AN ATTEMPT AT A SELF-PORTRAIT
My four maternal uncles from the district town were at the front; now my father and his cousin Shakro had been called up. Shakro was also the son of my mother’s paternal aunt. Two of my uncles, Haykaz and Vardan, did not return; Shakro did not return. My eldest uncle, Voskan, came back bleeding from a wound that would not close, began drinking, and drinks to this day. My other uncle, Artash, never reached the front—I do not think he saw it. He was a “difficult lad”; probably with the consent of his father, my grandfather Ishkhan, the enlistment office wanted to rid the town of his troublesome presence, but each time he managed to run back. Artash recently died of cancer. Shakro left five children; my two uncles who were killed left none. And that is not the saddest thing, because in our village of Ahnidzor, far from centres and the civilisation of the time, many young men left not even a photograph. If by chance their likeness has reappeared in other young men of their family, some old woman will sometimes remember that such a person existed in the distant pre-war days. My father is alive: last summer he was mowing my favourite clearing, and a dark thrush foraged behind him like a domestic bird. It became very disturbed when I appeared; in its native inhabitant’s view, I was a stranger in the clearing belonging to it and the old mower. But I am speaking now of the moment when thirty-three-year-old Ignat, an excellent carpenter and silent tiller of the soil, and his thirty-two-year-old cousin Shakro—the brigade leader, the activist, the man who always managed to snatch some office from among the village’s powerful—stand before the district military commissar. Between them and the commissar stands my grandfather Ishkhan, a capable man, or a man whom the helplessness of his relatives from distant Ahnidzor in that strange town compels to be capable. He is obliged to help his sister’s son and his daughter’s husband, my father. Having explained clearly to the commissar that these two would leave eight orphans behind them, Grandfather has managed to defer the call-up of one or the other for the time being. One must stay in the village and be the man at the head of both families. Those directors of human destinies have for a moment left the choice of living or dying to Shakro and Ignat themselves: let them decide who goes to the front and who returns to the village. But Grandfather suddenly realises that the glamour of military life may attract Shakro, with his love of fine horses, songs, good clothes, polished leather boots and giving orders, while that same glamour may repel shy, withdrawn Ignat. So Grandfather chooses himself: “Shall I give them Ignat? I’ll give them Ignat, lad. Ignat is tongue-tied and helpless; the village has no use for Ignat.” As it happened, they took Shakro after Ignat as well. I also remember Grandfather Ishkhan in a soldier’s greatcoat. Three more orphans from the village of Dsegh joined the eight of us children left without the men, and Ishkhan’s hundred-year-old mother was brought to Ahnidzor from distant Sanahin. On long winter nights we older children, barely able to sound out the words, tried to read to this classroom of nursing infants and old women the house’s only work of literature: the splendid 1939 anniversary edition of “David of Sasun,” with its rustling protective sheets over the illustrations. Then the grandmother of us all, Ishkhan’s sister, took the book from our hands, closed it, pretended she was telling that very story, and told the nightmare of her own life. Perhaps one day I will be able to awaken our childish breathing from those distant nights, our understanding, our incomprehension, our fear, the old woman’s continued secrecy and hints after openly losing everything, when even a fairy-tale clarity about that life would have disclosed little to us children aged three to ten. Perhaps I will be able to. But I am certain I will tell how they stood a hereditary labourer before them, examined him and decided he was unfit to wrest his children’s bread from among other people—and he agreed.
WE WERE LUCKY: the recruits had been sorted in Makhachkala, and the rejects sent back to their enlistment offices. My father came with four others like him; those four became the joy of our collective farm, while the district enlistment office sent my father to a labour battalion for logging—in our forests from Dsegh to Ahnidzor, to fell and break up trees, send them downstream in snowmelt and floodwater, build dams, catch the timber, load it and saw it. With the end of the war the forest returned to the forestry enterprise, and the enterprise was removed from the enlistment office’s authority. But the substance of the army years was slow to leave the convenient form of this economic institution: out of habit, they gave workers a daily bread ration, disputed rights to forest clearings with neighbouring collective farms, owned hayfields and arable land, kept draught oxen and a dairy and meat operation. They were, in a way, both workers and peasants, and my father had no intention of leaving for our poor collective farm. So he was not as useless as Ishkhan had thought…
Published in part. You can download the complete version (PDF).