And when night was already, already descending from the sky, when the sky was about to lower the grandmother and grandson’s night upon them, the wretched rabble of the destitute rose on the road of the red sunset. They noticed them—or had noticed long before, or knew without noticing that they were there: however mercilessly the upper villages were being slaughtered and plundered, God always sent some morsel of fortune to the camps below. They noticed and moved, and that was the end—if, indeed, the animal devotion of grandmothers has an end, and if the young life lodged in our serviceable bodies abandons the shins of our bodies so easily.
“Run, my boy, let me die for your little feet, disappear!”
Did the grandmother say this in Armenian, in Turkish, in Kurdish? They learnt Armenian later, in the diaspora communities; there they understood that they were not Ottomans but Armenians. Or in such moments people do not speak, do not say anything: with the wild shriek of a mother they fling themselves forward to tear and be torn apart, drawing the rabble onto themselves until darkness falls and the child’s trail and scent are lost. I do not know. I know only that this is a story revised forty times. When life—splendid, deceitful, bold, tender, humorous—came to meet the boy, and the event settled into the harmless distance of years, it was told many times and many times attested by gold:
“Open your mouth,” she said, “let me die for your tiny teeth; clench your teeth,” she said. “Now disappear, run, my boy, do not look back.” And from the inner rooms, with the ceremonies of a fortunate and shrewd master of the house, they brought out that single gold coin which, at that distant sunset, the grandmother had made her grandson hold between his teeth. “Run, let me die for your little deer’s feet, disappear, do not look back.”
Peoples are turned into herds, set against one another, driven from their homes by one another; and a people once torn from its place becomes a scourge upon the world. I suppose those camps in southern Cappadocia held tribes forcibly displaced from the Balkans by the war of 1912, or Turkmens uprooted from Western Armenia by the war of 1878, or Shamil’s North Caucasian people. Utterly deprived of home and place for five years, for fifty years, they were an indispensable striking force for tormenting the Armenian caravans, for wiping them, scattered, from the face of the earth. So the pack of wretches and dogs must have dragged from the road the body and every garment of that village-town khanum, down to the last bead and pin, everything down to flesh and bone.
I know the opposite happened too, perhaps just as often and more often: it must have happened. If it happens in the silent world of animals, it must also have happened in our human world: we must have abandoned our young and saved our own poor heads. Yet there is no word or story about us, the abandoners, because those who should have lived in our place and rung out our selfless love were torn apart in the claws of brutalised wretches. And we who saved ourselves surrendered ourselves to the animal silence of harems, conversion and slavery.
My painter friend, who paints many Mount Ararats and trees, told me this story; he had heard it from some wealthy Armenian of Argentina, or Uruguay, or America:
“Run, my boy,” she said, “let me die for your strong little feet. You run; my legs are tired.”
Into their conversation—the successful merchant’s words to the successful painter, exchanged shortly before our black year of 1988—even a note of humour entered. “Mr Rich Man,” the painter said, “I have a most Armenian-loving, most patriotic proposal for you: buy me an island in the ocean, and our Armenian nation will have two wealthy island-owners instead of one,” and so on. These successful Armenians roared with laughter in the splendid security of what they had found, leaving what they had lost to the past—separated from the place of the event and that evening by seventy years, mountains of gold, the great Soviet country and the whole civilised world.
And this next account is assembled from the testimonies of Stepan Zoryan, Nvard Tumanyan and, I think, Tigran Hakhumyan. I would wish, would dearly wish, that it had not happened, had not been witnessed, that I had not read it, had not seen Tumanyan bewildered. But it happened. And from the flood of panic, folly, madness, courage, hope and faith, this is what stands apart: a broken Tumanyan at Karakilisa station. He is intimate enough to pierce your heart, for his clothes, voice, colour and scent to surround you; the landscape too is as familiar as family—that Mount Tagavoranist, that Lone Tree, the apple orchards, red-tiled roofs, the muted rustling of spring streams filling the damp valley with a languid, kindly tale.
Partly at his urging, Simon Vratsyan’s insurgents have sheathed their swords and are leaving the country through the Garni gorge. The road to Sharur–Nakhichevan is closed; through the other gorge, Dilijan, he himself returns to Tiflis, the line to Alexandropol closed. That is Armenia: a couple of gorges and a stooped, grey, poor Yerevan. Simon’s men leave with a flag, with ceremony, to the trumpets of an honourable retreat, never of defeat. He too leaves with princely pride, considering his mission as poet of all Armenians, almost a Catholicos, accomplished. With ceremony or in secret, dejected or princely proud, to Tabriz or Tiflis—whatever the case, it was all the same: they were leaving the country, abandoning Armenia. What would happen afterwards, neither he nor Simon’s men knew.
Perhaps the Russians would take charge, perhaps the Turks, who were stationed in Alexandropol. Worse than bad Russians were good Turks; worse than the Turks was anarchy. But more deadly than Russians, Turks or anarchy was the fact that Armenia was something outside us, something one could abandon, leave without considering oneself dead; something one could love, devote oneself to and expect gratitude—from whom?—something one could regard as conquered or surrendered. Armenia was not ourselves; Armenia was not me; Armenia was “that Armenia of yours.” It was a place everyone retreated from while believing the place still existed; a body from which one could supposedly detach oneself, be above or below it—only above—grant oneself a mission in relation to it and consider that mission successful or not so successful.
The Tumanyan of 1921, who had lost his brother and son, and another brother too—that brave brother whose flying detachment had subdued the enemy in these same gorges fifteen years earlier—has reached Vanadzor station and does not know how he will get to Tiflis. The witnesses say that from the window of the diplomatic train on the Kars–Alexandropol–Tiflis–Baku–Moscow route, the bey-pasha heading the Turkish mission noticed his noble figure and invited him into the carriage. There it is.
What did they say, what did they talk about? Did they talk? Or did the bey regard the invitation itself as a breach of diplomatic etiquette and content himself with providing a seat in one of the distant compartments? Or did he offer tea to a man respected throughout the Caucasus, order tea to be taken to the great man? Did they speak of the great calamity? What did the bey say? That he had been on the European front and knew little of events in Asia Minor? Did he express condolences? Curse one or two former rulers? Say that the loss of the Armenians was first of all a great loss to the Turks, because you lost your brothers and we lost those who fed us? Say that he had several close Armenian friends, all fine people, all law-abiding citizens? Say that what happened was a regrettable misunderstanding? Say: let us leave the past to the past?
What did they leave unsaid, what did they discuss, what was Tumanyan doing? I do not know. To the right of the railway was the old mill of the Tersants family, a branch of the great Tumanyan family. To the left, the outlet of the Dzoraget, then the old ancestral orchards of Dzaghidzor, the old village site of Dsegh. The house was his, the master of the house the enemy; the guest was himself, the host the enemy. What am I to say?
Should I say he ought not to have thrown himself into the arena of the mad slaughter between Communist Armenians and Dashnak Armenians, that he should have let them devour one another to the end, that he had no business among them? That he was not them, they were not him? Should I say he ought not to have entered the carriage, should have turned away and ignored the Turk’s invitation? Should I not remember, not put myself in uncomfortable situations?
We simply do not remember and consider ourselves saved; we throw ourselves into the military camp of a powerful state and remember and threaten from there; we bypass a millennium and appear in times and places without Turks; we fill our sails with the winds of world citizenship; we settle our curly-haired sons and daughters in the innocent valleys of a civilised tomorrow. But the Turk is everywhere: in the past and the future, in the north and the south.
Now, as a whole nation and state, no longer as shreds of battered and tormented caravans, it is we who stand face to face with being torn apart and being saved. This is not a recollection, in our splendid mansions, of a distant and now harmless past eighty years ago. This is today. This is not Tumanyan in the diplomat and soldier’s saloon carriage. This is me, with the whole present, seated before my enemy. Should I speak or not speak, remember or not remember, tell or not tell?
If I do not remember, I am an animal before him; if I remember, an enemy. An enemy is destroyed; an animal is an animal. Yet an enemy is also respected, because an enemy sets a limit to the parade of your insolence. The enemy returns you to yourself. If I do not remember, do not tell, do not speak, do not punish, I betray myself, everyone, and him—the enemy, the enemy himself. By not remembering, not telling, not punishing, I turn his insolence into a punishment upon everyone. No one will thank me for that, and the enemy himself will not thank me.
THIS IS MY HOMELAND. This is my homeland. The homeland is me. The homeland is my life’s work within the time I have lived. If that work does not exist, that time does not exist; that homeland does not exist in that nonexistent time; I do not exist. The scissors of history cut off and discard those times of homelands, and us along with those times: we never were, we are not. The darkness of the universe is full of the empty times of deserted homelands. You reach out a hand—there is no one to take it; you call out—your voice goes away and is lost; you cast a light—it finds nothing, neither face nor event.
Ah, how beautiful it is that my lights find scenes of immolation on those distant roads! Ah, how good that I do not have to populate the past of struggle and eternity. Following their example, we shall fill our time with our work and voice; upon our time we shall leave our inscription in erkatagir: we lived here.
“Grakan Tert”, 1 May 1995.