All the Light There Was (20 page)

A few minutes later, I sat on the bench in the courtyard of my building under the round moon’s harsh light. Long shadows moved over the ground and walls of the courtyard. Only the chirping of a few crickets in the bushes and the sound of an occasional passing car interrupted the stillness. Finally I trudged up the stairs to our apartment, thinking my family would all be asleep, but my mother was sitting in the front room in her robe with her long hair down.

“You shouldn’t have waited up for me.”

She sighed. “I couldn’t sleep.”

“I don’t really want to talk.”

“That’s okay. It’s past time for bed,” she answered wearily.

I went to my bedroom and lay on the bed fully clothed, silently repeating to myself,
Zaven is dead. Zaven won’t be coming back. Zaven is gone for good,
but the words were meaningless. My body felt hollow, as though it had been gutted of blood, muscle, bone, and all sensation.

No one woke me up the next morning so I missed my classes and didn’t get up until midday. The food my mother offered me at lunchtime appeared inedible.

In the afternoon, I went to see Barkev. His mother ushered me into the parlor, where he was sitting in the same armchair he had been in the day before, but he was wearing a clean shirt and he had shaved.

“It’s a beautiful day,” I said. “Should we go to the Buttes Chaumont?”

His mother objected. “You can’t walk all that way, Barkev.”

“Maybe not,” he said, looking apologetically at me. “Maybe the park around the corner would be better.”

We made our way slowly down the stairs, Barkev holding the railing and taking each step carefully as though he were unsure of his footing.

When we reached the bustling rue de Belleville, we paused, and Barkev said, “Everything here seems the same. Except for me.”

“You’ll soon be back to your same old self,” I said.

He glanced at me doubtfully. “Maybe.”

Seeing how tired even this short walk had made him, I said, “I’m thirsty. Why don’t we go to the café on the corner.”

So we settled at a table on the sidewalk after giving our order to the barman.

“Barkev,” I said, “is it okay for you to talk about what happened?”

“What do you want to know?” His voice was small and tight, as though he were bracing himself for a blow. The barman brought our coffee.

I wanted to know what had happened to Zaven—how and when he had died. I wanted to know what the camp had been like for the two of them, and how Barkev had managed to survive when his brother had not. But he wasn’t ready for all these questions, so I decided to start from the beginning with one simple query.

“So after you left Fresnes, you went to Buchenwald?” I asked.

“From Fresnes we went to Compiègne, and from there they put us onto a train to Buchenwald. Do you know what the word
buchenwald
means in German?” he asked. “‘Beech forest.’ You might want to take a holiday in a place with a name like that.”

I watched as he picked up his coffee cup, his hand unsteady, and brought it to his lips. He lifted his eyes to mine.

All the unspeakable images from the newspapers flashed through my mind. “What happened to Zaven?”

“There’s a short answer and a long one. He died of typhus in March.” He put down his cup.

“And the long answer?”

He said, “I’m not ready for the long answer. Maybe tomorrow.”

He picked up his cup again, but his hand was shaking so hard that he gave up and returned it to the saucer. “It’s strange about my hands,” he said, staring at them as though they belonged to someone else. “Often they are fine. And then, like just now, I have no control over them.”

I said, “You’ve got to have patience. It will take some time.”

“And if it doesn’t get better, what work will I be able to do?”

“I promise you, it will get better.”

He said, “Now you’re a fortuneteller.”

“No,” I told him. “But you’ve been making shoes since you were eight. You’ll be able to do that again.”

I accompanied him to the entrance of his building, but he didn’t want me to walk up the stairs with him. I think he didn’t want me to witness how difficult it was for him to mount the steps.

As I turned to go, he said, “You’ll come tomorrow?”

“I’ll stop by when I’m finished with classes.”

The next afternoon we made it to the Parc de Belleville and sat on a bench in the shade.

It was a brilliant spring afternoon. There were several small children playing in the sandbox with shovels and a pail, their mothers chatting nearby. An old woman sat on another bench with a grizzled mongrel in her lap.

Barkev said, “I’m still not ready to tell the long story. But I can give you the middle-size version.”

I nodded.

He started. “When we arrived at the camp, they asked what work we did. I said shoemaker. Zaven said small-appliance repair. It was bad luck they didn’t need another person to do what he did. I worked in the shoe-repair shop in the officers’ school. They put Zaven on the work crew moving stones, shoveling dirt, and grading roads. We had already been hungry for months, so after a few weeks of that work and the slop they gave us to eat, he was as thin as a stick. I had it easy with an inside job. The outside details were brutal. After three months, I was able to fix it so he was transferred to shoe repair. But he was already weak.

“When the weather turned, everyone started getting sick. We thought the war would be over by Christmas, but it wasn’t. The week after Christmas, dozens of guys died because they had given up hope. Later, Zaven came down with typhus. His temperature was so high he couldn’t sit up at the workbench. They sent him to what they called the infirmary. That was another German joke. It was a barracks where they put the sick on wooden boards to get well or die.

“I visited him in the evening. He wouldn’t eat. He might take a little water. Half the time when he talked he made no sense. The last night he was suddenly calm, and when he looked at me I could see the old Zaven in his eyes. He made me promise I’d go home for my mother and you.”

Barkev bowed his head. I noticed that his hands were clenched into tight fists on his lap.

He said, “A month later they liberated the camp.”

We walked slowly home and as we were parting, he asked, “Will you come again tomorrow?”

“Not tomorrow,” I said. “I have classes and then work at the library.”

“The next day?” he asked.

“Not until the weekend,” I said.

On Sunday afternoon, I noticed that Barkev was already looking less gaunt. His mother, my mother, and a few other Armenian women in the neighborhood were putting their concerted efforts into fattening him, believing that good food could cure any ailment.

He suggested that we go to the Buttes Chaumont.

“Are you sure that’s not too far?” I asked.

“I went there myself yesterday and the day before,” he assured me.

So we strolled slowly to the park and chose a bench under a broad chestnut tree near the entrance.

Barkev said, “When I told you what happened to Zaven, I left parts of the story out.” He pulled a grubby bit of dark yarn from his breast pocket and held it out to me with a slight tremble in his hand. “He made me promise to give you this.”

I took the yarn. It was no longer possible to tell what color it had been, and its strands were frayed.

“I knew it was important. It wasn’t easy holding on to anything in the camp, not even something so worthless that no one would want to steal it. How could I let him down and not bring this to you? Guys were dying all over the place up to the last hours before they liberated the camp, and even after.”

He stared down as he continued talking. “After Zaven died, I had this dream about you a lot of nights. You were standing in the cathedral lighting candles. Always you lit two candles—one for Zaven and one for me.”

He stopped here, an unasked question suspended in the air between us.

Then Barkev said, “Surviving was almost all luck. But even with luck, you needed something to keep yourself from giving up. Maybe it was a wife or a mother. Maybe not wanting to let the Germans win. For me it was this.”

He reached into his shirt pocket and held out with a steady hand a tiny pencil stub. The lead and eraser were long gone; the yellow wood was chipped and dented. It was the one he had used to trace my feet on cardboard that long-ago Sunday afternoon.

He lifted his eyes to me then, and they were dark and fierce in his narrow face. It was impossible for me to imagine saying no.

O
NE FRIDAY IN JUNE
, not long after my nineteenth birthday, my father dropped an envelope beside my plate at the dinner table. “A young man came to the shop today. He brought a pair of shoes for repair and left this for you.”

I instantly recognized the handwriting.

“Aren’t you going to open it?” my mother asked.

“Not now,” I said.

“He was polite,” my father said. “His heels were worn down, but they were good shoes.”

“If it was that Andon I met at church, he seemed like a nice boy,” my mother added.

Missak asked, “You met him?”

“Of course I did,” my mother said. “His family is from Moush.”

“When did you tell him the shoes would be ready?” I asked.

“Monday afternoon,” my father answered.

“Can you have them done tomorrow?”

My father shrugged. “If you want. He isn’t some kind of a suitor, is he?”

“Of course he’s not a suitor,” the mother said. “Maral’s engaged.”

“He’s a friend,” I said. “I gave him French lessons.”

“The same kind of French lessons you gave that American soldier?” Missak asked.

I elbowed him. “He was Armenian.”

“What American soldier?” my mother asked.

Neither of us replied.

Later, when I was alone in my room, I carefully unsealed the envelope and unfolded the sheet of writing paper.

Dear Maral,

If you should need to get in touch with me for any reason, you may reach me at my cousin’s shop. I can be found there during business hours each day except for Sunday. For the next three Sundays I will be at the service at the cathedral.

Your friend,

Andon

The address and phone number of the store, Tapis Shirvan, were printed at the bottom of the note.

That Sunday I entered the church carrying a brown-paper parcel. When I sighted Andon seated halfway up the nave on the left side, I became flustered and paused, trying to decide where to go. I walked slowly forward and slid into a pew on the right side a few rows behind him. When the congregation stood as the clergy’s procession made its way up the aisle, I watched him as he turned to scan the nave. His eyes passed over the crowd and he smiled when he recognized me. I had hoped I would feel nothing, but my heart beat suddenly faster. The chanting of the liturgy continued, with the congregants rising and sitting, and the incense burning, and it went on for what seemed like hours.

Finally the service was over, and I allowed myself to be pulled along by the crowd as it spilled out of the cathedral. I waited in the courtyard, anxiously smoothing my hair and straightening my skirt. Then, among the stream of gray parishioners, his handsome face appeared.

“Compliments of my father,” I said, holding out the parcel.

Andon took the package and untied the string. He lifted one of the shoes to examine the new heel. “But I must pay him.”

“My father won’t accept your money.”

“But I insist,” he said.

“No, my father insists.”

Andon bowed his head slightly. “Tell your father thank you for his kindness and that I appreciate his fine work. Would you care to go for a stroll? It’s a beautiful day.”

We walked along the Champs Élysées under clear blue skies and a dazzling sun. I almost wished it were raining. If rain were pelting down, Andon would have held up a large black umbrella. He would have taken my hand to help me across the flooded gutters.

“Well, my friend, it has been a long time,” he said.

“Very long,” I said.

“Your man did not return, but his brother did,” he said.

“How did you know?”

“News has no borders.”

“Did you also hear that I’m engaged?”

“In fact, I had heard this. But I thought perhaps you would come to tell me yourself, one friend to another. I wrote you the note hoping to give you such an opportunity.”

“My brother and my best friend, Jacqueline, announced they were engaged. The next day Barkev asked me to marry him.”

“And you said yes.”

“Evidently.”

“Evidently,” he repeated.

“My brother put his foot down—he didn’t want a church wedding. Jacqueline couldn’t convince him. Barkev didn’t care, and so the four of us will be married at the
mairie
on the same day.”

“When will that be?”

I hesitated. “In two weeks.”

“So soon?”

“Yes.”

“And you are sure this is what you want?” There was a tight smile on his face.

“Yes,” I said.

“Well, if you were not, I would offer you an alternative.” The smile was gone.

I said nothing and stared down at our shoes moving over the pavement.

“I must tell you, I was disappointed to learn you had substituted the brother without giving me at least an opportunity,” Andon said.

We continued walking in silence.

When we reached the Métro entrance, he shook my hand and looked gravely into my eyes. “I wish you the greatest happiness. Should you ever have need, you know how to reach me. Goodbye, my friend.”

“Goodbye,” I said.

After running headlong down the Métro stairs, I sat on the bench once again, letting several trains pass before I boarded a car to go home. I stared out the window into the hurtling darkness, seeing Andon’s face and then Barkev’s, and then Zaven’s. They flew by faster and faster, until the three faces blended into one. When I was a schoolgirl, I had believed that happiness was a question of finding one’s true love, the way it happened in so many of the novels I read. But as the train sped through the tunnel, I realized you could love more than one person at the same time, and that marriage was not just about love. It was also about duty.