All the Light There Was by Nancy Kricorian

to visit your aunt. And when will we be seeing you again on a Sunday?”
    “I have so much schoolwork these days . . .”
    He shook his head from side to side. “Excuses, excuses. I’ll be looking for you. Now let me go see how this young lady is doing.”
    A half an hour later he and my mother came out of the room, both of them with somber faces. Once the door was shut, he said to my mother, “It is in the Lord’s hands.”
    Later that week, early in the morning, my mother came to the kitchen, where my father, Missak, and I were taking breakfast. She said simply, “She has gone to her Maker.”
    I began to cry, Missak’s face crumpled, and my father’s eyes brimmed with tears, but my mother stood before us with her eyes dull and empty. She turned and walked slowly to the bedroom she shared with my father. Without looking back, she closed the door behind her.
    Dr. Odabashian arrived at midmorning and went into the bedroom, where he threw open the windows to the frigid air. After the doctor left, Father Avedis appeared and performed the house rite. It was decided that because of wartime scarcity and expense of transport, the body should be kept at home and not be transferred to the church before burial. My father, without telling anyone, had already purchased a small plot in the cemetery. Jacqueline’s mother and Zaven’s mother came to dress the body.
    The next morning, Father Avedis, who was wearing stiff black robes and a black peaked hood, intoned the ritual prayers at the graveside. The trees were bare, the skies were gray, and our family stood there with the Kacherians, the Sahadians, and other friends as the snow began to slowly filter down over us. Father Avedis sang,
“The time has come for me to enter the womb of the earth .
.
 .”
    It occurred to me that Auntie Shakeh would think that the shawl of bright snow falling over the dark wood of the casket was beautiful. The pattern was as intricate as some of her handiwork. I imagined her looking down at us from heaven, where it was always springtime. The flowering trees were in bloom, and lambs gamboled across a sunny meadow. Auntie sat at Jesus’s right hand at a long table spread with a feast for the angels.
    She had left us behind, and we were far from heaven. I thought about the chill apartment, the cold classrooms at school, the gnawing hunger that wasn’t sated by parsnips and rutabagas. Everything seemed dismal after Auntie’s death, and the war itself seemed like a dark and interminable winter. Every day, I walked to school past posters on the walls of Belleville and the Marais that announced the latest “criminals” shot in front of a stone wall outside a prison on the edge of the city, and the most recent bit of neighborhood treachery was that of a locksmith on the boulevard de Belleville who had turned in a Jewish family that had been hiding in the attic of his building.
    I knew from looking at my father’s newspapers that life in Paris was easier than in London, or Warsaw, or any of the other cities where the war was more brutal in its daily habits. But what did any of this have to do with my aunt? Instead of grieving her loss, I was feeling sorry for myself.
    After the service at the graveside, when the mourners filed down the icy stone steps to leave the cemetery, my foot slipped and I stumbled. Zaven, who I hadn’t realized was just behind me, caught me by the elbow and helped me regain my balance. I turned toward him.
    For the few seconds that our eyes met, I forgot everything except for the pressure of his fingers on my arm. I saw the warmth in his eyes, his black hair flecked with snow, and the collar of his thin coat turned up so it grazed the sides of his face. A few bright snowflakes had caught on his dark lashes.
    “Thank you” was all I said.
    Amid a cluster of mourners, we walked down the hill as shovelfuls of frozen earth thudded onto my aunt’s casket.
    Armenian women from the neighborhood arrived at our apartment