“We better get the boys ready for breakfast,” Anush says. It is understood. Anush will take care of six-month-old Aram, while Lucine will attend to Bedros, their ten-year-old brother. In the seven days since their uncle’s disappearance, Lucine and Anush have taken over their mother’s role while she hides in her room, mourning her brother’s loss.
She hasn’t left her bedroom since that night. A headache is how their father describes it. Tending to her is an unpleasant but necessary task—emptying her bedpan, bringing her food—but the thought of her mother sitting in the stench of her own filth is unthinkable.
Lucine places her hand on the doorknob and prays that her mother is still sleeping. When Mairig sleeps, her eyes don’t stare vacantly into the distance, her mouth does not betray the dark roads where her mind roams. When Mairig is sleeping, Lucine can pretend that she will soon get up from under her embroidered coverlet and resume mothering.
The door squeaks open despite all of Lucine’s precaution. The air, trapped by the red velvet curtains, is thick and sticky. Mairig’s head is propped up at the center of her pillow, like a rare jewel. She blinks at the wall when Lucine stands before her four-poster bed. Lucine waits for Mairig’s gaze to land on her. When it doesn’t, she breathes a sigh of gratitude, thinking today Mairig will not put her despair into words.
“He was all I had left here. The only thing I brought with me. That and my dowry. Silk dresses, tablecloths, gold and him, body and mind.”
Lucine ignores her words. She bends down and retrieves the bedpan with both hands, careful not to spill anything on Mairig’s Persian rug, the one she brought with her from the city.
“I’ve got nothing left here that is my own,” Mairig continues. “Nothing from that life before.” She is referring to her other lives again. The life she lived in Istanbul and the one she was meant to live in Paris. The lives in which her hands worked at a piano instead of the rearing of children, where she was not limited to hobnobbing with missionaries but instead conversed with composers and actresses.
Lucine can’t understand why Uncle Nazareth’s presence made it all bearable, but it did. She can’t understand why she and her siblings are not enough for Mairig. Why she needs her brother, the missionaries, and all kinds of news from the capital. What Lucine does understand is that her mother’s unhappiness began long before Nazareth disappeared. She can trace it back even further than her own birth, back to the moment her parents met and fell in love. Falling in love had derailed Mairig’s life; Lucine has heard the story many times. Uncle Nazareth’s disappearance is only the last episode in that derailment.
“Hairig will find him,” Lucine whispers.
“Yes, yes he will,” Mairig says, turning her face away.
Lucine drags her feet to Bedros’s room, wondering why Anush is so eager to marry and spend the rest of her life taking care of a brood of children, an as-yet-undetermined but no doubt foul-smelling husband, and a host of new family members that may or may not include a domineering motherin-law.
Bedros sits up in bed, his eyes still shut. As she pulls the nightshirt off her brother’s back, Lucine notices that he is still clutching the slingshot their uncle gave him for Easter.
The morning of Uncle Nazareth’s disappearance, Lucine tiptoed past her sister’s bed, careful not to touch the door, which creaked at the most inopportune times. In the darkness of the hallway, she stepped over the seventh floorboard, knowing it too would betray her if given the chance. Downstairs Mairig was already busy preparing for their trip to the public baths. Lucine could hear her slippered feet brushing against the stone floor of their kitchen, filling the damp air with the smell of stuffed cabbage and soap. Lucine’s plan was to slip out the front door, take her uncle’s horse for a ride, and disappear into the nearby fields, thus avoiding all the ogling and nakedness of the community bath. She managed to get to the door and unlock it before the smell of Turkish coffee wafted up the stairs to awaken her father. But before she could open it, a violent banging came from the other side.