His “The General’s Sister,” about massacre and revenge, was in our school textbooks. It was a dreadful, nightmarish reality, but in our village in Lori, where a special kindness seemed to have settled after the war and all of us children were the children of all the grown-ups, our pure young hearts could not believe such cruelty: the orphans of slaughtered parents avoided people like wild animals. It happened long ago, there—we did not know where. An explanation from the teacher was needed. I cannot now remember our teacher’s intervention; perhaps she did tell us and fill in who we were, whom we had troubled, whose path we had been thrown out of. But our hearts rejected her insistence, too. I distinctly remember that the ending upset us most: the general had word sent that he was not the brother of the Armenian woman from the diaspora whose appeal brought both anguish and hope. The story was about one person being filled with another’s pain, so that was a true answer. But we schoolchildren sought a different truth: the general had to be that very orphan who hid from people holding his sister’s hand. That “there” also nestled on another page of the school textbook; Hrachya Kochar whispered about it once again. It was a wonderful story about brotherly love, care, separation and rural labour. At night the married brother moved sheaves from his own stack to his younger brother’s, since the younger one still had a family to establish; the next night the younger brother moved sheaves from his stack to his elder brother’s, since the elder one already had a family. I was familiar with the threshing floor and the sheaves in moonlight, with the secret pact of brotherly concern, with the worries, and with what it meant that “the wife drove herself like a sharp wedge between the brothers.” All these things already existed here, in our village of Ahnidzor, just as they were described, but they seemed to be blessed with the peaceful moonlight of beauty and goodness solely because they were there, at the foot of distant Mount Npat.
Kochar himself was always there, from beginning to end; among us schoolchildren he sought kindred spirits. That “there” was no dying dream for him, nor was his last “White Book” a final confession. He was there when he stood in a Soviet officer’s uniform before another enemy. That “there” was his oath as soldier and writer. He was there when, in the north, standing as the Red commander Gai before regiments of other tongues and other origins, he murmured in Armenian, “Brothers, brothers”—meaning that he hoped and believed he could bring those regiments to his creed. And he was there when he brought “The Children of the Great House” back to the same question.
He was there when, in the film novella “The Northern Rainbow,” he directed the advance of Yermolov’s army—an advance bearing hope—and, compelled by the weight of historical facts, also directed the disappointment that advance had brought. He was there when, before us students at the pedagogical institute, he spent three whole hours recounting, simply recounting—what a splendid storyteller he was!—his journey through the Armenian communities of the Middle East. There are a thousand ways to live: it was an intelligent, restrained and practical programme for living with honour and taking responsibility for one’s victories and defeats.
He returned to one and the same place of pilgrimage, sometimes from the past, sometimes from the future, more often from the present. He changed directions and times, never the point of convergence. Many-faced, belonging to many times, resourceful, he was the same Kochar: the fedayi who had arrived too late for the fight, his very short life bound in a predicament with no way out. Once he even shattered those bonds. As the herdsman of the wonderful “Longing,” he burst across the border to “go just once and see our mountains and valleys.” It was madness—the madness of a free being caged—but madness, too, was a way out, at least in literature. He returned among people defeated, and gave himself to the wildflowers and grass: he would tell them his pain, or not even tell them, but be silent and meekly eaten away by it. That, too, is reality, but that was no longer Hrachya Kochar.
He himself was a powerful man; the direction in which he looked became the direction we had to look. He succeeded in making his hopes and his grief ours.