Zabelle

by Nancy Kricorian

  We bound up a second sheet filled with Vartanoush’s things and heaved it into a musty walk-in closet in the hall.

  Joy opened her bedroom door, rubbing her eyes. “What you doing, Ma?”

  “Putting away some of Grandma’s things, honey.” I shooed her back to bed.

  Next we opened the windows and spread salt in the four corners of the old lady’s room. Then we tiptoed down the stairs and into Toros’s room. His snores rumbled from among the bedclothes.

  I held a candle while Arsinee rummaged in the pillowcase. She pulled a horseshoe from the sack.

  “This,” she whispered, “we put under the mattress.”

  “Digin Haygouhi told you that?”

  “I heard it somewhere. Don’t worry, it’ll help.” She slid the horseshoe smoothly into place. Toros snored on. “Salt next,” Arsinee instructed.

  It bothered me a little, knowing I’d have to sweep it up the next day. But I tossed salt into the corners and opened the closet door and threw some in there for good measure.

  “Now, while you douse him with holy water, I’ll say a few words.” Arsinee unscrewed the lid on a Mason jar and handed it to me.

  “This is holy water?” I whispered.

  “It’s holy enough.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Where did you get it?”

  Arsinee said, “Out of the birdbath.”

  I put the candle on the bureau and tiptoed toward the bed, the jar in hand.

  Arsinee whispered, “Hear, O Vartanoush, we command you, in the name of the Lord, to leave this room.…”

  I whispered, “The Digin told you to say that?”

  Arsinee went on. “To leave this house. Cross the bridge of hair from this world into the next. Go to your Maker, and leave Toros here with his wife and children….”

  I let a few drops fall onto Toros’s bed. He continued to snore, and I grew bolder dropping some water onto his forehead.

  He paused midsnore. He said, “What? Who?”

  I backed away from the bed.

  “It’s your mother, Toros,” whispered Arsinee.

  Arsinee sounded just like Vartanoush. I couldn’t believe my ears.

  “Mayrig?” he asked sleepily.

  What if Toros woke up and found us strewing his room with salt and magic spells, talking in the voice of his dead mother?

  “Yes, yavrum,” continued Arsinee. “I’m leaving, Toros, but you must stay here. You must provide for your wife and children. Don’t abandon them, son.”

  “No, Mayrig, he said, drifting back into sleep.

  Arsinee pointed toward the hall, and the two of us went out, closing the door softly behind.

  When we reached the living room, I said, “You almost gave me a heart attack. You sounded just like her. It was our good luck that he didn’t wake up.”

  “Well, that takes care of her,” said Arsinee. “Bitdi, getdi,” she added, gesturing as though to brush flour from her hands.

  “I hope so,” I said. I patted the brooch in my pocket.

  The next morning I was ready for him to yell at me about the salt, the water, the horseshoe, the whole crazy thing. When I opened the door to his room, a cold blast of air hit me. He had pulled up the shade, and the window was wide open. He was standing in the middle of the room, and I rushed past him to shut the sash. He would catch pneumonia like that.

  Then I turned to him. He stood, a wild halo of hair around his head, his eyes snapping like matches, smiling.

  “I have seen the Lord, Zabelle. He was in the pear tree,” he said to me.

  I put my hand to my heart and closed my eyes. His body was healed, but now he had lost his mind. Jesus in the pear tree. Toros had snapped. It was Arsinee’s fault. I opened my eyes and saw an idiot’s joy spread across my husband’s face. I thought we would have to send him to the mental hospital. I wanted to faint.

  “Don’t look at me like that!” He laughed. “I saw Jesus, and he told me to join the poghokagans to build His true church.”

  I was speechless. The poghokagans? What did the Protestants have to do with anything? This was the result of Digin Haygouhi’s spells. God was punishing us.

  He explained it all to me. How he jumped out of bed in the morning, opened the shade, and saw Jesus in the pear tree. Jesus was dressed in long robes, and He said, in these exact words, “Toros, I have healed you that you might build Me a new church.”

  So my husband, who was one of the founders of the Saint James Armenian Apostolic Church, vowed to join the Armenian Brethren and help them build their new church. It was a divine revelation, like something out of the Old Testament or Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. Saul was from Tarsus, which was very close to Adana, Toros’s hometown.

  Given my husband’s leanings toward Bible-thumping sermons and direct communication with God, our belonging to the Armenian Brethren Church on Arlington Avenue made sense. No liturgy, no long black robes and enormous crosses, just the Bible, “Bringing in the Sheaves” in Armenian, and straight, hard pews. It was the same Bible and, as far as I could tell, the same God, in either place. The only sad part for me was that Arsinee and I weren’t in the same house of worship on Sunday. But we had all week to gab about twice as many people.

  After he told me about his vision, Toros grabbed me by the hands and twirled me around. I’m on fire with the Spirit of the Lord,” he said.

  In the moment, I decided not to question him. Maybe Jesus had spoken to him. Maybe the salt had worked, and Vartanoush’s spirit had been banished from our house. At least he was out of bed. I tried to figure out some way to get him to wear blue for the rest of the week.

  By this time the kids stood in the doorway, watching us, not sure what to think.

  “Come on, Moses!” shouted Toros. “Let’s go down to the store.” He hustled Moses and the other two children out of the house, saying they’d be back by lunch. The kids were happy—I heard them laughing down the stairs and out onto Lincoln Street.

  I flung open the window and stood in the cold air, brushing my hair. A squirrel stared at me from the top branches of the pear tree. I hurled the hairbrush at the bushy-tailed rat, which leaped down the tree and scurried out of sight. Then I went to fetch the broom.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Work of the Lord

  (CHICAGO, 1948)

  I marked the passage of time with a pencil on a door frame. My children shot up faster than seedlings in a summer garden. Moses was twenty, Jack was a teenager, and my baby was beginning to have a woman’s body. It seemed like one minute I was in the basement, hanging out row upon row of diapers, and the next minute I was presiding at a dinner table of creatures half human, half beast—Americans.

  Moses was turned down by the army because of flat feet, and I was very thankful for those feet. He wanted to go to Bible school and train to be a preacher. Moses had never been interested in the market, and Toros had long since settled on Jack to take over the store when the time came. Since he’d been ten Jack had helped out at the market, while Moses had gone to the town library to study.

  Sometimes Moses wrote sermons for his imaginary church, and when he asked, I would be his congregation. He was a marvel to listen to, my Moses, his words as sturdy and beautiful as an old country church. The preacher in him came in part from his father’s dinner-table ranting, but he was gentle as well. He could have persuaded a wolf in a sheep fold to eat grass rather than lamb.

  After he finished high school, Moses took a job selling encyclopedias. The company van scooped up the salesmen and dropped them in nearby suburbs, where they went house to house. Once Moses overcame his fear of rapping on doors and greeting unknown ladies of the house, he outsold the other boys on his team. Saving every penny, he guarded his bankbook like it was the key to the Holy Kingdom. Toros was extremely proud and pushed Moses to apply to the Moody Bible Institute in Illinois.

  When the letter from Chicago pitched through the mail slot, I was home alone. The envelope was thick with promise or disaster, depending o
n your point of view. I had a notion to get my garden spade and bury the thing under the spruce in the front yard. But I couldn’t do that to my son. When Moses sat down to dinner that night, the envelope lay on his plate. He was so happy, he kept slapping his face and laughing. Jack whooped like a wild man, and I thought Toros was going to start jumping around like a kid. Joy looked at me nervously. She knew it was going to break my heart.

  Then the morning came for him to take his new leather suitcase and leave us. I tried to be cheerful, but every time I thought about my Moses, my first baby, going halfway across the country to live with strangers, I had to pull the handkerchief out of my purse and wipe my eyes.

  “Ma,” said Jack from the backseat, “would you turn the faucet off?”

  “Why don’t you leave her alone,” Joy said.

  “Think of Hannah in the Bible,” Toros said. “She gave Samuel up to the Lord when he was a small child. Our Moses is a grown man.”

  I put the handkerchief over my face.

  Toros talked to Moses. “When you finish, maybe you could be pastor of our church. Who knows, though, what God has planned. You could be called to the mission fields. Africa, India, South America …”

  I started crying harder. I felt as though someone were sawing at my right leg, cutting it off below the joint. How did I raise him to be the leaving kind? Jack and Joy would stay close by, the old country way, but I could feel Moses lifting anchor.

  Jack said, “Ma, calm down. They have telephones in Chicago.”

  “He’ll be back in the summer, Ma,” Joy added.

  “… to preach to the heathen in the jungle. You would do great work in the mission field,” Toros continued, “although we could use a revival here in America. There is work to be done among the heathen in this country.”

  When we reached the station, Jack lugged Moses’s suitcases to the platform, where we stood in a small dark knot by the waiting train. Moses looked uncomfortable, as though he wanted to sneak away and pretend he didn’t know us. I had no intention of causing a fuss. Toros continued yammering in Armenian at Moses, who no longer spoke a word of his mother tongue.

  Although Moses had stopped speaking Armenian when he was twelve, he never pretended he didn’t understand us when we spoke it, which some kids did. He answered us in English, and soon Jack picked up the trick. That was how the Armenians would be finished off. First we were driven out, then the children abandoned the language, and finally they married odars and birthed children who were barely half Armenian. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

  As I stood on the train platform, Moses’s childhood unrolled in my head like a tapestry. I remembered rocking him in the night when he was sick, and the dusky baby smell that clung to his soft hair. How he clasped my hand tightly as we crossed the street on the way to his first day at school, his unscuffed brown shoes a source of pride to us both. Now he stood there, almost a grown man, as bright as a new copper penny, all that was the best about us about to be flung into the world’s coffer.

  It reminded me of a summer day years before when I took the kids to Revere Beach on the streetcar. Jack brought a kite with him, which leaped into the full wind like a bird. He let out more and more string, until the kite was only a colored speck near the sun. I told him to reel it back in, that otherwise he might lose it, but he didn’t care. He felt the tug in his hands as it made for the heavens. He wanted to see how high it could go. And then the string snapped. He was probably eight or nine at the time, and tough as he was, his face crumpled into despair. But still, I don’t think he would have done any differently.

  “He learned his first Bible verse before he could read,” Toros stated. Who was he talking to? It was like this was some kind of testimonial dinner or he was delivering Moses’ eulogy.

  Joy produced a flat package she had concealed under her coat. She held it out to Moses, saying shyly, “I made this for you.”

  Moses undid the paper to find a pair of hand-knit socks in fine navy wool. He pulled on one of Joy’s braids. “Thanks, sis,” he said huskily.

  When the whistle blew, Moses hugged Joy and shook hands with Toros and Jack, while I stood to one side. Then he leaned down to hug me. He was stiff and unyielding, but I couldn’t help holding on to him like he was a wooden plank in the bobbing sea. I imagined myself gripping the hem of his coat as he mounted the train steps, dragging behind him. He pulled himself free and slowly picked up his suitcase.

  Suddenly I was a small, dirt-caked girl among a hundred ragged children, reaching up to Moses, begging for a crust of bread. But with dignity and determination, he climbed the steps of the train, knowing he could save only himself. Like a fox in an iron trap, he would chew off his own leg in order to make his escape.

  I called after him, “Moses, don’t forget us.”

  The train pulled out of the station, and he was gone.

  * * *

  The next day Arsinee came over to keep me company. I had run through a half dozen or more handkerchiefs, with no end in sight. All sensible thoughts had flown out of my head, and I was crazy as a hen whose chick had been snatched by a weasel.

  “I should have killed him the day he was born,” I sobbed.

  “That’s a nice way for a mother to talk,” said Arsinee.

  “I knitted his bones inside my body. I chewed up food and put it in his mouth. And now he’s gone. He’s left the only home he’s ever known.” I wanted sympathy, not smart comments.

  “They learn that in this country. You still have the other two, which is a lot more than some people. Besides, Chicago isn’t that far.”

  “What do you know? Henry moved three miles to Boston, and Dahlia will never go farther than the next block.”

  “I hardly see them.”

  I sniffed into my handkerchief. “If we lived in the old country, he would have married a nice girl, and we’d all be living in the same house. In this country, all they can think of is trains and planes taking you as far as you can get from your mother.”

  “Maybe if you hadn’t nursed him until he was five years old, he would have stayed closer to home,” Arsinee said.

  “Some friend you are. My heart is being devoured by jackals, and you crack jokes.”

  Arsinee, “Honey, the world is claiming him, and you have to move over.”

  “Move over into my grave,” I retorted.

  “You don’t have enough white hairs to count, and you’re talking about the grave. Maybe that’s the best place for you if you’re going to be sitting in ashes, tearing out your hair. Come on. Stop feeling sorry for yourself.”

  I dreamed about Moses that night. I stood on the sidewalk in a strange city, watching a parade go by. He was marching down the street in a beige uniform with red trim, waving a baton, with hundreds of boys following him. They all looked alike—same height, build, blond hair, same blank stare—and they were singing “Onward Christian Soldiers.” I could tell my son from them because he had the only distinctive profile. I waved and called, “Moses! Moses!” But he didn’t stop for a minute. He didn’t even glance my way. He just kept marching at the head of the troop. I wanted to run after him, but my shoes were stuck to the pavement with a thick glue, and I couldn’t lift my feet. Those boys marched right down the street to the ocean, onto a pier, and off the pier into the harbor.

  I woke up in a worse mood than I had been in the day before. We hadn’t heard a word from Moses, and he was definitely in Chicago by that time. I woodenly made preparations for the midday meal before leaving for church. The sermon was something about brotherly love, and it flew in one ear and out the other like my head was a rotted-out tree stump. Unfortunately the closing hymn for the day was “Amazing Grace”—in Armenian—and I broke down because it was Moses’s favorite. I had to run from the pew to the ladies’ room, where I perched on the toilet seat cover and wept.

  When we sat down to dinner, I noticed that Joy had automatically set a place for Moses. His empty chair, the unused plate and fork and knife, it took my appeti
te away.

  Toros shouted, “The boy hasn’t died, Zabelle. He’s gone to do the Lord’s work.”

  “I almost wish he were dead, because then I wouldn’t have to worry about him. He’d be in heaven, instead of in some town hundreds of miles away among foreigners, eating strange food. He could be lying by the roadside right now, clubbed over the head by a robber, bleeding in the gutter, and we wouldn’t know it.”

  Jack and Joy stared at Toros. I didn’t need to look to know that the muscle in his jaw had begun to twitch, which wasn’t a good sign.

  But I couldn’t stop myself. It was as if I had a part in a play, and I just had to say my lines, no matter what. I continued, “He could be dead for all we know.”

  Toros slammed his fist on the table, rattling the glasses and silver. He thundered, “I won’t stand for any more of this gnashing of teeth. He’s a grown man.”

  My mouth snapped shut. What did Toros know? Only a mother could understand what it was to lose a child.

  * * *

  A week went by, and still no word from Moses. There were hours when I was able to stuff a tray of tomatoes and green peppers without once thinking of him. I’d have my feet propped up on the hassock in the living room, reading the Bible, when the mail thumped to the floor in the front hall. I’d spread the envelopes like a fan and find nothing. The dread of his absence would cleave me in half, like a melon on a cutting board. I slumped into a chair, without the energy to push back a lock of hair fallen across my forehead. After a time, I forced myself to go to the basement and fold the laundry. When Joy came home from school, she and I walked to the store to visit Toros and Jack.

  Finally one afternoon a postcard arrived saying, “Ma and Pa, Arrived safely. Will call when I get a chance.”

  “When he gets a chance?” I asked Arsinee. “Do you think he’s in classes day and night? Do you think he has to walk two miles to find a telephone?”

  “He’s in a new world. He’s twenty years old. He needs some time.”

  “Some time for what? To forget his mother?”