The ancient epic singer laments: turning my face to the sky, I struck my knees against the earth, cried out and bore a son; far away among warm rocks, the tigress curled, twisted, cried out and bore a cub. Against my breast, with a song, I taught my son to look and not blink; far away among warm rocks, the tigress taught her cub to look and not turn aside his young gaze. My son armed himself and went hunting; among the distant warm rocks the cub stood, tensed and went hunting. On a narrow path they came face to face: my son looked at the cub, and the cub looked at my son. My boy’s bow cracked, his spear whistled among the warm rocks, but my son would not defeat the tigress’s son with arrow and spear, at the cost of his young life. The cub looked, tensed and sprang, but he would not defeat my son with his claws, at the cost of his brave life. They darkened each other’s red sun among the distant warm rocks, the tigress’s boy and my boy; they darkened their mothers’ joyful sun, the tigress’s son and my son. What shall I do now, she says: rise, take the long road, find the cub’s mother, and together lament our young brave ones.
But I, but we, have no need to turn our faces towards the distance, set foot on a road of searching. The man who gathered the remnants of our martial will from all our lazy, paralysed, timid Armenian times into a people and forged them together; who opened an arena of victory and rejoicing in our souls and before us; our new Nzhdeh, sought for decades and found in our own blood and marrow — we ourselves have killed him.
Just like that, we killed him.
The monster that grew in the marshes of our shallow thoughts and our unbrave souls, we unleashed upon the master of our arena of hope and confidence. Because there shall be no arena of hope and confidence among us: we are the square of lament and complaint, and hope for a secure future will be in other capitals — Moscow, for instance, America, for instance, Paris, for instance, even Istanbul or Ctesiphon. At our head in our time there shall be no soldier and commander of our own flesh and blood; the soldier and commander shall be Saint George riding a white horse across the sky, and not Vazgen Sargsyan.
We killed him and will kill again, and the marsh of our sunless thought and our unbrave spirit will swallow those who rise anew, until we can see our brother as our king and commander, ourselves as his subjects and soldiers, this land as our homeland.
We killed him, and today we stand before those clear-minded, optimistic forebears who loved us, who brought us here. After this catastrophe of our spirit and thought, I wonder: would they still love us, would they still bring us here? Would Saroyan come again from his distant Fresno to this country with his open heart, urging us not to fear ourselves or others, to love ourselves and the other? Would Saryan see us and this country as he saw them? Would Tamanyan build this city for our present inhabitant? And our grandchildren in the distant future: will they love us, will they? We ourselves have laid the disgrace of the fall of Kars fortress upon a commander of non-Armenian origin, placed a monster of another nationality at the head of each other disgrace, and with our lazy minds ruminate that our saviour and our enemy alike are somewhere far away from us.
Now, at last, we have managed to see that we are both contemporaries of our disasters and active participants in them. And we are not dear to ourselves.