His great forebear—the great forebear of us all—had marked out the road for him and for all of us: the road of flight for all of us, weak and helpless, before empire, violence and the bronze hoofbeats of a metallic will. And of course he would come here: who are we, what are we doing, how much do we remain ourselves beneath the relentless press of past and present, how much are we corrupted and distorted—or do we remain unblemished?
And of course our Armenian woman poet would be standing in his path with her friends. And of course, in the warmth of a Yerevan evening: who is this who has come, by what right does he call our pain his own, even tasting his own flesh in our wound?
Our poet: ‘Well, I do not believe that 1915 truly tastes of your own flesh in your mouth.’
Andrei: ‘As far as that is possible.’
I, thirty years later: ‘It is a question of capacity. I am glad that my fellow writer, my contemporary, my friend became that tireless traveller for whom neither the road nor the discovery was found by chance: he had searched doggedly for them—for the Human Being and for Armenia.’