Dr. Odabashian listened to her lungs and thumped her back with his fingers. In response, Auntie Shakeh coughed and coughed, doubling over and spitting into her hankie. After she finished her fit of coughing, her eyes were ringed with red and her face was ashen. She looked haggard and suddenly ten years older.
When Auntie Shakeh went to the WC, the doctor informed my mother that her sister was suffering from tuberculosis.
“She’s likely been sick for a year or more. I’ve been seeing many of these cases. It’s the lack of nutrition and the miserable cold. No heat, no nourishment; it’s a wonder we’re all not half dead. If we could send her to the south, where there is sun and plenty of fresh air, and make sure she had lamb stew and fresh fruit, she would improve.” He shook his head.
“There isn’t anything you can do?” my mother asked.
“They have been experimenting with new treatments, but nothing I can yet recommend. I’ll give you some pain pills in case she needs them. They are hard to come by in the pharmacy.”
“How long?” my mother asked.
“It could be months; it could be weeks. It’s in God’s hands.”
My mother said nothing.
“Does she share a room with anyone?” he asked.
My mother nodded toward me. “She and Maral . . .”
“Is there someplace else the girl could sleep? I wouldn’t like to see Maral or anyone else in the family get sick with this. Be careful how you handle her linens.”
My mother made me promise not to tell Auntie Shakeh. “It’s better that she doesn’t know.”
On the way home, my mother told her that Dr. Odabashian thought everyone would sleep better if she had her own room. “All that coughing is so noisy and he doesn’t want you to worry about keeping Maral awake,” she explained.
We pulled out Claire’s mattress from where it had been rolled up under my bed and moved it to the front room. On the weeknights that Missak stayed at his job, I slept in his bed, and when he was home I slept on Claire’s mattress on the floor. But no matter where I lay, I could still hear my aunt’s coughing through the bedroom door. In the morning, Auntie Shakeh’s sheets were soaked with sweat, even though the apartment was stone cold.
My mother and I washed and washed—soiled sheets, pillowcases, hankies, and nightclothes. My hands were soon red and chafed. We hung wet laundry outside from the balconies and shutters, where they froze. Then we strung up the stiff forms in the kitchen, where they slowly thawed and dried during the hours the stove was hot. Finally my mother ironed them.
One Sunday afternoon when my parents went out to visit some friends in the neighborhood, and Missak was off with the Meguerditchian brothers, I sat in the bedroom on my old bed with books and notebooks spread around me while Auntie Shakeh lay nearby in her bed. I thought my aunt was asleep until I heard a small voice say, “Maral?”
“Yes, Auntie?”
Auntie Shakeh said, “It is not for man to talk about the day of his death. That is for only God to know. But I’m not afraid, Maral. I just worry about your mother. We have never been apart, not for one day in all our lives. We lost everything, but we had each other. I don’t know what she will do without me. You and Missak will watch over her, won’t you, sweetheart?”
Her pale, thin face was expectant. There were dark rings under her eyes.
“We will take care of her all the days of her life, Auntie. But you shouldn’t talk like that. We can’t do without you. Who will knit me new underwear?”
A tattered cough of a laugh came from her throat. “When this war is over,
anoushig,
you will have had enough of woolen
vardig.
You tell your mother I said she should buy you some satin ones with lace trim.”
As the winter progressed, my mother attended to her sister like a nurse. She made tisane and toast. She contrived to get a bit of meat for her, but Auntie had no appetite. My mother moved her sewing machine into the bedroom so the two of them could work together, and when Shakeh slept, my mother switched to hand sewing so as not to disturb her.
With my mother and aunt sequestered in the sickroom and Missak staying late at the print shop, I sat in the cold front room with my stacks of books and papers. At the end of the year, I would be taking the first part of the baccalaureate exams, and I had already begun to prepare. My father was ensconced in his armchair reading the newspaper, withholding his commentary in deference to my studies. He couldn’t stop himself from sighing and snorting in exasperation, but I ignored him. As hours went by, the wall clock dosed out the minutes like medicine.
Auntie Shakeh grew worse with each passing day. Soon she was coughing up blood, then she was unable to leave her bed without assistance, and she was even too weak to knit. Ignoring the doctor’s advice, my mother began to sleep in Auntie Shakeh’s room. From behind the door came intermittent sounds of the sewing machine and the long murmuring of their talk. It was as though the two sisters had gone together to a far-off country, leaving the rest of us behind.
In order to give my mother a little break and a few moments of fresh air, I sat with my aunt as she rested on her pillows. Her face was strained and tired, but she smiled wanly at me when I asked if she wanted to hear some neighborhood gossip.
So I started. “Madame Dupuy threw all her husband’s clothes out the window onto the street, pretty much on top of his head as he stood below. And she was yelling at him that he was a drunk and an animal and she was going to have the locksmith come and change the locks on the apartment. He shouted up at her that she wasn’t fit to be a wife to a dog and that he was going to throw her out and change all the locks himself. The whole neighborhood stopped on the sidewalk to watch.”
“You too?” Auntie Shakeh asked weakly.
I nodded. “A woman stuck her head out the window from the floor above Madame Dupuy and told them to shut up. Then the husband started cursing at the neighbor, telling her to mind her own business. The neighbor yelled that Dupuy should be locked up, and then Madame Dupuy told her she had no right to speak that way to her husband. Monsieur Dupuy gathered up his shirts, underwear, pants, and shoes and went back upstairs.”
“It’s not the first time,” Auntie Shakeh said, her breathing suddenly slow and labored. “Would you read to me,
anoushig
?” she whispered.
“What should I read?”
“Psalms,” she said. “Number Twenty-Three.”
I went to the dresser and found my aunt’s worn copy of the Armenian Bible. The spine was cracked, and the cover was held in place by a thick rubber band. On the black cardboard, there were traces of gold decorative flowers and scrolls that had been worn away by years of daily use. This was the book my aunt had used to teach me to read and write Armenian when I was a little girl. I pulled off the rubber band and opened the book, turned leaves that were as thin and brittle as onion skins. The pages were crowded with small spiky letters and punctuated by my aunt’s marginal notations in blue ink. I found the requested psalm and began to read.
It was a short passage, but before I reached the end, my aunt’s eyes were closed. I watched Auntie Shakeh sleep until my mother returned.
A few days later I opened the front door to Father Avedis, a priest I had known since my aunt first took me to the cathedral, when I was five years old. He was a kind man with a white beard, a large hooked nose, and eyes the color of Greek olives.
He said in his deep, raspy voice, “Don’t look at me like that, my girl. I’m not the Angel of Death. I’ve come to visit your aunt. And when will we be seeing you again on a Sunday?”
“I have so much schoolwork these days . . .”
He shook his head from side to side. “Excuses, excuses. I’ll be looking for you. Now let me go see how this young lady is doing.”
A half an hour later he and my mother came out of the room, both of them with somber faces. Once the door was shut, he said to my mother, “It is in the Lord’s hands.”
Later that week, early in the morning, my mother came to the kitchen, where my father, Missak, and I were taking breakfast. She said simply, “She has gone to her Maker.”
I began to cry, Missak’s face crumpled, and my father’s eyes brimmed with tears, but my mother stood before us with her eyes dull and empty. She turned and walked slowly to the bedroom she shared with my father. Without looking back, she closed the door behind her.
Dr. Odabashian arrived at midmorning and went into the bedroom, where he threw open the windows to the frigid air. After the doctor left, Father Avedis appeared and performed the house rite. It was decided that because of wartime scarcity and expense of transport, the body should be kept at home and not be transferred to the church before burial. My father, without telling anyone, had already purchased a small plot in the cemetery. Jacqueline’s mother and Zaven’s mother came to dress the body.
The next morning, Father Avedis, who was wearing stiff black robes and a black peaked hood, intoned the ritual prayers at the graveside. The trees were bare, the skies were gray, and our family stood there with the Kacherians, the Sahadians, and other friends as the snow began to slowly filter down over us. Father Avedis sang,
“The time has come for me to enter the womb of the earth .
.
.”
It occurred to me that Auntie Shakeh would think that the shawl of bright snow falling over the dark wood of the casket was beautiful. The pattern was as intricate as some of her handiwork. I imagined her looking down at us from heaven, where it was always springtime. The flowering trees were in bloom, and lambs gamboled across a sunny meadow. Auntie sat at Jesus’s right hand at a long table spread with a feast for the angels.
She had left us behind, and we were far from heaven. I thought about the chill apartment, the cold classrooms at school, the gnawing hunger that wasn’t sated by parsnips and rutabagas. Everything seemed dismal after Auntie’s death, and the war itself seemed like a dark and interminable winter. Every day, I walked to school past posters on the walls of Belleville and the Marais that announced the latest “criminals” shot in front of a stone wall outside a prison on the edge of the city, and the most recent bit of neighborhood treachery was that of a locksmith on the boulevard de Belleville who had turned in a Jewish family that had been hiding in the attic of his building.
I knew from looking at my father’s newspapers that life in Paris was easier than in London, or Warsaw, or any of the other cities where the war was more brutal in its daily habits. But what did any of this have to do with my aunt? Instead of grieving her loss, I was feeling sorry for myself.
After the service at the graveside, when the mourners filed down the icy stone steps to leave the cemetery, my foot slipped and I stumbled. Zaven, who I hadn’t realized was just behind me, caught me by the elbow and helped me regain my balance. I turned toward him.
For the few seconds that our eyes met, I forgot everything except for the pressure of his fingers on my arm. I saw the warmth in his eyes, his black hair flecked with snow, and the collar of his thin coat turned up so it grazed the sides of his face. A few bright snowflakes had caught on his dark lashes.
“Thank you” was all I said.
Amid a cluster of mourners, we walked down the hill as shovelfuls of frozen earth thudded onto my aunt’s casket.
Armenian women from the neighborhood arrived at our apartment carrying cloth-covered plates and steaming casseroles. They moaned and sighed in the front room while their men wandered in and out during the day as their vocations allowed.
It was left to me to go through Auntie Shakeh’s scant possessions. She had lived lightly on the earth, like a sparrow. I folded her clothes—a few plain dresses, some underclothes, two worn pairs of shoes made for her by my father before the war, the hand-knit sweaters, and a frayed cloth coat. She had never married or had children. I wondered if she had ever been kissed, if she had ever wanted more from life than being our spinster aunt. As I went through her belongings, I could see her sitting in the corner watching, her knitting needles busy as always. I heard her voice:
Don’t forget,
anoushig,
to put some mothballs in with the woolens when the spring comes. You don’t want to find them later full of holes.
I gathered up the items on the top of the dresser my aunt and I had shared, among them a hairbrush, a comb, a hand mirror, some hairpins, and the Bible. I put everything except the book in a suitcase and slid it under the empty bed. The Bible I placed in my own dresser drawer. Then I sifted through the knitting baskets, putting the small balls of leftover yarn into one bag and sorting the knitting needles into pairs. I stowed all this in the bottom of the small armoire in the front room, where my mother sat in silence.
For the forty days of mourning, my mother, dressed in black and with her hair pulled severely back from her face, sat in the parlor, her hands folded in her lap and her eyes straight ahead. She barely spoke and when she did, it was hardly above a whisper. When my father leaned toward her and said words into her ear, her face remained immobile. She made me think of a bell with no clapper.
One evening soon after the formal mourning period had ended and when my mother had gone early to her bed, my father sat in his armchair staring into the air. Missak hadn’t come home that night. I was, as usual, bent over my books, an old blanket my aunt had knit over my shoulders for warmth.
“Babig,” I said. “Can I ask you something?”
My father nodded.
“Do you think she’ll come back to us?”
“Give her time,” he said. “No one can sigh for forty years.”
He continued, “My brother also died of this disease, when we first came to Camp Oddo in Marseille. He was all the family I had. The rest had been killed in the Massacres. Just like your mother and Shakeh, my brother and I had been the only two left from our family.
“The two of us were sent to an orphanage in Jbail, where they trained us to make shoes. That’s where we met Vahan Kacherian. Then my brother and I took the ship to Marseille so we could find work and make a new life for ourselves. At Camp Oddo, he got sick, like your aunt. He was in the hospital, where he wasted to nothing, and there was nothing I could do for him. I visited him in the evening after work each day. One night when I came, he wasn’t in his bed, and the nurse told me he had died.