Deanna Krikorian

To Those Who Wait

She entered the world silently. It was the first thing her parents told her about herself, the memory they lived in more than any other. She hadn’t cried, not on her own, not until the doctors and nurses had whisked her away and dragged the sound out of her dying lungs. There was pride in their story, in the version of her they saw. Proof of a survivor, of miracles living outside the pages of scripture. All Maral saw was a pattern. 

**

The wind bit at her exposed cheeks and left them uncharacteristically red. October in Chicago was indecisive. Days jumped between seasons with little warning. Any promise of heat was unreliable; more often than not, it had to be found elsewhere. It had to be made.

Theoretically, there was warmth in numbers. Standing shoulder to shoulder should have made it easy to keep going, should have lit a collective flame, but there weren’t enough people to get so much as a spark. The cold capitalized on the opportunity, slipped in without resistance. 

A part of her longed for September, when every day felt like fire. Standing under the light of the sun, summer’s lingering grasp had heated the air around them while they marched. The red, blue, orange of their flags painted their path, bled over sidewalks and intersections, left in their wake a mark that felt so permanent, she didn’t understand how anyone could think they’d be strong enough to erase it.  

She had screamed that day. They all had. We’re here. We survived. We’re not going anywhere. Chants echoed across the lake, across the country, across the Atlantic. Reporters captured the moment, used their pens and cameras to transform their plight into something finally considered newsworthy. If she listened, she swore she could hear them, her brothers and sisters all around the world, standing up and making noise alongside them. Begging for the world to notice, and thinking they’d succeeded.

Now all she heard was the sounds of the city, the clamor that cloaked everyone in anonymity. Breaking through the background was Narek, trying his best to overpower the traffic with the bullhorn in his hands. People didn’t pay attention after the initial shockwave, not when the message was the same. A battle waged for months, for generations, didn’t provide any kind of instant gratification. Maral knew it didn’t matter how it started; in the end, they always fought alone. 

**

If she thought back as far as she could, she saw the stares. The faces were a bit of a blur now, time taking away some of the details of her earliest memory, but not the feeling. Fifteen years later and she could do more than recall – she could relive it, in striking clarity. 

It started with their voices. In retrospect, all kids talked funny, but it wasn’t immaturity she was hearing. It was incoherency. Each introduction ended before it could start. Maral had gone up to everyone she could find, had asked all kinds of questions, only to be left with the same frustration when their reply was a tilt of their heads and sentences made up entirely of gibberish. 

They were broken. It was the only explanation, the only reason she could come up with for why nobody would answer her. Her new classmates were all missing pieces, and she was the only one left completely whole. 

For a moment, she’d felt the thrilling rush of responsibility. It became her job, her duty, to help them, to break through to someone, to let them know that this playground, this elementary school, was full of broken kids. She’d spotted a teacher standing off to the side, had run so fast she’d tripped over her own feet. And it was there, lying on the ground, staring up at the building in front of her, that she saw the giant signs on the wall. 

They were letters. At least, some of them were – she recognized the Տ and Ս and ա, but they were surrounded by foreigners, shapes that she’d never seen before, round and twisted and entirely unfamiliar. She felt her head tilt to the side as she searched for any kind of meaning in it. 

The realization came quickly. The identical reactions, the incomprehensible voices, and the alphabet that didn’t belong to her. She scanned the playground, the lack of concern from her classmates confirming her suspicions. 

She wasn’t special at all. She was the broken one.

**

Her eyes kept drifting to the pile of signs. She and Narek had spent hours holed up in her basement making them. The first day had brought hundreds more people than they’d planned for, the crowd eager and hungry to make the cause feel like their own, so they’d stocked up on poster board and markers, piled them into the backseat of her car until she could hardly see out of the rearview mirror. 

A month into their endeavor, into their continued plea for action and awareness, and the stack seemed to grow. Each day, more and more stayed in the pile. She knew they should stop bringing them, but Narek wouldn’t let her. It would be like giving up, he argued. And he refused to give up. So she drove blind, and when they stepped out onto the street, he fit as many into his open arms as he could carry, just in case the world changed its mind. 

**

She used to get excited over footnotes. Textbooks had a habit of falling into repetition, highlighting the same moments over and over again. So much space was given to colonizers, limiting the world to England and France and Spain. They spanned eras of time, yet stayed confined to two continents, only venturing out on the rarest of occasions. Unlike most of her classmates, she couldn’t see herself in their selective history. So the first thing Maral did at the start of every school year was search the index. 

It was usually near the front if it was mentioned at all. Sandwiched between armada and armistice, the page number often led her to a section dedicated to genocides, a victory in its own right considering it wasn’t officially recognized as such in most countries. Tragedies from all across the globe got lumped together, the history and nuance and devastation watered down to a handful of paragraphs spread over a couple of pages. It was usually one of the last chapters, added at the very end when the rest of the book had already journeyed back to the present as if each travesty managed to exist completely outside of history. As if they were nothing more than outliers unrelated to the happenings of the rest of the world. 

There was a certain kind of satisfaction when they got it, the mere mention. It was never a guarantee. Even if they didn’t get to the chapter, even if every teacher classified her history as expendable, easy to skip by the time May rolled around, at least someone knew they were there. They may not have been worth a lesson plan, may not have been placed on any kind of map that didn’t include the entire world, but if they had a listing in the index, then they hadn’t been erased, not completely. 

That used to be enough. 

**

Maral let him use the bullhorn. They’d shared the responsibility initially, but she kept losing her voice. Narek could go on for days without so much a crack. The changing weather and rush hour traffic had no effect on his ability to be heard. It was like he was made for it.

“Thanks for coming out today.” He spoke louder than he needed to, used the horn even though the crowd wasn’t big enough to warrant the added projection anymore. “We’re gonna start here for a bit, by the embassy building, and then we’ll head over toward Michigan Avenue. Remember that we’ve got to stay on the sidewalks and off private property at all times. Be loud, hold your signs, do everything you can to try and make sure people hear us.”

“Are any news stations coming?” someone asked.

Her empty inbox answered the question clearly enough, but Narek just smiled. “They might. Even with everything else going on right now, they can’t ignore us if we make enough noise.”

The group started marching, formed a circle on the patch of sidewalk they occupied. Maral and Narek stood in the middle. He led the chants, spoke proudly and without hesitation. Every word reflected his confidence in a happy ending, in a world that would come to their aid; she tried to find the same faith. 

“If you think it’s cold,” he called out, “or you’re tired of walking, remember what the people in Artsakh are going through. They’re losing their homes. Their loved ones are out there fighting, giving their lives to try and keep Hayastan safe. If they can do that, we can do this much.” 

They didn’t need the reminder, although they responded with jest. Most of the people here had family in Armenia or Artsakh, cousins and aunts and uncles volunteering to fight in a war none of them wanted, desperate to keep the land their ancestors had lived on for generations. The land they’d already lost so much of. Narek had entire branches of his family tree fleeing. Sometimes, he went days without any kind of contact. His eyes always went dark when it happened, when too much time passed. 

It was a unique kind of helplessness, watching it from across the ocean, an invasion that mirrored the one from a century ago, the one that only got printed into history if they got lucky. She could send supplies and money, give her voice and time and effort, and it would never, ever be enough. Nothing she did, nothing any of them did, would have the impact they needed to put an end to it, to restore what was rightfully theirs. 

In the end, it all came down to a waiting game. One they couldn’t afford to lose.

 **

Despair was no stranger. It lived in every key of the organ, every chord from the choir. Sundays had always been dedicated to muted formality, to echoes that felt more somber than celebratory. There was beauty in the solemnness, she could recognize it, but there was also something formative about a service that, to untrained ears, left little distinction between the remorse and the exultation. A century of grief couldn’t separate itself from their survival. In its wake, hope and despondence intertwined, became reliant on one another, and she began to see them as they were: hand in hand, two sides of the same coin, impossible to separate. 

 **

It was probably because of the context. 

That’s what he told her as they watched people march. The reason non-Armenians didn’t hold onto the same fervor they’d shown earlier, the reason most of them didn’t feel the gravity of the fight as heavily as she did. “They don’t get why it matters,” he kept saying. “Odars barely even know we exist. They don’t get the politics behind it, or why we’re so scared.”

There was always an excuse. A past that remained foreign, a nation they couldn’t afford to upset with reminders of their own horrid history. A reason they could be dismissed or considered expendable. Not worth the time, the effort, the disruption. Easier to just wait and see if they’d make it out themselves.  

“They killed us before, and they’re trying to do it again. It’s not that hard to comprehend.” 

“Maral—“

“I’m serious. Nobody’s asking every American to be experts in Armenian history. But they know us, don’t they? They know right from wrong. What else do they need?”

“You know there’s more to it than that.”

“Is there?”

He paused; let the group lead themselves, putting the same chant on repeat. “There are a lot of people suffering right now. Here, in this country. It’s hard for something international to break through that kind of noise.” 

She knew he was right, but she also knew she wasn’t wrong, either. “That’s not good enough.”

“Come on, Maral, be reasonable.”

“I am being reasonable. The world is drowning in catastrophes. It always has been, and it always will be. I’m tired of ours falling through the cracks.”

When he looked at her, it was as if the façade faded, and for just a moment she could see what hid behind the endless optimism: the inherited pain that only grew heavier with time. It became her job to bear witness to the solitude of leadership, to find the strength to carry it with him, to avoid cracking underneath it, and to pick up the pieces if she failed. 

As quickly as it dropped, the mask went back up. “We just need to get them to understand,” he repeated as if it was nothing more than one task, one simple solution. “Then they’ll come. Then they’ll care.” 

“And when they don’t?”

He shook his head, raised the bullhorn to his face. “They will.”

Turning away from her, Narek walked with the crowd, spoke with a reenergized effort. All Maral heard was artificial enthusiasm. He led their group in circles until they formed their own echo chamber, reaching only people who had heard it all before. The city disappeared behind a wall of flags, every color condensed to their minuscule radius. Outside became nothing more than a backdrop, a mural of subdued greys, filled to the brim with people who kept their heads down and their mouths shut.  

Indifference. That was the response they’d earned, the result of their time and effort, of their sacrificed afternoons and their frozen fingers. Among dwindling crowds and familiar faces, the absence of outsiders, of supporters, was unavoidable. It stoked the burning deep in her gut, the fire in her bloodstream keeping her warm when her companions let her down. Frustration, anguish, terror, desperation, they all combined and shifted into something singular. A sensation she didn’t have a word for, not in either language. 

 Buried underneath, the sliver of hope that refused to die, the one that brought her out again and again when she knew disappointment was all she would find. The reminder of what was worth fighting for, images of the land waiting for her, the land relying on her; the mountains, the churches, the proof of failure by those who tried to eradicate them. The one place where her hair and her skin and her alphabet weren’t an oddity. She knew it was no guarantee. Permanence was nothing more than an illusion; it had to be fought for. It had to be made and remade, an endless process that required sacrifice and conviction and unfailing, relentless nerve. 

 It had to be demanded. 

Maral scanned the protestors until she found him, sandwiched between an elderly man and a young woman waving a giant flag above her head. Narek marched alongside the others, his voice fading into their collective anonymity. Whether he stood inside their circle or along its edge, it would never be enough. Someone had to break through, to let their colors bleed out into the rest of the world again. 

Ten seconds went by before he made it to her spot at the top of the circle. She held her hand out, their unspoken sign for passing the bullhorn. For a second, he hesitated, stopped in place, and let the others walk past him. There was a shred of disbelief in his eyes. Like he could sense her plan as it materialized. Like he didn’t think she’d follow through. 

For one more moment, she allowed herself to be patient. The lesson had taken her too long to learn. What she’d thought was a virtue was nothing more than complacency in disguise, an invitation to be dismissed time and time again. All she’d ever done was wait—for an answer, for a footnote, and for help that wouldn’t come—and she’d never once gained anything from it. None of them had.

Vindication came when he placed the horn in her hand. She walked toward the circle, toward the people marching along the edge of the sidewalk. They didn’t see her, not until she passed through them, until she stepped over the curb and into the street, forging a path of her own. 

She didn’t look back, didn’t wait to see if they’d follow. Narek would stay put, would lecture her on safety and leadership during the drive home. He’d hop on his high horse and talk about the example she was setting, and in the meantime, their marches would go unnoticed and their people would suffer at the hands of those who wanted nothing less than their extinction. He could stand on the sidewalk, could get on his hands and knees and beg for an attentive audience, but his voice couldn’t carry out here. And she was tired of asking.

Standing beneath the stoplight, staring at the cars waiting for the light to change, the only thing she heard was the pounding in her head, her heartbeat falling into sync with her breath. Proof of life, of miracles that were meaningless without purpose. Lifting the bullhorn to her lips, she made a vow, a promise to herself and to her people: however loud she had to be, whatever cost she had to pay, it was worth it. Their survival was no longer a request. This time, when she spoke, they would hear her. 

Deanna Krikorian graduated from Drake University with Bachelor of Arts degrees in both English and Rhetoric, Media, and Social Change. She has previously been published in EveryDay Fiction and was selected as one of two winners in the Luther College Undergraduate Writing Contest in 2018. She won first place in the Mundelein Arts Commission Fall 2020 Writing Contest.