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  Zabelle

  Zabelle

  NANCY KRICORIAN

  Copyright © 1998 by Nancy Kricorian

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-5558-4806-4

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  To the memory of

  Mariam Kodjababian Kricorian

  Three apples fell from heaven: one to me, one to the storyteller, and one to the reader of this tale.

  Zabelle

  PROLOGUE

  Heaven and Hell

  (WATERTOWN, 1985)

  It was Zabelle Chahasbanian’s seventy-fifth or seventy-sixth birthday. No one knew for sure because Zabelle’s birth date had been lost with her family when she was a child. As she gingerly descended the stairs to the church function room, Zabelle assumed she was on time for a meeting of the Ladies Aid Society.

  When a roomful of her family and friends shouted, “Surprise,” Zabelle felt a hand twist her heart. She sat heavily in a chair, fumbling in her purse for her nitroglycerin pills. While the tablet dissolved under her tongue, Zabelle closed her eyes. The hand released slowly. Exhaling deeply, Zabelle gazed at the blurred faces hovering around her. As their features came into focus, the names floated just beyond reach. Finally the faces and names realigned themselves, but the damage had been done. In that moment, Zabelle had started to come unmoored from her present life. She was on a boat whose anchor had worked itself loose, and the tide was pulling it slowly away from shore.

  Zabelle lived in the upstairs apartment of a two-family house in Watertown, Massachusetts. She had raised three children there. Decades before, her eldest son, Moses, had fled the nest, eventually settling in the distant land of California. Her son Jack had strayed only as far as the downstairs apartment, which he now inhabited with his wife and two college-age daughters. Zabelle’s daughter, Joy, had never married and lived with her mother still.

  A few days after the birthday party, Joy opened the pickle crock on the back porch and discovered her mother’s stockings soaking in the brine. Next she found her mother’s pock-etbook in the bread box and a stick of butter in the medicine cabinet. When Joy questioned her mother, the old woman groped for words, as though sorting through lentils for rocks. Then she trailed off midsentence.

  Joy was afraid. Every morning of her forty-eight years, she had taken breakfast with her mother. She faced the prospect of life after Zabelle the way a blind man might face news of a distant tidal wave. But the fear passed, and life seemed to return to normal.

  One afternoon a few weeks later, Zabelle’s granddaughter Elizabeth sat on the porch with her grandmother while the old woman hemmed the girl’s new skirt. Elizabeth, with her legs folded under her, rested her head on the back of the couch and stared out through the grapevine that was unfurling its first green leaves.

  “Why am I doing this, Joy? I taught you to sew,” Zabelle said without lifting her eyes from the work in her lap.

  “Grandma, I’m Elizabeth.”

  Zabelle shook her head. “Sorry, honey. My mind is wandering.” She patted the girl’s hand and asked, “You want ice cream?”

  “I don’t eat ice cream.”

  “Some yogurt, maybe?” Zabelle disliked seeing the collar bones poking out of her granddaughter’s shirt.

  “Stop it. I’m not hungry.”

  Zabelle shook her head. “In Hadjin, everyone wanted a plump hen for a wife. You look like the last scrawny chicken someone would think to throw in a pot.”

  Elizabeth groaned, “Grandma.”

  “I’ll be back,” the old woman said. She shuffled inside. When she returned a few minutes later, she said, “Open your hand.”

  Zabelle placed an antique silver thimble in her granddaughter’s palm. It was from the old country.

  “Grandma, I can’t take this.” Elizabeth examined the thimble, which was decorated with coiling silver tendrils.

  “I want you to have it,” insisted Zabelle.

  “I can’t sew.”

  “Doesn’t matter.” Zabelle closed her hand over Elizabeth’s, the thimble like a seed in the girl’s palm.

  As her hold on this world slackened, Zabelle turned her sights on the next. She spent long hours reading her Bible, lingering over the descriptions of heaven in Revelations. The city was pure gold, like unto clear glass. … The foundations of the wall of the city were garnished with all matter of precious stone.

  God would give her a new body, one without pains in the hands or the droop and sag of old age. There would be no dust in heaven, no frayed patches on the Oriental rugs. No one would be sick or hungry. She wouldn’t be plagued by nightmares.

  When she slept, Zabelle dreamed about the skin-and-bones children in her missionary magazines. They were shades of black and brown, teeth and eyes an awful yellow. Their sticklike arms reached up to her. She placed a grain of rice in each palm, but they clamored for more. In the morning, Zabelle wrote out checks for five and ten dollars to the missionary societies whose publications she read. But the nighttime visitations continued, and soon ancient fears crept out to prowl Zabelle’s room.

  * * *

  Arsinee Manoogian, Zabelle’s best friend, began to notice that something strange was going on. The two women talked to each other on the phone every day, morning and afternoon. One morning Arsinee’s phone was silent at the appointed hour.

  After ten minutes had passed, Arsinee impatiently dialed her friend’s number. She let the phone ring ten times and was just about to hang up when Zabelle answered.

  “Hello?”

  Arsinee shouted, “Are you trying to give me a stroke? Why didn’t you call?”

  “Arsinee? Is that you?” asked Zabelle.

  “Who do you think it is? Billy Graham?”

  “I forgot,” Zabelle said simply.

  “You’ll end up like Digin Lucia, who has to be reminded to use the toilet.”

  Several days later, Arsinee muttered under her breath as she dialed, “She’d leave her teeth in the glass if I didn’t tell her to put them in her head.”

  “Who is it?” asked Zabelle.

  “Lawrence Welk.”

  Zabelle dropped her voice to a whisper. “They’re coming.”

  “Who?” questioned Arsinee.

  “The Turks,” Zabelle said. “They’re going to break down the door.”

  “In Watertown, we have French, Greeks, Italians, and Irish, Zabelle, but no Turks.”

  “We’ll be killed.”

  “Zabelle, stop this foolishness. Do you want Joy to shut you up in the Ararat Nursing Home?”

  “No,” said Zabelle.

  “Then forget about the Turks.”

  “I hear voices at night.”

  “Tell them to pipe down.”

  “Remember the mother who threw her baby in the river and jumped in after?”

  “Vay babum. You’re going to make yourself crazy with this kind of talk.”

  At night, long shadows and disembodied voices, speaking Armenian and Turkish, circled Zabell
e’s bed. She heard fragments of long-forgotten songs. The faces of her mother, father, brother, grandparents, aunts, and uncles came swimming up at her like fish surfacing from the bottom of a pond.

  When she woke with her heart thrashing in its cage, Zabelle calmed herself by imagining the life she would lead in heaven. Flowers lined the gleaming promenades. Pastel aluminum siding covered the houses, and fruit hung heavy in the trees. She saw Jesus surrounded by young people in flowing robes, sitting in the shade of a beech tree with silver leaves.

  He gestured to her to come closer. “Zabelle,” Jesus said, “in my Father’s house there are many mansions. What color do you want?”

  “Blue,” she responded. “With a pear tree, and mint in the garden.” She added, “No squirrels.”

  “We’ll see what we can do,” Jesus said.

  * * *

  Jack shut the family market for a few minutes so he could drive his mother to Arsinee’s. She was no longer able to walk the distance.

  “Don’t drive so fast,” Zabelle said.

  Jack sped up.

  “Toros, slow down,” Zabelle insisted.

  Toros, Jack thought as he glanced at himself in the rear-view mirror. He did look like his father. It was as if the old man were slowly taking over from the inside. He pulled up in front of Arsinee’s house.

  “Joy will pick you up later. Okay?”

  Zabelle snapped her purse shut. “Okay.”

  “You want some coffee?” Arsinee asked as Zabelle entered the front door.

  ”Cheh. It upsets my stomach.”

  “Come sit down.”

  Zabelle crossed the Oriental rug and settled into a doily-strewn armchair, next to an end table bearing framed photographs of Arsinee’s children and grandchildren. It could have been Zabelle’s apartment, even down to the potted philoden-dron vine growing along the mantel.

  “I saw Moses Charles on TV,” commented Arsinee.

  Moses Charles, the California evangelist, was Zabelle’s eldest son, whom she hadn’t seen in the flesh for eight years. It still rankled Zabelle that her son had changed his name.

  “Waiting on the Lord?” Zabelle asked. This was her son’s weekly Bible show.

  “No. He was a guest on the 700 Club.”

  “He visits everyone but his mother,” Zabelle said.

  “At least he has the excuse of living on the other side of the country. Henry hasn’t been here in a month, and he lives ten minutes away.”

  “You have Dahlia,” Zabelle reminded her.

  “And your grandson remembers you. How is Peter?” Arsinee asked.

  “He’s learning Armenian in college. He called to practice new words.”

  “Any good?”

  “Terrible accent, but he tries.”

  They fell into silence.

  “I’m having trouble at night again,” Zabelle said.

  “Indigestion?” asked Arsinee

  “The desert,” said Zabelle.

  Arsinee, who had been there with Zabelle, knew what the word meant. Arsinee studied Zabelle’s face, judging whether to joke or bluster. Tears were sliding over Zabelle’s cheeks. Arsinee sighed and took her friend’s hand.

  On Friday Joy arrived home from work, slipped into a housecoat, and lay down on her bed. She imagined what it would be like to be married to her boss. This time his wife was killed by a hit-and-run driver, and after comforting him in his grief, Joy accepted his offer of marriage. Suddenly it occurred to Joy that she hadn’t seen her mother.

  She called out, “Ma!” She searched the rooms of the house and the porch. She went to the back gate, she looked in the front yard, and then she knocked on the door to the downstairs apartment.

  Joy’s niece Elizabeth came to the screen. Joy, who always wore a hat and gloves for a trip to the local mall, stood on the back porch in a housecoat and slippers.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Elizabeth.

  “Have you seen Grandma?” Joy nervously tapped her fingers on her cheek.

  “Not since this morning,” said Elizabeth.

  “I’m worried. You take Lincoln, and I’ll go down Walnut. …”

  Zabelle, meanwhile, crouched on her suitcase in the walk-in closet in the attic. She had been there for most of the afternoon. The lightbulb was burned out and the air musty, but Zabelle felt safe surrounded by her first set of dishes, stacks of Moses’s books, Jack’s army footlocker, and her husband’s dusty suits. After a while the attic’s tiny noises grew louder, so she began to softly sing old hymns. But what had driven her to the attic in the first place?

  In the midafternoon, Zabelle had turned on the television to find Arlene Francis wiping a tabletop. Arlene Francis, born Arline Kazanjian, was an actress Zabelle admired. Here she was selling Zabelle’s favorite brand of lemon furniture polish.

  As she dusted, Arlene came closer until her face filled the screen. Zabelle saw perspiration on the woman’s upper lip, lines in her forehead, even the pores on her nose. The actress looked directly at Zabelle and whispered in Armenian, “They’re coming to get you.”

  Zabelle flew out of the chair and switched off the television. She hustled to her bedroom, pulled a suitcase from under her bed, and began packing some clothes. She emptied her top dresser drawer of her prized possessions. Into a pillowcase she dropped a battered tin cup, a wooden hand mirror, a set of tortoiseshell combs, a blue paste brooch, and a faded envelope with a Worcester postmark. Zabelle searched the back of the drawer before she remembered she had given the thimble to her granddaughter.

  In the kitchen, she threw some food into her suitcase. After dragging her bags to the attic, she found a place to hide.

  “She’s got to be somewhere in the house,” said Elizabeth as she and Joy came in the back gate.

  “In the basement?”

  “Or the attic. You go down.”

  Elizabeth took the stairs two at a time. She heard muffled singing coming from the closet near the bathroom.

  “There is going to be a meeting in the air, in the sweet, sweet by and by …”

  “Grandma?”

  The song stopped, and there was no response. As Elizabeth walked toward the door, a floorboard squeaked under the thin carpet. She grasped the doorknob, turned it, and met resistance.

  “Elizabeth!” Joy called up the stairs.

  “Up here.” Elizabeth pulled hard. The door gave way. There was Zabelle, sitting on a suitcase in the dark closet.

  “Grandma!”

  Joy, huffing after the flight of stairs, pushed Elizabeth aside. “Ma! What are you doing?”

  “Hiding,” Zabelle said calmly.

  “From what?” her daughter asked.

  Zabelle remembered Arsinee’s warning about the Ararat Nursing Home. “Nothing much.” She picked up her bags and stepped out of the closet. She handed Joy the suitcase. “You know that blue dress?”

  “The blue-and-green flowered one?” Joy asked.

  “That’s the dress I want to be buried in,” Zabelle said. She handed Elizabeth the pillowcase. “This is for you, honey.”

  “What for?” the girl asked.

  Zabelle didn’t answer.

  * * *

  Less than a week later, as the ambulance careened toward Mount Auburn Hospital, Zabelle lay on a stretcher and Joy clasped her mother’s hand. Zabelle’s eyes were clouded with pain. She could barely talk. Joy leaned close to hear what her mother whispered.

  “I came back with the water, and she was gone.”

  Joy said softly, “Ma, don’t talk.”

  “Toros. And Moses.”

  “He’ll be on the next plane from California, Ma.”

  “Heaven.”

  Joy murmured, “Don’t leave me.”

  Joy stopped by the Mardirosian Funeral Home the next day to order a casket lined with blue silk. When she arrived home, she closed the door to her mother’s bedroom, as though it were a time capsule. She set up the ironing board in the kitchen and pressed every tablecloth and napkin in the house.
r />   Moses Charles, his wife, and his two sons arrived in Watertown a few hours before the wake. Moses would deliver the eulogy and asked his brother and sister to help him write it. Zabelle’s three grown children sat at the dining-room table. The daughters-in-law busied themselves in the kitchen.

  Moses tapped his pen on the table impatiently. “So, what was special about Ma?”

  Jack and Joy were silent. Jack imagined he was being quizzed by a hostile schoolteacher. Joy felt as if she were in a rubber dinghy floating in a shark-infested sea.

  “There must be something.” Moses felt unappreciated. As Jesus said, a prophet had no honor in his own country.

  Jack tried, “She … uh …” Then he froze.

  Joy offered, “She made the best stuffed grape leaves. Everyone at church said so.”

  Moses rolled his eyes.

  The four grandchildren watched TV in the living room. Elizabeth grabbed a peppermint candy from the bowl on the coffee table. The taste was from a hundred years ago. It reminded her of a song her grandmother used to sing in Armenian about a cat who got into the butter dish. Elizabeth couldn’t remember the words.

  Before the funeral, Elizabeth and her sister helped Joy with the baskets, casseroles, and pans of food that people from the church had delivered. Joy found her mother’s spare teeth in the dairy compartment and laughed raggedly.

  When the phone rang, Elizabeth picked it up. “Hello?”

  “Zabelle?”

  Elizabeth recognized the voice. “Auntie Arsinee, this is Elizabeth.”

  “Zabelle?” Arsinee was confused.

  “Zabelle’s dead, Auntie. You were at the wake last night.”

  “Elizabeth?”

  “Yes.”

  Arsinee said, “You sound just like Zabelle.”

  “No, I don’t!” yelled Elizabeth. She slammed down the phone and burst into tears.

  This was the end and the beginning of Zabelle’s tale.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Jin Cup

  (RAS AL-AIN, 1916)