All the Light There Was (15 page)

“But in that place I found a way to live, and there was only one. I lived in order to keep my younger sister alive. She would have died without me, you see.”

When she said those words—
you see
—she wasn’t looking at me. She was looking beyond me at something that was more real to her than the room we were in.

“But now she’s dead,” she continued, “and I have lost my reason to stay alive. Those times were unspeakable. They were unthinkable. And since Shakeh died, it’s all I think about, or fight not to think about. I believed I had kept her from dying, but in the end, I failed. She lay in that bed getting smaller and smaller until she was again a child. She was a small, sick orphan. And I failed her.”

I said, “You didn’t fail her. It was the war and disease that killed her. There was nothing you could have done.”

My mother stared down at her hands.

I spoke louder. “Please don’t ignore me. I’m listening. Talk to me.”

My mother said nothing, her face a mask of grief.

“Mairig, I need you to come back. I need you. Do you hear that? And before she died, Auntie Shakeh made me promise that I would take care of you. You won’t let me help you and you are pushing me away. Don’t make me break my promise to Auntie Shakeh. That would be failing her again.”

My mother’s eyes moved almost imperceptibly. I could tell that she had heard me.

“Let me take care of you,” I repeated. I left my chair and moved closer to her. I stretched out my arm and put my hand over hers.

My mother’s face fell and she began to cry. Once she started crying, it seemed that she would never stop. She sobbed with the force of her whole being, and I held her tightly, as though she were my own child.

M
Y PARENTS AND I
traveled by Métro to the cathedral for Auntie Shakeh’s
hokehankisd.
Jacqueline and her family joined us, as did the Kacherians and some other neighbors, the same group that had been at the cemetery one year before. Only Zaven and Barkev were missing.

The priest and the deacon recited their parts of the ritual for the dead. As the swinging gold censer filled the room with incense, we intoned our lines in response, calling on God to grant rest and mercy for the departed.
Der voghormia,
Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy. Have pity on the soul of Thy departed servant Shakeh Nazarian. Have pity on us all, and forgive the sins of the living.

As I repeated the words of the liturgy, I understood that one of the sins of the living was to be still alive when the loved one was no longer walking the earth. The priest sang to us that Aunt Shakeh was in the Heavenly Jerusalem, the dwelling place of angels. I wasn’t sure I believed in heaven, or in God for that matter. My father was an anticlerical atheist, as were Missak and Mr. Kacherian. They were at the church service out of deference to my mother. And with all my doubts, I came to the cathedral fueled by nostalgia for the childhood hours spent there with my aunt, who had been a devout parishioner.

In the days after the service, my mother seemed calmer and less burdened. For hours at a time, she was back to her old self. After that afternoon when the story and its grief poured out of her, she never spoke again of the ordeal in the desert. But I now recognized the expression that came over her face when she was thinking of it.

I started preparing for the exams I would face at the end of the school year, and, as my parents relied on my contribution to the household income, I continued knitting. I even grew used to Zaven’s absence. At first it had felt like running my tongue over the space where a tooth had been—always a little sore, always a little bit of a surprise to find the lack. But then the pain receded, and the gap was no longer unusual. Still, at night I lay in bed remembering our first kiss in the dark stairwell, or the rainy hour under the tree, or that last meeting in the bare attic room.

On Saturday afternoons, I often went to help my father and Paul close up shop. I washed the front window, swept the floor, and helped sort the shoes into their places on the shelves where they awaited repair or pickup. We pulled the iron shutter down over the storefront. When I was small, I had imagined that the minute that my father, brother, and I walked away from the shop, all the shoes sprang to life on the shelves. They talked to one another, their tongues wagging like busy gossips’ in the market. The kids’ shoes spoke in high, childish voices, the old-lady shoes had quavers, and the large men’s boots were gruff and loud. Now the shoes were still—silent as the city without cars, and dark as the streets in the middle of the war.

When Missak came home one Saturday a few weeks later, his expression was so grim that I could tell something calamitous had happened.

“What is it?”

“Zaven and Barkev have been arrested,” he said.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“I heard this afternoon. I just stopped by the Kacherians’ and they had received word as well.”

“Where are Zaven and Barkev?”

“They were at La Santé, but they’ve been moved to the prison at Fresnes.”

“What can we do?”

Missak said, “Visitors aren’t allowed, but I told the Kacherians I would take food and clothes to them early next week.”

“I’m going too,” I said.

“I’ll borrow the Kacherians’ bicycle, and you can take ours. It’s going to be a long, cold ride. And you’ll have to miss school.”

“Should we tell the parents?” I asked.

“We don’t need to tell them we’re going out there. Mairig is jittery enough.”

When my mother heard the news, she put her hand over her eyes and began to rock from side to side in her chair. “Our boys, our boys, they have taken our boys. What will become of them? What will become of us all?”

My father said, “They’re holding Manouchian at Fresnes as well.”

My mother turned to Missak. “You stay out of trouble, okay, my boy? Don’t do anything that would give them the idea to arrest you. Poor Shushan. Both of her boys.”

When Missak and I went to the Kacherians’ early on Monday morning to pick up the basket, Auntie Shushan was red-eyed from crying, as was Virginie. Mr. Kacherian was more stoic, but his face was ashen.

Auntie Shushan and I went into the kitchen so I could collect the wicker hamper they had packed: a jar of jam, a loaf of bread, a wedge of cheese, some long underwear, and two clean shirts.

“I wish we had more for them,” she said. “Do you think I should put in combs and toothbrushes?”

“They could use those,” I said. Then I pulled from my school bag two pairs of hand-knit socks: a dark green pair for Barkev and gray for Zaven. “I made these. And my mother sent pickles. Auntie, we didn’t tell my mother that we’re going, so please don’t say anything.”

Shushan Kacherian nodded in assent. She took the socks, rolling them carefully before adding them to the hamper. “You are such a good girl, Maral. I hope that you and Zavig . . .” Her eyes filled with tears. “Do you think they’ll let them go? Why both of them? Can you imagine what it has been like these past months, not knowing anything? But why am I saying this to you? Of course you know. He loves you, sweetie. He isn’t one to talk much about that kind of thing. But I know. I put a small note in the basket telling my sons that I love them. It’s in French so the police will know it is nothing bad. Virginie helped with the spelling. You should write something for Zaven too.”

Before Missak headed off to the printing shop with the basket and the Kacherians’ bicycle, we made plans to meet early the next morning. That evening I wrote and tore up a dozen notes to Zaven, imagining other people reading my words. Finally I settled on a simple message:
Dear Zavig, I think of you often and when I do, I can feel your thoughts are turned toward me as well. I send you a pair of warm socks and much love. Your Maro.

The next day, Missak and I set off on our bicycles to Fresnes. I wore long woolen stockings under my skirt, but the cold wind still bit at my skin. After a few miles of pedaling, I was hot with exertion, except for my fingers, which were numbed by the bike’s icy handles. We sped through the Porte d’Orléans and took the Nationale 20 to the town of Fresnes. We stopped at a café in the town’s center to ask for directions to the prison.

The prison itself was like a huge medieval fortress, with a high wall around it and rows of tall stone and concrete buildings within. We approached the front entrance and talked with a guard through a small window.

“We’re looking for Barkev and Zaven Kacherian,” Missak said. “We brought them a package from their family.”

“Kacherian?” The guard opened a large leather ledger and ran his finger down a page. “Ah yes, Kacherian. You can leave that package with me.”

“Is it possible to see them?” I asked.

He shook his head. “No visitors.”

We walked our bicycles toward the road.

“I just have to see him,” I said.

Missak didn’t reply.

“How can we come all the way out here without at least trying? I’m going to walk around the other side. Maybe it’s possible to glimpse something from the back,” I said.

“There are sentries in the watchtowers.”

“You wait here with the bikes.” I dumped my bike against his and took off at a trot before he could tell me no.

“Maral! Get back here!” he called.

I jogged the perimeter of the prison ten feet back from the high fortress walls so I could see over them, gazing up at the rows of windows along the buildings inside. They were covered with wire mesh and bars, and many of them were darkened so no one could see in or out. There must have been a thousand men in there, and among them Zaven and his brother. I sensed that it was a dreadful place, full of fear and hunger and suffering.

I paused for a moment and closed my eyes, conjuring up Zaven’s face. Not the lean, haggard countenance that was hidden away in the prison, but the face that he had turned to me as we sat under the tree in the park. He was close by—I could feel it.

So without even thinking, I shouted as loudly as I could, “Zaven! Zaven! It’s me, Maral. I’m here. I’m here. Zaven! Zaven!”

“You! Shut up!” a gruff voice barked from the tower above. The sentry was pointing a rifle at me. I took off at a gallop to where Missak was waiting.

I reached my brother and stopped to catch my breath. “Okay, we can go now.”

“That was the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen you do. You’re lucky he didn’t shoot you.” Missak swung his leg over his bike and pushed off for the long ride back.

That night I told my parents about the journey, and neither of them reproached me. For the week after that trip to Fresnes, I hardly slept, and when I did my dreams were nightmares set in the prison. I wandered up and down the dark halls, knocking on doors of cells that rang hollow. There were coughs and cries, but I never saw anyone. I heard weeping behind a door, but when I called, there was no response.

Now it was my mother’s turn to fuss over me, clucking her tongue and admonishing me to eat. She insisted that I drink hot tisane before bed so I could get some rest.

Several weeks later we heard on the puppet’s broadcast that Manouchian had appeared before a military tribunal at the Hôtel Continental. The headline of the paper on February 22 was “23 Terrorists, Almost All Foreigners, Condemned to Death.” We found out later from Zaven’s father that Manouchian and his men had been shot the previous day at Mont-Valérien. Manouchian had made a brave final speech that we were told had been broadcast on Radio Alger and repeated later on the BBC.

My father said, “With his last breath, he spoke like a free man. He died a hero and a patriot.”

Small consolation for his wife that he died a hero, I thought.

There had been no word from Zaven and Barkev. As far as the Kacherians could determine, their sons were accused of disseminating forbidden tracts, but at that point in the war, even being in the wrong place at the wrong time could result in deportation.

A few weeks later, one morning on my way to school, I saw red posters plastered on the walls of Belleville. Across the top was the question
LIBERATORS
? I stood in front of one of them, scanning the faces in the medallions on the poster: Manouchian, Alfonso, Rayman, Elek, Fontanot, Grzywacz, Wasjbrot, and the rest. There was a caption beneath each man describing him in terms of the despised group he had belonged to—an Armenian, a Red Spaniard, a Hungarian Jew, a Polish Jew, an Italian Communist, and so on—and noting how many attacks he had committed. Their faces were shadowed and puffy, probably from the beatings they had suffered at the hands of their jailers, and it made me sick with fear that Zaven and Barkev were being mistreated. Across the bottom of the poster it said
LIBERATION BY THE ARMY OF CRIME.
I knew the Germans wanted us to loathe them, these foreigners, immigrants, and Communists who had taken up arms against the Occupation.

But I didn’t despise them. They were our cousins and our martyrs. At the end of the day, as I was on my way home from school, I saw that there were pyramids of flowers dropped at the foot of the wall under the posters. And the next morning I saw that on each red poster along the rue de Belleville, someone, in the dark of the night, had scrawled
Mort pour la France.

I
N THE SPRING, THE ALLIES
flew many bombing raids over France, but out of respect for Paris’s monuments, the targets were in the suburbs. Several times that season, the warning sirens blared in Paris, and we tumbled out of bed and headed to the air-raid shelter. The Sahadians were there, and Jacqueline and I spent the time whispering in a corner. One night in April, the sirens didn’t sound the alert until the bombs were already dropping, so my parents and I didn’t have time to go to the shelter; we stayed in the front room of our apartment while explosions thundered only a few miles away.

My father cocked his head to one side. “Sounds like it’s near La Chapelle.”

The next day, the newspaper reported a grisly 651 dead and 461 wounded. The factories at La Chapelle were damaged, and some bombs had gone astray and hit Montmartre.