All the Light There Was Read Online Free PDF Page B

I’d seen him, gave us a walking tour of the garden: tomato plants covered with yellow flowers and a few green fruits, beans growing on a trellis, onions, carrot tops, lettuces, beds of mint and parsley, green peppers, cucumbers, and eggplants.
    I thought about the narrow window boxes my father had built for my mother; she was growing tomatoes and parsley on our sills. People in the city, unless they were rich enough for the black market or had relatives on farms in the countryside, ate so much worse than those who had a bit of earth to tend.
    Vasken pointed to a small wooden coop in a corner of the yard. “That’s where my father keeps his chickens.”
    “Chickens?” I asked. “Do you have eggs?” An egg was an almost unimaginable luxury.
    Cousin Karnig came up behind us. “We had the first two eggs this week. The pullets are going to start laying regularly any day now. I helped the Varjabedians build a new room on their house for their son and his bride, and they gave me some fertilized eggs.”
    Akabi said, “He paid more attention to those eggs than he ever has to us. If he weren’t afraid of crushing them, I think he would have sat on them himself.”
    “Go ahead and make fun of your father,” Karnig said. “But it’s thanks to me that every one of those eggs hatched. One will grow into a rooster and then we’ll have even more. Maybe I’ll give up carpentry and go into the chicken business.”
    Cousin Satenig carried out a tray of tea and cups that she placed on the wooden table. “Come sit down. No sugar today, but we have dried peaches. Oh, you’re admiring your cousin’s new business. How are we going to keep those birds alive come winter, Karnig? They’re going to freeze.”
    Karnig answered, “I’ll make a pen in a corner of the kitchen. They are my queens, and they can sleep in our bed if that’s what it takes.”
    An hour later, as Cousin Satenig, Akabi, and I were chatting while Missak loaded a box of vegetables onto the back of his bike, Cousin Karnig approached with a pullet under one arm.
    “This is for Maral.”
    He held the bird out to me. I took her gingerly in my arms, and the chicken cocked her head to the side and looked up at me with a beady eye.
    “What’s her name?” I asked.
    “This one is Takouhi. She laid the first egg.”
    “This is too generous. I can’t accept.” I tried to hand Takouhi back to him, but he put his palms up and shook his head.
    Cousin Satenig said, “Yes, you must. It’s your birthday gift.”
    “No, it’s really too much,” I insisted.
    “Don’t argue,” Karnig said.
    “But I can’t.”
    “Sweetheart,” Karnig said, “now you’ve said no three times and we’ve said yes three times, so it’s finished.”
    Missak used wire mesh to secure the chicken in the front basket of my bicycle.
    As Missak and I pedaled back to the city, I drew up alongside him and asked, “What do you think they’ll say when they see the chicken?”
    “The first thing out of Babig’s mouth will be ‘Is that chicken going to shit all over the floor?’” He pulled out ahead and grinned at me over his shoulder.
    “I’ll bet he won’t say that at all!” I called, pedaling quickly behind him.
    We reached the rue de Belleville, dismounted, and pushed the bikes up the steep hill.
    Missak said, “Tonight I’m going to tell Babig that I’ve found a job.”
    “What? You aren’t going to work in the shop?” I asked.
    Missak was to graduate from technical school in July, and it had been assumed that he would take a place alongside my father at the cobbler’s bench.
    Missak said, “I’ve been working in the shop since I was six and I’ve had enough.”
    “I started when I was six too,” I said.
    “You swept the floor and lined up the finished shoes on the shelves. But nobody ever thought you were going to be a cobbler. You’re the scholar.”
    I winced at the tone he used for the word, as though it were at once a royal title and an insult. But he had