The Doves of Ohanavank

by Vahan Zanoyan

  Now she sits in the very room that only six months ago she was not allowed to enter, and ponders the possibilities of taking over the operation. The biggest challenge for her is figuring out where all the pieces are hidden—what exactly belonged to her father, where are the various sources of income which now someone, somewhere, is enjoying but which belong to her, who were her father’s debtors and how much did they owe him? People like Ayvazian don’t just get killed; so the last thing he would have worried about is keeping a record or a will.

  Yuri knocks and enters. He sees her at the desk, her feet up, the hem of her purple dress fallen to mid thigh, sheer stockings glistening in the late afternoon light, and smiles as warmly as he thinks is appropriate without reducing his stature as a tough guy. He is in his early forties but looks younger; he is trim, muscular and, unlike most of Ayvazian’s other henchmen, does not shave his head. His thick, pitch-black, heavily gelled hair is combed straight back, highlighting his wide forehead. His face is not handsome, with small eyes that look ever so slightly crossed, especially when he concentrates on something, and a chin that looks a bit too long for his face, but it is also a face that is hard to forget. Yuri has a presence, and, had he been a bit less muscular, he would look as much like a men’s fashion model as a muscle man.

  “You’re late,” says Carla.

  Yuri walks over to her, lifts her chin with his forefinger and kisses her on the mouth.

  They have figured each other out pretty well in the past few months, both as lovers and as collaborators. Carla decided early on to start her investigation with her father’s employees. She slept with most of the younger ones, and gathered as much information as she could from them. They did not know about each other, even though they all worked for Ayvazian, which shed some light on Ayvazian’s style of management. No one knew everything, not even Viktor. Carla decided to keep it that way, and rarely disclosed what she found out from one source to another, even when such disclosure would have helped the second source in his work. Little by little, clue by clue, she started getting a picture of the breadth and depth of her father’s operations, and the soldiers who made it all possible.

  Yuri had arrived from Moscow soon after his brother’s shattered body was collected from the boulders at the foot of the cliff in Sevajayr. He had been one of Ayvazian’s main men in Moscow for years, but he had not met Lara during the several months that they kept her in Moscow. Lara was not only a special case because of her youth and stunning beauty, but also a very difficult case. She had been raped and thrown into the market in Moscow straight from Saralandj. She had gone through the motions, but had not accepted her new reality as a prostitute. She had not understood the role, let alone shown any ability or willingness to play the courtesan. But her youth and beauty made her by far the largest potential earner for Ayvazian, and Viktor had wanted to handle her himself, relying on a Ukrainian prostitute called Anastasia to break her in.

  So when Yuri arrived in Yerevan, he did not know about Lara or the Galians. He came to find out what had happened to his brother Hamo, and to try and exact some type of compensation from the Ayvazians. Hamo was killed on active duty, after all. When he first appeared at the Ayvazian’s door, he did not know what to expect. He knew that the only family that Ayvazian had was his wife and daughter, and assumed he’d deal with the wife. But Ayvazian’s wife refused to see him; she told the maid to take him to Carla.

  “I have some news,” says Yuri, leaning against the desk, facing her and putting his hand on her knee. That is all the explanation that he’s prepared to give for being late. Carla likes that side of Yuri. She has intimidated most of her father’s other underlings, and has stopped seeing them because of it. The ideal balance, it seems to her, is to be strict enough to make a man realize she’s boss, but leave him enough confidence and sense of control to allow him to perform, both on the street and in the bedroom.

  “Well?” she says, “now you want to take your time telling me?”

  “Have you heard of someone called Samvel Galian?”

  “No. What about him?”

  He leans closer to her, allowing his hand to slide a few inches up her thigh.

  “He visited your father in Martashen around two years ago. Then they went to Sevajayr together with Hamo. There was an accident, and the man fell off the cliff, exactly the same location where Hamo and your father fell.”

  Carla shifts in her chair, uncrossing then re-crossing her feet; her movement causes her skirt to slide a bit further up her thighs. She looks at him for a few seconds with no expression on her face. Yuri knows she’s processing the information, but Carla never asks the obvious questions directly. In that, she is different from her father, who loved to bombard people with questions, often allowing them no time to answer.

  “What else do you have?” she asks.

  “Galian is from a village near Aparan, called Saralandj. Haven’t been there myself, but they say it is poor and backward. He has a large family—eight children. The wife’s dead too.”

  “I guess you’ll have to get your shoes muddy,” says Carla. “It’s worth checking.”

  “There’s more,” says Yuri. “I cannot be a hundred percent sure of this yet, but some of the people on your father’s payroll in Aparan think that Viktor and his bodyguards visited the Galians on more than one occasion.”

  “You think that’s related to the sex trade or some other business?”

  “Could very well be the sex trade, even though I know we used to avoid cases like this, where the girl lives at home with her parents. But I just found out that Viktor used to wire money to the mother from Moscow. What else could that be for?”

  “You tell me, Yuri, what else could that be for?”

  “Well, in theory, it could be many other things, but I doubt your Papa was in business with this Galian guy, because he was too poor. Besides, he died in Sevajayr.”

  “How much money was Viktor wiring them?”

  “I am still checking the details.”

  “What’s taking so long to check, Yuri?” Carla says a bit too calmly. “Didn’t you run everything in Moscow?”

  “Carla, no one ran ‘everything’ anywhere under your father. He had a lot of people working for him, each knows very little, and is not willing to talk. Why should they tell me anything?”

  “Why should they tell you anything? How about because you know how to ask?”

  “They’re scared. The only two bosses they ever knew are both dead. They don’t know me. To them, probably even talking to me is risky.”

  “Now, now Yuri,” she says softening her tone and putting her hand on his to stop it from sliding further up her thigh. “You can be more persuasive than that.”

  She then takes her feet off the desk and stands up, leading him by the hand to the maroon velvet sofa. “A lot more persuasive,” she says, “both with them and with me…”

  Chapter Five

  “May you be naked, as a poet’s soul!

  And beneath that pagan nudity of yours

  May man suffer yearning,

  unable to touch you…”

  That is a verse from Daniel Varujan’s opening poem in his Pagan Songs, entitled “To the Statue of Beauty.” I’ve been reading the collection of poems every day since Edik gave it to me. Naked as a poet’s soul…spoken to the statue of beauty. Every time I read something like this, I wonder what it would be like to have an hour with the author. Just one hour, over a cup of coffee, to get a glimpse of his naked soul…

  I know Edik would have a lot to say about that. But we have not had the chance to talk privately for a while, at least not about poetry. Gagik and Edik seem to be worried about Yuri. Edik thinks that sooner or later they’ll figure things out, and wonder how I managed to return home after just eighteen months. No girl working for Ayvazian has ever done something like that.

  And then there’s this other oligarch, Manvel Aleksyan, whom everyone refers to by his nickname, LeFreak. No one knows how the nickname came about,
but it stuck. Edik thinks it was a French journalist who coined it. At any rate, LeFreak was one of the Ayvazian’s competitors. According to Gagik he is trying to find out how to get his hands on the business Ayvazian used to control. The problem is that as he digs deeper into Ayvazian’s business, he may stumble upon my story. So the whole notion that once we got rid of the Ayvazian menace we could live in peace, a notion that Avo had believed and worked for, has now come into question.

  Fortunately, Avo is too busy with the countless tasks of spring to give a lot of thought to Yuri and LeFreak. Aside from his normal duties, he also has to deal with his pig farm. That was Gagik’s idea. Pork prices have risen; the government has started a program to import a good quality special feed mix from Holland, they say with no hormones or chemicals, which, when mixed with local chaff, makes an excellent feed which many small farmers in the region are now using. Avo is excited about the pig farm. So much so that he agreed to borrow money from Edik to start it. With Gagik’s help, he bought twenty pregnant pigs last fall, expected to deliver in a few weeks. That will keep him busy all spring and summer, and hopefully out of trouble, even though in our family, trouble has always found its way to us.

  As for myself, I will be happy to spend the warmer months far from Avo’s pigs, in my rented room in an apartment in the outskirts of Yerevan, with an old lady who lives alone. It is a two-bedroom apartment on the eleventh floor of an old Soviet-style building. The elevator goes up to the tenth floor, and we have to go up the last flight of stairs on foot. This can be difficult for my landlady, Diqin (Mrs.) Alice, who is in her late seventies, so she does not leave the apartment often. Her husband has passed away, and her two sons live and work in Russia. They send her money every month, but she says they are waiting for her to die so they can sell the apartment. They have no desire to return to Armenia, she says. I sense the bitterness in her voice, but I can’t tell whether it is directed at her sons or at the country. Too many people leave these days out of desperation.

  Bitter or not, Diqin Alice is among the few fortunate ones. Many old ladies her age have become homeless, abandoned by family members who do not have the means to care for them. Edik says that these old women would have been better off under the Soviet system; in spite of all its faults, he says, the Soviet system provided basic economic security to the elderly. I wouldn’t know much about that. I was born after that system collapsed, but my father did not have anything positive to say about the Soviet days. Our family paid dearly during those years, he used to say, especially during the reign of Joseph Stalin. But I guess none of that matters much to anyone in Armenia today, unless you are talking to someone like Edik, for whom everything seems to have some relevance, no matter how old or distant.

  My room is small but comfortable. I have a narrow wardrobe and a single bed, a window that overlooks a small park and, unlike Diqin Alice’s room where the walls are lined with countless family photographs and small hand-woven carpets, the walls in my room are bare. I share the kitchen and bathroom with her, and help her with household chores. The rent is low, around twenty dollars a month, and she asks me to use it to buy her groceries. I do, and I give her the receipt, because she is always surprised how little it buys. She remembers the food prices of a different era. With the amount of money that I sent home before escaping, and with what I brought with me, I can afford to keep a place like this in Yerevan for a very long time.

  But why am I here and not at our home in Saralandj? It is, after all, not really the pigs. After struggling for eighteen long and excruciating months with one aching obsession, namely to return home, why am I not at home? Why was it so easy for Edik to convince me to sign up for two courses at the history department of Yerevan State University, and for one English language course? I later heard that the professors were bribed to let me audit the courses, but I did not want to ask Edik about it. I’m sure he was the one who had done the bribing, even though he argues against bribery and corruption with a passion. Why was I so eager to have an excuse to move to Yerevan?

  Sumaya told me once that she had long stopped wanting to go home, and that my desire to return reminded her of when she still missed home. “I now miss the days when I used to miss home,” she said. “There’s something sweet about missing home. It gives one hope, and I’ve lost that now.” That touched me deeply then and I felt close to her for opening up to me like that. But I also swore then that I’d never get to that point, I’d never stop missing home.

  But missing home is one thing and being able to return an entirely different thing. Sumaya was right. It is easy and sweet to miss home when you’re away. And it gives you hope, because you constantly count on the nostalgia, no matter how painful, to drive you to freedom. Without the nostalgia, hope is lost because you no longer have something to look forward to. But all the missing, the pining, the obsession, and the life sustaining hope is lost the minute you return. It’s done. You’re back, against all odds, having conquered incredible obstacles, having beaten people a thousand times more powerful than you…and then you ask, now what?

  It is difficult in Saralandj. My family never confronts me directly, but there are the silent stares and unspoken questions on my sisters’ and brothers’ faces. Village gossip can be ruthless. And although the gossip is about me, the malicious tales deliberately reach my brothers and sisters, hurting them, as much if not more, than me.

  There is a difference between the solitude that I enjoy and the loneliness from which I suffer. The loneliness is anchored in hiding the truth, in the fear of being rejected, in the inability to share my story with a single soul who can relate to it. I have known girls who could not handle that kind of loneliness. It pushed them into such severe depression that they were unable to have any social interaction. In the most severe cases they became suicidal.

  Soon after I found this place, I met a girl on the bus coming home one night. She is my age, and lives in one of the buildings around here. We take the same bus from center city Yerevan, to the same bus stop. After seeing each other a few times on the bus, we started talking. We were both careful and reserved at first, starting with a simple nod the second time we saw each other, then a smile and a hello, and then taking a seat next to each other and striking up a conversation.

  Her name is Anna, and she is from a village in the Lori region in the North. A year ago, when she was seventeen, her parents agreed to marry her off to a man in his thirties from a nearby town. She says she was horrified, because she did not like his demeanor, but had no say in the matter. Soon after they were married, her husband, who used to work in a butcher shop, lost his job. He tried to earn money by buying foodstuffs from nearby villages and selling to shops in the town, but could not make enough. He started drinking heavily, and asked her to get money from her parents. She went home once for help, but her father refused to give her money. Her mother didn’t have any money herself. Her husband started beating her and telling her how useless she was.

  One day, he came home drunk and asked her to come with him. “I’ll take you to see someone,” he said. “Just do whatever he tells you.” He dropped her in front of a house in the outskirts of town, where a man was waiting for her. They went in the house, and it turned out that the man expected to have sex with her, because he had already paid her husband for it. Anna was horrified and tried to run away, but the man grabbed her and raped her. “I paid your pimp a lot of money for you,” he kept yelling.

  Her husband was waiting for her when she came out. She refused to get back in the car with him. She was shaking with shame and anger, but he was acting as if nothing unusual happened. “Since you cannot earn money any other way, this is what you’ll do from now on,” he told her. “Get in the car right now!” Anna refused, and started screaming, threatening to tell the police what had just happened. She screamed so loud that her husband, wanting to avoid attention, drove away. “Fine, walk home!” He yelled as he left her.

  Anna did not walk home. She walked to the bus stop and caught the last b
us to her village. She went home, but her father refused to accept her. “Go back to your husband,” he said. “Married girls don’t run away from home like mad dogs.”

  I cannot imagine how any father can treat his daughter in that manner. Anna spent that night with her aunt. The next morning she borrowed some money from her and took the bus to Yerevan. Her aunt arranged for her to get in touch with her sister-in-law, and she found a job as a sales girl in a women’s clothing store. Her husband found out that she was in Yerevan, but could not find her. He visited the aunt’s sister-in-law, who denied having seen her. A month later Anna moved to a room like mine, a few buildings down the road from me.

  Now Anna lives in constant fear. Her husband can show up anytime and force her to return. No one can stop him from abusing her if he finds her—neither her family nor the police. She believes the only reason he has not found her yet is his fear that she’ll tell the police the story of how he sold her for sex. She uses a different last name to rent her place and at work.

  Anna’s story has made me realize how lucky I am and how great my own family really is. My father would never have treated any of his daughters like hers treated her. My sisters and brothers have accepted me in spite of the stigma I carry. I have heard stories of angry brothers who slit their sister’s throat when they found out that she had worked as a prostitute; that is a matter of family honor in some of our villages. I have not faced any of these threats. I have been welcomed.