All the Light There Was (12 page)

“That tickles.”

“Don’t move,” Barkev said.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Lift your foot.”

I followed his instructions, and he wrapped the tape measure around the ball of my foot, his fingers warm on my skin. Then he made notations on the side of the cardboard.

“Done,” he said. “I don’t know why your boyfriend didn’t do this.”

When Zaven and I left the apartment a few minutes later, I said, “I don’t think Barkev likes me.”

“Either you’re joking or you’re blind,” Zaven said.

“What?”

Zaven shook his head. “As smart as you are, you can be pretty slow. You want to go to the park?”

The weather had warmed, and our favorite place had become the Buttes Chaumont. That spring we spent hours exploring the park—its artificial lake and waterfalls, the grottoes and the hanging bridge. Each Sunday we went, another kind of flower had burst forth: daffodils gave way to hyacinths, which were followed by scarlet tulips. The ornamental fruit trees put on their show, the bright petals drifting down like confetti onto the lawns and sidewalks. I hated to leave as dusk approached. At that hour, the trees were alive with birds calling to one another while the sky moved through darker and darker hues.

One Sunday afternoon it started to rain, and we took refuge under an enormous beech tree with deep purple leaves, sitting with our backs against its smooth gray trunk. Zavig put his arm around me and I leaned into him, resting my head on his shoulder and watching the rain falling beyond the sheltering canopy of the tree.

I said, “It’s like a house under here. This is our parlor. We need some chairs and a table.”

“Where would we plug in the radio?” he asked.

“No radio. We don’t want any bad news in this house.”

“What will we eat?”

“The kiosk will be our dining room, and the servers will bring us trays of ice cream and tall glasses of mineral water with almond syrup.”

“Sounds too sweet.”

“Do you want a beer?”

“Sure.”

“Okay, a beer, then, and a cheese sandwich.”

“Ham and cheese.”

I added, “And chocolate cake for dessert.”

“Don’t talk about food. My stomach is rumbling,” he said.

“You know,” I said, rubbing my cheek against the softness of his worn cotton shirt, “you smell good. Like damp leaves in a garden on a rainy day.”

He laughed. “That’s the dirt we’re sitting on.”

“You’re so romantic,” I said.

“And yet you like me anyway.”

I looked up at him. “When I was little I decided that I was going to marry you, but I knew that if I told Missak, he would laugh at me. And I thought maybe you would laugh at me too, and so in my head I told you off.”

“You had a fight with me that I didn’t know about.”

“Yes, but then we made up. And I still wanted to marry you.”

“Well, let’s get married then.”

My heart swooped inside my chest.

“How does that sound?” he asked.

I answered carefully, “It sounds perfect. But I won’t be seventeen until next month. And I have another year of school and another round of exams . . .”

“There’s no rush,” he said. “Your education is important.”

“You know, since I started lycée, when I was eleven, I’ve always felt proud to be working toward my bac. But I’ve never been able to imagine what I might do after.”

“No idea?” he asked.

“I’ve always wanted to get married and have children. And sometimes I thought I might go to the
école normale
and become a teacher.”

“I can see you at the front of the classroom. Mademoiselle Pegorian. Or Madame Kacherian.

“Look,” he continued, turning to pat the tree, “see all the lovers who have been here before us.”

The silver trunk was scarred with initials. He pulled a penknife from his pocket and carefully carved in the bark
M.P. + Z.K.,
surrounded by a heart.

I ran my fingers over the rough edges of the letters. “These trees can live for hundreds of years.”

“And our initials will still be right there, and you’ll still be mine.”

In the days that followed, as I sat in the classroom, my mind strayed to this moment under the tree. In the back of my English notebook I wrote a list of names:
Maral Kacherian, Madame Maral Kacherian, Madame Zaven Kacherian,
and
Maral Pegorian Kacherian.
I copied them in long columns from the top to the bottom of the page. In the margins, I drew hearts around our initials, like the image Zaven had carved into the tree. Then I decorated the empty spaces with birds and flowers.

I was staring dreamily at this page in class when my English teacher tapped me on the shoulder. “I don’t believe that will be of any use to you on the examination you will take in a few short weeks.”

I quickly closed the notebook, my face flushed with embarrassment. “I am sorry, Mrs. Collin.”

“Girls your age often find it difficult to strike a balance between study and romance. But I would suggest for the next few weeks you focus on the former. You are an excellent student and it would be unfortunate if you didn’t perform as well as you ought.”

When I got home that evening, I carefully tore the thin page out of the back of my notebook and slipped it beneath the stack of cards and mementos I stored in my bureau’s top drawer. Then I went to the table in the front room, where I spread out my study guides and notebooks and got back to work.

Z
AVEN AND I SAT
on a bench under a plane tree in the Parc de Belleville. The sprawl of city buildings shimmered in the bright summer sun.

“I can’t believe exams are over,” I said.

“How does it feel?” he asked.

“Like I’ve been walking around for months with a sack of bricks over my shoulder, and now that it’s gone, I might just float up to the clouds.” I shaded my eyes to look into the sky. “Except today there are no clouds. And it won’t really be over until the results are posted.”

“You’re at the top of the class.”

“Denise was always first. If she were still here, her name would be above mine on the list. I wonder where she is right now, and her parents, and Henri. And the Lipskis.”

Zaven frowned. “This war is crap. And now with Barkev called up for the STO . . .”

Barkev was scheduled to take a train from the Gare de l’Est; he was in the Germans’ new mandatory work program, the
service du travail obligatoire,
or the STO. All Frenchmen aged twenty to twenty-two were required to go to Germany. Exceptions were made only for those involved in agriculture and other essential industries, although the wealthy and the well connected would surely manage to find ways around it for their sons. Thankfully, Zaven and Missak were too young to be called up.

“Barkev won’t go,” Zavig said flatly.

“What will he do?” I asked.

“Disappear. I’m thinking of doing the same.”

I knew as soon as he said it that the decision had been made. The ground beneath my feet dropped away. “Where would you go?”

“Out of the city. Or into hiding.”

“You’ve been considering this for a while?”

He rubbed his forehead. “Yes.”

I didn’t say anything.

He said, “It wouldn’t be for long. The Germans are losing. It’s only a matter of time.”

“You and my father are optimists.”

“You think Barkev should make guns for the Nazis?”

“No. But that doesn’t mean you have to run off with him.”

“It doesn’t feel like a choice,” he said.

“I saw in the paper the other day—on the same page as the questions from this year’s bac—a message from the editor about the STO. His recommendation, of course, was to obey the call. According to him, murderous Communists run the Resistance. One day they will turn their arms against France as part of the international Communist revolution. It’s odd that they printed that. I would think they would worry it might put ideas into people’s heads.”

He said nothing.

I asked, “Are you going underground?”

His silence was an answer.

“You promise you won’t leave without saying goodbye?” I asked.

“This is goodbye,” he said.

I stiffened as he put his hand on top of mine.

“What does your mother think?”

“My parents agree that Barkev shouldn’t go to Germany. I haven’t told them about myself. I probably shouldn’t have told you, but how could I not tell my fiancée?”

“I never said I would marry you.”

“Yes you did!”

“Well, if I did, I’m having second thoughts.”

“Don’t be like that, Maro,” he said. “Don’t make it harder than it already is.”

That night I couldn’t fall asleep. I lay twisting in my bed thinking about the terrible fates that might await Zaven and Barkev. Finally I sat up, turned on the lamp, and found my fountain pen. I didn’t want to use the cheap wartime paper that filled my notebooks. Thin and gray, it ripped easily under the nib, and the ink bled so that the letters blurred. I rifled through the cards and notes in my top drawer and plucked out an old sketch of me that Missak had made on sturdy drawing paper. On the back I wrote:

Dear Zavig,

Please forgive me for being so disagreeable. Please come back soon. I’m waiting for you.

Maro

Feeling a little foolish, I drew a heart with our initials in it at the bottom of the page, and I put the message into an envelope that I slid in the Kacherians’ letterbox the next morning.

When Missak came home the next Sunday, I asked if he knew where Zaven and Barkev were.

He answered, “They’re gone.”

“Are they still in the city?”

He shrugged.

“I wish I could throttle all of you! Then I wouldn’t have to worry about the Germans doing it first.”

“I have something I’ve been meaning to give you,” he said.

I trailed behind my brother to the front room. He pulled out his sketchbook and opened it to the back, where there were several loose sheets. He sorted through them, selected one, and handed it to me.

I looked down at the drawing Missak had made of Zaven and me at the kitchen table during the afternoon of the snowstorm. Zavig’s face was handsome and full of life. I remembered the details of that afternoon—the downy feathers falling from the sky, the troop of neighborhood friends, the snowball fight, and drops of red blood in the snow. It seemed a world away.

“Remember how you both wanted the picture?” Missak asked. “You both blushed.”

“We were so young,” I said.

“You’re still young, sister. It’s just the war that’s old.”

T
HE REST OF THE SUMMER
was like a dry crust of bread too hard and stale for a sparrow. I took up knitting for Auntie Shakeh’s old boss, sitting in the stuffy apartment making fine-gauge wool sweaters. My mother was in the same room running up vests on her sewing machine and doing the finishing by hand, still wrapped in wordless sadness. For the months that I had been focused on Zaven and exams, I had not felt the full weight of my mother’s gloom. Now that we worked in a shared space for hours each afternoon, it was almost crushing. If I asked a question, my mother would give a monosyllabic answer, and then the room would again fall silent except for the sound of the machine and the clicking of the needles. During the month of August, the front room felt like an airless tomb.

One afternoon, I wanted to escape, so I told my mother I was going to see if my father needed any help. She nodded and turned back to her work.

When I arrived at the shop, the front counter, where a jumbled pile of shoes had accumulated, was untended. My father was visible in the back at his workbench hammering at a heel. Paul Sahadian, Jacqueline’s fifteen-year-old brother who had started as an apprentice when school let out, was at the finisher polishing shoes.

“Anything I can do to help?” I called over the whirring of the motor.

My father paused in his work and pointed with the hammer toward the broom standing in the corner.

I swept the floor in the front of the shop. There was no more talk here than there was at home with my mother, but at least it was alive with noise and industry. I worked my way to the back and, careful to stay out of the way of my father and Paul, swept up the sawdust, bits of wood, scraps of leather, and bent nails. Paul looked at me and grinned as he grabbed another pair of shoes to polish. He had grown tall and thin, but his ears were still like sugar-bowl handles.

“So now you’re a cobbler?” I asked him.

“I’m learning. He’s a good teacher,” he said, gesturing toward my father with his head.

My father, who heard nothing, put down the hammer to run his thumb around a wooden heel, making sure the fit was tight. I glanced at my father’s hands, callused and stained with shoe polish in the fingers’ cracks and creases. It occurred to me that they were Armenian hands: whether repairing shoes, sewing, knitting, or drawing, our hands were deft and industrious. It was a national attribute. In Zaven’s case, his intelligent hands gave him an almost magical ability to repair any machine.

It seemed that every stream of thought led back to Zaven. I wondered where he was and what he was doing in the shadowy world I could only half envision. How long would I have to wait for him? Would he be back before the holidays? The tide had turned against the Germans—my father was jubilant when the Americans invaded Sicily, and he was sure that in Kursk on the eastern front, the Soviets were poised to defeat the Germans. But it didn’t seem to me that the war was anywhere near its end. I was already dreading another frigid, starving winter, and the idea of facing it without Zaven made it even worse.

When it was time to close the shop, Paul turned off the finisher. He and my father carefully wiped their hands with rags dampened with witch hazel. After they hung their aprons on hooks on the wall, my father switched off the lights. Standing on the sidewalk, I watched Paul use his full weight to drag the iron shutter down over the store window.