Dreams of Bread and Fire (26 page)

Baba told her, “Anytime you want, Sophie, you call me and I’ll come pick you up.”

Ani and Baba got in the car. Instead of heading down Mount Auburn Street toward home, Baba drove toward Cambridge.

“Where are we going?” Ani asked.

“You’ll see,” Baba replied.

Ani asked, “What do you think will happen to Van?”

“I don’t know,
aghchigess.
He has a good heart, and I hope he comes home soon.”

“What kind of job can you have after being an armed revolutionary?” Ani asked.

“When guys come home from a war they can go into any business they want. Dry cleaning, whatever,” Baba said.

Ani couldn’t quite imagine Van as a dry cleaner.

Baba said, “Listen,
anoushig,
don’t look for trouble. No more mountain men or fighters, okay? Why don’t you go out with a nice guy with a steady job, like a dentist or something? Your grandmother could use a new pair of dentures. Plus she would love to see you get married.”

“To a nice Armenian dentist?” Ani asked.

Baba shrugged. “Why not?”

Ani didn’t think she’d be the right kind of a wife for an Armenian dentist any more than she was a proper partner for an Armenian revolutionary. Van needed a woman with an assault rifle in one hand and the Armenian flag in the other—an Armenian version of the girl in the Delacroix painting leading the battle charge. Ani saw the two of them in dusty fatigues, bandoliers crisscrossed over their chests, as they moved with an armed column across the Anatolian plain. After the revolution they would settle by the shores of Lake Van and name their dark-eyed children after Armenian pagan deities.

Baba pulled into the Star Market parking lot.

“We’re grocery shopping?” Ani asked.

“No. We’re crossing the street.”

They entered the Mount Auburn Cemetery through a massive granite gate.

“Are we here to visit someone in particular?” Ani asked.

“No. I come here to walk.”

They strolled up the cemetery’s main avenue, passing a row of marble crypts, tombs guarded by angels with long stone wings, and all along the way the names of the dead inscribed in stone. There were potted annuals, sculpted shrubs, rolling lawns, and the tall graceful trunks of century trees. It was a beautiful place, once you accepted the death motif as part of the natural order of things.

“Let’s sit,” Baba said. He was winded from the upward slope.

They found a stone bench under the shade of an oak tree.

“Who is Mujahed?” Ani asked Baba.

“He goes by the name Hagop Hagopian. He’s the big boss in
ASALA
. I guess Van is on his bad side right now.”

“How do you know so much about all this, Baba?” Ani asked.

“I know a lot of things,
anoushig
. But we can’t mention it at home.”

“I know.”

The shadows of the leaves shifted around them in the breeze.

Baba stared into the distance. “I sometimes gave money for
ASALA
. When I went to play
tavloo,
I collected money for them too.”

“You did?” Ani asked incredulously.

“They used to do better things. Like that Turkish Consulate takeover in Paris. That was a good one.”

“Why, Baba?”

“Do you know what I dream about at night? I see my mother. She’s lying in the dirt. She’s dying. There is blood in the corner of her mouth. And my older brother is crouching in the ditch on a pile of rags and bones that used to be people. He is thin like a scarecrow. He says,
Mattheos, you should have brought us with you.
And my sister. My sister—”

Baba stopped. He put his hands over his face. His shoulders were moving up and down as though he were crying, but he didn’t make a sound.

land of Armenians, land of stones

After supper, Ani and Violet sat on the front steps watching the neighborhood kids play kickball in the street. A passing car put a brief halt to the game. One of the boys held the ball under the crook of his arm while the kids watched the offending vehicle roll by. The kids spilled back into the street.

“Did you hear the latest about Brenda O’Malley?” Violet asked.

They both glanced at the O’Malleys’ house directly across the street.

Ani saw an image of Brenda’s freckled face circa first grade. “What about her?”

“Well, she and her boyfriend had a big blowout. She came home with a twin under each arm and a black eye.”

“Who is her boyfriend?” Ani hadn’t thought about Brenda O’Malley in years. They hadn’t been friends beyond second grade.

Violet said, a grimace of disapproval on her face, “Her boyfriend is that awful Vinny DeRenzo.”

Ani had a recollection of Vinny as a thuggish, long-haired guy wearing a dungaree jacket with a pack of Marlboros poking out of the pocket. Four years out of high school, he showed up at the Thanksgiving football game their senior year with a Doberman puppy on a leash as a kind of bait. Brenda O’Malley had been among the girls gathered around the dog.

Violet continued. “He has no interest in providing for them. It’s a shame. Poor Gloria has Brenda and the babies to support now that they moved back in. I told you about Lucy Sevanian, right? Did I mention that she sent you an invitation to her baby shower? You were in Paris so I called with your regrets. The baby must be about three months old. You should call her,” Violet said.

Ani had no interest in calling Lucy, who, at the age of twenty-four, was installed in a split-level ranch house in Belmont complete with husband, infant, and, Ani supposed, her own vacuum cleaner and washing machine.

New York City—in Ani’s imagination a vast canyon of tall buildings with an underground network of fast trains where people rushed from one engagement to the next—would be her salvation.

Ani had called Elena, who told her she didn’t need to bring or buy a bed. Elena’s previous roommate had dropped out of graduate school and returned to Ohio, leaving behind an almost new mattress and box spring. Ani had wanted to know whether to bring twin or double sheets.

Elena said, “A twin? Nobody should sleep in a twin bed except for children and monks. It’s a double. I can’t wait for you to get here. I want you to meet my new lover.”

Ani thought it strange the way Elena said
lover.
Maybe it was a New York thing or a graduate student affectation.
Boyfriend
must be considered too juvenile a word. Ani would soon find out. She’d be leaving for New York in less than ten days.

“What’s up with you and Nick?” Ani asked her mother.

“What about us?”

“Are you guys going to get married?”

“Maybe,” Violet answered. “We haven’t talked about that yet.”

They sat in silence for a while. The streetlights came on and the kids drifted home, some of them hearing their names shouted from up the block.

Violet said, “When you were a toddler we used to take you to the campus every evening after supper in the summer. There would be lots of other families with small children. Your dad would bring a ball for you to kick around and you loved to throw it in the fountain. You liked to slide down the stone balustrades until you wore holes in the seat of your pants.”

“Where was our apartment?” Ani asked.

“Overlooking Morningside Park,” Violet replied. “I still remember the phone number, isn’t that funny? Almost twenty years later and I still remember the number. The phone was installed the day we were married. We went to city hall because we didn’t want a religious ceremony. We had what they called in those days a
mixed marriage
. Odd expression, don’t you think?”

Do you feel twice blessed or doubly cursed?

Van had once asked, If you cut yourself off from your people, then who are you? A person is nothing alone, he had said. We are only something together.

At the time Ani understood his words without knowing what they meant. Now she could feel how a thousand family stories made her who she was. She could faintly sense the pull of invisible satin laces that bound her to the Armenian people. What about her father’s family? Would it be possible to knot or splice together the severed ties?

“I was thinking about trying to contact the Silvers,” Ani told her mother.

Violet drew her eyebrows together, her mouth twisting into a frown. “Oh, Ani. What for? After we got married they sat shiva for him. He was dead to them long before he died. They never wanted anything to do with us either. You’ll only get yourself hurt.”

“I thought you said his sister used to call him once in a while.”

“Occasionally. And if I answered the phone she pretended not to know who I was when she asked for him. We sent her an announcement after you were born and she never sent even a card. Can you imagine not acknowledging your own brother’s child?”

“Mom, that was a long time ago. I’m a grown-up. They’re my father’s family. They’re my family.”

“I’ve never wanted to tell you this, Ani, but when your father and I had been dating for about six months, his sister came to see me. I didn’t tell your father about it. She found out where I was living and knocked on my dorm room door. She had come to tell me that David would never marry me because his family wouldn’t accept me. And she also told me—contradicting the first thing she said—that if he did marry me, the Silvers would never have anything to do with him or me and any children we might have. No contact. No money. No nothing. We wouldn’t exist for them.”

“Mom, that was decades ago. I’m going to be living in the same city. Wouldn’t it be weird if I walked past one of them on the street and didn’t even know it was my blood relative? I have to at least try.”

Her mother looked heavenward and sighed. “Between the Massacres and the Silvers, you’re really trying to torture yourself, aren’t you?”

Violet shrugged in defeat. She went into the house and came back with a faded cloth address book. Ani watched as her mother copied onto a blank index card the name Leah Kantrowitz and an address on West End Avenue in Manhattan.

Violet said, “Your father’s sister. I have no idea if she’s still at this address. Before you call her, Ani, you should think about what you want. Don’t expect much.”

In the basement room, Ani pulled out the framed black-and-white photo of David Silver. She recollected little from the years they had lived in New York. She wondered if returning to the same neighborhood would be like taking a stick to the bottom of a pond, stirring up fragments of memory from where they had settled long before.

Ani glanced at the address on the piece of paper her mother had given her. She wanted someone to tell her stories about her father when he was a child or to repeat a joke that he used to tell. Maybe she’d be invited to meet her grandparents, if they were still alive, and her cousins. They would all crow over her and say how much she looked like her father. Maybe, though, Leah Kantrowitz would shout into the phone,
We want none of you!
and slam the receiver down.

Ani began to pack her things for the move to New York. She had expected that her mother would be getting weepy about losing her baby again, but Nick seemed to provide distraction. Grandma was the one Ani worried about. The old woman seemed sad and preoccupied, sitting in her armchair staring into space.

“You’re eating like a bird, Grandma,” Ani scolded her at suppertime.

The old woman complained, “Tasteless.
Anham eh
. Old age. Taste buds dry up.”

“You want to go for an ice cream?” Ani offered.

“No, honey, I’m too tired,” Grandma said.

The next night Ani convinced Grandma to accept her invitation. Ani drove Baba’s car up Mount Auburn Street. The windows were rolled down and an August breeze blew in, pulling wisps of Grandma’s gray hair from her bun and sending them flying around her head.

Ani brought the car to a halt in the parking lot of Dairy Joy. Grandma called it “Jeddy Doy.”

“You want a marble cone?” Ani asked.

Grandma nodded. “Sure. Let me give . . .” She reached for her wallet.

“This is my treat,” Ani insisted.

Hearing that Grandma had been half starved during the Deportations explained a lot. Little wonder that she slammed the string cheese on the dining room table, announcing,
Four dollars a pound
. It had seemed like an indictment of some kind, but Ani now realized it was actually a profession of love.

After the famous expression
amot kezi
and the numbers one to twenty, the first Armenian that Grandma had taught Ani was the phrase “I love you,”
kezi geh sirem
. Grandma had said that to Ani from time to time—never to anyone else—but more than with words Grandma expressed her affection through small gifts: quarters, dollar bills, homemade yogurt, tiny meat dumplings that took hours to produce, fruit slices, and chocolate bars. This was Grandma’s economy of love.