Here is what happened in the autumn of the ninth grade: one more hot, sweet and rough summer had made men of us, while Davtyan, the headmaster and geography teacher, half asleep in the softness of long service and a secure life, indifferent to whether we studied well or badly, to the teachers’ secret laughter, said to us through his drowsiness:
‘Shut up, monkeys.’
During haymaking, at night, lame and shameless Spandar had slipped away from beneath the haystack in his socks; then tall Lena rose in the moonlight, waited anxiously for a moment and took a step with her long, strong leg. At that change of footing the sleepy widow Gino sat up: “Eh? Who is it? What is happening?” That was how it was. That had happened in the summer; I had read The Decameron, last year’s clothes were growing tight on the girls, Ignatios’s Jemma threw her bag to me on the way to school—“Take it to our house”—and went off with the driver from Kirovakan to become his wife. Skinny Garush from Shamut had seen the new teacher’s bra hanging out to dry; grey-green-eyed Anahit laid her head in her palms and looked and looked at me. Yet that Davtyan said with the laziness of age and a soft life:
‘Shut up, good-for-nothing monkeys.’
Let me see, I thought, whether he is entirely asleep or a little asleep and a little awake. I said:
‘We are not the monkeys.’
It turned out he was not asleep. He said:
‘Who was that?’
Last year’s dresses were growing tight on the girls, we had seen the new teacher’s bra hanging out to dry, in summer Gino had interrupted splendid Lena and lame Spandar, and that Anahit’s woollen dress and skin were strained by the tautness of her breasts. I unfolded myself, rose and waited with my head tilted ironically. He said:
‘You are not the monkeys? Then who is the monkey?’
Garush’s skinny sister had turned back fearfully from the desk in front; Anahit’s grey-green gaze filled my back with a shiver. I braced both hands on the desk, my shoulders rose, and I said:
‘Some people.’ And I looked at him without blinking.
‘What people?’
‘It depends,’ I said.
He threw me out of the classroom:
‘Go and become a swineherd.’
With what I had earned that summer I had bought myself shoes, trousers, a shirt, a jacket, a watch, swimming trunks and a fountain pen; for my mother, a shawl; for the children, sweets. That September the French teacher, the Pioneer leader and all the girls in the eighth, ninth and tenth grades trembled with warmth and secrets; those girls could not fit within themselves. And I said:
‘Think what you like.’
So that teachers and pupils would respect him not only when speaking to him but also while eating, reading and walking, he expelled me from school. “Monkey,” he concluded. I did not tell him “You are the monkey yourself”, and that left some hope that if he were properly begged, he would take me back. My father sent me to vocational school. Seven children made noise at home and consumed bread and potatoes. “You will become a stonemason and help the household.”
‘Box!’
‘Stop! With your left! Only your left! You have no right hand. Left. Box! Your left, your left, your left, your left! Well done!’
In the first round I mashed Karapet Karapetyan’s nose. He had come down to the school from Aparan, had the bulk of a bull and charged as though to gore me. In fourteen of our fifteen bouts that year I battered his broad face. I was already bored with him; he tired me by being beaten continually. His presence no longer troubled or tensed me, and precisely then, in our fifteenth meeting, he came down on my jaw with a force that could dislocate it: he made me lick the floor’s dust mixed with the insipid taste of my blood.
‘Your left, your left, your left!’ The trainer hopped around us. ‘Where had you forgotten your left, sleepyhead?’
That autumn they took us to Moscow for competitions. What is called an opponent was no opponent, because he was not there. On the platform in the cage of ropes there was one victory and one defeat. They gave the victory to the Bashkir Makanin and the defeat to me, so he and I must have boxed. But I did not see him opposite me, my hand did not find him. Apparently he was somewhere nearby, because they applauded him, but he was not there, not there. I fought the air, the ropes, mistook the referee for Makanin. “Your left, your left, your left,” my trainer whispered. Once or twice I saw Makanin’s catlike eyes behind the gloves, then he was again not there, not there. “Your left, your left, your left,” the trainer whispered. I turned suddenly to strike that Makanin with my right, my left, my knee and my head, smash his agility to pieces, turn him into a sportsman, an opponent, place him before me; but again he was not there, and my own momentum threw me onto the ropes. And I was ashamed to raise my head and see the laughing mouths in the warm dampness and half-dark.
‘I am sick of you and your left, left, left!’ I shouted at the trainer, dropping my hands.
And bread would not go down, the softness of the bed was wasted, and girls did not stir the man in me.
That year a long essay of mine appeared in the newspaper. The story about boxers did not appear. They said: here is the platform, these are the ropes, these the opponents, this the referee; all are there, is anyone absent? No. They said: here the athletes, through their strength, drive their victory out of the unknown; what do you mean by “there was one victory and one defeat in the cage of ropes”? The essay about builders won first prize. In the spring of my eighteenth year I came to know a woman. That day, in the hotel bath, I remembered the village school and Davtyan. And I smirked, because this was how it had turned out: Davtyan predicted swineherding for me, I turned back to say “think what you like”, while Meruzhan from Shamut had raised his hand and badly wanted to recite the lesson because he understood that day’s lesson. There, in my mind, he was still begging to be called on, while I had been to Moscow, won, lost, and now was in a hotel, bathing. I finished secondary school at evening classes. When the boys from Shamut and Tsmakut arrived, collars buttoned, sweating, sleepless and frightened of the unknown future and the examiners’ monstrous severity, everyone at the university doors was talking about a composition with the value of a dissertation and the brilliance of a classic short story. It was my written paper. I asked the boys from Shamut and Tsmakut: how is Davtyan? And added benevolently: he is a tired man, after all. And I asked the Tsmakut boys: what does my father think of stonemasonry?
‘Brother, have you learnt your lesson?’ I said to Meruzhan in our dialect. ‘Come to get into the instoot, have you?..’
That year they tried again to draw me into boxing and failed, but my successes were numerous enough for me to be shattered by them: three essays and a story appeared in succession; I opened a grand evening meeting with a poet; everyone would have gone to Tbilisi with a fluttering heart to take part in their student scientific conference, but I declined. During my interview with the world-famous Saryan he made an error in a moment of inattention; I said, might it not be otherwise? He immediately agreed and corrected the error in accordance with my opinion. In political economy lectures I was writing a long newspaper essay, sometimes challenging the lecturer; he flew into a rage while I wrote the essay, winked at Vergine, blew on Bersabe’s smooth nape and said over my shoulder to Suren, who poked my back every minute: “You son of a dog, we will drink together, let me finish.”
While the horse Alkho was inching Fox Gikor and its load from Kazakh towards the village of Tsmakut, I, in a soft carriage of the Yerevan–Moscow express, imagined myself a pampered success, handsome, loved and God’s punishment upon women: “Ah, that Hrant Karyan…” Dumas père enjoyed fame and women—that was me; Kutuzov slept at the hour of battle—that was me; our King Artavazd passed before Cleopatra on his way to beheading, his crowned head held high—that was me. Nobel Prize, toro-toreador, garçon, two bottles of cognac to table three, the she-kitten Brigitte Bardot, Girl on a Ball. “I tell you: the emperor is waiting for you.” “Tell the emperor I shall be an hour late.”
“‘Vergine?.. Vergine!’
‘It is late, already late.’
‘Vergine!’
‘Four years… from the first day… At home, on the tram, in lectures, at camp, on the excavations… Four years… where were you?..’
‘Vergine…’
‘Too late.’
‘Well then, Vergine… happy housewifery to you.’”
That was just how it had happened. Vergine married an engineer, ran to her final examination with sweat beneath her nose, dashed out of the examination to breastfeed her child; while one day the newest star of French cinema would come to Yerevan, or Hrant would go to Paris. My pedestal was my mother’s shrill admiration for me, the astonished gaze of our ten children, my father’s hidden pride, Associate Professor Akhverdyan’s proposal in the corridor: “Stay for postgraduate study.” And the fact that this was the Yerevan–Moscow train, an express, and mine. In the carriage corridor, feeling my pressed trousers, I could walk slowly back and forth; open the window—it was hot; smoke—there were ashtrays and I knew where; lie with one leg over the other—it was my place. Fox Gikor and a couple of milkmaids had indeed gone to Moscow in nineteen thirty-nine, probably by express, but had not felt its comfort: they were taken in a group, as though in a box—“This is the Kremlin, this the Moscow River, this the mausoleum”—and sent back. Yet here in the corridor the Georgian girl in trousers had fixed her eyes, large as eggs, on me and looked and looked, while I noticed or did not notice the poor girl. And the third passenger in the compartment was short-sighted and half-bald, while I was so successful, handsome, my grey striped trousers pressed, black shoes clean, dark tie loosened over my white shirt. Here I was bent so wearily after winning a great argument; the poor Georgian girl’s gaze was still fixed on my compartment door, and the second passenger, probably the bespectacled man’s wife, had thrust her fingers into her golden hair and wanted not to look at me but could not help it. Byron glanced at her sad eyes, magnificent forehead, long fingers in golden hair and long legs beneath the little table, and Byron patted his mouth and yawned. “Will you stay for postgraduate study? Stay.” And those half-literate lecturers, that half-literate associate professor too: the origin of the verb, Meillet says, Acharian says, Vvedensky says, Aghayan says. And my sharp retort: what about you? And the girls’ frightened eyes on me.
The white July day; in the garden Vergine, screened by her husband, breastfeeds her child, while upstairs it is already her turn, perhaps her turn has passed, and she has not prepared well: “The origin of money, money as…” Oh, you are wearing me out, eat… Yet there, beyond the blue shadows, in the July sunshine, Hrant Karyan slowly passed: tall, straight, clean. The son of a dog, what is walking? He walks—he is handsome; comes sleepily to a lecture—handsome; at the November parade he danced rock and roll in the street with Karine from the Polytechnic—handsome; on an excursion he danced the Kurdish kochari with a faint smile—again handsome. He had slapped Karine from the Polytechnic and came to the university beaten, a bruise beneath his eye and swollen lips: “Nothing, they gave me a knock… Nothing, there were three of them, pinned me against the wall—whack…” And the son of a dog was handsome again.
‘Kirovakan, Kirovakan station…’
And that Kirovakan… Plump housewives in housecoats, flushed and sweating, cook their twenty-third variety of jam: “‘Did you see?’ ‘What?’ ‘Didn’t you see?’ ‘What?’ ‘Hrach from the city council’s black car.’ ‘When did he change it?’ ‘On the seventeenth, five days ago.’ ‘Quite a man!’ ‘Aha.’” And the chemical works ensemble’s suite: “Kirovakan, my glorious town, you enchant your visitors with your magical appearance. City of song, city of breath, my Kirovakan!” And my father: “Come and teach in Kirovakan, let us build a house and live in Kirovakan.” Aha, go to the villages and eat mutton, get official travel orders when we go to Yerevan on our own business… Go to the station: among the holidaymakers getting off the Tbilisi–Yerevan train, are there conveniently suitable ones, both fresh and without husbands?.. “‘Did you manage?’ ‘We shall see, she is being coy.’ ‘That is their habit, get on with it.’ ‘I know.’”
For a second, barely a second, little Pambak station looked in through the window and fell behind. Poor little Pambak station: a red cap, a small green lantern and a bell. How many arrogant expresses have passed, yet you remain in this gorge, a green lantern, a red cap and a bell. And that third passenger: he lives only once, and even then short-sighted and bald. And that woman passenger: a woman and sadness, true, but here the compartment door slides back silently, and Brigitte Bardot stands in the doorway. The poor thing would be ashamed of having thrust her fingers into her hair in the foreign style, of her bare legs, of having thought herself beautiful until now.
‘Is the young man going to Moscow for an examination?’
‘The young man has finished university,’ I said, bent over, my tie loose, and told myself that our conversation was proceeding at a Parisian level.
‘Then where?’
‘Dawn is breaking; you did not sleep.’
‘But where is the young man going?’
‘Tsmakut. That is Czechoslovakia,’ I said, and rose. The sleepy attendant came to say that the train would now stop for one minute at Kolageran.
‘Tsmakut,’ I said, carrying the suitcases and baskets into the corridor. And I felt that Tsmakut village was becoming famous. They thought an injustice was being done: the young man deserved Paris, yet was getting off at some Kolageran for some Tsmakut. The train slid slowly forward, while Hrant Karyan stood with his hands in his pockets, feet wide apart, watching its slow advance indifferently. The heap of suitcases and baskets on the platform had no owner, because Hrant had nothing to do with them. Kolageran was becoming famous: Hrant Karyan, his tie loose over his white shirt, stood on Kolageran’s only platform. He stood until the last carriage passed, silence came, and in the silence a cock crowed from its dark nest. Hrant Karyan smiled, loved the cock with faint condescension, as one strokes another person’s child’s head in a crowded street, then yawned and, tall, tall, step by step, went to the telephone exchange, steeped in the warm morning uncleanliness of a bedroom. The sleepy, rumpled telephone operator, still dreaming, said gloomily: what do you want? Hrant Karyan understood that she had children at home and thought: poor mothers, poor women.
‘What time is it?’
‘Five. Connect me to Tsmakut.’
‘What Tsmakut?’
‘Tsmakut village. It is my birthplace.’
She interrupted her sleepy stupor for a minute and smiled:
‘Aren’t you cross-eyed Yeghysh’s Hrant?’
‘Well, yes,’ I said, disconcerted.
Her head heavy on her palms, eyes stuck shut, she said with a sleepy, broken grumble:
‘Hey… are you mad?.. Tsmakut… The people in your village are a bit cracked, aren’t they?..’
In the half-dark the policeman on duty sat up on the adjoining chairs.
‘Why?’ I asked the operator, and told myself I loved our people’s good-natured smile.
‘Hey, who is going to be waiting for you there at five o’clock?’
The policeman on duty looked with reddened eyes, looked with a sleepy snuffle, then said very suddenly:
‘Is that our cross-eyed Yeghysh’s boy?’
‘The watchman,’ I told the operator, and felt ashamed, because that August there was unlikely to be a watchman in the office.
Her head on the table, she said irritably:
‘Yes, they will loot your chairman’s millions, they have posted a watchman, machine gun in hand too.’
‘Were you going to Tsmakut?’ the policeman asked.
‘Tsmakut.’
‘A vehicle went that way last night. If you had come in the evening, you would have gone.’ With his hands beneath him on the chair, he looked a little and asked: ‘What time is it?’
‘Five.’
‘Yes,’ he said, yawning. ‘It went last night. About twelve o’clock. How many kilometres?’
‘Twenty-five.’
‘Yes,’ he said, lying down on the chairs. ‘It went last night. It was not going to Tsmakut, but it was going to Shamut. How far apart are they?’
‘Seven kilometres.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Your farm manager was in it too. Is Levon your farm manager?’
‘I think so.’
‘Is his name Levon?’
‘I do not know,’ I said.
The station is cramped. Utmost necessity had forced the Russian engineers to build a station in an impossible place: the rocks had stepped back by the width of two tracks. The platform is a narrow pavement, while the building had been accommodated at the river’s expense. Children are born here, go to school until the seventh grade, then board a train and leave the gorge, never to return. Afterwards they see their parents’ house from the windows of the Alaverdi–Leninakan workers’ train, the Tbilisi–Yerevan mixed train and the important Moscow–Yerevan express. Perhaps they grow sad for a moment at the geese of their childhood waddling between the highway and the tracks, at the yellow strip of sunlight sliding down from the gorge’s rim, briefly caressing the brown river at the bottom and the oil between the rails, then slowly climbing the other slope towards the plateau—breadth and pastures, forests and silence. Hrant Karyan walked along the only narrow platform, drank water from the memorial fountain, came back and thought: my poor station. Then he entered the hall, swept clean and smelling of dust and water, and said with a yawn in the empty room:
‘My poor Kolageran.’
Hrant Karyan sat, lay down, liked his own stretched-out stature, liked that his white shirt would get a little dirty, and thought: here we are at Kolageran station.
Someone tapped his head with a finger and pulled his leg off the bench. Hrant Karyan woke; the policeman seemed to be smiling, seemed to be angry:
‘You look like an educated man too; you cannot lie down here.’
Hrant Karyan, clean-shaven and broad-shouldered, said to the policeman from below:
‘Eh?’ And with his hands in his pockets lay down again.
‘I am telling you something!’ Hrant Karyan sat up at once, as he had before university, on the same bench. ‘What, do they go to their Yerevans, leave their brains there and come back? If you are told you cannot, you cannot.’
‘All right, all right, do not get angry,’ Hrant Karyan said, and left the hall. And remembered with shame that he had never danced any rock and roll with Karine from the Polytechnic. He saw the heap of suitcases and baskets on the platform and said: how are we going to get out of this gorge?
The policeman had established order and was now pacing the platform. He reached the fountain, came back, looked at me, looked at the tracks and said:
‘Do not stand here. Gather your luggage and go to the highway. If there is a vehicle, it will be there; do not miss it.’
‘Are there vehicles?’ I asked.
‘Sometimes there are, sometimes there are not; you know how it is.’
‘Thank you,’ I said.
At seven a vehicle came. When I heard its noise, I said: Hrant Karyan has always been fortunate. Then it appeared, and it was not a lorry—“It is Shamut’s Willys”—and my hope went out, as it had eight years earlier when I dared not raise my hand to stop a passenger car. The world of the sweet life rejects Hrant Karyan; Hrant Karyan rejects the world of the sweet life. His head in his palms, he sits on the baskets, to which he is bound by his last stipends and the hope of pleasing his mother. That is his burden.
‘Citizen!’ He whistled, and that whistle killed me. ‘Comrade Correspondent!’ Shamut’s doctor, Meruzhan, was smiling in the car.
He whistled, and that whistle killed me. Friends do not whistle to friends that way, masters do not whistle to servants that way; those who have suddenly flown upwards whistle that way to those below. Starting in the ninth grade, every holidaymaker from Yerevan was their god. Later only people with any connection to the medical institute were gods. His mother was secretly their servant, and openly before the villagers the mother who soared on her Meruzh’s success. His shepherd father would send them a sack of matsun from the mountain: “It is skimmed matsun, brother, we have nothing better, we are shepherds,” and smile with a peasant’s foresight. Through mockery and matsun, debts and crawling, he pocketed his diploma; now he shakes the dust from his belly.
And I remembered the beating, and that after it I had not smiled at all. And that there had not been three of them, but one, and that one was not even a boxer. Vergine’s husband, a foreman, jumped from a moving lorry carrying cement; I was going to the library. He caught my arm—“Recognise me?”—and before I had recognised him, landed a couple of blows and went off with his cement to his building site.
‘What is new, Comrade Correspondent? Where are you headed?’
And that good-natured condescension suited the son of a dog so well that I felt ashamed of my couple of articles and something resembling an essay. There are a thousand occupations in the world; was scribbling on paper what had been allotted to me?
‘Home, Meruzh, to Tsmakut.’
‘Ah… Well done, well done. Good that you have remembered us.’
‘I have arrived, there is no vehicle; I am waiting for one.’ Hrant Karyan rose, placed his hands on his hips beneath his belt, stretched to his full height and smiled.
‘Yes… What is happening in the Yerevans?’
‘The same old Yerevan, Meruzh. Heat and dust.’
‘Ah,’ he said, yawning and patting his mouth. ‘We did not sleep last night. It was Tokhyan’s daughter’s birthday.’
“Did you not take matsun?”
‘Put your suitcases in if you like; you can come with your baskets.’
‘Did you clear your debt?’ Hrant Karyan said suddenly.
‘What debt?’ Comrade Meruzhan went pale.
‘Didn’t you have a chemistry exam outstanding?’
‘No.’
‘Ah,’ Hrant Karyan drawled, ‘well, that is good, good. I thought you might have something left over at the instoot. Well done, well done.’
He thought a little and said:
‘So you are not coming?’
‘Thank you, Meruzh.’
‘You are right, Comrade Correspondent. There is glass here, it will break, and I have half an hour’s business on the way; we shall stop and delay you.’ He smiled. ‘You are an important man.’
‘Go, of course go.’ “You must have taken matsun all the same.”
He smiled again. ‘Well, goodbye, drop in now and then.’ He waved too.
Rocking on my taut legs, I remembered the university corridor, Associate Professor Akhverdyan: “Have you no thought of postgraduate study?” And remembered that as we spoke so earnestly, Bersabe passed—not stupid, calculating, feminine, full, full in her tight dress—and I watched her swaying back with hostility to the end of the corridor, until she entered the dean’s office. “I am talking to you.” Associate Professor Akhverdyan understood why I was distracted and said a sighing “Y-e-s”.
“‘Think about it, think.’
‘I shall think.’” And I slid down the stair railing. Then the next. Then the next. Then the next. On my way out I said to the doorman, who had been in a military tunic, boots and a peaked cap for forty years, to that doorman Nikol: “Enough being a captain, Nikol; do you not think of a dissertation, Nikol?” Serious Nikol thought that yes, it was he who should defend a dissertation; a university was no place for halfwits like Hrant Karyan. Meanwhile I was outside in the sunshine, laughing.
With the lightness of that day, I now descended from the highway, crossed the swaying bridge—“Son of a dog, I turned down postgraduate study; who are you?”—and headed for the telephone exchange.
‘The car was empty; why did he not take you?’ the policeman asked with interest. His eyes were serious, as though he were concerned about what had happened, but in his mind he was smirking, because he had discovered my true value—about fifteen roubles; the same old donkey with a different packsaddle.
‘It was not empty; he was taking matsun,’ I said.
There might be meaning in what that Hrant Karyan said, there might not; he might be making fun of him. The policeman laughed cautiously.
‘Keep your spirits up,’ Hrant Karyan said, and entered the exchange. ‘I think we can call now. Connect me to Tsmakut.’
‘Hello, Sanasar, it is Hrant. From the station. Karyan.’ Laughing, he agreed: yes, cross-eyed Yeghysh’s eldest. ‘How are you?’ And because things were going so well, he winked at the operator. ‘Sanasar, I have arrived, I am at the station. Tell my family, a horse or something… No, it is not something to carry by hand. Two suitcases, two baskets. Goodbye, I am waiting.’
Hrant Karyan took his wallet from the back pocket of his striped trousers, took the only five-rouble note from the bundle of one hundred and forty-seven thousand six hundred and fifteen roubles and held it out to the operator.
‘Give me change.’
‘I have none.’
‘Look properly in your pockets.’
‘I am not in the habit of keeping kopecks.’
‘Then what shall we do?’
‘Keep it with you; when you have change later, you can pay.’
‘Hey, this fellow is a fool, isn’t he?’
‘Why a fool?’ Hrant Karyan laughed.
‘Hey, who is going to come here and talk so much that I can change a fiver and give it to you?’
Hrant Karyan laughed again and said through his laughter:
‘All right, I shall change it at the ticket office and bring it.’
‘The ticket office opens in the evening.’
‘All right, keep it with you,’ Hrant Karyan said seriously. ‘I shall collect it when I happen to pass.’
The operator blinked, and Hrant Karyan laughed again. The operator blinked and blinked and said:
‘Hey… Hey, you proud fool… Your father is a bit mad, you are a fool—what is going to become of your family?’
‘Why?’ Hrant Karyan laughed.
‘He even asks, he even asks.’
‘No, why?’
‘Hey, if I take it now, a vehicle comes and by God’s good fortune you leave today, what will you buy cigarettes with, smoking so grandly as you do?’
Hrant Karyan laughed until he cried, then began again, and laughing thought that he loved that station, that exchange with not a kopeck in its drawers, that operator with four children at home, that policeman and, God be his witness, that Meruzh and his father’s sack of matsun on the lecturers’ parquet, his countrymen’s openhearted smiles, his cross-eyed father, his lazily sorrowful mother, his nine cross-eyed brothers and himself, who had managed to slip through all those gaps with straight eyes.
Later I was sitting in the hall; the policeman came with individually tapping steps, stopped before me and said:
‘Sitting is allowed.’
‘Eh?’ I opened my eyes. ‘What is allowed?’
‘Sleep, sleep; you probably did not sleep last night.’
After eight the station filled with villagers; at nine the workers’ train came and swept away chickens, eggs, noise, greens, butter, apples, questions, complaints, mutton, cheese and gloom. The policeman, the station building with its old bell and I remained.
‘Let us go and eat,’ the policeman said.
‘Thank you,’ I said, immediately understanding that he had been speaking to himself: a thousand people, familiar and unfamiliar, get off at this station each day, and he is a man on a salary.
‘What is there to be shy about?’ the policeman adjusted.
‘I am not hungry.’
‘That is another matter.’
At ten I called Tsmakut; there was no one by the telephone. At half past ten I called again, and there was the hot village square, the closed club, the closed shop behind whose windows a bee had struggled for five days, the closed village council; the school building smelled of plaster, the well was filling with water, and over the upper quarter hung my old grandmother’s alarm—“Kite, kite, kite, hoo!”—and a cock’s crow broke off on a fence. I saw the village in all its smells and colours, heard the telephone ringing across the deserted square, and in one second grew sad and listless. There, in the sunshine and sadness, the dog Basar grows slowly old; the chickens increase and diminish; low, monotonous, endless and sleep-inducing, the telephone wires sing; in the ravine, motionless as a painted horse, the same chestnut horse has stood for twenty years. Ah, the silent mill’s roof has tilted and does not collapse—where am I going? I shall mow hay with the boys. We shall mock Lavrenti Vardanyan: he did not understand that ice cream is cold and swallowed it in village fashion. We shall mock him while he dozes with his cap over his eyes. We shall mow and mow and mow and mow, never finish, and the grain harvest will begin. The field’s heat, the awns and your sweaty neck. And your dry, bitter mouth. “‘You have been fetching water for two hours, you bitch!’ ‘Well, keep your muzzle shut, eh…’” And the university corridor, Bersabe’s firm and soft back. No one speaks to her without smiling. And she is not stupid, not cheap either.
On the cramped station’s only platform I ate myself alive. I stood on that one platform and cursed:
‘Ignoramus, every girl in the group was cleverer than you. Careerist, you pushed yourself forward through organisational work… Self-satisfied, what organisational work was that? Were you beautiful?.. What was your beauty? You will sell every gram of your flesh for a thousand roubles.’
I remembered the village’s bad road; that my father and mother do not think how so many of their children will live, simply bear them and love them equally, while they are barefoot; that for two years I went half-barefoot through mud and rain to school from Tsmakut to Shamut; that that brute Meruzh was the dullest and most cautious boy in school; that that engineer-foreman had a heavy hand; that when it rains my father’s legs ache, yet he carries hay and wood, shovels dung out of the cowshed and goes to the village square limping on both legs instead of sitting and rubbing them; and that that station is so narrow. For all this I cursed Bersabe Mirzakhanyan, while she still smiled, was still beautiful, affected her little airs in the dean’s office and was so precise she did not err by a hair. Associate Professor Akhverdyan smiled before her, everyone smiled, everyone acknowledged her intelligence. If she wishes, she will become famous; if she wishes, she will buy and sell half of Africa, and if she does not buy it, then she did not wish to. Famous people are no cleverer than she. There was America’s President Wilson, sitting in his white house, the world soft and pleasant, wanting to do something good; he thought and devised a great Armenia and drew a map of Greater Armenia, and the pencil moved over the paper easily, easily. Biographers looked in his archive and said: ah, how he loved Christians! And what did that Hitler do? Having supposedly put himself in order, he now aspired to put the world in order. And what did that Armenian officer in the Turkish army do? He freed the Turkish minister Enver from captivity; Enver escaped that captivity, went straight off and organised the great Armenian massacre, then, having the military storehouse keys, took and adorned himself with a marshal’s ornaments. And what was that crusaders’ expedition? They said: let us go and free the Lord’s remains. They went and arrived: so much pepper and coriander, so much cinnamon and dill!.. They shouldered cinnamon and pepper, dill and parsley, and went home. They were asked: what about the Lord’s remains? They asked: what Lord’s remains? They were told: why, the Lord Jesus’… But they were eating food with pepper, unheard-of delicious food, and had no time to answer idle questions. And the Rome of those philosophers, lawgivers, orators and poets sent Carthage a memorandum as though Rome had no philosophers or lawgivers, orators or poets, only illiterate barbarians: move the city of Carthage thirteen versts back from the sea. And that Chinese wall, because it is long, the longest, because there is no other wall so long in the world, wants a place among the seven wonders. And that, that, that Mesrop, that horsekeeper of Tsmakut, who did not want to be an ordinary horsekeeper and went and discovered he was both a horsekeeper and a nationalist, was imprisoned and liked being imprisoned. His interrogators probably liked their own dull seriousness.
What a story this is!
‘Forgive me, Bersabe, keep your head down and stick to your participle,’ I said to Bersabe Mirzakhanyan.
And when the Tbilisi–Yerevan train came and stopped heavily, heavily, Hrant Karyan leaned his back against the narrow platform’s railing and smiled. His eyes probably looked intelligent and the smile at the corner of his lips was handsome. And he said to the hairy fellow staring dully through a window and to his stout wife:
‘Hot, is it? Eat, eat; eating is good against the heat.’
And he said to those at the next window, unquestionably traders:
‘Where are you going? The crusaders have taken the pepper and parsley.’
And he said to the Russian girls at the next window:
‘Get off; Yerevan is hot.’
They pointed at the station and grimaced.
‘Is everything good in your Moscow?’
‘We are from Kursk,’ they said.
‘Well done, well done.’ And Hrant Karyan said to the older man at the next window about his girlish wife:
‘Where are you taking that child, to those savages’ Yerevan?’
And he said to the villagers at the next window:
‘The market is full of eggs now; wait until January. Fifty kopecks!’
And he saluted the military carriage:
‘Good health to you, Comrade General!’
And he said to the smiling man with a moustache in the next carriage:
‘Going to Kirovakan? Have you arrived? Make sure to eat some jam!’
And he said to the tousled man in the next carriage, probably a poet:
‘Naturalism, capitalism, pantheism, socialist realism.’
And he said to the drunks in the next carriage:
‘Shhhhh.’
And triumphantly pinned down the lovers in the last carriage:
‘Meow, baaaa.’ The girl resembled a lovestruck kitten; the boy looked like a calf.
After that I was alone at the station for five whole hours and seemed to be going mad. Smiling, I meowed and lowed in my mind, but it was sad. I tried to quarrel with the stationmaster; nothing came of it.
‘Why is there no left-luggage room?’
‘Who said there is none?’
‘If there is one, where is it?’
‘That is another question. It is closed.’
‘Why is it closed?’
‘The attendant has gone to Yerevan.’
‘“Gone to Yerevan”—what am I to do?’
‘That is another question too: put your head in your hand and sing a bayati.’
I called Tsmakut again: again the hot village square and the dog ageing in sadness. I fell asleep. The policeman pulled my leg down again and tapped my head.
‘Eh? Is there a vehicle?’
‘No, an aeroplane. A special one. You cannot lie down!’
‘Be human, man!’
‘And who said we are not human?’
I did not want to wake because I had nothing to do. I looked at my watch and lay down again.
‘Get up!’
I sprang up. He silently pushed me between the benches, held my elbow and opened a room’s door; while I thought that there was a misspelling on the sign, that this was theatre and that the saddest thing in the world was to be an inhabitant of a small station, he had gone behind the desk and was smirking.
‘Well?’ I said.
Well, the telephone rested on the desk, thick glass beneath the telephone, the desk beneath the glass, his resoled boots beneath the desk, the worn floor beneath the boots; the floor was over the cellar, the cellar over the river. The river had flowed for a thousand, a million, a billion years between the same banks, striking the same stones, and it was boring enough to break the heart. But the policeman smiled: he was glad to be rid of mowing, to have a house at the station, to be in contact with something as great as the Moscow–Yerevan express; he had two pigs, feed was no problem because only he kept pigs at the station, and the river had swept away the stationmaster’s two piglets, leaving the buffet scraps for his pigs alone. And the day, well, could be filled somehow: trains come and go, a vehicle appears, there is sometimes something like a fight in the buffet; freight trains carry stone, coal and timber, one can stand and watch; the radio speaks, one can listen. They say that in America or somewhere a boy stole pieces of gold. What will he do with them? It is not money to buy clothes with. He will probably exchange it for money to spend on clothes and such. They will catch him. One can say to a fat passenger who gets off for water, “Is Yerevan hot?” and nod in agreement.
‘Yesterday you went to the city,’ he said with a smirk, ‘today you come back and we are not human? Did they give you a diploma so you could come and tell us we are not human?’
‘Well?’ I said.
‘No, tell me, is that what they gave you a diploma for?’
‘I have no diploma.’
‘That would be all we needed, for you to have one too,’ he smirked.
‘And if I have?’
‘One can tell by looking at you.’
My trousers were crumpled, my shirt dirty and crumpled, my eyes hurt, my face was probably swollen. ‘I did not sleep last night,’ I said.
‘Does that affect my salary?’
‘It does not.’
He leaned back in his chair, smiling with his hands in his pockets:
‘Am I not human? If I close the door now and break your bones, who will say I beat you?’
‘You can,’ I said. ‘No one will testify.’
‘You are talking of witnesses?’ He stood. ‘You ate the state’s bread free at university so you could come here and talk of witnesses?’
No, he was not going to beat me. He was passing the time.
‘I cannot be bothered,’ I grimaced.
‘Behave yourself!’
‘Oh, I cannot be bothered.’
He picked up the receiver and had the operator connect him to Kirovakan. He was calling the Kirovakan police—“He cannot be bothered”—asked for the duty officer and said Kolageran was troubling them. “The lad cannot be bothered.” He waited for the captain on duty, while I laughed ironically, but was certainly crying. “The lad has got his diploma; he cannot be bothered.”
‘Oh, stop it, fool!’ I shouted.
He reported what had happened to the captain in detail, adding nothing and omitting nothing. I was grateful for that precision. The captain was silent there, and for a moment I pitied the captain. Then he added my last words:
‘Comrade Captain, I was calling him to order and he told me, “Oh, stop it, fool!”’
The captain was silent, and from far away I loved him; the captain and I were fighting stupidity.
‘Shall I bring him to the precinct, Comrade Captain?’
‘No,’ the captain said.
This one took offence. ‘Well, what shall I do, Comrade Captain?’
The captain was silent, then said: “Fine him.” In his place I would have said the same, thrown down the receiver and cut the line linking me to Kolageran. But I was Hrant Karyan, at the station, waiting for a horse or a vehicle; there was none. I was to mow in Tsmakut, flatter Comrade Ruben by some device to squeeze a few more teaching hours out of the school, and at home there was the noise of those nine children and the smell of my father’s socks.
‘I have not a kopeck, fool.’
He shook his head and said:
‘What if I call again now?’
‘Listen,’ I said, ‘if you want to go to Kirovakan, go. No one will carry off your desk and your stationmaster.’
‘Oh, oh, oh,’ he said in feigned surprise. ‘He has got his diploma and gets angry. Your father is such a calm man too; how did you become so angry? Have you taken offence?’
So he was joking. With jokes and such, he could take me to Kirovakan too. With jokes and such, he fines me. Later he will boast to himself: “He was passing with his diploma; we stopped him, had a little fun.”
‘Take out your wallet.’
‘I shall take out my wallet, but do you know I work at a newspaper?’ I said. If I worked at a newspaper, I would have come by car, passed by car, never noticed him, never even known that Kolageran station existed.
‘And if you work at a newspaper, what are you going to do to me?’ Looking away with faded eyes, he moved his white lips soundlessly. Then moved them again; there was not enough air. To this day I have seen nothing more disgusting than a half-literate man’s envy.
‘You will write, spout nonsense. And once you have written, what will they do to me? Remove me from this station, promote me?.. A boss has come over me; he works at a newspaper. He will write, they will dismiss me from the police. Not a kopeck in his pocket, he works at a newspaper. He is not from Tsmakut; he is from the editorial office.’
I put my hand in my pocket to take out a hundred thousand roubles and strike his cast-iron head; I took out the last roubles he had himself given me that morning for my five-rouble note and paid the fine.
Afterwards I stood on the narrow platform looking at the express going from Moscow to Yerevan, while behind me the policeman nodded towards me and told the stationmaster: “The lad has a diploma; he works at a newspaper. Do not delay the train or he will put you in the paper. Put your cap on properly or he will dress you up in the paper. His father is a correspondent too; father and son are correspondents.”
I cried silently and said to the express: “You come and go, so very important. You stop at Kolageran station. Thank you! You get travel orders and have them stamped. You make your beds and sleep. You go to the restaurant car. You laugh. You eat chicken, drink cognac. You wake and yawn.”
I called Tsmakut again; there was my poor little village. Here at the nearby power station they had forgotten to switch on its lights, and the great moon merely shone without flooding its houses, gardens and paths, because the dense forest reflected not a ray. They had come back from mowing and gone to sleep, needing neither light, newspaper nor conversation.
Fifty kopecks remained. “With that too,” the operator said, “you will call tomorrow and whoosh, the vehicle will come. It will come and take my Yerevan fellow. Hey, what have you become?” she said in our way, serious and laughing. “Have they mauled you? Yes, they have, they have mauled the child.”
“Damn it,” I thought, “they have gone into the forest depths: they neither know what there is in the world nor want to know… They mow hay, stack hay, keep cows, store butter, cheese, meat and hides, mow hay again, stack hay… They might at least live a little closer to the railway, a little this side. They have gone and found a place in the woods.”
Kolageran had long lit its lights, looking through warm windows upon the station’s peace. A freight train came and went. The duty engine accompanied it to the upper station and returned. Two track workers had been drinking beer outside the kiosk for about five hours already. After ravaging the pointsman’s bean patch, the geese came along the tracks in peaceful conversation, turned, crossed the bridge, crossed the highway and found their safe place. Good night, until tomorrow morning.
“Damn it, what is wrong with this station?” I thought. “It is both town and village. No one comes here on tour, true, but whenever they wish they can board a train and go to Kirovakan, Tbilisi or Yerevan. Do they keep pigs? They do. Damn it, both town and village: they keep pigs, and there is no question of wolves. Now on the tables there are ruddy fried potatoes, sausage cut in slices, tea is always there, a white tablecloth; the radio quietly spins song and conversation. There is fresh white bread every day; the power station’s bakery is just there. They always supply electricity, never forget as they do Tsmakut. Damn it, if my father’s house were here, there would be beans, we would keep pigs, he would work as a pointsman, a policeman or at the bakery, bringing hot loaves in the mornings.”
The windows’ yellow light suggested stuffiness and bedbugs; but what of Tsmakut’s dark mud? The ground slipping from beneath your feet, the gully flooding in the darkness, the wolf pack snatching the dog from the door? And the district executive committee’s technical secretary, who can summon you to the telephone at any moment from any field and pour a dog’s slops over your head, while you do not feel insulted because you were speaking to a representative of the district executive committee itself? He had considered you worth something, had spoken to you.
And I cursed Bersabe Mirzakhanyan again, then saw how powerless I was against her round shoulders, magnificent smile and practical intelligence. Then clearly, clearly, like the memory of Tsmakut village, I saw that the sofa and telephone and delicately stirring modulations of laughter and voice suited Bersabe, while these baskets, this dirty shirt and these reddened eyes suited me. Each of us was precisely in the right place. Old ministers and lecturers die, age, retire; who will replace them? Here we have finished university and will gradually rise to the age of lecturer and minister. Which of us will become a lecturer or minister? We were standing in the corridor when the English lecturer, Hamlet Taronyan, came and passed. His springy gait was too inviting for me not to follow him in imitation; besides, I had just told a joke and we had laughed, a moment for losing one’s head. Hamlet Taronyan looked back; scratching my nose, head down, I continued walking as he had caught me, as if that were my gait. He followed me with his eyes until I turned at the stairhead. I turned and, laughing, red and sweaty, flung myself down. “Slowly, lad!” “Be… Bersabe?.. I did something stupid… Ugh!” “Well done, well done,” she said casually, and continued ascending with grace and dignity beside old Hasratyan. For a couple of years afterwards I was Hamlet Taronyan’s psychological serf, while Bersabe scarcely noticed him: he was not respected among the lecturers, she herself knew English within the limits of the textbook and had not mocked him. Why is Bersabe serious and not a clown? Bersabe will become a minister, while on the mountain hayfields I will tell the mowers she was in our group. “We were friends,” I will say; the mowers will look at Bersabe’s photograph, the list of honoured guests at the banquet, look at me and say: “Your father is a boaster, you are a boaster.”
From narrow Kolageran station, from the depths of night, I begged her:
‘One cannot be such a careerist, Bersabe… Have a conscience, one cannot be such a careerist. You can, of course you can, but so powerfully beautiful, you cannot be such a careerist, Bersabe.’
At five o’clock, twenty-four hours later, the Yerevan–Moscow express came and passed over me. When it came I looked at my watch and said it was on time, it had been here at exactly this hour yesterday. For a minute I wanted to praise the driver’s punctuality, then suddenly saw I had been here twenty-four hours, and it was horribly absurd: taking a taxi to the station in Yerevan, the suitcases, the lemonade I took at the station, thinking a little with a finger at my temple before getting into the taxi—have I forgotten anything? And having the taxi driven along Vergine’s street: “Hrant is going to Australia for twenty-five years.”
I entered the hall because I was ashamed before the express. I closed my eyes because I felt that my train of yesterday had reached the lower station and was returning from Moscow, growing louder. It was not so, of course; there were four days left. Now it was barely crawling somewhere near Rostov. But it was moving. It would arrive, be emptied, be oiled and take the return route. While I, like this bridge, this kiosk, these geese, am here; like this hall, I am becoming infested with bedbugs.
‘Sanasar!’ I shouted. ‘What has happened? I have been stuck here thirty hours!’
Yes, he had forgotten; he fell silent and asked:
‘Who is speaking?’
‘Is that right?’ I said. ‘Is that right, Sanasar?’
‘Who is speaking, then?’
‘Me, Sanasar, I have been waiting here thirty hours!’
He thought and thought and laughed, unable to guess the face of the helpless idler who had done nothing for thirty hours but wait for others to act.
‘Who are you?’ he laughed.
‘Hrant, Sanasar, Hrant Karyan!’
‘Ah!’ He was pleased. ‘Are you cross-eyed Yeghysh’s Hrant? Hello, Hrant.’
‘Hello, Sanasar.’
‘I told you there are no oxen; I told you I will not give you oxen in this rain. Look at the cart he has made, look at him asking for oxen. Hello!’ Then he shouted across the office and village square: ‘The city, the city! What are you grumbling about? Go, gather your things and leave. This very day. But until you leave, do what we tell you!’ He walked around the office, came back to the telephone and threw down the receiver.
Well then? What was I to have done that I had not done? Very well, I had not danced rock and roll with Karine from the Polytechnic, but in my mind I had boasted that I had. Very well, I am the world’s foremost monster; I organised the great Armenian massacre, the slaughter of the Jews; I want somehow to start another world war and secretly, amid the smoke and noise, annihilate the remaining Armenians and Jews, then hypocritically go into mourning. I find this railway, telephone, radio, asphalt, cement, this coal, buttons, watch, this hammer, pen, stamp, this samovar, chemistry, bed, smile, this piano, hall, chewing gum and letter superfluous; humanity is unworthy of them. I want to make life begin again with forest, roots and plague—very well. But why do people not prevent a monster’s birth through their goodness?
The monster Hrant Karyan sat on the baskets and told himself: “You water-splasher, if you were a man you would have forced yourself on Meruzh and gone with him.” Hrant Karyan wandered about the station, then stood by the operator:
‘Connect me again.’
‘When I tell you to work as a teacher here, you say no.’ She went on as she called: ‘When your people get here, they ask whether this is Yerevan or Moscow.’
‘Sanasar!’ I shouted. ‘Be human, man! What must I become for you to soften at the telephone? Tell me, I shall become it. I mowed hay for you four summers.’
‘Now you want a medal?’
‘No!’ I shouted. ‘I want to be treated like a human being.’
‘What should we have done for it to be human?’
‘I have been at the station thirty hours.’
‘Ah… Where are you speaking from?’
‘The sta-tion!’
‘I think you were at the station yesterday too. Are you still at the station? Bless your house! You studied and studied, but you still belong to Yeghysh’s clan.’
‘Sanasar,’ I said, ‘my load is heavy.’
‘I shall tell your family now.’
‘Sanasar, my load is heavy, a horse or something…’
‘No, no horse. I shall tell your family now.’
‘My family have no horse, and my luggage is heavy, Sanasar.’
‘I do not know,’ he said. ‘What shall I tell your family now: Hrant is at the station, his luggage is heavy?’
‘Comrade Chairman,’ I explained, ‘my family are not private farmers. When they formed the collective they gathered the horses and said: “When you need them, you can take them.”’
‘Is that written in your diploma?’ he mocked calmly.
‘I think it is in yours too.’
‘We are modest people; we do not need a diploma.’
‘And what do you think of elementary logic?’
‘Ours is work, not logic.’
‘A horse!’
‘Take one,’ he said, dropped the receiver, then said something just as I too was throwing mine down.
‘What?’
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I am saying you have a houseful of people; you will manage without a horse.’
‘Please,’ I said. ‘You need not even tell them. And in general, to hell with the horse and with you… Goodbye.’
…Hrant Karyan threw down the receiver and, tall, tall, with a little businesslike carelessness, a little unshaven and tense, walked slowly to the Polytechnic Institute, found Karine, danced rock and roll with her, went to university, to postgraduate study; and among the lecturers there was no one so young, witty or intelligent. He was Yerevan’s most famous man; everywhere they said “Hrant Karyan, Hrant Karyan”. They were already talking about him in Tbilisi and Kyiv; in Moscow they said: “Remarkable, Yerevan—and so much intelligence?” Then Hrant Karyan, so tall and handsome, twenty-eight or thirty, his tie loose, sitting behind his desk, took the pistol from the drawer and shot himself in the mouth. “Heavy, friends, is the victor’s burden.” And no one ever knew that every second his young heart fluttered at the memory of Kolageran station.
To hell with American cinema. To hell with the stupid father of Tsmakut’s librarian, who would not give me another piece of rubbish until she had stuffed one piece into my head paragraph by paragraph. “You must read the book you have borrowed.”
…‘Please,’ I said. ‘You need not even tell them. And in general, to hell with the horse and with you… Goodbye.’
‘Never mind,’ Sanasar said. ‘It is nothing new; my mother is used to it. Goodbye.’
‘Goodbye,’ I said. ‘It is nothing new for me either: ten times I have reached this broken-down station and got stuck, gone mouldy. Thank you.’
‘They have made me chairman and everyone heaps abuse on me: Andro, the instructor, the calf keeper, Shamut’s chairman… Whoever comes abuses me; your turn will come once too, curse away.’
‘Forgive me,’ I said.
‘You are welcome, but as for the horse, forgive me.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Who are you for me to take offence at you?’
‘But what a big mouth you have!’
‘Until you have a big mouth, your business will not move forward.’
‘Wait.’
‘Do you think I shall wait after all this?’
‘Goodbye.’
‘Farewell. There is not a kilo of groats at home; what am I coming to do?’
‘My house is full of groats; come and take a tonne.’
‘Why are you complaining to me? I am not your storekeeper. Goodbye.’
‘And am I your servant that you ask for a horse?’
‘I am not asking you for a horse.’
‘I am glad. Goodbye.’
‘My poor father mows for you twelve months a year. Goodbye.’
‘Yes, your poor father’s back still aches from mowing. Goodbye.’
‘That is none of your business.’
‘What is none of my business?’
‘Whether it aches or not.’
‘Then why tell me?’
‘It is good to remember. Goodbye.’
‘It is good to remember—remember. Goodbye.’
‘Yes, I shall remember.’
‘Remember.’
‘Do you remember how supposedly someone had come from the district centre, supposedly there was nothing in your houses, and you came and took our slaughtered pig?’
‘I remember: two days later we gave you a singed pig in exchange.’
‘Remember properly. And understand that we needed the hide. There were seven children at home, barefoot. If we had wanted to singe it, we would have. We know how to singe.’
‘I singe, you singe, we would have singed, singeing, the diploma—then what?’
‘Officially you give my mother an allowance; behind her back you call her a rabbit.’
‘She produces one a year; what are we to say? They say she has had another. How many are you now?’
‘Eleven. Is it a boy or a girl?.. Sanasar, is it a boy or a girl?..’
‘There are so many of you they cannot tell whether it is a girl or a boy.’
‘Sanasar!..’
‘They say it was born and mingled with the others; cross-eyed Yeghysh cannot tell which is the new one.’
‘How is my mother, my mother?..’ My lazy mother, my mother’s secret smile: the false sigh and secret smile; the false anger and secret smile. I shall put your eyes out, you rascal! Oh, you have eaten my soul. Half an egg for you, half for you. Go outside, Hrant is reading, shoo…
‘Sanasar!’ I shouted. ‘A horse or something… I shall mow for a month.’
‘Is that for your abuse?’
‘Forgive me.’
‘You curse, then ask forgiveness?’
‘But I have been stuck here since yesterday.’
‘Did I put you there, that you take offence at me?’
‘I take offence at you for not giving me a horse.’
‘You are right; take as much offence as you can.’
‘All right, I take no offence, Sanasar.’
‘You are right; take no offence.’
‘Sanasar…’
‘Who will give you a horse in August? Goodbye.’
‘You are human, not a beast!’
‘Eh? Someone was shouting; I did not hear.’
‘Who was shouting?’
‘I cannot hear.’
‘Do you want me to repeat it?’
‘I cannot hear!’
‘Then why can I hear you?’
‘I cannot hear; come to the village and say it.’
‘Send a horse so I can come.’
‘Ah, a horse… I said I will not give you a horse. Goodbye.’
‘Goodbye, Sanasar, but do not forget.’
‘Goo’bye, Sana-saar, but don’ ferget…’
‘Well, well… You turn out to be a clown, and they entrusted you with a village?’
‘Well, we-ell… Ye turn oot t’ be a clown, an’ they entrusted ye wi’ a village?’
‘Oh, pah!..’
‘Because we are chairman, have we no right to joke?’
‘I have been stuck at the station two days. That is not humane.’
‘We have none of that commodity here; bring some from the station.’
‘Then send a horse so I can bring it…’
Damn it, I kept hoping and losing hope; to me he became god-beast, god-beast, god-beast… and I could not understand that he was neither god nor beast: he was human. Rain clatters down on Tsmakut; drowsily they have sat down to cards, dominoes, jokes, newspapers or the telephone. Lightning shatters in the surrounding mountains, and drowsily they remember that that year it struck Lachin the buffalo dead above the White Spring, last year or the year before it killed Ashot’s Varduhi, and that Ashot’s new wife looks after the children better than the old one and is a good wife too. Should they complain to the ministry about lightning conductors, or is it pointless? They say the newspaper printed an article; someone in the village had read it, who had read it? Of course they can complain to the ministry, and to Moscow too, but where would one plant a lightning conductor? They say it strikes the mountains; one may agree, but that time it killed Yesayi’s boy in the ravine, beneath the lime tree.
‘Have a look,’ Sanasar said. ‘See whether the river has risen.’
The river was red and full, coming and going, choking. The geese were not swimming, the worn tyre and fuel-oil barrel were not beneath the bridge. The river raged; with a little more strength it would carry off the row of outhouses belonging to the stationmaster, operator, policeman, storekeeper, pointsman, cleaner, headmaster and teachers.
‘It has risen, Sanasar. Then what?’ I winked at the operator.
‘Why has it risen, Comrade Citizen?’
‘Why has it risen?’ I repeated, winking at the operator.
‘Rain, rain!’
‘It is not raining, Sanasar, nor is there sunshine; it is muggy.’
‘Here, here in the village it is raining. Hail has begun in the mountains.’
‘Then what?’ I winked at the operator.
‘Then we are having a conversation with Comrade Karyan.’
‘Why did you ask about the river, then?’
‘Ah!’ Sanasar laughed. ‘Yes, so that is our river, Comrade Citizen: hail falls here and it rises there. The river comes from here, remember?’ He laughed again, and I was very glad of his laughter.
‘Ah, is it raining?.. I was wondering why he asks me to see whether the river has risen. So it is raining. So it is raining in the village, and that is why the river… Sanasar… please, eh? A horse or something…’ I winked at the policeman, who stood smirking. ‘I have arrived, I have been here two days, Sanasar…’
‘Bless your house, are you still speaking from Kolageran? Man, that water, water though it is, reached Kolageran in two hours without a diploma and has already passed it, while with your diploma and everything you have not reached Tsmakut in two days?’
‘All right, Sanasar, to hell with the diploma; the important thing is to be a worker of the soil. A horse or something, Sanasar…’
‘No, why? The diploma is important.’
‘It is important, but now the horse is more important, Sanasar.’
‘Of course the horse is important, but the diploma is important too. Look, Ruben has no diploma; they are removing him as headmaster.’
‘Let them dash their heads against a rock! What right have they to interfere in your village’s affairs?’
‘No, why? That is good: you will come and work as headmaster.’
‘Who will give me the headmaster’s post, Sanasar?’
‘I shall talk to them.’
‘Thank you, Sanasar.’
‘Goodbye, we are waiting.’
‘But send a horse, Sanasar.’
‘You are a headmaster; what do you need a horse for?’
‘But I have a load, Sanasar.’
‘Never mind, you will forget. You will become headmaster and not even say hello.’
‘Me?.. You do not know me well yet, Sanasar.’
‘They always say that.’
‘It depends who is saying it, Sanasar.’
‘They always say that too.’
‘Try me, then you will know.’
‘Ha-ha-ha-ha… They say that too.’
‘Perhaps they say it when they are in a tight spot.’
‘Why are you in a tight spot? Is there a war?’
‘There is no war; I have been at the station two days.’
‘Get up and come.’
‘But I have a load, Sanasar.’
‘You have a load; what load?’
‘Two baskets, two suitcases.’
‘“Two baskets, two suitcases”—and what is in them?’
‘Odds and ends, Sanasar.’
‘What secret odds and ends, for example, that you conceal them so?’
‘I am not concealing anything, Sanasar; there is simply nothing to say.’
‘You have filled two baskets and two suitcases; that is a load. But when you must say it, it is not a load: “nothing to say”.’
‘Sugar, Sanasar.’
‘A hundred kilos of sugar?’
‘Five. Noodles, Sanasar.’
‘Ninety-five kilos of noodles?’
‘Ten, Sanasar.’
‘Exactly ten?’
‘No, eight, Sanasar.’
‘Are eight and ten the same? What else?’
‘Why do you need to know about that rubbish?’
‘Ah, if it is rubbish, then I am right not to give you a horse.’
‘Biscuits for the children.’
‘“For the children”, as if Yeghysh could not eat them. What else?’
‘What else what?’
‘Sugar, noodles and biscuits?’
‘No, there are other things, Sanasar.’
‘Go on, go on.’
‘Grapes, the first grapes.’
‘Well done, well done.’
‘My books.’
‘Well done.’
‘Shoes for the children.’
‘Very well done!’
‘A jacket for my father, padded.’
‘Well done, Yeghysh, well done! Will he wear it?’
‘Yes, he probably will. A headscarf for my mother, my old shoes. Lecture notebooks, my jacket, underpants, shirt. Long johns for my father, baby nappies, baby soap, women’s thick underpants, knives and forks, a cake, an iron, a thermometer and iodine, a packsaddle, a lock, a plough, dung, a cap, a patch—one day I shall curse your father, you robber, son of a dog!’
I put down the receiver, and the silence was such that I seemed under anaesthesia. From distant dark spaces my consciousness returned with a low rustle.
‘Eh?’ I said to the policeman or the operator, then seized the receiver: ‘Murderer!’ And threw it down.
From the darkness the operator’s eyes looked at me with pity, the policeman’s with a smirk and pity, and line by line the wall took shape there, the door there, the window, highway and piglet. ‘Shameless!’ I rushed towards the telephone; then the policeman had his arms around me and his breathing was close to my ear:
‘Easy… easy… easy…’
‘Brute… beast… ignoramus…’ I gasped.
Then the world seemed beautiful and sad, and I felt my brain grow hot, hot, hot and begin to soften. All the links and connections in my brain softened and melted, and I had no ambitions; I loved no one and hated no one. Only the floor drew me with an irresistible charm; I sagged towards it in those arms, while the arms tightened and would not let me go.
‘All right, now… all right… all right…’ I begged. ‘All right… all right… let go… all right…’
He let go, but now there was a chair beneath me. I sat for half a second, then flung myself onto the floor, and that was already a little acting. I flung myself down and wanted to howl, but it was too forced. So I fell silent. The smell of dust is in my nostrils to this day. I lay there telling myself I was crying for my trampled rights, because my clothes were dirty, because I had no telephone money, because the policeman was human after all, for the policeman, because my Vergine had been taken from me, because I could not howl aloud and was crying softly and that was beautiful. But in fact I was thinking what occasion would let me rise from where I had fallen, and that after all this Sanasar would send a horse, be ashamed and send it.
Out of deep silence the world gradually returned to its sounds: the hiss was the river, the regular subterranean shaking a train coming; now it shrieked, now it was near, now it came, passed and faded. Someone’s steps approached, the door opened, the steps stopped beside my ear.
‘Well, well… Is he drunk?’
‘No, he is lying down.’
‘What happened?’
‘He has taken offence.’
‘Why have you upset the child?’
If only he would take me in his arms, lift me up and be my father, and I were little. If I had lost my knife and cried and cried and cried… Their caresses would inflame my crying and I would sob through my tears; the temptation to take their apple would seem a betrayal of my lost knife and I would cry through my tears; I would remember how my knife folded and the pictures drawn on its handle, and cry through my tears; they would scold me and I would cry for the knife and for that rough scolding… Cry inconsolably, purely, abundantly, so much, so wetly… And sleep in my father’s arms, wake innocent as milk, smile softly, softly.
‘Get up, lad… Your suitcases over there are saying: we have an owner, our owner is a grown man, he has finished university. It turns out the owner is a child, rolling about here…’
‘He has broken the telephone here too.’
‘Broken it?’
‘Yes, broken it: they have rung, and they do not speak.’
‘If he has broken it, that is bad.’
Hrant Karyan unfolded himself, stood and, swaying with red, gloomy eyes, said:
‘Then what?’
His voice was hoarse and he liked it, and wanted them to say something else so he could answer and hear his deep, manly voice.
‘You have broken the telephone and have not a kopeck; what are we to do?’
‘I have none. Then what?’
‘I do not know.’
‘I know,’ Hrant Karyan said.
‘What do you know?’
‘Take me and hang me.’
‘Eee… Mad Tsmakut fellow… Man, so young, your diploma so new, so handsome… If we take and hang you, will you not feel sorry for yourself?’
‘No!’ Hrant Karyan thundered.
‘Well, if not… Take hold of him, lads…’
The stationmaster and policeman took my arms, led me out, over the bridge and to the policeman’s house. They were taking me to give me fried potatoes and tea. To put me to bed, make me sleep. Make me grateful to them. Wake me, say Alkho had arrived, fit the suitcases on the horse, have me do what happens even without doing. Show me where to cross the tracks and the entrance to the path to the village.
‘Arayik,’ I said to my brother, ‘was there no other horse that you brought this one?’
‘Oh!’ he said tearfully. ‘You should have seen how Andro refused!’
‘What did he say?’
‘He said it had come from Kazakh only two hours earlier.’
‘Then how did he give it?’
‘Father went; he would not give it. Mother and Father quarrelled. Then Mother went and brought it.’
‘How is Mother?’
‘How would she be?’
‘Did you hurry it on the way?’
‘As if it could walk in the first place, for me to hurry it too.’
Below, the Moscow–Yerevan express wound silently along. The compartment’s scent played in my nostrils for a minute; for a minute I remembered bare women’s legs beneath the little table and Hrant Karyan, carelessly folded over.
‘Arayik,’ I said, ‘have you no money on you?’
He was silent, silent, then said irritably: ‘Well…’
‘What, none?’
‘Where would I get money?’
‘Did Mother not give you any?’
‘When she got the child allowance she gave me a rouble. I went to buy a fountain pen, looked and saw I had lost it. Now I do not know whether it fell from my pocket or I left it at home.’
‘Never mind, Ara, I shall give you money.’
‘What do I need money for?’
‘You can buy sweets.’
Devastatingly adult, devastatingly burdened with cares, he looked at me for a moment and turned his head.
‘Do you not like sweets?’
He almost shouted:
‘I like them!’
‘Well, then?’
‘There is not a piece of sugar at home, and you say I can buy sweets.’
‘Arayik… Arayik, who took the horse to Kazakh?’
‘Gikor,’ he said sulkily.
‘Arayik, I shall give you a fountain pen.’
He asked very simply:
‘What will you write with?’
‘Well, I shall write.’
‘With a pencil?’
‘I shall write with something, Arayik.’
‘You will give me your fountain pen and write with a pencil yourself?’
‘Yes, if need be.’
‘Well done,’ he said.
“Your left, your left, your left, your left… well done… Your left, your left, your left… You have no right! With your left! It is gone! The Second World War took it. A tram cut it off. You were born without your right. Left, left! Well done, well done.” After the sports society’s competition he christened me a “magnificent southpaw”, and when they took me for the qualifying contests he thought I would carry his theory and skill, together with the name he had given me, to Moscow, Berlin, Rome and Melbourne, set them on the victor’s podium. “Your left, your left, your left…” The commission agreed with his demand. I too thought I had a magnificent left. But the Bull from the veterinary school, Karapet Karapetyan, pecked my muzzle in the very first second. I told myself: never mind. The commission awaited my sudden left. Clinging to the ropes, the trainer prompted: your left, your left, your left. I agreed with him; I knew my unexpected left would spring out any moment. We had dressed. The commission had dispersed; Karapet Karapetyan had been declared the winner and I the loser; the trainer had spat and left. We were in the street, it was spring, peaceful twilight, and I still thought my unexpected left would spring out any moment. “‘What sort of fight was that, Bull?’ I said. ‘How should I know?’ He raised his shoulders. ‘You escaped my left nicely, Karapet.’” Later I asked Vergine to tell her husband that Hrant was a boxer, had a terrible left. Whether she told him or not, he jumped from the moving vehicle, gave me a couple of blows and went to carry his cement to his building site.
‘Is Sanasar a good man or a bad one, Comrade Arayik?’
‘He is just a man, after all.’
‘Was it raining?’
‘I said it was.’
‘But why did Uncle not want to give the horse, Arayik?’
‘I said it had just come from Kazakh.’
‘He gives Gikor the horse to take to Kazakh, and when we ask he says it has just come from Kazakh?’
‘If it had just come, what was he to say—that it had come long ago?’
‘Did he know I had been stuck at the station a week?’
‘He and Father are a little at odds.’
‘Why?’
‘He told Father: why do you need so many children?’
‘What business is it of his?’
‘He said: how are you going to feed so many children?’
‘But what business is it of his?’
‘Father said: I shall feed them. He said: then go and find yourself a horse; Alkho has just come from Kazakh.’
‘Then what are we to do, Arayik?’
‘About what?’
‘In general, Arayik.’
‘I do not know. Father said you should greet Uncle coldly.’