Arutyun had five sons. The eldest worked as a drilling engineer. He was killed a year ago in a drunken brawl; someone smashed him on the head with a piece of iron piping. The villagers say he was a bad man. They feel sorry not for him but for the man who killed him and is now in prison.
Arutyun’s second son is the husband of the beautiful Astra. Eighteen months ago he went to prison himself—after killing a truck driver in another drunken brawl, in Karapet-aga’s restaurant. The driver had come from Lake Sevan, from deep-blue Lake Sevan. With him he had brought his beloved—they wanted to drink, to eat Karapet’s famous kebab, to have a good time. Aramais, Astra’s husband, was sitting at the next table with a group of friends. He insulted the driver’s beloved, who was married to someone else. The driver took offense and hit Aramais in the face. Aramais then stabbed him with a Finnish knife. Apparently Astra never wanted to marry Aramais—he was a ne’er-do-well, a troublemaker, a gambler and drunkard. But Aramais was infatuated; he wept, threw himself drunkenly at her feet, and vowed to kill both her and himself. Astra, her mother, and everyone in the village knew this was no empty threat. And so now she goes about in ragged clothes and worn-out boots, saving every kopek she can in order to be able to take a little more food to her husband. Every month she travels two hundred and eighty kilometers to see him; he is in a camp now, working in a mine. His sentence is not going to be reduced; he does not have a good record in the camp—he drinks, shirks work, and gets into fights.
Arutyun’s third son was recently released from a prison in Yerevan, and Arutyun was himself recently released from the district hospital—this third son had knifed him in the ribs during a quarrel. Arutyun was in the hospital for three months, and his son was in prison for three months—the father saved his son from a worse fate by giving false testimony. Sometimes this third son, a narrow-shouldered young man with a thin face and a heavy, hooked nose, comes to the terrace outside the House of Creativity for a game of billiards. On his face is a schizophrenic smile: sometimes he looks guilty, sometimes insane, sometimes brazenly unconcerned. And his father, old Arutyun, comes along to watch. When the game’s over, the son walks past his father in silence. His father is no less silent.
I’ve heard that Arutyun’s fourth son, the wildest one of all, left Armenia three years ago; he was one of the young people who answered the call for volunteers to settle the virgin lands of Siberia. Away he went—and no one has heard from him since. No one has seen him, nobody knows how to find him or even if he is still alive.
Arutyun’s fifth son, though mentally retarded, is the least unsatisfactory. His baby face is covered with black down; he smiles affectionately and slobbers as he shows me a picture book—a book of Armenian tales about animals. The animals in the pictures all look Eastern; they have dark hair and Armenian faces. The wolf and the hare have dark hair, and so does the middle-aged fox in a bonnet, peering slyly over her spectacles. But the boy’s old enough to be in ninth grade next year. . . . Yes, now I understand why old Arutyun’s eyes contain such vast yearning, why his gait, his silence, his insomnia, his hunched back—why everything about him expresses such a vast sorrow.
One day we were having breakfast. The kitchen was unusually full of noise and merriment and I half opened the door to see what was going on. I saw Katya, laughing loudly and blushing deeply. I saw Rosa, the housekeeper, showing her white teeth as she laughed no less loudly. I saw the gloomy and always preoccupied Tigran; this father of six young daughters, this disgraced ex-Secretary of the Party District Committee who was now in charge of the House of Writers, was also laughing. The whole kitchen was laughing, listening to a small, nimble old woman. The old woman was merry, and her shining eyes were full of life. Listening to her talk, even though I didn’t understand a word, I began to laugh along with everyone else. Then I was told that this old woman—the merriest woman in the village—was the wife of Arutyun, our night watchman; she was the mother of his five sons. . . . As Knut Hamsun put it, in the wonderful title he gave to one of his novels: But Life Goes On.[31]
For some reason or other, or rather for a reason that is only too obvious, I started to remember my earlier encounters, on the streets of Yerevan, with people of standing.
Here in Tsakhkadzor I was learning more and more, getting ever more involved in the life of the village. And this human involvement continued in spite of everything. It hardly mattered that the people I met spoke Russian so badly that they put the word stress in quite impossible places and often even came out with quite the wrong word, and that I, the translator of an epic novel about a copper-smelting plant, knew only two words of Armenian: che (meaning “no”) and barev.
I learned the story of mad old Andreas—but that is something I have already written about. And handsome, white-haired old Armo told me the story of his own life: his father had been one of the richest landowners in all Armenia, and Armo had been one of the most ardent Komsomol members in all Armenia.[32] This had created difficulties. . . . Some Turkish Kurds, who still remembered the old days and who revered Armo’s father, heard of his troubles and sent him, from Turkey, a present of five hundred rams. This was when Armo was already an important figure in the Armenian Komsomol, nursing in his young and passionate heart a hatred for all landlords and capitalists, for all enemies of the working people—and, at the same time, loving his father with no less passion, taking pride in his father’s fame, in the way he enjoyed such honor and respect both on the Russian and on the Turkish side of the Araks River. But in the end Armo’s father was buried in Siberia—nobody knows where.
Then I heard the life story of a sweet, asthmatic old man by the name of Sarkisyan. In a peaceful little house, together with his elderly wife, he is living out the last years of a life that has been anything but peaceful. When he was young, he was an important figure in the Party; during his years as an émigré, he knew Lenin. And then he was denounced as a Turkish spy, beaten almost to death, and sent to a camp in Siberia, where he remained for nineteen years.
And then he returned home, not embittered but convinced that people are essentially good, glad to have enriched his heart through conversations in camp barracks, north of the Arctic Circle, with ordinary Russian peasants and workers, glad to have enriched his mind through conversations with Russian scientists and intellectuals.
He said a lot about how, though reduced almost to the level of animals, people in the camps still felt pity for one another, about how those who were on their last legs did all they could to help others who were on their last legs, about how neither blizzards, nor temperatures of minus forty, nor national differences ever got in the way of human kindness.
He told me how his wife had come from Armenia to visit him, how she had made a home for herself in a filthy old hut just outside the barbed wire of the camp, how happy her kindness had made him, how proud he had felt of her, how much the other prisoners had liked her. He had retained the ability to laugh heartily and, as he told me the story of his two decades of confinement, he found things to laugh about.
He told me how in the main prison in Yerevan, eighty people had shared a single cell; all were highly educated—professors, old revolutionaries, sculptors, architects, actors and singers, famous doctors. It had taken the guards a painfully long time to count them, and they were forever losing count and having to start again. One day the guards had come in with a sullen-looking old man; he had cast a quick glance over the human mass on the bed boards and on the floor and then left. The same thing happened day after day. Eventually they learned that the old man was a shepherd. The prison administration had decided to make use of his phenomenal ability to count, almost instantaneously, flocks of several hundred, or even thousands, of sheep. This really was very funny—a shepherd counting a flock of professors, writers, doctors, and actors. . . .
He told me how, after returning from the camp, he had worked for a while selling fizzy water on Abovyan Street. Once an old man from a collective farm had had a long conversation with him while drinking his
glass of water. Sarkisyan told the old man how he had been involved in the political underground, how he had helped to overthrow the tsar in 1917, helped to build the Soviet state—and then spent years in a camp. “And here I am now, selling fizzy water on the street!” After a moment’s thought, the old man said, “But why did you have to get rid of the tsar? Was he preventing you from selling fizzy water?” As he told me this, there were tears of laughter in Sarkisyan’s eyes.
From Ivan, the boiler man, I learned about an event that had caused great excitement among the whole Molokan community—about how two large families of Russian Molokans, the family of a carpenter and the family of a miller, had crossed one night from Turkey to Soviet Armenia, fording the Araks River. Their preparations had taken many months. The carpenter and his family had moved from Kars to the home of his friend the miller, who lived right by the border. They had learned the ways of the Araks, which months it gets deeper or shallower; they had studied, in detail, the habits of the Turkish border guards. On a moonless night, the two families had gathered on the bank, had felt the damp breath of the river. The men set off first; the water was up to their chests and the powerful current pressed against them, making them lose their footing. The water howled and roared; round stones slipped and slid soundlessly under their feet, not wanting to bear their weight. The swift water seemed black and terrible, like death; the foam on its surface seemed no less deathly, a deathly white. The women followed the men, carrying their little ones. When they reached the middle of the river, the fathers took the children, lifting them up in the air; the water was now wetting their beards. But then the riverbed began to rise again. Astonishingly, in spite of the dark, in spite of being only just above the cold noisy water, the children were entirely silent; not one of them cried. The men then went back again, to help the old men and the young boys and girls across; both families were extremely large. When they reached the Armenian bank, everyone fell on their knees, weeping and kissing the ground, kissing the cold stones. The Soviet border guards failed to see them; it really was a dark night. One of the refugees whistled and a border guard called out. The head of the border post appeared and questioned the fugitives. He understood everything at once and felt deeply moved. His fellow officers all gathered there on the bank, and their wives joined them as quickly as they could, bringing dry clothes for the women and children.
There must have been something poignant about this nighttime return, about this meeting between a group of bearded Russian peasants from Turkey and a group of young Russian soldiers, about the weeping officers’ wives throwing their arms around these Molokan old women and children on the bank of the roaring river. Ivan wept as he told me the story and, listening to him, I wept too.
Meanwhile, life in Tsakhkadzor went on as usual. . . .
In Karapet’s restaurant shop assistants, teachers, and bricklayers gather to drink grape vodka, to sing songs, to lose their tempers, to tell scandalous stories, to eat kebabs, air-cured beef, sulguni cheese, spicy green beans and coriander, and then to drink more grape vodka and fizzy Jermuk mineral water.
There is much drunken boasting: Jermuk is better than Georgian Borjomi; it is the Armenians who first made sulguni cheese; cognac may be a French word, but Armenian cognac is the best cognac of all; no grapes are as sweet as Armenian grapes; it is the Armenians who first taught the Georgians to make shashlyk kebabs, although, to be honest, they still haven’t quite got the hang of it.
Sometimes I hear singing on the village streets, and the rumble of drums: A wedding is being celebrated.
After a few more days, someone invites me to their home to drink vodka. And a day after that, I visit the library, and a lady librarian with broad shoulders and a mustache shows me an Armenian translation of one of my books. It has been read. Some of the pages are a little swollen; the edge of the binding is frayed.
What more do I need? On the street people greet me with a smile: Barev! . . . Barev dzez! People share their stories with me; they tell me about their lives, about their sorrows. Ivan has told me the story of the night crossing of the Araks—and this man I had thought of as cruel had wept. A villager has invited me to his house to drink wine and talk about life. A book of mine has been read in Tsakhkadzor, some pages are a bit swollen. It’s all right here. I’m accepted; I’m one of them.
7
MY FIRST long trip was to Lake Sevan.
Sevan lies in the middle of a great scattering of stones. It is very strange—amid the stones you suddenly see deep-blue water. Sevan has nothing in common with the dry, stony earth—just as a bright faceted jewel has nothing in common with the black velvet on which it rests. The dry hills and mountains have been baked by the summer heat and winds, smoothed by the geological weight of time—and there amid them lies deep-blue water. Usually water and dry land are connected. Usually there is a gradual transition between them—damp sand, a squelchy, boggy, gradually descending shore, lush grass, reeds, willows whose leaves are constantly peering into the lake, as if they breathe not air but water. Here, though, the baked mountain stone and the deep-blue water are separate and equally self-contained. This blue water seems unearthly; it seems to have peeled off from the sky. Probably it is closer to sky level than to sea level. It even seems strange that fish can live in this cold, transparent, deep-blue water; what one expects to see, flying beneath the surface, are the birds of heaven. Admittedly, there are some very special fish in this lake—the silvery-gray trout, speckled with stars, that the Armenians call ishkhan, or prince fish.
A tunnel has been drilled into the side of the stone bowl that contains Lake Sevan, and through it the water crashes into a valley, driving turbines with its deep-blue weight, creating light and electricity. There in the valley the water loses its deep blue and turns gray or green; perhaps it is its special blue, its Sevan blue, that is transformed into electric light.
The whole of Armenia is awash with light. Villages lost in the mountains, the ancient caves of Zangezur, inhabited to this day—all are lit by electricity. These caves were inhabited for thousands of years before our era, before the rise of ancient Sumer, probably even during the Stone Age and the Bronze Age.
Most of these caves’ present inhabitants, however, are working in factories that make precision instruments. These electrically lit caves now contain radios and televisions. Electricity is everywhere—in the action of motors, in electric trains, in music, in the changing frames of a film, in the smooth rotation of the telescopes on Mount Aragats. Lake Sevan is burning its blue body, turning it into light and heat. The water level in the lake has dropped by eleven meters; where there was once deep-blue water, there is now only a band of dark, murky stone. The lake is disappearing from its stone basin. Armenia, awash with electric light, grieves for Lake Sevan, which is perishing. There is now a project to redirect a mountain river and make it flow into Lake Sevan. But in the meantime, the deep-blue pearl is melting away, becoming smaller every day.
What will artists do if Lake Sevan dries up? I have seen any number of Lake Sevans in Yerevan—in the picture gallery, in hotel rooms, restaurants, railway-station halls, and public places of all kinds. I have seen Lake Sevan on postcards, in book illustrations, and in advertisements for food and industrial products.
What will Armenians do if they cannot come to Lake Sevan, if they cannot come and eat trout in the Minutka restaurant?
After yet another twist in the road, our car seemed to be soaring over the lake: We saw the snowy crests of mountains lit by the sun. They were pale blue, as if the snow had absorbed both the blue of the sky and the blue of the lake. And there on a rough stone dish—a dish that was black and brown and the color of rust—lay Lake Sevan, deep blue, almost boundless.
On a humpbacked island, now joined to the mainland because of the drop in the water level, stands an ancient chapel, built with a simplicity and a perfection incomprehensible to modern man. According to legend, Princess Mariam built this chapel for a young monk whose beauty had filled her with awe. The
air here is transparent and clear, and so, every morning, the princess was able to see the young monk from the windows of her mountain castle.
Goethe once said that during eighty years of life he had known eleven happy days. I imagine that everyone, in the course of their life, must have seen many hundreds of sunrises and sunsets; they must have seen rain, rainbows, lakes, seas, and meadows. But of these hundreds of scenes only two or three enter a person’s soul with a miraculous power and become for them what those eleven happy days were for Goethe.
One person may never forget a little cloud lit by a quiet sunset, even though he entirely forgets hundreds of more splendid sunsets. Someone else will never forget a moment of summer rain or a young moon reflected in the pockmarked surface of a forest stream in April.
For a particular scene to enter into a person and become a part of their soul, it is evidently not enough that the scene be beautiful. The person also has to have something clear and beautiful present inside them. It is like a moment of shared love, of communion, of true meeting between a human being and the outer world.
The world was beautiful on that day. And Lake Sevan is one of the most beautiful places on earth. But there was nothing clear or good about me—and I had heard too many stories about the Minutka restaurant. After listening to the story of the love-struck princess, I asked, “But where’s the restaurant?”
Nothing came of my meeting with Lake Sevan; it did not enter my soul. What is pure and divine in me did not get the upper hand. As if I were a base animal, with no wings of imagination, all I could think about was Sevan trout. Unfortunately, just as we were setting out, Martirosyan had poisoned me with the words, “They don’t have trout at the Minutka every day.” These words had troubled me all through the journey.
An Armenian Sketchbook Page 6
