Gregory Djanikian

They thought the trouble was over, they thought they had talked it all out, it was a mistake, she’d said, this infatuation for someone else which had turned suddenly too serious, she could see that now. But they thought there was nothing left of it, their nerves had been rubbed so raw through bouts of anger, shame, even love, so many words had come and gone between them that they couldn’t easily remember what they’d said, what they’d imagined. But it didn’t matter now, they thought they had gotten over something difficult, something which had felt immovable, the long unbearable ache which had become too much a habit, and they were celebrating in their way, having dinner at a new expensive place where they had no history of being together, where they expected nothing. They were sipping wine, a deep rich red, the waiter was hovering over them like a generous uncle and they were selecting everything he had suggested— how good to be in his hands for awhile! Soon it was happening, the old ardor was coming back, they were beginning to flirt with one another, the way she said baby, the way his shoulder was brushing hers, the way they were allowing themselves to think for the first time in a long time of the good sex they might later have, the after-talk which would be easy and low. And maybe he hadn’t meant what he was about to say, maybe when she remarked how she loved the leek soup it was the wine in him, his jauntiness, that made him ask what else she loved, jokingly at first, whether she loved the stuffed mushrooms on his plate, the braised beef, or maybe she loved what others were having, this one in the dark suit, or that one with the coyly unbuttoned collar, or maybe she loved the whole damn menu in fact, he couldn’t help himself, the words came pouring forth, spilling all over the table. And it was not until late at night when she’d finally gone to her room and closed herself off from him in sleep that he stopped talking and remembered only half of what he’d said because he’d said too much, created too much damage, crossed some boundary he had avoided most of his life. Maybe it was desert, maybe tundra, or the white insinuating madness of the polar ice cap, but wherever he was was strange and dangerous, and somehow dazzling for all that, and only in the morning would he know for better or worse in which direction each of them would be walking it, though never had he felt, as he had tonight, so permissive with himself, so luxuriously tactless, having said again and again the words he thought he could never bear to use, so suddenly commonplace, so readily available to him now.

Alexandria, 1956 The rugs had been rolled up and islands of them Floated in the centers of every room, And now, on the bare wood floors, My sister and I were skimming among them In the boats we’d made from newspaper, Sheets of them pinned to each other, Dhows, gondolas, clippers, arks. There was a mule outside on the street Braying under a load of figs, though mostly There was quiet, a wind from the desert Was putting the city to sleep, But we were too far adrift, the air Was scurfy and wet, the currents tricking Our bows against reef and coral And hulls shearing under the weight of cargo. “Ahoy and belay!” I called to my sister, “Avast, avast!” she yelled back from her rigging, And neither of us knew what we were saying But the words came to us as from a movie, Cinemascopic, American. “Richard Widmark,” I said. “Clark Gable, Bogie,” she said, “Yo-ho-ho.” We had passed Cyprus And now there was Crete or Sardinia Maybe something larger further off. The horizon was everywhere I turned, The waters were becoming turgid, They were roiling, weeks had passed. “America, America, land-ho!” I yelled directionless. “Gibraltar,” my sister said, “Heave to,” And signalling a right, her arm straight out, She turned and bravely set our course North-by-northwest for the New World. Did we arrive? Years later, yes. By plane, suddenly. With suitcases And something as hazy as a future. The November sun was pale and far off, The air was colder than we’d ever felt, And already these were wonders to us As much as snow would be or evergreens, And it would take me a long time Before I’d ever remember Boats made of paper, islands of wool, And my sister’s voice, as in a fog, Calling out the hazards, Leading me on, getting us there.

You are sitting in Mrs. Caldera’s kitchen, you are sipping a glass of lemonade and trying not to be too curious about the box of plastic hummingbirds behind you, the tray of tineless forks at your elbow. You have heard about the backroom where no one else has ever gone and whatever enters, remains, refrigerator doors, fused coils, mower blades, milk bottles, pistons, gears. “You never know,” she says, rummaging through a cedar chest of recipes, “when something will come of use.” There is a vase of pencil tips on the table, a bowl full of miniature wheels and axles. Upstairs, where her children slept, the doors will not close, the stacks of magazines are burgeoning, there are snow shoes and lampshades, bedsprings and picture tubes, and boxes and boxes of irreducibles! You imagine the headline in the Literalist Express: House Founders Under Weight Of Past. But Mrs Caldera is baking cookies, she is humming a song from childhood, her arms are heavy and strong, they have held babies, a husband, tractor parts and gas tanks, what have they not found a place for? It is getting dark, you have sat for a long time. If you move, you feel something will be disturbed, there is room enough only for your body. “Stay awhile,” Mrs. Caldera says, and never have you felt so valuable.

Alexandria, 1956, after the nationalization of the Suez Canal and all foreign capital Perhaps her cook, come under the influence Of a few discreet piastres, had spoken Too indiscreetly. Or just perhaps, On a hot day along the azure of the Mediterranean, Rue Fouad bearing a stream of traffic To Muhammed Ali Square in a riot Of klaxons and shouts, and the whole city Gleaming white as it must have from a distance, Perhaps on such a day, someone got lucky And Mme. Sperides at the customs house Could sense what price she would have to pay, That the official full of apologies And gold teeth would usher her into A private room smelling of dark tobacco, That under the drone of the ceiling fans Her valises would be searched, the linings Cut out, the cowhide ripped back, That despite her protests which would be Useless but obligatory, she herself Would be stripped, that finally, Two large diamonds worth a modest villa Would peek and shine from the elegant crack Of her ass. Whatever the story, It was not for a boy to know. I listened at my grandmother’s door As she spoke in a whisper, thieving A fragment here a word there naked Jewels   hidden you know where

How do they survive, riven as they are, the one undoing the other's desire? Tell the body to outrun the mind, and the mind smirks, whispering too loudly this way   this way, blocking all the exits. And the body, luxurious sensualist by pool side or in bed, doesn't it hear the mind's impatient machinery ticking it's time   it's time? And only in our mind's eye, as we're fond of saying, someone else's body leaping nimbly in jetés of thought, or revealing to us Act V, scene iii in one gestural flourish, body and mind beautifully synchronous. Oh, the mind is eely, slipping out of its puzzle boxes, loving its own wit. And the earnest body: speak of it with the least irony, and already you've begun to unnerve it. Better to let them have their way, forgetting about them both until they meet again sometime as if for the first time in library or steam room ready to shake hello or lead you to whatever door there is and always the two sets of stairs.

My wife tells me she hears a beetle Scurrying across the kitchen floor. She says our daughter is dreaming Too loudly, just listen, her eyelids Are fluttering like butterflies. What about the thunder, I say, What about the dispatches from the police car Parked outside, or me rolling over like a whale? She tells me there’s a leaf falling And grazing the downstairs window, Or it could be glass cutters, diamonds, Thieves working their hands toward the latch. She tells me our son is breathing too quickly, Is it pneumonia, is it the furnace Suddenly pumping monoxides through the house? So when my wife says sleep, she means A closing of the eyes, a tuning Of the ears to ultra frequencies. (It is what always happens When there are children, the bed Becoming at night a listening post, Each little ting forewarning disaster.) Downstairs there is the sound Of something brushing against something else And I try to listen as my wife might listen, Insects, I say, dust on a table top, Maybe a knife’s edge against the palm. But she tells me it’s only The African violet on the windowsill Putting out another flower, And falls luxuriously into a dream Of being awake and vigilant. So the house grows noisier, There are clicks in the woodwork, There are drips, raps, clunks, things To make sense of, make benign. My son and daughter are sleeping calmly, And the stairs, yes, are creaking, The wind, I think, or maybe two men, Where’s the beaker of acid, The bowling ball, the war hoop I learned in second grade? So this is what it’s like when there’s No one left but you to love and defend. Outside there are cats in a fight And they remind me too much of babies crying. Then the bottle thrown against the stoop, The sound of something delicate shattered. My wife stirs, Be glad, she says, Sound doesn’t carry far, that you don’t hear The whole of it, cries in the night, Children in other cities, hurts, silences. And she’s right, I can’t hear the whole of it, Or else I hear too much and it’s noise Or I make it noise because it’s too much. So I begin homing in on something Around me, something distinct, my wife’s Breathing, a window’s rattle. Outside, Grass is lengthening in the dark, And sap running up the phloem of the maple, (Do I hear it? And how the stars must be wheeling!) And in the far room, my children’s Hearts are keeping time, for them, for us Who have begun to listen in earnest.

I had never seen a cornfield in my life, I had never been to Oklahoma, But I was singing as loud as anyone, “Oh what a beautiful morning. . . . The corn Is as high as an elephant’s eye,” Though I knew something about elephants, I thought, Coming from the same continent as they did, And they being more like camels than anything else. And when we sang from Meet Me in St. Louis, “Clang, clang, clang went the trolley,” I remembered the ride from Ramleh Station In the heart of Alexandria All the way to Roushdy where my grandmother lived, The autos on the roadways vying With mule carts and bicycles, The Mediterranean half a mile off on the left, The air smelling sharply of diesel and salt. It was a problem which had dogged me For a few years, this confusion of places. And when in 5th grade geography I had pronounced “Des Moines” as though it were a village in France, Mr. Kephart led me to the map on the front wall, And so I’d know where I was, Pressed my forehead squarely against Iowa. Des Moines, he’d said. Rhymes with coins. Now we were singing “zippidy-doo-dah, zippidy-ay,” And every song we’d sung had in it Either sun or bluebirds, fair weather Or fancy fringe, O beautiful America! And one tier below me, There was Linda Deemer with her amber waves And lovely fruited plains, And she was part of America too Along with sun and spacious sky Though untouchable, and as distant As purple mountains of majesty. “This is my country,” we sang, And a few years ago there would have been A scent of figs in the air, mangoes, And someone playing the oud along a clear stream. But now it was “My country 'tis of thee” And I sang it out with all my heart And now with Linda Deemer in mind. “Land where my fathers died,” I bellowed, And it was not too hard to imagine A host of my great-uncles and -grandfathers Stunned from their graves in the Turkish interior And finding themselves suddenly On a rock among maize and poultry And Squanto shaking their hands. How could anyone not think America Was exotic when it had Massachusetts And the long tables of thanksgiving? And how could it not be home If it were the place where love first struck? We had finished singing. The sun was shining through large windows On the beatified faces of all Who had sung well and with feeling. We were ready to file out and march back To our room where Mr. Kephart was waiting. Already Linda Deemer had disappeared Into the high society of the hallway. One day I was going to tell her something. Des Moines, I was saying to myself, Baton Rouge. Terre Haute. Boise.

It's the Fourth of July, the flags are painting the town, the plastic forks and knives are laid out like a parade. And I'm grilling, I've got my apron, I've got potato salad, macaroni, relish, I've got a hat shaped like the state of Pennsylvania. I ask my father what's his pleasure and he says, "Hot dog, medium rare," and then, "Hamburger, sure, what's the big difference," as if he's really asking. I put on hamburgers and hot dogs, slice up the sour pickles and Bermudas, uncap the condiments. The paper napkins are fluttering away like lost messages. "You're running around," my mother says, "like a chicken with its head loose." "Ma," I say, "you mean cut off, loose and cut off   being as far apart as, say, son and daughter." She gives me a quizzical look as though I've been caught in some impropriety. "I love you and your sister just the same," she says, "Sure," my grandmother pipes in, "you're both our children, so why worry?" That's not the point I begin telling them, and I'm comparing words to fish now, like the ones in the sea at Port Said, or like birds among the date palms by the Nile, unrepentantly elusive, wild. "Sonia," my father says to my mother, "what the hell is he talking about?" "He's on a ball," my mother says. "That's roll!" I say, throwing up my hands, "as in hot dog, hamburger, dinner roll...." "And what about roll out the barrels?" my mother asks, and my father claps his hands, "Why sure," he says, "let's have some fun," and launches into a polka, twirling my mother around and around like the happiest top, and my uncle is shaking his head, saying "You could grow nuts listening to us," and I'm thinking of pistachios in the Sinai burgeoning without end, pecans in the South, the jumbled flavor of them suddenly in my mouth, wordless, confusing, crowding out everything else.

Sure, she says, why not, we buy the ground lamb from the market we buy parsley, fresh tomatoes, garlic we cut, press, dice, mix make the yeasty dough the night before, kneading it until our knuckles feel the hardness of river beds or rocks in the desert we tell Tante Lola to come with her rolling pins we tell Zaven and Maroush, Hagop and Arpiné to bring their baking sheets we sprinkle the flour on the kitchen table and it is snowing on Ararat we sprinkle the flour and the memory of winter is in our eyes we roll the dough out into small circles pale moons over every empty village Kevork is standing on a chair and singing O my Armenian girl my spirit longs to be nearer Nevrig is warming the oven and a dry desert breeze is skimming over the rooftops toward the sea we are spreading the lahma on the ajoun with our fingers whispering into it the histories of those who have none we are baking them under the heat of the sun the dough crispening so thin and delicate you would swear it is valuable parchment we are taking out and rolling up in our hands and eating and tasting again everything that has already been written into the body.

We have been cruising, half a block at a time, my wife, my two children, all morning, and I have been pointing out unhurriedly and with some feeling places of consequence, sacred places, backyards, lush fields, garages, alleyways. “There,” I say, “by this big cottonwood, That’s where I dropped the fly ball, 1959.” “And in 1961,” I say, “at this very corner, Barry Sapolsky tripped me up with his gym bag.” My son has fallen asleep, my daughter has been nodding “yes” indiscriminately for the last half hour, and my wife has the frozen, wide-eyed look of the undead. “Maybe lunch,” I say, though I’m making now my fourth approach to Curtin Jr. High School, yellow-bricked, large-windowed, gothic, where Frank Marone preyed on our terror once and Janice Lehman walked in beauty. “Salute, everyone,” I say, “salute,” bringing my hand up to my brow as we pass the gilded entrance, “This is where things of importance happened,” and I am pulling out from under the car seat a photo album of old school pictures, “Page 8,” I say, “Fred Decker, John Carlson by the bike rack, Mr. Burkett … ,” and driving on, following the invisible map before my eyes. Now we are drifting toward my boyhood house and I am showing my wife trellised porches, bike routes, more than she’d care to see; “Why this longing?” she says, “What about now, the kids, our lives together, lunch, me?” I give her a kiss and turn right on Cherry and there in front of our eyes, barely changed, is the house where all my memories converge. “Look at the windows of my room,” I say, “see, there, the shadowy figure moving behind them?” And before anyone can hope to answer, I have grabbed my camera, I am snapping pictures through the windshield, bricks, dormers, railings, fences, streets, all are falling thrall to my aim. “We could be happy here,” I say, putting another roll of film in and beginning to nose my car toward Bill Corson’s house. “Really, Daddy,” my daughter says; “No chance,” my wife tacks on, but all I’m hearing is the crack of bats in the neighborhood lot and Danny’s pearl-handled cap gun going off and the drone of bees around honeysuckle and Dewey Waugh’s gravelly voice urging on his mower, and the sound of wind in the cottonwoods is like water, I am coasting, there is time for everything.