The Gimmicks

by Chris McCormick

  Only after the day’s matches were done, when I was taking the elevator back to my room, did I see Ruben again. He walked into the elevator and—I still don’t believe it—asked me a question. And not only one but two. He said, “How are you feeling going into tomorrow? Are you nervous?” When I said I was nervous, a little, he said, “Oh, don’t be. You’re leagues above the competition here.” And then—it’s only just happened an hour ago, and so I’m baffled about it as I write this—he walked me from the elevator to my room, wished me a good night, and then—I really can’t—he kissed me. Just once, on the cheek, as my uncle would kiss me. But coming from Ruben, it was as if he’d proposed marriage. Of course it was disgusting—the kiss came from a boy I’ve never felt very comfortable around. But it was also something more. Because the kiss didn’t come only from that boy. The kiss seemed to be coming from someone else, too. And at first the only person I could think of who would send a kiss through Ruben to me was the man who should have been here with me all along. Tigran. But then I had another idea. I’ve been imagining that the kiss came from someone still in Kirovakan, and it wasn’t a kiss of friendship but a beckoning home. And I’m smiling as I write this.

  Jour trois

  The tournament is over and has been for two months. I’m home in Kirovakan, the end of October, and it’s late—nobody is awake in my building but me. This journal was confiscated, along with the rest of my possessions, upon my return to Armenia in August. My parents were taken in for questioning. So was I. I was asked about Ruben’s behavior and about the men I described in my journal under the heading “Jour deux.” I said I had no information, other than the facts of the morning after the tournament. How Ruben wasn’t in his hotel room. How he wasn’t at the train station or the airport, either. How he simply disappeared.

  And now I can’t sleep. I’m home, and it’s late, and nobody is awake maybe in the whole city but me. This journal was returned to me a week after it was taken, and I threw it in the back of my wardrobe. Backgammon has brought me nothing but trouble. I thought forgetting this journal would be the same as clearing my mind of all that. But last week, I heard the news from Paris, and I haven’t been able to sleep since. So, a moment ago, I thought: Maybe what’s keeping me up at night is that I left the journal unfinished. Maybe if I fill those empty lines under “Jour trois,” I’ll be able to sleep again. Because the truth is I haven’t told anyone—not my parents, not the officials—the whole story about Ruben’s disappearance. And I’m afraid I’ll never be able to fall asleep again until I tell somebody—even myself, in these pages—the truth. So just now I kicked out of my bedsheets, fished for the journal in the closet, and—here I go.

  The final day of the tournament—the day before the flight home—I ate breakfast surrounded by reporters. Ruben was with me, and—continuing whatever transformation had occurred the night before—he seemed happy to speak to the reporters for me, interpreting their English and Russian, interpreting my responses, and answering many of the questions on his own. The local press, already rooting against me in the upcoming match, were additionally upset that Ruben, who seemingly spoke every other language fluently, didn’t know a word of French. Ruben said something in English that made everybody but the French laugh. And then Ruben did what I’d never seen him do before: he laughed, too.

  It took me two hours to beat the French player. Even some of the home crowd applauded me afterward. I suspect they wanted me to go on to win the whole tournament now, since they’d lost to me and could therefore claim a roundabout second place. They knew I only had to win two more matches to win the whole tournament.

  In the break between matches, while the player from Ireland prepared to face me, I shook off fans and reporters so I could go find Ruben, who’d left the tournament area before I could. I found him outside, near the carport of the hotel, smoking with the well-dressed men I’d seen the day before. There were the same three men—two older, one younger—and they called me over to join. I accepted a cigarette and thanked them for complimenting my winning streak. Then the younger man said, “Do you know who you’ll be playing next?” “Yes,” I said, “Ireland.” “You haven’t heard?” he said. “There’s been a loaded-dice scandal. Ireland’s been disqualified. And so their last opponent will take their place.” “Oh,” I said. “Who is it?” And the men started to laugh, except for Ruben, who stared at me seriously and said, “Turkey.”

  Of course I know the history. But my mother always told me that the past is the past, and that the only Armenians who obsess over what the Turks did to us are those who left Armenia and feel the need to compensate for the guilt of living abroad. I heard Turkey, and the only thought I had was that it would be a tougher matchup than I would’ve had against Ireland. But the men—and Ruben, certainly—seemed to have something larger than backgammon in mind.

  I can see that now.

  The other semifinal match—the USA versus Morocco, at a nearby table—finished early, with the American player advancing. Now all eyes were on my match with the Turkish player. The match was close, but in the end, I lost. We’d spent nearly four hours breathing into each other’s faces, and afterward, I tried to congratulate the Turkish player, but he did not want to shake my hand. Finally, his coach forced him to do it. The Turkish coach—a gentle-faced man with a dark mustache and hair slicked back behind his ears—congratulated me on my play in the tournament and said I should be very proud. Then he and his student left to prepare for the final match, and the crowd—or most of them, anyway—followed.

  I thought I was alone, and so I began to cry. I wasn’t crying because I lost, though I’d hoped to win it all and was disappointed in myself. No, I was crying for Tigran. Dead for weeks, but not until my tournament was over did his death feel real to me. I lost, and then I lost him.

  But I was not alone. A voice, an Armenian voice, called to me from the other side of the banquet hall: “Girl.” He was one of the rich-looking Armenians, the young one. In his mid-twenties, I’d say. “You can’t let them see you like this. They’ve made too many of our women cry already.”

  “I’m not crying because of them,” I said.

  “Do you know who I am?” he said. Just the way he asked the question made me feel as though I should, that I was an ignorant little girl for not knowing who he was. He ran his fingers through his hair, which was black and thick, as if to show me more of his face. There was a deep vertical line between his eyes, which made me think he was a man who spent most of his time in serious thought. He wore a neatly trimmed beard and a brown suit with his shirt collar hanging fashionably over the lapels. I worried that another five minutes alone with him, and I’d be his.

  “No,” I admitted.

  “You will,” he said. He winked. “I’m impressed with your little boyfriend. Small, that Ruben, but he knows his history. Politics, languages. An impressive young man.”

  “He’s not my—”

  “You can call me Hagop,” he said. “I spend most of my time in Beirut. Have you been?”

  “I’ve been to Georgia,” I said, as if that were related. “The coast of the Black Sea.”

  “Armenian girls can be so provincial,” he said. “Would you like to travel the world?”

  “Yes,” I said, because clearly, that was the answer he wanted. The truth was I couldn’t wait to be home again, this time for good.

  “Where do you want to go? I can send you there. In fact, I can make you a citizen in any nation in the world. You want to be an American?”

  “No, thank you,” I said.

  “Good. To use a French word, that would’ve been a cliché. All your girlfriends back home want to be Americans, don’t they, but not you. Tell me, though—how is it that you lost to the Turk? Did he cheat?”

  “No.”

  “Are you certain? If he cheated, I can have justice carried out.”

  “He won fair.”

  “Do you care about justice? About the truth being told?”

  “I try not to li
e, myself.”

  “Provincial,” he said, disappointed. “You’re not like your partner. You don’t think big enough.”

  And although he was dismissing me—scaring me a little, too—I still couldn’t help feeling drawn to him. It was more than his sharp looks. He had a habit of squinting while he spoke, and each time he did it, I wanted more and more to follow him wherever he went.

  But before I could, Ruben arrived and diffused the spell.

  “You should go pack,” Ruben said. “We’ve got an early morning ahead of us.”

  “Aren’t you going to watch the final match?”

  “I’m going to explore the city.”

  “Can I come?” I asked.

  Ruben looked to Hagop for the answer. Hagop shook his head, which made me feel as though I’d just failed an exam I hadn’t known I was taking.

  “We’ll be doing men’s things,” Ruben said. “You enjoy the match, though. I might be out late, but don’t stay up for me. We’ve got an early morning, remember. Get some sleep.”

  And then they left. And I returned to the tournament and watched the American player win the final match. Then I went to my room and fell asleep. And in the morning, I waited in the lobby for Ruben to come down, but he never did. I took the elevator back up and went to his room, thinking he’d overslept. But the door was open, and the cleaning crew was there, and he had already checked out. So I went to the train station, and he was not there, and I went to the church where I’d arranged for us to have a little tour, but he was not there, and I took the train to the airport, and I waited as long as I could before boarding my plane. And he was not there, either.

  I came home, alone, to interrogations from my family, from Ruben’s parents, and from government officials. In all of them, I skipped over my encounter with Hagop out of pure embarrassment. I thought it was the story of my own girlishness, my flirting with a handsome, charismatic man, and my failure in making him see me as a worldly person. It was not a story I thought needed to be told. I had no idea where Ruben went—still the truth. Hagop’s claim to be able to make me a citizen anywhere in the world? Bravado and flirtation and—I still thought, even after Ruben’s disappearance—bullshit.

  But then, just this week, news came in from Paris.

  The final match of the tournament had been quick and anticlimactic—the American won easily. Afterward, I watched the trophy ceremony among an enormous crowd. I was escorted to the front of the pack, because I was to be given a ribbon, so I had a clear view of the ceremony. The American heaved his trophy, flanked by his coach and a man announced as the American ambassador to France. Similarly, the Turkish player, silver medalist, had his coach and ambassador at his side. The Turkish ambassador made a big show of giving his car key to the Turkish coach, the gentle-faced man who’d made his student shake my hand. The ambassador was offering the coach a job to be his official chauffeur, and the coach—to a large swell of cheering laughter—accepted the position. The French loved him, and the ambassador would expedite the paperwork to keep the Turkish coach in Paris. He would send for his family in the morning.

  Last week, the news came in: Three or four men, claiming to be members of a new so-called Armenian army, assassinated the Turkish ambassador to France in front of the Turkish embassy building in Paris. It was one thirty in the afternoon, and the ambassador was in his car. His chauffeur was also killed, and it’s his picture in the newspaper that’s been keeping me awake at night. It’s the chauffeur’s face—a gentle face, with a dark mustache and hair slicked back behind his ears—that has forced me to dig this journal out of the back of my closet and finish my story.

  The truth is I didn’t know where Ruben went. And I don’t know where Ruben is now. But last week, on October 24, 1974, on a clear afternoon, I believe I know where Ruben Petrosian was, and what he was doing.

  There. I feel better. This has helped—I’ll be able to sleep now. I’m going to fall asleep, and then I’m going to burn this journal. I want no trouble. I only want to be provincial, and to think the way my sister thinks. Time is not round like the earth. The past is the past is the past.

  Two

  10

  Kirovakan, Soviet Armenia, 1974

  To the factory, then, if his cousin’s cousin had left him for good, which seemed impossible at first, when Mina arrived shockingly alone on the train from the airport, and then perfectly inevitable. Ruben had either gotten himself into serious trouble or chosen to abandon Avo in Kirovakan. Both scenarios were unbearable to think about, so all that was left to consider was the result: Ruben was gone.

  The factory, then. Avo’s parents had worked at a factory just like this, as had all his uncles, all the tall and thwarted Gregoryans, and why not Avo, then, too, the tallest and most thwarted yet. Eighteen years old and two meters tall, he couldn’t find a pair of gloves that fit him. So the factory made a pair—synthetic rubber, fingers and thumbs as long as skewers, wide as champagne flutes, though there were no celebratory drinks to commemorate his first day on the job. Just the slot at the machinery, doing his part to manufacture synthetic fibers—polyester and nylon, mainly, though also spandex and rayon and styrene-butadiene, like his gloves—textiles that went on, according to the parents of young children in Kirovakan, to become toys, stockings, and boots. Maybe no one outside the factory was aware of the truth, that some two thirds of the textiles manufactured at the plant were for military use, nylon parachutes and polyester webbing and styrene-butadiene tires for vehicles engineered for Soviet combat. For a war that would never come.

  His supervisor, a stout man who went by the nickname Shorty and therefore couldn’t help but refer constantly to Avo’s size, had a habit of standing too close and delivering lectures. “Come on, Stretch,” he’d say, face at Avo’s belt. “Cheer up! I can’t have a morose Gregoryan in the barracks, no sir, not at my plant. You’re young! Cheer up! Who cares if you don’t want to be here? You’re making synthetic fibers. Counterfeit silk, basically, but the counterfeit is better than the real thing! Where’s your enthusiasm? You’re helping fight the good fight, God forbid the good fight comes. Where’s your energy? You don’t have any?”

  But faking enthusiasm seemed more difficult than feeling it. Avo had stolen a man’s life, and the last person he’d told even a morsel of the truth to—Siranoush—had keeled over just a few days after hearing his confession. And now that Ruben was gone, Avo was left alone with his guilt, and even faking heart felt impossible. What was even more impossible to explain—not only to Shorty but to anyone at all—was the horrible irony that he himself was the one who’d made Ruben’s escape possible in the first place; that if he hadn’t killed Tigran, not only would he not feel any guilt, but he wouldn’t be alone now, either. If anyone should have abandoned anybody, Avo thought, it should have been the other way around. And with all of that in his mind, the guilt and the resentment and the total isolation, it was extraordinarily difficult to fake enthusiasm for a job manufacturing materials of war. Avo, alone with his anger at his station in the plant except for the occasional needling from his supervisor, was growing angrier and more imaginative in the ways he would bring Ruben to justice for leaving him, maybe with the help of some of this equipment.

  “Come on, Stretch! Why don’t you put a smile on your face? You’re doing your part for the people! You’re chipping in! You should put on a smile, and before you know it, you won’t have to put it on at all—it’ll already be there! Habit into virtue!”

  The only habits Avo found himself developing, however, were the long walks between the factory and the city and the village, where he was still sleeping, most nights, in Ruben’s old bedroom.

  In an act of foresight Avo had never seen her apply with her own son, Ruben’s mother often had food—a covered pot of borscht or a lidded plate of meat—waiting for him on the nightstand. Avo couldn’t say whether the meals were acts of genuine kindness or material apologies for the new ritual of Avo’s having to pay rent to stay there. The monthly contribut
ions Avo made were quasi-voluntary: Ruben’s father, who had proposed the idea in the first place, occasionally claimed that the arrangement signified a distasteful act of showmanship on Avo’s part, but at other times grumbled loudly that the money wasn’t nearly enough.

  For those reasons, Avo never rushed home from the factory after work, and his habitual strolls through the city took on a leisurely, imaginative mood. Once, in late October when the nighttime rain didn’t fall so much as hang in thin curtains visible here and there near the halogen lamps and in the lightly pockmarked faces of puddles, Avo kept on walking. It was impossible to say how many countless cigarettes he smoked as he wandered past the plant and Kirov Square, on through the street curving alongside the tallest building in the city, a twelve-story apartment building with bright slitted windows like the eyes of cats, and farther still through the city limits in the opposite direction of the village in the hills. Beyond there, on to Spitak, where the smell of woodsmoke steered through the rain and reminded him of his mother, who used to fry fish in beds of stripped bark. After all that walking, he thought, he’d grow accustomed to being alone, come to prefer it, and therefore feel less angry at being left behind in a place he’d never chosen for himself.

  But there he was, confused and bitter two months after Ruben’s disappearance, finally turning around and walking home through those thin, still curtains of rain on a late night at the end of October, when no one else in all of Kirovakan would possibly be awake.