shushan Kacherian’s despair was a flood that drowned everything in its path, so I tried to spend as much of the day as possible in the bedroom. From there I heard the voices of the visitors and the muffled sounds of crying. Feet shuffled in and out of the apartment as neighbors brought casseroles, stews, and other dishes. I played with the baby, who was miraculously sunny, and when he slept, I tried, with little success, to read one of a stack of books Paul Sahadian had borrowed for me from the municipal library.

I came out of the room at mealtimes and put some of the tasteless foods into my mouth because it was important to keep my strength up for Pierre.
Poor baby,
I thought.
Trapped here in this apartment with all these weeping women.
It was late September—the beginning of autumn—and it would have been pleasant, although inappropriate during the period of mourning, to take him for a stroll to the park.

One afternoon I dared to push the perambulator around the corner to visit my mother.

“Oh, honey,” my mother said, “you don’t look good.”

“I’ll be okay.”

“I don’t know,” my mother said doubtfully. “You need to eat. You need some sun. I don’t like this custom for a young girl like you, or for the baby.”

“It’s day thirty-five. Only five more days.”

The next afternoon I took the stroller out again, stopping by my father’s shop, where I was lucky to find him alone—no customers, and Paul was off on an errand.

He asked, “How is Shushan today?”

“She is an endless fountain of tears. Grieving has become a full-time job.” I was surprised at the hard edge in my voice.

My father eyed me. “Are you all right, my girl?”

“It’s like I’ve been buried alive. And there is no room for my feelings because hers take up all the space. She doesn’t need me for anything—she has Virginie, thank God. Now that Barkev is gone, I’m just a burden to them. And I’m worried about the baby. Every time my mother-in-law looks at him, she starts crying. I think she hates me.”

“Why should she hate you?”

“It’s my fault her sons are dead. Maybe loving me is a curse. Or maybe she resents that I’m still aboveground when they are not.”

“I will talk with them. You should come home.”

“Do you think they’ll let me? What will people say? She doesn’t want me to go to the park for fear of what people will say. It is like I’m behind a black curtain, and I can’t feel anything at all.”

“I have lived behind such a curtain myself. It was a time I don’t talk about, but maybe it will help you to know. During the Massacres, the Turks burned Moush to the ground, killing everyone they could with torture, with swords, with fire. And the ones that survived, they drove out. My father was killed, my grandparents, and my uncle’s whole family, so my mother took us, me and my brother, Missak, and two small sisters—they must have been about two and four years old—and we went with the other deportees from our town. I can’t tell you, I won’t tell you what I saw—I don’t want my words to live in your head the way these images are burned into mine. We walked, we walked, and we had next to nothing to eat. After two weeks, we were near the river and I saw a village in the distance. I told my mother that Missak and I would go try to find some food. Beg, steal, whatever. So I left her sitting on a rock near the river with those two little girls on her lap. One was called Arpi and the other was Nazani. We were gone maybe an hour and a half, two hours. When we came back with the bread—it was a miracle, we had managed to convince the village baker to give us half a loaf—the rock was empty. I asked people where my mother and the girls had gone, and no one seemed to know. Had Kurds kidnapped them? Had they been killed? Had my mother thrown herself and the babies into the river? We looked for them for days. Each place we stopped, I looked and asked for them. But we never found them.”

“Oh, Baba,” I said.

“Don’t cry, my girl. Rivers of tears could not bring them back. I stopped believing in God after what I witnessed. And just now, again, there was this war that made so much suffering. When I saw those pictures in the paper, I thought,
If those boys come back, those memories come with them.
Both heaven and hell are here in this world.

“Right now, you are lost, but you have a beautiful child. You will think about poor Barkev, who came back broken. You will remember also Zaven, how he once was so strong and full of life. And then you will go on. Because of Bedros, and because you are twenty years old with a life ahead of you. Because also you are my daughter, and if we are anything, my girl, we are tough and we are
jarbig.
”

“Clever or not, Babig,” I said, “I want to come home.”

F
OR CHRISTMAS, JACQUELINE GAVE
me a ginger kitten, a fuzzy thing with a pink nose and hazel eyes. By February, when Jacqueline and Alex came for a Sunday visit, the kitten had more than doubled in size, and her fur was sleek and shiny. I tossed the kitten a ball of green yarn that she batted around on the carpet while Pierre watched excitedly from my lap.

“What did you decide to call her?” Jacqueline asked, holding Alex, who was wearing a bib to catch his bounteous drool.

“We’ve been calling her Saffron.”

“That’s sweet. Why don’t you let the baby down on the floor to play with her?”

“He tries to grab her tail. Have you seen how fast he crawls? He moves like a beetle.”

“The cat can take care of herself,” Jacqueline said. “You watch.”

I put Pierre on the floor, and he made a beeline for the kitten, which quickly scampered under my father’s armchair. Pierre lay on his belly, grasping for the kitten that was just out of reach.

Pierre screeched in disappointment. I offered him a set of metal measuring spoons and a wooden rattle. He grabbed them both, one with each hand.

“I can’t wait for this one to crawl.” Jacqueline bounced Alex up and down on her knee. “He’s just started sitting up, but he falls over and hits his head on the floor. I put pillows around him, but he always seems to fall where the pillows aren’t.”