The Red Thread

by Unknown

  Her whole life had taken place in the dark. The spotlight shone down on the black, hushed circle in a café; the moon slowly slid through the clouds. Night-working, smiling, in make-up, in long, silky dresses, singing over and over, again and again. The aim of it all is just to be drifting off to sleep when the first rays of the sun’s brightness threaten the theatrical eyelids.

  YEREVAN

  Vasily Grossman

  THE TRAIN arrived in Yerevan on the morning of November 3. No one was there to meet me, though I had sent a telegram in advance to Martirosyan, the writer whose book I had come to translate. I had been certain he would be there; I had even imagined that other Armenian writers would also be coming to meet me. And so there I was on the platform, under a warm, pale-blue sky, wearing a thick woolen scarf, a cloth cap, and a new autumn coat I had just bought in order to look respectable in Armenia. Muscovite experts in sartorial matters had looked me up and down and said, “Well, it’s hardly chic, but it’ll do for a translator.” In one hand I had a case, quite a heavy one—I was, after all, going to be in Armenia for two months. In the other I had a bag with a heavy manuscript—a word-for-word translation of an epic novel by a prominent Armenian writer about the construction of a copper-smelting plant.

  The exclamations of joy had died down and dark eyes were no longer gleaming all around me; my fellow passengers and the hundreds of people who had come to meet them had all hurried away to line up for taxis. The Moscow–Yerevan train had crawled off to the yards; the murky, rain-stained windows and the dusty green flanks of coaches that, after nearly three thousand kilometers, looked tired and sweaty—everything had now disappeared. Everything around me was unfamiliar, and my heart sank—the last little piece of Moscow had slipped away from me.

  I saw a large square in front of the station, and a huge half-naked young man on a bronze horse. His sword was drawn, and I realized this must be David of Sasun.* I was struck by the power of this statue: David himself, his steed, his sword—everything was huge, full of movement and strength.

  I stood in the spacious square and wondered why no one had come to meet me. Arrogance? Forgetfulness? Eastern indolence? Some muddle with the telegram? I looked around the square, glancing up at the magnificent monument. . . . The power of David and his steed, the movement captured in the bronze—suddenly all this seemed too much. It was not a legend realized in bronze but a bronze advertisement for a legend.

  I was upset. Should I go straight to the hotel? Without a document, I wouldn’t be let in. Should I trail around the Armenian capital, under the hot sun, wearing a warm coat, a cap, and a thick scarf? A stranger wandering through an alien city always seems sad and absurd. The young and fashionable love nothing more than to laugh at some old countrywoman passing through Moscow in her rustic felt boots, or at some old Yakut walking through Theater Square in a fur jacket on a sultry August afternoon.

  Thank heavens none of my fellow passengers had seen me. Yesterday I had haughtily rejected their attempts to tell me how to go by bus to the hotel. They had understood that I was being met by someone with a car.

  A few minutes later I was in line for the left-luggage office, standing in the cool half dark. There was no sign of any artificial fur coats here, only a sad young woman with a docile child; a young lad in a trade-school forage cap; a young lieutenant, evidently from a village, who had the eyes of a child and who seemed unused to his country’s vast spaces; and an old man with a suitcase made of wood.

  Now I am walking through the square. No one so much as glances at me: I’m just a man in a jacket. I’m just someone going for a walk; I’ve gone out to buy some flatbread or half a liter of beer; I’m on my way to the clinic for some kind of treatment. No one imagines that I’ve only just arrived, that I’m feeling lost, and that I can only half remember the address of the one person I know in Yerevan, the writer Martirosyan.

  I board a bus. For some reason I feel awkward about admitting I don’t know the price of a ticket. I give the conductor a ruble. He gestures at me: Haven’t I got any change? I shake my head, even though I have several small coins in my pocket. The price turns out to be the same as in Moscow.

  Your first minutes on the streets of an unfamiliar city are always special; what happens in later months or years can never supplant them. These minutes are filled with the visual equivalent of nuclear energy, a kind of nuclear power of attention. With penetrating insight and an all-pervading excitement, you absorb a huge universe—houses, trees, faces of passersby, signs, squares, smells, dust, cats and dogs, the color of the sky. During these minutes, like an omnipotent God, you bring a new world into being; you create, you build inside yourself a whole city with all its streets and squares, with its courtyards and patios, with its sparrows, with its thousands of years of history, with its food shops and its shops for manufactured goods, with its opera house and its canteens. This city that suddenly arises from nonbeing is a special city; it differs from the city that exists in reality—it is the city of a particular person. Its autumn leaves have their own unique way of rustling; there is something special about the smell of its dust, about the way its young boys fire their slingshots.

  And it takes only a few minutes, not even hours, to accomplish this miracle of creation. And when a man dies, there dies with him a unique, unrepeatable world that he himself has created—a whole universe with its own oceans and mountains, with its own sky. These oceans and this sky are strikingly similar to the billions of oceans and skies in the minds of others; this universe is strikingly similar to the one and only universe that exists in its own right, regardless of humanity. But these mountains, these waves, this particular grass, and this particular pea soup have something unique about them, something that has come into being only recently; they have their own tints, their own quiet splashing and rustling—they are part of a particular universe that lives in the soul of the man who has created it.

  And so there I was, sitting in a bus, walking across a square, looking at the titanic bronze Stalin and at houses, built from pink and yellow-gray tufa, that reproduce the contours of ancient Armenian churches with a grace that seems entirely natural; there I was, creating my own special Yerevan—a Yerevan remarkably similar to the Yerevan in the external world, a Yerevan remarkably similar to the city present in the minds of the thousands of other people walking about on the streets, and at the same time distinct from all these other Yerevans. It was my own Yerevan, my own unrepeatable Yerevan. The autumn leaves of its plane trees rustled in their own peculiar way; its sparrows were shouting in their own peculiar way.

  I was in the main square. On each side was a large building built from pink tufa: the Intourist hotel Armenia, for Armenians from the diaspora coming to visit their motherland; the Soviet of the National Economy, responsible for everything to do with Armenian marble, basalt, tufa, copper, aluminum, cognac, and electricity; the architecturally perfect Soviet of Ministers; and the post office, where my heart would later race anxiously when I went to pick up letters sent general delivery. I came to the main boulevard, where the sparrows were shouting wildly, in Armenian, among the brown leaves of the plane trees. I passed the wonderful Yerevan market, with its heaps of fruit and vegetables in every color—yellow, red, orange, white, and blue-black—with the velvet of its peaches, the Baltic amber of its grapes, its juicy red-orange persimmons, its pomegranates and chestnuts, its mighty eighteen-inch-long radishes that seemed to belong to some phallic cult, its garlands of churchkhela,† its hills of cabbages and dunes of walnuts, its fiery peppers, its fragrant and spicy green leaves.

  I already knew that it was Tamanyan who had created the architectural style of the new Yerevan, and that he had drawn his inspiration from ancient Armenian churches; I knew he had resurrected an ancient ornamental pattern depicting a bunch of grapes and the head of an eagle. . . . Later, people showed me the very finest creations of Armenian architects; they took me to see a street of detached houses, every one of which was a masterpiece. But, considering them of no in
terest, these people never showed me the old buildings; nor did they show me the inner courtyards hidden behind the façades both of the temple-like modern buildings and of the squat nineteenth-century buildings that had marched into Yerevan along with the Russian infantry. All this, however, I had already seen—on my very first day in Yerevan.

  The inner yard! What constitutes the kernel, the heart and soul of Yerevan is not its churches or government buildings, not its railway stations, not its theater or its concert hall, nor its three-story palace of a department store. No, what constitutes the soul of Yerevan are its inner courtyards. Flat roofs, long staircases, short flights of steps, little corridors and balconies, terraces of all sizes, plane trees, a fig tree, a climbing vine, a little table, small benches, passages, verandas—everything fits harmoniously together, one thing leading into another, one thing emerging from another. Linking all the balconies and verandas, like arteries and nerve fibers, are hundreds of long lines on which the copious and motley linen of the inhabitants of Yerevan has been hung out to dry. Here are the sheets on which the black-browed men and women sleep and make children; here are the vast, sail-like brassieres of hero-mothers; here are the shirts of little girls; here are the underpants, discolored in the crotch, of Armenian old men; here are lace veils, swaddling clothes, and little babies’ trousers. Here we see the city as a living organism, stripped of its outer skin. Here we see all of Eastern life: the tenderness of the heart, the peristalsis of the gut, the firing of synapses, the power of both blood kinship and the ties that link everyone born in the same town or village. Old men click their worry beads and exchange leisurely smiles; children get up to mischief; smoke rises from braziers; quince and peach preserves simmer in copper pans; washing tubs disappear in clouds of steam; green-eyed cats watch their mistresses pluck chickens. We are not far from Turkey. We are not far from Persia.

  The inner yard! It links different eras: the present, when a four-engined Ilyushin-18 can take you from Moscow to Yerevan in a few hours, and the days of camel paths and caravansaries.

  And so I go on building my own Yerevan. I grind up, crush, absorb, and inhale its basalt and its rose-colored tufa, its asphalt and its cobblestones, the glass of its shop windows, its monuments to Stalin and Lenin, its monuments to Abovyan, Shaumyan, and Charents, the countless portraits of Anastas Mikoyan; I absorb and inhale faces, accents, the frenzied roar of cars being driven at speed by frenzied drivers. I see a lot of people with big noses, a lot of faces covered in black stubble; I understand that it can’t be easy to shave iron beards.

  I see today’s Yerevan with its factories, its huge, tall blocks of new apartments for workers, its splendid opera house, its magnificent pink schools, its academic institutions, its precious repository for books and manuscripts—the Matenadaran—and its famous Academy of Sciences. The academy looks graceful and harmonious.

  I see Mount Ararat—it stands high in the blue sky. With its gentle, tender contours, it seems to grow not out of the earth but out of the sky, as if it has condensed from its white clouds and its deep blue. It is this snowy mountain, this bluish-white sunlit mountain that shone in the eyes of those who wrote the Bible.

  The young and fashionable of this city love black suits. The shops are well supplied; there is plenty of butter, sausages, and meat. And the young women are lovely, though some of them really do have terribly big noses. One thing astonishes me: An old man or woman has only to raise their hand and a bus driver will stop for them; people here are kind and compassionate. Pretty young women walk along the pavement, clicking their thin high heels; dandies in hats lead sheep they have bought for the impending holiday; the sheep click their little hooves on the pavement, and the young women click their fashionable little heels; amid the fine buildings and the neon lights, the sheep smell their death. Some of them try to resist, to dig their little hooves in; afraid of dirtying their clothes, the dandies push the sheep, trying to get them to move; the sheep, full of the anguish of their coming death, lie down on the pavement; the behatted dandies, still afraid of dirtying their clothes, lift them up; the anguished sheep scatter their little black peas. Women with kind faces are carrying chickens and turkeys by their legs; the birds’ heads hang down. These little heads must be swollen and painful, and the birds arch their necks in order, at least slightly, to reduce their sufferings. Their round pupils look at Yerevan without reproach. There too—in the birds’ confused and spinning little heads—a city of pink tufa is coming into being.

  Lord and creator, I wander through the streets of Yerevan; I build Yerevan in my soul. Yerevan—this city that Armenians say has existed for two thousand seven hundred years; this city that was invaded by both Mongols and Persians; this city that was visited by Greek merchants and occupied by Paskevich’s army;‡ this city that, only three hours earlier, did not exist at all.

  But then this creator, this almighty ruler begins to feel anxious; he starts glancing around uneasily.

  Whom can I ask? Many of the people around me do not speak Russian—I feel shy, embarrassed to address them. The lord and master is tongue-tied. And so I enter a courtyard. But no—not a chance. This courtyard is nothing like our own deserted Russian yards—it is an Eastern courtyard, an Eastern inner yard, and I am at once scrutinized by dozens of pairs of eyes. I hurry back out onto the street. Very soon, however, I enter another courtyard. My anxiety is growing—I am no longer meditating on how, in the East, the inner yard is the heart and soul of life. But it truly is the heart and soul of life—and so, once again, I go back out onto the street. What am I to do?

  I rush into a third courtyard—and am filled with despair. I see a network of little staircases and balconies, an old man sipping coffee from a little cup, a group of women who break off their conversation to look at me. I smile confusedly and turn back. Everywhere I look, there is life! What am I to do? There is nothing poetic about my thoughts now. Should I try to find Martirosyan as quickly as possible? But what help would that be? I can’t turn up in his house and, ignoring his attempts to introduce me to his wife and family, ignoring everyone’s questions, make a dash for the toilet. I’ve heard that Armenian intellectuals are fond of gossip. I can’t burst into the apartment of one of the masters of Armenian prose and trample people underfoot as I dash towards the water closet. I’d never be able to live it down—people would be joking about this throughout my stay in Armenia. No, it was out of the question. And so—I jump into a half-empty tram. For three kopeks I acquire a ticket. I sit myself down on the hard seat, and for a while I breathe more freely. No longer am I a lord and creator—I am the slave of a base need. This need controls me; it has power over my thoughts and my soul. It has fettered my proud brain.

  The whole world—architecture, the outlines of mountains, plants and trees, people’s customs and habits—everything is now subordinated to a single longing.

  I see tall boxlike buildings; I see squares; I see a grocery store, a television shop, a bakery, a building site; I see a bridge, a deep gorge, houses clinging to its stone slopes, quick foaming water far down below. Everything is new to me; I am seeing everything for the first time. But no longer is the creator’s power of thought constructing an entire capital city—old quarters and new quarters at once. The creator’s thought is now obstinately focused on a single goal—yet open to all possible ways of achieving it. How, in a given building, are the toilets arranged? The construction sites are still largely unmechanized and there are crowds of workers everywhere—just what I don’t want. Behind every pile of bricks I’ll find people, people, and still more people. . . . But if I get out by the bridge and stand on top of the cliff, I might get dizzy. My blood pressure feels terribly high. . . . But the torrent at the bottom of the gorge is white with foam. It looks beautiful!

  A children’s park. . . . Hopeless! You can see right through it from every side. The trees are mere twigs; they must have only just been planted. Even an infant would feel awkward behind a tree as small as these.

  And then smoking ch
imneys—a factory with an entire settlement around it. . . . Districts like this are densely populated; the little houses are close together and there is a family in every room.

  Then there’s a grating of wheels, and the tram makes a sharp turn. The road has come to an end; now there is only wasteland and scree. Nearly all the passengers get out; only two others are left, both unshaven, their faces covered in black stubble. One has a long nose, the other a snub Mongolian nose. And me. The conductress gives me a searching look. She walks down the car to the driver and says a few quick words to him in Armenian. Evidently, she is sharing her suspicions with him. Yes, she glances around at me: What is this strange man after—this strange man in glasses? What is he doing at the terminus, amid a wasteland of clay and scree?

  In a moment the driver will walk up to me, and then, out of nowhere, a policeman will appear. What will I say? That I’m from Moscow, that this is my first time in Yerevan? And that, in order to get to know the city, I needed to see these wastelands and scrap heaps? I’ll get flustered, of course. I won’t admit the truth; I won’t say why I’ve made this journey to the city’s outskirts. And it really will all look very strange indeed: A man leaves his things in the left-luggage office, no one turns up to meet him, he wanders about the city for hours, he doesn’t register his arrival at any official institution; he makes no attempt to get a hotel room or even a bed in the House of the Collective Farmer. Instead, he makes his way to some outlying district where there is nothing but pits and scrap heaps. Yes, it’s all very strange indeed, very perplexing. Or rather, it’s all only too obvious.