The Gimmicks

by Chris McCormick

  “I’ll ask the boys when they get back,” she said, and her husband said, “The boys will know.” Mina, turning down their offer to stay and eat, never visited them again.

  Finally, her search led her to an antique shop four blocks from the statue of Kirov, and although the dice weren’t there, either, she did find her next obsession: American maps.

  The whole city knew that Avo had gone to America, thanks to the bus driver who’d taken him to the airport. The bus driver also insisted that Avo meant to return, shortly, to his fiancée, but Mina could see through a lie told for the sake of kindness. Now, though, in the back of the antique shop, Mina studied dozens of Armenian, Turkish, and Russian-language American maps, annotated with informative facts, wondering which place Avo had chosen to call home. She memorized the names of fifty American cities. Among her favorites: Baton Rouge, Chula Vista, Minneapolis, Chesapeake, and Chattanooga. What a country. There was a picture in her parents’ home of her grandfather’s cousin posing with Lenin. All her life, she’d heard about the lie of peaceful cohabitation in America, the violence and the hatred between races and classes. But when she spoke aloud the names of those cities, she felt a curious zap of hope. Whether or not the experiment was working, she couldn’t say, but all the languages of the world were in those cities, and it was impossible not to admire, at least a little, the gall of America. Maybe it was propaganda, but she could really hear its ships drawing people together over oceans, its trains—never stalled by something so inconsequential as a mudslide—drawing people together over borders. Chattanooga, chattanooga, chattanooga, chattanooga. She imagined Avo writing her postcards from those cities, imagined him licking the stamps.

  Even if he’d written her, she’d never write back. All she would’ve done was imagine herself transported to whatever city he was writing from, to that day in the past when he’d licked the stamp, pretending she’d been there, too, that she’d watched the ospreys dive at the Bayfront in Chula Vista, that she’d closed her eyes in Louisiana and breathed in the lovely smell of fresh petroleum from the refinery in Baton Rouge.

  But her imagination only worked so far, and where she’d been or what she’d done never actually changed just because she could imagine a different past. That was for the best, she thought. Dwelling on history was a luxury reserved for people who didn’t have present demands. Her mother always attributed this to the political activism of the diaspora, who obsessed themselves with setting history into place like a broken bone. Armenians at home talked about the genocide, but they didn’t live in it, and they certainly never plotted—beyond drunken what-ifs—to avenge it. Mina’s ancestors had been mostly out of harm’s way during the genocide, too far east, and no matter how deeply she felt the injury to her people, no matter how sincerely she sympathized with her cousins from Turkey and Syria and Lebanon, she could never quite reach their hearts, never fully understand their absorption with the past. She never said it, for fear of causing further pain, but she wanted—very badly wanted—to move forward already.

  And so Mina did, preparing for the wedding she did not want. Twenty-four years old, she’d waited as long as she could for Avo to return, or for him to send for her in Bismarck or Amarillo or Sault Ste. Marie. Her sister had married at seventeen, ten years earlier, and had told her, “The wedding is the easy part, don’t worry. Talk to me when you have a baby. Every first child is a twin, because the husband turns into an infant, too.”

  With that in mind, when Mina was introduced—in her soon-to-be mother-in-law’s living room—to her fiancé, she almost cried, and then almost laughed. She’d always been accused of having good luck. Now that reputation would die at last.

  “Barev,” said her fiancé, a wolf in a white leisure suit. He’d rolled his sleeves to the elbows to show that the hair on his wrists matched the thickets at his chest. Just barely she could make out the glint of a gold chain buried in that chest hair, ancient ruins at the foot of the woods. “I’m Galust.”

  Before they could spend the rest of their lives together, she thought, she would have to sit with this man, with her parents and his, for several hours. They would discuss their families. They would discuss their expectations. Her only job that day was to appear happy. She wondered how her sister had done it. She wondered if her mother had. Suddenly, the whole of civilization seemed to her an accident based on precedence, that if one woman long ago hadn’t been forced to sit patiently through an event like this, there would be no such thing as nations.

  She hated that woman, whoever she was. And now Mina was beginning to hate her soon-to-be mother-in-law, too. The old woman was the age of Mina’s grandmother, and she was explaining why her son, at fifty-one, hadn’t been remarried in the decade since the death of his first wife, who was never able to bear children.

  “My Galust is a worker, first and foremost,” his mother said. “God has graced him with sharp eyesight and an organized mind, which he has put to use for twenty-five years down at the census bureau in Leninakan’s city hall. After the death of the Childless One—God rest her soul—Galust was transferred here to Kirovakan, where—speaking only factually—the women are relatively disappointing. I joined him here, and we’ve waited years for a beauty to materialize, but time is getting short, and Mina here is—how would you put it?—perfectly acceptable.”

  “More than acceptable,” Galust said. “Gorgeous.”

  His mother patted him on the knee. “And he has that famous Leninakan sense of humor.”

  “No,” Galust said, speaking directly to Mina. “I find you very beautiful.”

  Mina broke the rules to say, “Thank you, but that’s enough, really.” But Galust went on: “I happen to have the opposite dimensions, a very big chin and a tiny little nose, so it’s like our faces were custom-made to be kissing.”

  “Good idea,” said Mina’s mother, rushing things along, and both families watched as, at the center of the room, the newly engaged couple fitted their perfectly matched face shapes together. “Bravo,” someone coughed as the stubble on Galust’s enormous chin scratched Mina, and as her nose rammed into his like a tractor into a kitten. From the corner where Galust’s mother was seated, Mina thought she heard a short quivering sound of disgust. It took Galust’s lips in her teeth not to make the same noise herself.

  A city can go by many names. Long before the Soviets had graced the city with the name of its hero, for instance, Kirovakan was known as Gharakilisa. The word—a Seljuk Turk’s word—meant black church, because when the Seljuks invaded the land, they found an ancient Armenian church made of black stones. It stood for five more centuries, until 1826, when one of history’s great earthquakes destroyed the city, bringing down the black-stoned Holy Mother of God. Reconstruction began two years later, using black and orange tufa stones imported, like Galust, from Leninakan, a city once called Alexandropol and, before the tsar, Gyumri. The tufa stones at the reconstructed church in Kirovakan—in the churchyard, in the shadow of the single-domed basilica, a few surviving thirteenth-century cross-stones called khachkars would serve as the perfect backdrop to wedding photographs. For now, though, Mina had the churchyard to herself. Everyone else was inside, between the stone walls of a shifting and rebuilt history, waiting for the bride to enter.

  How many cousins did she have? They seemed to have multiplied, sitting in the pews while they waited. She couldn’t name many of the faces. They all belonged to a larger family, the one she was expected to contribute to. The one she was expected to represent. At the altar, she kept her eyes on her shoes.

  The priest asked the man and wife to touch their foreheads together, and he held over them an enormous bronze cross. The weight of it came down on them as the priest read long passages from the Bible and from the city ordinance. At some point, a funny thought flitted into her head.

  She imagined having to stand on a chair to touch foreheads with Avo. Or else he’d have to crouch uncomfortably low. Maybe he would’ve bent to a knee. She smiled so wide that Galust noticed.
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br />   Forehead to hers, he whispered, “I’m so relieved you’re happy.” It was, she thought, the sweetest thing anyone had ever said to her, and she began to cry. He was slightly shorter than she was, and she realized she was bearing the brunt of the priest’s accessory. For the rest of her life, she would wake early in the morning with a slight headache that didn’t dispel until the afternoon. It would always feel as though that bronze cross had never fully been lifted.

  The reception was held outdoors, in the city square. The weather, rainless, was an act of grace. At one point, while the men danced in a circle around her, and while they whistled and dusted her feet with dinner napkins, she spotted a familiar face near the statue of Kirov. As soon as she had a chance, she lifted the hem of her dress, so as not to drag it, and walked toward it.

  “Ruben,” she said. “Is it you?”

  “All the way in Paris, they’re talking about this wedding,” Ruben said. “I couldn’t stay away. I had to come and congratulate you in person.”

  Mina didn’t know what to say. She wanted to ask where he’d been, why he’d disappeared, whether or not he knew where Avo had gone. But she also wanted to run back to the wedding. She feared being seen with him.

  “I’m giving you the best wishes for your marriage,” he said.

  She started to ask a question, but Ruben must’ve known what was on her mind, because he interrupted her to say, “Is Avo inside the church?”

  “Oh,” Mina said. “He’s—no. No, he hasn’t been here for a very long time. You didn’t know that?”

  “I haven’t seen him since we left for Paris,” Ruben said. “We speak on the phone, however. I thought he might’ve returned for your wedding.”

  “You talk to him?”

  “All the time. He’s my brother.”

  Mina spun her ring on her finger. This diamond was real. “Is he happy?”

  “I think so,” Ruben said. “He sounds happy. Every time we speak, he goes on and on about how much he’s enjoying Los Angeles.”

  Mina said, “California.”

  “That’s right,” Ruben said. He smiled. “He’s found work as a fighter, he says. He always was an athlete, a competitor. He fights for good money, I hear, but it’s a dangerous life, as you can imagine. People trying to kill each other for money. I can’t imagine a more American life for him. Oh, we talk about it all the time, although I haven’t heard from him since arriving here. It’s easier, as you can imagine, to call him when I’m outside of the USSR. When I’m in France or Israel, or when I’m in Spain, you see.”

  “He’s a fighter?”

  “I guess he’s been traveling a lot, too, otherwise I’m sure he would’ve come for the wedding.”

  Again Mina said, almost to herself this time, “He’s a fighter?”

  “America can bring it out of a man.”

  “But why did he leave in the first place? Ruben, please, tell me if you know.”

  Ruben put his hands on the shoulders of her wedding gown. “Well,” he said. “Or—no, I shouldn’t guess.”

  “Tell me,” Mina said.

  “Well, I think it might have something to do with what happened with Tigran. It broke Avo, I think.”

  “But he hardly knew Tigran. You and I should’ve been broken, if anyone.”

  “Oh, Mina-jan. He hasn’t told you?”

  “What?”

  “I hate to be the one to tell you. I assumed he already had, a long time ago. He told me just after he got to America.”

  “What is it?”

  “When Tigran died,” Ruben said, and then he stopped. He straightened the sleeves of her dress and stood back. “Avo told me that—well, I came here to tell you something Avo kept a secret for a very long time.”

  “Tell me.”

  Ruben seemed smaller than he’d ever appeared across a backgammon board. He adjusted his glasses and started again. “Well, when Tigran died, you see, Avo—well, he pitied you. That’s the truth. Believe me, I hate to tell you, but it’s the truth—I swear it. He told me he saw you crying and childish, and you reminded him—yes, that’s what he said, you reminded him of himself when his parents died, and, well, Avo confused pity for love. That’s how he put it to me. Pity for love. And I wanted you to know, so you can live happily with your new husband, without ever having to think back on what could have been. He confused pity for love, and he decided to leave before you both made the mistake of marrying.”

  Mina covered her chin. She said, “I see.”

  “But it’s good news,” Ruben said. “You’re free, and happily married, and Avo, well, he’ll be relieved when I tell him how perfect your life turned out now. No need to look back. You don’t need his pity anymore, right? Look at you in your gown.”

  Soon he was gone, and Mina returned to the party. Whistles and hollers, hollers and whistles.

  The married couple moved into a flat up the stairs from the bride’s parents, up to the top floor of the tallest building in Kirovakan. For some years, she continued to teach backgammon after hours at the school, and she cooked and cleaned and sewed buttons on Galust’s shirtsleeves, which she gently suggested he keep rolled down. She became pregnant after only a few hairy attempts. And then pregnant again. Immediately after the wedding, she’d stopped studying the map of America, but she continued for a while to recount the names of her favorite cities. At first she kept the map, right there in her drawer along with Shirakatsi’s proofs and her journal from Paris. But soon, with the babies, it became a lodestone of a burdensome past, and one day she folded the map into a small, sharp triangle and flicked it into the trash.

  15

  Paris, France, 1983

  Several stories below his balcony at the Hôtel de Crillon, horsemen in white garlands shouldered épées to the galloping shots of distant firecrackers. A marching band rolled its snares and brass into the deafening blares of aerobatic jets, whose shadows blinked now and then over the assembled crowd. There must have been fifty thousand people on this block alone, Parisians and tourists alike feeding candies to the children seated like demiurges on their shoulders, waving feverishly to the president and the visiting heads of state. It was Bastille Day 1983. Just shy of two centuries earlier, seven meager prisoners had been released during the storming of a prison, and now the entire country swaggered in its freedom. One little flashpoint had led to this, a national glistering. Ruben finished the last of his bottle of apple cider vinegar and went inside to fetch another.

  His shoe hadn’t hit the carpet before his partner, Varoujan, stood from the chaise longue. He tried and failed to fold the newspaper he’d been reading, and finally resorted to splaying the pages out on the oval coffee table like a map. Sticking out from underneath was a corner of the blueprints for the terminals at Orly. Varoujan rushed to pluck out the blueprints like a card from a deck, as if he’d been looking for them all morning, as if he’d been doing his job, and spoke as he reshuffled the pages. “How’s the parade?” he asked. “Is it good? A good parade?”

  Ruben went to the refrigerator. He’d miscounted; he’d underpacked. He’d already taken the last of his apple cider vinegar.

  “One day soon,” Varoujan continued, “we’ll have ourselves a parade just like it.”

  “No,” Ruben said. “We won’t. And sit down already.”

  Varoujan sat. He smoothed out the wrinkles in his oversize slacks. At forty-seven, he was exactly twenty years Ruben’s senior, but he still hadn’t found a tailor.

  Rooting through the fridge again, Ruben said, “You didn’t happen to see another bottle of my—did you see another bottle of the—”

  “We won’t have a parade, you think? You don’t think we’ll—”

  “We’ll win,” Ruben said, “it’s not that. I could’ve sworn, though, that I’d brought another bottle.”

  “There’s a drawer in the fridge, did you check? And why no parade, then, if we’ll win? I want a parade if we win, I want a parade like this.”

  Ruben checked the drawer in the fri
dge, even though he’d already checked it several times. “It’s not Armenian, a parade. A parade—it’s so . . . French. Can you imagine us parading? High-stepping over piles of horse shit? No. Dancing, singing, yes. But trotting in costumes like kids in a school play? Can you imagine us? Turkey issuing an apology, Turkey paying reparations, ceding land, and Armenians on the streets? No, we’ll be in our homes, in our halls and our churches, praising each other. These Frenchmen, my God. I don’t care what they say the parade is for—if you have to perform like that, you’re not free. Is there another drawer in here I’m not seeing?”

  Varoujan said, “I think I’ve got the terminal memorized, every detail. I’ll review again tonight, but I could use some fresh air. I can go for you, Ruben-jan, if you need more of—what was it you’ve been drinking?”

  The man was a father and a husband, Ruben remembered, and it occurred to him for the first time since they’d arrived in Paris together three days earlier that all of Varoujan’s deference and respect might have been an act. Probably Varoujan was seething—paired up with a kid his daughter’s age. He probably thought Ruben was demented, what with the addiction to apple cider vinegar, what with the particular way the kid had been forced to re-earn the boss’s trust. Turning on a brother like that. A cousin’s cousin, but still. Varoujan had taken the hotel key off the nightstand and was heading for the door when Ruben stopped him. Possibly he would go to the police, Ruben thought. Maybe this was all a setup. Who was this man in slouching slacks? He hardly knew him.