Dreams of Bread and Fire (20 page)

The Massacres had never been explained to Ani, but she knew from bits of conversation she wasn’t supposed to have heard between her mother and grandfather and occasional vague references from her grandmother that in the old country the Turks had murdered lots of Armenians and forced even more to leave their homes. But no one was supposed to talk about the Deportations, especially not in front of Grandma.

Mr. Norabedian declined the pastor’s offer of ascending to the pulpit and stood instead on the same level as the pews at the front of the church. He was a thickset older man in a gray suit. His thinning hair was grizzled, his skin was ashen, and everything about him was gray. Even his stiff, craggy voice had smoke in it as he started to speak.

In 1915, the Turks came into our house and said to my father, Give up your God and we will let you live. But my father wouldn’t give up his Jesus, so they threw him in the fireplace in front of us—my mother, my grandparents, me and my sisters and brother—and they burned him alive. And the Turks held my mother and made her watch her husband burn. When I saw my father die I wanted to tear the eyes from my head.

Mr. Norabedian’s voice broke and tears began to roll down his face, but he kept talking over the moans of the old women in the front pews.

He said, But my eyes saw more. The Turks used bayonets to cut babes from the bellies of pregnant women and then tossed the bloody babies into the air and caught them on the ends of their bayonets. This was a game and they laughed. They tied young girls to trees and raped them, one man having his way after the next, until the girls were torn open and bleeding to death. I still hear them screaming.

Tears streamed down his craggy face. He went on.

Some girls threw themselves into the river. Some mothers threw their children into the rushing water and jumped in after them. Better to go to God than to be defiled by the Turks or die like a dog by the side of the road. The land ran red with our blood.

Ani was glad that the small children were downstairs in the Sunday school room because these stories might give them nightmares. Next to Ani her cousin Mike was doodling with a small pencil on a collection envelope. He had drawn a row of bayonets. Ani gazed at her grandmother’s small pale hands, which were clenched tightly in her lap. Then the girl glanced up at the old woman’s pallid, stonelike countenance.

Ani turned away, blinking rapidly. She didn’t think Grandma should be hearing what Mr. Norabedian was saying. His voice kept spilling out the horrible story and wouldn’t stop. After a while it sounded like a saw rasping through wood. She stared at the white numerals on the hymn board and repeated the numbers: 115, 89, 236, 115, 89, 236.

Finally they did sing hymn number 236.

Then, as he did each week, the pastor blessed the congregation with these words:
Now unto Him that is able to keep you from falling and to present you faultless before the presence of His glory and with exceeding joy, to the only wise God our Savior, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever.
Amen.

Ani repeated the phrases in her head. To keep you from falling. To present you faultless. Falling. Faultless.

“Ani? Are you listening?” Van asked.

Sliding his feet onto the mattress, Ani crawled to the other end of the bed and took his head into her lap. “Sorry. I was thinking about something. What did you say?” She applied pressure to his temples.

“I said it’s like the culture and language were pulled up by the roots and tossed into the desert to wither away. The plan was to exterminate the Armenians, drive out the Greeks, and assimilate the Kurds. Only the last was unsuccessful. So now they’re razing Kurdish villages. According to government policy there are no Kurds, only ‘mountain Turks.’ You can be thrown into prison for speaking Kurdish.”

Ani heard what he was saying, but his words dropped through silent air until they hit bottom with distant echoing splashes.

Van stopped talking.

She said, “My grandmother used to tell me about angels and spirits. Satan was a fallen angel. In the old days there were
devs
as big as mountains that came out at night to make trouble. There were evil spirits that liked the dirt in corners, which was why you had to sweep carefully. There was a hearth angel who lived in the fire. We didn’t have a
toneer
or an
ojakh,
so I thought the angel lived in the pilot light of the stove.”

As she talked, Ani slowly massaged Van’s face, pressing deeply into his tense jaw muscles until she felt them begin to slacken.

She continued. “There was a small blue and yellow flame inside the oven that burned night and day. Sometimes I would open the oven door and peer into the hole to check on the flame. As long as that pilot light was burning I knew nothing bad could happen in our kitchen. I also believed that my pink blanket had magical powers to protect me from Satan. I would pull the blanket over my head at night before I fell asleep so that not even the tip of my nose was showing.”

Finally Ani lay down beside him and listened to his breathing as it grew deep and regular until she drifted off herself.

It seemed like five minutes later that the alarm went off. Van reached across Ani to slap the clock quiet, then pulled her closer.

“Sleep some more,” he murmured.

Ani rested her head on his shoulder. A minute later she rolled over and looked at the alarm clock. “Oh, shit. It’s almost seven. I won’t have time to shower and change.”

She jumped up, pulling on her skirt, and nudged Van with her foot. “Come on, get up. The door’s barricaded. We have to move the furniture.”

When Ani arrived in the Bartons’ kitchen Sydney was lining up the pancake ingredients on the counter.

“Your hair is sticking up on one side and it’s flat on the other,” the little girl observed.

Ani told her, “It’s called bed head.”

“You have a new hairdresser?” Sydney asked slyly.

“You’re too smart for your own good, little lady.” Recognizing that the sentence and tone came straight from Violet Silver’s repertoire, Ani laughed.

The following weekend the Bartons were away. Van arrived on Friday night with a day pack and a toothbrush. They cooked meals in the palace kitchen and made forays to the local greengrocer, cheese shop, and bakery for supplies. On Sunday evening when they emerged at dusk to seek out dinner there was a guy lurking in the passageway near the front entrance.

“Van,
hos yegoor,
” he said, in a gravelly voice. Wearing a black leather jacket and jeans, he had a beard and mustache and looked to be in his mid-twenties.

Van told Ani, “Wait for me in the garden. I’ll be three minutes.”

“Van!” Ani protested.

“Go on, please. Hratch is a friend. I have to talk with him and then we’ll go.”

Ani glanced at the guy and shrugged. “Okay.”

Hratch addressed her in a brighter tone. “
Kisher pari,
Ani.”

She reluctantly walked through the passageway to the garden, where she righted a metal chair and sat in a pool of light spilling from the nearby arcade. Ani didn’t like that Hratch knew not only her name but also where she lived when she had never even heard of him. As a matter of fact, she didn’t know any of Van’s friends, except for Pascal and Isabelle. He didn’t know any of her friends either. They met each other in a separate world outside of her daily contacts at work or school.

It seemed like a lot longer than three minutes before Van appeared.

“Come on,” he said, lacing his arm through hers. “I’m hungry.”

“What was that all about?”

“He was trying to get in touch with me all weekend.”

“Give him my phone number, will you? All we need is for the concierge to see him skulking in the alley like that.”

The next morning after Van had padded out to the hall for his shower, Ani went for his pack. It had been in the back of her mind to do this since she had searched his wallet. Out of a front compartment she pulled Van’s U.S. passport and a pocket spiral notebook filled with Armenian words she couldn’t decipher. She reached into the main section of the pack, pushing his clothes to one side. Toward the bottom her hand brushed a zipper on the back inside face. From this hidden pocket she extracted a small booklet. It was a Cypriot passport with a white slot in its dark blue cover. The name on the outside was Yannis Antoniades. The photo inside was of Van.

There were any number of reasonable explanations for why Van had false papers, although Ani couldn’t think of them at the moment. She could just ask him, Hey, Van, why do you have a passport in the name of Yannis Antoniades? When he questioned her about how she had come across this item, she would answer, Oh, I was sweeping the floor and by accident I knocked over your pack and the false passport fell out.

She remembered how grim-faced he had been when the cops had pulled them over outside Lyon. Was he a drug runner? Wasn’t Marseille some kind of drug hub? She remembered the unspecified “errands” he had done in Marseille and in Ajaccio. But she couldn’t believe that Van—who didn’t drink alcohol, who disdained cigarettes, who lived an austere life in a tiny rented room—could possibly be a drug dealer.

Then what the hell was he doing with a false passport?

She replaced the booklet, arranging his pack exactly as she had found it. She would say nothing, but she would monitor him closely with the invisible threadlike antennae of her doubts.

there is life like iron and there is life like silver

ARAA
, that’s where Van said he worked. The Armenian Refugee Aid Association. How would that read in French? Association pour l’Aide aux Refugiés Arméniens? Ani paged through the telephone directory in the central post office until she found the listing.

As she dialed, Ani decided that if Van answered the phone she would hang up immediately, but there was no answer. At least there was such an organization with an office in Paris. Since Ani had found the Cypriot passport she had begun to worry that nothing he told her was true.

Ani had scrutinized his face for signs of deceit. But there didn’t appear to be anything counterfeit about him. He seemed genuine. Was it a facade behind which another life—another Van—existed?

She wished she had access to some pot. Most of the time that she smoked—always with Asa—it had made her feel like a chipped teacup on an empty shelf. Occasionally, though, the altered habits of perception it provided had been enlightening. Everything was a half inch off-kilter, nudging ordinary sights, smells, and sounds into strangeness. One time she was able to watch and listen to beautiful, outwardly invulnerable Asa and hear not only the words he was saying but also the anxieties and insecurities that lay behind them. It allowed Ani, if only briefly, to recognize the power she had over him.

Knowledge is power.

While on the ferry from Corsica, Van had said, Knowledge is a kind of power, but force is also power. You can know many things and not have the ability to alter them because they are braced by violent force.

What gives true power? Ani had asked.

A gun, Van had said, jokingly aiming and siting his finger at her temple.

Ani’s Van was a kaleidoscope of memories and images, starting with their first meeting when they were small children. His smile burned like a candle’s flame in a dark chapel. His touch melted her as though the scaffolding inside her body were made of wax. She had refused to allow the gesture of a gun to her temple be a part of how she understood him. But now she found herself resifting his words, especially the ones she had pushed aside.

She wouldn’t see Van again until the end of the week. She was grateful for the machinery of daily life that kept her occupied—lecture, seminar, and dance classes. Through it all, though, her thoughts of Van were like a string of beads she worried in a jacket pocket. Late on Friday night long after Sydney had fallen asleep, Van finally arrived in the front hall of the Bartons’ apartment carrying a duffel bag.

Ani rested her head on his shoulder and breathed in. She sighed deeply, his presence dispelling her frantic doubts.

Van laughed. “What do I smell like?”

“Spices of the Orient. Earth in Baba’s garden. October apples.”

“As long as it’s not unwashed gym socks, I guess we’re okay.”

She sent him upstairs to wait for her.

When the Bartons swaggered in several hours later Tacey’s lipstick was smudged and John’s face was florid.

“Sorry we’re late, Ani.” With her words, Tacey blew a puff of whisky breath into Ani’s face. “First of all, the play was dismal. Lots of nonsensical screaming and dashing around the stage. If it had to be modern they should at least have been naked. But no, they wore these hideous costumes. Then there was dinner and then these clients dragged us off to a bar and we lost all track of time, right, Johnny?”

He was already halfway up the stairs to the second floor. “Shut up, Tacey, and come to bed.”

She dramatically whispered into Ani’s ear, “If it wouldn’t mean losing all my credit cards, I think I’d divorce the bastard.” She put her hand over her mouth in a theatrical gesture and laughed raggedly.