“Maybe because it’s more interesting than sitting like a hen in a coop.”
“You think war is interesting? I saw a war once and there was nothing interesting about it. Better a hen in a coop than a bloody pile of feathers by the side of the road.” My mother drew her eyebrows together and pressed her lips thin, jabbing the needle through the hole of a button.
Auntie Shakeh said, “May the good Lord watch over us and protect us from ever seeing such things again.”
It was strange that I knew so little about what they had gone through, especially as it seemed to loom like a vast, amorphous shadow over our lives. My mother and my aunt referred vaguely and ominously to what they called the Massacres or the Deportations. If I asked a question about that period in the Old Country, my mother would say darkly, “It’s better not to talk about those times.” Auntie Shakeh would go pale and invoke God. So after a while, I stopped asking, and it was all I could do to keep from rolling my eyes when they made their dire, cryptic references.
My father and brother returned a half an hour later, saying they hadn’t seen anything but bright flashes along the skyline. But the Kacherians had been there, as well as other neighbors. Once the British planes had flown off, people dispersed.
“No one complained about the English going after Renault,” my father said.
Missak laughed. “You might even say they were happy.”
My mother said, “I promise you, the people of Boulogne are not happy tonight. And all I’m feeling is exhausted.”
The night was almost over as we wearily returned to our beds.
I lay in the dark listening to the soft wheezing of my aunt, who had fallen asleep immediately. I was unhappy because I had missed seeing Zaven twice in one night. I wished it didn’t matter so much to me, but there were so few chances for romance in my life, and I had pegged my heart on this particular boy.
When finally I fell asleep, I dreamed that I was walking along the lake in the Buttes Chaumont. Zaven strolled beside me. It was a beautiful afternoon, the skies clear and the trees adorned with flowers. He slipped his arm through mine as though we had walked like this a thousand times, and he smiled into my eyes. My heart beat its feathered wings. I looked down at our feet. There were ducks and swans lying at the edge of the water. They were lifeless, their necks twisted at awful angles, their eyes staring up without seeing. Shuddering, I hid my face against Zavig’s shoulder.
I
STOOD ON THE STOOL
in my bedroom while my mother pinned the hem of a new dress. The fabric was ruby taffeta, and my mother had managed to hide the discolored folds in such a way that no one would guess the dress was made from a pair of flea-market curtains.
“Hold still,” my mother mumbled through a mouthful of pins. “If you keep moving, it’s going to be crooked.”
I glanced at myself in the mirror. The dress had three-quarter-length sleeves, a tight bodice, and a full skirt that made my waist look tiny. I wished that I had someplace special to go, and someone to take me there.
“Done,” my mother said. “Give it to me so I can hem it.”
“Can I wear it to Sunday dinner at the Kacherians’, or do you think it’s too fancy?” I undid the buttons and pulled off the dress.
My mother draped the dress over her arm. “You can wear this to church, to Sunday dinner . . . Speaking of Sunday dinner, I promised Shushan that your aunt and I would help her make
manti
on Saturday. So we might not be here when you get home from school.”
“Manti?”
I could almost smell the meat dumplings swimming in broth. “She can get lamb?”
“Chicken, but you’ll hardly be able to tell the difference,” my mother said. “In times like these, you make do. In the Old Country, no one ever made
manti
alone. The whole neighborhood gathered, and we each brought a rolling pin. You didn’t have to sit alone in your kitchen and do it all by yourself. You should have seen the times when they made phyllo dough for
paklava.
My mother could roll it out so it was thinner than a sheet of paper.”
Saturday was my sixteenth birthday, but there was no cake that evening at supper. My gifts were the dress from my mother, a pair of leather-soled black pumps from my father, and a hand-knit summer sweater from Auntie Shakeh.
“Babig
,
where did you get the leather?” I asked my father.
“From Vahan. No wooden soles on my daughter’s birthday shoes.”
The last and best gift was a bar of lavender soap that Missak gave me.
I held the smooth bar cupped in my hands and put it to my nose, breathing in. “It smells beautiful. Where did you manage to find it?”
My brother just smiled.
On Sunday morning after the breakfast dishes were done, I barricaded myself in the kitchen and boiled water for a bath in the large zinc tub we kept under the sink. Using the soap, I lathered my hair and then, with a rough washcloth, scrubbed my skin until it was pink. Wrapped in a towel, I rinsed my hair under the cold tap so that it would shine.
I spent the rest of the morning sequestered in the bedroom. First I filed my fingernails, and then, using a pair of tweezers, I carefully shaped my eyebrows, making them narrow and sleek. I studied my face in the mirror, smiling and pouting and frowning, then sticking out my tongue at my vanity.
When I finally emerged from the bedroom wearing my new red dress, my family were all sitting in the front room, except for Auntie Shakeh, who had gone to church right after breakfast.
“Are we ready to go?” I asked.
“Meghah!”
my mother said. “What did you do to your eyebrows?”
“What about her eyebrows?” My father peered over the top of his newspaper.
“Do they look bad?” I put my hand to my face.
“Ridiculous,” Missak said.
This was not at all the reaction I had been hoping for. We were going to the Kacherians’ for Sunday dinner. I hadn’t seen Zaven in weeks, and I wanted him to think I looked elegant and mature.
My mother clucked her tongue. “I don’t know why you’d do something like that. They are hardly wider than a thread.”
Missak said, “Jacqueline did the same thing. It looks silly.”
I retorted, “I don’t care what you think. You don’t know anything about fashion.”
“If it were the fashion to shave your head, would you do that as well?” my father asked.
I turned on my heel and headed to the door.
When we reached the Kacherians’, we found that Auntie Shakeh had arrived ahead of us and was already seated on the parlor couch with Virginie and Vahan Kacherian.
Missak asked, “Where are the guys?”
Vahan said, “Any minute they’ll be here.”
Zaven and Barkev arrived just then, and we all took seats around the dinner table. I ended up with my mother on my right and Virginie on my left, far from Zaven’s place between his mother and my brother. Auntie Shushan ladled out the
manti
soup, and the bowls were passed around. The steam rising from my bowl smelled so wonderfully of chicken and onions that I said before I even tasted it, “Auntie, this is heavenly.”
My father said, “In lean times, heaven is a full belly.”
Missak imitated my father with fake solemnity. “Heaven, my friends, is a bowl of chicken dumplings.”
Vahan laughed. “Enough proverbs, my friends. Time to eat.”
With such a crowd, there was no chance for anything interesting to pass between Zaven and me: no meaningful glances, no words whispered on the stairs. When the men retired to the front room to talk politics and the women repaired to the kitchen, I fantasized that Zaven and I headed to the park, where the roses were just starting to bloom. He used his penknife to cut a rose from a bush and presented it to me with a flourish. But, of course, I was actually in the crowded kitchen with a damp dishtowel in my hand. Much later, I realized that all he was waiting for was a small gesture from me—going a few steps out of my way to cross his path or slipping a note into his jacket pocket—but for me at that age, even a small act seemed impossibly bold.
The next morning when I met Denise on the corner of the rue de Belleville on the way to school, she was wearing a yellow fabric star sewn to her jacket. The law had gone into effect a few days before, and it was the first I had seen of this new insult.
Denise avoided my eyes. “Did you see Z.K. this weekend?”
I followed her lead, slipping into conversation without comment about the ignominious star. “We had Sunday dinner with his family yesterday.”
“Did you get to talk with him alone?”
“Nothing. Not even an elbow next to mine on the table.”
“At this rate, you could be eighteen before he says anything,” Denise said.
“Maybe he never will. Maybe he’s not interested in me.”
“You know that’s not true.”
Just then, a mother and a little blond boy of about five years old walked by. The boy pointed at the star on Denise’s jacket and said, “Mama, look, a Jew.” The mother leaned down and whispered something into his ear as she hurried him past.
Denise flushed. “I was pretending there was nothing different today. But this is our life now. So one might as well get used to it. The first morning will be the most difficult.”
“It’s like something out of the Middle Ages. How can this be happening in the twentieth century?”
Denise shrugged. “The irony, if you can call anything about it ironic, is that we’re required by law to wear them but we have to pay for the fabric with our ration tickets.”
“What would happen if you didn’t wear them?”
“They would put us in jail, I suppose, if they caught us.”
As we continued down the hill, we saw others wearing yellow stars, and Denise exchanged empathetic glances with them. It was as though they were acknowledging their membership in a no-longer-secret society. We walked in glum silence toward the lycée. When we were a few blocks from our destination, a young man we crossed paths with noticed Denise’s star and with a smile pointed to his own. In the center, instead of
Jew,
he had written
Buddhist
in black letters.
“Do you think he’s really a Buddhist?” I asked.
“Well, he’s not a Jew. My brother says we’re crazy to do what they tell us. We registered as Jews, and Henri says they have our address any time they want to come find us. Now my mother has sewn these stars on our clothes. Henri ripped his off this morning, threw it on the floor, and ground it under his heel. My mother was weeping, he was yelling at her, and my father started shouting at Henri. Henri’s angry they didn’t listen to him two years ago when he wanted us to go to America. We have cousins in Baltimore. But my parents trusted in the French Republic. They are French citizens, or at least they were until recently. What about your parents?”
“They have Nansen passports, the ones for stateless people. That’s what most Armenians have.”
“My parents’ citizenship was revoked. They have no country now either.”
I thought of an Armenian maxim my father used in his darker moods: If they send two baskets of shit to our city, one will come to our house. The Occupation was baskets of shit, that was sure, and the largest one had been delivered to the Jews.
When Denise and I reached the school, I noticed other classmates wearing yellow stars on their jackets. One girl had let her long hair hang down so it obscured most of the yellow, and another had turned back her jacket lapel to cover hers. Thankfully, when we all entered the lycée and exchanged our outerwear for the school’s democratizing smocks, the Jewish girls looked like everyone else.
Denise and I went together to our first-period mathematics class. The teacher, Madame Bourdet, had a bonnet of short, gray curls and a long, pointed nose. She was a rigid and demanding instructor, but on this morning she seemed flustered whenever she turned from the board to face the class. She dropped her chalk several times and pulled out the hankie tucked into her sweater cuff to wipe her perspiring face.
Just before the class came to an end, Madame Bourdet declared, in her formal manner, “My dear girls, this has nothing whatsoever to do with algebra, but I cannot restrain myself from sharing with you the profound regret I experienced this morning as I witnessed the latest affront to the values of the French Republic. And to those of you who are subject to this indignity, I can only say that I offer you my sincerest apology on behalf of the vast majority of the French people. Class is dismissed.”
As we soberly filed out of the classroom, I turned back to see Madame Bourdet dabbing at her eyes with the white hankie.
Denise took my arm and whispered, “She forgot to assign homework.”
I
WAS AWAKENED BY
the sounds of muffled shouting and pounding. Pulling back the curtain, I glanced at the clock on the windowsill. It was just after six in the morning, but it seemed earlier because the skies were gray.
Auntie Shakeh sat up in bed. “What is it?”
I slid my feet into my slippers. “I don’t know.”
We pulled on our robes and went to the front hall. My mother leaned her head out the doorway while my father stood on the landing.
“What’s happening?” I asked.
“They’re taking the Jews,” my father answered. “The police are in the next stairwell. They’ll probably be coming here in a few minutes. They’re taking them all, even the women and children.”
I noticed that my brother was missing. “Where’s Missak?”
“He went down to the street to see what’s going on,” my father said.
“What about the Lipskis?” I asked.
“They are packing their bags.” My father shook his head. “I told them to hide on the roof, but it would be no use. The police are searching from top to bottom.”
My mother’s face was ashen. “Joseph is concerned about Sara. He’s afraid all this will make the baby come early.”
“What about Claire?” I asked.
“Children are to go with their parents,” my father answered.
I said, “They should leave her with us.”