As though I had lost it, as though I had never received it—the hundred and forty roubles of my student grant dried up in a week. Whenever I received it, I multiplied the three roubles for a kilogram of bread by the thirty days of the month: ninety roubles, leaving a lavish, bewildering extra fifty for sweets, the theatre and the cinema. But some monstrously powerful jaws secretly swallowed my calculations every time, and every time I told myself, “This time it went wrong—with the next grant!”
The college had rented a room for us, put a stove in it, sometimes gave us an armful or two of wood, enough for about three fires. Like the grant, the wood flared up once, warmed us and was gone. Back in August, when I was to be brought to the college, my father and the man from our village who lived in Kirovakan sat at home in the yellow kerosene light, working out how I would live on a hundred and forty roubles. For some reason my father divided the grant by the price of bread on an abacus; the beads clicked dully. Our fellow villager said, “He’ll manage,” but did not know how I would manage; said, “It can be done!”—meaning I could live on that much money. My father did not believe him but did not object either: what would an objection achieve? They, the grown-ups—my father and our fellow villager, and the college authorities too—knew that the grant was paltry and the wood was paltry, but could not be generous however they tried, and put their faith in a miracle. The miracle was that we had been born to live, were children and had to live.
Hunching our thin shoulders, books under our arms, the group from Spitak and I came home almost at a run. The Spitak boys sorted out two weeks’ textbooks, stuffed them into their rucksacks and flew out to run to the station. It turned out I had been hurrying with them for nothing: they were rushing to catch a train, while I had nowhere to go. Their villages were nearby; they were going to spend at least a Sunday around the family tonir and return on Monday with bread and provisions. There was bread in their villages, whereas from distant Kirovakan I could feel our village’s poverty, swept bare. I was left alone in the cold, empty room. In front of a Spitak boy’s cupboard lay a tiny scrap of lavash, a mouse’s morsel—that and the cold stove were all there was. Hunger stared out of the dead stove, the cold bed, the silent radio and Jack London’s White Fang. Swallowing your saliva, you could hold your breath and hear the coal stove roaring in the landlord’s big room, his daughter turning a page on the divan with a shawl over her legs, and smell the bread on their table.
I went to our fellow villager’s house. They were good people; their daughter had been my friend at the village school, their daughter-in-law was fair-haired, pretty and warm-hearted. But they had finished their meal, my father’s friend had lain down for a little after-dinner nap, and the house was quiet. In that silence I grew shy, and they did not understand that my grant money had run out. They remembered our poverty in the village; I could not ask to borrow money as though on my father’s behalf. I was still too much a child to borrow against my future. I thought their daughter was a fool who would scarcely ever get into university, and left.
The gates of my teacher-training college were locked; until Monday I had no one there. Our Uncle Sedrak’s large house, broad yard and beautiful railings were wrapped that winter in the smell of hot food. Their stove burned so peacefully that not even smoke rose from the roof… But on my one previous visit they had not understood who I was to them. Uncle Sedrak had moved away from the village long ago and had seen my father as a child; he thought I was my father and said, “Does Uncle Avetik have a son as little as this?”
Turning sharply, I passed our Uncle Sedrak’s door once more, so that the mistress of the house, who had watched me walk past while taking a carpet off the railing, would recognise me and call me in. But the balcony was empty now and the doors were closed; the gramophone’s song came faintly from far inside. Tears and anger choked me.
With that same headlong rush I reached our lodging-room door and pushed it. Locked; the key was hanging on its usual nail; no one had come, no one was in the room—just the same silent radio, open book and scrap of lavash.
I unpicked the seam of the mattress the college had given me and pulled from the dirty, matted cotton the things that were always there, that no one in this city of Kirovakan knew about: my trekh shoes, the rawhide shoes my father had made. My canvas shoes always got wet, shrank and pinched my feet. Locking the door from inside, I stuffed the canvas shoes into the mattress, stood for a second in my socks—the floor was cold—put on my trekh shoes, straightened up and waited ready at the door until the landlord’s footsteps receded along the balcony. I shot out of the room, off the balcony and out of the yard faster than the landlords could spot me through their curtains.
Through moonlight and ice, accompanied by the cold barking of dogs, I went from Vanadzor to the station, ran beside a freight train, skipping between the sleepers, let all the wagons pass and jumped, clinging with my knees and fingers to the last one. My palms had stuck to the wet handrail, and that seemed a good thing: otherwise my hands would have come loose while I looked for a foothold. My cap was slipping off, my knees were scraped, but there was no blood because it was cold. “I’m going to Georgia, to Shulaver,” I lied to the guard. “My grandmother has died.” He took me under his fur coat; that kindness moved me a little inside, but I never told him I would get off three stations later, so he would expect the money he meant to ask for only nearer Shulaver. Once we had passed my station, before the train picked up speed, I sprang out of his coat and off the wagon. Feeling his gaze embarrassed me a little, but the train moved away. So everything went well: not being afraid of the dogs in Dsegh, or the snowy wind, or the dead. At dawn I pushed open the door of our warm, half-dark house and said with a smile, “I’ve come.” “Armo, dear?” My father sat up in bed.
Mother was blowing on the stove.
“Oh, may I go blind, my child’s money has run out, may I go blind.”
Mother’s soft breast and neck were warm, so warm.
“My dear brother?” Father sat up in bed in the dimness.
“May I go blind, blind, blind, so I don’t have to see…” The lamplight grew brighter. Hrayr appeared on the broad wooden divan, his neck thin, his big head almost between his legs, his bottom bare. Nanarik woke whimpering, sat up in bed and opened her eyes. “You’ve lit the lamp.” Then her rosy cheeks drew back, her eyes filled with a smile, her lips stretched and widened.
“May I go blind, your money must have run out…”
The stove crackled, almost danced, then caressed us with warmth, love and family.
“Hey, you’ve come?” Hrayr had pulled his head out from between his legs. “I’ll tell you a riddle. If you guess it, I’ll go to Kirovakan instead of you. What is it: its nose is warm, its bottom cold?”
“That’s a fine way to welcome your brother,” Father said, putting on his trekh shoes.
“And what has he brought me from town?”
“Hungry, thirsty, at other people’s doors… May I go blind.” Father went to feed the cows. The hens poured out of the byre; the goat stood with her feet on the rails, waiting for hay. The cow Nakhshun turned her neck to look at me and lowed. Her udder had filled and softened; she would soon calve. Satik was due to calve at the end of May.
“This is the hard year,” Father said. “If you can bear this year, in November I’ll give you the money for Nakhshun.”
I did not want anything to change in that house or anything to be taken away from it.
“Don’t sell Nakhshun,” I said.
“She’ll have to be sold,” Father said. “For you, she’ll have to be sold.”
“I won’t take it. Don’t sell her, I won’t take it.”
He smiled gently and, passing, pressed my head to his chest. I quickly cleaned the byre, packed the hay into the manger and felt for the calf: inside its mother’s belly it was playing like joy.
“Your grandfather Avetik,” Mother said as she came into the byre, “knew cows like a doctor, but never had his fill of bread. Have nothing to do with cattle.”
We ate potatoes fried in beech-nut oil and drank tea made with dried pears. At midday we ate potatoes boiled with salt and pickled cabbage. Hrayr suddenly showed Nanar a wolf on the wall and snatched one of her potatoes. There was no lying wolf on the wall, and one of her potatoes seemed to have disappeared.
“Armik, does four come after three, or five?”
“Four.”
“Then why haven’t I got five potatoes?”
“Count to ten and you’ll have ten,” Hrayr said.
“How can I count four as ten?”
“One, two, three, four, five… ten.” And Hrayr had the trap opened, shouldered it and took it off to catch a fox: he had seen a fox’s tracks in the snow near our poor neighbourhood. Father was still not back.
“May I go blind, dear Armik, do you get very cold?”
“When I come back from classes, I go to Hasmik’s. Hasmik and I sit beside the stove until her family comes home. Then I get into bed and read.”
“And in the mornings?”
“In the mornings we run, and when we run we aren’t cold any more.”
“But in bed you’ll be reading stories. When do you study your lessons?”
“I’ve been to the theatre once too.”
“Don’t be shy, go to Uncle Sedrak’s now and then.”
“I don’t need them.”
“There’ll be hot food.”
Father came in embarrassed, as though entering someone else’s house. He had taken our one sack of wheat to be ground, but the mills were frozen; he had brought no flour, had brought the wheat back. People coming up along the river had said that all the mills on our stream, down to the great Debed, were frozen and not working. And if they worked, what would they grind?
“May I go blind. If we grind some wheat into groats on our hand mill, can you cook yourself a meal like a man? There’ll be hot food, dear Armik, and it’ll last you a month; it isn’t bread, it won’t go bad. Let’s grind some groats.”
“I would cook, but there’s no wood. When the college gives us wood, we burn it in two days.”
“Who is Hasmik? Give it to Hasmik; she’ll cook it on their stove.”
“We could do that,” Father said.
But we could not, because Hasmik would find out that all I ate was water and groats.
“We can’t,” Hrayr said over his book. Father and Mother turned to him:
“Why can’t we, you big-eared rascal?”
“Armik’s in love with Hasmik.”
“Is that written in your book?”
I managed not to blush.
“Armik, when people fall in love, ho-ow do they fall in love?” Nanarik drawled. Father and Mother laughed, and that saved me.
“The way you fall in love with your father,” Mother said.
“I fall in love with Daddy, but I fall in love with Armik too.”
“And your big-eared brother Hrayr?”
“Hrayr stole my potato.”
Mother and Father drew into a corner and, talking it over, realised that groats from that wheat would be good for me, but I would be ashamed before the landlord’s daughter, because it would be nothing but water and groats. The hand mill rolled briskly into the middle of the room. Swinging his big head on his thin neck, Hrayr turned the mill, while Nanarik toasted half the wheat for pokhindz. After we sifted the ground grain, coarse flour fell through and we ground the larger pieces left on top again. Then we ground Nanarik’s toasted wheat, but so that Hrayr would not suddenly steal some toasted grains, she drove him away and hung from the mill’s handle herself. There were fine groats, flour and pokhindz, toasted-wheat flour. The flour became dough, and the dough was almost proper dough; the groats were tied in one bag, the pokhindz in another. That thief Hrayr did manage to steal a handful of pokhindz after all, through Mother’s fault.
“It’s all because of you,” Nanar cried, “all because of your guilty fault.”
Smiling with her lips closed, Mother wished her green, cloudless days, a good boy, a good companion; prayed for Hrayr to have a master of ceremonies’ job in bright, warm palaces; saw me in a white shirt before a class, explaining a lesson to pupils… And the world was so clean, the voices so clear, happiness rang so brightly, that Mother laid herself beneath the silent stones of the green graveyard, and her heart fluttered with joy and sadness.
“Hrayr—to your lessons, Nanar—into the corner, Armen—into the tub, quickly!” Mother ordered.
“What tub!”
“Armik’s having a bath.”
“I’ll pour the water.”
“You’re a girl, Armik’s a boy. Turn your face to the wall.”
“Armik’s a little brother, not a boy.”
“I had a bath yesterday.”
“Who scrubbed your back, may I go blind, who washed your head, who rubbed your feet?”
“Hasmik,” Hrayr read in his textbook.
Mother tossed me into the tub; suddenly I saw I was naked. I would not let her finish undressing me; she pulled down, I pulled up. Laughing, she slapped my hands. I wanted to cry, but hot water poured into my mouth and burned my head. I coughed, then soap seized my eyes and closed my mouth. Through the soap, Hrayr was smirking; Nanar was busy with serious work in her corner. Later, when I was back in Kirovakan, I understood what serious work she had been doing. I thought my hands down below were holding up my underwear; my underwear was not on me. That was something to howl in protest about, but the water burned and my hands flew up to protect my head. “Ho-o-ot!” Water entered my mouth, soap plastered my eyes and cold bit my shoulder. “Co-o-old!” There was the slap of a wet hand and Hrayr’s laughter—so Hrayr had poured the cold water. Then soft water wrapped me from head to foot, caressed, stroked and cherished me. Strong, familiar fingers took hold of my nose: “Blow… again.” And the soft towel embraced my head like a mother’s breast.
In a daze, Nanar was covering my shoulder; a bristly chin kissed my forehead; something played inside my heel, neither a tickle nor quite pain; I jumped from the train and fell into soft cotton. This is our home. Hrayr and I will take the sledge, go to the forest and bring back wood so dry it crumbles. On the icy road the sledge will run away; we will brace our frozen trekh shoes against the ground, but the ice will not hold. The sledge will fly off the top of a rock. Shivering, we will give the cows water and hay and run to the stove. We will spread potato slices on it, sprinkle them with salt and read Jean-Christophe beside the stove. If we fall ill, someone will murmur words of prayer and love and kiss our foreheads; our aunt will have come from her house in the middle of the village. Through the mist her anxious smile will appear, her single apple, and the apple’s fragrance will seem like mist.
“I’m not going to Kirovakan!”
“Little, so little—she isn’t nine yet.”
“It’s co-old, everyone has a coat… I won’t take your bread away.”
“I’ll grab you and beat you like a dog.”
“As if you will… Keep your bread, I’m not taking your bread.”
“Sahak owes your father money. When he pays, we’ll buy a coat.”
“In Ma-ay!”
“We can’t strangle the man.”
“What do I care? Strangle him.”
“You are my clever Armen, my hope, my future, your poor father’s helper. You must become the foremost man in the city of Kirovakan.”
“I won’t!”
“You will, and you’ll say: my mother was right.”
That evening we ate potatoes boiled with salt and drank tea with honey cakes. Ten loaves were cooling on the windowsill, ready to be stacked and tied up. Later I would receive the hundred and forty roubles of my grant. Nanarik was smiling, but she threw up. In bed she smiled again, her mouth closed, cheeks red, lips stretched. Father came from the byre. What had he brought, what had he brought, what had he brought? In that deep winter he had brought Nanar one white egg. Who had laid it, who had laid it, who had laid it?…
“Golden Co-o-omb!”
“Who’s going to eat it, who’s going to eat it, who’s going to eat it?…”
“Spread it… spread it, spread it,” Nanarik stammered. “Spread it on bread and make gata.”
Mother secretly shed a tear or two.
“She won’t live,” Mother cried. “She is so good she has no right to live. How will she live in this world?” Mother choked.
Later the family slept. Hrayr had his bottom on the pillow, his head between his legs. Nanar had a knee on Armik’s chest and was smiling in her sleep; Armen’s arm was beneath his sister’s head. He breathed with the full capacity of his clean pink lungs and grew a handspan every ten minutes. In his dream Hrayr lied that the trap had caught a fox as big as a wolf, almost a wolf, its pelt worth five hundred roubles. Father walked through the softness of green fields. In the dark room the stove shrank as it cooled; Mother, her eyes open, saw cold Kirovakan beneath the moon, a brown, honey-scented summer, a white shirt on Armen, the goat’s full udder and a reddening tomato.
“When Sahak pays his debt…”
That was on the road already.
“When Sahak pays his debt, send it to me. I’ll buy Hrayr a hat with earflaps and Nanar a coat.”
“Nanar stays at home, and Hrayr goes to school in the afternoon. She doesn’t need a coat, nor does he need a hat.”
“The holiday grant comes to four hundred and twenty roubles. Three times a hundred and forty.”
“Keep talking, and keep walking. What does a boy’s coat cost?”
“I went to look once, but the shop was shut. It was cold, and I ran back to our lodgings.”
“What’s wrong with the way you’re walking?”
“I don’t know if my foot hurts or itches.”
“Never mind, it’s a foot, not a head. You’ll become a fine man and travel by car and horse. You’ll say on the telephone: it’s me, send a horse so I can come.”
“Should I come in March or not?”
“Whatever suits you.”
“But if everyone goes home, what will I do on my own?”
“You aren’t everyone, you’re Armen. You must remember this day.”
“When I come in summer, I’ll pick raspberries. We’ll take them to Dilijan and sell them.”
“Better find some light work in Kirovakan, as a watchman or something.”
“In summer too?”
“Come often. Your foot seems to hurt.”
“I don’t know if it hurts or itches. But it’s money: we’ll make more from raspberries than from watchman’s work.”
“Take your mind away from this swept-bare poverty, this village falling apart.”
“In summer too?”
“In summer, and always.”
When I looked back from Honut hill, she was kneeling before the chapel of Saint Sargis. She was not a believer; now, for my sake, she had become one. From the bend by the crosses, she was still kneeling before the chapel. On the snowdrop hill I stopped, pretending to adjust my load, and secretly looked back over my shoulder: she stood below the chapel in the white snow, and her hand said, go, go, go. In the cold silence I seemed to hear her voice, thin as the song of a spinning wheel:
“Go, go, go…”
I sat down to rest at Aygetak, and my heel began to sting. I thought it had gone numb; I took off my shoe and sock and rubbed it. As I rubbed, the stinging gathered into a ball of needles, then the pain softened and rounded like a baked apple. The cold had taken my heel. When I jumped from the train, my heel had broken the ice on a puddle, got wet and then become frostbitten on the road. The pain swelled and struck the walls of the bone in tiny flashes, inward, inward. I took some snow and rubbed that heel with it until the pain went cold. The pain died down. “Now go…” I cursed the pain as one curses a living enemy. As I rubbed my heel and the pain shrank back into its den, I felt someone secretly watching me. I felt that outside gaze and felt its admiration. It was saying, “Lucky your father, to have a son like you,” and I considered myself worthy of its admiration. I deserved such praise.
I put on my sock and shoe, tied the rawhide lace and, lifting my head as I rose, saw a dog sitting in the snow, watching me. “Basar?” I asked with a tenderness born of pain. But it did not accept my tenderness, because it was a wolf. He drew back, not as though fleeing, but just enough to make it clear that he was a wolf. “What do you want, you beast?” I cried, but he spread his feet and held fast. “You’re all I needed, you…” Years later I remembered and realised that this had been the only curse of my youth.
“You’re all I needed, you…” With his spine bent like a young oak and his fingers hooked, that child advanced towards the wolf, placing his steps one by one, hardening and growing with every step. The wolf’s tail went between his legs; he bristled. Nanar smiled in her sleep, Father lay wearily on the divan; in those old days the Japanese had taken Grandfather Simon’s knee out and put it into their general’s knee, telling him: you can go. I had heard that when I was little: we thin children told terrible things in a cold classroom, shrinking from other people’s pain and huddling against the cold stove.
His pale eyes fixed on the beast’s mindless stare, the child went to strangle him. With a dry throat the child murmured words to strengthen himself and pressed straight towards the wolf’s eyes. The wolf looked away from those pale eyes, tilted his head and kicked up powdery snow: he was lulling the child so he could leap. But the child knew he was being deceived and advanced slowly towards the wolf, hard as a club; the wolf forgot he was a wolf and sprang back with a yelp.
The child now stood where the wolf had trampled, straightened, grown, victorious: now he was a peasant man of twenty or twenty-five. “Come, come,” he said mockingly. The wolf backed away, spun in a leap, retreated and kicked up powdery snow with his tail and feet. “We know that trick,” the child said. Again the wolf backed away yelping, leapt forward, turned and fled a little. He rushed back and ran away as though pursued. Something like a deliberate plan appeared in his actions; an intelligent enemy seemed to have entered the wolf’s skin and was looking out from within. An unknown edge of terror was opening. Was this a wolf, a hyena, or death itself? The child’s sinews began to freeze. The child was being annihilated before the wolf attacked. “Da-a-addy!” But he felt that his voice was dead already. As in a dream, the wolf was still dancing, approaching and withdrawing, backing away, spinning in a leap, coming forward a little and running back a leap or two as though pursued. The child saw himself rise from where he had been sitting, stand up; his mother passed through the snow with a switch in her hand. On the white snow another familiar presence appeared, very familiar, dear, one of their family. He approached it and realised he had approached the sack. “Dear sack,” he said and cried, “he wanted to eat me.” And the wolf was still dancing, approaching and withdrawing. The child told the sack that the wolf had wanted to trick him, trick him as donkeys are tricked.
The wolf wanted me to pursue him, supposedly a coward, pursue him to a hidden place far from the road. Instead I turned and shouldered the sack of pokhindz, groats and bread. The wolf stood piecing together what had happened and what he should do, but that strange prey was moving away without giving him time to think. He followed it helplessly, hoping to find what to do along the road. The prey stopped, and the wolf waited; the prey hurried, and the wolf hurried. Now the prey gave the orders and the wolf obeyed. The prey turned and said, “What do you want, you beast?” The wolf stopped too and, not quite understanding, looked about. The prey adjusted the load on its back and went on, no longer taking any notice of the wolf, and he followed like an ordinary travelling companion. Near the ridge of hills the boy adjusted his load and said, “Come, come, I’ll give you to the dogs of Dsegh.” But the wolf glanced at a mouse leaping in the snow and waited.
At a bend they once came very close. The wolf bristled and thought he was about to leap, but at that moment a plane thundered over the earth and faded away. Then something like a dog’s howl drew out in the ears, and from the hilltop Dsegh glittered ahead. The wolf did not turn back: he thought for a moment and walked parallel to the boy. The village was wrapped in dogs’ barking; lights rose and fell, pecked at his eyes from behind the roofs, while the boy invited him into the village with a smirk:
“Since you’ve come this far, why won’t you come this little bit farther?”
Their paths slowly drew apart: the boy’s road entered the village, while the wolf’s trail seemed to circle along the radius of the barking. But as soon as the trail touched the forest, he folded his gliding course back and, at a trot, cut by the shortest route towards Aygetak, where, in his foolish opinion, I was still sitting in the snow rubbing my foot.
As far as Dsegh the wolf, and from Dsegh to the station the memory of the wolf, kept my foot from hurting. The station hall was bright and warm. A Russian captain’s immense wife slept with her head in her husband’s lap; a group of soldiers, embarrassed before the captain and by their own true feelings, secretly made fun of a flirtatious woman from Stepanavan. A man very like my father broke apart a boiled chicken and pushed a leg into my hand. His child salted the meat in his own hand, salted his father’s piece, took a pinch of salt and slid off the bench to stand before me. With her arms crossed beneath her large breasts, a mother and wife looked warmly at me and the child… And in that warm tenderness my foot burst into a howl. The pain had found sympathy and wanted to be cherished. With meat in my mouth, I writhed as though being torn apart; people were already gathering around me… but the train arrived.
“If I cut off your ears now, what will you say?” the mail-wagon guard asked calmly.
“If they’re no use, cut them off. If they’re useful, why cut them off?”
“Your tongue’s too long. Let’s cut off your tongue.”
“But why cut it off?”
“Do you know where you’ve climbed?”
“Into a mail wagon.”
“Why?”
“So I don’t have to pay.”
“What do you mean, not pay?”
“Just that.”
“Do you know it’s forbidden?”
“I know.”
“Then why did you climb in?”
“I climbed in specially to steal your mail, take the letters away and read them.”
“There’s nothing for it, I’ll have to cut off your tongue.”
“What will I recite my lessons with?”
“Are you a student?”
“At the teacher-training college.”
“You’re going to be a teacher. Where are you from?”
“From our village.”
“A wit too, are you? What’s in that sack?”
“A buffalo. I stole it. Want half?”
“What if I stop the train now and put you off in this field?”
“Stop it.”
“What’s in that sack?”
“Whatever it is, it’s for me, not for you.”
“If you’d got into a proper carriage, how much would you have paid?”
“I wouldn’t have paid.”
“What do you mean, you wouldn’t? Is this your father’s cart?”
“Yes, my father’s cart, it’s my father’s cart.”
“What if I put you off in this field now?”
“What if I put you off?”
“Get down, get down, get down of your own accord or I’ll send you flying.”
“Do you keep pigeons, then?”
All the way to Kirovakan he ate my soul. In my disgust I could not remember the pain for a single second.
The bread was salty, like sand; it could not be chewed. While I was being bathed, Nanarik had withdrawn into a corner, added salt to the dough again and poured in water, but there had been no flour. I wanted to be angry with her, but from far away I longed for her little cheeks when she smiled with her mouth closed. However hungry I became, the bread could not be eaten. I deceived myself that I could not eat it because, secretly from myself, I kept eating a little pokhindz. I hid the pokhindz from myself, but the bread still could not be chewed.
The Spitak boys finished their lavash, spent their roubles and, as they read, secretly listened to my bread. But the bread was salty; I was ashamed to give them any.
The landlord’s Hasmik knocked at the door, put her beautiful head inside, came to ask where the Iberian Peninsula was and to look into my face. But I had no time, I did not know where the peninsula was; let them leave me alone with my troubles, I was reading attentively. “Huh, as if I cared!” Hasmik took offence and left. Her ears turned pink with hurt; her thick braid, tied tightly at the root with a white ribbon, swung and wrapped around her neck as the door slammed… But the bread was salty; no one must know that my mother had baked salty bread.
From so much cold water my throat became infected, and the Spitak boys smiled mockingly because I had not pitied them or given them a piece of bread. Hasmik’s mother brought tea, but I was not ill, I did not need their tea or… I loved my wolf on the road and the mail-wagon guard more than those who pitied me. That pity was killing me.
They said Mamikonyan, the literature teacher, had asked about me and was coming to see me… I dressed, locked the cupboard and fled our lodgings. The towers of the Arev sanatorium swayed beneath a crow’s cold cawing; an orange peel or an apple appeared and vanished in the snow. A dog’s bark was as distant as a memory, yet the dog rushed at me and sprang back with a yelp. Uncle Sedrak’s almost-palace was clean and spacious, and the smell of watery soup now drifted through the warm kitchen, but his daughter-in-law was always angry and never smiled. Would I return to our lodgings by Brickmakers’ Street or Schoolchildren’s Street? Mo-o-other!…
That night they took me into Hasmik’s home. Her father held a compress to my forehead; her mother was warming food. When her father studied in Yerevan, he had fallen ill with exactly my illness, and his landlord’s daughter had cured him. Yet here I had treated Hasmik roughly: she would not have let me fall ill, she was almost a trained doctor. “You ate salted fish and drank cold water? Why drink cold water after salted fish? Never mind, if it was salted fish, you’ll be well in two days.” He pressed my jaws, opened my mouth and poured food in. “You’re the size of my child; I’ll give you a beating.” He made me swallow my tears, the hot food, the pus. “We’re brothers now,” he said. He left for the morning shift, and I got up and went into our room, into my cold bed.
“I’ve brought you tea with lemon in it.”
“No one asked you for lemon.”
“Do you want it without lemon?”
“No one asked you for tea.”
“Huh!”
“Go away.”
“I won’t.”
“You’re being told to leave this room.”
Her father came home from work. He came and sat wearily on my bed. He did not know whether to talk or doze. Everything about him—the knock at the door, the way he sat as though collapsing, the way he rose, his speech—everything, his whole being, was slow and unstoppable. He said:
“Well, what do you say: am I the good fellow or are you?”
He said:
“It hurts, never mind, don’t speak.”
He said:
“But you and I are going to eat bread together.”
I looked at my cupboard and turned to stone.
“We’ll put out your bread,” he said, “put out my bread and eat together like men, like friends. I have grape spirit from Shulaver. We’re living,” he said, “we’re living already.”
I shook my head in refusal. He said:
“I’m not asking for your sake, I’m saying it for mine. I can’t eat alone. The army taught me close companionship.”
He was deceiving me.
“You’re lying,” I said.
“I’m lying,” he said. “Whether I’m lying or not, I’m the elder.”
He bent heavily and, heavily, as though lifting a heavy stone, took a loaf from my cupboard, breathed in its smell with his whole lungs and said it in a way I remember to this day:
“It’s the smell of our hard-earned bread. Get up.”
On the way along their balcony to the dining room, I sweated and dried ten times over. Before me was his heavy back, and in his hand my salty, dry bread. I was ashamed to look at Hasmik, because she could see I was losing. The bread baked by my mother and little sister, the bread from the wheat my father had carried under his arm down to the mill at Hovit and, sweating with effort and frustration, carried back up to the village… He set that bread beside their light, white, fragrant city bread and sat down with his elbows on the table. He supported a family; there was vodka on his table, their tablecloth was clean and white, their house was warm, he had brought a sick boy in to feed him, he was calm… He did not understand that the boy’s throat was blocked with tears. Slowly, sip by sip, he drank the vodka, stretched out his heavy hand, broke that bread with one hand, broke it again, sniffed it and chewed.
He kept chewing and winked at me.
“Never mind,” he said, “you’re a man, but we’re men too. Have you ever eaten mustard, nothing but mustard—gorchitsa?”
He chewed my salty, heavy bread and told his story. He would not let his wife or daughter touch that bread; he took it, set it before him and told his story while chewing slowly, as though grinding stone:
“Mustard, pure mustard, only mustard—gorchitsa. You get top marks in history, you know what the siege of Leningrad was, but you know nothing. When they squeeze your throat, squeeze it again, keep squeezing it, and it isn’t even a dream you can wake from and escape—they look into your eyes and squeeze to strangle you—that is the siege of Leningrad. There was a ruined building beneath the snow; he dug through the snow, dug, dug, pushed it back… No, why like a dog? What is a dog, could it endure… but we are human, aren’t we… He dug through the snow, pushed it back, dug and found a box of mustard—gorchitsa, mustard flour. In white time, in the whole white world, a box of mustard. He mixed it with snow, made mustard mud, mixed it with difficulty because there was no warmth in his hands, the snow would not melt, and drank the mustard mud. His intestines began to burn; he would have sworn he could see their flames. He clutched his belly with both hands, folded into the space between his own legs and fell. He lay like that in the snow, with neither strength nor memory left inside, but he knew the mustard was inside him now, it was his, it would keep him alive by killing him. Eat your bread,” he said. “Who have you come to, and what are you boasting about?”