Zabelle

by Nancy Kricorian

  Just before the intermission, Toros grabbed my arm. I don’t know if it was the heat, or the excitement, or if he was still thinking about the story he had told me the night before.

  He was sitting next to me, listening to his son, his heart thumping along, and then it sputtered and stalled.

  It was awful to see the way his mouth worked the air. He turned gray. I didn’t know what to do. Part of me was calm and alert, watching the events occur around me. But another part screamed and pulled at my hair. When I noticed Peter sitting gape mouthed beside me, I threw my sweater over his head.

  Jack ran up and down the aisle, shouting for help. Helen loosened Toros’s tie and unbuttoned his shirt. Elizabeth and Julie started crying. Sarah and Jonathan chased an usher, who called for a doctor. An ambulance was waiting outside for this kind of emergency.

  I climbed into the back of the ambulance and held my husband’s cold hand. His face was the color of cement, and he was trying to talk to me.

  “What is it, Toros?” I leaned close to him.

  “Don’t feel bad. God has forgiven me. I’m going home.” Toros closed his eyes.

  I saw him as a young man on a white stallion, galloping through the streets of Adana. With a mighty sword he struck down the Turkish soldiers who approached his father, pulling the old man into the saddle behind him. The horse sprouted enormous wings and flew toward heaven.

  I wanted to tell the ambulance driver there was no hurry. The spirit had gone out of my husband’s body. I held his hand and shut my eyes. The breath was going in and out of me, my heart plodding along like a workhorse. It was strange how someone you loved could die in front of you, and you kept on. You found food and put it in your mouth. You drank water. You walked, you opened your lips and words came out. Put on your clothes. Take off your clothes. Sleep. Dream. Survive.

  The funeral was two days later. Moses gave the eulogy, which was eloquent and hollow, as though he were speaking of someone he barely knew. And then he was gone. I wish there had been a moment for us to talk before he left for Chicago. What would we have said to each other? I felt like I was wrapped in waxed paper, and everyone seemed far away.

  I kept expecting to hear Toros yell from the other room, “Zabelle, come in here!” Then I saw his creased work shoes bowed on the floor of our closet, and I couldn’t stop crying. Joy and Helen sent me out of the room, packed everything up, and put it in the attic.

  Arsinee came to keep me company. We sat on the back porch under the shade of the grape leaves. For a long time we didn’t speak.

  I was thinking about Toros pouring coffee into my cup in the morning. And the way he read things out loud from the newspaper to prove the rotten state of the world. How would I sleep without his snoring?

  “So, here we are,” Arsinee finally said. She patted my hand.

  “Yes,” I said. “Here we are.”

  “When you get to heaven,” Arsinee asked, “are you going to live with Toros?”

  “That depends on where his mother’s staying.”

  We laughed. And then we went to the garden to pull some weeds.

  EPILOGUE

  Hadjintsi Badmoutioune

  (HADJIN, 1909)

  There was, there was not, there was a girl named Lucine Kodjababian who lived in the town of Hadjin, Cilicia, in the Ottoman empire. In the same town, not very far away, lived a boy named Garabed Boyajian. One day Garabed and Lucine—who had never seen or at least never noticed each other in their respective seventeen and fifteen years—passed each other in the street and exchanged glances, which left each dreaming of the other.

  Now, in our times, this isn’t such a problem: a boy sees a girl, he wants the girl, he chases after the girl, he marries her, and sometimes the other way around. But in 1909 in Cilicia, when Garabed stared after the lovely Lucine, her face as radiant as her name implied, it was not usual that boys chose their wives, or that girls gazed back at boys in the street.

  As a matter of fact, Lucine’s cousin, with whom she was going to market to buy vegetables for the evening meal, said to the girl, “What, have you no shame?” So Lucine, who had been turning to look at Garabed, who was turning back to look at her as they walked with their companions in opposite directions, faced ahead, her cheeks burning.

  Garabed himself was thinking, Who was that girl? He noted the dark, sleek hair that hung down the center of her back in a long braid twined with ribbon, and the small waist under her embroidered apron. He saw a hint of her shift’s hem appear from under the overdress, and the cuff of her pants covering her slim ankles. In his memory her eyes burned like dark moons in the night-white sky of her face.

  And what did Lucine remember? Not his handsome face with its proud dark brow or his head of thick, black hair. Not the plain of his shoulders that rose out of the sleeveless vest. Not the red sash tied where his baggy pants met his shirt, above the narrow hips. She remembered the way his fierce eyes locked on hers, making her want something.

  Now Hadjin, a town perched on the Toros Mountains of Cilicia, had over forty thousand inhabitants, almost all of them Armenian. About the time that Garabed saw Lucine, news of massacres in Adana reached the ears of the Hadjintsis, who thanked God for the good fortune of their own safety, not realizing that this news was only a thin shadow of what was to come.

  In Hadjin, the streets, which were straight and narrow, with houses on each side, rose into the hills, so that some rooftops were level with the next street. Thousands of ojakhs sent smoke from daily meals coiling into the air above. How would Garabed ever find out this girl’s name? Would Lucine ever see this boy again?

  For days, when they went into the street—to church, to the market, or on other errands—the boy and the girl searched for each other. Garabed tossed and turned on his doshag in his family’s house and dragged his tired body through his daily work in his father’s shop. A little over a mile away, Lucine, asleep in her family’s house, dreamed of eyes that reached out to her like burning hands. The daylight alarmed her. She yawned and rubbed her eyes, ate less than usual, spilled pails of water, and tripped over invisible obstacles, to the point that her mother was sure someone had given Lucine the evil eye. Her mother insisted that Lucine wear a blue ribbon in her hair and hung a horseshoe set with blue stones over the door.

  Finally, after several weeks of despair, Lucine, who was returning home from the baths with her cousins and her younger sister, saw the boy with the coal black eyes, carrying a large package over his shoulder, walking toward them. She was terrified that he would pass without noticing her, but just as their paths crossed, he glanced up and met Lucine’s eyes. She felt a shock, as though someone had rapped on her head with a thimble, and then a dizziness. Garabed stopped stock still, his pulse pounding in his neck, considering briefly what to do, then dropped his package and ran after her as she turned a corner with the other girls.

  “What’s your name?” he called.

  She paused for a second and then said, “Kodjababian. Lucine.”

  Her older cousin hissed at her, “Are you crazy? Why are you listening to that rude boy? Why are you shouting your name shamelessly in the street?” The cousin grabbed Lucine’s arm and hustled her along.

  Garabed went back to his package, a delivery his father had entrusted to him, and continued on his way, singing to himself. “I have found the girl, her name is Lucine, Lucine the light of my eyes, Lucine the light of the night skies …”

  Garabed made a number of inquiries in the afternoon and found out the address of the Kodjababians, the family of Lucine, happy it was so close to his own neighborhood. In the next days he went out of his way while on errands to walk up and down the Kodjababians’ street. But not once did he see Lucine, and the sight of the blank wooden door of her house only made his misery grow.

  His father, who noticed with annoyance this increasing absentmindedness and the dark moons under his son’s eyes, finally called the boy aside one afternoon. “Son,” he asked, “what devil is it that plagues you? You ac
t more and more like a ghost.”

  Garabed admitted to his father his love for this girl, Lucine, and begged the elder Boyajian to plead his son’s case with the Kodjababians. Berj Boyajian, who had his eye on another girl for his son, wasn’t happy—what was the world coming to when a boy thought he could choose his own bride?—but he regarded himself as a modern man, and he loved his son, so he decided to consider the boy’s request. As with all such dealings, the process had to be handled carefully and with discretion, so as not to shame either family.

  That evening Berj Boyajian consulted with his brother Sahak and the godfather of Garabed, Hagop Asadourian, both of whom agreed to make inquiries into the character of the Kodjababians before undertaking to contact them about the Boyajian family’s interest in the girl.

  Meanwhile, still suspecting that her listless daughter was under the cast of an evil eye, Aghavni Kodjababian called in Digin Isgouhi, the local healer, to put salt on her daughter’s forehead and in her mouth. Digin Isgouhi, an old woman renowned for her cures, prayed over Lucine, scattering salt in the corners of the house as well as just outside the door.

  “Don’t worry, honey,” the old woman reassured Aghavni. “This happens to a lot of girls at this age.”

  Lucine, who didn’t want to admit that she was actually under the spell of a pair of eyes, tried to be more careful in order to assuage her mother’s fears. But since the second time she had seen the boy—whose name she still didn’t know—her dreams were filled with signs and portents she couldn’t interpret and that she was afraid to share with anyone. What did it mean to dream of sitting down to a meal with strangers? What was the significance of chasing a white dove up a hill?

  Garabed’s godfather, Hagop Asadourian, found out that the Kodjababians were a respectable, although by no means wealthy, family, Lucine’s father being a tailor and her uncle, who lived in a house connected to Lucine’s, a smith. Lucine, Asadourian learned, had the qualities one would desire in the possible future wife of one’s godson: she was chaste, modest, and obedient. She was not promised to anyone and was also the elder of two sisters, which meant there was no obstacle in approaching the family.

  Digin Isgouhi, the healer who had cured Lucine of the evil eye, was enlisted by the Boyajians as an emissary. Stopping by Lucine’s father’s shop, she said to Missak Kodjababian, “The Boyajians are interested in Lucine for their boy, Garabed. It’s a good family of merchants, and the boy has straight legs and a strong back. You couldn’t find a better husband for Lucine: he’s healthy, will inherit his father’s business, and attends church. When can you serve them coffee?”

  So it was that Hagop Asadourian and Sahak Boyajian appeared on Sunday afternoon at the Kodjababian household for coffee. Lucine’s family had in the meantime made their own inquiries about Garabed and, deciding he was a worthy candidate, made the coffee sweet as a signal to their guests that they were favorably disposed toward the offer.

  Of course, Garabed paced back and forth in the courtyard behind his house that afternoon, tugging impatiently at his hair. And Lucine, who didn’t yet know the family negotiating for her was that of the boy with the coal black eyes, wondered who her future husband might be. Would he be ugly? Would he be kind? She brought a tray of coffee to the men who sat on cushions around a low table and kept her eyes cast down as the visitors glanced at her and then each other. Lucine demurely retired to the back courtyard of her house, where she twisted the end of her braid and felt her stomach churn enough to make butter.

  The next week Garabed’s mother, aunt, sisters, and girl cousins arranged to go to the same Turkish baths as the Kodjababian women. In the steamy clamor of the bath, the Boyajian women inspected Lucine from a distance: her limbs were straight, all the body parts were in their accustomed places as far as they could see, and aside from a few moles, her skin was unblemished.

  Garabed longed to see Lucine again. The complicated process of negotiating a betrothal could take several months, and while, at this point, success seemed likely, he thought of the girl through the day and the night. Occasionally his mind would be diverted by something else—a conversation with a friend, an urgent errand for his father—but then Lucine would come back to him. It was the simultaneity of her presence and her absence that caused him pain.

  So, enlisting the aid of one of the Kodjababians’ neighbors, a boy about his own age whose sister was a friend of Lucine’s, he passed her a note: “I beg you please to try to meet me tomorrow at the market in the afternoon. I’ll be by the halvah seller. Signed, Garabed Boyajian.”

  Lucine was terribly upset by the note. It was improper for her to have a secret meeting with a boy, even her future husband. In any case, she couldn’t go to the market alone and arranged for Mariam, her friend and neighbor, to accompany her on the pretense of buying some cloth.

  Garabed stood waiting at the halvah seller most of the afternoon, his eyes searching the passing crowds for Lucine. The muscles in his legs ached from being tensed and released, and his ears were ringing when, finally, she and Mariam appeared. When Lucine saw Garabed and recognized him as the boy whose gaze had filled her with longing, she felt blood rush to her face. Garabed, suddenly struck dumb with fear himself, bowed to the girls as they approached. Mariam glanced at one and then the other and moved off a few feet, out of hearing.

  Garabed said, “My family is speaking with your family.”

  “Yes,” said Lucine. She cast her eyes down.

  “It may be that we are to be married,” he added.

  “This is your doing?” she asked.

  “Are you displeased?” he asked. It had occurred to him before that she might not share his feelings, but as he was faced with her now, this possibility cut through him like a sword.

  “No. I am not displeased,” she said, adding quickly, “Our families know better than we do about these things.”

  Mariam tugged at Lucine’s sleeve; she said good-bye to Garabed, not daring again to meet his eyes, and the two girls hurried off.

  Lucine lay awake that night, seeing above her in the dark a long, narrow face with wide, dark eyes that spat light. And Garabed stared out the window at the moon, its light falling in on his bed, seeing in its features those of his future wife.

  So, reader, the betrothal was accomplished in its time, and Garabed’s family placed a ring on Lucine’s right hand, which a year later Garabed himself placed on her left hand in a service blessed by God. Here it is customary to say that they lived happily ever after, but while they loved each other, and two children, Zabelle and Krikor, came of their love, long life and happiness were not their destiny. Garabed was part of a row of men who were shot by Turkish soldiers on the outskirts of Hadjin, and Lucine, after the demise of her infant son, died of exhaustion and hunger in a desert tent. Zabelle, whose story this is, lived to remember and forget the tale.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Leo Hamalian, editor of ARARAT Quarterly in which “Armenian Eyes” and “The Balcony” first appeared, and to the Corporation of Yaddo for a quiet month. Gratitude to those who read and offered comments: Merloyd Lawrence, Paula Sharp, Susan Kricorian, Anne Carey, Tanja Graf, Maria Massie, Kim Witherspoon, Sally Wofford-Girand, Marlene Adelstein, Lola Koundakjian, and Elisabeth Schmitz. Thanks to Irene and Ed Kricorian, for answering my questions, and to James Schamus, my most critical and devoted reader. Mrs. Alice Kharibian told me her story and what she knew of my grandmother’s. Mrs. Rachel Gayzagian’s voice was in my head as I wrote.

  A GROVE PRESS READING GROUP GUIDE BY ARSEN KASHKASHIAN

  ZABELLE

  NANCY KRICORIAN

  ABOUT THIS GUIDE

  We hope that these discussion questions will enhance your reading group’s exploration of Nancy Kricorian’s Zabelle. They are meant to stimulate discussion, offer new viewpoints, and enrich your enjoyment of the book.

  More reading group guides and additional information, including summaries, author tours, and author sites for other fine Grove Press titles, may be fo
und on our Web site, www.groveatlantic.com.

  QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. The book’s epigraph, Three apples fell from heaven, is a variation on the closing formula of an Armenian fairy tale, akin to ‘and they all lived happily ever after.’ Why do you think the author chose this epigraph?

  2. The prologue begins by recounting Zabelle’s story from the third person point of view, but in the first chapter, the narration shifts to first person as Zabelle tells her own life story. Why do you think the author chose to begin the story from this point of view? Why does she begin at the end of Zabelle’s story, only to jump back to the beginning?

  3. In the prologue, Zabelle searches for a tin cup, a hand mirror, a set of combs, a silver thimble, a brooch, and an envelope with a Wor-chester postmark. What is the significance of each of these objects?

  4. After her mother dies in the desert, Zabelle’s almost gives up her struggle to survive until Arsinee appears. Later in the book, Arsinee again appears at a critical moment. What roles do Zabelle and Arsinee play in each other’s lives. What role does Arsinee play in the novel itself?

  5. While the old country custom of ‘the bride has lost her tongue’ (p. 63) was no longer formally practiced when Zabelle married Toros, how does this custom echo in Zabelle’s dealings with her mother-in-law, Vartanoush? Is there any remnant in Zabelle’s own attitude toward her daughter-in-law, Helen?

  6. Zabelle’s romance with Moses Bodjakanian at the shirt factory has as much to do with her unhappiness at home as it does with Moses himself. What does Moses represent to Zabelle?

  7. Zabelle has different relationships with each of her three children—Moses, Jack, and Joy. How do her feelings toward each of them shape the directions of their lives? How are these relationships satisfying or disappointing to Zabelle? What about her relationships with her grandchildren?