On the first day of the outbreak of this endless Armenian 1915, this black Sumgait plague, Vano Siradeghyan sat in our home for a couple of minutes and demanded many trainloads from me:
“Call the Central Committee. Let’s get the people out of the neighbouring republic.”
The house was still my house, not yet an aquarium visible from every side and unable to hide anything; with a last effort I was still myself, not yet an aquarium fish. Half of Vano was my old Vano—straightforward, fiery, a born soldier rather than a tiller of the soil, and thus defenceless as a soldier, naked before every cold. The other half was already the son and witness of a reality that was unwanted but existed, and was taking on a commanding character.
A voice heard throughout the Soviet Union and even the world, I naturally moved my almighty mouth at once, and blue trainloads rang from every corner of the world towards the mouth of the black inferno. They carried light, justice, trust and humanity. Among the conductors, of course, was Anatole France; the tall figure of General de Gaulle appeared; Turkish writers with their little daughters came to meet them with flowers and songs; the images of Christ and the prophets shone; “The Internationale” hovered over every road and border… Everyone, everything went in, was bound and fell silent in the black maw.
I have given my words a joking tone, yet neither the colour nor the weight of that heavy black whirlwind changes in the slightest. It was an accumulation of the malice in all our souls, harnessed by Turkish politicians, named Vatan and driven into the arena of devouring Armenians, to collapse upon everyone and everything. With the trust of a fool—in Armenian, an eccentric; in Russian, a little fool—we went out to fight a many-headed monster whose approximate shape we did not even know, and whose end was our own end, because at least one of its many heads sat on our own shoulders.
What was Vano testing through me—the extent of the sense of mastery in me and “my Central Committee”? What was he checking? Was he testing anything, or, like me, was he bewildered by the terrifying dimensions of that reality which had so far torn its army-green casing in one poor Turkish town and, rising and ripping its casing, was emerging across the whole surface of the vast country? Much more the latter; much more, he was bewildered.
What followed made it clear: all the masters of life and the public square—all of us—would flee, all of us would hide in cracks and corners. Vano would not flee. Vano would stand in the square and, with every hour and every day, affirm one thing: “This is my homeland at this hour, and I am its master.”
…The image of a compatriot driver who lived hurriedly and hastily disappeared passed from Vano himself into a short story by Vano Siradeghyan. From that brief, precise story it emerges multiplied, as an image of many and many of us, called not to live this way, yet condemned to live this way.
A blind, restless, instinctive, one might say non-intellectual but purely bodily, almost animal, heavy effort marks the behaviour of Siradeghyan’s characters: an effort towards existence and the morality of existence, as if they did not yet exist and wanted to establish themselves, as if they had not yet been created and sought to create themselves. In that stubborn, blind, endless striving they fall and arise under new names in new works, to fall again and strive again from non-being towards being, from animal towards human.
In the old, century-old phrasing: Vano, called to be a tragedian, perhaps an outstanding one, is forced to drag his role as a bearer of grief through the public square of our Armenian wretched life. And thank God that among the not-so-few comedians like him, among us, his stance remains the proudest: he will be the last to accept the defeat of us all.
This Hrant Matevossian is me, almost ten years ago. Ten years later, on the occasion of this book’s publication, I read my words and leafed through the whole body of work, and now I add:
What a caring, unerring hand laid down its pen in 1988! What a commanding master of truthful storytelling withdrew from literature! What an affectionate gaze broke away from our multitude of children and animals, old people and young men, women and men! In that tender, loving, forgiving gaze, accepting us as we are, we will never be recorded as a crowd, however much we lose ourselves, however corrupted and distorted we become. For we are mothers—his mother; brothers—his brother; children—his boyhood; homeland—his only place to live, establish himself and rest. And how unerring was the political thought of the approaching time twelve years ago, choosing him from the hundreds and thousands of our past: the one able to reject falsehood, whether the reality of life growing heavy or a literary reality; able not to bind himself either to the unanswerable convention of literary reality—“Well, we’re just talking, aren’t we?”—or to the convincing presence of life’s facts—“Well, it’s life, we obey, don’t we?”—but to keep himself in constant movement back and forth between abstraction and reality.
This is certainly no call for our fellow writer to return. That would be the wish of those whose peaceful enclosure in a casing is disturbed by his presence. On the contrary, it is a call to stand firm in politics, because enclosure there turns our common drama into a nationwide farce.