Dreams of Bread and Fire (25 page)

The old woman stared at her turned-up palms, which were resting on her lap.

Ani went on. “You could say it into this tape recorder when you’re alone. All you have to do is push this red button here. You push it down and talk. The microphone is built in.”

There was no response.

“So you push this one to start”—Ani pressed down the
RECORD
button—“and when you’re finished you push down this one at the end.”

Gesturing toward the grapevine growing up over the porch railing, Grandma said, “Those
yaprak
are too tough to cook. If you vant me to make
yalanchi
you have to get jar at Kay’s Market.”

Ani stood, leaving the tape recorder on the seat next to her grandmother. “Okay. I’ll pick some up.”

“Let me give money.” Grandma pulled a small plastic change purse from her apron pocket, opened it, and pulled out a crumpled ten-dollar bill. “Buy some
banir.
And halvah if you vant. You like that.”

After Ani came home with the groceries, she checked the porch. The tape recorder was nowhere to be seen.

better to go into captivity with the
village than to go to a wedding alone

A month after Ani arrived home from Paris, a bomb exploded in a suitcase at the Turkish Airlines counter in Paris’s Orly Airport, killing five and wounding fifty-six. It was on the front page of the morning paper. When Ani saw the photos of the bewildered blood-spattered travelers, her stomach lurched and the nerves under her skin contracted into little pins of pain. The Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia had claimed responsibility for the attack.

Not Van. It couldn’t have been Van. He would never do something like that.

Why would
ASALA
do it? As far as Ani could see, the people who had been killed had nothing remotely to do with the death of 1.5 million Armenians. Their only fault, if you could call it that, was to have bought a ticket to Istanbul from the Turkish national airline.

The queasiness that Ani felt was worsened by the small part of her that thrilled at the idea of revenge. Let them suffer. Let them know how we suffered. Our blood ran in the gutters, our dead filled the streams, our women wept for their murdered husbands, and our mothers watched their children starve. The pain of my people sears my heart.

This kind of thinking frightened her.

If you wanted revenge for what had been done to your grandparents, whom should you target? What was the difference between an innocent victim and a guilty one? If you were guilty, did that make you not a victim? Who was guilty now?

Ani distractedly shelved the picture books in the children’s room of the library. Every time she thought of Van, her stomach wrenched into a little ball. Was it possible that he had returned to France? Maybe he had been ordered to plant the bomb at Orly by the head of his organization. No. She couldn’t tolerate that thought. He must be thousands of miles away,on Cyprus or in Lebanon. The bomb in Brussels had been bad enough.

Can you explain it to me? Can you tell me how you can be so sure about what you believe that you can put explosives outside a travel agency?

She imagined his explanation.

You are in a war zone, Beirut for example. You are responsible for protecting a neighborhood. You learn how to take the weapons apart and put them back together. You hear the planes overhead and the shelling. There is fighting on the street. You see someone you know shot and killed by a sniper. One day you kill someone in combat. Eventually the war inhabits you. Then you translate it outward.

Go on, Ani urged. Don’t stop there.

You can see the same forces at work everywhere. Different faces but the same body, like some mythical monster. You look around and see what is happening to people, your people, and think the only way to fix it is to fight the system.

And the system is a hapless tourist at an airline counter? Ani asked.

The beast chews up and spits out tens of thousands of people a day. Pick any spot on the globe and there are hundreds of dead bodies lying at its feet.

It’s too big for me, Van. I can only see the individuals and not the pattern.

All you have to do, Ani, is connect the dots.

She heard his voice so clearly, but those were her words and not his. She didn’t know where he was or what he was thinking. She only prayed he was safe.

When her shift in the children’s room was over, Ani went upstairs to pore over the newspapers. Baba arrived and sat down next to her.

Baba pointed to the headline with his forefinger. “Now these boys are killing the wrong people.”

“Who are the right people?” Ani asked.

“I never held a gun in my life. But if I was going to shoot somebody I think it would be those guys in the Turkish government who say the Genocide never happened. You know after the war, some Dashnaks went and hunted down those Young Turk leaders and shot them one by one: Talaat, Djemal, Enver, and a few other big murderers. Operation Nemesis it was called. I could be wrong, but I think even your grandmother’s God gave his blessing to that. But this?” Here he tapped the newspaper and shook his head. “In the end I’m afraid this will be bad business for the Armenians.”

Ani made photocopies of the Orly newspaper coverage, putting them into a manila file folder labeled
ASALA
. On her day off she went to the Boston Public Library to read the French newspapers, pained by the descriptions of the people who had been injured and especially those who had been killed in the bombing.

Among the dead: a small French boy and a Greek-American student who was about to leave on a flight to Istanbul with his Turkish fiancée. Surrounding the figures of the dead Ani imagined widening circles of family and friends, their mouths contorted with grief.

One of the books Ani had come across in her reading was by a Turkish writer who claimed her son had been killed by Armenian terrorists. The writer, in idiosyncratic English, described the Armenians as a “community of nonappreciatives.” In the book there were photos of dead Turks who had apparently been killed by Armenian revolutionaries.

With pictures of corpses the captions always instruct you on whom to blame.

“Don’t you think you’re dwelling too much on this stuff, Ani?” Violet asked her. “If you’re not depressed yet, you’re certainly pushing yourself in that direction.”

Ani groaned. “Mom, would you give me a break? Knowledge is power.”

She heard Van again, his voice small behind her ear: No, actually a gun is power and a bomb in a suitcase gets you a banner headline. It’s called
armed propaganda.
No one cares what happened to the Armenians, Ani. No one remembers what was done to us. We have to make them remember.

When she lay in bed she closed her eyes and saw Van on a street corner standing in a lighted phone booth. He hadn’t shaved, his clothes were rumpled as though he had slept in them, and his duffel was at his feet. After he pulled a handful of foreign coins from his pocket, he pumped them into the slot and began to dial her number. The phone didn’t ring and the image faded.

One afternoon about a week later, Baba was waiting in the car outside the library for Ani when she got off work. He gestured her in.

“Put the bike in the trunk. We’re going visiting,” he told her.

Minutes later they pulled up in front of the Ardavanians’ house. They walked around the side to the cellar door, where Baba knocked. Vahram Ardavanian, a frail man wearing an ancient gray cardigan despite the summer heat, opened the door. Ani noticed milky cataracts around the edges of the old man’s brown irises.

“Come sit down,” Vahram invited them.

In the paneled basement room, a narrow bed took up one corner and there were stacks of yellowed Armenian newspapers against a wall. A frayed couch was covered with a crocheted afghan. As she sat down, Ani glanced at a cluster of photographs in gilt frames that were arranged on an end table. Four generations of Ardavanians were represented. Ani picked up a photo of smiling Van in his Red Raiders football uniform, holding his helmet in the crook of his arm.

Ani remembered watching Van loping down the long aisle in the high school auditorium as the cheerleaders chanted,
Van Ardavanian, he’s our man, if he can’t do it, no one can.

“Can I get you something to drink?” Vahram asked. “How about some candy?” He lifted the cover of a yellow cardboard box filled with chocolates that had gone white with age.

“No thanks, Vahram,” Baba said.

Vahram lowered himself carefully onto a wooden side chair. “I understand you saw our Van in Paris,” he said to Ani.

What did Vahram Ardavanian know? She couldn’t tell anything from the look on his face or his tone.

“We ran into each other on Christmas Eve,” Ani replied. She kept her own voice neutral.

“He called yesterday,” the old man said. “I was the only one home. He asked me to tell you hello.”

Ani wanted to ask if there was any other message. Had he said, Tell Ani I love her?

“Where is he?” Ani asked evenly.

Vahram shrugged. “You never know with that boy. He doesn’t say. We’re just happy to hear his voice.”

From the floor above, Sophie Nahabedian called in Armenian down the basement stairs, “Vahram, is Mattheos Kersamian there with you?”

“Come down, Sophie. Mattheos and his granddaughter are here,” Vahram called back in Armenian.

The old woman slowly descended the steps, gripping the railing. “Hello, hello. Mattheos, don’t get up.” She settled carefully into an armchair, then smoothed the skirt of the paisley housecoat she was wearing over her dress. “We hear you saw our Van,” she said to Ani. “How did he look?”

“He looked fine, Auntie,” Ani responded.

“Was he eating enough?” the old woman inquired.

“Eating, sleeping, exercising. He’s in good health,” Ani assured her.

Auntie Sophie shook her head. “I pray every night that he will come home to us in one piece.”

“Sophie, Sophie, don’t start,” said Vahram. “In a war there have to be soldiers.”

“
Vhy
,
vhy
,
vhy,
” Auntie Sophie said. “The Turks murdered us, stole everything we had, and keep killing us with their lies. Now we have to give up our grandsons too.”

Baba commented, “Some kind of war your grandson is fighting, blowing up innocent people in airports.”

Sophie clucked her tongue.

Ani scrutinized her grandfather. Baba knew about Van’s political activities and yet he hadn’t said anything to her. But then, she hadn’t confided in him either. Van’s grandparents were chatting about Van’s involvement in
ASALA
as though it were akin to joining the U.S. Army.

Van and these old Armenians, members of the same clan, were open with each other. Ani had made herself an outsider who couldn’t entirely be trusted. Only when he was heading to Brussels and an operation from which he might not return had Van shared his secret with her.

“Mattheos, that blood isn’t on Van’s hands,” said Vahram. “There’s trouble in the group. Who knows how it will end?”

Baba said, “The Justice Commandos only go after diplomats and government officials. They get a better reputation that way.”

Vahram waved as though shooing flies. “Those guys are thugs. They have no politics. They only don’t want
ASALA
to get all the attention—”

Ani interrupted. “Who are the Justice Commandos?”

“Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide. It’s a group the Dashnaks made to compete with
ASALA
,” Vahram said. “Van and some other guys were against Orly. So Van is hiding from Mujahed
and
the police.”

“He told you this?” Ani asked.

“Not in so many words. I pick up things here and there,” Vahram answered.

Baba said, “Always with Armenians, huh, there’s this group and that group, and this group splits into two groups and nobody is talking to nobody.”

“The churches are the worst of it,” observed Sophie.

“You put a priest in the middle and it becomes a riot,” Baba added.

Vahram said, “At least in the church it’s been a long time since anybody’s killed anyone. They’ve become a little more civilized. I just hope Van can stay down until it gets calm. He wants to come home.”

“I pray, I pray,” said Sophie. “I pray for him night and day.”

“Well, if he makes it home, give your God a little of the credit,” Vahram said sourly.

“How is Mariam?” Sophie asked, changing the subject.

Baba shrugged. “She misses you. She said she has some
tourshi
on the back porch for you but you have to come get them.”

“With this pain in my hip, it’s not so easy to walk to your house anymore. I don’t like to bother Aram and Alice for rides.”