Two of them leaped to their feet, gratified to show us a courtesy. These polite, deferential young men or ones just like them had, less than an hour earlier, charged into a crowd of unarmed students with trucks and jeeps, brandishing loaded weapons. Jacqueline and I sat while Missak and Zaven stood rigidly over us, their faces hooded with anger. Finally, when we changed train lines for the last part of the trip to Belleville, there were no more soldiers. The knot of fear in my belly released while my ankle began to pulse with pain.
We left Jacqueline at her building across the street from ours, and then Missak and I headed to our place, along with Zaven. When we reached the bottom stairs of our landing, where I could use the banister for support, Zaven said goodbye.
As we started up the flight, Missak whispered, “Don’t tell them anything. I’ll explain. You tripped on the curb when we were on our way home.”
“Do you think I’m a fool?”
“You’re not stupid, but you can’t lie to save your life.”
I put my hand on his arm. “Missak . . .”
“What?”
“I was afraid that you and Zavig had been arrested like all those others. What will happen to them?”
“There’s nothing we can do. Come on, up the stairs.” He gestured for me to go ahead.
When we entered the apartment, my mother and aunt were setting food on the table.
“Let me guess,” Missak said in Armenian, sniffing the air. “Turnips?”
My mother smiled grimly. “Turnips with—”
He interrupted. “Turnips with bulgur.”
I was awed that my brother could slip so easily into kitchen banter.
My mother and aunt noticed my limp, and there followed a good fifteen minutes of agitated clucking while the two of them attended to the injury with cold, damp towels. Missak explained how it had happened, and my mother and aunt were impressed at our good fortune that Zaven was on hand to help us get home.
We sat down at the table for dinner, my foot propped up on a stool, and I had a strange sensation as I listened to my father talk about the details of his day at work and heard my mother recount some bits of gossip reported by a neighbor while they were in line at the market. The words sounded as though they were coming from far away. I kept seeing the trucks rolling onto the sidewalk as students scattered in terror.
We are up to our ears in their crap,
Zaven had said. Crap, so much crap.
“Maral, I asked you a question,” my mother said.
“What did you say?”
“Are you sure you’re not coming down with something? You just don’t seem like yourself these past few days.” My mother put her hand to my forehead.
“I’m fine, Mairig, really. It’s just the ankle, and it was a long day at school,” I said. The second lie was easier than the first.
T
HERE WAS A SNOWSTORM
that first winter of the Occupation that marked for me the last day of my childhood. I think it was a Sunday; it must have been, because my father was home, or perhaps he had decided not to open the shop because of the inclement weather. I drew back the curtain in the front room and stared out at the downy flakes dancing on currents of air. Swirls of white dust blew above the snowy sidewalk, and tall drifts were forming along the street. The snow had been falling for hours and showed no signs of stopping. A thick layer of down camouflaged the uneven cobblestones, the overflowing trash cans, and the propaganda posters.
After lunch, Zaven came to our apartment. He joined Missak and me at the table, where I was working math problems and my brother was bent over his sketchpad. My father was in his armchair reading the paper, and Zaven’s presence inspired him to put down his newspaper for some verbal jousting.
In those days, my father and Zaven enjoyed a running semi-joking dialogue that ranged over the political philosophies that had cast the continent into misery: fascism, Nazism, communism, and socialism, with a detour through the various warring Armenian political parties. My father and Zaven agreed on their antipathy for Hitler, but my father loathed the Soviet leader, whom he referred to as Stalin the Assassin, just as much. My father was fond of ribbing Zaven about the pact between Stalin and Hitler, which had posed a dilemma for the Communists of France, including Zaven’s father.
I wasn’t following their banter, having heard it all before, but Zaven’s physical proximity, with his knee barely inches from mine under the table, was more interesting than the math problems. Meanwhile, Missak finished his sketch, tore it from the pad, and held it up.
“Any takers?” he asked.
It was a drawing of Zaven and me, and while I thought it was skillfully rendered, and a handsome likeness of Zaven, I was shy about asking for it right away.
After a brief pause, Zaven said, “My mother might want that.”
“I’ll take it,” I said.
Missak scrutinized the picture anew. “No. I like this one. I think I’ll keep it.”
By midafternoon, the wind had died down but the snow was still falling. Missak, Zaven, and I bundled into our winter clothes. As we raced out, my mother called after us, “Be careful that you don’t slip and break your necks! And be back before dark.”
We crossed the street to Jacqueline’s building. Mrs. Sahadian, a small, stocky woman wearing a flowered apron over her gray coat, leaned out the door of their apartment and said in Armenian, “Your mothers let you out on a day like this?”
“It’s beautiful outside, Auntie,” I answered. “Please tell Jacqueline we’re here.”
Mrs. Sahadian asked, “You want to come in?”
“No, thanks.” Missak pointed to the puddles forming around our boots.
She withdrew into the apartment, shutting the door against the draft.
Within minutes Jacqueline appeared with two of her younger siblings in tow: thirteen-year-old Paul, whose ears stuck out like handles on a sugar bowl, and twelve-year-old Alice, who was wearing a green wool hat that I had passed down to her. The three siblings had used twine to tie burlap over their school shoes.
We stopped at the Kacherians’ to collect Barkev and Virginie, who was the shortest by more than a head. Next we gathered the three Meguerditchian brothers, the two Kostas girls, and Denise Rozenbaum and her older brother, Henri. Under gray skies and a curtain of thick-falling snow, we returned to the side street near our building. I started rolling a snowball, and Jacqueline helped me push it when it got big. The other girls joined in, and soon we had three big snowballs that we stacked into a human form.
I turned from our sculpture as Zaven raced by. He smiled as he scooped up some of the heavy snow and pressed it between his mittens into a fist-size ball. He pitched it at my brother, shouting, “Take that,” and hit his target square in the chest.
Missak responded, “You dare attack me?” He launched a missile at Zaven, who turned to take it in the shoulder.
Soon all the boys were pursuing one another up and down the block, the snowballs whizzing by, thudding against their marks.
Henri Rozenbaum aimed at Missak. “That one is for you!” The ball flew wide and slammed into a wall.
“You need glasses, Henri. This one is for the honor of France!” Zaven hurled a ball toward Henri.
“Get out of the line of fire,” my brother warned me.
I ducked too late. The snowball slammed into my nose like a hard, cold punch. When I looked down, there were bright red drops staining the snow at my feet. Suddenly I had a premonition that not all of these boys would survive the war. I was filled then with a sense of dread, as though the game the boys played was a rehearsal for things to come.
Henri said, “Let me see.”
I moved my sodden mittens away from my face, tasting blood as it trickled over my lips.
Henri carefully touched my nose. “It’s not broken.”
Barkev said, “You should tip your head back.”
Missak pulled out his handkerchief to wipe my face and then he pinched the bridge of my nose.
Zaven said, “Sorry. That wasn’t meant for you.”
When the bleeding stopped, Barkev picked up a handful of snow. “Hold this to your nose. I know it’s cold, but it will keep the swelling down.”
Henri commented, “That’s going to be pretty.”
Jacqueline pushed her way past the boys. “Haven’t you done enough?”
Virginie sidled up behind her. “Are you all right, Maral?”
I glanced at tiny Virginie and saw that her lips had gone purple from the cold.
Alice Sahadian was shivering in her thin coat. The snow had stopped falling, and as the skies darkened, the air grew colder by the minute. It was time for us to go home.
When I think back to that afternoon, I see us as though we are in a group photograph. It’s black-and-white; not posed, but a moment suspended in time. My friends are clustered around me, concern etched on their features. With a black pen, someone has drawn circles around the faces of those whom we were soon to lose.
O
UR NEIGHBORS THE LIPSKIS
, who were Yiddish-speaking Jews from Poland, lived in the apartment across the landing. The father worked in a tailor’s shop, and the mother did piecework at home so she could take care of their three-year-old daughter, Claire. Occasionally, I watched the little girl for a few hours while Madame Lipski did errands.
On one such afternoon, Claire and I sat on the day bed in the parlor where Missak slept at night. Between us was a circular cookie tin filled with spare buttons that my mother had amassed over her years as a seamstress. Claire thrust her hands deep into the buttons, lifted two fistfuls, and let them slip through her fingers. The buttons rained back into the box.
“Do you want to dump them out?” I asked.
Claire turned over the tin, laughing as the buttons cascaded onto the bed. We spread them out to examine them more carefully. There were buttons with two holes and those with four, plus metal and leather shank buttons. The colors were varied: shiny gold, red, all shades of white and brown, and thin disks made from shimmering mother-of-pearl. I had spent hours playing with them when I was small, sitting on the carpet near my mother’s feet while she worked at the sewing machine.
When Claire tired of the buttons, I suggested that we make a doll. We searched the ragbag in the kitchen and found an old white sock. She watched as I cut and sewed, then she helped me stuff the form with bits of cloth and fluffy cotton. Claire selected yellow yarn for hair and two pearly gray buttons for eyes. I stitched on a red mouth with embroidery floss and made a simple jumper from a scrap of calico.
“Does this dolly resemble anyone you know?”
“She looks like me,” Claire answered.
“What are you going to call her?”
“Her outside name is Charlotte. And her name for inside is Sheindeleh.”
“Both of those are beautiful names,” I told her.
I knew the system of double names. Inside I was Maral and outside Marie. Missak was Michel. Zaven was Stéphane. His brother, Barkev, was Bernard. And Jacqueline’s original name was Iskouhi, but no one called her that except for the priest who had baptized her, and her mother when she was in a fit of rage. We had two languages as well—Armenian in the house and French outside. My excellent grades, neatly ironed clothes, and well-polished shoes made me popular with the teachers, but my strange surname marked me as the child of foreigners, the stateless Armenians. I glanced at Claire, who sat playing with her doll. She was too young to be able to read the yellow signs on the park entrances saying
FORBIDDEN TO JEWS.
While Claire was absorbed with Charlotte, I cleared up the materials left from our work. I slid my hand under the day bed to search for stray buttons, a few of which I retrieved and dropped into the cookie tin. Then I reached under again and pulled out a small bundle wrapped in brown paper and tied with a bit of twine. Inside were two thick sticks of white chalk. I knew immediately what they were.
As part of a campaign that was launched over the BBC and soon spread by word of mouth, Paris had been chalked with
V
for
victory.
The walls of Belleville were marked with
V
s, and I had seen them also in the Marais, near my school.
That evening, I had no chance to talk with my brother out of earshot of the family, so the next morning as Missak and I left our building, I said, “I found the chalk under your bed.”
“There’s no chalk under my bed,” Missak answered.
“So I suppose now it’s in your satchel.”
“It’s not your business,” he snapped.
When my brother used that tone of voice, I knew better than to badger him. Sometimes, if I held my tongue, he would offer things up on his own. So we walked a few paces in silence.
“It’s nothing to worry about. We do it after dark, with one person to draw and one to stand watch,” he said.
“You and Zaven?”
He shrugged, and from the steely look on his face, I knew the conversation was over.
We reached the corner of the rue de Belleville where Denise Rozenbaum was waiting. Denise and I attended a lycée in the Marais, and Missak and Zaven were students at a technical school in Belleville.
“See you later,” Missak said jauntily as he headed toward Zaven’s building.
Denise and I turned down the hill. We walked because the buses were no longer running, due to lack of gasoline, and the Métro was too expensive to take both ways.
I ran my fingers under a row of
V
s along the wall we were passing. I looked at Denise, who had been my classmate since we were six and with whom I had gone to lycée at the age of eleven. Both of us had scholarships that helped pay for the materials we needed and for lunch at the school canteen. We both loved the Lycée Victor Hugo for its notebooks, French dictations, and even the exams, at which we excelled. I enjoyed wearing the required hat and gloves and putting on the beige smock with my name and the name of the school embroidered on it. The smock kept anyone from knowing if the dress underneath was fashionable or not or if the same dress was worn several times in one week.
The war had marred the closeness of our school community. One of the most unsettling aspects of the Occupation was the way it made you suspicious of your neighbor. How could you truly know where people’s loyalties lay? When we had returned to school that fall, the noticeable absence of Mademoiselle Lévy, the beloved Latin and Greek teacher who had been dismissed because she was a Jew, had upset us all, but our dismay had been muted. We found out after the war that Mademoiselle Lévy had joined the Resistance soon after leaving us and that eventually the Nazis had decapitated her with an ax in Germany.