In addition to long conversations about food or its lack, dinner featured my father’s nightly diatribe against the
maréchal,
whom he referred to as “that lying goat.”
“It isn’t enough that the Germans are stealing our wine and chocolate—people can live without wine and chocolate, but now”—here he slammed his hand on the table—“that lying goat is letting them make off with our wheat and potatoes.”
My mother pleaded, “Be careful, you’re going to knock over the glasses. And not so loud.”
“You don’t think the Lipskis agree with me?” he shouted.
After the dishes were done, I sat at the table with my books in a stack beside me. Across the table, Missak scratched on his sketchpad with a pencil. In another corner of the room, my mother worked the foot pedal of the sewing machine, and its arm stuttered up and down, thrusting the needle in and out of the fabric. Auntie Shakeh’s metal knitting needles ticked against each other as a sweater grew from a fat, round ball of wool. The volume on my father’s radio was turned so low that he had to lean forward in his armchair to catch the words that were an indistinguishable murmur a few feet away.
I pulled out the slip of paper Missak had passed to me.
Missak slid another scrap across the table to me:
Get rid of that paper. And if there’s trouble on Monday, go to the cathedral.
At bedtime that night, my mother, aunt, and I were in the room that I shared with Aunt Shakeh. All three of us wore the white flannel nightgowns that my mother had sewn. My mother had let her long hair down from its tight bun, and it made a dark cascade on the back of the white gown. No matter how many times I saw my mother’s loose hair at night, there was always something shocking about it, as though my prim mother had turned into another woman. But her oval face remained domestic and familiar.
My mother took a seat behind me on the bed and started to brush out my long, heavy hair.
“Did the teacher give back the math exam?” my mother asked.
“Yes.”
“Top of the class?”
I said, “Denise Rozenbaum was number one.”
“Next time.”
“This year I haven’t bested her once. I need to study harder.”
My mother paused the brush. “You work hard enough already, my smart girl.”
Auntie Shakeh, who was sitting on the other bed, added, “Our girl is smart, and she’s beautiful.”
A snake of guilt lay coiled behind my ribs. They both thought I was their good, smart, beautiful, nice Armenian girl. However, not only was I jealous of Denise Rozenbaum, who was my best school friend, but I was hiding from them our plans to attend a student rally. I was becoming the
char aghchig,
the bad girl my mother had always warned me about.
At the breakfast table Monday, my father said, “I’d like you two to come by the shop this evening so I can measure you. Vahan Kacherian gave me some leather from his workshop, a little more than enough to make you boots, I think, unless your feet have doubled in size.”
“Eh, Babig, today is no good,” Missak said. “Tomorrow could work. Or Thursday I’ll be at the shop anyways.”
“And you?” my father asked me.
“Me?” I responded.
“Yes, you. Can you come by the shop after school?”
“Babig, she’s going with me to the library,” my brother deftly lied. “We’ll come by tomorrow.”
As she poured mint tea into my cup, my mother remarked, “You’re being quiet this morning,
anoushig.
Are you okay?”
Missak eyed me in warning.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“Are you sure you aren’t coming down with something?” My mother put a wrist to my forehead and peered into my eyes.
I lifted the cup of tea, turning from her gaze. “I’m okay. I’m just tired.” I was relieved and saddened that she believed me.
That afternoon when I exited the wooden portals of the lycée, Jacqueline was waiting across the street. I noticed that her wrists were sticking out of the sleeves of last year’s winter coat. Jacqueline Sahadian was the eldest of five children. Their father was a manual laborer, their mother took in laundry, and there had rarely been an extra franc, even before the war. Despite her too-small coat, Jacqueline looked stylish, with a royal blue tam at an angle on her dark, wavy hair, which she had cut to a fashionable chin length.
“Beautiful hat.” I fell into step beside her as we headed toward the Métro.
“I borrowed it from a girl in my typing class.”
“My hat was the wrong color, so I brought this.” I pulled a thick length of red ribbon from my satchel. Pausing on the sidewalk, I took off my hat, slid the ribbon under my thick, black braid, and made a bow at the top of my head.
“Let me fix that for you.” Jacqueline adjusted the ribbon so the bow was just above my left ear. “That’s better. But you really should cut your hair.”
“Denise cut hers last week. I’m the only one in our class with long hair. My mother says a woman’s hair is her crowning glory. And so on and so forth.”
“Is Denise coming?”
“I didn’t ask her. She’s too scared for this kind of thing.”
Jacqueline asked, “Are you scared?”
“If my brother and Zaven are going to be there . . .”
“Whatever the Left Shoe and the Right can do, the Right Glove and the Left can do,” Jacqueline answered.
These were the nicknames my father had for the four of us. Jacqueline, who was my best friend, had been in and out of our apartment since her mother had first allowed her to cross the street. Missak and Zaven, who were inseparable, had ranged the neighborhood with a gang of local boys since they were old enough to tie their shoes.
We went down the steps into the Métro, where the platform was thick with gray-green uniforms. When the train doors opened, people quickly pressed into the car. Jacqueline and I ended up seated between two German soldiers. I inched my foot away from a well-polished black boot on the floor. We sat in silence, staring at our laps, as the train rattled from one station to the next. I could see in my peripheral vision that the soldiers on either side of us were looking us up and down and winking at each other.
Suddenly, the soldier next to Jacqueline leaned toward her and said with a heavy German accent,
“S’il vous plaît, mademoiselle.”
Jacqueline turned away from him, grimacing at me.
I said in Armenian, “Pretend you don’t understand.”
“S’il vous plaît, mademoiselle,”
he repeated. After a brief pause he said it again.
“S’il vous plaît, mademoiselle.”
Jacqueline shook her head no and said to him in Armenian, “I don’t understand.”
He tried once more.
“S’il vous plaît, mademoiselle.”
Jacqueline muttered to me in Armenian, “He sounds like a parrot.”
“It’s probably the only sentence he knows in French. He tries it on all the French girls he sees. Let’s get off.”
The train pulled into the station and when the doors slid open, Jacqueline and I bolted onto the platform. We hurtled up the stairs, not pausing until we reached the street.
When I looked up at the Naval Ministry and the Hôtel de Crillon, I felt as though someone had knocked the wind out of me. The towering white facades were draped with scarlet banners scarred by black swastikas. The Germans rarely ventured into our neighborhood, and in the first months of the war, if you ignored the propaganda posters and the hunger, you could forget sometimes for a few hours that the city was occupied.
We walked along the Champs Élysées, where most shopkeepers were in the process of rolling down their metal shutters in anticipation of trouble. We saw dozens of girls walking arm in arm by twos or threes, many of them dressed in one of the colors of the tricolor flag. French police patrolled the boulevard, warning groups of young men to disperse and go home. There were also clusters of gray-green uniforms sitting in cafés and strolling along the avenue as though they were on holiday.
Jacqueline and I approached the Étoile and joined a stream of young people—thousands of lycée and university students—filing toward the Arc de Triomphe. A boy passing through the crowd with an armful of flowers wordlessly handed Jacqueline and me each a red carnation. Ahead of us, the monument dwarfed the tiny figures pausing to drop blooms at the foot of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
Spying a group of German soldiers lined up on the far side of the Étoile, I told Jacqueline, “Let’s stay at the edge and go around to the other side.”
It was the first time since the start of the Occupation that there had been such a gathering; public assemblies of any kind were forbidden. Jacqueline and I threaded through the crowd while more and more students poured into the Étoile, flocking toward the monument. I noticed that in our vicinity the boys outnumbered the girls by at least ten to one and that Jacqueline and I were among the youngest students there. I scanned the faces streaming past us, hoping to find my brother and Zaven, but I didn’t recognize anyone. More German soldiers arrived at the intersections of the broad boulevards leading to the circle, where they lined up in neat rows. As I surveyed the troops, I sensed that they were poised for action, merely awaiting the order. The tension rippling through their ranks seemed to me a warning, like the smell of ozone before a storm.
“Jacqueline,” I said, “we should go to the cathedral.”
She looked at me quizzically. “Now?”
Just then, German military vehicles roared into the intersection, some of them rolling onto the sidewalks, forcing pedestrians to scatter. Soldiers leaped out of their trucks and were met by others who came trotting in formation toward the crowd. Shouts of
“Les Boches!”
rose up from all sides. Within seconds students were running pell-mell away from the Germans, jostling and shoving one another in the panic. Jacqueline and I were in a cluster that moved as though pushed by invisible hands. But we were headed in the wrong direction, away from, not toward, the Armenian cathedral. Someone shouted
“Vive la France!”
and soon the call echoed around the vast roundabout. Then I thought I heard gunfire.
I grabbed Jacqueline by the hand, not wanting to lose her, and struggled mightily against the crowd that flowed around us. I pressed ahead until we made passage to a side street, where I paused to get my bearings.
“That way,” I said, pointing toward the rue Vernet.
As we started running, a boy raced by carrying two long fishing poles, one of which hit me in the head as he passed. When he turned to apologize, he bumped into Jacqueline, knocking her to the ground. I tripped over her legs, twisting my ankle as I fell, and landed beside her. The boy charged ahead, calling back over his shoulder, “So sorry!”
Jacqueline leaned forward to examine her knees. “Do you know how long I saved to buy these stockings? They’re ruined.”
“Oh, Jacqueline, there’s no time for that.” I stood up and pulled her to her feet.
On my next step, I felt my ankle buckle a little, but ran on despite the pain. When we reached the courtyard of the Armenian cathedral on Jean-Goujon, we doubled over and panted for air.
Jacqueline said, “My knees are skinned and my only pair of stockings are torn. Where are those stupid boys?”
I sat heavily on the stone bench, wincing as I took the weight off my foot. My heart was pumping wildly in my chest. “I’m sure they’ll be here soon.”
“What if they aren’t?” Jacqueline sat beside me on the bench.
“They will.” I untied the ribbon in my hair with trembling hands.
“What the hell was that boy doing with those fishing poles?”
I found out later that they were a reference to General de Gaulle, the leader of the Free French movement, whose surname was a homophone for the French words meaning “two poles.”
The courtyard was dark, the bench was cold, and my ankle throbbed. I had no wristwatch, and we may have been waiting only a few minutes, but it felt like hours. We could hear sirens wail in the distance. My gut was clenched like a fist. I chewed on the inside of my lip, imagining my brother and Zaven thrown into the back of an army truck with a dozen other students. In that moment it occurred to me for the first time, with all the wisdom of my fourteen years, that the Occupation might inflict more on us than inconvenience and hunger.
Jacqueline shivered. “God, I’m freezing.”
“Me too.” I turned up the collar on my coat.
Just then I heard the sound of churning gravel as my brother and Zaven sped into the courtyard.
Missak, puffing for air, spat angrily, “I shouldn’t have let you two come. We were in the middle of the crowd when they moved in and started grabbing people. We had to circle around to avoid getting nabbed ourselves.”
Zaven said, “They must have rounded up at least a couple hundred.”
“Crap.” Missak turned and vomited into the bushes, then wiped his mouth on his sleeve.
Zaven laughed. “Crap is right. We are up to our ears in their crap.”
Jacqueline retorted, “I don’t know what you think is so funny, Zaven Kacherian.”
“Let’s go,” I said. When I tried to stand, I groaned from the pain in my ankle and sank back to the bench.
“What’s the matter with you?” my brother asked.
“It’s my ankle. I tripped.”
“Can you stand?” Zaven asked.
“Maybe,” I said.
Missak kicked the gravel and cursed under his breath. He knelt down to examine my ankle.
I winced. “Not so hard.”
He said, “It’s not broken. Do we have anything to bind it?”
“Give me the ribbon.” Jacqueline wrapped it tightly around my ankle like a bandage.
Zaven said, “Put one arm around my neck, and one around your brother’s.”
We slowly made our way along the dark street. Zaven’s cheek was close to mine and I could feel the muscles in his shoulders shift under my arm. But I needed to focus on keeping the weight off my ankle. I feared that we might run into a German ambush around the next corner. There were echoing footfalls on the opposite sidewalk, but we couldn’t make out anything more than dark figures. Finally we filed down the Métro stairs at Alma-Marceau. The train was packed with soldiers dressed in gray-green wool uniforms with shining silver buttons, their guns in leather holsters. There were no seats available, so Jacqueline gestured at my bandaged ankle and said to one of the Boches,
“S’il vous plaît, monsieur.”