The Gimmicks

by Chris McCormick

  “You did?”

  “I was so mortified I packed my bags and moved to Moscow. I mean, I changed my whole life because of my shame. The next time I saw my sister was twenty years later, and when I went to embrace her, we just burst out laughing. Right in front of the whole family, dozens of them. We shook hands instead, laughing so hard our faces turned purple. Until the day she died, we shook hands to say hello, shook hands to say goodbye, and no one knew why that cracked us up so bad, but sure enough, they laughed, too.” He pushed himself up from the log and wiped his hands clean. “That laughter became the signature memory I have of her, the texture of our love. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have escaped to Moscow. I’d have liked to have those twenty years back. I’d have liked to have more of that experience, shaking hands and losing our breath with laughter.”

  He was so caring with her she almost forgot what she’d done. It was as though he’d given her the only type of forgetting she’d ever known to be an act of kindness. He was willing to forget her stupidity to remember her genius.

  Now, watching her child roll dice, Mina felt as far from genius as a woman could be.

  No wonder Avo had pitied her, she thought. No wonder he’d faked his affection for her, no wonder he’d left without saying goodbye. All those years of pity she’d mistaken for love. She covered her chin.

  After the conversation with Ruben at the wedding, throwing away the American map proved insufficient. Like her sister before her, she threw away her records. She threw away books of poetry and photographs in thick stacks, and burned many hundreds of pages of her journals over the stove. She even burned the invitation to the tournament bearing the Eiffel Tower. One day, Galust had come home from work sniffing. “What’s on fire?” he asked, and she told him she’d burned the pilaf.

  All that was left after those fiery first months of her marriage was the gift she’d been given in the shadows of the larches. She sometimes fanned the golden edges, smelling the three-hundred-year-old paper. She followed the lines of math like faint tracings of fossils. Galust had asked her politely to stop leading the student backgammon club so they could work on starting a family, and it saddened her beyond comprehension that she no longer had a student to groom.

  Unlike all the previous recipients of the journal, she would fail to pass it on. Instead, she was living a typical domestic life. The day she realized she was pregnant, she took Shirakatsi’s proofs straight to the stove.

  But in the kitchen, she must have lost track of time, studying the math before destroying it, and Galust—had he been home all along?—found her at the stove with her nose in the crease. He said, “My love, my bookish love, what’s that you’re reading?” His heels lifted from the floor so he could kiss her on the lips. But he missed, as he often did when they were standing, and kissed her, accidentally, directly on the chin.

  Right then Mina lost it. She was laughing and sobbing all at once in that ugly authentic way she’d been taught so many times to bury. But Galust held her and joked that he didn’t know her chin was so sensitive. He’d kiss her more gently next time, he said. He loved her. And the way he loved her—no bargain at all. She knew his deepest fear was that he’d missed his chance to be a father, and she savored the brief moment before she exorcised that fear with her news. He must’ve seen a change in her eyes. He said, “Never mind about the book, my love, it’s none of my business as long as you’re enjoying it.”

  That was when she told him. “You’ll be a father soon,” she said.

  He folded over himself and touched his cheek to her stomach, and he held her hands. They danced like that, right there in the kitchen. Not like an arranged marriage but like lovers, like real lovers.

  Something about the impending baby turned her secrets into burdens, and she let them free almost dispassionately. It was a few months into her pregnancy when she explained the journal she’d nearly incinerated.

  Galust asked if he could hold it. Together they marveled at its age, its history, its value.

  “Why destroy it?” Galust asked, and Mina said, “I know it’s crazy, but I have this feeling that this book is my last piece of bad luck, and I just need to get rid of it before the baby comes.”

  Galust said, “I’ll light the stove now.”

  It was the word now that changed her mind. The idea that a single moment was all a person needed to erase centuries seemed vulgar. Whatever pain that book had caused for her, she couldn’t destroy it. Besides, there was always the dim hope that the painful could become useful. She said, “What if we sell it? Use the money for the baby. For the baby’s whole life.”

  From his previous post, Galust knew a man who ran an illegal shop out of his home in Leninakan. The man bought and sold and traded with foreign dealers. Rugs and glassware, mostly. But art and antiques, too.

  On the westward train the next day, Mina felt sick on the tracks. Galust gave her his hat to throw up in, which she did. They arrived in the unreasonably bright afternoon. Galust streaked his hat through a fountain, singing a little song to hide the nature of his chore.

  Inside the merchant’s home, the walls seemed built of framed paintings. Landscapes, mostly—mountains and rivers with horses at the banks. In the lone spot of plaster between frames, Mina could make out a small pale stain where a crucifix once hung. Truncated wooden columns studded the entryway, bearing antique figurines of bronze and silver. Quickly, they were greeted by a cat who ran the soft bones of his body along Mina’s calves.

  Galust’s friend appeared. He had the biggest face she’d ever seen, and his jowls rumbled with every word he spoke. “If you see something you like,” he joked, “tell me so I can hike up the price.”

  The cat followed them to the back of the house. The merchant pulled a curtain to reveal a rack of rugs. Mina knelt to stroke the cat, and by the time she stood again, the false front had dropped, and her husband was showing his friend the proofs.

  The merchant fixed a loupe in his big eye socket and studied the ink. He left and returned with another book, perhaps as old. He studied both books under his loupe.

  Finally, he looked up at Galust. He didn’t bother to take out the eyepiece. Slamming a book shut in each hand like a pincer, he said, “You’ve been had.”

  “Is that so,” Galust said, but Mina stepped on his toe until he let her do the talking. She said, “I’m not claiming it’s an original Shirakatsi from the fifth century, only a copy made by a cleric in the seventeenth century. Even still, that would make the book rare and valuable. Priceless, even.”

  “Priceless and worthless are synonyms to me,” the merchant muttered, recessing his head into his jowls to drop the loupe into his shirt pocket. “Fifth century, seventeenth century—both ancient history compared to this. The ink here is Turkish-made. Can’t be much older than your dear old husband, I’m afraid.”

  The cat was at her feet again, and this time she kicked him. She must’ve seemed possessed, because Galust asked if she needed to borrow his hat again. She declined. She looked to the merchant once more and asked if he was sure. Could he—please, and closely this time—check the ink again?

  The man pursed his big face. Maybe because the shop was otherwise empty, or maybe because he had an authentic affection for Galust from some unknown shared history, or maybe because he could see by Mina’s appearance and by her husband’s soaking hat how much farther than a train ride she’d traveled to hear the news, he agreed to look once more. He popped the loupe back into his eye and opened the book. He spent a much longer time checking, even going so far as to leave and return with other artifacts for comparison. A Bible. A map. What appeared to be a list or a poem. Finally, he said, “I’m sorry.”

  Oh, apologies, Mina thought. They mean so much to Armenians. But now that she was in possession of one, she didn’t know what to do with it. The apology just sat there in front of her, old words in a forged book. She told him to keep it.

  “Oh,” she said, almost at the door. “You haven’t seen a collection of old misma
tched dice come through here, have you?”

  But all the man had was another apology.

  Back home, she was getting big. In the mornings, her sister brought Mina’s nephew and niece to the apartment. Those angels took turns rubbing their aunt’s swollen feet. Her sister made tea and assorted bread and salted cucumbers and cheese. Every morning. Eating and laughing. Mina with her foot massages, talking with the children about nothing but the future. Vahan was eleven and wanted to be a pilot. Talin was seven and wanted to be a singer. She sang. They applauded.

  Mina would always love those mornings.

  And by the time Araksya arrived, Mina was so enamored with her family that she hardly had the space in her heart to remember the forgery. But when a small crack opened up—at night, usually, waiting for the baby to fall asleep—when she remembered the fraudulence of the book, she wondered if Tigran had lied to her on purpose—had simply made the whole story up—or if he himself had been fooled. It seemed to her that if he’d known the book was fake, it would have made the gift even sweeter, in a way, a lie to help her believe in herself. Or was his encouragement just as fraudulent as the book? She didn’t know what to feel. And the crack in her heart went on opening and soldering itself, no less painful every time, because she would never know the truth, which is the only thing that can pin a heart open or seal it off forever.

  Once she got to thinking about Tigran, it was only a matter of synapses before she was stuck again with Avo. He had pretended to love her, and she couldn’t imagine a crueler lie. She dreamed sad, silly dreams of taking his love to an appraiser’s shop, watching his heart go under an appraiser’s loupe. She wished she hadn’t been so eager to believe, so young and crazy and impatient for love.

  She wished, too, after all these years, that she wasn’t still doubting her doubt. Short passing moments of the day when the clearest light in the world came through in her heart, when she knew as certainly as a thing can be known that Ruben—from envy or hate—had lied, and that Avo’s love was real.

  No matter, though. All in the past now. Now what she had were those glorious mornings, her nephew and niece on the rug with the baby, speaking about nothing at all except for the future.

  Now her daughter was two years old but more heightened than that. On the roof in January, she rolled the dice. Red faces, white pips. How many of those mornings with her cousins would Araksya go on to remember? Many, Mina hoped. Let more of them come. Tonight they would go to Talin’s recital, and just over there, in the snow-scattered pines and larches, just up in the mountains there, that’s where the skiers go. Tomorrow, Mina decided, she would take the children to the lift.

  “Are you ready to go inside?” she asked her daughter. Her husband would be home soon, and she hadn’t chopped the cabbage. It pained her to think of him going hungry for even one minute.

  19

  Kirovakan, Soviet Armenia, 1983

  One last time as the workday ended, before he rushed off to the recital his niece was due to give, Galust admired the pin in his lapel. Gold and rimmed in pearl, the pin brought the job at the census bureau a kind of ancillary beauty that—after logging names and numbers in meticulously sharpened graphite all day—made him feel important. A civic mechanic, Mina had called him once, where names and dates were the nuts and bolts of history, and his calling was to ratchet them into place.

  The pin said as much. Every morning, descending the elevator from the top floor of the tallest building in Kirovakan, as he walked across the city square to the administration building, he could feel the eyes of the citizens fall upon his pin. There he goes, they seemed to say, our next Secretary of the Regional Committee!

  One last look in the mirror, then, before the clock reached the hour when he could rush home for a quick dinner. Beside his reflection, on the desk, he saw his wife and daughter. The two-year-old with the same chin as Mina, so steep that the bottom lip seemed to hang off the end of her face. Like a beautiful fish, he thought, and that’s what he called Araksya, his little dzuk.

  He was thinking, Fish, fish, fish, as he packed his typewriter for the day. That was when the knock came at the door.

  “Sorry,” he called out, locking the door. He straightened his pin in a mirror. “The office is closed for the day. Back in the morning.”

  Technically, the office was open for five more minutes, a fact that painfully discredited Galust’s pin. Earlier, he’d given himself permission for this one transgression, justifying it by remembering all the compliments his work had received since he was transferred to Kirovakan from Leninakan. In just five years, he’d whipped the city’s census bureau into shape. He’d earned the pin that suggested his future promotion.

  He held his breath, hoping the person at the door wouldn’t insist. One word, and Galust knew he’d fold and stay late to work.

  No response came. Galust counted silently to one hundred, just to be safe.

  At the count of ninety, he picked up his typewriter, which folded neatly into a smart blue briefcase with golden clasps that brought out the pin on his lapel. Then he pressed his ear to the door, waited a beat, and poked his head out into the hall.

  The coast seemed clear. Locking up, he left the office and then the building, which let out into the city square, just across from the old statue Mina despised so much, the statue of Sergey Kirov. Whenever she came to see Galust, she would always walk around the entire city square to avoid getting near it, and he never asked why. He didn’t want to burden her with questions or imply that he didn’t love every part of her, even her eccentricities.

  Love. He was a man unafraid to do it. When he was transferred from Leninakan to Kirovakan, his colleagues joked that he—sentimental, unguarded—would fit right in. He laughed along with the jokes, but he never explained how he’d come to be so unabashedly romantic. He’d failed to love his first wife and had always regretted the young man he’d been with her. Every doctor in Armenia had checked her, and no one could pinpoint why she’d been unable to get pregnant. He was fine, according to the doctors, and the invisibility of his first wife’s issue made the problem difficult to trust. Galust’s mother—meaning well, he still believed—kept telling her that the problem was in her head, that if only she wanted the baby badly enough, then she’d be fixed, a bit of nonsense that turned his wife depressive and bitter. Galust found himself in the terrible position of sympathizing with both his wife and his mother, whose yearning for a grandchild seemed intensely personal. He defended one to the other with all of his heart, so that he ended up without the trust of either. The truth was he believed his first wife was not, as his mother claimed, “faking it,” and yet also felt that her inability to get pregnant was somehow a warning from fate: they weren’t meant to be together. All of this led to him not loving her as well as he could have loved her, picking on her eccentricities, and now, over a decade after her death, he remembered her and missed her and regretted the man he’d been when she was his wife. He was much older now, almost sixty, and worked hard to avoid his earlier mistakes, loving Mina as well as he was able to, as kindly and as gratefully as he actually felt, walking home from the office, picturing her with their little fish in her arms.

  Halfway through the city square, Galust heard a man calling his name. “Mr. Avakian,” the man said, “I was just knocking on your door.”

  Galust turned and had to raise his chin to see the man’s face. He was monstrous—huge and baldheaded, with a nasty deformation above his eyes—and Galust clutched the pin at his lapel. “We’ll be open again in the morning,” he offered without stopping.

  “Please listen for just a minute,” the man said. Again Galust looked at him and saw that the deformation was actually a burn. Otherwise he seemed respectable enough—clean-shaven in a desperate way, as though he’d just shaved for the first time in many months, with nicks along his throat.

  “All right,” Galust said. “What is it?”

  “You used to be the census man in Leninakan, yeah? I spent my early childhood there.
I’m wondering if you knew my family.”

  The pin in Galust’s lapel twinkled. “I’m sure I did. I knew every name in that city. What’s yours?”

  “Gregoryan,” the man said, and Galust instantly remembered the tragedy.

  “Were you there, in the factory fire? Is that how you got your scar?” he asked.

  “No, but my parents were there.”

  Galust apologized, though that didn’t seem right. He offered the man a cigarette and kept him company as he smoked. That seemed better, but still not quite right, either. “In some ways,” he finally said, “I miss Leninakan.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Kirovakan is beautiful, don’t get me wrong. But everyone here is very sensitive. In Leninakan, no one would get offended by anything. We’d laugh at everyone and everything, and then we’d drink together and keep laughing. At least that’s how I remember it. Here, everyone’s very polite.”

  “Polite’s not bad.”

  “No, no. Don’t get me wrong. In most ways, I’d rather be here. In the most important ways.”

  “Yeah?”

  Galust lit a cigarette for himself and pointed its heat off into the distance. “You see that building over there—the tallest one in the city? Every evening, my wife and daughter and mother wait for me in there to get home from work.”

  “That’s very sweet.”

  “Ah, it’s this city. Gentle people. My wife turned me into a sap the day I met her. Then my baby girl arrived, and I’ve basically turned into pudding. You should’ve seen me in Leninakan. I was much tougher. I could drink anyone—even a man your size—under the table.”

  Gregoryan said, “You know, I haven’t heard a joke from Leninakan in a long time. You know any good ones?”

  Galust laughed before the punch line even came to him. He said, “You know how people from Aparan are notoriously stupid? Well, this man there returns to his office after lunch and asks his secretary, ‘While I was out, did I get a phone call from a man with a mustache?’”