Ask the Crane

The Gate on Arsenal Street

The whistle at the Hood Rubber Company blew at ten minutes to seven, and in February of 1913 it blew into a dark so cold that Nishan Tarpinian could feel it in the fillings of his back teeth. He was twenty-three years old. He had been in Watertown, Massachusetts, for nine months, and he still woke each morning in the boarding house on Dexter Avenue expecting to hear his mother's broom on the stone step at home.

Instead he heard Avedis Kalfayan coughing in the next bed, the landlady's son stamping ice off his boots on the porch, and the long, flat note of the whistle rolling up from the river.

"Get up, blacksmith's son," Avedis said, without opening his eyes. "The rubber does not wait for the Tarpinians."

"The rubber does not know my name," Nishan said, and put his feet on the cold boards.

There were six men in the room, all from the plain of Kharpert, all sleeping in two shifts so that the beds were never empty for long. Their landlady, Digin Siranoush, kept the house warm with a coal stove she fed as if every lump came out of her own purse, which it did. She rented the beds, cooked one pot of bulgur and lentils at night, and kept a list on the kitchen wall of who owed what. She could not read English. She could read money in any language.

Nishan dressed in the dark. Wool trousers, two shirts, the brown sweater his mother had knitted in the summer before he left, now darned at both elbows by his own clumsy hand. He wrapped a heel of bread and a piece of white cheese in newspaper and put it in his coat pocket. Then he and Avedis went down the stairs and out into the street, where the snow from Sunday had frozen into ruts and the gas lamps were still burning.

They were not alone. All along Dexter Avenue, along Bigelow Avenue and School Street and the narrow lanes between them, doors opened and men came out, and women too, wrapped in shawls, lunch pails swinging. They spoke Armenian, Irish English, Italian, Greek, and the slow Yankee English of the foremen. Their breath went up in clouds. Nobody talked much. At the bottom of the hill the factory rose out of the dark like a town of its own, brick on brick, building after building and the tall stack over all of it, already breathing smoke into the sky. The smell came up to meet them before the gate did: hot rubber, naphtha, coal, and something sweetish underneath that Nishan had never been able to name. He had stopped noticing it on his skin. His mother would have noticed it the moment he came through the door.

At the gate on Arsenal Street, the timekeeper sat in his little window and took the men's numbers. Nishan's was 4117. He had learned to say it in English before he had learned to say "thank you," because the number was the thing that got him paid.

He worked in the cementing room. All day long, rubber soles and canvas uppers and the little parts that went between them came down the line, and Nishan and the men beside him brushed them with cement and pressed them together, and the pieces went on down to the next men, who did the next thing, until at the far end of the building there were shoes. Rubber boots for New England mud. Overshoes for city men who did not want to wet their good leather. Canvas shoes with rubber soles for boys who would play baseball in them all summer. Thousands of pairs a day. The foreman said once that the Hood plant made one pair out of every five that Americans wore on their feet, and Nishan thought about that often: somewhere a man in Ohio, a woman in Maine, stepping through a puddle, never knowing a Kharpert boy had pressed the sole of that shoe with his two thumbs.

The cement smelled worse than anything in the plant. By ten in the morning his head ached with it. By noon he felt as if he were looking at the world through a glass of water. The men who had been there longest had learned to breathe through their mouths and open the high windows when the foreman was not looking. The foreman was an Irishman named Doyle, broad, red-faced, not cruel, and he could count faster than any man Nishan had ever met.

"Tarpinian," Doyle said that morning, standing over him. "You're quick today."

"Cold," Nishan said. "Quick is warm."

Doyle laughed. "Quick is money, too, but don't tell the others."

The pay was by the piece. In a good week Nishan earned a little over twelve dollars. He paid two to Digin Siranoush for his bed and his supper, and on the first Saturday of every month he bought a money order at the post office in Watertown Square and sent it home to his mother in Parchanj.

At noon he and Avedis ate their bread on the loading dock, out of the wind behind a stack of crates. The Charles River lay just beyond the plant, iced at the edges, dark and slow in the middle. Gulls stood on the ice. On the far bank the trees were bare and gray, and past them the land rose toward the big houses of the people who did not work at Hood.

"In Parchanj," Avedis said, "it is snowing on the mulberry trees."

"You do not know that."

"I know it. It is February. It snows on the mulberry trees every February. My mother is sitting by the tonir with her feet in the warm ashes, and she is telling my sister to stop looking out the window for a husband."

Nishan laughed. Avedis was twenty-five, two years older, thin as a reed, with long fingers that the cement was ruining. He had come in 1909. He was the first person Nishan had met in America, standing on the platform at the Boston railroad station with a piece of paper that said NISHAN TARPINIAN – PARCHANJ in Armenian letters, so that the new man would not walk past him. He had brought Nishan to Digin Siranoush's house. He had taken him to the gate on Arsenal Street and spoken to the man who spoke to Doyle. That was how it worked. A man from the village came, and then he sent for his cousin, and then the cousin sent for his neighbor's son, and in this way a whole slope of Kharpert villages was moving, a few men at a time, to the bank of a river in Massachusetts.

"Are you going to go back?" Nishan asked.

"Everyone is going back," Avedis said. "In three years. Five. When I have enough."

"Enough for what?"

"A roof. A field. A wife who will not complain about the smell of my hands." He held them up. The skin of his fingertips was cracked and shiny. "Look at that. I used to be able to play."

On Saturday nights, at Digin Siranoush's, Avedis still played. He kept an oud in a cloth bag under his bed, a short-necked, round-backed instrument with a body like half a melon, made of thin strips of dark and light wood. He had bought it in Boston from a Syrian man on Harrison Avenue for more than a week's pay, and he looked after it the way other men looked after a pocket watch. When the supper pot was empty and the dishes were washed, Avedis would sit on the edge of the kitchen table, tune the strings with his head bent close to the pegs, and begin.

He played the songs of the plain. Slow ones first, the kind that wandered, a phrase climbing up and falling back like a man walking a hill path in the dark. Then quicker ones, dance tunes, and the men would clap and sometimes the bravest would stand and dance in the narrow space between the stove and the door, arms on each other's shoulders, feet stamping on Digin Siranoush's floor until she shouted at them from the next room. And at the end of the night, always, he played the song of the crane.

Everyone from the old country knew it. It was a song about a man far from home who sees a crane flying overhead and calls up to it: Where are you coming from? Do you have any news of my country? The crane does not answer. The man asks again. He tells the crane about the house he left, the people in it, the water that runs past the door. Nishan had heard his mother sing it when he was a boy, when his father was away working in Constantinople, and he had thought it was a woman's song, a song for waiting. In Watertown he learned that it was every emigrant's song. When Avedis played it the room went quiet, and the men looked at the floor or at the black window, and Digin Siranoush stood in the doorway with her arms folded and her eyes shut.

"In Armenian it is groung," Avedis told the Irish boy from next door, who came over sometimes on Saturday nights because he liked the music. "The crane. Groung."

"Groung," said the boy, whose name was Michael Tierney and who was sixteen. "Sounds like a door that needs oil."

"It sounds," said Avedis, "like a bird that is too far away."

Nishan kept a book. It was a cheap ledger, the kind sold for keeping accounts, bought at a stationer's on Main Street in Watertown Square. On the first page, in his careful school hand, he had written his own name, and under it his father's, Hagop, and his mother's, Mariam, and his grandfather's, Kevork, who had been the blacksmith, and his brothers', Toros and Sarkis, and his sister's, Nevart. He had drawn lines between them, the way the schoolmaster in Parchanj had drawn the kings of old Armenia on the blackboard. On the second page he had begun to write the names of every person from Parchanj that he met in Watertown, with the name of their father and their house in the village, so that he could tell his mother in his letters who was here and who was well. By February of 1913 there were thirty-one names on the second page. He was proud of that page. It made the village seem less far.

On the wall above his bed he had pinned a picture postcard, bought from a peddler in Boston who sold views of the old country. It showed the plain of Kharpert from above, from the old fortress town on the hill: fields in squares, poplar trees, and a white line that was the road. The color had been added by hand afterward, and it was wrong; the fields were too green and the sky was the blue of a laundry rinse. Still, Nishan had found Parchanj on it, a smudge of roofs to the east, and marked it with a tiny ink dot. Beside the dot he had written the date he left: 14 April 1912. Below the postcard he had pinned the only photograph he owned, taken in a studio on Washington Street in Boston in his first month: Nishan in a borrowed collar, unsmiling, his hands on the back of a painted chair. He had written the date on that, too, and sent a copy home so his mother could see he was eating.

That night, after supper, he wrote his February letter. The kitchen table was the only table, so he waited until the dishes were done and Avedis had his oud out, and then he sat at the end of the table with his ledger and his pen and a sheet of thin paper.

Mayrig, he wrote. My dear mother. I am well. The work is steady. It is very cold here, colder than home, but the house is warm and the landlady feeds us. Avedis Kalfayan sends his respects to his mother and asks you to tell her that he is eating. This month I am sending eight dollars. Use some for the roof, and some for Nevart's wedding things, and do not let Father send it back to me.

He stopped. He wanted to tell her about the river, about the gulls standing on the ice, about the shoes that went out of the plant to every corner of America with his thumbprints on them. He wanted to tell her that on Saturday night a young Irishman had tried to say groung and made everyone laugh. He did not know how to write those things so that they would make sense in Parchanj, where nobody had ever seen an Irishman or a rubber boot or a frozen river with a factory beside it.

Tell Toros, he wrote at last, that there is work here for him if he wants to come. Tell Sarkis to stay in school.

Behind him Avedis was playing the slow song from the plain, the one that climbed and fell. Michael Tierney from next door was sitting on the floor by the stove with his back against the wall and his eyes closed. Digin Siranoush was mending a sock. Outside, the dark of the East End was settling, and somewhere down the hill the night shift at Hood was coming on, and the stack was breathing steadily into the cold.

I think of home every day, Nishan wrote. Every day I say, three years more.

He blotted the page, folded it, and put it in the envelope with the money order. Then he opened the ledger again and, under the thirty-first name on the second page, wrote the thirty-second: Hampartsoum, son of Kapriel the miller, arrived this week, working in the shipping room.

He looked at the names for a while. Thirty-two people from one village, in one corner of one town, on the far side of the world. He thought that if he kept writing them down, carefully, one under another, then when they all went home together someday, nobody would be forgotten on the road.

He did not know yet how much of his life that book would hold.

No Letters

The last letter from Parchanj came in May of 1915. Nishan did not know it was the last. He read it on the back steps of Digin Siranoush's house on a warm evening, with the lilacs blooming in the yard next door and the Tierney children shrieking in the street, and when he finished he laughed out loud, because his mother had written that Nevart's new husband snored like a buffalo and Nevart had moved her bedding up to the roof.

The letter had been written in March. It talked about the price of wheat, about the mulberry trees, about the schoolmaster's bad leg. Sarkis had won a prize for recitation. Toros was thinking about America, but their father wanted him for the forge. At the end, in a different ink, as if she had come back to it later, his mother had written: There is talk in the town. The men are worried. Do not send money for a little while. Keep it there until we write.

Nishan read that line twice and decided it was about the price of wheat.

That summer the Armenian newspaper from Boston began to carry reports that the men in the boarding house read aloud to each other at night, one man holding the paper close to the lamp and the others listening with their supper going cold. The reports were short at first, and confused, and nobody quite believed them. Then they were longer. Names of towns appeared that everyone knew. The men stopped reading the paper aloud. They read it alone, standing up, and then folded it and put it away and went out into the yard to smoke.

What the papers said, and what the world would come to know in the years after, was this. In the spring of 1915 the government of the Ottoman Empire, at war, ordered the removal of its Armenian people from their towns and villages. In Constantinople, on the twenty-fourth of April, hundreds of Armenian writers, teachers and community leaders were arrested and sent away. In the provinces of the east, through the summer, the men of village after village were taken from their homes, and the women, the old and the children were made to walk south, toward the deserts of Syria. Most did not arrive. Of the Armenians of the Kharpert plain, the great majority were gone by the autumn of that year.

The men on Dexter Avenue did not know all of this in 1915. They knew enough.

Nishan wrote in June, as he always did. He wrote in July. He sent no money, because his mother had told him not to, and he was glad of the reason; it meant there was a reason. In August he went to the post office in Watertown Square on the first Saturday and stood in the line and then, when he reached the window, could not think what he had come for. The clerk, a young woman with spectacles, waited. "Stamps," Nishan said at last, and bought six, and walked back up Mount Auburn Street with them in his hand.

The letters he sent did not come back. That was the worst of it, later, when he thought about it. If they had come back he would have known something. They simply went, across the ocean, and into the silence, and nothing answered.

At the plant the work went on. In fact there was more of it than ever. The war in Europe meant orders, and the orders meant longer shifts, and the foremen walked the lines with their stopwatches and their pencils. Doyle came by Nishan's bench one afternoon in September and stood there for a long time without saying anything. Then he said, "My wife reads the Boston papers. She showed me." He did not say what she had shown him. He put his hand for a moment on Nishan's shoulder, a heavy, awkward hand, and then he went on down the line.

That was the only time.

On the calendar that hung by Digin Siranoush's stove, a free calendar from a coal merchant on Arsenal Street with a picture of a sailing ship on it, Nishan made a small mark in the corner of the square for the twelfth of May: the day the last letter had come. He did not tell anyone what it meant. When the year ended and Digin Siranoush took the calendar down to replace it with the next one, he asked if he could keep the old page, and she gave it to him without a question. He folded it and put it in the back of his ledger.

In October Avedis stopped playing.

He did not say he was stopping. He just did not take the oud out from under his bed on Saturday night, and the next Saturday he did not either, and after the third week the men stopped looking at him when the dishes were done. Michael Tierney came over once and stood in the kitchen doorway and then went home again.

They found other things to do. There was a great deal to do. Up and down the East End and in every town in New England where Armenians had come to work, in Worcester and Providence and Lowell and Lawrence, there were meetings in rented halls, committees, collections. The men from each region of the old country had formed small unions years before, compatriotic societies, to help each other with sickness and burial and to build schools at home. Now the schools at home were gone, and the unions turned all their effort to finding out who was alive.

The Kharpert men met on Sunday afternoons in a hall above a shoe repair shop on Main Street. Nishan went every week. He paid his dues. He listened to the secretary read letters from Aleppo, from Beirut, from Constantinople, from relief workers and missionaries and survivors, letters that had taken months to come. He listened for the name Parchanj. Sometimes he heard it. Then a woman's name, or a boy's, would be read out, someone who had been seen alive in a town in Syria, and a man in the room would stand up, and the others would hold on to him.

The American relief committee had begun its work that autumn, raising money from churches and clubs and schoolchildren all over the country, sending food and doctors and later building orphanages and workshops in the cities of the Near East. In Watertown the collection went from door to door. The Irish and Italian women on Bigelow Avenue gave. The Yankee ladies from the big houses on the hill gave. Doyle put a dollar in the tin at the plant gate every payday and pretended no one saw.

Nishan gave more than he could afford. He had stopped needing money for anything else.

In the ledger, on the first page, beside each name of his family, he began to make a small mark in pencil. Not a cross. He would not put a cross there. A question mark, very light, so that it could be rubbed out. Hagop, father, blacksmith: question. Mariam, mother: question. Toros. Sarkis. Nevart, and Nevart's husband who snored like a buffalo, whose name he had never been told. Question, question, question. On the second page, the thirty-two names from Parchanj grew to forty-one, because men kept arriving in Watertown through 1914 and before the war closed the sea roads, and under each one he wrote, as he always had, the father's name and the house in the village. He began a third page. On the third page he wrote the names that the secretary read out on Sunday afternoons. Seen alive in Aleppo. Seen alive in Deir ez-Zor. Seen alive.

In March of 1916 Avedis came home from his shift and sat down on the edge of his bed and did not take his boots off. Nishan was lying down already, too tired to sleep.

"I had a letter," Avedis said. "From a cousin in Aleppo."

Nishan waited.

"My sister is alive. She is in the orphanage there. She is working in the kitchen." He looked at his hands. "Nobody else."

"Your sister is alive," Nishan said.

"My sister is alive."

They sat there. After a while Avedis bent down and pulled the cloth bag from under his bed and untied it. He took out the oud. He did not tune it. He sat with it across his knees and put his ruined fingers on the strings, and then he began, very quietly, to play the crane.

He played it badly. He had not touched the strings in five months and his fingers had stiffened in the cold and the cement. A string buzzed. He missed a note and went back for it. Nishan lay on his bed and listened. One by one, the other men in the room, the ones who were not on the night shift, turned over in their beds and lay with their faces to the wall or to the ceiling and listened too.

Where are you coming from, crane? What news do you have of my country?

When he finished Avedis put the oud back in the bag and pushed it under the bed and took off his boots.

"Tomorrow," he said, "I am going to write to her. And I am going to send money to the committee to send to her. And on Saturday I will play properly. You will see. I will play until Digin Siranoush throws a pot at me."

"She will," Nishan said.

"Good."

On Saturday he played. He played every Saturday after that, and the men came back into the kitchen, and Michael Tierney came back and sat on the floor by the stove, and the Kharpert songs filled the room again, the slow ones and the quick ones and the dances. At the end of every evening he played the crane. Nishan noticed that he had changed the way he played it. Before, it had been a song about a man waiting for news. Now he played it as if the man already knew the news, and was asking anyway, out of habit, out of love, because asking was the last thing he could still do for the people at home.

Nishan never received another letter from his family. He did not learn for certain what had happened to them until 1920, when a man from Parchanj who had survived as a boy, hidden by a Kurdish shepherd's family in the hills, reached Watertown and came to the hall above the shoe repair shop and told the men what he had seen. He spoke for a long time. Nishan listened to all of it, and went home, and never repeated a word of it to anyone, not to his wife, not to his children, not in all the years of his life.

But that was later. In the spring of 1916 he only knew what he did not know. He went to work. He paid his dues. He wrote the names. And on the twelfth of May, without telling anyone, he walked down to the bank of the Charles River behind the plant at the end of his shift and stood there for a while in the evening light, watching the water go by toward Boston and the sea, and the swallows coming back to nest under the eaves of the loading sheds.

Then he went home, and ate his supper, and opened the ledger, and on the third page, under seen alive, he wrote another name.

Aleppo Thread

In Aleppo the light came down into the courtyard of the workshop at about nine in the morning, slanting over the high wall and landing first on the fig tree and then, a little at a time, on the women. By ten it reached the bench where Zabel Ashjian sat. She was twenty-one years old in the spring of 1919, and she had learned to wait for that light the way other people waited for a bell.

Needle lace needed light. It needed good eyes and steady fingers and a patience that could not be taught, only discovered. Zabel had discovered hers in this courtyard, two years before, on the day an older woman named Digin Hripsime had put a needle and a ball of white cotton thread into her hands and shown her how to make a single knot.

"One," Digin Hripsime had said. "Now another next to it. Now another. Do not think about the flower. Think about the knot."

The workshop belonged to the relief committee. It was one of many in the city, where the Americans and their helpers had found that the thousands of women who had come out of the desert, half of them alone, needed two things besides bread: wages, and something to do with their hands. So there were rooms where women carded wool and spun it, rooms with tall looms where girls tied the knots of carpets in long rows, rooms where women sewed shirts for the orphanages. And there was this courtyard, with its fig tree and its cracked tiled floor and its smell of jasmine from the house next door, where the lace makers sat on benches along the wall with their work in their laps.

The lace itself was older than any workshop. In the villages of the old country women had made it for their own things for longer than anyone could say: for the edges of head scarves, for the borders of the cloth that covered a bride's tray of gifts, for pillow ends and towel ends and the little pieces that hung at the top of a window. It was made with nothing but a needle and thread. No hook, no bobbins, no pattern on paper. Each tiny knot was tied on the loop of the one before it, row after row, and out of the rows came shapes: almond leaves, pomegranates, little birds, the tight round rosettes the women called by a dozen different village names. Every village had its own ways. Every woman had her own hand. Digin Hripsime said she could look at a piece of lace and tell you not only what region it came from but whether the woman who made it had been happy that week.

"How?" Zabel had asked.

"Look at the tension. A happy woman pulls the knot tight and even. An angry woman pulls too tight. A sad woman," Digin Hripsime had said, holding up a collar someone had left on the bench, "makes loose knots, like this, and the whole thing goes sideways."

Zabel's knots had been loose for a long time.

She had been seventeen in the summer of 1915. She did not speak, then or afterward, of what had happened between that summer and the winter of 1916, when she was brought into Aleppo with a group of other women by an Arab carter who had found them near a village to the north and had let them walk behind his cart and given them water. The relief workers wrote her name in a book: Zabel, daughter of Garabed Ashjian, of Parchanj, Kharpert. Age eighteen. No living family known. She had lived since then in a house of refugee women near the workshop, sleeping on a mat in a room with nine others, eating bread and lentils and, in the good months, apricots and grapes from the market. She had been sick for a winter. She had gotten better. She had learned the knot.

And she had begun, in secret, a piece of her own.

It was a strip about four fingers wide. She worked on it in the evenings, by the oil lamp in the women's house, with thread she bought out of her own wages, a few coins at a time. Digin Hripsime knew about it, because Digin Hripsime knew everything, but she had never asked to see it, and Zabel had never shown her.

The strip was made of motifs, one after another, joined by a thin band of plain knots. Each motif was different. One was a small almond. One was a rosette with eight petals. One was a pomegranate split open, with tiny knots for the seeds. One was a bird with a long neck. One was a pair of crossed leaves. Each one was a person. Zabel had not decided this; she had simply found, the first evening, that she was making an almond and thinking of her mother, who had kept a jar of salted almonds on a high shelf and given them out one at a time as rewards. The next evening she made an eight-petaled rosette and thought of her father, who was the most orderly man in Parchanj and had laid out his garden in eight square beds. After that it was not a decision anymore. It was the way the strip was made.

She had made her mother, her father, her grandmother, her two younger brothers. She had made her aunt and her aunt's children. She had made the neighbors on either side. She had made the schoolmaster with the bad leg, as a little three-legged stool, because that was what the children had called him behind his back and he had known and laughed. She had made the girl who had been her best friend, Lucine, as a bird with its wings open. She did not write anything down. She knew who each one was by the shape and by the order, and she thought that was enough. By the spring of 1919 the strip was as long as her forearm, and it lived rolled up in a clean cotton cloth inside her bundle, and she did not let anyone touch it.

That spring the war had been over for six months. The British were in Aleppo, and then the French were coming, and the city was full of soldiers of every kind and refugees of every kind and rumors of every kind. Some of the women in the house talked of going home. Most did not. There were lists everywhere. The relief committee kept lists. The Armenian societies of every city kept lists. People wrote their names on walls, on the doors of the workshop, on scraps of paper pinned to a board in the courtyard of the great hall in the Armenian quarter: Searching for. Alive. Will be in Beirut. Has gone to Marseille.

And from America, from the compatriotic unions of every village and region, came the other lists. The ones with the names of the men who had left before 1915, who had gone to work in the factories and on the railways and in the vineyards of California, and who were now searching for anyone, anyone at all, from home.

In May a woman from the Kharpert society came to the workshop with a sheaf of papers and sat at a table under the fig tree and read names. The lace makers put down their work and listened. Zabel listened with her hands in her lap. Most of the names meant nothing. Some of them made women stand up. One of them made Zabel go cold all the way down her back.

"Nishan, son of Hagop Tarpinian, blacksmith, of Parchanj. In Watertown, Massachusetts. Asks for news of his family and of anyone from Parchanj."

She remembered him. Of course she remembered him. The Tarpinians' forge had been at the bottom of the lane, and she had passed it every day of her childhood on the way to the spring. Nishan was the middle son, the quiet one, the one who could do arithmetic in his head faster than the schoolmaster. He had gone to America when she was fourteen. She remembered the morning he left, because half the village had walked with him to the edge of the fields and his mother had cried into her apron, and Zabel and Lucine had run alongside the cart until they could not keep up. She had not thought of him in years.

She stood up.

"I know him," she said. "I knew his family."

The woman from the society looked at her over the papers. "And his family?"

Zabel said nothing. After a moment the woman nodded and wrote something down.

It took months. Letters went from Aleppo to Boston and from Boston to Watertown and back again. In September Zabel was given a letter in a hand she did not recognize, and she took it to the women's house and sat on her mat and opened it with the lamp beside her, and it was from him.

It was a careful letter. He wrote in the old way, beginning with respects and good wishes. He wrote that he had heard from the society that she was alive and in Aleppo, and that he was more glad than he could say. He wrote that he had had no news of his own family since May of 1915, and asked her, if she had any, to tell him the truth, and if she had none, to tell him that. He wrote a little about Watertown: the river, the factory, the house where he lived with other men from the plain. He wrote that he remembered her as a small girl who ran very fast. At the end he wrote that if she needed anything, anything at all, she must tell him, and he would send it.

Zabel read the letter four times. Then she took out her strip of lace and unrolled it on the cloth and looked at the motifs one by one. Toward the beginning was a small square, a closed box of knots with a single line through it, which she had made for Mariam Tarpinian, Nishan's mother, who had been kind to her once when she had cut her foot on a stone by the forge and had sat her down and washed it and given her a fig. She had not known, when she made that square, that she would ever see anyone who would care what it meant.

She wrote back. She told him the truth, as much of it as she could put on paper. She did not tell him everything. She told him that she had no word of his family after the summer of 1915, and that she had no reason to hope, and that she was sorry. She told him that his mother had once washed her foot and given her a fig. She told him she was well, and working, and that she did not need anything.

The letters went back and forth all through the winter. In February of 1920 he asked her, in a letter so carefully written that she could see where he had copied it over to remove the blots, whether she would think of coming to America. He did not say as his wife. He did not need to. That was how it was done now. All over the world, men who had left home before the catastrophe were writing to women who had survived it, women they had known as girls or not at all, and photographs were going back and forth, and passages were being paid for. It was how a scattered people began to put itself back together. People called the women picture brides, and some of the marriages were happy and some were not, and nobody pretended it was simple.

Zabel took the letter to Digin Hripsime.

The old woman read it in the courtyard light, holding it at arm's length. When she finished she folded it and gave it back.

"Is he kind?"

"I think so. He was a kind boy."

"Then you should go," said Digin Hripsime. She looked at Zabel's hands, at the lace collar half-finished in her lap. "Your knots are tight now. Did you know? Since about the new year. Tight and even."

Zabel looked down at her work. It was true. She had not noticed.

"Take your thread," said Digin Hripsime. "They have thread in America, but it is not the same."

Providence in the Rain

It was raining in Providence on the eighteenth of May, 1921, a soft gray spring rain that hung over the harbor and blurred the cranes and warehouses along the docks into shapes like folded paper. Nishan Tarpinian had been standing under the roof of the pier shed since six in the morning. The ship had been due at seven. It came in a little after ten, white and rust-streaked, with FABRE LINE painted on the side and a cloud of gulls over its stern, and when it finally tied up he found that he could not move his feet.

He had taken the day off from Hood, the first day he had missed in nine years apart from the influenza autumn of 1918, when half the plant had been sick at once. He had shaved twice. He was wearing a new collar and the good gray suit he had bought in Boston for the purpose, and in his inside pocket, wrapped in a handkerchief, he had the photograph she had sent him from Beirut the winter before: a young woman in a dark dress, very straight, her hair pulled back, looking at the camera as if she did not trust it.

Avedis was with him. Avedis had insisted. "If she sees you alone she will think you have no friends," he had said, "and she will get straight back on the boat."

The ship had come from Marseille by way of the Azores. It carried Italians and Portuguese and Greeks and Syrians and Armenians, more than a thousand of them, and they came down the gangways in a slow river of shawls and bundles and cardboard suitcases tied with rope, and went into the immigration hall to be counted and checked and questioned. Nishan and Avedis waited outside the hall with the other men who were waiting for someone. Some of them held photographs. Some held signs. One very old man held nothing at all and stood with his hat in both hands, turning it around and around by the brim.

It took four hours. Then a door opened at the side of the hall, and a clerk with a list called names, and the new arrivals came out one at a time, blinking, into the rain.

He knew her at once, though she looked nothing like the photograph. She was smaller. She was thinner. She was wearing a brown coat that was too big for her and a dark kerchief over her hair, and she carried one canvas bundle in her arms like a baby. She stood in the doorway and looked out at the waiting men, and her face did not change at all, and Nishan understood that she was frightened half to death and would rather have died than show it.

He walked over to her. He had prepared a great many things to say. He said, "Zabel. It's me. It's Nishan. From the forge."

She looked at him for a long moment.

"You were taller," she said.

"You were smaller."

And then, suddenly, she smiled, and it was the girl who had run beside the cart at the edge of the fields, and he had to look away at the gulls for a while before he could speak again.

They took the train to Boston and the streetcar out to Watertown, and Avedis talked the whole way so that neither of them had to. They were married three days later, on the twenty-first of May, at the office of the town clerk in Watertown, with Avedis and Digin Siranoush as witnesses. Zabel wore the dark dress from the photograph. Afterward there was a dinner in Digin Siranoush's kitchen, and every man from Parchanj in the East End came, and some of their wives, the few who had wives, and the Tierneys from next door brought a cake with white icing that nobody knew what to make of and everybody ate. Avedis played until midnight. When he played the crane, Zabel, who had been sitting very straight at the end of the table, put her hand flat on the cloth beside her plate and kept it there until the song was over.

Nishan had rented the downstairs of a two-family house on Quince Street, a short street of wooden houses that ran uphill from Mount Auburn Street, a little way west of the square where the streetcars turned. It was a plain house, painted gray, with a front porch, a back porch, a narrow yard with a clothesline and a grape arbor some previous owner had built and abandoned, and a coal stove in the kitchen. Upstairs lived an Italian family, the Ferraros: Salvatore, who worked at the Arsenal, his wife Concetta, her mother, and four children who thundered up and down the back stairs from morning to night. Avedis moved into the small back bedroom as a boarder. It was what everyone did. It helped with the rent, and it meant there was always a man in the house, and it meant that Zabel would not be alone with a husband she had known as a grown man for three days.

The first week she cleaned. She cleaned the house from the attic hatch to the cellar door, on her knees, with a bucket and a brush and a bar of yellow soap, and Nishan came home from the plant every evening to find another room transformed and his wife sitting on the back steps in the dusk with her hands in her lap, looking at the arbor.

The second week she went out.

She did not tell him where she was going, and he did not ask; he was learning not to ask. She went down to Mount Auburn Street and walked along it, east, past the grocers and the bakers and the barber shops and the coffeehouse where the old men played backgammon, past the Irish saloon with its frosted windows and the Italian fruit seller with his pyramids of oranges, past the hardware store and the shoe repair and the little stationers. The street was full of noise. Trucks and wagons and the clanging streetcars. Children selling newspapers. Women calling to each other from windows in four languages. She walked all the way to Coolidge Square and back, and then she turned south, down the hill, toward the factory and the river.

Nishan found out later that she had walked along the river every day that week. She walked the path on the north bank from the bridge in Watertown Square almost to the plant, and back. She walked slowly, looking at everything. The sycamores. The willows trailing their hair in the water. The red-winged blackbirds clinging to the reeds and shouting. The rowers from Cambridge in their long thin boats, gliding past as if the river were made of glass. She looked at the plants along the bank the way a woman looks at the shelves of a new grocer, deciding what she will be able to cook.

On the Saturday of the second week she came home with her apron gathered up in her hands, full of something, and spilled it out on the kitchen table in front of him. It was a heap of dark red berries, packed tight together in cone-shaped clusters, dry and fuzzy, like the tips of a dozen small torches. The leaves had been stripped off, but a few of the stems were still attached.

"What is it?" Nishan asked.

"Taste."

He picked a berry off a cluster and put it in his mouth. It was sour. Sharp, clean, lemony sour, with something dusty and warm underneath it, and he sat back in his chair and stared at her, because it was the taste of every summer of his childhood, the taste of the red powder his mother sprinkled on onions and on grilled meat and on the yogurt with cucumbers, the powder that came from the sumac bushes on the dry slopes above the village.

"Where?"

"By the river. Behind the factory. On the bank by the railroad tracks." She was smiling, the second time he had seen her smile. "Hundreds of them. Nobody picks them. Nobody knows."

"It's not the same," he said. "It can't be the same."

"It's not the same," she agreed. "It's American. It is a little different. The berries are bigger and there is more fuzz. But it is sumac. It is sour. I asked the Ferraro grandmother and she said the Americans call it sumac too, and some of them make a drink from it in the summer, like lemonade." She picked up a cluster and turned it in her fingers. "I will dry them on the back porch. I will grind them. You will see."

That night she made a salad of sliced onions and parsley from the Italian fruit seller and sprinkled it with the sumac she had ground in the coffee mill, and set it on the table beside the bread and the cheese and the lentils, and Nishan and Avedis ate it without speaking. It was not the same. It was close enough that Avedis had to get up from the table halfway through and stand on the back porch for a while.

There were other discoveries that summer. Zabel found that the grape arbor, when she pruned it back, put out leaves in July that were good enough for wrapping rice and meat, if you picked them young. She found purslane growing in the cracks of the sidewalk on Quince Street, the same fat-leaved creeping weed the women at home had gathered for salads, and picked it while the Irish women on the next porch watched her with their arms folded. She found that the Syrian grocer on Mount Auburn Street sold bulgur by the scoop out of a barrel, and that the Greek bakery in the square made a bread that was almost right if you bought it in the afternoon. She found that nobody in Watertown sold the cheese she wanted, and began, in August, to make her own, with milk from the dairy wagon and a cloth tied to the handle of a broom laid across two chairs.

She did not do these things because she missed home. She told Nishan that, once, when he found her on her knees in the yard digging a corner of ground to plant herbs. She did it because a person had to eat, and a person might as well eat food that tasted like something.

But he noticed that she sang while she worked in the garden. Very quietly, under her breath. The songs were village songs, the ones the women sang in the fields, and he had not heard some of them since he was a boy.

On the kitchen wall, beside the window that looked out on the arbor, there was a calendar from a coal merchant, the same company that had given Digin Siranoush hers. Zabel could not yet read the English names of the months, but she could read numbers. On the square for the eighteenth of May she drew a small ship, three lines and a curve, with a pencil. Nishan saw it the next morning and did not ask about it either. But the following January, when the new calendar went up, he turned to May before she did and drew the same small ship in the same square, and when she saw it she looked at him across the kitchen for a long time and then went back to her coffee.

He moved the postcard of the Kharpert plain from the boarding house to the wall above the kitchen table. Beside the ink dot that was Parchanj he wrote, in tiny letters, Zabel. Below the postcard he pinned the only photograph they had of the two of them, taken in the studio on Washington Street in Boston the week after the wedding: Zabel seated in her dark dress, Nishan standing beside her with his hand on the back of the chair, both of them looking at the camera with the same faint suspicion. Under it he wrote: May 1921, Boston. And then, after a moment, under that: Quince Street, Watertown.

In the back bedroom, at night, Avedis played. Upstairs the Ferraro children thundered and slept. And in the front room, by the lamp, when Nishan had gone to bed, Zabel unrolled her strip of lace on the table and looked at it for a while, the long row of almonds and rosettes and birds and little stools, all the people of Parchanj she had carried across the sea in a cotton cloth.

Then she threaded her needle and began, slowly, to make a new motif.

It was not for anyone who had died. It was the first one in the strip that was not. She made it in the shape of a small square with a single line through it, like the one she had made for Nishan's mother, but with a second line crossing the first, so that it looked like a little window. She worked on it for three nights. When it was finished she rolled up the strip again and put it back in its cloth and did not tell him.

He never knew it was there.

The Saturday Table

On Saturdays in 1930 the kitchen on Quince Street became a school.

It happened at two o'clock, after the noon meal was cleared and the oilcloth wiped, and it lasted until four, when the light began to go and the mothers came to collect their children. There were eleven children that autumn, from six years old to thirteen, and they sat on the kitchen chairs and the back-bedroom chairs and an apple crate turned on its end, with their elbows on the table and their slates and copybooks in front of them, and they learned to read and write Armenian.

The teacher was Zabel.

She had not meant to be. The Kharpert society had always talked about a Saturday school, and in 1928 they had rented a room for one above the shoe repair shop on Main Street, with a schoolmaster who had taught in the old country and wore a celluloid collar and could recite whole books of poetry from memory. The schoolmaster had a stroke in the winter of 1929. The room above the shoe repair cost money the society did not have once the factories began cutting hours. By the spring of 1930 there was no school, and the children of the East End, who spoke Armenian at home and English on the street and a careless mixture of both on the stairs between, were beginning to forget the letters they had learned.

Zabel's daughter Araxie was eight. Her son Mihran was four and a half. One Saturday in May Zabel heard Araxie and the Ferraro girl from upstairs playing school on the back porch, and the Ferraro girl was the teacher and was teaching Araxie the English alphabet, and Araxie was reciting it in a perfect Watertown accent, and Zabel stood at the screen door and listened, and something in her went very still.

That evening she asked Nishan to bring home a box of chalk.

She had very little schooling herself. In Parchanj the girls had gone to the village school for three years, long enough to read and write and do sums, and then had gone home to the looms and the fields. But she had a good memory and a beautiful hand, and she had learned, in the workshop in Aleppo, how to teach someone a thing by doing it slowly beside them until their fingers knew it. And she had the alphabet. Thirty-six letters, devised by a scholar named Mesrop Mashtots fifteen hundred years before, and two more added later by people who needed them. Thirty-eight letters with their round shoulders and their hooks and their tails, letters that every Armenian child in every village had learned by chanting them in order, ayp, pen, kim, ta, yech, the sounds of the Western speech of Kharpert and Constantinople and Aleppo.

She painted them on the back of an old window shade with a brush and a pot of black stove enamel and hung it on the kitchen wall with two nails. The painted letters were large and careful, each one in its own square, with the English sound written small underneath in Nishan's hand. She did not know that she was a fine calligrapher. She only knew that the letters ought to look the way they had looked on the schoolroom wall at home, firm and upright and a little proud, and she made them that way.

On the first Saturday there were three children: Araxie, the Kalustian boy from Bigelow Avenue, and the Tashjian twins. Mihran sat under the table and played with clothespins. On the second Saturday there were six. By October, word had gone up and down the East End, and there were eleven, and Zabel was turning children away because there was no room on the bench.

She taught the way she had been taught to make lace. One letter at a time. One sound at a time. Then two letters together. Then a word. She did not let them hurry. When a child made a letter badly she did not scold; she took the pencil and made it again, slowly, beside theirs, and said "Like this. Look at the shoulder. Look where it turns," until the child saw. When they could write a word she gave them another. The words came from the kitchen and the street. Hatz, bread. Chour, water. Doun, house. Mayrig, mother. Arev, the sun. Dziran, apricot. Groung, the crane.

"Why do we have to learn this," the older Kalustian boy said one afternoon, a sharp, bored thirteen-year-old with ink on his cuffs. "Everyone here speaks English."

Zabel looked at him for a moment.

"Your grandmother does not speak English," she said.

"My grandmother is in the old country."

"Your grandmother," said Zabel, "is in a cemetery in Watertown, and she wrote letters to your mother every week of her life before that, in these letters, and your mother kept them in a tin box. One day you are going to want to read them. And then you will come back to my kitchen and say, Digin Zabel, I am sorry I was rude, please teach me the letters. And I will say, why, everyone speaks English."

The Kalustian boy went red. The other children laughed. He did not miss a Saturday for the next four years.

Araxie kept a copybook. It was a cheap one from the five-and-ten on Main Street, with a marbled cover and the words COMPOSITION BOOK printed on a label. On the first page she wrote, in her best round Armenian letters, Araxie Tarpinian, Quince Street, Watertown, 1930. And under that, because she was eight and very serious, she began a list of words.

They were not lesson words. They were the words her mother said that were not in the lessons. The words for things in the old village that did not exist in Watertown: the clay oven sunk in the floor, the flat roof where people slept in summer, the room where the silkworms were kept on their trays of mulberry leaves. The words her mother used when she was cross, and when she was tender, and when she was talking to herself in the garden. The words her father used that were different from her mother's words for the same thing, because he had left Parchanj when he was a young man and she had left it as a girl, and their speech had gone different ways. Araxie wrote each word down in Armenian letters, and beside it, in English, what it meant, as best she could tell. If she did not know what it meant she asked. If her mother did not want to tell her she wrote a question mark and asked again later.

She was to keep that list for the rest of her life.

Times were bad and getting worse. Hood had cut hours at the plant twice that year, and the Ferraros upstairs were behind on their rent. Zabel took in lace.

She had found the customers almost by accident, the year before. A woman named Mrs. Abbott, one of the Cambridge ladies who came out to Watertown on the streetcar to do settlement work among the immigrant families, had seen a lace collar on Araxie's school dress and asked who had made it. Zabel had been embarrassed. Mrs. Abbott had insisted. By the end of the month Zabel had orders for six collars and a set of cuffs from Mrs. Abbott's friends on Brattle Street, and by the end of the year she had more work than she could do.

But the strip, the long strip of motifs in its cotton cloth, she still worked on only at night, when the house was asleep. It was much longer now. Nishan knew it existed. He had come into the front room late one night in 1924, unable to sleep, and found her bent over it under the lamp, and she had not covered it. He had sat down across the table from her. After a long time he had pointed to one motif, a little square box of knots with a line through it.

"That one," he had said. "Who is that?"

She had looked at him. "Your mother," she had said.

He had not asked about any of the others. He had sat with her until she finished the knot she was working on, and then they had both gone to bed, and he had never mentioned it again. But sometimes, after that, when she was working on it at night, she would look up and find him standing in the doorway in his nightshirt, watching her, and he would nod and go back to bed.

On the last Saturday of October, the school did not meet in the kitchen. It met in the yard, and in the kitchens of three other houses on Quince Street, and in the back room of the Syrian bakery on Mount Auburn Street, and it did not learn letters at all. It made lahmajoun.

This was Zabel's idea, and it was a large one. The bakery had a deep brick oven that the owner, a Syrian from Aleppo named Mr. Haddad, lent out to the East End women on Saturday afternoons when his own baking was done. The women had always gone there in twos and threes to bake their bread. Zabel's idea was that they should all go at once, every family from the Saturday school and anyone else who wanted to, and make enough of the thin round breads spread with spiced meat to last every household through November. Everyone would bring what they could. Flour. Lamb, or beef if lamb was too dear. Onions, peppers, tomatoes put up from the summer. Parsley from the window boxes. Whatever spices they had. And the work would be shared, so that no one family had to spend its money or its whole Saturday alone.

It took over the street. In the morning the women made dough in four kitchens at once, and the children carried the bowls on their heads to Mr. Haddad's, shrieking. In the afternoon, in the bakery's back room, the women sat around a long table under a hanging bulb and rolled out the dough into rounds as thin as a page, and spread each one with the red meat paste in a single quick sweep of the palm, and the men carried the trays to the oven, where Mr. Haddad, sweating in an undershirt, slid them in on a long wooden paddle and slid them out again four minutes later, blistered and fragrant and curling at the edges. The smell went out of the bakery and up Mount Auburn Street and stopped people on the sidewalk.

The Ferraros came down. Concetta Ferraro took one look at the dough and rolled up her sleeves and sat down at the table, because she had been rolling dough since she was six years old in Calabria, and within an hour she was arguing with Zabel about how thin it should be, in a mixture of Italian, Armenian and English that only the two of them understood. The Tierneys came. Old Mrs. Tierney, who was seventy and had come from County Clare as a girl, sat by the oven in a kitchen chair and was given the first lahmajoun out of every batch, folded into quarters, and she ate eleven. Mrs. Abbott came out from Cambridge on the streetcar in a good coat and a hat with a feather and was put to work stacking the finished breads between sheets of clean newspaper, and did it all afternoon, very seriously, and went home smelling of onions.

By nightfall there were more than eight hundred, stacked in towers in the back of the bakery, and every family carried home its share in clean pillowcases. Mr. Haddad would not take money for the oven. He took forty lahmajoun instead, and said they were better than his own wife's, and asked that no one tell her.

It became a thing that happened every year, on the last Saturday of October, for nearly forty years. Nobody ever wrote down how much of anything went into the meat. Nobody needed to. Every year the women argued about it from the beginning, and the argument was the point. The children who carried the bowls on their heads in 1930 carried them on their heads in 1940, taller, and the year after that carried them with the youngest children of the street trotting behind. On the coal-company calendar in the kitchen on Quince Street, Zabel drew a small round loaf on the last Saturday of October, next to the little ship on the eighteenth of May.

That night, after the children were in bed and Avedis had played and gone to sleep and Nishan was snoring, Zabel sat at the kitchen table under the window shade with its thirty-eight painted letters and looked at Araxie's copybook, which the girl had left open on the oilcloth.

On the newest page, in round careful letters, Araxie had written: Lahmajoun. And beside it, in English: Bread with meat on it. Everyone makes it together.

Zabel read that line several times. Then she closed the copybook and put it on the shelf by the window, where it would be safe.

Women at the Arsenal

The Watertown Arsenal ran along the north bank of the Charles River behind a long brick wall on Arsenal Street, and in the winter of 1943 it never slept. It had been building gun carriages for the army since the Civil War. Now it made them faster than it had ever made anything: gun carriages, breech blocks, the great steel tubes for cannon, cast and forged and bored in long sheds where the noise was so enormous that the workers learned to talk with their hands. Its smokestacks and the smokestacks of Hood a little way down the road put a brown smear over the whole East End that you could see from the top of the hill in Belmont.

Araxie Tarpinian was twenty-one. She worked in the inspection department of the machine shop, on the day shift, seven to three-thirty, six days a week, with a white kerchief over her hair and a pair of men's coveralls rolled up at the ankles and the cuffs. Her job was to measure things. Parts came to her bench from the machines, still warm and smelling of cutting oil, and she checked them with gauges and micrometers against the numbers on the drawings, and either stamped them and sent them on or tagged them in red and sent them back. She was very good at it. Her supervisor, a gray Yankee named Mr. Pratt who had worked at the Arsenal since 1911 and had never expected to see a woman in his shop, said once that she had the steadiest eye on the floor. He said it to the foreman, not to her. She heard it anyway.

There were hundreds of women at the Arsenal by then, and thousands at Hood, where the old shoe lines had been turned over to making rubber goods for the war and the old men and the girls ran them. Women from every street of the East End. Irish, Italian, Armenian, Greek, Yankee. They ate their lunch together on the benches by the river in good weather and in the canteen in bad, and they talked about everything. Prices. Ration stamps. Letters from overseas. They talked across the edges of their languages, and somewhere in that first winter the edges started to wear smooth. Rosemary Doherty from Arlington Street learned to say "enough, enough" in Armenian, because Araxie's mother always said it at the Tarpinian table when someone tried to give her more. Araxie learned to swear in Italian from Gina Ferraro, who had grown up upstairs and was now running a lathe. They all learned, from a Polish woman named Stella who had a son in North Africa, a way of saying "come home safe" that none of them could pronounce and all of them used.

Mihran was in the navy.

He had enlisted in October, the week after his eighteenth birthday, without telling anyone first. He had taken the streetcar into Boston on a Tuesday morning when he was supposed to be at his job loading trucks at the Hood shipping dock and had come home on Tuesday evening with a paper in his pocket and a face like a boy who has broken a window. Zabel had not spoken to him for three days. Nishan had taken him out to the back porch and talked to him for an hour in a low voice that the whole house had strained to hear and nobody had. On the fourth day Zabel had made him boreg, the flaky pastries filled with cheese and parsley that were his favorite and took most of a day to make, and had set the plate in front of him without a word, and that had been the end of the argument.

He went to boot camp in Newport, and then to a school for signalmen, and then, in March of 1944, to a destroyer escort in the Pacific. His letters came irregularly, in bunches, cut up by the censors, written in a cramped and cheerful English that sounded nothing like the way he talked at home. He wrote about the food, which was bad, and the heat, which was worse, and the other men on the ship: a boy from Iowa who had never seen the ocean, a boy from Georgia who talked so slowly that Mihran thought for a month he was making fun of him, a boy from Brooklyn who knew every word of every song ever recorded. He wrote nothing about where they were or what they were doing, because he could not. He signed every letter, in English, Your son, Mike.

Zabel could not read English well enough to read them. Araxie read them aloud at the kitchen table in the evenings, translating as she went, while her mother sat with her hands folded on the oilcloth and her father smoked by the stove and Avedis sat on the back-bedroom chair with his oud on his knee, not playing. When she came to the word Mike, Araxie said "Mihran." She never said Mike. Her mother did not know, until much later, that her son had become Mike to everybody outside the house.

On the wall above the kitchen table, beside the old postcard of the Kharpert plain, Nishan had pinned a big map of the Pacific Ocean that came folded inside a magazine. He did not know where Mihran's ship was. Nobody did. But when the newspaper reported a battle or a landing, Nishan would find the place on the map, a tiny island with a name nobody could say, and push a pin into it, and write the date on a scrap of paper and pin that beside it. By the summer of 1944 there were eleven pins. None of them, as far as anyone ever learned, marked a place Mihran had actually been. But Zabel looked at them every morning when she came into the kitchen, and Nishan kept putting them in.

The house was very quiet without Mihran. Araxie had not known how much noise her brother made until he was not making it.

In the evenings, after the letters, after the dishes, after her father had gone to bed and her mother had gone into the front room to work on the lace by the lamp, Araxie sat at the kitchen table with her composition book.

It was not the same book. The first one, from 1930, had filled up when she was eleven, and she had bought a second one and a third. She was on her sixth now, and the five before it were stacked on the shelf by the window in a rubber band. They were full of words. Her mother's words and her father's words, and Avedis's words, which were older again, because Avedis had been raised by a grandmother who spoke the way people spoke before the village had a school. Words she had heard old women say to each other on Mount Auburn Street. Words she had heard at the Kharpert society meetings, which she still went to with her father, and at the weddings and the funerals and the picnics on the Fourth of July out at a farm in Andover that one of the society men had bought. Words for weather. Words for cooking. Words for the parts of a loom. Words for the parts of a plow, which nobody in Watertown had used for thirty years. Insults. Blessings. Proverbs. Lullabies. The names of plants.

She had started to notice, around 1940, that some of the words were disappearing. Not from the books; from the street. The old women who had said them were dying. The children who were born in Watertown did not learn them, because nobody in Watertown needed a word for the room where you keep the silkworms. Even her own mother, who spoke nothing but Armenian at home, had begun to say "icebox" and "streetcar" and "bus" in English, because there was no point inventing an Armenian word for a thing that had not existed in Parchanj.

So Araxie had begun asking. When she heard a word she did not know, she wrote it down and asked. When an old person used a word she suspected was going out of the world, she asked them what it meant and how they had learned it and whether there was another word for the same thing in the next village. She asked politely and persistently, and people told her, partly because she was Zabel Tarpinian's daughter and partly because almost nobody had ever asked them before.

That winter she was working on the words for lace.

Her mother knew a great many. Every stitch had a name. Every shape had a name: the almond, the pomegranate, the little ladder, the fish's spine, the bird's foot, the eye of the needle. Every kind of edging had a name. The women of different villages called the same thing by different names, and Zabel knew the Parchanj names and some of the Aleppo workshop names and a few of the names from the women of other regions she had sat beside on the bench, and she said them all as if they were common knowledge. Araxie wrote them down, with little drawings in the margin, and asked her mother to check them.

"Why do you want this?" Zabel asked her one night, leaning over her shoulder at the kitchen table, looking at a page of tiny pencil sketches. "Nobody needs to know what the Habousi women called this edge. Nobody in America makes this edge."

"You make it."

"I will not live forever."

"That's why," said Araxie.

Zabel studied her. Then she pulled out the chair beside her and sat down and took the pencil out of her daughter's hand and, very slowly, corrected one of the drawings. "Not like that. The loop goes the other way. Look." And then she sat there until nearly midnight, while the house creaked and the coal stove ticked and down the hill the night shift at the Arsenal clanged and hissed, telling her daughter the names of things.

It was that winter, too, that Araxie met Walter.

Walter Lindqvist was a draftsman in the Arsenal's design office, a tall, fair, quiet man from a Swedish family in Waltham, two years older than she was, with weak eyes that had kept him out of the service and a habit of blushing when anyone spoke to him. He came down to the inspection department one day with a drawing that had an error in it, an error Araxie had found and tagged, and he stood at her bench and went red to the ears and thanked her for catching it. After that he came down often, with drawings that did not seem to need him to come down with them.

He walked her home along Arsenal Street in the spring evenings, and up the hill to Mount Auburn Street, and to the bottom of Quince Street, where she always stopped him, because she was not ready for her mother to see him. He told her about his grandmother in Waltham, who had come from a farm in Småland and still spoke nothing but Swedish and made a kind of bread with rye and orange peel that he said he would bring her some of. He asked her about the words in her book. She had never told anyone outside the family about the book. She told him. He did not laugh. He asked if he could see it, and when she brought it to work one day in her lunch bag he turned the pages very carefully, looking at the drawings of the lace in the margins, and said that her drawings were better than half the men's in his office.

"My grandmother has words like these," he said. "Words for things on the farm. Nobody writes them down. When she goes, they go."

"Then write them down."

"I can't speak Swedish. Not really. I understand it. I can't write it."

"So learn," said Araxie, and he looked at her as if she had said something remarkable, and she felt her own face go hot and looked away at the river.

She did not marry him. That was decided later, and slowly, and for reasons that were partly hers and partly the war's and partly nobody's, and it is not this chapter's to tell. But in the spring of 1944 she let him walk her to the bottom of Quince Street four evenings a week, and once, on a Sunday in May, she let him walk her all the way up to the porch, where her mother was sitting in the sun with a collar in her lap.

Zabel looked him up and down over the top of her spectacles. Walter went red and said good afternoon. Zabel said good afternoon, in English, which she almost never spoke. Then she held up the collar she was working on, and said to Araxie in Armenian, "Ask him if Swedish women make this."

Araxie asked.

"My grandmother crochets," said Walter, faintly. "With a hook."

Araxie translated. Zabel considered this.

"Tell him that is a different thing," she said. "But tell him I am sure it is very nice."

Walter brought the rye bread with the orange peel the next week. Zabel ate a slice and said it needed more salt. Then she ate another one.

On a Wednesday in late June, a letter came from Mihran, the first in five weeks. It was short. It said that he was fine. It said that it had been a busy month. It said that he had been thinking about the lahmajoun at Mr. Haddad's bakery, and would someone please send him some, because the navy did not know how to cook anything, and he would share it with the boy from Iowa, who had never tasted anything with flavor in his life.

Araxie read it aloud at the kitchen table. When she finished, nobody said anything for a moment. Then Avedis lifted the oud off his knee, and tuned it, and began to play.

He did not play the crane. He played a dance from the plain, a fast one, the kind that went faster and faster until the dancers fell down laughing, and he played it loud enough that the Ferraros upstairs stopped what they were doing and came down the back stairs to see. Nishan got up from his chair by the stove. Zabel looked at him as if he had lost his mind. He held out his hand to her. After a long moment, she took it.

Araxie, at the table, opened her composition book to the back page, where she kept the words that did not belong anywhere else, and wrote down the name of the dance.

Two Kitchens

Avedis Kalfayan died in April of 1949, in the back bedroom on Quince Street, where he had lived for twenty-eight years. He was sixty-one. The doctor said it was his lungs, and that a great many men who had worked in the cementing rooms at Hood in the early days had lungs like his, and that there was nothing to be done but keep him warm. Zabel kept him warm. She kept the coal stove in the kitchen roaring all that cold spring and the door to the back bedroom open so the heat would reach him, and she brought him soup and sat with him in the afternoons, and Nishan sat with him in the evenings, and Araxie read him the Armenian newspaper and the Boston Globe, both, front to back, because he wanted to know everything.

He did not play, at the end. His hands had been too stiff for years to play well, and he would not play badly in front of people. But the oud hung on its nail on the wall where he could see it from the bed, and once, when Araxie came in with the paper, she found him looking at it with an expression she did not know how to read.

"Who gets it," he said, "when I go?"

"Don't talk like that."

"Araxie. I am sixty-one and I cannot breathe. Who gets it?"

She was quiet for a moment. "Who do you want to have it?"

"Mihran."

"Mihran doesn't play."

"Mihran," said Avedis, "is the only person in this house who used to sit on the floor and watch my hands. When he was four. Five. He sat right there by the stove." He coughed for a long time. "He doesn't play. Somebody after him will."

He died two weeks later, early on a Sunday morning, with Nishan beside him. Half the East End came to the funeral, and the Kharpert society paid for the stone, and the Tierneys and the Ferraros and Mr. Haddad from the bakery came, and Michael Tierney, who was fifty-two now and had a mustache and a hardware business in Waltham, stood at the back with his hat in his hands and cried without hiding it. Afterward, in the kitchen, somebody asked who was going to play, and nobody answered, and the silence went on so long that people began to talk about other things.

Mihran took the oud down from the nail that night.

He did not try to play it. He sat on the edge of the stripped bed with it across his knees, as he had seen Avedis sit a thousand times, and turned it over and looked at it. The back was made of strips of wood, dark and light, bent and glued into a bowl. The top was thin and pale, with a carved rosette in the middle and a long scratch near the bottom where something had once hit it. The neck was worn smooth and dark where a hand had moved along it for forty years. The pegs did not match: two of them were newer than the others, replaced at some point. Inside the sound hole, when he tilted it to the light, he could see a paper label with writing on it in Arabic letters that he could not read.

Zabel came to the door.

"He wanted you to have it," she said.

"I know. Araxie told me."

"Do you know where he bought it?"

Mihran shook his head. His mother came into the room and sat down beside him on the bed, which she had never done in twenty-eight years, and told him. The Syrian man on Harrison Avenue in Boston, in 1910. More than a week's pay. The pegs he had replaced in 1922, when the old ones split in a cold winter. The scratch on the top, which had happened at a wedding in Worcester in 1927 when a man had fallen into him while dancing, and Avedis had not spoken to that man for two years. The night he had stopped playing, in October of 1915, and the night he had started again, in March of 1916.

When she was finished Mihran got up and went to the kitchen and came back with a pencil and an index card from the box Araxie kept for her word lists. He wrote on the card, in English, everything his mother had told him, in order. He wrote it carefully and small, so that it all fit on both sides. Then he punched a hole in the corner with a nail and tied the card to the oud's lowest peg with a piece of string.

"So nobody forgets," he said.

Zabel looked at the card hanging from the peg. "That," she said, "is a very American thing to do."

"I am a very American person," said Mihran, and his mother laughed for the first time in a month.

He had come home from the Pacific in the spring of 1946 with a duffel bag, a ribbon he never wore, and a habit of waking at four in the morning that he never lost. He had gone back to Hood because Hood was there, and his father was there, and it paid. He worked in the tire division now. He was twenty-three, good-looking in a dark, serious way, and he had learned in the navy that he could talk to anybody, which had made him popular in the plant and on Mount Auburn Street and among the girls who worked in the Hood offices on the second floor of the administration building.

One of them was Peggy Callahan.

She was a typist in the payroll department. She was twenty, from a family of seven children on Westminster Avenue, the third of them, with red-brown hair she wore pinned up and a laugh that could be heard from the other end of the cafeteria. Her father was a fireman. Her mother had come from Galway as a girl. Peggy had gone to Watertown High and then to a secretarial course in Boston and then to Hood, because Hood was there, and it paid. She had typed Mihran Tarpinian's name on a payroll card every week for a year before she ever saw his face, and when she finally saw it, at the plant's Fourth of July outing at a pond in Lexington in 1949, she walked straight up to him and said, "You're Tarpinian, M., tire division, aren't you? I've been spelling you wrong for months."

"How have you been spelling me?"

"With a b. T-a-r-b. Somebody wrote it that way on your card."

"That's how they spelled it in the navy," he said.

"Well, it's wrong," said Peggy Callahan. "I fixed it."

They were married in June of 1952. It took three years, and it was not easy, and both mothers had a great deal to say about it, and most of it was said in languages the other mother could not understand, which may have been the only thing that saved them.

Zabel's objection was simple. Peggy was an odar, an outsider, not Armenian. Every Armenian mother in Watertown knew what happened when a son married an odar. The children did not learn the language. The grandchildren did not know the songs. In two generations the family was gone into America like a drop of dye into a river, and all the names in all the ledgers in all the kitchens of the East End would be names nobody could pronounce. Zabel had not walked out of the desert and crossed the sea and painted thirty-eight letters on a window shade to watch her grandchildren grow up without them.

Mrs. Callahan's objection was simpler. Mihran was not Irish. He was, as she put it to her daughter on the back steps of the house on Westminster Avenue, "some kind of foreigner."

"He was born on Quince Street," Peggy said. "He's about as foreign as the fire station."

"You know what I mean."

"I do know what you mean," said Peggy. "And I'm marrying him anyway."

It was Nishan who settled it, in the end, at least on the Tarpinian side. He was sixty-two that winter, gray now, slower, still working three days a week at Hood in a job that was mostly sweeping. He sat Zabel down at the kitchen table one evening in February of 1952 and opened his ledger to the first page. The page of his family. The names of his father and mother, his brothers, his sister, all with their small faint question marks beside them in pencil, which he had never rubbed out. And under them, his own name, and Zabel's, and Araxie's, and Mihran's, in ink.

"When I left Parchanj," he said, "I thought there would be thirty names on this page by now. Forty. Brothers' wives. Nephews. Cousins." He put his finger on the page. "There are four."

Zabel looked at the page.

"She is a good girl," Nishan said. "She makes him laugh. She came to the lahmajoun day in October and rolled dough for six hours and did not complain once. She asked Araxie for the words for flour and salt and wrote them on her hand." He closed the ledger. "I want more names on this page, Zabel. I don't care where they come from."

They were married at the town hall, as Nishan and Zabel had been, with a reception afterward in the Callahans' backyard on Westminster Avenue that both families attended in a state of armed politeness that lasted until about the third hour, when Mr. Callahan the fireman got out a fiddle and Nishan, who had not danced in public in thirty years, got up and danced, and then everybody did. Peggy's brothers learned an Armenian line dance. Mihran's friends from the Kharpert society learned an Irish set.

The young couple moved into the upstairs flat on Quince Street, which the Ferraros had left empty when they bought their own house. And so, from the summer of 1952, there were two kitchens in the gray house: Zabel's downstairs and Peggy's upstairs, connected by a steep back staircase and a great deal of traffic.

The first Thanksgiving was the worst.

Peggy had always cooked Thanksgiving with her mother, a turkey stuffed with bread and celery and onion and sage, the way it was done on Westminster Avenue. Zabel had always cooked Thanksgiving, too, since 1922, because she had decided early on that an American holiday about a harvest was a reasonable holiday; and she stuffed her turkey with rice and bulgur and chestnuts and pine nuts and currants, the way the Armenian families of the East End had been doing it for thirty years. Both women assumed the other would come to her table. Neither said so. On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, there were two turkeys thawing in the gray house on Quince Street, one upstairs and one downstairs, and Mihran stood in the back hall between them and did not know which way to go.

Araxie solved it. She went upstairs on the Wednesday morning, and then downstairs, and then up again, and at noon she announced that there would be one dinner, in Zabel's kitchen, because it was bigger, with two turkeys. One would be stuffed with bread and sage. The other would be stuffed with rice and chestnuts. Everybody would eat both, and nobody would say which was better.

They ate both. Nobody said which was better. Mrs. Callahan came, and Mr. Callahan, and two of the brothers, and the table had to be extended with the kitchen door laid across two sawhorses and covered with a sheet. Mr. Callahan ate three helpings of the rice stuffing and asked what the little black things were. Nishan, who had grown fond of the fireman, told him they were currants, from the islands of Greece, and that in the old country they had been put in the rice at weddings so the couple would have many children. Mr. Callahan looked at his plate, and at his daughter, and asked for a fourth helping.

After that there were always two stuffings on Quince Street, every year, for as long as anyone in the family could remember. It stopped being a compromise and became the way the dinner was made. Peggy learned to make the rice one. Zabel never learned to make the bread one; she said it was a waste of good bread. But she ate it.

In the spring of 1954 Peggy came downstairs one afternoon with a large wooden box in her arms, which she set down on Zabel's kitchen table with a thump. It was a tape recorder, a reel-to-reel machine that her brother Dennis had borrowed from the radio and television shop in Watertown Square where he worked. Peggy was four months pregnant.

"I want to ask you something," she said, in her slow, careful Armenian, which was improving. "Through Araxie, if I get lost."

Araxie, at the end of the table with her composition book, put down her pencil.

What Peggy wanted to ask was this. She did not know any Armenian lullabies. Her own mother had sung to her in English and, sometimes, in Irish, the old songs from Galway, and Peggy would sing those to the baby. But she wanted the baby to hear the Armenian ones too, and she did not trust herself to learn them right, and she did not want to wait until the baby came and then ask Zabel to sing in front of her, because she knew Zabel would not.

"So I thought," Peggy said, "if you would sing them once, into this. Just once. When nobody's home. And I would keep the tape. And when the baby can't sleep, I'll play it."

Zabel looked at the machine and did not touch it.

"Who would hear it?" she asked.

"Me. The baby. Mihran, I suppose."

"Nobody else?"

"Nobody else unless you say so."

"Not the radio. Not the Kharpert society. Not the Callahans."

"Not unless you say so," Peggy said again.

Zabel was quiet. Outside, in the yard, the grape arbor was putting out its first small leaves. On the wall above the table the postcard of the Kharpert plain had gone pale with thirty years of kitchen light.

"Leave it," Zabel said finally. "Show Araxie how to make it go. I will think about it."

Three weeks later, on a Tuesday afternoon, when Peggy was out at the doctor's and Mihran was at work and Nishan was asleep in his chair on the front porch, Araxie came home from her job at the school department to find her mother sitting alone at the kitchen table with the tape recorder in front of her, its two reels turning slowly, and her hands folded on the oilcloth, singing.

Araxie stood in the back hall and did not go in. She listened to all of it. Five songs. Four she knew. One she had never heard. When it was over her mother reached out and pressed the button the way Araxie had shown her, and the reels stopped, and Zabel sat for a while with her hands in her lap, and then got up and put the kettle on.

That evening, in the ledger, under Mihran's name, Nishan at last wrote Peggy's. He had been waiting, he told Zabel, until he was sure of the spelling. Margaret Callahan Tarpinian, born Watertown, 1929. Daughter of Thomas Callahan, fireman, and Bridget Joyce Callahan, of Galway. He wrote it in the same careful hand he had used for every name since 1913, and drew a line from it to his son's.

It was the first name on that page that had not come from the plain of Kharpert. He looked at it for a long time, and then he blotted it and closed the book.

The Last Shift

Nishan Tarpinian died on the ninth of December, 1968, in the front bedroom of the gray house on Quince Street, at the age of seventy-eight. It snowed that day, the first real snow of the winter, big slow flakes coming down past the window and settling on the porch rail and on the bare grape arbor in the yard, and in the afternoon, when Zabel came in with his tea, he was looking out at it.

"In Parchanj," he said, "it is snowing on the mulberry trees."

They were the last whole words he said. He slept after that, and in the night he went on sleeping, and in the morning he was gone.

His granddaughter Lucy, who was ten, remembered that snow for the rest of her life. She remembered her grandmother standing at the kitchen window with her arms folded, looking out at the yard, not crying. She remembered her father, Mihran, sitting at the kitchen table with his head in his hands. She remembered her aunt Araxie making telephone calls in the front hall, one after another, in Armenian and English, in a low steady voice, writing each call down on a pad as she made it. And she remembered that sometime in the middle of that long gray morning she had gone into the front room, where she was not supposed to go, and found the ledger lying open on the little table beside her grandfather's chair, and had looked at it.

She could read Armenian letters by then. Her aunt had seen to that. She sat in her grandfather's chair with the book on her knees and read the first page, slowly, sounding the names out under her breath. Kevork. Hagop. Mariam. Toros. Sarkis. Nevart. Each with a tiny question mark beside it in pencil, so faint she almost missed them. Then her grandfather's name. Then her grandmother's. Then Araxie, and her father, and her mother, Margaret Callahan Tarpinian, and her brother Paul, and herself, Lucine, born 1958. Lines between them. She traced the lines with her finger.

She turned the page. There were names on the second page, and the third, and the fourth, pages and pages of them, in her grandfather's hand, some in ink and some in pencil, with little notes beside them she could not make out. Arrived. Married. Working in the shipping room. Seen alive. Gone to Fresno. Gone to Detroit. Died. Born.

Araxie found her there an hour later, still turning pages.

She did not scold. She sat down on the footstool and looked at her niece, and then at the book.

"He kept it for fifty-five years," she said. "Every person from the village who came. Every person who was found. Every one who was born here."

"Why?"

Araxie took her time with that.

"So that when they all went home," she said, "nobody would be left behind on the road."

"But they didn't go home."

"No," said Araxie. "So he kept it anyway."

It was the last winter of the plant.

Everybody had known it was coming. The Goodrich company of Ohio, which had taken over Hood in 1929, had been moving work out of Watertown for years, to newer plants in other states where the land was cheaper and the wages lower. Departments had closed one after another. The shoe lines were long gone. The workforce that had once been nearly ten thousand was down to a few hundred, and most of those were men like Mihran, who had been there twenty years and more and had nowhere else in particular to go. In January of 1969 the notices went up. The Watertown plant would close. The last shift would be in the spring.

Mihran was forty-three. He had worked at Hood since the summer of 1946, and before that, as a boy, on the loading docks. His father had walked through the gate on Arsenal Street for the first time in 1912. Between them they had given the place nearly seventy years.

He did not talk about it at home. He went to work. He came back. He sat at the kitchen table in the evenings with the newspaper and did not read it. Peggy watched him and did not push. Lucy watched both of them and understood that something was wrong in the way children understand weather.

On the last day of the last shift, a Friday in April, Lucy and her brother Paul walked down to Arsenal Street after school and waited outside the gate. Paul was fourteen and pretending he had better things to do. Lucy was eleven and did not pretend anything. It was a gray, raw day with the wind coming up off the river. The plant was enormous and mostly dark. Half the windows were boarded. The great stack stood over all of it, not smoking. Lucy had never seen it not smoking. She had grown up under that smoke the way she had grown up under the sky.

At three-thirty the gate opened and the men came out. Not many. A few dozen. They came out slowly, in their work jackets, carrying their lunch pails, some in twos and threes, some alone. Some of them stopped just outside the gate and turned around and looked back at the buildings. A few shook hands. One old man, much older than Lucy's father, stood with his hand flat on the brick of the gatepost for a long time, and then took it away, and walked off toward Watertown Square without looking at anyone.

Her father came out near the end. He saw them and stopped. For a moment his face did something Lucy had never seen it do. Then he smiled and came over and put a hand on each of their heads, the way he had when they were small.

"What are you doing here?"

"Waiting for you," said Lucy.

He looked back at the plant. The timekeeper's window by the gate was empty. The number on the card in his pocket, Paul told her later, had been 2290. He had told Paul that his own father's had been 4117, and that he had always wondered whether there had ever been a man between them with a number they both would have known.

"Well," said Mihran. "Let's go home."

Halfway along Mount Auburn Street, Mihran stopped in front of a narrow empty shop with a FOR RENT sign in the window. It had been a hardware store, and then a dry cleaner, and then nothing for a year. The glass was dusty. Inside, in the dim, you could see bare shelves and a long wooden counter and a pressed-tin ceiling, painted cream, with a pattern of squares and flowers.

He stood there looking at it for so long that Paul said, "Dad?"

"Your mother," Mihran said, "has been after me about this for a year."

The market opened in September of 1969. Tarpinian's, it said on the window, in gold letters, and underneath, in smaller gold letters, Imported and Domestic Groceries. Peggy had wanted the second line. Mihran had wanted only the name. They had both been right; the second line brought in the Irish and Italian women who would not otherwise have known what a place called Tarpinian's sold.

What it sold was everything the East End could not get at the supermarket. Bulgur, fine and coarse, out of barrels. Lentils red and green and brown. Rice, four kinds. Dried apricots and figs and apricot paste rolled in thin orange sheets, pressed dates, pistachios in their pale shells, roasted chickpeas, pumpkin seeds. Olives in brine in big crocks behind the counter: the small black wrinkled ones, the green cracked ones, the purple ones from Greece. Feta in tins. Braided string cheese, white and salty, in coils like rope. Basterma, the dried beef cured in a thick paste of fenugreek and garlic and red pepper, hanging from hooks behind the counter in long dark slabs, so that the whole shop smelled of it and anyone who came in could smell it on their coat for the rest of the day. Spices in glass jars along one wall, the red pepper from Aleppo and the cumin and the allspice and the mahleb, the little pits ground for sweet breads, and a big jar of sumac that Peggy had insisted on, though most of the Armenians brought their own from home.

Bread came every morning from an Armenian bakery in Belmont. Lahmajoun came frozen in stacks of a dozen from a woman in Arlington who made them in her basement. Zabel's cheese came from Zabel. She made it in her kitchen downstairs on Quince Street twice a week, as she had since 1921, and Mihran carried it down to the shop in a covered bucket, and it was gone by noon.

Peggy ran the register. She was forty, and she had been speaking Armenian for seventeen years, with an accent that made the old women laugh and a vocabulary that was larger than her husband's. She knew the names of everything on the shelves in three languages. She knew which of the old women were widows and which had sons in California and which were not speaking to which. She knew, without asking, who could not pay this week, and wrote it in a little book under the counter, and never mentioned it.

Araxie came every Saturday after the Saturday school. She was forty-seven now, a teacher of fourth grade at the Lowell School on Lowell Avenue, gray at the temples, with reading glasses on a chain around her neck. She had never married. Walter Lindqvist had married a girl from Waltham in 1947, and Araxie had danced at his wedding and remained his friend; he sent her a card every Christmas with a drawing on it, and she sent him lists of Swedish words she had found in library books, and he sent her back corrections from his grandmother, who had died in 1958 but whose words he had written down. The Saturday school met in a rented room above a bank on Mount Auburn Street now, with thirty children, and Araxie ran it. She had been running it since 1948.

In May, a little before the market opened, the family had sat down together one evening at Zabel's kitchen table, all of them, Zabel and Araxie and Mihran and Peggy and the two children. It had been Araxie's idea. She had brought a cookie tin, a big square one that had held butter cookies from Denmark at Christmas, and a box of envelopes, and a stack of writing paper.

"Next week," she said, "it will be forty-eight years since Mayrig came to Providence on the boat."

Zabel looked at her.

"In fifty-two years from then, it will be one hundred." Araxie set the tin in the middle of the table. "The eighteenth of May, 2021. None of us knows who will be here. I want everyone to write a letter. To whoever is. Write what you want them to know. Seal it. Put it in the tin. I will keep it. And on the eighteenth of May, 2021, whoever is here opens it."

"I'll be sixty-three," said Lucy, astonished. "That's so old."

"I'll be ninety-nine," said Araxie. "You don't hear me complaining."

So they wrote. It took most of the evening. Peggy wrote quickly and sealed hers without reading it over. Mihran wrote slowly, crossing out, starting again. Paul wrote a page and a half and refused to let anyone see it. Lucy wrote three pages, in pencil, and drew a picture at the bottom of the gray house with everyone in the windows. Araxie wrote hers in Armenian. Zabel did not write. She sat at the end of the table and watched them, her hands folded, and when Araxie held out a sheet of paper to her she shook her head.

"I can't write well enough."

"Then tell me and I'll write it."

"No," Zabel said. And then, after a moment: "I will put something in. Not a letter. Later."

She did not say what. When Araxie sealed the tin with tape that night, there were five envelopes in it, and Zabel watched her do it and did not object. But a week later Araxie found the tape cut neatly with a razor and resealed, and when she opened the lid there were six things inside. The sixth was a small flat packet, wrapped in white cotton cloth and tied with thread.

Araxie did not open it. She taped the tin up again, and wrote on the lid in marker, in English and in Armenian, To be opened 18 May 2021, and put it on the high shelf in the closet of the front bedroom, where her father's ledger already lay. The ledger was hers now. Her mother had given it to her the week after the funeral, without a word, holding it out across the kitchen table in both hands.

On the first page, beside her father's name, Araxie wrote the date of his death. She wrote it in pencil, very lightly, the way he had written the question marks beside his family. She could not have said why.

Then she turned to the last page with writing on it and, under the last name her father had entered, she drew a line, and began to write the names of everyone who had come to the funeral.

Kef Time

The summer Lucy Tarpinian turned eighteen, the summer of 1976, the whole country was having a birthday party, and she wanted nothing to do with it.

There were flags on every porch on Quince Street and a fife-and-drum corps in tricorn hats in Watertown Square on the Fourth of July. In Boston the tall ships came into the harbor, and Lucy went once, with her mother, and stood on the pier in the heat looking at the white sails, and felt, for reasons she could not explain, that they had nothing to do with her. Her brother Paul, twenty-one and home from the state college in Amherst, went three times.

She had graduated from Watertown High in June. She was going to Boston University in the fall, to study something; she had not decided what. She was working the summer at the market, at the register beside her mother, weighing olives and bagging bulgur and listening to the old women complain about the price of basterma. She was restless in a way that made her mother watch her and her father avoid her, and she did not know what she wanted, except that it was not this.

She had stopped going to the Saturday school when she was fourteen. There had been a fight about it, with her aunt Araxie mostly, a long, low, terrible fight at the kitchen table in which Lucy had said that nobody she knew spoke Armenian except old people and that she was American and she was tired of being different. Araxie had listened to all of it and then said, "All right," and got up and left the room. That had been worse than if she had shouted. Lucy had not been back since. She still understood almost everything her grandmother said. She answered in English.

The man who painted the new window came in May.

The gold letters on the market window, Tarpinian's, Imported and Domestic Groceries, had been there since 1969, and the sun had faded them and a careless delivery boy had scratched the second line with a hand truck, and Lucy's father had decided it was time for new ones. He hired a sign painter who had a card up on the bulletin board at the Armenian club on Mount Auburn Street. The card said, in English and Armenian, V. Ohanessian, Signs and Lettering, All Languages, and gave a telephone number in the Coolidge Square apartments.

V. Ohanessian turned out to be a young man of twenty-six with a black beard, a paint-spattered canvas jacket, a box of brushes and gold leaf, and an accent Lucy had never heard before. He spoke English well but carefully, with a French softness in it, and when he spoke Armenian to her father it was an Armenian that sounded like her grandmother's and also completely different: quicker, sharper, more city than village, full of French and Arabic words dropped in like seasoning.

"Beirut," her father said, when Lucy asked. "He came over in February. From the Armenian quarter there. Bourj Hammoud. The war."

"There have been Armenians in Beirut," he went on, "since before your grandmother left Aleppo. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. Your grandmother was in Beirut for a year before she came here. They kept the language there. Better than we did." He watched the young man through the window, where he was standing on a ladder outside on the sidewalk, sketching the outline of a letter in chalk on the glass. "Now they're coming here. Because of the fighting. More every month."

Vartan Ohanessian worked on the window for four days. He took the old letters off with a razor blade, cleaned the glass with something that smelled of ammonia, and laid out the new design in chalk. Then he painted, very slowly, with long thin brushes, standing on the inside of the glass so that he worked backward, the letters reversed, and laid the gold leaf over the paint in thin trembling sheets that he lifted with a flat brush he had charged by stroking it against his own cheek. Lucy watched him from the register. She could not help it. He was not handsome, exactly. But she had never seen anyone work with that kind of attention, as if there were nothing else in the world but the letter in front of him.

On the third day he started on the second line, and she saw that he was not painting Imported and Domestic Groceries. He was painting Armenian letters.

She went out onto the sidewalk to look. He had painted, above the English name, in a curving arch, the word Tarpinian in Armenian script. But it was not like any Armenian she had seen. The letters were tall and narrow and elegant, with long tails that swept below the line and little hooks and swells at the tops, and the first letter had been turned into a bird, a long-necked bird with its wings folded, its body made of the letter's curve.

"What is that?" she said.

He looked down at her through the glass from his ladder.

"It's the first letter," he said. "Ta. Made into a bird. In the old manuscripts, the scribes used to make the first letter of a page into a bird, or a fish, or a man, or a dragon. They are called bird letters. There are whole alphabets of them." He came down the ladder and out the door and stood beside her on the sidewalk and looked up at it critically. "This one is a crane. For your family. Your father told me the story. The song your grandfather's friend used to play."

Lucy looked at the bird. Its long neck was the stroke of the letter. Its folded wing was the bowl.

"My father told you about Avedis?"

"Your father," said Vartan, "talks a great deal when he is paying by the hour."

She laughed. It was the first time she had laughed all summer.

That evening, at home, she went up to the attic of the gray house on Quince Street, where her father kept the things he did not know what to do with, and found Avedis Kalfayan's oud in its cloth bag, lying across two old trunks under the eaves. She had not seen it since she was a child. She took it out of the bag. The strings were slack and rusted. The top had a long scratch. Hanging from the lowest peg, on a piece of string gone gray, was an index card, written on both sides in her father's small careful hand.

She sat on a trunk under the hot roof and read it. The Syrian man on Harrison Avenue. The pegs replaced in 1922. The wedding in Worcester. The night he had stopped playing, in October of 1915, and the night he had started again.

She had heard about Avedis her whole life. She had never once wondered what he had sounded like.

The next week she carried the oud down Mount Auburn Street to the Coolidge Square apartments and knocked on Vartan Ohanessian's door.

He restrung it for her, at his kitchen table, among jars of brushes and sheets of gold leaf and sketches of letters pinned to every wall. He handled it like something alive. He found the paper label inside the sound hole and tilted it to the light and read the Arabic out loud, slowly: a maker's name, and Aleppo, and a year, 1907. He found a crack in the back, old and stable, that someone had repaired long ago with a strip of cloth glued on the inside. He tuned the new strings, with his head bent close to the pegs, exactly as Lucy's father said Avedis used to do it.

Then he played.

He did not play long. A few phrases, to hear it. But the sound went through the small hot kitchen and out the open window and down into the courtyard of the apartments, and Lucy, sitting on the other side of the table, felt something go through her that she had no name for in either language. It was dark and round and close, the oud's voice, nothing like a guitar. It sounded like someone speaking in the next room. It sounded old.

"It's a good instrument," Vartan said. He put it down carefully on the table between them. "Better than mine. Your Avedis knew what he was buying." He looked at her. "Do you play?"

"No."

"Do you want to?"

She thought about the fight at the kitchen table when she was fourteen. I'm tired of being different.

"Yes," she said.

He taught her on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, through the rest of that summer, at his kitchen table, among the letters. He was not an easy teacher. He made her learn the old way, by ear, phrase by phrase, the way he had learned in Beirut from an old man in Bourj Hammoud who had learned in Aleppo, who had learned somewhere in the old country from someone whose name nobody remembered. He made her learn the scales that were not like Western scales, with notes that lived in the cracks between the piano keys. He made her listen to records: the great oud players of Cairo and Baghdad and Istanbul, and the Armenian kef bands of Fresno and Detroit and New York and Boston, musicians who had played at every Armenian wedding and picnic and dance in America since the 1920s, mixing the village songs of the old country with the café music of the cities and a little American jazz and a great deal of nerve.

"Kef," he said. "Do you know what it means?"

"A party."

"Not a party. The feeling of a party. The good time. Joy." He played a few bars of a quick dance, then stopped. "Your grandparents' people came here with nothing and worked in factories and every Saturday night they played kef. You understand? That's what it is. It's not sad music. Some of it is sad. But mostly it's what you do because you are still alive."

She went to her first kef dance in July, at a hall in Cambridge, with Vartan's band, which played every weekend somewhere in New England that summer: oud, clarinet, a kanun with its rows of strings plucked with picks on the fingers, a dumbeg drum held under the arm, and a young man from Providence on electric bass. The hall was full. Newcomers from Beirut and Aleppo and Tehran and Istanbul, who spoke Armenian to each other with a dozen different accents and English hardly at all. They danced in long lines, holding each other by the little fingers, shoulders touching, the line coiling around the room like a snake while the band went faster and faster, and when the clarinet player took a solo the whole hall shouted.

Lucy danced until her feet hurt. She danced next to a girl her own age who had arrived from Beirut in April and who spoke to her in quick rapid Armenian and laughed when Lucy answered in English and then switched, gracefully, without comment. She danced next to an old man from Worcester who told her, between songs, that he had known her grandfather at Hood in 1925. At midnight Vartan's band played a slow song, and the hall went quiet, and the old people stopped dancing and sat down, and Lucy recognized it from the first phrase without ever having heard it played.

It was the crane.

She stood at the edge of the floor and listened to the clarinet carry the melody, slow and bending, over the soft pulse of the oud and the drum. Where are you coming from? What news? The old man from Worcester, beside her, had his eyes shut. Across the hall a woman from Beirut was singing the words, not loudly, to herself.

That night, when Vartan dropped her at the bottom of Quince Street at two in the morning, she went up the porch steps quietly so as not to wake anyone and found the kitchen light on and her grandmother sitting at the table in her robe.

Zabel was seventy-eight. She did not sleep well. She looked up when Lucy came in, and her eyes went to the case in Lucy's hand, which held Avedis's oud.

"You played?" she said, in Armenian.

Lucy put the case down on the table. She had not played. She had only carried it, because Vartan had told her an instrument should go to dances even when it was not being played, so that it remembered what it was for.

"Not yet," she said. In Armenian.

Her grandmother looked at her for a long moment. Then she got up, slowly, and went to the stove, and put the kettle on.

On the market's wall calendar, the one from the Armenian bakery in Belmont with a photograph of a mountain on it, Lucy began that week to write the dates of the dances in red pen. Peggy saw them the next morning, standing at the register with her coffee. She looked at them for a while. Then she went to the cash drawer and took out the market's little book of who owed what, and turned to a clean page at the back, and wrote down, in her bad but determined Armenian handwriting, kef, and beside it, in English, a good time. Joy.

Araxie was in the market that Saturday after the school, as she always was. She saw the calendar, and the red dates, and the word in Peggy's book, and she did not say anything at all.

But that fall, when Lucy started at Boston University and came home on weekends, there was a new composition book waiting on her bed upstairs. Its first page had a title in Araxie's round, firm Armenian hand: Words for Music. Below it, the first entry was the word kef.

The rest of the book was empty.

The Second Half of the Strip

By the winter of 1987 Zabel Tarpinian could no longer see well enough to make lace.

She had turned eighty-nine in February. Her hands were still good. They were knotted at the joints and spotted on the backs, but steady, and when she sat at the kitchen table in the gray house on Quince Street and folded them on the oilcloth, they lay as quiet as two stones. It was her eyes. A cloudiness had come over them slowly through the 1980s, first one and then the other, and the doctor at the eye hospital in Boston had operated on the left one in 1985 and said the right one was not worth the risk. She could see faces at a few feet. She could see the light from the window. She could watch television if she sat close. She could not see a single knot of white cotton thread on the end of a needle, and so, sometime in 1986, without telling anyone, she had stopped.

Lucy noticed in March. She came over from her own apartment in Belmont on a Sunday afternoon with Maral, who was two and liked to pull every pot out of her great-grandmother's lower cabinets, and found her grandmother sitting at the table with nothing in her hands. In sixty-six years in that kitchen, nobody had ever seen Zabel sitting with nothing in her hands.

"Medzmama," Lucy said. "Where's your work?"

"Put away."

"Why?"

Zabel lifted one hand, and turned it over, and put it down again.

Lucy was twenty-nine. She taught music at an elementary school in Arlington, four days a week, and played oud in Vartan's kef band on weekends, and she had been married to Vartan for seven years and had learned, in that time, to speak Armenian with a Beirut lilt that made her grandmother laugh and her aunt Araxie wince. She had also learned, from Vartan, that when a thing was about to go out of the world you did not wait.

"Medzmama," she said. "Will you tell me about the long strip?"

Zabel did not answer for a long time. Maral was banging a saucepan lid against the floor. Outside, on Quince Street, somebody was trying to start a car in the cold.

"Why?" Zabel said finally.

"Because nobody else knows what it means."

"Araxie knows some of it."

"Araxie knows the names of the stitches. She doesn't know who they are."

Her grandmother turned her clouded eyes toward the window.

"Your grandfather knew one," she said. "Only one. I told him once. He never asked about the rest."

Lucy waited.

"If I tell you," said Zabel, "you will want to put it on one of your little tapes."

Lucy had been recording the band for years, on a cassette recorder she carried everywhere in her bag. She had recorded old men singing at picnics, and old women at weddings, and her mother in the market telling a customer from Galway how the Irish and the Armenians were exactly the same. She had not recorded her grandmother. She had not dared to ask.

"Only if you say yes," she said. "And only for the family. And you can say stop. And if you tell me something and then you don't want it kept, I'll erase it in front of you."

Zabel was quiet for a while longer.

"Your mother asked me that once," she said. "In 1954. With the big machine. Before your brother was born."

"I know. I've never heard it."

"Nobody has heard it. Only your mother. And your brother, when he was a baby." Zabel almost smiled. "And he will not remember."

"Will you let me ask her for it? To copy it? For Maral?"

There was a long silence. Maral had found a wooden spoon and was drumming.

"Bring your tape," said Zabel Tarpinian. "Next Sunday. And bring the strip down from the closet. It is on the high shelf in the front bedroom, next to your aunt's tin. Do not drop it."

The strip, when Lucy carried it down the next Sunday and unrolled it on the kitchen table, was longer than the table. It was longer than the kitchen. She had to unroll it a little at a time and roll up the other end as she went, like a scroll, and even then it reached from the stove to the back door. Four fingers wide, white cotton thread gone ivory with age at the beginning and still nearly white at the end, a long row of small shapes joined by a narrow band of plain knots, each shape different from the one before. The work at the beginning was loose and uneven. Then, a little way in, it tightened. From there to the end every knot was as small and hard and even as a grain of rice.

Lucy set the cassette recorder on the table and pressed the red button.

"It is the eighth of March, 1987," she said, in English, and then in Armenian. "This is Zabel Ashjian Tarpinian, in her kitchen on Quince Street, in Watertown. She says it's all right to record this, for the family. Medzmama, is that true?"

"It is true," said Zabel. "Now be quiet and let me find the beginning."

She could not see the shapes. But she could feel them. She ran her fingertips along the strip from the very first knot, slowly, the way a person reads braille, and when she came to the first motif she stopped.

"This is my mother," she said.

It took six Sundays. Lucy recorded twenty-two cassettes. She labeled each one with the date and a number, and wrote on a sheet of paper, as they went, the number of each motif and its shape and the name her grandmother gave it and the counter number on the cassette where the name was said. Her grandmother went slowly. Some motifs she named in a word and moved on. Some she stopped at for a long time and talked about: who the person had been, where their house had stood in the village, what they had been like. A great-uncle who kept bees and had been stung so many times he no longer swelled. The schoolmaster with the bad leg, the little three-legged stool, who had made the children recite the alphabet backward when they misbehaved. A girl named Lucine, a bird with its wings open, who had been Zabel's best friend and had run with her beside the cart on the morning Nishan Tarpinian left for America.

"You were named for her," Zabel said. "Did you know that?"

Lucy had not known. She had to stop the tape for a while.

Some motifs Zabel would not name. She passed her fingers over them and said "No," or said nothing and moved on, and Lucy did not ask. There were nine of those. Lucy wrote them on her sheet as a number and a shape and a blank, and later, when she typed the sheet up neatly on Vartan's typewriter, she left the blank. Her grandmother never told her who they were, and she never asked again.

In the middle of the fourth Sunday, Zabel's fingers came to a small square box of knots with a single line through it. She stopped.

"Your grandfather's mother," she said. "Mariam. She washed my foot once and gave me a fig."

Lucy wrote it down.

The fingers moved on, through the rest of the village, rosettes and leaves and long-necked birds, the rest of that Sunday and most of the next. Then they came to another small square, much like the first, but with two lines through it, crossing, so that it looked like a window. Zabel's hand stopped on it and stayed there.

"This," she said, "is your grandfather."

Lucy looked up from her paper.

"But he wasn't..." she started, and then stopped.

"No," said Zabel. "He was not. He was alive. He was standing in the rain in Providence in his new collar." She kept her hand on the motif. "I made this one in the first week, on Quince Street. In 1921. It is the first one I made for someone alive."

"And after that?"

Her grandmother moved her hand along the strip. A small oval with a line down the middle like a seed. "Avedis. An apricot pit, because that is what his oud looked like from the back, when he was sitting on the bed." A round flat circle with a ring of tiny points. "Mr. Haddad. His oven door." A shape like a little rolling pin. "Concetta Ferraro. She was always right about the dough and I never told her." A small open book. "Your aunt Araxie. When she was eight, with her copybook." Another, a tiny anchor. "Your father, in the navy." Three round petals around a center. "Your mother. The Irish clover." Zabel's mouth twitched. "What else would I make? She laughed when I showed her. She said it was exactly right and exactly what she expected."

Lucy had stopped writing. She was staring at the strip, at the long second half of it, stretching away down the table and rolled up at the far end, as long as the first half, maybe longer.

"Medzmama," she said. "How many are there? After Grandpa?"

"Count," said her grandmother.

She counted. It took a long time, because she had to unroll and roll. There were sixty-one motifs in the first half, from Zabel's mother to a small almond near the end that Zabel said was a little boy from the house by the spring, whose name she had forgotten and whom she had made anyway, so he would be there. Then the window. And after the window there were seventy-three.

Lucy found herself among them, a bird with its wings open, the same shape as the girl Lucine. Her brother Paul, a little baseball. Walter Lindqvist, whom Zabel had made in 1944, the week after he brought the rye bread, a draftsman's compass, two straight legs and a hinge. Mrs. Abbott, the Cambridge lady, a feather from her hat. The Tierneys, every one of them. Michael Tierney, who had sat on Digin Siranoush's floor in 1913 and cried at Avedis's funeral, a little door with a key, for his hardware business. Peggy's father the fireman, a ladder. Peggy's mother from Galway, a cup, because of the tea. The Kalustian boy from Bigelow Avenue who had been rude in 1930 and had come back for four years, a pen. Women from the Saturday school, men from the Kharpert society, neighbors, customers of the market, a Greek baker and a Syrian grocer and a Polish woman named Stella who had worked beside Araxie at the Arsenal. Vartan, a thin brush. And at the very end, finished in the spring of 1985, the newest and the last, a tiny almond bud, closed tight.

"Maral," said Zabel. "Before my eyes went."

Lucy turned off the recorder. She sat at the table with her hand on the last motif and said nothing. Across the kitchen, on the floor, Maral had fallen asleep on a folded blanket with the wooden spoon in her fist.

"Everybody thinks it's for the dead," Lucy said finally. "Aunt Araxie thinks so. Dad thinks so. I always thought so."

"The first half is for the dead," said Zabel. "I finished the dead in 1921. I carried them across the sea. That was enough. After that I made the people who came." She was quiet for a moment. "An odar from Westminster Avenue. A Swede. An Italian who argued with me about dough for forty years. A boy from Beirut with a beard. They came. I put them in."

On her sheet of paper, under the last line, Lucy wrote: 135 motifs. 61 before 1921. 74 after. 9 not named. Then she sat looking at the number for a while.

On the last Sunday, when the strip had been rolled up again and wrapped in its cotton cloth, Lucy asked her grandmother about the reel of tape from 1954.

Zabel considered.

"Ask your mother," she said. "If she still has it. Tell her I say yes. For Maral, and for whoever comes after. Not the radio. Not the newspapers." She paused. "Tell her the fourth song is one my mother sang. I never sang it for anyone else."

Peggy still had it. She had kept it for thirty-three years in a shoebox on the top shelf of her bedroom closet upstairs, with the baby clothes she could not bring herself to give away. Lucy took it to a man in Cambridge who could copy old reels onto cassette. It played. It hissed and wavered, and in the middle of the third song a truck went by on Quince Street in 1954 and rattled the window, but it played: Zabel Tarpinian at fifty-six, alone at her kitchen table on a Tuesday afternoon, singing five lullabies in a low, sure voice into a borrowed machine for a grandson who was not yet born.

The fourth song was one Lucy had never heard. It was slow and very simple, the melody turning around and around a few notes like a cradle rocking. When it was over Lucy sat in the car outside the man's shop on a side street in Cambridge for half an hour before she could drive home.

She made copies. One for her mother. One for Paul, who was thirty-two now and lived in Waltham with his wife, Theresa, and their four-year-old son, Nick, and who listened to it once in his car and called his sister afterward and could not say anything. One for Aunt Araxie. One for the family, which went into a shoebox with the twenty-two cassettes and the typed sheet of motifs and the copy of the index card from Avedis's oud, on the high shelf of the front bedroom closet, next to the tin that said To be opened 18 May 2021.

On the shoebox lid, in black marker, Lucy wrote: Medzmama's voice. Family only. She said yes.

Two Ways to Say Water

The woman who came to work at the market in the autumn of 1992 said "jur" for water.

She said it on her first morning, standing behind the counter in a borrowed apron, when Peggy asked her to fill the kettle. Peggy filled it herself, in the end, because she did not understand. In Watertown water was chour. It had been chour in the kitchen on Quince Street since 1921, and chour in the Saturday school, and chour in Araxie's composition books, in her round firm hand, with the English underneath. Jur sounded to Peggy like a word in some other language entirely.

"It is the same word," said Anahit Sargsyan, embarrassed, in careful English. "Only how we say it. In Yerevan."

She was thirty. She had been an engineer at a chemical plant outside Yerevan until the plant closed, and before that a student, and before that a girl in a Soviet city where Armenian was spoken in the kitchen and Russian in the offices and the old Western speech of Kharpert and Constantinople was something you heard on records from abroad. She had come to Watertown in the spring of 1992 with her husband, Gor, and a suitcase each, by way of a cousin in Glendale who had found them an apartment above a dry cleaner on Arsenal Street. Armenia had been independent for a year. It was a hard year there. The great earthquake of December 1988 had flattened whole towns in the north and left tens of thousands of people dead and half a million without homes, and Watertown had collected clothing and blankets and money for months afterward in every club room and community hall and in the back of Tarpinian's Market, where Peggy had kept a cardboard box by the register all that winter. Now there was a war in the mountains and a blockade on the roads, and in Yerevan there was no heat and no light for most of the day. Anahit's mother wrote that she was burning the books from the shelves to cook.

Anahit did not talk about that much. She talked about words.

She could not help it. Every day at the market she heard the old women of the East End speak an Armenian that was hers and not hers. They said p where she said b, and t where she said d, and k where she said g, so that every word came out of their mouths turned inside out, like a glove. They said chour and dzov and groung. She said jur and tsov and krunk. They used Turkish words she had to guess at and English words she knew and old village words that no one in Yerevan had used in a hundred years. They had a whole grammar that was different from hers, verbs that did not end where hers ended. When she spoke, the old women stopped and looked at her as if a parrot had spoken, and one of them, a Mrs. Kalustian who was eighty and had been married to the rude boy from the Saturday school, said to Peggy in the Western speech, loud enough for everyone to hear, "That one talks like a Russian."

Anahit went into the stockroom and stood among the bulgur sacks for ten minutes.

Peggy found her there. Peggy, at sixty-three, had been the odar in this family for forty years, and she knew a great deal about standing in stockrooms.

"Mrs. Kalustian," she said, "once told my husband's mother that I talked like a sheep. In 1953. She said it in front of the whole bakery."

Anahit looked at her.

"She's said it every year since. I bring her a cup of tea on her birthday." Peggy handed Anahit a jar of apricot jam to put on the shelf. "Come on. I'll introduce you to the other one."

The other one was Zabel.

She was ninety-four that autumn. She did not come to the market anymore. She sat in the kitchen on Quince Street, by the window, where she could feel the sun on her face and see the shapes of people coming up the back steps, and she received visitors, and she had opinions about everything. Araxie, who was seventy and retired from the Lowell School and still running the Saturday school, lived with her. Lucy and Vartan and Maral came on Sundays. Peggy came down the back stairs every day.

Peggy brought Anahit on a Saturday in October. Zabel listened to her speak for about a minute.

"Yerevan," she said.

"Yes, Tikin Tarpinian."

"Say chour."

Anahit hesitated. "Jur."

"Chour."

"Jur."

Zabel sat back in her chair. For a moment nobody in the kitchen breathed. Then the old woman laughed, a dry small sound, delighted.

"We are going to fight," she said. "Sit down. Araxie, bring her coffee. Tell me what they call this in Yerevan," and she held up the cup.

They fought every Saturday for two years. Over words, over the sounds of the letters, over which of them spoke the real Armenian and which one had let in too many Russian or Turkish or English words. The argument was serious and also a game, and both of them knew it, and neither of them ever let the other win. Araxie sat at the end of the table through all of it with a new composition book and, for the first time since 1930, drew a third column on the page. Western. Eastern. English. She filled four books that way. Water: chour, jur, water. Sea: dzov, tsov, sea. Crane: groung, krunk, crane. Apricot: dziran, tsiran, apricot.

"It is the same word," Anahit said again, one Saturday, looking at the list. "All of them. Only the mouth is different."

"The mouth is everything," said Zabel.

Gor played the duduk.

He played it for the first time in the gray house on a Sunday in December, at the end of a long dinner, because Lucy asked him. He took it out of an inside pocket of his coat, wrapped in a cloth: a plain wooden pipe a little longer than a man's hand, dark and smooth, with eight finger holes on top and one underneath, and a wide flat reed made of cane, folded and tied, that he wetted in a glass of water before he fitted it on. He said the pipe was apricot wood. Dziran, said Zabel, from her chair. Tsiran, said Gor, and smiled, and put the reed to his lips.

The sound filled the kitchen. It was low and soft and breathy and very close, more like a human voice than any instrument Lucy had ever heard, and it seemed to come from everywhere at once. Gor played a slow melody that wandered and turned back on itself and held on single notes until they trembled. He breathed in through his nose while he blew out through his mouth, so that the sound never stopped. Beside the window Zabel had gone completely still.

Lucy took Avedis's oud out of its case and, very quietly, found the key, and came in underneath him.

They played for an hour. Old songs from the plain that Lucy had learned from Vartan and from records. Songs from Yerevan that Gor taught her as they went, nodding at her when the melody turned. And at the end, because everyone in the room was waiting for it and nobody had asked, the crane. Gor knew it as krunk. He played it the way it was played in Yerevan, a little slower, with a different turn at the top of the phrase. Lucy followed him. Halfway through, Zabel began to sing.

She had not sung in front of the family in forty years. Her voice was thin now, and cracked on the high notes, and she sang in the Western speech, groung, not krunk, the words of the village the way her mother had sung them, and Anahit, at the table, listened with her hand over her mouth, because the words were not quite the words she had grown up with. Some lines were different. One whole verse she had never heard.

Afterward, when the dishes were done, Anahit asked Araxie if she could see the composition books.

On the eighteenth of February, 1994, Zabel turned ninety-six.

Lucy had begun in January. She wrote letters, dozens of them, to every name and address she could find in her grandfather's ledger and her aunt's lists and the Christmas card box upstairs: to cousins of cousins in Fresno and Detroit and Los Angeles, to the grandchildren of the Kharpert society families who had moved to Florida, to the Callahans in Galway whom Peggy still wrote to, to the Ferraros' children in Belmont and the Tierneys' grandchildren in Waltham and Walter Lindqvist, who was seventy-four and a widower and lived in a retirement home in Maine. To an old man in Beirut who had known Zabel in the relief workshop in Aleppo as a boy, whose address Vartan had found through a cousin. To Anahit's mother in Yerevan. Each letter said the same thing: on the eighteenth of February our grandmother Zabel will be ninety-six. If you have a word for her, a memory, a wish, please send it. We will read it to her.

They came for a month. Letters and cards, and, from the ones who had machines in their offices, faxes, which came out of the machine Vartan had bought for his sign business in long curling sheets of thin shiny paper. Lucy put them all in a three-ring binder with plastic sleeves. Some were a line long. Some were pages. Walter Lindqvist sent a drawing of a lace collar, very precise, with every knot in place, and a note that said he had drawn it from memory of one he had seen on Araxie's dress in 1944. The old man in Beirut wrote, in Armenian, that he remembered a girl in the workshop courtyard who had worked so slowly that the lace women laughed at her, and who had later become the best of them all. Anahit's mother wrote from Yerevan, by hand, by candlelight, that she did not know Zabel Tarpinian but that she knew what ninety-six years meant for a woman of her people and that she wished her a long, warm life, and sent a pressed apricot blossom from the tree outside her building.

On the morning of her birthday, in the kitchen, Lucy read them to her grandmother one by one. It took most of the day. People came and went. Peggy made coffee. Anahit and Gor came at noon. Maral, who was nine, sat on the floor by her great-grandmother's chair and turned the plastic sleeves in the binder and held up each page as her mother read it, as if Zabel could see.

At the end, Zabel asked to hold the binder. She held it on her lap with both hands for a long time.

"So many," she said.

Zabel Tarpinian died in November of 1994, in the front bedroom where Nishan had died, on an afternoon of cold sun. Araxie was with her. The last thing she said, in the morning, was a question about whether the sumac by the river had been picked yet this year, because it should be picked before the rains, or it lost its sourness.

In the ledger, on the first page, beside her name, Araxie wrote the date in pencil, lightly, beside her father's.

And on the last page with writing, under Vartan's name and Maral's and Paul's wife's and Paul's son's, she wrote two more, which her mother had asked her to put there in the summer, between one Saturday argument and the next. Anahit Sargsyan. Gor Sargsyan. Born Yerevan.

Beside Anahit's name, in the margin, she wrote: Says jur.

Bird Letters

The old bank on Main Street in Watertown Square had a heavy stone front, tall windows and a door that took two hands to open, and in the spring of 2005 Maral Ohanessian pushed it open on a wet Thursday afternoon with her portfolio under her arm and the rain dripping off her hood onto the floor.

The building had been the Coolidge Bank and Trust once. Since the late 1980s it had been home to the Armenian Library and Museum of America, and the vault downstairs, people said, still had its great round steel door. She was twenty, in her second year at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, studying graphic design, and her typography professor had given the class an assignment: design a complete alphabet, every letter, based on a historical source. Most of her classmates had chosen Roman inscriptions or Victorian shop signs. Maral had sat in the back of the studio with her sketchbook and thought about a gold crane on a shop window on Mount Auburn Street.

The museum was quiet. Rain on the high windows. The smell of old paper and floor wax. A woman at the front desk looked up and smiled and asked if she needed help, and Maral said she was looking for bird letters, and the woman's face changed in the way people's faces change when you ask them about the thing they love most.

She spent the afternoon at a long table in the library upstairs, with books the woman brought her: big heavy volumes of color plates of medieval Armenian manuscripts, photographed in libraries in Yerevan and Venice and Jerusalem and Vienna. Pages of tall black letters with red and blue and gold. Margins full of vines and pomegranates and animals. And at the start of a page, or a chapter, the first letter grown into a creature. A heron whose neck made the letter's stroke. Two fish twined into a loop. A peacock whose tail was the curve. An eagle gripping a hare. A man leaning on a stick, the stick the letter's downstroke. Whole alphabets, all thirty-eight letters, made of birds.

She filled half a sketchbook. When the woman came to say they were closing, Maral asked if the museum had any lace.

"We have a great deal of lace," the woman said. "Textiles are one of the strengths of the collection. Why?"

"My great-grandmother made it."

"Then you should come back," said the woman, "and look at it properly. And you should bring hers."

Maral did not bring the strip. She was not allowed to touch the strip. Nobody touched the strip except her grandmother Peggy, who took it out once a year, on the eighteenth of May, and unrolled it on the kitchen table on Quince Street for anyone who wanted to look, and rolled it up again when everyone had gone home.

But she went to Quince Street that Sunday and asked her great-aunt Araxie to teach her the letters.

Araxie was eighty-three. She lived alone in the downstairs of the gray house now, as her mother had, and Peggy, who was seventy-six and had been a widow for less than a year, lived upstairs. Mihran had died in February at seventy-nine, at home, and the house still had the stunned quiet of a place someone has just left. Araxie walked with a cane and had given up driving and still ran the Saturday school, which was down to nine children in a borrowed room at the Armenian club. She had taught Maral there until Maral was twelve, when Maral had stopped coming, the way Lucy had stopped coming at fourteen, and Araxie had said "All right," and got up and left the room.

"I know the letters," Maral said. "I mean, I can read them. Slowly. I want to learn to make them."

Araxie looked at her over her glasses.

"Why?"

Maral opened her sketchbook on the kitchen table, on the oilcloth, and turned the pages. Herons. Fish. Peacocks. Her own drawings of a crane, over and over, trying to make its neck into the first letter of her mother's family name.

Araxie turned the pages slowly, one by one.

"Wait here," she said.

She went to the back hall and opened the door to the attic stairs and called up them, and after a while Peggy came down from upstairs, and the two old women went up into the attic together, slowly, one step at a time, with Maral behind them in case one of them fell. Among the trunks under the eaves, behind Avedis's empty oud case and a box of Mihran's navy papers, Araxie found what she was looking for: a long tube of something rolled up and tied with string.

It was an old window shade. When they unrolled it on the kitchen table it cracked a little along the edges. On its back, painted in black stove enamel, in thirty-eight squares, were the letters of the Armenian alphabet, large and firm and upright and a little proud, with the English sounds written small underneath in a man's careful hand.

"My mother painted this," said Araxie. "In 1930. For the Saturday school. In this kitchen. It hung there," and she pointed to the wall beside the window, where two old nail holes still showed under the paint. "I learned my letters from it. So did your grandfather. So did every child on this street for eighteen years."

Maral looked at the letters. She had seen ten thousand Armenian letters in her life, on signs and books and the windows of shops on Mount Auburn Street, and none of them had looked like these. These letters stood the way her great-grandmother had stood in the only photograph Maral had seen of her as a young woman, straight-backed in a dark dress, looking at the camera as if she did not trust it.

"She wasn't a calligrapher," said Araxie. "She had three years of school. She just made them the way she thought they should look."

They began that Sunday and went on every Sunday through the spring. Araxie sat at the table with the window shade spread out in front of her, and Maral sat beside her with a pad of paper and a set of pens and brushes she had brought from school. Araxie did not know calligraphy either. But she knew the letters the way Zabel had known lace. She knew which stroke came first and which way it turned. She knew where each letter's weight belonged. She taught the way her mother had taught her: one letter at a time. Slowly. Taking the pen and making the letter beside Maral's when Maral got it wrong, and saying, "Look at the shoulder. Look where it turns."

Peggy came down from upstairs and sat with them and made coffee and did not say much. Sometimes, while Maral worked, Araxie talked. About the Saturday school in 1930 and the rude Kalustian boy. About the Arsenal, and a draftsman named Walter. About her composition books, which filled two shelves in the front room now, forty-one of them, every word she had collected since she was eight years old, in three columns since 1992.

"Who's going to have them?" Maral asked one afternoon, without looking up from the letter she was drawing.

Araxie was quiet for a while.

"I have thought about the museum," she said. "On Main Street. They would keep them properly." She turned her coffee cup on its saucer. "But a museum keeps things so people can look at them. I kept them so people could use them."

Maral did not say anything. She finished the letter. It was the fourth letter of the alphabet, and she had made its long tail into the leg of a crane.

At the end of May she handed in her alphabet. Thirty-eight letters, each one a bird. A crane for the first letter of her mother's family name. A heron. A swallow, because her great-aunt said there had been swallows under the eaves of the loading sheds at Hood when her great-grandfather was young. A gull, for the gulls on the ice of the Charles River. A red-winged blackbird, for the blackbirds her great-grandmother had watched in the reeds in her first weeks in America. A hen. A dove. An owl. A sparrow from Mount Auburn Street. Each one drawn in black ink with the stance of the letters on the window shade, upright and firm and a little proud.

Her professor gave it the highest mark in the class and asked if he could keep a copy for his files. The woman at the museum on Main Street asked if she could put it on the wall of the library upstairs for a month.

Maral said yes to both. Then she took the original drawings home to Quince Street and laid them out on the kitchen table in front of her great-aunt, all thirty-eight, in order.

Araxie looked them over, the way she had once looked at a list of words for lace in her mother's hand.

"Now," she said finally, "do it again. Properly. There is something wrong with the shoulder of the seventh."

That summer Maral made something else. She took her great-grandfather's ledger down from the high shelf in the front bedroom closet, with Araxie's permission and Araxie sitting beside her, and copied every name from its first page onto one large sheet of drawing paper, four feet wide, with the lines between them. Kevork the blacksmith at the top. Then Hagop and Mariam and their children, with the small pencil question marks copied exactly. Then Nishan and Zabel. Then Araxie and Mihran and Peggy. Then Paul and Theresa and their son Nick, and Lucy and Vartan and herself. And off to one side, joined by a dotted line, Avedis Kalfayan, and Anahit and Gor Sargsyan, born Yerevan, says jur.

She lettered every name twice, once in English and once in Armenian, and for the first letter of each Armenian name she drew a small bird.

She gave it to Araxie on the first Sunday of September. Araxie hung it on the kitchen wall, on two new nails in the old holes beside the window, where the alphabet had hung in 1930.

The Tin on the High Shelf

On the eighteenth of May, 2021, it did not rain in Watertown. It was warm and clear, the lilacs were finishing along the fences of Quince Street, and the grape arbor in the backyard of the gray house, which had been pruned every winter for a hundred years by somebody in the family, was just coming into leaf.

They held it in the yard. It was the second spring of the pandemic, and most of them had their shots by then, but nobody wanted a crowd in the kitchen yet. So Vartan and Gor carried the kitchen table out through the back door and down the steps, the way Nishan and Avedis must have carried it at some point, and set it up under the arbor, and Lucy covered it with the oilcloth from the kitchen, green and cream, faded to almost nothing in the middle where a hundred years of elbows had rested.

Lucy was sixty-three. She had laughed about that all spring. "I'll be sixty-three," she had said at this same table in 1969, astonished, "that's so old." Now she was sixty-three and retired from teaching and living downstairs in the gray house with Vartan, who was seventy-one and still lettered a few shop windows a year when he felt like it, and Maral lived upstairs, at thirty-six, with a quiet man from Maine named Sam Whitcomb who built wooden boats in a shop in Somerville and had learned to say "enough, enough" in Armenian within a month of meeting her family.

Araxie had died in October of 2019, at ninety-seven, in the front bedroom where her father and mother had died. She had run the Saturday school until she was ninety. Peggy had died the next year, in the spring of 2020, at ninety-one, in the weeks when no one could visit anyone, and the family had said goodbye to her through a window and on a telephone screen, and it was still too soon to talk about.

Paul was there, sixty-six, with Theresa and their son Nick, who was thirty-eight and had two daughters of his own and had driven up from Connecticut. Anahit and Gor were there. They owned the market now. Paul had run it for twenty-eight years after his father retired and had sold it to them in 2018 for less than it was worth, on the condition that they never take the name off the window, and they never had. The gold crane that Vartan had painted in 1976 still stood over the door on Mount Auburn Street, faded a little, folding its wings.

The tin sat in the middle of the table. A square cookie tin that had once held Danish butter cookies, its blue paint worn through to silver at the corners, its lid taped shut with tape gone brown and brittle. On the lid, in marker, in Araxie's hand: To be opened 18 May 2021.

It had sat on the high shelf of the front bedroom closet for fifty-two years. Nobody had touched it except Araxie, once, in 1969, to find that her mother had cut it open and put something in.

Maral had a phone propped against the sugar bowl, recording. Most of the family who could not be there were watching. Cousins in Fresno and Glendale, the Callahans' grandchildren in Galway, Anahit's sister in Yerevan, a dozen others. Maral had set it up the winter before, when nobody could see anybody: a private space on the internet that belonged only to the family, where the people in the ledger could find each other. She had built it slowly, over the long months of 2020, sitting upstairs at her drawing table. The family tree from her great-grandfather's ledger, every name, with the small question marks beside the first ones copied exactly as he had made them. A map with a pin on Parchanj and a pin on the pier in Providence and a pin on Quince Street, and on each pin the photographs that belonged to it, each with its date. The 1912 studio portrait of Nishan in a borrowed collar. The wedding photograph from Washington Street, 1921. Mihran in his navy whites. Peggy at the market register in 1970. Zabel's twenty-two cassettes and the 1954 reel, copied and kept there for the family only, as she had said, with her words "she said yes" at the top of the page. And Araxie's forty-one composition books, which Maral and Anahit had spent the winter photographing page by page, with recordings beside many of the words: Anahit saying jur and tsov and krunk, Lucy saying chour and dzov and groung, a hundred, then two hundred, then five hundred words, slowly, a few every night.

"Who goes first?" said Paul.

"Mom's," said Lucy. "She always went first."

Vartan slit the tape with his pocketknife. The lid came up with a small sigh. Inside, the envelopes were stacked on their edges, yellowed, with names on them, and at the back, flat against the side of the tin, was a small packet wrapped in white cotton cloth and tied with thread.

They read the letters in order, around the table, under the arbor, in the warm afternoon. Peggy's letter was a page. It said that she hoped whoever was reading it had married someone their mother did not approve of, because it had worked out very well for her, and that the rice stuffing was better than the bread stuffing, and that if anyone ever told Zabel she said so, she would deny it. Lucy read it aloud and everyone laughed and then nobody did.

Mihran's letter was two pages, crossed out and started again. He wrote about the last shift at Hood, a few weeks before. He wrote that he did not know what the market would become. He wrote that his father had kept a book of names for fifty-five years so that nobody would be left behind on the road, and that he hoped whoever was reading this still had the book, and still kept it. Paul read that one. He had to stop twice.

Paul's own letter, at fourteen, said that he was going to play for the Red Sox. Theresa read it and he put his face in his hands.

Lucy read hers herself. Three pages in pencil, with a drawing at the bottom of the gray house and everyone in the windows: her grandparents downstairs, her parents upstairs, Aunt Araxie in the front room with a book. In the window of the back bedroom, where nobody had lived since 1949, she had drawn a thin man with a mustache holding something round. She did not remember drawing it. She did not know, at eleven, that she would ever play his oud.

Araxie's letter was in Armenian.

Maral read it. She read it slowly, out loud, with her finger under the lines, the way Araxie had taught her to read the window shade. It was in the Western speech, in Araxie's round firm hand. It said that it did not matter who was reading it, as long as they could read it. It said that the composition books were not for a museum, unless a museum would let people use them. It said that she had never married, and that people would wonder why, and that the reason was very simple: she had married the Saturday school, on a Saturday in 1948, and she had never once regretted it. It said that her mother's lace had a second half, and that someday somebody should ask what it meant. And it said, at the end, to whoever had read the letter aloud: Well done. Now teach someone else.

Maral got to the end. Then she put the letter down on the oilcloth and sat there.

Anahit, beside her, reached over and put a hand on her back.

The last thing in the tin was the packet.

Lucy untied the thread and unfolded the cotton cloth. Inside was a small square of stiff card, the kind that came in the back of a shirt from the laundry. Stuck through the card, carefully, so that it would not slip, was a steel needle. Threaded through the eye of the needle, and wound around the card in neat even turns, was a length of white cotton thread, gone ivory with age, finer than any thread anyone at the table had seen in years.

On the card, in black ink, in the Armenian letters of the window shade, firm and upright and a little proud, someone had written a single line.

Lucy read it. Then she read it again, and handed the card to Anahit, because her voice had gone.

"For whoever is here," Anahit read aloud, in her Yerevan accent, and then again, in English, for Sam and for the Callahans watching in Galway. "Tie the next one."

Nobody said anything for a while. A car went by on Quince Street. Up in the arbor a sparrow was scolding.

"Her Aleppo thread," Lucy said finally. "Digin Hripsime told her to bring it. It's the last of it. It must be. She saved the last of it."

"Who knows how to make it?" said Paul. "The lace. Anybody?"

Nobody did. Zabel had taught Araxie the names of every stitch, and Araxie had drawn them in the margins of her composition books, but Araxie had never made more than a few rows. Peggy had tried and given up. Lucy had never tried.

Maral picked up the card and held it on her open palm, looking at the needle, the fine pale thread wound around the card in the same neat even turns her great-grandmother had used on every knot.

"The museum has a teacher," she said. "On Main Street. They hold a class. I saw a notice."

She looked up at her mother, at Anahit, at the arbor and the gray house and the window of the back bedroom where Avedis Kalfayan had played for twenty-eight years.

"Somebody has to learn," she said.

In the evening, after everyone had gone, she opened the family's page on her laptop at the kitchen table and added a date to the shared calendar, where her mother had already marked the eighteenth of May with a small ship and the last Saturday of October with a round loaf. It was the date of the first class on Main Street, in September. She wrote beside it, in Armenian letters, carefully: Tie the next one.

Ask the Crane

On the eighteenth of May, 2026, a hundred and five years after a Fabre Line steamer tied up in the rain at Providence, Maral Ohanessian walked down to the Charles River before anyone else in the house was awake.

She went the way her great-grandmother had gone in her second week in America: down the hill from Mount Auburn Street, across Arsenal Street, past the new labs and apartment blocks of glass and pale brick that stood now where the long sheds of the East End had been, and onto the path along the north bank. The river was high and brown with spring. Mist lay on it. The sycamores were coming into leaf, and the red-winged blackbirds were on the reeds, shouting, exactly as Araxie's composition book said they had shouted in May of 1921.

She had a page of the family's calendar open on her phone. The small ship on the eighteenth, which her mother had copied from a coal-company calendar that no longer existed. Beneath it, Maral had made a page for the day, private, for the family: a photograph of the Providence pier in 1921 that she had found in a state archive, the wedding portrait from Washington Street, and a short line inviting anyone in the ledger to leave a word for Zabel's landing day. By six that morning there were forty-three. A cousin in Fresno. Three Callahans in Galway. Anahit's sister in Yerevan. Nick's two daughters in Connecticut, who had drawn a ship. An old man in Beirut, the son of the boy from the Aleppo workshop, who wrote that his father had told him about a girl who worked so slowly the lace women laughed. Walter Lindqvist's granddaughter in Maine, who had found the family's page through Maral and had sent, a year before, a box of her grandfather's Swedish word lists, half of them in Araxie's handwriting.

A great blue heron rose out of the shallows ahead of her, slow, folding its long neck back onto its shoulders, and flapped low over the water toward Watertown Square. Maral stopped and watched it go. There were no cranes on the Charles. Vartan said a heron would do.

She was forty-one. She had been learning needle lace for four and a half years.

The class at the museum on Main Street, which had changed its name in 2013 to the Armenian Museum of America and, people still said, the great round vault door downstairs, had met on Wednesday evenings that first autumn in a room off the library, with six women and one man around a table and a teacher who had learned from her grandmother in Aleppo and had come to Watertown from Syria in 2014. Maral had been the slowest in the class. Her knots had been loose and crooked for a year. Then, sometime in the second winter, without her noticing, they had tightened.

She had not touched the strip until the third year. She practiced on her own scraps, collars and edgings, little rosettes and almonds, and kept them in a box. In the spring of 2024 she had asked her mother, and her mother had asked the family on the family's page, and Paul had written back from Waltham in one line, "Who else would do it?" and that had been that.

She had used the Aleppo thread for the first knot only. One knot, at the end of Zabel's last motif, the tiny almond bud she had made for Maral in 1985. Then she had tied on new thread, as close to the old as she could buy, and begun.

Everyone came at four. They carried the kitchen table out under the arbor, as they had in 2021, and Lucy put the oilcloth on it. Anahit brought trays from the market: lahmajoun, and string cheese, and a bowl of sliced onions with parsley, red with sumac. Maral had picked the sumac herself the September before, from the bushes on the bank behind the old Arsenal, where they still grew along the fence and still nobody picked them, and dried it on the back porch and ground it in Zabel's coffee mill. It was not the same as the sumac of the Kharpert plain. It was sour. That was enough.

After they ate, Lucy unrolled the strip.

It ran the length of the table and off both ends. Sixty-one motifs for the people Zabel had carried across the sea. A small window for a man standing in the rain in Providence. Seventy-two more for the people who had come after. A tiny almond bud. And then, past the bud, in thread a shade whiter, a short new stretch: nine motifs, the knots not quite as small and hard as Zabel's, but close.

Maral named them, because her family asked, and because she had been taught that you did not wait.

A drop of water, with a tiny tail. "Anahit. Jur." Anahit put her hand over her mouth.

A flat shape like a folded leaf, with two lines tied across it. "Gor. The reed of the duduk."

An open hand. "Grandma Peggy's second one. She already had a clover. But she was the one who wrote down who couldn't pay."

A short hull with a keel. "Sam."

A small round loaf. "Lahmajoun day. Not a person. All of them."

A pen nib. "Aunt Araxie had a book already. This is for the composition books. Forty-one of them."

Two little ships, side by side. "Nick's girls."

A grape leaf. "The arbor. The house."

The ninth was not finished. Its outline was there, and half its knots, and the needle was still in it, pinned to the cloth, waiting. Nobody asked who it was for. Maral did not say.

Then Lucy took Avedis Kalfayan's oud out of its case, with the gray index card still tied to its lowest peg, and Gor took his duduk out of his inside pocket and wetted the reed in a glass of water, and they played.

They played the slow songs of the plain and the quick dances. Nick and Sam carried the old kitchen chairs off the grass, and Anahit pulled Paul up by the little finger, and Theresa pulled Vartan, and the line went around the arbor and the clothesline and the corner of the porch the way it had gone around Digin Siranoush's kitchen in 1913, and the neighbors on Quince Street, a Brazilian family and a pair of young engineers from Bangalore and an old Irish widow who had lived three doors down since 1971, came out onto their porches to watch, and two of them came down and joined the line.

At the end, as the light went gold under the arbor, Lucy found the first notes of the crane, and the yard went quiet.

Gor played it the Yerevan way, with the turn at the top of the phrase. Lucy followed him. And Anahit sang the verses she had grown up with, krunk, krunk, and when she reached the end of them, Lucy, without stopping her hands on the strings, sang the one more verse that Anahit had never heard until a winter night in 1992, in the Western speech, the way Zabel had sung it, groung, the words of a village on the Kharpert plain whose Armenians had been gone for more than a hundred years.

Where are you coming from? What news?

Maral sat at the end of the table with her hand on the strip, on the half-made ninth motif, and listened to the two versions of the song fold together under the grape arbor, and thought that the old question had an answer now, though nobody in Parchanj would ever hear it. Here. This yard. These people. The ledger on the high shelf, the tin, the window shade, the oud with its card. Five hundred words in three columns, spoken aloud. A drop of water and a duduk reed and a small round loaf. A song with two sets of words.

When it was over, nobody clapped. Then everybody did.

That night, after the table had been carried in and the dishes washed and the strip rolled up in its cotton cloth, Maral sat alone at the kitchen table under the family tree she had lettered for her great-aunt in 2005, with its small birds at the start of every name. She took out the needle. She worked by lamplight, the way Zabel had worked, one knot on the loop of the one before, tight and even.

Outside, on Quince Street, the May night was soft. Somewhere down the hill a late bus went along Mount Auburn Street, where the trolley wires used to hang. In the arbor the grape leaves moved.

She did not finish the ninth motif that night. There was no hurry. It would be finished when the person it belonged to had arrived.