“Someone’s asking for you.”
“Thank you.”
One hand in my pocket, tall, handsome, immaculately dressed, I lift the receiver and draw out, with a French inflection, “Allô!” And I am pleased with myself: yesterday’s peasant, now entirely freed from the danger of becoming a shepherd, battered by hail and ground down by aching joints, I sit somewhere safe. I am important enough to have a telephone; my friends are famous, which means I am famous too. “Allô!”
“You once wanted us to go to Ani.”
“Ah, I wanted all sorts of things.”
“There’s me, you, Minas, the sister-in-law, a couple of architects.”
It is hot, the snows of Masis grow dim, the grapes rustle as they fill with sweetness. A little cognac, fifty grams or so; the sister-in-law ties on a light nylon headscarf and puts on cream to keep from tanning. Her smoke-tinted glasses are foreign and very good; we ought to have a little coffee. “This fellow García Lorca is a Spanish version of our Isahakyan.” “Yes, we have magnificent poetry.”
“But why are you laughing?”
“Because I’m right to.”
“Tell us, so we can laugh too.”
“As if I’d tell you!”
I am no carter, my ox has not broken a leg on some distant road, and the brigade leader will not quarrel with me. Instead of the remote, remote word “architect,” I deal with actual architects. Some of the painter Minas’s works are very good; some I cannot accept. When I talk to the painter Minas, the world, with the finest part of its civilisation, enters our language and is kneaded into it. There is Cézanne, there is Manet, I think there is Monet too. Where I should have said “rake,” I say “Cézanne”; where I should have said “foot-and-mouth disease,” I say, “Who were those Czechs in your studio yesterday?” The wolf’s howl and the alarm of dogs and shepherd in the dark mountain camps are a distant dream to me. Predicting rain from aching joints is lyric poetry, as medieval clouds of locusts are to the peasant of today. A very, very solicitous hand picked me out of the field and set me in an armchair in town. And in my joy at no longer being a mower, I sometimes criticise the mowers. The shepherds too. The authorities too. Mao Zedong too. “This bridge,” Mao said, and the words were inscribed in gold on the bridge, “connects this bank of the river to the other bank of the river.” I, a shepherd’s son destined to be a shepherd, now recall the Chinese god with a smirk. I, a peasant’s child, a peasant, have now thoroughly mastered asphalt and say that asphalt will have no bumps and hollows. Mine are this Volga car, this speed of a hundred kilometres an hour, this nylon headscarf, the flowered flask and the coffee inside, the pregnant indolence of these orchards, the town-like villages and picture-perfect Aragats, the spring brought out to the roadside, the ancient inn, the flocks spread out like clouds and the breeze wandering with the scent of flowers. And the sea of fields and the city of Gyumri. And the border guards’ commanding officer from Rostov and his reserved readiness to escort us right up to the border. And the feeling that my country begins at the Masis mountains and ends in Chukotka. Somewhere I confuse Shirak and the Kuban, as a Russian confuses the grapes of Crimea and Ararat.
And here I stand, so happy, so powerful, among my equally happy and powerful friends, atop the observation tower, behind the binoculars, while in the green desolation headless forms reaching skyward sway. I have seen better ones in films, and in greater detail. Besides, Yerevan is worth seven Anis, and I am a resident of Yerevan.
“Why are you crying?”
There were Turkish encampments in our mountains. They came from their yellow valleys, grew red and weather-cracked in our mountains, loaded their nomadic belongings onto their oxen, and ho, ha, ho—back to their yellow valleys.
Now my eldest uncle and I have gone to buy butter from them. For the first time in my life I hear people speaking another language, and I am afraid. They are lively little devils, swearing, hitting in secret and smiling openly, their eyes somehow unthinking. I saw them again only twenty years later, in a dream: it was supposed to be the fortress of Karin, clay walls and these children, and at thirty I was afraid even in the dream.
There was one among them who sat hugging his knees, with large, slightly vacant eyes that seemed to look at us and seemed to look at nothing at all. A woman called to him; he moved as if to rise, seemed to have gone, but suddenly she called again, so he had not gone. She came over, her skirts swaying, to beat him. He leapt up, seemed even to run a couple of steps, then grew lazy or forgot he was supposed to run.
My half-bald uncle, with his triangular eyes and high-bridged nose, was bargaining there. No, their price did not suit him. As though offended by their haggling, he drew back to leave, and as if this were his final refusal, said to me too, “Get up, let’s go, boy,” and winked. He had boasted to our people in the village and to me on the road, “You’ll see how your uncle tricks the Turks,” and now he was showing both me and himself that he had almost, almost done it. They were just about to come down to his price when he grew tired of bargaining or forgot he was supposed to trick them. “All right,” he said, “give it at whatever price you ask.” They sold at their own price and had mixed sheep’s butter into the cow’s butter just as they pleased. The women at home quarrelled with him separately about that too, but it was no longer his concern; his mind was on something else. He had noticed the boy hugging his knees and was watching him. He let go of the balance beam, forgot his business and called the boy.
“Come here, Armenian boy.”
Listening to the evening sounds of the camp, the child looked into the twilight of the ravines, his eyes wide open and seemingly a little crossed. He sat motionless, unresponsive.
“Isn’t he Armenian?” my uncle asked, bewildered.
“Armenian, Armenian,” they said. “Mind your butter, so you don’t say afterwards that we cheated you.”
“Aha!” my uncle boasted. “Put him among a thousand and I’ll pick out my own blood.”
The boy had now taken a switch and was beating the bull. He struck its muzzle, eyes and horns, scarcely hurting it. One step forward and the bull would have crushed that little creature a span and a half high, but he had slipped beneath its muzzle and was striking again and again, nervously, falling and getting up, unevenly; it seemed he regretted striking it at every moment. The bull turned to run. The other children followed with the dogs, while the boy was again sitting with his knees in his arms, looking into the ravines filled with darkness.
“I’ll recognise my own blood among a thousand,” my uncle murmured again, as though recognition were some great achievement.
“I’ll pick it out from a thousand,” he said as he put me in the saddle among the packs.
In those old years, a man well known in his native Zangezur, who has struck and been struck in ethnic and civil fighting, stands at the centre of events and cannot make sense of what is happening in this country. He crosses the Araks and goes down to Tabriz. In Tabriz he settles into his trading, the comfortable life brings drowsiness, and the scorched smell of gunpowder fades in his nostrils, like yesterday’s intensely hot and intensely cold day along the pathways of memory. This is my gate, this is my house, this is my pillow, these are my wife and children.
“Does Armenia still exist? Is it still in its place?”
Armenia existed, had to exist, because now his son had fallen ill with homesickness. Lord God, Lord God... There are a thousand kinds of pain and a thousand remedies in the world, and here the boy has fallen ill with homesickness. The doctor said this was an animal disease, not a human one: the Persian tiger, for example, will not live in, say, Germany, and so on. The doctor gave medicines and said they were useless things: his homeland would cure the child.
“Where was he born?” the doctor asked.
“Zangezur or somewhere. Kapan.”
“Where is that?” the doctor asked.
“The Araks or whatever. Beyond it. Russia.”
“I don’t know,” said the doctor. “If your child is dear to you, you’ll take him. If you can’t, medicine is powerless here.”
Lord God, Lord God... Such a thing had happened only in the old hashish-steeped Persian tales, ten thousand years ago, and once again in Tabriz, in the family of Gerasim Atajanyan, in 1927.
Gerasim Atajanyan, an anti-communist in his past, strapped on his Mauser, took the boy along behind him, crossed the Araks at night and climbed into the mountains.
With the ringing of the sun came a morning of blue gorges and yellow mountains. Smoke rose there from the camp of Artsvanik, there from Geghanush, there from the camps of Davit Bek and Tsav. The distant forests, the ravines of ravines, smoked with blue mist; the summits of summits scattered golden dust. And Gerasim saw that no, the child was not the only one suffering from the animal disease.
Morning came. A detachment of the Red militia lined up at the door of the Goris revolutionary committee and, on command, marched off to arrest the border violator Gerasim Atajanyan.
“Simon of the Gyanjunts,” Gerasim Atajanyan called from his hiding place among the crags, “Simon of the Gyanjunts, be a man, don’t be inhuman. The child is ill.”
“Gerasim of the Atajans,” called the Red militia chief, “did you think you could escape by fleeing to Tabriz? Come out and surrender.”
“Simon of the Gyanjunts, while you still have blood in you, go about your business.”
His reputation as a good shot, the child, his well-chosen shelter and the thought that these mountains belonged to Gerasim too compelled the Red detachment to turn back without Atajanyan. Conversing peacefully, they came down from the mountains, climbed the mountains, descended to Goris and reported that there was no border violator. Meanwhile the border violator roamed up and down the paths of his childhood, drank thirstily from the old cold springs and told his son:
“This is the Cold Spring, this is the Blind Spring, remember, and that is Bear Ravine. This is an oak. It isn’t gold; the world is full of oaks, but this is a special tree. It is the tree that stood beside our grandfather and now stands beside us. Even if you go on from Tabriz to Egypt and America, this is your tree; it will come with you. You will fall ill, they will ask what you want, and you must say: that oak that lived beside our grandfathers.”
And Gerasim looked and saw his grandfather, an axe in his belt, slowly climbing the steep path, with his piebald dog following slowly behind. Gerasim recognised the dog: it was the two hundred and twentieth of his family’s seven hundred wolfhounds, passing on undiminished to its descendants the instincts and intelligence of its sheep-guarding ancestors.
And Gerasim looked and saw the red-cheeked child Gerasim, the adolescent Gerasim with sweat where his moustache would grow, the young Gerasim with his arched brow, climbing from the ravine to the spring, now one ahead, now another. And Gerasim listened and heard the voices of all his ages on the eternally same slopes, and the voices he had heard through stories. There was a sea of red poppies, fields greener than green, a concert of larks, and all of it multiplied, because for him the poppies, larks and fields of every age of his life were reddening, greening and rustling.
That summer until autumn, and again for two whole summers until deep autumn, when the mountains’ coolness turns to cold and the camps empty, the hearths no longer smoke and the mountains stand deserted in autumn’s last green, Gerasim Atajanyan lived like this in the mountains with his son, then went down to Tabriz, looking back. His son had recovered; he himself had fallen ill. He needed his mountains, which were on this side of the Araks, and on this side of the Araks was his past as well.
The writer Anton Chekhov grew bored with his Moscow, got up and travelled along his Volga to his Urals, through the Urals to Western Siberia, Eastern Siberia, his Irkutia, his Yakutia, his Far East, along his Amur to his Sakhalin. He travelled about and came back to his Moscow with his book of travel notes, Sakhalin, under his arm.
The writer Derenik Demirchyan grew bored with his Yerevan and set off to travel as far as his Sakhalin: it was two hours away. He crossed the Sevan mountain, descended into the Dilijan gorge and followed it, and where the gorge became a valley, Demirchyan said:
“Vardan fought a brief battle here.” And he said to the Azerbaijani melon-grower, “What’s new, my friend? How are you, how’s life?..”
And he turned the car towards the other end of the land of Armenia: the other end lay at the end of a four-hour journey. “What’s new, my friend?” In four hours a poor pupil can earn four failing marks, a good one four excellent marks; a rocket will draw a little nearer the moon, the sea will buffet itself a little more, the Matenadaran’s blue basalt will change through a few more shades. But four hours, no, will not become a book of travel notes.
Six hours later Derenik Demirchyan came home.
“We’ve traversed the land of Armenia. We’ve been in the region of Gugark in the land of Armenia, the region of Kotayk, the district of Tsaghkotn, the great region of Ayrarat, the region of Syunik, the district of Sisakan, the region of Shirak.”
Had Napoleon’s affairs gone well—Russia was not his goal—he would have descended through the Caucasus to India, destroying the Ottoman Empire along the way and establishing an Armenian kingdom. And he would have said to the Armenian commander in his army, Joachim Murat—Hovakim Muradyan—“Here, Murat, receive your lost homeland.” But Napoleon’s affairs failed at Borodino, in the opinion of some researchers because of a cold.
Naive, dear, weak, faithful...
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