In a time of turmoil and depravity
Do not condemn your brother, brothers…
—You once said you could not write about the genocide because you could not be impartial. Can you write about it today? How do you assess this untimely uproar over “recognition of the genocide”?
Levon Asatryan, journalist, ChI.
— Yes, I said something of that kind, and a decade or two before saying it I had also done it. Our revenge destroys us; our fragile shoulders give way beneath the burden of our past; our human path, the path of someone who has come into this sunlit world only once, is diverted, wanders and is lost. Later, by setting the identity and work of the Belarusian Ales Adamovich alongside those of the Turkish subject Hakob Mndzuri, I think I theorised it not badly, roughly like this: it is one thing to have your Slavic brothers at your back and demand an account from fascism for your incinerated Khatyn, and quite another to live in a country where the executioners of your child and parent, your village and country, are made heroes and given statues.
That was what was said, and nevertheless there was, if not confidence in a rear secured by “Slavic brothers”, the Union and the sympathy of the whole world, at least the hope of confidence. When the Armenian historian wrote The Young Turks before the Judgement of History or Cilicia, he nevertheless had strength, a certain confidence in his ability to act. Our status as citizens of the empire made us speak an entirely different language. Now, you say, am I to change my language, when dominion has departed for good, when Adamovich’s Khatyn or Romm’s Ordinary Fascism flare up beyond the bounds of my strength as an Armenian? Are we to change our language, stand before this suddenly Turkified world in another language and another stance?
Please do not regard my words as poetic affectation. For if anyone is more serious than a poet, and that is the Armenian diplomat, the Armenian political thinker, the national parties and the entire public, then both of us stand before the same wall, are held captive by the same blockade, and have the same task: to break through the enclosure.
But the enclosure is an enclosure only for us. For those beyond it, towards whom or where we strive, it is no enclosure at all: it is a state border defined by bloody and bloodless victories. And the Turk is a symbol of evil only to me; I am a symbol of the victim only to myself. For them it may be the exact opposite, or perhaps they do not judge by these symbols; perhaps they have other signs for evil and good, danger and safety, harm and harmlessness. Our endless anguish as a small people may have wearied them, if not repelled them. Let us be certain of only one thing: beyond the besiegers there are no brothers of ours in blood and faith. Or even if there are, faced with the problem’s difficulty they will turn away, pretend not to understand, or we really will be incomprehensible. A true book is accessible to each and all of us, and each and all of us have access to a true book. If I consider it a good book about my brother, if I consider it a book about my daughter, it is a failed book. The writer was dishonest, and the book punished him: it was born dead. Just like the natural scientist and his experiment, like a doctrine and society, which have left whole histories of mutual punishment. Like a true book, with a scientific problem’s clarity, like a doctrine drawn from society and returned to society, our conduct and our policy concerning genocide must be built first and solely upon honesty. Honesty first and solely towards the subject itself, honesty somehow within itself and for itself. Then we will have broken through the enclosure and will be comprehensible to each and everyone. A little cunning, a slight inaccuracy, the omission of an unknown in that equation of many unknowns, and the problem will punish us; the problem will punish itself.
No, the Turk will not recognise the genocide, will not admit that he is guilty of genocide. His communist did not admit it; his nationalist will not. Every morning I face my day as a claimant with heavy reluctance. Why would he—his political thinker, poet, student, diplomat—make it his own concern to remind every member of his great people that he is steeped in guilt and debt? The Turk will not divide his land, will not break his whole into fractions. So is it worth expending effort and sweat upon a stone that will not crack, that on the contrary will crack us, going on and on through a labyrinth that shows no sign of an exit? It is not, but we cannot refrain from going, cannot refrain from expending effort and sweat. One thing we certainly can do: think of our children and not go mad. That is, bring ourselves to measure, to our own measure, place ourselves within the bounds of reason, pull the black curtain away from our children’s faces before God’s day, not build a wall of lamentation and suffering around the whole public and each individual. They do not live by beating their heads against that wall, after all. In their day of song and anthem, they see rancour and lament huddled in a modest corner.
That much we can do, and that much is not little. But to fail before that possibility is unforgivable, and yet we fail, fail again.
This is not about advantages to be wrested from the enemy, harm to be inflicted on the enemy, nor even hindering his march eastwards. It is about our behaviour towards ourselves. As an entire people we speak and act for recognition of the genocide; young and old, we kneel over our unburied dead and do not see that we are squandering the people itself, its capacity and living breath. We meditate on justice and God, hope for restitution and press our claims, and do not see that the claimant himself is being exhausted.
We should have thought about the claimant, not the claim. We should have loved this Homeland, attended to today’s cares. Otherwise tomorrow the claims may be satisfied and there may be no claimant left. Especially since this has already happened once: we give you a country from Yerznka to Shushi, but you have no people.
— Please give your definition of an “intellectual” and say whether, in your opinion, we have intellectuals as such. Your opinion of contemporary intellectuals. And can those who witnessed the murder at Poplavok and stayed silent about the truth be called intellectuals?
Naira Mamikonyan, journalist, Aravot.
— Intellectual culture as an essential component of our spiritual life and conduct, a characteristic, a quality; and the intelligentsia as a caste, a stratum, preferably an upper stratum, embodying a standard, giving its time a face and features, holding the government and society accountable before it. In the absence of a broad national and state life, we have never had the second. And now you and I bring its glorious image, that of the country’s true master, its uncrowned king, into our world of anguish from Russia, Germany and Scandinavia, not from our own past. Or, so our past should not look too impoverished, let us say: we were just about to have that intelligentsia when genocide and revolution overturned the country; it was just about there when ’88 happened.
Churchill said the aristocracy would clot the English Channel with its own blood and never let the enemy set foot in Britain. It is painful, of course, that we do not and have not had that stratum, that elite defining a homeland by its blood and constituting a country by its conduct, that stratum of intellectuals. More painful, however, is the decline of that honest and noble human quality, the retreat of that characteristic which was to have been an inalienable component of each and all of us; which told the epic through hundreds of mouths over thousands upon thousands of nights, and not once, anywhere, did an indecent word slip out; which set a measure upon our deeds and speech and recoiled from the beyond-natural and the excessive as from real leprosy. That reverent moderation, that unconditional obligation towards measure, made us notice that perhaps there is no need to seek our aristocracy in blood-clotted straits. Perhaps our intelligentsia and our intellectual are the Armenian himself, the Armenian peasant, my father, my grandfather, who in this masterless world was both master and labourer of his home, both prince and shepherd of this uncrowned, ungoverned land.
I do not know. In my time, say in my presence, the incident at Poplavok flared up; in the presence of those far from intellectualism and the intelligentsia it would not have flared up. In, say, Sos Sargsyan’s presence that discrediting disgrace unfolded and burst forth; in our father’s and grandfathers’ presence there would have been a different evening, of tolerance and conversation. Suppose Isahakyan and Demirchyan were there, sitting opposite each other at one table, their chins upon their hands, yes? Their hands upon the heads of their walking sticks… And the room’s warmth, cultured, restrained, orderly, and the harmonious conversation of saxophone and piano, yes? For the president of the republic is present…
I do not know. This expulsion of the well-mannered person from each of us, this trampling of one another’s boundaries, this apparently familiar but truly boorish invasion of one another’s territory, was of course to become loud-mouthed wretchedness and boorish baseness, base boorishness, turning the real drama of abuse of power and murder into a provincial club’s play. “The boys were drunk; they stopped the carriage, the minister’s carriage… Took him out and spat in his face… Well, what’s a minister to a drunk? Dro also summoned him to the police station, deceived him by saying he would forgive him, shot him in the back in the presence of one of the drunks.” You and I, alongside the celebrated troop commander, can say to our Poplavok, “Ah, you scoundrels!” and pass on. Or did you remember Zampanò from La Strada, that dense, impenetrable brute of savage strength who snaps an ox-chain, ridiculous to the clown and poet, who in turn is an incomprehensible superfluity to the thick-witted brute?
—Has this country had its Rostom? Will it? Or has the lone horseman’s heart broken beyond repair, and are we dwindling away?
Liza Chagharyan, journalist.
— Wasn’t Vano one? Wasn’t Vazgen?… Or shall we keep our eyes fixed again on the red mists of Vardanank’s times and the lands of the Chens, from which, rest assured, the smell of intrigue and blood will not strike our nostrils? Did we know they would exist? I, for example, was not sure. I said “army” and saw a Turkish or Russian army; I said “victory” and the triumphal arch stood upon other horizons; I said “minister” and “commander-in-chief”, and the commander dozed on horseback in Rshtunik’s distant nights, while the “minister” took shape beneath a scribe’s hand on ancient parchment. Yet the living figures of Vano and Vazgen, growing and strengthening hour by hour, were establishing themselves in our days, among us. And now I take that blindness towards our own day upon myself in vain, that powerlessness of vision, that sin of laying waste to the near and making the distant bloom. Sacred things are sacred, but I have always regarded the past with reservations and the present with confidence. A thriving hearth is more of a shrine to me, even if its door is closed to me, than any St Karapet monastery, even if its doors stand open. In ’89 or ’90 a child disappeared in Abovyan, let us say a teenager. For weeks the radio sifted out the parents’ anxiety. Then I seem to have heard that the boy had been found, I think in Karabakh or on the road there. To me: long live that nameless child, rather than even Nzhdeh.
No village, no people has left itself without a Rostom. Let us wait, create, call, be one ourselves a little, and he will come. Or he has already come, is among us.
—If war begins tomorrow, what words will you address to those leaving for the front?
Armen Baghdasaryan, political commentator.
— Victory alone, I shall say. Defeat will become an old witch clinging to your back. Wherever you go, in whichever direction, the Georgian, Russian, Chechen, Greek, Persian, even the Turk will say: you are a young man, aren’t you ashamed? What have you shouldered? Is she your wife, are you married to her in church, can’t you separate? Or is she your mother, did she bring you into the world, are you obliged? Throw her off, I shall say, you son of a dog: you began your people’s history in disgrace, will you close it in disgrace too? Victory alone, and your life will become a steed, take you into its saddle; horizons will open on every side, and along your road the Georgian, Russian, Chechen, Greek, Persian, even your enemy will greet you with sympathetic love. Victory alone, I shall say. Defeat and victory both come from the human being, are the human being himself. Victory is the radiant person, defeat the darkened person. Your ancestor has already passed through your eclipses; you have nowhere left to grow dark. Your ancestor has already worn out your black clothes. Will you put on your red once? Only victory has been given to you. Be a human being before yourself, and mount your horse.
—Why are we so malevolent?
Samvel Mkrtchyan, translator.
— Is your Saryan malevolent? Komitas, Charents, Tumanyan, Myasnikyan, Garegin Nzhdeh?… Which of our individuals who has expressed himself to any extent embodies malevolence? On the contrary, all are marked by something that reminds me of the biblical Dutiful Son. May we not call the Prodigal’s brother Dutiful, the one who did not surrender himself to pleasures and adventures, did not approach the bounds of soaring and falling, did not squander or become squandered, did not enter his father’s world of loss and longing, and so on? Instead, quietly and anonymously, always present and through his presence absent from his father’s world of longing, he travels from field to home, from home to field, keeps his father’s house. Everything successful among us really does conform to that image of the Dutiful Son.
Do you mean the rest of us, the mass? Those who raged around Saryan as he rose day by day, who devoured Charents, expelled Komitas from here, wrote hundreds of articles and denunciations against Tumanyan, and so on? Those we call the people? That is not malevolence, it is wretchedness, incapacity. The saxophonist in Cortázar’s story rages and smashes his instrument just when he thinks that through his playing he is about to enter the highest sphere of mysteries, some mysterious magnificent palace, but at the last moment the doors are closed beneath his very nose. That is the rejected person’s bitterness. Tumanyan said “embittered” and explained it through our trampled Armenian history; I say “incapable”. The painter unable to enter Saryan’s world, the poet Charents’s, the scientist Hambardzumyan’s, the worker that of high productivity, the peasant that of great, expansive, billowing farms and herds, and so on. Perhaps these are not different worlds but one and the same splendid world of the successful and fulfilled, surrounded by the world of us, rejected and embittered.
To thirst a little more than we do, to equip ourselves a little better at the age when gifts are acquired, not to rely on the community so much, not to tolerate weakness as much as we rely and tolerate and are tolerated; to work on each individual of ours, on our child, as much as a Jew or a German… Then bread for two days and the prospect of a two-day journey, and see how your malevolent, my incapable, Tumanyan’s embittered person turns before our eyes into the world’s kindest, most lovable people. Bread for two days, the prospect of a two-day journey, and what a splendid people arose from the truly bitter twenties: my parents’ people! A little effort upon ourselves and the prospect of two days’ advance, or even the illusion of a prospect, and see what an upright, just-minded, brave people will rise: my sons’ people.
—Recently an Italian diplomat came to Armenia, returned home and wrote: “I went and saw a people who have turned away from themselves.” Do you agree with that foreigner?
Naira Zohrabyan, journalist.
— Tolstoy, they say, grew very angry when “tragedy” was used on every occasion. The Russian fleet at Tsushima sunk to the last ship: “tragedy”; Russian nationalists in Tula wrecking Jewish shops: “tragedy”; a thousand people trampled to death at the open-air public feast for the tsar’s coronation: “tragedy”… He would rage and grimace: “Traaaagedy, traaaagedy!” What the devil’s tragedy, when these are ordinary ineptitude, revolutionary agitation and slovenly wretchedness? Had they been a little more competent, they would not have perished, would not have been smashed, would not have suffocated in the crush.
Tragedy is what cannot be encompassed or constrained. Against your will and effort it unfolds, follows its own course and carries you away with it.
But ours now really is a tragedy: after so many years it does not reveal its beginning or initiators to your backward gaze, nor show its end in the distance of decades. What is happening, what will happen, I do not know. Let me use Bergman’s example: there he speaks of art; let us read it as speaking of the country, the homeland. Art, he says, is no longer that old hissing, writhing, biting, beautiful viper. It is the empty sack of an old viper, long dead, eaten inside by ants, moving through the ants’ bustle and giving an illusion of writhing. I am one of those ants inside, he says.
We too, then, are willing or unwilling participants in our tragedy. Within it each diligently gnaws his share and does not see the whole: head down, alone for himself, in parties, cliques, mafias… Trading in achievements, sacrifice, blood, through sheer bullying, snatching bread from one another’s mouths, making one another’s parents weep… We gnaw at the core and do not see the whole. To see the whole we would have to be outsiders, like your Italian.
The successes of those parties, entrepreneurs and others ought to have been the nation’s success, meaning the success of us all. Palaces have risen, wealth has accumulated, parties and groups have taken shape, and so on. But the whole absurdity is that the whole has not grown stronger thereby: the whole as such has ceased to exist, its parts no longer belong to one another; we no longer belong to one another.
With our brilliant victories over one another, we have left a torn country in the arena, a country that looks upon us as strangers, as we do upon it. So that it might be otherwise, so that we might all find one another, belong to one another… But that has not happened and will not. Vazgen was not killed so that we might again read homeland in one another’s eyes. Demirchyan, Ter-Petrosyan and Siradeghyan were not driven from the arena so that the homeland of us all should again be there and we should all be its sons.
— I start from your words: we all wrote the script of the twenty-seventh; Nairi was born of the bloodthirsty atmosphere. Did the twenty-seventh discharge that atmosphere, or does it persist?
Anna Israyelyan, Aravot.
— Let me try to answer with an example from Turkish history. If it helps, good; if, in the Turkish manner, it proves treacherous as always, then at least as a fact in itself it will become the possession of a slightly wider circle. In the single year 1912–13 the Turks had two Balkan wars and were defeated very quickly in both. In the second war, when Greek-Balkan forces had encircled them on every side and Salonika was about to fall, that port so important to the Turks, their Saint Petersburg, the Young Turks sent, I think, their only cruiser not to strengthen the city’s defence but to take out their exile, their deposed Abdul Hamid, their enemy. They had waged a bloody struggle against him for thirty years and dethroned him four years earlier; two years earlier he had struck Constantinople with a heavy wave of counter-revolution and almost destroyed it. This sultan and his family they brought out of Salonika, breaking through the ring. Their enemy must not fall into their adversary’s hands. Their exiled sultan was not now to become the adversary’s captive. Deep in the country’s safety, in Bursa, he was to live out his remaining human years, chew over his deposed ruler’s plots, burst forth in his sultan’s malice: how dared the incompetent fools leave heavenly Salonika to an unworthy Greek? And, I think, secretly rejoice at Enver’s statesmanlike foresight, which did not hand him, removed from affairs of state, to Turkey’s enemies, did not strengthen Turkey’s enemy with him, the deposed sultan. His substantial possibility of revenge, the factor of his vengeance and possible comeback, was not incorporated into the barracks of enemy forces.
There: it has proved treacherous in the Turkish manner. I wanted only to have seen and understood that the Young Turks did not drive even their deposed sultan, a heavy stone in the path of the ruling carriage and an extra burden upon the treasury, into enemy captivity, did not make an exile of him. But no matter: both conclusions lead into a sphere of national pride and subtle calculations of power that is incomprehensibly distant from us.
Ours is not that; we are not that. Among us, persecuted and persecutors alike have no Turkey of our own above our heads; we are not its subjects, do not fear its sternness and do not become human through its love. Our persecution will proceed to the end, to a dead end, to annihilation, to the “camp of the Hagarenes”; and our being persecuted will amount only to growing fangs in that dead end, turning our horn into a sword and turning round at the head of the “army of the Hagarenes”. There is no submission, no negotiation, no play or flexibility. Is it weakness of thought, weakness of language? It can be explained roughly thus: the centuries-long absence of a ruling national elite has deprived us descendants of both the ruling conduct and the language of enmity and friendship. Explicable, but a national flaw, because what should end in a quarrel of words ends in blood. Tumanyan said: “You quarrelled in words; you did not shed blood, after all.” The absence of that great gift of “quarrelling in words”…
I remembered Faulkner’s story. So that the “incident” between the insulted man and the insulter should not be sealed within their tribe by either man’s blood, the chief sets up a cockfight. And so that justice should be served and only the insulted man win, he has his own cock brought against the insulter’s fighting cock. You should see what a cry the insulted man cries with each strike, what jubilation he jubilates when the other falls, what a dance he dances over the lifeless bird! He must dance, trample, crush, flatten, obliterate it into the ground: it never was and is not, while he himself exists, sweating, victorious, his rancour satisfied.
Ours—shall I call it heaviness of breath? The absence of an effort to bear our truly heavy human and communal burden with a light heart, to “give our pain to the south wind”? Or some unwillingness to tear oneself away from oneself—some of our dialects still say ink zink—to free oneself from the very unroyal arrogance of humiliating everyone apart from oneself, bringing them to one’s own conquering king’s feet? Unable to win, unable to bring the other to his feet, he will not tolerate the other’s mere presence, will destroy him. Unable to submit, unable to negotiate, he will fall silent and silently harbour rancour.
Tumanyan branded that open arrogance of ours and that equally Asiatic vindictiveness a “disease”, the disease of revenge: “More disgusting still is that our man likes to take his revenge and deal the blow through another’s hand, himself always in the dark.”
The Turk has a good saying: “The traveller should be on the road.” By the twenty-ninth, the national disaster of 27 October should have been uncovered, closed, sealed and handed to history, and for three years we should have been upon our road as the poor in spirit. To hell with it if the same procession contained all of us, guilty and innocent, conspirators and the uninformed, those bewildered before the catastrophe’s enormity and those secretly examining our human quality. That would, of course, have been self-deception, but there are paralysing things before which a community cannot stand without self-deception. For example, Turkish public thought placed the guilt for the Armenian calamity within a narrow circle of the ruling party of the time and stayed on its own course. For example, the German people attached the Gehenna of the Second World War to a couple of its madmen and set about healing itself. From entire decades of blood and betrayal, our Nikita Khrushchev selected the single year ’37, and from whole armies of intellectual and physical slaughter a couple of generals. The remaining two hundred million of us were to stay in the parade of our decades. Adjustments as we proceed, corrections on the road, disputes and bargaining later, the anguish of guilt and repentance with time, with generations. In all three cases, in all thirty-three and three hundred and thirty-three cases, society was not fragmented or torn apart, did not nail itself to guilt and the time of guilt, did not fall in its own eyes. It preserved the dignity of its unity and course.
I could have answered your question thus: “No, the atmosphere has not discharged itself. Ambushes are still concealed, castles will still vanish into the air, bloody reckonings will still occur. Armenian and Armenian, Armenian and Armenia still have a road to travel away from one another.” Especially since years ago Vano threw out: “The field of privatisation among us is mined”, and what Vano has said in his own terse, decisive way is truth to be carved in stone. Or I would answer: “There will be no explosion in parliament or elsewhere. They will strengthen the guards, close the gates and, leaving the dissatisfied whimperers outside, settle into their beys’ peaceful doze.” In either case you would not be dissatisfied, because either would encompass quite a number of events and faces from our future reality.
But the point is that the atmosphere itself has been paralysed among us. The vanguard fighter has already opened the road, and it is quite possible that tomorrow some idiot, for the sake of the same progress, will repeat him and a third will follow. Yet the thunder of those disasters will no longer roll across our nationwide sky, our unified national body will no longer shudder. Those bursts of gunfire will strike our nationally dead body; those explosions will sound to us like news of some dreadful incident that happened, or did not happen, in a distant country. A foreign country? An airless space where events and things float, having lost their weight and meaning? Or some lunar landscape where you call and do not hear your own voice? Through 27 October, this is the Armenia the twenty-seventh’s generals found. After the twenty-seventh, this is what we and the country became.
The twenty-seventh itself was still bearable: a massacre unknown in world history, existing only in minds filled with black nightmare, yet through self-deception one could draw parallels—this, this and this had happened in such-and-such countries too—and be consoled. But what happened over these three years, the irrecoverable loss that peeled layer by layer from our national face, the pollution of the shared national image that stuck in layers and folds, person by person, to us all—how many decades, how many Saryans and Komitases and Tumanyans and Abovyans and Charentses will be needed to cleanse it through effort and suffering?… This loss, this discrediting of sovereignty, history will not forgive us, just as the earthquake did not forgive the falsehood of our buildings.
—You once said that if humanity lost its morality for some reason, it could be restored through the way of life of Tsmakut’s inhabitants. Tsmakut’s inhabitants are in literature. Whose image in real life could restore the lost morality?
Tigran Hakobyan, former journalist.
— Tolstoy sends a very promising young officer, who has turned away in disgust from the emperor himself and his high society, into the world of childhood. There he has a cousin, I think his father’s sister’s daughter, a little girl who trembled amid other people’s hatred of one another, who made herself ridiculous: for example, pretended to swim on dry ground so that smiles might appear on her cousins’ faces, earth-coloured with hostility. Tolstoy’s own flight before his death was also towards youth, towards the Cossacks and the Caucasus. He died on that road. Tumanyan gave himself to our legends and tales, Hemingway to Africa.
Now you prevent that escape of mine, and you are right to prevent it. “That is literature”, “they are in literature”, “whose image in real life could restore the lost morality?” Whom can we rely on, whom can you and I cling to so the mire does not seize our feet? In our old villages they called it ushab. The buffalo, an animal of water and marsh, able to cross Sevan snorting, would have its feet seized by the mire, and the buffalo would drown.
Since the day I received your question, whole multitudes of literary and real faces, an endless procession of our own and foreign, familiar and unfamiliar people have passed before my eyes. They went, circled, as though around a mountain, returned thinned, with irrecoverable losses, to pass again, lose again, return brightened or darkened, grown or worn down, having lost their faces along with their masks. Most often I remembered Tushin. Tushin was Tolstoy’s captain’s name, wasn’t it? He draws the burden of war like a draught animal and, drying his wet feet beside the fire, is as silent as a draught animal before remarks and reproaches. It is imperceptibly natural both to him and his superior that, along with the burden of work, the lashes of reproach are his. In short, a man of work: he and the work always find one another, give one another breath. Often I remembered Christ himself, often Hadji Murad, the doomed Chechen commander. Sometimes for a minute or two my contemporaries, friends, parents and all our mothers flared in that procession, mothers who bore saints’ torments. In Mndzuri’s words: “To become saints, the Hripsimes and Gayanes did not endure our mothers’ suffering.” And throughout that time one picture from my old days stood before me, astonishingly fresh, its colours and sounds beloved and ringing as they are only in children’s souls. It would not let any of the many similar pictures replace it.
In the mountain’s misty May sunlight, in a hollow between two hills, a wholly virgin place where no summer encampment had ever stood before us, a man, one of the few post-war men, whose breath brought peace to everything living and lifeless, and a boy, one of the many post-war children, are putting up a tent together. The village authorities had, understandably, designated that clean, new alpine campsite, where the complete absence of thick weeds showed that its first inhabitants were this man and this boy. But the boy chose the tent’s position himself: where the buffaloes would stand so milking would be easy for nani; where the tent should be set so that the ground was level, sheltered from the winds by the hill’s foot, and left no space for another tent above it; where the ground should be opened for the tonir oven so it would be easy to dig and would not draw water.
But you do not know what a tent is. My tents and yours are different. Your light tents you unfold, stretch and pitch; our heavy felt tents we tied together. Ours were warm in the cold and cool in the sun. Yours in cold and rain are all right, bearable; in the sun unbearably stifling. Ours did not leak in the rain either, if stretched into a proper dome and their skirts gathered tightly. Few people still had felt in our time. Our young family, inexperienced in mountain herding, for example, did not. That boy’s old, large household had had it before the war and still had it. Perhaps their great felt tent was the last to disappear from the mountains, the tent Tumanyan calls daga in one place and tent in another: “Girl, you godless thing, sit in the tent”; “Enough, girl, come into the daga.” It was heavy; two men could barely put the rolled bundle onto an ox-cart, especially if it had absorbed rain. But one could not leave it in the mountains: someone would take shelter, light an open fire inside, leave, and it would burn.
Now there is something difficult for me: to make you understand what a pole is, what bast is, what the reed mat is. And I cannot find the Armenian for “framework”: “skeleton” is not pretty, yet at first the picture was so clear. An uncle and his brother’s eleven-year-old son, just the two of them, are tying a tent together. The boy cut the poles, the boy stripped the bast. Not the reed mat: reed mats were brought from the Turks along the Kura. Their great tent’s mat, the tent or daga that accommodated five children and their nani, their grandmother, and could receive a couple of guests for a day or two, had come from those Turks before the war, before us. The boy’s journeys did not yet go so far. It was later, in the troubled summer of ’89, that, returning from Georgia, the boy suddenly realised he was among Turks. He pretended he was meant to be there, asked his way, drove his truck to the door of acquaintances, his own from the summer of ’46, his great household’s from ’36 and earlier. He said he was himself, had been passing and remembered. He was entertained; understandingly, an escort was placed beside him and brought him to our border at Qazakh. It was later, in the autumn of ’93, that he rang from Ararat, said he was calling from Ararat, on the road to Karabakh. If he did not go, they would give the truck to someone else, who would take it and ruin it; if he went… “Wouldn’t I have told Vazgen?” Then he rang to say he was going. Not going and going were both awkward, but by going he would at least be with the truck. It was later, I think in ’98–99, that they took the truck from him; they seemed well informed that he could found a home and make a farm flourish in bare desolation. But now it is ’46, late May of ’46. He is only eleven, tying a tent with his uncle. He has cut each pole himself, trimmed it, dragged it from the thicket. He has peeled the bast from its trees himself, and even now I do not know which tree it comes from, although I am half a year older. At eleven, five or six months is an enormous span. Our house has a man, and poles, bast and tents are his things to know. The man of their house is the boy himself. His father did not return from the army.
In his story The Deer, Tumanyan says brnut; we say brmut. Where the soil is well fertilised, the trees, snatching light from one another, pushing one another down, rise and rise with the density of a reed bed. Their crowns sway in the distant sky, especially if you are only eleven and short even among your peers. Brmut is that thicket of young hornbeams, and the pole is a young, straight, soaring hornbeam, as though a reed, cane, ghamish, kamysh. The oriental hornbeam is more flexible, but our forest has neither its thickets nor the tree itself. The reed mat… It has just occurred to me that our Turks of the old days would hardly have tied themselves to such minute work: cutting a thousand reeds one by one, binding a thousand and ten thousand stems to one another in three places. They probably gave their Kura reed beds to their Gypsies; it was probably these who cut the reeds and tied the mats for the nomadic camps.
I do not know. That boy taught me oriental hornbeam, pole, mat, bast: oriental hornbeam, mat, pole, bast I know.
We drove the hornbeam poles deep into the ground in a circle, an oval, bent them, brought them together from opposite sides and bound them tightly with bast. Bast is a strip of bark as wide as a girl’s ribbon, perhaps from a linden, perhaps from some other tree. The northern Russians may have woven their bast shoes from it; our ascetics may have woven their sackcloth with it, I do not know. Before chemical ropes arrived, we bent our poles, bound them at their crossing points with strips of bast, and the tent’s framework was ready.
Two eleven-year-old boys, inseparable friends but eleven separately, eleven each, two boys and a man, one of the few post-war men, will now draw the felt over the framework. The framework will not slide sideways, will not sink backwards like an animal getting to its feet. Then they will belt the felt’s hem, its skirts, all around with a broad belt of reed mat so the buffalo calves do not chew the tent’s skirts, the pigs do not tug them. They will go inside through the doorway and say: “Good day… Why are you still asleep? It’s getting on for lunchtime”, though there is no one and nothing inside. Then there will be silence. They will stand or sit for a while, and in the silence the boy’s light, childish snuffling: he broke his nose falling from a buffalo, and ten years later the army doctors in Yerevan will set it right. In a minute or two the spirit of that great family must slip gently from the old felt and sit silently there, as though it had long been there, the place long belonged to it, the boy belonged to it from birth. The uncle and the other boy, although they helped very well, are not quite its own; now they will leave and go to their own places.
The buffaloes will rise slowly from the gorge’s warm pastures and stand at that door in the evening for milking: to be milked, to hear a couple of gentle words, not to remain ownerless in the gorge, or not to leave that door ownerless, who knows? Two days later the dog will come before the horse and nani. Although other tents will be there, it will circle this one, look in over the threshold and, although no one and nothing is inside, run to meet the horse and nani: it has found their home, it stands there. The uncle’s horse will come laden before nani and the dog. Although it is the uncle’s horse and they have their own mountain home, it will turn from the path and stand at that door, because that load and that tent belong to one another. Then the green-grey-eyed face of little, fair, pretty nani from Sanahin will appear. But that is later, two days later. Now an uncle and his brother’s ten-year-old son are tying a tent together, solid and heavy, as though not for four months but for endless time: they are founding a tent. In every word and grumble of the uncle’s, every movement, there is vexation at his brother who went and did not come back, at all who went and do not return, who left their work upon one uncle. And in his vexed speech, whatever he says, there is longing for his brother and love for this little scrap.
I stand beside them, or perhaps opposite, on the other hill’s slope where our mountain hut is to be, and do not know that their friendship, the friendship of the big and small, the elder and the child, where nothing is lost of the elder’s rare words, his heavy, firm kneeling, his hand’s spare, strong movement—the hand is like a ploughshare moving beneath black earth—his strained black-red flush and tired sigh, everything pours into the boy; and nothing of what the child does and will do is lost, everything is drawn into the elder’s being as pride in his brother’s son and as satisfaction: that friendship, the dearest of all friendships, is being imprinted upon me and will come with me to this day.
The uncle has just returned either from the Turks of Qazakh, where our villages’ sheep wintered in those years, or from the Sevan hydroelectric construction site, where he hauled stone with an ox-cart alongside a German prisoner of war. I do not remember. I know only that from either place he would return weary and thoroughly fed up, wanting a good washing and a couple of days’ sleep, while here there were the whole village’s cares and his brother’s household’s too. He came and saw that here they both knew his weariness and possessed the dignified awareness that, however much a man and uncle he was, one must not become a burden on another’s shoulders, must not be a burden at all. All they asked of him was that his kindly breath be here, that the little ones should sit beside him, snuffling, and watch, and then they themselves would shear the next sheep, hang the tent’s little door, cut the place for the tonir, speak to the ox with his peaceful anger, and the ox would obey. They themselves would say with his calm peace of the Turks of the misty, smoky gorge, “our Turks in the gorge”, although they were only eleven and “had never once in all their lives been among Turks”.
I do not remember that boy in our games in the summer of ’46. He was at his work as the household’s man, where his father and uncle were to have been. Even now I have not overcome my fear of a Turk, a Turk’s dog, a Turkish settlement, whereas I remember him coming from their camp in the gorge. He had gone to see whether Kor Ahmad had come to the mountains that year. Why was his eye swollen? A bee had stung him. So he already tended their hives himself; they no longer asked others. Besides, even if he did not go, the buffaloes went down to the Turks’ gorge: the brushwood and buffalo wallows were there. Kor Ahmad perhaps said: “You’re the blind one, boy. You call me blind?” He laughed and perhaps said: “A bee stung mine, but your name is Kor.” Kor Ahmad may have said: “Know why the bee stung you? It saw you eating honey secretly from Kor Ahmad and stung you.” Or something else like it, meaning nothing, simply a sign of simple coexistence.
We last met that boy this past August. “It’s all right, life goes on, don’t think too much,” he said. “What were we meant to do that we aren’t doing? This is it, this is what we do. You know the town ponds, those three lakes above one another? Floods brought silt into them; the mayor gave them to the people. I’ve planted beans on my plot for two years; now it’s a fine flowering bean field. Some plant potatoes too, but I grow my potatoes in the Stepanavan villages. The spirits—I don’t drink shop spirits, only what I distil myself. Don’t turn everything into a worry either. It’s life, we’ll live.” He laughed. “We mow hay on Maymekh. I outdo all the young ones. They smoke; they can’t stand the scythe.”
I am certain those little great people have been and are in your life too. They are not so great as to be visible from my and your positions and from every side. But there are many, at least a few in each life, and many of us, all of us, are that little great person. Within us and among us he has always been and is, as father, friend, wife, son, an unrelated stranger, the people.
Andranik Tsarukyan of Beirut, the very good writer, forthright publicist and sober political figure who stood over me with your question and did not leave, suggests in the “They Were, and Are No More” sequence of his documentary volume The Great and the Others: those nameless little people were there in Paris, Zurich, Rome, Yerevan, and my life, the famous man’s life, became a parade. Now they have passed, are gone, and my fire sinks. Without them it is I who will now go out.
They are not marked out or made renowned by business reality, by reality’s practicality, so that, say, they might express themselves and become Kirk or Tchaikovsky. It is contraindicated for them. Their popular body, that of the simple, ordinary, nameless, accepts neither earthly nor heavenly stimulants or doping: it is contraindicated. They avoid pens too. But they have a great advantage: they are many, they are a people, the people itself, which recoils from immorality as from the unnatural. Otherwise our life would not be life, and life itself would not exist.
We have nothing to do to them, as though they were immature and we made them mature, as though they did not know what homeland was, meaning who and what they were, and we made them patriots, as though they were unbelievers and we brought them to faith. No, we cannot have a saving mission towards them. But we do have something to do concerning ourselves: at least sometimes look at ourselves through their eyes.
Precisely so: to see ourselves through their eyes, to be certain that they are beside us and look at us sometimes with Fyodor Dostoevsky’s gaze, sometimes with that of the boy from our distant youth who has not abandoned us and will not until our days end, sometimes with someone else’s. And to correct our conduct, course and behaviour according to him, them, the people; to beware of tormenting his soil-like, gentle submission, to fear embittering him, to dread his contempt.
Vazgen had that boy in his soul. Vazgen was a poet and perhaps saw that boy watching him from the top of that hill. Karen Demirchyan knew the heavy weight of the people’s regard and feared losing even an ounce of it. Catholicos Vazgen had formed around himself a whole retinue of our ancestors and our future, and his royal bearing was through them and for them. Andranik upon a white horse held himself under that gaze of the people; otherwise he had long been defeated and old. They were all human beings who, setting foot upon the battlefield, could say, “God is with us.” Yet it was not a bad thing that we did not fill the empty sanctuary of morality with any one of them, not even Tumanyan’s or Alexander Myasnikyan’s image. Instead we obtained an exact formula:
Lost morality can be restored through our own images, fashioned according to the people and by the people.
—At one time you urged Levon Ter-Petrosyan not to resign, saying it would set Armenia back some three years. Do you think your prediction has come true?
Armen Dulyan, Radio Azatutyun.
— If, of course, I considered his Musa Dagh flank so open and sensitive to any urging; if rulers are governed by our urging at all, if they do not know everything from the outset. If that were so, I would now ask you to go and soften this other man’s Karabakh flank through urging: let him do this, this and this in this, this and this way.
It is not so, but if you say “urging” and “some three years”, I shall answer.
Sadly, yes. Sadly, the house’s pillars seem to each newcomer to have grown of themselves. Each departing man takes possibilities and prospects with him, which seem to him his own, not the republic’s and his successor’s. Sadly, it was not a prediction—then at least my vanity as a black prophet would have been satisfied—but a simple reading of history textbooks. Kochinyan’s stability and peaceful ascent were not tolerated in those old days, already thirty years distant, and were replaced by Demirchyan’s rule. Ten years later Demirchyan’s peace and reserved caution before perestroika’s times were no longer advantageous. Another ten years later, Ter-Petrosyan’s stability. To whom, to whom were they not advantageous? Probably those who cannot imagine this country without their own prosecutor’s presence. Now, with discredited sovereignty, industry not trying to rise from its “place of death”, and emigration, it is probably advantageous, or even this is not advantageous. To whom, I do not know. Perhaps we must ask our KGB and influential parties, if they are indeed our parties and our KGB rather than parties and a KGB over us, if they are anything at all.
How beautiful Mexico was, yes? It spread its skirts over its earthquake, neither brought the earthquake’s dust to the world’s nose nor accepted the world’s sympathy and aid. How beautiful Chile’s Pinochet was, gathering all the country’s agitation and noise into one stadium and sifting ten years of peaceful silence over the country. How beautiful to be a citizen of a great, strong-willed country. How beautiful to rise commandingly from the country and above it, to become human before its image, to become a person, to be proud of the strength of your foundations.
Our former rulers understood only “some three years” after coming to power that they had inherited a country. Only some three years later did they become human before that country’s image; love and care for this country, for its people, appeared upon their faces only after three or four years. Naturally I would suppose the same for the new ones—you say “predict”—that in three or four years they would grow from conquerors into masters, would not fear every growl, post a guard beneath every bush, would become human before the country’s image, frown before ugliness and bloom before beauty.
But I was well wide of the mark. What three or four? I should have “predicted” seventy-three or seventy-four. Excluding Soviet Armenia’s reality, as though passing through an uninhabited desert, as though that time had not even existed, I should have descended into the century’s depths, into the time of open passions and unconcealed ambitions, where the people exists as the faceless, nameless mass of a silent country and lets its sons’ evil games pass over it without a murmur.
—Do you ever feel, like Márquez, the wish to take a recorder and return to journalism, where you began?
Ruzan Khachatryan, Radio Azatutyun.
— Armenian literature has never had that merciless cruelty of abstraction which would make it sometimes descend into the street with a recorder to test its truthfulness in Márquez’s way. Armenian reality has had no shortage of demons, yet Demons was written in Russian. Those who cut off a mother’s breast are not lacking among us either, yet Civil War was filmed in the distant West. Turkey’s most law-abiding taxpayer is the Armenian mistress of brothels, while Armenian literature murmurs The Girl Khonarh and Our Mothers. The reality of phantasmagoria, nightmare and delirium has unfolded and flourished here; our reader had to recognise our reality’s delirium in other horizons, other languages, other societies.
Is this our literature’s flaw or virtue? Flaw or virtue, that is how it is, how it has been from the beginning. Having lost his king and kingdom, the Armenian took refuge in Armenian literature, and ours was an apostolic writing of healing, encouragement, consolation, hope and faith. Is that not a kind of partisanship, the same partisan literature? Can literature be partisan, can there be partisan literature? There cannot. And from the sea of reality that opened in ’88, has unfolded to this day and will still unfold, not one incident or event had a precedent in Armenian literature that would let you say: this too has fallen here from this page. And 27 October was wholly unexpected for Armenian literature, but never for Armenian reality.
I deliberately consign a couple of major facts of Armenian literature to oblivion: Charents’s Land of Nairi, At the Crossroads of History and Vision of Death, Bakunts’s Twilight of the Province. They exist, and how they exist: “Through history’s crossroads we have passed without helm or idea, endlessly reddened by others’ fire.” But they are not the backbone of our literature’s attitude towards reality. Ours, I repeat, is an attitude of healing.
I understand that impulse of yours to be authenticated, renewed, reborn by reality, or, if we are nothing, wholly annihilated. I know a couple of your attempts and can be said to sympathise with you. But I am that old blind man. For ten or fifteen years reality has shown me another face, and I still remain with my old pictures. In these new times of yours, in several places and on several occasions, I have seen whole, finished films, heard the melody of unspoilt, peasant Armenian, full of thought and seriousness. Open your camera and recorder, and you have a documentary film, Armenian Soil, and a hymn of the Armenian language. I know the charm and power of the documentary; I know there is a “New Journalism” movement with its Norman Mailer and Michael Arlen. A good journey to such a movement among us too, but I shall not surrender to that documentary truth, because I have never been that “unauthentic” one.
Do you remember Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev? Forgive me for not managing without great names: they are my life, that Beckett, that Bronze Horseman, that Hadji Murad, that Dantean Legend… Otherwise provincialism and greyness would torment me, as they do. It is not a good film, it is a great film, made in defiance and in glory of a great nation and state, made with great will and by overcoming the material’s heavy resistance. Andrei Rublev does not paint the Last Judgement there, does not want to, hesitates. The monastery stands, the other Gospel episodes are on the walls, the Judgement’s white wall awaits its nightmare, and Rublev does not want to be that nightmare’s parent. Tarkovsky has left room for another interpretation: as though the rulers of the time wrest our talent from us for their monasteries and put out our eyes so those eyes cannot give colours and forms to other walls. But I understand what I understand: I shall not paint the Last Judgement as a fresco, so that there should be no last judgement. We find what we seek; I shall not paint the Last Judgement. Seeking darkness, we find darkness; I shall not cover your world with my darkness. “In the beginning was the Word.” Our word becomes a deed. Let my Judgement remain unopened beneath the layers of white plaster.
You say: but Dalí? But Guernica, Vision of Death, Demons?… Do not say “but Dalí”, because it was not he who spread before himself the country where Dalí arose and established himself, but other people with an entirely different worldview.
…Both Tumanyan’s front-line, Western Armenian diaries and his lament With My Homeland belong to the same 1915. “Before fleeing, the people of Shatakh killed their old fathers and mothers and the sick, buried them with their own hands, and came like that.” “There were people from elsewhere carrying their old parents on their backs, on foot.” “Little ten- to twelve-year-old children carrying their younger brothers and sisters. Four- and five-year-olds travelled thirty versts a day.” And then: poets with undefiled lips must praise your new life in new songs, new words:
My new homeland,
Mighty homeland.
I did not want to see his classical, ceremonial words broken by your newspaper’s typesetting, and did not present the quotation in its splendid, masculine, regimentally ordered form. But even thus it obliges us to a different attitude, stance and course from the diaries’ reality: “One suddenly begins to cry, some start to follow him, while a few look calmly at them and around themselves and continue eating; others ponder silently, philosophically.”
Saryan could recall his nightmarish impressions of those same places in that same ’15 only fifty years later, when he whispered “cosmos, cosmos” with the cosmonauts and marvelled even more than they did at the earth’s unique beauty, which he too had created. Yet his painter’s life had brought from that same ’15 Flowers of the Little Town and the magnificent Iosif Mantashev. If you have the book, open it and admire them again: is the world so imperishably beautiful, the human being so unshakably confident? If you say that in 1915 Saryan faced not that reality of the world’s and humanity’s enduring charm but this other one, and cite his own recollections of unburied dead, of a mother swaddling her baby with her long auburn braid, you turn the painter’s and our 1915 into a white wall, death and silence. Do not do so. He did not; neither should you.
Here, where we are now, a hundred paces this way or that, in those same times lived our renowned Kostan Zaryan. Barely escaping death at the hands of the red Turks, he came to roof the native country with the sky of European culture: Velázquez, Dante, Spain, Baudelaire, the Hellenes… Yet this grey peasant province has neither strength nor desire to lift its head. Cold, rubbish right before the window, behind the partition a silent Turkish family, Chekists and a Russian Chekist in the Turk’s house, sharing the Turk’s daily ration and wife equally with him. Commissars, Astafyan Street, the cold, sunless, hungry, grey last ten days of January. The Red Army at the top of Astafyan, the Leader’s red coffin above the gloomy, taut, grey army mass, which must now, at a restrained command, step forth and fill the city with its masculine grief. The Leader, the Only One, has died in Red Moscow, the country has been orphaned, and understandably the red funeral is in Moscow now too. What is the red coffin here for? That is how it is: throughout the country red coffins must be set up, commissars in leather jackets stand honour guard and make a silent oath, the red Chekists… That is how it is. The reality here at that time is precisely that, not this which rose from this very place and time like a flock of doves, like the clash of cymbals:
A fiery girl struck her flaming hip with her hand
And laughed down merrily in a golden voice.
A thousand roses caught fire around her, at her side,
A thousand poppies, a spring day and a rainbow.
Charents, yes. Charents: “1921, May, Yerevan.” Or that same funeral with the red coffin:
We blew the trumpet, and the terrible echo
Thundered from land to land,
And in the fields of millions, of countless thousands,
Rebellion swelled and grew.
Or I Love My Sweet Armenia, our national anthem, our soldier’s oath, our ode, our lament?… “Unattainable glory”, “white Ararat”, “blood-like flower”, “dragon-voiced blizzard”, “books in erkatagir script”… Words woven into a nervous system for those newly arriving, joined into a backbone for generations, becoming the stance and language of an upright, lofty human being, perhaps even for that Turkish woman who, with the daily ration, was silently shared between Chekist and husband. Or even for the native Nairian himself, who was there, is here today, always despairing, always bent beneath care, who sometimes looked out from the depths of a firewood seller’s eyes. Sometimes their gazes clung to one another: his, the firewood seller’s, Nairi’s actual reality, and his, who opened another Nairian reality before the upright, unbending person of the future.
Tomorrow, merely tomorrow, when that other reality begins to become real reality, and especially forty years later when it is established and dominant, the other, yesterday’s actual reality, please, by right of being its time’s chronicle, may be leafed through as a book or testimony, disputed, dispute, complain and accuse. In short, live its modest book’s life, but never replace the present with itself. The present has been shaped beneath other hands, warmed by other gazes; its gardens are not your gardens, and your eye becomes a fairy tale’s evil eye upon the present.
We have the national right to recall General Franco’s name here. This land too, eighty years ago, experienced battles like Spain’s civil war. Like the general, his country’s master and son, who gathered the remains of all the fallen from every corner into one valley and raised a cross visible to every corner, set a cross above all, believers and unbelievers, righteous and guilty, this people too had that son and master: Alexander Myasnikyan. We know the Spanish war a little from history textbooks, communists and Falangists drinking one another’s blood in a life-and-death struggle, and much from the American’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. The bells toll for you to hear; with every dying Spaniard something dies in your soul, with everyone departing you are robbed.
Our own war we know a little from our history textbooks, films, memoirs and testimonies: communists and Dashnaks drinking one another’s blood in a life-and-death struggle. And much, again, from that same novel. With every dying person you die; with every axe-wielder you become a beast; with every plot your face darkens; with every death sentence you become an executioner. Urged by your party comrades, you surrender the arena to madness. The bells toll for you, over you, plundered and murdered.
Our words about that time’s reality were a foolish repetition of the same madness; we need not draw even a sound from those words. But here is our deed: the lofty person of reason and tolerance was summoned into the arena, the knight of reason and tolerance, Alexander Myasnikyan of New Nakhichevan, a Lazarev Institute graduate, Teryan’s friend, communist, front-line soldier, founder of Belarus, Leninist, the man for whom party orthodoxy was a personal flaw and partisan obstinacy donkey-like stupidity.
It is not the mist of time’s distance that makes him great, but the nearness of our time to his. “For centuries we had no homeland. And he gave us a homeland”—Charents. Only in a foreign land, only enemies of different peoples would slaughter one another as we slaughtered one another before he appeared. It was before such people’s feet that he spread a homeland; it was such people he called to sobriety.
It is a consolation that it was not our nationalists, not we, who eliminated him. But we have no consolation for having brought down, with our own hands, Alexander the great Myasnikyan re-embodied in Vazgen and Demirchyan. Vazgen, yes, possessed the sobriety not to give his fiery self to the embodiment of tolerance and reason: Demirchyan was to be that image in our national arena. And Demirchyan, greatly to his credit, possessed the sobriety not to give himself to that same image of energy and practicality: that was Vazgen’s element.
You ask: how will it end?
Their fall is not the fall of that image. The fall of Vazgen and Demirchyan, however precisely the enemy chose them, was only their destruction. We shall call, and from us and through us that same image will rise, the person of reason and tolerance. With his commanding presence we shall be a people of another stance, another homeland.
Chorrord Ishkhanutyun (Fourth Estate), Nos. 166–172, 2002.