1
This village is tied to the world by a thousand threads: the telephone, the power line, the post, deliveries of wool, meat and butter, the cooperative shop, school curricula. The training school for club workers gives the village graduates who understand theatre and books; the village sends plump young brides to villages near and far, brides who do not put down their pitchforks until childbirth is upon them, and not one has ever proved even a little loose. The village gives universities able students and the army cheerful, disciplined soldiers; the film distribution office sends it films, newspapers send correspondents, and so on. And the people at these points of contact with the world, who have voluntarily assumed the duty of judging those around them in addition to their own work, invariably describe the people of this village as modest.
A fifth-grader fills the children’s magazine crossword with Beethoven, Cervantes, Lenz, Hippocrates, Bruno, Komitas, the Sahara, the Euphrates and a kangaroo, and does not send his answer to the editors because he cannot see the point of sending it. He fills it with what he knows, puts the magazine aside and goes to borrow a library book, help a driver with repairs, shoot at flocks of sparrows on the threshing floors; in the smithy he smudges his little nose with soot and pumps the bellows, his eyes on the iron being hammered.
In summer the village’s children come home from the city, from their places of study. They come straight to the fields. Their fathers, their older friends, tell them:
‘You’re here? Welcome home, there’s your scythe waiting for you.’
The village has given generals to the army. Occasionally, once in ten years, they come to the village for a summer month.
‘Comrade General,’ they tell them, ‘take a pitchfork and command the stackers.’
‘How did you stack so much without orders?’ the general smiles.
‘You’re so backward!’ the general’s wife had protested. ‘Not a “welcome home”, not a “congratulations”—“Comrade General, the hay’s spoiling, take a pitchfork.”’
‘What should we congratulate him on?’ they asked the general’s wife one rainy day.
‘There... you don’t even know that... he only became a general two months ago.’
‘And what was he before?’
‘A colonel, obviously.’
‘Well,’ the mowers, stackers and ploughmen said without a smile, confidently, seriously, ‘after colonel you become a general.’
Antaramej had no permanent foreign-language teacher. The girls sent there taught for a few months, forgot to put on lipstick, grew disgusted with themselves in the mirror, and left for the city in tears. In the city they told their friends in disgust: ‘What was that? They sit through films in fur hats, smoking. “You’re a clever girl all right, but eat a little bread, put some flesh on you; my son’s just coming home from the army.”’
The headmaster went to the farm’s bookkeeper:
‘You were at the front, weren’t you?’
‘Left my leg there.’
‘That’s not what I mean. You know German, don’t you?’
‘Of course. I was a prisoner for two years.’
‘Can you teach?’
‘I’ve forgotten the letters.’
‘I’ll teach you. Come.’
Genosse Manukyan refreshed his memory of the letters, and from then on the school’s graduates received excellent marks in German when applying to university.
The threshing-floor watchman, also one-legged, took over as bookkeeper. He and the chairman had this conversation:
‘Can you work as bookkeeper?’
‘I’m a watchman, you know.’
‘We need a bookkeeper.’
‘It’s work, isn’t it? We’ll do it.’
‘Come.’
The farm’s very first chairman, Abgar, became the watchman. At home he put his grandchild to sleep and teased his old wife; she grew furious, while the very first chairman said, ‘Don’t shout, the child’s asleep,’ and went to the village centre. He would tell the chairman:
‘Give me work.’
‘Go put your grandchild to sleep.’
‘I have.’
‘Go play with your old wife.’
‘She’s grown up, doesn’t want to play with me any more.’
‘Go...’ the chairman thought. ‘Go, your pension’s been paid, buy some biscuits for your grandchild at the shop.’
‘My grandchild has no teeth.’
‘For your wife.’
‘Neither of them has teeth.’
And the chairman and Abgar, the very first chairman, fell thoughtfully silent.
‘I don’t know,’ the chairman would say. ‘Don’t bother me, I’m busy.’
‘Do you remember,’ the chairman would say, ‘you were a little boy, as high as my boots, your father brought you to the village centre, that big nose of yours was a little nose then, with a bubble on it; I’d take out my handkerchief and wipe it.’
‘What shall we do then?’ the chairman would say. ‘You can’t mow, you can’t herd cattle, you can’t eat honey, or you could work at the apiary. You know what, come bend oak branches into cattle tethers.’
‘Think you’ve found a child to make fun of?’
‘No, I’m serious.’
‘You’ve received iron ones.’
‘Oak ones are better.’
‘Well, I’ve made them already. You have two thousand.’
‘I don’t know, I don’t know. You’ve retired, stay quietly in retirement. What do you want from me?’
Then the watchman’s post fell vacant.
‘Don’t give it to anyone else!’ the old man grew agitated. ‘Keep it till I fetch my gun.’
The old man even stumbled on the threshold. Old men do not usually stumble. In walking they have an adult’s experience and a child’s caution. With his stumbling, the strong, beautiful, sturdy age of our living stirred free of time’s gelatinous eternity and stood in the office like a shepherd.
The village is old. Its monastery is fifteen hundred years old. The pagan fire hearth beneath the monastery’s foundations is eight thousand five hundred years old. Whether the monastery nested in the village or the village wound itself around the monastery, they do not know; they do not know the village’s age. Visitors from the city consider the monastery a treasure: ‘There are nations without even a two-hundred-year-old building.’ That is what the historians say. If, they say, the Turks, with God’s and the tsar’s blessing, had uprooted and annihilated Armenia completely, and only this village with this monastery remained of us, we would still have the right to call ourselves a highly civilised nation. With a scythe on his shoulder Pavle listens and cannot feel proud, because that son of a dog Zaven said ‘wait, I’m coming’ an hour ago and has been absent a whole hour, while clouds are rising from Sevan over Mount Zardakar and rain will crash down around noon. Architects value the monastery too: its windows are so narrow that only a sunbeam and a dove can slip inside, a cat cannot squeeze through, yet inside it is as light as a clear day.
And that architect and historian, and the general’s wife, and the finance department’s agent, and the telephone, whose history in the village’s life is only thirty years long, and all the newspapers, films, circulars, touring performances, praise, instructions, reprimands and threats have no effect on the village. A newspaper is a newspaper, an instruction an instruction, but it is the sun that will dry the hay, not an instruction, and they keep their faces towards the sun, which is why reprimands have no effect on them. Once a lecturer from the centre was left alone because a bear had got into the pigsties in the mountain cattle grounds. Another time the centre told the chairman, be here tomorrow. The chairman said, ‘I can’t,’ and the centre could not reply because lightning struck and shattered the telegraph pole. As for development, well, it is a village, of course it has developed.
He has put the telephone to his ear, reads a newspaper, takes a rag to wipe off fuel oil after repairing a vehicle. Today the Antaramej villager’s relationship with the telephone is not what it was in the thirties. There is no longer that suspicion and awe of the telephone: in the thirties it was something through which people issued orders and made demands, then hung up the receiver and tapped thoughtfully with a pencil on the glass of the desk. At that moment the chairman seemed as mysterious and powerful as a nuclear physicist kept behind locked doors seems to an Antaramej shepherd today. Then one day what had to happen happened: they asked the chairman for a horse to fetch the doctor from the next village, and the chairman laughed.
‘What do you need a horse for? Telephone, he’ll come.’
‘Isn’t the telephone only for the district centre?’
‘Telephone, telephone.’
‘I’ll telephone, but what do I say?’
‘Say, send Doctor Astabatsyan to Antaramej, there’s a sick child.’
‘If you’re not making fun of me, telephone yourself.’
After that they often had the chairman perform such little services and could never repay his kindness. Until one day he was not in the office and the telephone rang and rang. The shepherds grew agitated, then bewildered. And that exposing telephone kept insistently calling one of them. The shepherds looked at one another, then pushed forward the one they teased most in the mountains.
‘Sako, you’re the clever one among us...’
‘Sako, let’s see what you can do...’
‘May Sako’s mother live, just this once...’
‘Good for Sako!’
And Sako said to the telephone:
‘Eh?’
Then he remembered and corrected himself:
‘Hello!’
His companions roared with laughter: ‘Did you see how Sako developed all at once? Hello! He talks in hellos.’ Poor Sako was left with the name Telephone Sako.
Telephone Sako said to the telephone:
‘What?.. Yes, Antaramej... No, it’s Sako...’
The caller was from Getamej: there were goods in Getamej for Antaramej—soap, matches, calico, paraffin, biscuits, scythes; they should come and fetch them. The telephone was not so mysterious, its voice so human, as though the shop manager Khecho were beside him, and it became so familiar to Sako that Sako said:
‘Khecho...’
‘Speak, I’m listening.’
‘Khecho...’
‘Hello, speak, Sako, Khecho is listening.’
‘Khecho...’
‘Yes, speak!’
‘Khecho, you say biscuits, paraffin, and calico too?..’
‘Fuel oil, soap, nails, scythes.’
‘Khecho, you say it’s really you?’
‘Of course it’s me, Khecho.’
‘You’ve become somebody, talking on the telephone, Khecho, as though you couldn’t have sent a child.’
At the other end Khecho laughed loudly.
‘Khecho,’ Sako said, ‘you’re a son of a dog’s son.’
By this Sako meant that if he needed to, he too would telephone instead of sending a child.
Then the shepherds snatched the receiver from Sako’s hand, and each said whatever he knew about Khecho, his thieving father, his thieving grandfather, his thieving grandfather’s grandfather. By this the shepherds meant to praise the inventor of the telephone, the inventor’s father, his grandfather’s grandfather. And Khachik Poghosyan, the shop manager, understood it precisely that way.
So the telephone entered everyday life, became something like a staff, cheese, a cart. Then came electricity, radio and the rest. Incidentally, in its early days and for another year or two electricity stood for every sort of novelty. So much so that Sako could not call a metal bed simply an iron bed: he called it an electric bed. Or perhaps they invented that about Sako so Sako would not invent something about them.
The village quickly mastered this whole collection of novelties, electric and otherwise, and, enriched by them, went on digging the plot of planet Earth allotted to Antaramej. And that plot is beautiful. A monastery with doves upon it; a cemetery where you cannot tell whose heirs were poor and whose rich, because the village’s quarrymen and stonemasons have inherited, generation after generation, the skill of cutting stones of only one size and shape. Then beyond the graves, fields rise in waves up the mountain foothills, and where the wave of fields falls back before the steepness of the slope, beyond it sheep graze in white and black flocks. In the gorge, down the riverbanks as far as the lower village’s orchards and up them as far as the sweetening warmth reaches, Antaramej’s orchard runs in a narrow strip. There, on the boundary of coolness and heat, the river makes a bend. That bend is a high plateau, flat as a table, called Atorik, with lush, well-fed green growth rippling over black earth, and amid it the apiary’s blue hives stand in a chequerboard pattern, numbered from one to five hundred and thirty. Within a radius of seven versts hangs the apiary’s dense hum; within a radius of one verst hangs and ripples the warm scent of honey. Perhaps the bears squat below the cliff on the opposite bank, looking up, and perhaps at the cliff’s top the old beekeeper smiles, spectacles on his nose: ‘Come, come...’
‘Of course you’ll hold Antaramej up as an example,’ the leaders of other villages grumble at district meetings. ‘If Antaramej were my village... Their apiary... God gave and did not stint.’
Truly, God gave to everyone. Only, in giving Atorik jutting into the river, God did not arrange the apiary on it in a chequerboard pattern. He left that much to people. If people are not inclined to turn their plot of planet Earth into a garden, they will either not find the plateau or find it without a fathom-deep layer of black earth, or, who knows, something else will be missing.
I have already spoken of the monastery. For all its value, to me the monastery here is nothing. To me it is simply evidence that on this little piece of land the friendship of land and man has a thousand-year history.
2
Hovhannes the herdsman begat Yesayi the herdsman; Yesayi the herdsman begat Haykaz the herdsman; Haykaz the herdsman begat Stepan, who is no longer a herdsman but second secretary of the district committee of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League. He is a leader and says, ‘We must respect the labourer of the land.’ And for those words they love him.
I never saw Hovhannes; I only heard that he lived a hundred and twenty-seven years and complained of failing eyesight in his last two years. Of Yesayi I remember only his death: ‘The water drowned Yesayi.’ ‘How?’ ‘Tried to cross on horseback, it swept him away.’ ‘Have they pulled him out?’ ‘Haven’t found him yet.’ ‘Pah...’ I do not remember the funeral. I only remember that the man who spat in bewilderment was changing his trousers; his foot had become tangled in the leg, he hopped on one foot and cursed the seamstress—his wife...
An excerpt is published here. You can download the complete version as a PDF.