We traveled from Russia to Georgia—Tbilisi, where my grandfather had grown up. There we found a Georgian-Armenian driver who took us on a six-hour ride through the Georgian countryside to get to Yerevan. At the Sadakhlo border crossing, we had our passports stamped at the lone customs station, which looked like a lifeguard stand airdropped into the mountains. I lingered for a moment and tried to expand within myself what appeared to be a quiet, unremarkable occasion: I, a person who had always called herself Armenian, was actually in Armenia.
We drove on, through the Lori region, home to copper mines and medieval monasteries. It was rocky territory, but that August the landscape was dense with trees such a dark shade of green they looked black. The Debed River seemed to slice right through them, creating just a sliver for itself and the road.
“It’s so beautiful,” Gretchen said at every turn, and I nodded, proud but silent, trying not to seem like I thought I had something to do with it.
Then came miles of open plains dotted with Soviet-era construction projects that appeared to have been abandoned overnight: cranes stopped midlift, half-built walls of factories that were once destined for more than the weeds and wildflowers that now patched their unmortared crevices. Until 1991, Armenia had been an important manufacturing center for the Soviet Union, and the evidence of this past had not been cleared away.
Gradually, green and brown faded to gray. Instead of apricot sellers, there were makeshift gas stations every few miles—just a bench and a barrel of petrol, a sign in Russian or Armenian hand-painted on a scrap of wood.
Then, before I could register what happened, we were off the main road and driving on small streets, which were empty of people on that muggy summer afternoon.
“Here it is,” said the driver, slowing to turn onto Nalbandian Street.
“Here’s what?”
“Yerevan.”
I was embarrassed. I had lured Gretchen along by telling her that Yerevan was a beautiful city. I had been looking at photos of it all my life, after all—calendars published by the church, postcard sets from relatives on thick, Soviet-era cardstock showing yellowed photographs of monuments, fountains, and elaborate buildings, everything captioned in Russian back then. In recent summers, many of my American-Armenian friends had made the trip, and each one returned beatified as though from a pilgrimage to Mecca or Rome. I couldn’t have imagined Yerevan as anything less than extraordinary. But the city I saw now looked shabby and grim on that first glance into the haze.
In the sleepy city center, I found a telephone shop—the developing world’s answer to phone booths, where the phones look like the sort you’d find on an end table in a living room, and you pay a man at the front when you’re finished. I made two calls: one to my mother’s cousin, one to my father’s cousin. I had sent word through a chain of relatives that I would be coming at some point that summer, but I did not know whether the message had reached them, or if they would care. And when a woman answered the phone, I spoke Armenian to another person for the first time in twenty years. I was Roubic and Monic’s youngest daughter, I said, and I was in Yerevan. Ten minutes later, a car pulled up to retrieve me and Gretchen. She flew home after a few days, as planned, but I was not alone for the remainder of my two-week visit.
* * *
FOUR YEARS LATER, when I returned to Yerevan on one of Dikran’s charter flights from Istanbul, the city was changing fast. On the road from the airport into town, there was an anticipatory drive lined with casinos boasting names like Nevada’s and Rich Man. A law had been passed prohibiting their operation within city limits, so they ordered themselves, obligingly, just outside the boundary, the casinos becoming the first thing visitors saw, and, thanks to their garish, lighted facades, making an indelible impression on the tired eyes of late-night arrivals from all over the world. (Those arrivals, no matter where from, usually occurred between one and three a.m.; given Armenia’s economic condition, the inconvenient timing felt like some kind of discount program for use of the sky during off-peak hours.)
Yerevan is said to be one of the oldest cities in the world, officially dating back to 782 BC, when it was called Erebuni. Today, more than a third of Armenia’s three million citizens live in the capital and its outskirts. Although much of the population originated in the Caucasus, the post-1915 influx of Armenians from Anatolia is evident in the names of Yerevan neighborhoods: Arabkir, Malatya-Sebastia, New Marash, New Zeytun—towns in Turkey whose names the refugees brought with them. Since most of those places had been renamed in Turkey itself—Zeytun became Süleymanlı, Sebastia became Sivas—these districts were like a Rosetta stone for what had been.
It would be a mistake to imagine a chaotic Eastern city, with shops and kiosks jammed together on small streets. No, Yerevan was orderly and sparse, built to manageable scale, and most of the buildings in the central district were made of the locally abundant tuff stone, pinkish and smooth. This lent a striking uniformity. Still, in the second decade after the Soviet collapse, the urban landscape was transforming as if by the hour. When a boutique opened on an otherwise quiet block, neighbors tended to complain that the new signage was ugly, that the beauty of the city was being destroyed. To my eyes the additions looked like welcome signs of life; to theirs, unseemly capitalist interference.
Yerevan was also a city of a hundred tiny museums, each one devoted to an Armenian painter or author or musician. Streets were named after old poets, and plaques marked the homes where they once lived. And like every former Soviet capital, Yerevan had many parks, overgrown but well-loved gardens filled with pensioners chatting on benches and teenage sweethearts stealing kisses behind mulberry trees, which were everywhere, dropping carpets of ripe, sticky fruit. Of course, all cities have parks and museums, but most cities have more of everything else. Proportion makes all the difference.
* * *
I EXPLORED YEREVAN on foot with my father’s cousin Rafik and his wife Roza at my side. Strolling was one of their chief forms of leisure, and since Rafik had worked many years as an inspector for the city, he had something to tell me about every bench and building.
“This drinking fountain has the sweetest water in all of Yerevan—no, the world,” he proclaimed at one of the many burbling water stations.
Less cheerfully, he showed me evidence of the hardships Yerevan residents had faced. In consecutive freezing winters between 1992 and 1994, during the Karabakh war, blockades and exploded pipelines made electricity, gas, and hot water almost nonexistent. All the front doors along a particular street were made of metal, Rafik pointed out, because the original wooden ones had been ripped away by desperate neighbors and burned for heat.
Roza was a high school biology teacher, and given to commentary on the city’s social problems. Everything about their lives was emblematic of a solid, middle-class existence in Yerevan. They occupied the same apartment they’d been granted by the Party decades earlier, and kept it immaculate. Their two sons, near my age, were both working abroad, a doctor and a finance manager; they were part of what was known as Armenia’s brain drain—anybody who could get out of the country for work or school did so, and too many never came back.
On my first trip to Armenia, I had gotten to know Rafik and Roza over a dinner that began with shots of homemade walnut liqueur and continued through platters of stuffed vegetables, roasted meat, salads, and cakes until I cried mercy. Then Rafik pulled old maps from the closet, pointing out towns where our ancestors had lived, and Roza brought out photo albums, and read to me from letters my grandmother had sent her forty years ago.
But when I saw them next, fresh off my flight from Istanbul, I had an agenda more journalistic than familial, and at first I feared they’d be disappointed; in a few years’ time, I’d gone from carefree long-lost relative to chain-smoking neurotic, prickly with opinions about Turkish-Armenian relations. I made a total of three trips between Istanbul and Yerevan over the course of several months, and each time I had interviews scheduled and appointments to keep. And
although my Armenian was not equal to the complexity of my feelings about Turkey, I tried to explain to Rafik and Roza (neither of whom spoke English) what I was doing.
Now, on our walks, Rafik wanted to make sure I surveyed a cross-section of regular Armenians for their views on opening the border. He would stop any acquaintance he spotted on the street. “Zorik dear, how’ve you been? This young lady has something to ask you,” he said when we spotted his old coworker in front of a bookstore. (Go on, he nudged me, ask him what he thinks!) Rafik never told me what he himself believed; he was diplomatic, choosing curiosity over confrontation. He was the best wingman I could have asked for.
As for Roza, she was also tender with her judgments; she never betrayed suspicion of my motives, but I sensed she was worried that despite my best intentions, I would end up somehow exonerating the Turks. One afternoon, Roza made me a cup of coffee—Turkish or Armenian, call it what you will—and as we sat in the living room, everything haloed by sun pressing through the closed white curtains, she offered to read my fortune in the grounds. Reading coffee fortunes is a tradition usually carried out by women for other women, and it is often a lighthearted pastime. But it can also be taken very seriously—especially when the fortune-teller needs a tactful way to get something off her chest.
Gamely, I placed the saucer over the rim of the cup, held them tightly together and turned them upside down, as is the custom, to let the thickened liquid dribble along the glazed interior. After letting it dry for a few minutes, Roza turned the cup right-side up again and studied the resulting outlines. Then she had me press my thumb into the mud that clung to the bottom, and twist it just slightly, to make a final imprint, which is treated as a sort of punctuation mark to whatever prediction the coffee grounds deliver. She examined it again, and after a long while told me what she saw: my heart was open, she said, but there were two snakes trying to enter it from either side. I would have to be careful to keep them from twisting around me.
Roza was a reasonable but passionate woman, beloved by her students and respected by their parents. Her family had lived in Erzurum, eastern Turkey, before the genocide, and then in Georgia before moving to Yerevan. When we talked about the prospect of diplomatic relations with Turkey, she voiced a view shared by many Yerevan Armenians. She was not above prejudice or pride and did not want to beg Turkey for anything, but her priority was getting access to the world outside; she felt suffocated by the closed border. The verb she used to describe this concern surprised me: shoonch kashel, or “to get some air.” Armenians needed room to breathe.
16
Hello, Homeland!
The Vazgen Sargsyan Republican Stadium was named for the former prime minister of Armenia, who was murdered in 1999 along with six colleagues when a group of Armenian gunmen, in the name of fighting corruption, burst into a parliament session and opened fire.
Now the stadium’s parking lot was filled with thousands of young Armenian athletes. They were in Yerevan for the Pan-Armenian Games—a weeklong Olympics of sorts, where teams of Armenian men and women from all over the world came to compete in basketball, soccer, volleyball, track and field, even table tennis. It was the fourth time this athletic tournament had taken place.
The sporting events themselves held no interest for me, but I was drawn by the prospect of seeing Armenians from so many different countries together in one place, an anthropological full house. I almost hadn’t made it on the flight from Istanbul, but Dikran finally squeezed me onboard. The seats were taken by about eighty Bolsahays headed for the games—young athletes who had trained in private sports clubs, as well as their coaches and parents. On the airplane, the athletes had been as boisterous as sixth-graders on a field trip. Now I looked for them in the parking lot, which was mobbed. I had never seen Yerevan quite like this.
It was Friday evening, and the opening ceremony of the Pan-Armenian Games had been advertised as the place to be. The charm of Yerevan: it was small enough that you could get a feeling hard to come by in a capital city, the sense that there was a single main event. The details could be communicated to the entire population by a few large posters at major thoroughfares, through word of mouth, and by the local television stations (which usually filled their airtime with weather reports every few minutes and commercials for the same three products). In the stadium parking lot, old ladies sitting on overturned oil cans sold snacks for the spectators: pumpkin seeds in cones of twisted newsprint, plastic bags of homemade popcorn.
Each country’s athletes could be distinguished by their uniforms: the Paris team wore fitted white T-shirts with “Paris” printed across the back in sparkly cursive; there was Ukraine, looking like a flock of bumblebees in yellow and black; Vienna, indicated by a hip lowercase logo that could have been advertising a skateboard company; a group of women from Tehran in pink and blue jogging suits of cheap nylon; and on it went, Beirut, Cyprus, Georgia, Germany, Russia …
Could I tell where people were from by looking at their faces? We were all Armenian, but there seemed to be something besides the varied uniforms that evoked each team’s diaspora home. Was it the effect of climate, of fluoridated water, toxic fertilizers? I once read that every language subtly sculpts the facial muscles of its speakers. Maybe the heavy eyebrows and mountainous noses and hooded eyes of my people looked a little bit different on a face that had spoken German, or Hebrew, or Portuguese? Here was Javakh, a team from a troubled region in Georgia; their taupe and navy outfits were surprisingly nice, so nice that I would have thought they belonged to a wealthier city’s team, yet I had no doubt the players were from the Caucasus, based on their demeanor: sober, broad, browned faces, like the hardened bark of trees that had stood in the same spot for centuries.
I approached a fellow from the Manchester, England, soccer team. His name was Alex and he was twenty-one. It was his second trip to the games. His father was born in Cyprus, he told me, and his mother in Lebanon. His English accent betrayed nothing of his ethnic roots, and he had an Englishman’s reserve; he said he felt relaxed about the competitions to come.
I couldn’t hear him very well because a cheer-off had started between Beirut and Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires! If anybody looked like the cool kids in this sea of faces, it was Buenos Aires. Pounding a drum and singing a rally in Spanish, they wore turquoise and white shirts with the colors of the Armenian flag, red, blue, and orange, as armbands on both sleeves. The Beirut team sidled up to them and hollered the familiar “Oléee, Olé, Olé, Olé!” in greeting, which Buenos Aires met with a drawn-out “Beiiiiiruuuuut!”
Yes, there were Armenians in Buenos Aires, more than a hundred thousand of them. The community took root after 1909, when Armenians who fled the Adana massacres in Turkey’s Kilikia region went there; they were joined later by genocide survivors after 1915. There was a story for how Armenians had ended up in each of the cities whose teams now swarmed around me. But—did it even need to be said?—it was all one story, really. The majority of them had left Turkey, either after massacres in the 1890s, in 1909, or in 1915. It wasn’t news to me that Armenians lived in all these places; what I found amazing was that they were still organized as Armenians even as they spoke Spanish and German and every other language, even three generations after their families had made these migrations.
Getting into the spirit, I strolled from team to team like some kind of locker-room sportscaster, sticking my tape recorder in people’s faces.
“So are you here to win?” I heard myself asking a twenty-five-year-old guy from the team of La Crescenta, a town near Los Angeles.
“Of course we’re here to win!” He beamed. The athletes were enjoying the attention, and I was enjoying the way my presence was taken for granted. I suppose I imagined that my time in Turkey had marked me somehow—a scarlet “T” on my chest. But no, I was welcome here. This was the beauty of being among other Armenians: you were automatically assumed to be a friend—as long as you were Armenian, you were innocent until proven guilty.
Akhalts
ikhe, Almelo, Ararat, Armavir, Athens, Barnaul, Beirut, Brussels, Gardabad, Geghart … teams were starting to line up in order with the signs they would carry in the Olympic-style opening procession.
I wandered over to Jerusalem and spoke with one of the team managers. He had an accent I have always loved, the Israeli accent, with its burdensome r’s and argumentative inflections.
“Do you speak Armenian?” I asked him.
“Of course!”
“Where are your parents from?”
“Jerusalem.”
“And your grandparents?”
“Jerusalem.”
He told me that at home, there were two Armenian clubs: one Dashnak, the other Ramkavar—those were the political party lines along which Armenian churches divided decades ago—but that for the games the two clubs had joined forces.
“We belong to different clubs but we’re not enemies,” he said. He seemed sincere, maybe even a little bit sophisticated. But it amazed me that in holiest Jerusalem, where Jews and Palestinians persisted in the most intractable conflict in the world, the Armenians still opted to divide themselves.
* * *
I FOUND THE Istanbul team thanks to their impressive outfits. The entire group wore tailored white pants and tucked-in polo shirts; pale blue for the athletes, turquoise for the managers, and yellow for the coaches. Taking in their tasteful ensemble, I remembered something I had read a few years earlier, when I knew little about the Bolsahay community. In a diaspora magazine featuring a long article about the first Pan-Armenian Games, a single point had struck me. A team of Bolsahay athletes had attended the games, but they had problems fitting in. Other teams had bristled on hearing them speak Turkish, the article said. Their outfits might have lent them a subtle class advantage in the eyes of a neutral observer, but here they were more like black sheep.
I wondered if this perception had changed at all since Hrant’s murder. I was friendly with the manager of the Istanbul men’s basketball team, a thirty-four-year-old man named Nerses whom I’d met in the course of my reporting, and I had asked him about this back in Istanbul. He insisted there were no such problems. Nerses was sentimental about the games, and about Armenia in general. He was the one who convinced me that I had to come see them for myself: “You won’t believe how amazing it feels to be surrounded by so many Armenians,” he said.
There Was and There Was Not: A Journey through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond Page 22
