Tashkent

From an indescribably great, a worldwide journey, Jandar Tevan came back! He came back, laughed and laughed, pulled a ram down at his feet and slaughtered it, as though he were both the distinguished guest and the same old Tevik slaughtering a ram in the guest’s honour. His wife Sopi, the Other Tevan, the Handsome One, and that man’s young bride stood watching what he did and said, thinking he was thoroughly drunk, would fall down now and sleep a day and night. But he pulled a ram down at his feet and slaughtered it after his journey around the world. Around the world: that is, three days ago we vanish from here, for three days we do not know where we are, in what language or what we are saying; there is a constant smell of petrol and quince, and three days later suddenly we find ourselves here, before Sopi, the young bride, the Other Tevik and the new baby. We throw down the scythe in the Keghut hayfield, the heat at our backs, and make for the horses of Nav-Urt. Through the Kechut woods, Jarkhech, Kazakh, the Armenian and Turkish Voskepars, for three days we make a grand circuit on horseback, on foot, on the colourful Yerevan–Tbilisi bus. Then they give us a vehicle: in our honoured truck we arrive at our door, see a child’s switch in our hand and say, “What’s this switch? Who gave it to us?” We laugh and struggle to remember, as though it were an old dream, that three days ago we pushed back the colonel’s cap and looked from the slopes of Keghut towards the slopes of Arkanq, and before our eyes could tell us, our heart testified that the sheep had been driven away from the young bride. We left the scythe just so and made through the Acharkut woods towards Nav-Urt’s horses, the three horses. So our hand must have broken off the switch as we tumbled down from Keghut and held it that way for three days, as though it were someone else’s hand and the switch were in someone else’s hand. And all that time there is the smell of woman, quince, terror and dust. Here, from a victorious campaign Jandar Tevan came back, put the cap on the shelf and laughed.
“Pa-pa-pa-pa,” he said. “This isn’t a cap, it’s a polished sabre. It cleaves the people and passes through like a general. Y-e-es,” he said, “from Jarkhechavank to Voskepar and Red Bridge the people part and salute on both sides.”
There was a half-finished bottle of vodka in his pocket. Sitting hunched over his knees, he chuckled through his nose. They said he would sleep well now, told him to lie down so they could cover him. But he did not sleep: he pulled a ram down at his feet and slaughtered it. They thought something had been arranged, there would be guests, but no: solely for the four of them he pulled down one of the rams and slaughtered it.
Whether in jest or earnest, whether police colonel Vladimir Melikyan’s cap had played a part or not, that was how it was. Besides his own self, safe and sound and already edging towards a hangover, and twenty-five counted rams, our Jandar had brought:
Two flowered shawls for Sopi and the young bride: they could put them over their heads or over their shoulders, either way suited them very well, turning them into Turkish khanums. He had brought a large piece of halva, some two kilos, for Tevan’s child; a folding knife for Tevan; the half-finished green bottle of vodka costing two roubles seventy-five kopecks—he had drunk half in the cab, sip by sip from the neck, so the warm smell of petrol would not put him to sleep. The shawls, then, we have mentioned: two flowered shawls for the women. At the bottoms of his pockets three unripe medlars, picked in Jarkhechavank’s medlar thickets, but they had been unripe and stuck in Sopi’s throat, as earlier before Jarkhechavank they had stuck in Jandar’s throat for another reason. So, a watermelon in his arms and six batteries for the radio: all in perfect order, he had plundered Dagestan and brought it home. And there had been three roubles in his pocket, one single three-rouble note; a child’s switch in his hand, the colonel’s cap on his head. He came, stood chuckling through his nose, saw the switch in his hand and said:
“What’s this switch? What child have I taken it from?”
He had been quite unaware of those three roubles, that single three-rouble note: unaware that he had it, thought he had nothing at all. He had been disgraced before the driver of the bright Yerevan–Tbilisi bus and all its colourful people. The driver had said, “Aren’t you a peasant? There’s a thousand roubles in every fold of your clothes.” Jandar: “No, my friend. We don’t deny we have money, but we set out unprepared, what happened swept us away without warning.” He put his hand in his pocket, and there was a real disgrace: that folded three-rouble note. Now we do not quite understand whether the driver himself slipped it in from his own money with a Tiflis trick, Jandar himself had once gone to the shop and forgotten it in his pocket after buying something, or it had come from Yerevan just so with Vladimir Melikyan’s jacket. Though no: Hambo’s daughter turns the pockets out, washes, irons and sends everything clean and pressed.
With the morning’s bitter rust he came and whistled; his short-legged, broad-shouldered, Mongolian figure slipped, he burst out laughing, and by the old graves the watermelon rolled from his arms. “Hey, catch it!” he laughed. “The Jarkhech man’s escaped. Round him up, catch him!”
The Other Tevan, in shirt and underpants, was behind the shed; he shuddered as though struck by an evil spirit, and his stream stopped halfway. The sleepy, castrated red dog leapt diagonally towards the watermelon and went along with it, his proud head held high and paw ever ready to strike. But he caught his “brother’s” scent, yelped and flung himself back. What weeping and longing! As though the absence had been not three days but three years of army service. Flattened to the ground, he crawled and whined: castrated though he was, he was still a male, yet he whined and whimpered like a puppy, like a bitch; you thought he would fade away from longing. They sprang at one another’s faces, rolled about, thoroughly licked one another, and only then grew calm. The other dogs were untroubled, standing and watching.
“All right, all right,” he stood up and said. “You son of a dog. If you die of longing like that, next time you’ll fulfil your duty to the state properly, or your Jandar will leave and never come back.” But how could the poor dog be both here and there at once? The rams had not been taken from his flock.
Frost had settled—that is, not frost yet, but it was cold. The Other Tevan lost the shoe from one foot but managed to catch the thick-rinded K a z a k h watermelon, dark green, almost black. From a casual remark of Jandar’s he had already decided that the house of the clumsy Jarkhech fool had been a station between Kazakh and us. As though drawing a cudgel, in a minute his mouth filled with bitterness, and at that moment he decided exactly what Jandar had chuckled through his nose about for three days: this day next year, when the children had come down from the mountains for school, the Jarkhech fool would lose twenty-five counted and chosen rams, and lose them for good. He went to meet his friend in shirt and underpants, jacket over his shoulders; they exchanged a couple of words in their own language, and the decision about the Jarkhech man was confirmed. But, we say, just as the urination had stopped halfway and half drawn back inside, so the Handsome One remained soured.
Let us not say he took no notice of the gift of the knife or did not accept the radio batteries. He opened the knife, examined it, liked it, but folded it and put it on the shelf as though it were not his, had not been given to him. It was not a dagger, but the blade had a dagger’s groove. It was good for carving a forked stick, for slaughtering, for cutting hornbeam as thick as an arm. At the end of the sturdy buffalo-horn handle was an iron ring: he should hang it from his leather belt, but did not, folded it and put it on the shelf. The six radio batteries: sharpening a knife, scythe or radio, technical matters were his responsibility. He opened the radio’s back, removed the spent old ones, fitted the new ones carefully in order. It was precisely the hour of the special morning concert: Lusik Koshyan was singing for the village workers. His child lay in bed, holding the new shoes and moving little hands in a dance; two days before, the father had brought them from the village shop, and the child had slept hugging them. But just as the decision to deprive the poor Jarkhech fool had embittered his mouth, he himself was bitter like his mouth, and remained bitter. As though nothing lost had been recovered and no friend had returned, he stood apart from the concert and the women’s joy, and stayed that way.
The women said they did not know: ever since he came from the village and saw you absent, that was how he had been. It was Jandar’s Sopi who said it; how could the Other’s young bride read her husband’s mood, and what right had she to do so? She heard poorly: her hearing had grown dull after the child, or had been that way since school. Otherwise who would give a schoolgirl to a widowed mountain herdsman who had already had two wives? She looked attentively with blue eyes and understood nothing; had not yet understood that the twenty-five rams had disappeared from before her. Jandar said, “Yes.” Yes, he said: if the reason was our absence, we are present now; if it is some other absence, no loss in this world is found without loss, that is, disappears and is found unchanged. He said, “Have you noticed whether the horse came?” They said, what horse? He laughed and said, that is what I say too: what horse?
They thought he would sleep, said, now we shall drink tea with bread and cheese, the day will go its normal way. But he took his return and made it a celebration. Yet the joy had scarcely warmed properly when the Other stood up: I am off. Where? Tashkent. What Tashkent? I have a brother in Tashkent; I am going to bring him. Ah—ohhh...
Sopi was catching the ram’s blood for the dogs. Like a lavish king, our Jandar kicked the bowl: what was this thrift, we had returned as a victorious prince, had we no right to give the earth one ram’s blood? He pushed the bowl from beneath the neck with his foot, as though the slaughter took place before eminent guests. Before guests you do not catch the blood; it soaks in and disappears. You do not let the dogs lick it; before guests you are ashamed even of the dogs’ faces. You throw away the entrails so townspeople will not call peasants thrifty. Had they not indirectly let us know of an alleged town saying: “If a peasant kills a hen, either the hen is ill or he is”? But he allowed it: they drew the bowl under the neck, caught every last drop. He cut up the entrails so the dogs would not drag them about, mixed them with the blood, put them before the dogs. When a Turk slaughters, stand silently beside him like a child, watch and learn. Our Turkish friends taught us that a sheep has nothing to discard but a span of red intestine, yet you must find something for the dogs. Even the bile: if your gums are weak, rinse with warm bile and spit; it kills the rust and strengthens your teeth, and if your teeth are healthy, makes them healthier still. He cut off the cartilage of the feet and threw it to the dogs, cut exactly half the liver and gave it to the red wolfhound. He said:
“Over there, you have six more watermelons on Tsitskar’s tables. Whoever drives the sheep over will carry one back.”
Sopi had cut the watermelon; Tevan’s—the Other’s—baby fell upon the flesh, swam in the red sweetness.
He fed the dogs their fill and said:
“Let’s see what you can do. Today the shepherds are you alone; we’re at a grand wedding today.”
We all leave a wedding reluctantly. The red wolfhound and the other dog, who considered themselves Jandar’s, went reluctantly but went: they sat a while licking their mouths, then went after their sheep. The other two, who considered themselves the Other Tevan’s, went and sat beside their master, looking this way. Their master stood with his hands in his pockets, just as dressed up as when he came from the village two days before. He did not even say, let me stretch out my foot onto the ram’s leg; in its death throes it was beating my brother’s shin. However much the baby, the attentive, hard-of-hearing young bride, Jandar’s Sopi and Jandar himself said, the dogs did not leave the Other’s side. Until the Other grew angry and bent as though to pick up a stone, they sat watching. They had travelled by vehicle at night; the twenty-five stolen and recovered rams lay scattered between the sheds and might have stayed until evening and the next morning. They said the dogs took that separate little group for the whole flock and therefore would not leave. But why did the other two understand and go? These simply would not leave Tevan’s feet. Truthfully, had he not taken the dogs with him to the village, the rams would not have vanished: they had been selected and driven off one by one before yesterday’s schoolgirl cooing with her child. But we shall consider ourselves unsuccessful and unmanly if, on our famous night next autumn, the Jarkhech man’s wife is in the pen. We said, at least it is good they heed their master’s word. But just then the baby held out a little hand: now they sat watching from above the old cemetery. Jandar said:
“You’ve taught them badly, badly. If it were a Turk’s dog and he said go, would it sit and watch?”
Hands in his pockets, the Other raised his handsome face and blinked in his own way:
“What am I to do if they won’t leave my skirts, like children?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Do something so I don’t say more than I should about your dogs.”
Jandar said only that much about it, but even that much was not permissible: the poor young bride would at last begin to understand that the rams had disappeared from before her. Sopi, the young bride’s teacher and generally mistress of the two households, came with the half-finished bottle and pushed it into Jandar’s mouth. The young bride watched and learned that sometimes you must give your husband drink with your own hand like that, when he is working with a knife and his white, red-haired hands are bloody... But when would Handsome Tevik grant the poor young bride so much authority over him? Jandar drank a sip or two and immediately became all laughter; his green Mongolian eyes disappeared.
“You home-wrecker,” he said, “it burned. You pour it into my empty belly without thinking this lad has seen neither bread nor bed for three days and nights. All I’ve eaten,” he said, “is one unripe medlar of the priest’s.”
Our Turkish friends taught us that taking an axe to mutton is a crime: you must cut it up at the joints, playing the knife in your hand; the axe shatters the bones. Like a Turk, Jandar cut off a couple of pieces at the articulations, the joints, and said, “Away! Stop, Melikyan, your head’s falling off.” But the Other Tevan, the Handsome One, did not take charge of the work. In his famous blue suit, hands in pockets, he walked beside the recovered rams and examined them like a stranger, as though either the rams belonged to someone else or he did. Jandar and Sopi, husband and wife, looked at one another and said without words: his lordliness has come upon him. Sopi grew angry with a housewife’s familiarity: go change your clothes and come attend to this meat. But he turned his handsome face and looked askance: meaning, when your husband wears this suit, give your orders to him. And more: he grew angry with the poor young bride, though Sopi had cut the watermelon, saying you must not lose the child in the watermelon like that. His urban courtesy had truly come upon him.
“Bring it,” said Jandar. “Bring it, put your bottle to my lips; let this damned head clear a little.”
He drank a couple more sips from his wife’s hand, laughed and toppled over. “Saw this damned creature’s fat tail and remembered,” he said. “A fat tail, a fat tail, a fat tail, lads, soft: the moment you put your shoulder under it, your head sinks into it.”
But the Other apparently meant to spoil Jandar’s mood too. From over there he called across:
“So you brought them, what of it?” he said. “Whose are these?”
They said perhaps they were not the ones, perhaps not ours, but that was not what he meant. He said:
“Whoever owns them, let them come and recognise them. How should I know whose they are?” He raised his handsome face and blinked in his own way.
Our Jandar was not concerned; he had drunk, sleep was upon him, and he laughed. “Come,” he said, “come, all of you. Young bride, stand close so you can hear too. Jandar’s seen a film; he’s telling you. Teva-an!” he called. “Know Jarkhechavank, the place they call Haghartsin? Lads, women, women, women, all Russian and all engineers’ wives. Stop, Melikyan. Forgive us, in the army we were Melikyan: hold it, freeloader. They’ve put together an aerial train, come through the air, descend from heaven, sit on my Jandar’s shoulders. Women, women, women, heavy! Our Jandar puts his head underneath and tosses one onto the horse; the photographer takes a picture. Our Jandar reaches out his arms, embraces, turns, lowers the photographed one straight to the ground: that’s Lusya, one. Our Jandar puts his shoulder beneath the fat tail and tosses her onto the horse; the photographer takes a picture: that’s Dusya, two. Our Jandar adjusts the cap on his head and stands ready: Nadya, three. Our Jandar’s drenched with sweat, turned to water, but before strangers he’s ashamed and draws the sweat back in, word of honour. The unripe medlar’s stuck in his throat too; let its owner die there as well. They photographed my Jandar’s cap on a girl’s head. Girl or lady, she would know that herself. But that the horse was photographed under thirty women needs no oath.”
Sopi was a woman, after all; even at Jarkhechavank it was clear that before this story she would behave like a woman, press her lips together and refuse to listen. But Tevik? Not only did he not rejoice, offer an explanation of his own, embellish it a little himself; he came and stood there, saying:
“What are you telling us, hey?”
That theatre had probably really happened. Our Jandar began again:
“I say thirty, you take it as forty or fifty. Your Jandar embraced that many one by one, put them on the horse, the photographer took pictures.”
He closed his eyes and said:
“What horse?”
Jandar shrank and bent his neck. “Simon’s poor nag,” he said.
“Where is it now?” he said.
“Hasn’t it come?” He shrank. “I took my belt off its head, told it to go. It should have come.”
He was choking him, simply choking him, not thinking: my brother and friend of so many years. “When the owner asks, tell it that way,” he said. “Say: in Jarkhech Gorge I took the tether off its head and said, find your way out of these wolves and thieves without me; I’m boarding a colourful bus and going after I don’t know what, I don’t know where.” His mouth had whitened, his eyes blinked. He has a habit of closing his eyes and raising his face; the thin lids tremble over the closed eyes. The hardness of the thin, white lips is from the harsh mountain weather.
“Forgive us,” Jandar said. “The matter wasn’t well thought through on our part, forgive us. That is, we hadn’t yet had time to examine and understand it, thank you.”
“Then shut up,” he said.
But Jandar instantly forgot the condition. “My friend,” he laughed, “if I say I embraced her, shall I say I embraced her and did what?”
At that foolish loose talk Tevik raised a finger, but the finger stayed raised and Jandar’s mouth stayed open in admiration. Above the great Acharkut woods, in the very middle of the old Nav encampment, right at Nav’s centre, so far apart that the beholder would say three, not two, and so close that the watcher would see and say it was their old alliance of three, stood with heads high Rostom’s red-maned stallion, Avag’s old mare and Simon’s red nag, Tsmakut’s last horses. Grazing along, they had emerged from the gorge on Nav’s other side and, before descending the slopes on this side, stopped for a minute before our familiar, native, already aged world, stretching with harvested fields, fallows, forests, clearings and solitary trees to the warm mists of the Kura.
So, with thyme, salt, onions—Sopi had onions stored—and imagine, almost in its own juices, almost without water, as the town guests push us away from our cauldron and set their khashlama themselves from the prepared meat, they had put on khashlama. The sweet smell of meat was already rising; they sat side by side waiting for it to cook at least a little. And Jandar Tevan took the blame upon himself, pushed back the peak of the colonel’s cap and looked above the great Acharkut woods towards old Nav, from where he had taken and effectively lost the horse. He pushed back the cap and froze in admiration.
“Gyozynghadynem,” he said in Turkish. “Luck, luck.”
The moment the event happened, that very minute, the sky darkened and our Jandar’s star came out. It came out, stood before our Jandar and said: raise the cap from your eyes and follow me; I know where your lost things are. Our Jandar had sometimes gone wrong, wasted time and travelled in vain. The film at Jarkhechavank was not our fault, so let us not count that. A whole night he had stood frozen, waiting pointlessly in Kechut’s bushes: the poor thief would now walk into his hands himself. In vain. But afterwards the star had said: you went wrong, lad; now let us go this way.
Jandar’s eyes filled; our Jandar wept like a young lady. “My friend,” he said, “my friend... It has come. So it got out of that hostile gorge, came to the homeland.”
We understand that a horse is a horse everywhere—let us forget the slaughterhouses of Kazakh and the district centre. But our hearts falter a little when we picture our Tsmakut horses, lads, departed girls, sold cows, God’s lambs in foreign places. We think they all have longing and sadness like ourselves, stand in a foreign evening and want to weep.
“My friend,” he said, “my friend... When the question of the bus arose I took my belt from its neck, said: now it’s you and your wits; you must find the way alone. If you find it, I said, I shall be as grateful as to God; if not, know that Jandar did your owner a great wrong. So the homeland pulled,” he said, “drew it out of that gorge.”
The Other stood dressed like an executive committee official, dissatisfied—that is, whatever you did, he was displeased. Jandar rejoiced and grieved like a widow left without kin, wept and laughed so much, sniffling, that Sopi grew angry:
“Earth on their heads and on their horse’s head! If they needed it, they’d keep it at their own door. There they are, paying for a car. Enough,” she said.
“No, Sopo, no,” he said. “You’re a woman, you won’t understand. It’s not for the likes of us to speak against cars... Ah, the young people’s colourful bus... The car’s good, but our horse.” And begging her to admit he was right, he bent his neck so pleadingly that Sopi blushed and turned away. That too, then, was a separate matter for laughter: in three days we had missed her properly. We have been husband and wife all these years and never once looked properly at her face to see what she looked like, never once looked from behind to see her shape. When our uncles in Dsegh said they had chosen a girl for us, and we learned her name too was Sopi, like Ohan’s Sopi, we said: then that is it, Tevik–Sopik. She said, “Earth on the heads of your shameless Jarkhech women.” Meaning she believed her husband had been enjoying himself there, but deep down knew the true events: the poor lad had been worn out beneath them, and if he rejoiced so much at the horse’s return, he himself must have faced terror.
Just as the event was sudden, from Keghut’s slopes, above the gorge and winter quarters towards Nav-Urt, he had marked out Rostom Melikyan’s proud red-maned horse, no horse but a lightning bolt from horses’ ancient times. Yet proud and self-willed as its owner, it would not let Jandar approach, saying: you are not my Rostom. Avag’s old mare had let herself be caught calmly, but then the red-maned one and the nag would follow her: instead of secret reconnaissance, Genghis Khan’s open horde. He stood with neck bent, pleading with Uncle Simon’s nag: dear brother, I beg you, with my short Mongolian legs I must get all the way to Poghoskilisa and Jarkhech; dear brother, winter’s coming, you and my Jandar will remain in the mountains, I’ll let you eat hay from my stack. The nag stood, sighed and let itself be caught. Think of it saying: since you are Jandar, let us go. A whole night in the Kechut forest it had stood frozen beneath Jandar; not counting a couple of men, it had been photographed beneath exactly forty women at Jarkhechavank...
But we are not speaking of horses. The horses descended from Nav-Urt on this side, were in the scrub on the open slope. Nor are we speaking of Jandar Tevan, but of the Other, Handsome Tevik.
Thin as a dried bean stalk, a black Gypsy woman without breasts or buttocks had robbed him of his childhood as he was coming of age and left him feeble. All the sweetness and all the gall a woman can hold—the forbidden wife of a fallen brother, think of a father. Tevan’s life has continued like that, as though struck on the head; you think how thoroughly they muddied its source. Like a badly tied load: it will overturn now, fall into the gorge now; it comes along twisted and confused. If, for example—we speak by way of example—the child runs home breathless, saying the doctors with the police are taking Mama out of the grave, and our breastless, buttockless, crooked-mouthed black radio’s invention immediately spreads among the people, that poison is suspected, Tevan poisoned Vardo, imagine it. They do not let you near the grave; people draw back from you, even Jandar steps out of your way and believes it possible that with her bread you gave poison to your children’s mother, your brother, your mower, your household’s worker. Then they give no paper declaring innocence, no open statement, no certificate concerning the unhappy pregnancy—that the Hovit doctor caused her to bleed to death. They quietly withdraw to swill and gorge with the local petty bigwigs, leaving you so lost in the hostile evening that the same breastless, buttockless woman’s open mockery, our Tsmakut black radio, seems a friend’s call in that evening: “My brother-in-law came out innocent, girls! Where’s my white kid? I’m slaughtering it beneath my brother-in-law’s holy feet. What do I know? You say he didn’t give the poison.” If, for example—we speak by way of example—your brother’s son, your blood, in fact your brother, the eldest, the freckled one, strikes and fells you before the people at the office door and stands over you with his soldier’s legs planted wide, imagine it. As though he himself will always remain clean in that party-and-army way, keep his future clean in unruly Tsmakut, and cleanse his mother’s old honour too. As though the thousand apologies must go not to Tevik, whose uncomprehending adolescence was muddied, who was in fact abused like a little girl, but to the heated shrew. Meaning we have no right, without consulting our brother’s family, to bring ourselves a new wife, put on a suit at her request and go into the village centre. We are not one of the lads who belong in the village square: even a child a finger tall tells a sheepdog in the village, go away, where are your sheep, go to them... Meaning the sheepdog’s place is not the village or its centre; and even before a child a finger tall the dog tucks in its tail and silently leaves for its mountains. Whether it took offence at the child is unknown; it withdraws to its sheep.
But he too has his share of guilt; let us not say he is wholly innocent and unaware. If you knew your place was the mountain sheep, why pointlessly bring yourself into the village centre, so they could supposedly remember your old offence and strike you down? If you understood that whoever you married, your heart’s choice would not please them, and you yourself lacked even the courage to be blind and deaf before daily pressure, why bring the poor girl only to cast her out later and go to your people like a worker paid in food, accounting for yourself: yes, brother, I have no voice, I do not exist; there are you and your words, whoever you choose to bring in to mother my children, she will be the one? If your true leader is your brother’s family and the village’s voice, why supposedly appoint yourself leader?
Now again he stood up: I am going to Tashkent, to Tashkent, that is, Central Asia. He took Jandar and Sopi to stand beside the recovered rams. The young bride and new baby followed and stood watching what he said and showed, what they were learning from Papa. He took them to the rams, had them stand there, went among the rams himself with hands in pockets: whose stock are these, why have you needlessly brought them back? He lifted his handsome little-girl face and blinked in the lovely mountain sun.
Jandar said:
“What are you saying, hey? You’ve been saying it an hour and I don’t understand.”
The Handsome One said:
“Poison is what I’m saying.”
He said:
“Did you have to bring that up on my day of celebration?”
He said:
“So you’re happy—what are you happy about?”
“What do you mean?” he said. He said, “Past Dilijan and Kazakh I’ve circled the world; if nothing else, I’ve embraced thirty Russian women. Girl,” he said, “put that vodka to his mouth; let’s see if it cheers him up.”
The half-finished bottle under her arm and hand over her mouth, Sopi said to the Other:
“Brother, what if they aren’t ours? This sleep-muddled fool can’t tell.”
The Other said:
“I don’t know; let him speak himself.”
In the end he spoke and they answered; he nudged each one with his foot and asked, and they recognised them and answered. Not one of the twenty-five rams was their own, his and Jandar’s. He said:
“Let them come and take charge of their ownerless property. I’m not their worker.” Hands in the pockets of his blue suit, he came out from among the spoils.
Jandar said:
“You’re right. But what shall we do?”
He raised his handsome face; the closed eyelids fluttered. He said:
“I’m going there, to Tashkent.”

Three of the rams stood in Vladimir Melikyan’s name. So, in the summer of nineteen forty-six, police lieutenant Vladimir Melikyan came after ten years’ absence and said there was not one pure girl in the city. He became engaged to our uncle Hambo’s Aghavni, dressed her in a pretty red dress, and he and his fiancée came on horseback to the mountains, to go through the mountains to Dilijan and from there to Yerevan. She in her red dress, they emerged from the great Acharkut woods. On Nav-Urt’s open slope the lieutenant drew his pistol and fired three times in succession. In the Arkanq hayfield opposite, all the children longing for weapons, all the girls ready for betrothal and wives of the fallen weakened with longing. The fallen men’s withered widows said, “How fortunate... Vladimir Melikyan has come and is taking his fiancée through the mountains to show her Yerevan.” Our brother Ohan had one ram of his own among the collective farm’s sheep, kept since the summer of forty-one for a great purpose: to slaughter at our brother Aleksan’s feet on his return. But when the death notice was confirmed by an eyewitness, the ram faced a thousand claims. He did not spare it, dragged it down and slaughtered it at Vladimir Melikyan’s feet, because long before the war they had shared a school bench until the fourth year. From the fourth Ohan had fled to the mountains to herd lambs; Vladimir Melikyan, lest he learn hooliganism and smoking on the school road to Hovit, had been sent to police school and in Yerevan reached the high rank of lieutenant. The lieutenant wanted to give Ohan his Nagant, but Ohan was blind in one eye and feared weapons, and turned away. Ohan narrowed his blind eye, extended his staff and pointed into the flock: that sheep is yours, however many it bears, whatever it brings, is yours. From the hungry summer of nineteen forty-six it was understood that our cousin Vladimir Melikyan had sheep here. Their unwritten agreement remains after the loss of our brother; if, God forbid, police colonel Melikyan is no longer here, the agreement will apply between his sons and Jandar Tevan.
The veterinarian, a native of Hovit who drinks like a beast, said when the commission divided Ohan’s sheep between the two Tevans, “Son of a dog, isn’t your vet worth one Yerevan man? How come the police have sheep with you and we don’t?” He brought a couple of sorry creatures and entrusted them to their care. Entrusted them, and whenever he has a vehicle or a guest from the district centre, they come with bottles, choose and slaughter for themselves, drink the vodka to the bottom, find and drain Sopi’s reserve too, and leave. Each time he leaves he says, “Don’t fear, I haven’t lost count. One remains.” Whatever the case, one really was still his.
Before his illness and death, and imagine, a long time after death too, our elder brother Ohan was master of our three households, the entire farm and all the mountains Tsmakut has, our mountains in general, and his Sopi was mistress. Who needs a queen without a king? With Ohan’s death his Sopi took offence at fate, gathered whatever she considered hers from everything the three of us had in common, and came down from the mountains. Asking in words was hard; finding an intelligible explanation harder still. We looked silently, lost, thinking she would understand herself and not do it, would remain the mistress of our households. She did not remain. It was hard to be in the familiar places where her husband had been with song and jokes, had been and was no longer; they were desolate. Specifically, she sent someone to demand Ohan’s knife and radio from the Handsome One, Melikyan’s gift of twenty years before. Meaning the knife and radio must lie silent, not sing. She does not return our greeting, and we are ashamed to stop, greet, ask; we do not know of what, or are we too offended by death in our turn? She has a son and married daughter in the cities, that is, a son-in-law; they will have friends. We say: let them gather their friends whenever they wish, come in a group or alone. Their old homeland and paternal house will not meet them in orphaned widow’s poverty, with a couple of hens at the door and a few bean beds. We keep four or five good rams in Ohan’s name. Both of us Tevans have brothers killed in the war, my Jandar one, my Other two; both our parents were old, think of them as our grandparents. Yet a boy, whatever anyone says, loves a young parent, one who is both a friend teaching Turkish and Georgian curses and a father who commands your respect. But our parents had been grandfathers, had had us in the old dark times. Ohan became for both of us a friend with a father’s presence. He christened us Jandar, meaning gendarme. A poor lamb like the Other was freed by Ohan from the claws of the breastless, buttockless black vulture: he narrowed his eye, drew back his head in his own way and extended the cudgel between them—what are you doing, this is no way for Armenian Christians to behave, it is not permissible. Then Ohan taught us both the sheep’s difficult nature; we learned from him, especially the Other, since the Asors’ sons had previously neither owned sheep nor entrusted sheep to others to herd. And think of it as our socialist obligation towards Ohan’s children to be what he was to us. Four or five rams are theirs.
Of the three men killed in our two families, only Hakob left a photograph. Their Manvel and our Aleksan simply were, and are no more. The undying image of our dead brother was our mother’s silent murmuring: in the presence of our father Sergo, you see, she was not allowed to lament and weep aloud. And it was our father’s terrible bayati, a wild jumble of Armenian and Turkish, pieced together from here and there. For twenty or thirty years he hummed it alone in the fields, hummed and hummed, then brought it and sang it over our brother Ohan: there would be no other occasion. He proclaimed our fallen brother a brave outlaw, General Andranik Pasha, a village council, a sacrificial offering at the door of the holy Bardzrakash monastery, and a communard. The elders of his age were embarrassed before our new generation: if you have lost your mind, they said, at least hold your tongue. And the new generation wondered: had the Meleks’ household lost someone in the war, then? Who was this Aleksan being sung about? Whose father had he been? Nobody’s: our brother who left no children, no photograph, no trace. We were boys of seven or eight, and it fell to us to preserve his image. But curse time: Ohan’s movements and appearance come and stand in his innocent place. In those days the seven-year school was university and secondary school alike; the immortal golden certificate hangs there on the wall, framed behind glass. If a seven-year school certificate is an image, then that is the photograph of our dead brother. Our brother Aleksan, the advocate of our speechless household against the loud-mouthed village square of Tsmakut, goes to have us registered as Hovhannes, after Hovhannes Tumanyan, the man from our uncles’ village of Dsegh, but arrives to find we are Tevan. He grabs Ghevant Vratsyan by the collar: why must ours be Ohans and Tevans, while yours are Marcels and Marseillaises? No, he grabbed Ghevant by the collar on the twenty-third of June, nineteen forty-one: if you speak so well, you are coming to the front with me. They went, and that was that, taking the truth and falsehood of the rumours with them. Ghevant Vratsyan says: first, your household already has a Hovhannes; Ohan is Hovhannes. And second, there is another Tevan in your neighbourhood; they will grow up calling one another Tevik and herding the collective farm’s lambs together. We do not complain, but we went to school and found we were neither Tevan nor Hovan: we were Mongol and Wolf-Strangler. We were frightened of lessons and the teacher, fled into the mountains, and found another pair of names awaiting us there: Monk and Vardapet. The cold rain had plastered us against the rock, and when we stood with a sack over us for a monk’s cowl, that made us Monk and Vardapet. And when Vladimir Melikyan’s official cap fitted our head so well, that made us Jandar and Jandar: gendarme. Our brother Ohan put the cap on our head and christened us Jandar. Ohan was against our becoming mountain shepherds. Just as in olden times a Turkish shepherd’s cudgel barred the way to the mountains for Tsmakut’s miserable cattle, Ohan’s barred ours. And just as our people’s old cattle escaped the valley’s scorching heat and flies for the mountain wind, then tumbled back down with bloody horns, we escaped school, and Ohan’s staff stood in our way. He did not want it. He wanted through us to fulfil our dead brother’s commandment: bring forth a Hovhannes Tumanyan from Sergo Melek’s household. But Ohan himself was dearer to us even than our dead brother; we could not tear ourselves away from his coat-tails. Snot hung from our nose, we had frozen against the rock under our sack-cowl; he laughed, named us Monk and Vardapet, and said: all right, then. The teacher and headmistress, Miss Siranush Vratsyan, mounted a horse and came into the mountains after us four times. We went on all fours and slipped among the sheep: we were no runaway Tevan, you see, but a ram. What laughter! She said she would take it to court, meaning one had no right to crush a child’s future. But the gentleman allotted to us was already a lieutenant in town, while the working man wanted always to remain here, a lamb-herder, Tevik, Tevo, and Vardapet and Jandar into the bargain. Uncle Hamik Mnatsakanyan managed the farm; each time Miss Vratsyan came he hid his head in some ravine. He was pleased the shepherds’ tribe was producing another shepherd, and pleased when the young woman went away to Yerevan. The village’s chief guardian of everyone’s welfare, squat little Arto, had persuaded Uncle Hamik to send the widowed elder Sopni to the farm as a milkmaid, so she would be before Ohan’s eyes: they would see each other and take a liking to each other. As intended, the question of marrying Sopni had arisen. Our old man had sent word from the village that it was permissible, but Ohan was still free. And the Other Tevik had suddenly, decisively, broken away from a disgraceful liaison. Each arrival and departure of Miss Vratsyan—the mare’s broad rump, that is, and her own rump on top of the mare—brought out the hooligan in the lads. They did not say to themselves: there is an uncomprehending child beside us. Our brother Ohan pulled us out from among the sheep—not to hand us to the teacher; the teacher had gone—and in that quivering heat sent us from the Arkanq hayfields far away to the slopes of Nav-Urt: the Georgian’s Tiflis murtel is with Tevik, go and fetch it. Once we faced one another across the Acharkut slopes, he called: do not hurry, do not wear yourself out, go slowly. It is something like a horse-collar; put it over your head and round your neck, and come back at your ease. To this day we do not know what a murtel is. We can roughly guess, but we understand far better the profound human meaning of his joke: he was drawing Handsome Tevik out of the bottomless ravine of popular disgust and contempt. We picture the people driving him into a ravine with no way out and standing there with stones in their hands, while our brother Ohan holds out his hand and says: do not be afraid, come out.
We know the value of the people’s love. They invent things themselves, delight in them, and say, “Those are Jandar’s words. Jandar said that.” With not a Turkish word in your mouth—an empty mouth and empty hands, that is—you go and stand among them, speak Turkish right and left, and they invent the meaning themselves, clap, laugh, and say: go on. Meaning we have come to the right place. Imagine strangers in the distant land of Dsegh looking and seeing that a girl is innocent, still a milk-fed child, and saying: there is a Tevan in Tsmakut, they call him Jandar, a simple-hearted lad; this girl ought to go to him. And so we can imagine the people’s contempt too. Whatever good deed you do, they look, see, and remain silent: they do not believe it. The deed does not belong to you; you are unworthy of such a deed. Let us not blame them. If it was not I who was thirteen or fourteen then, but the Handsome One, if the overheated shrew noticed him and not me, let us say our luck simply held. Let us not say it was not luck, it was our own doing.
They lived door to door: anything said a little loudly here could be heard there. There were three little boys in her house, and Shushan herself was a fearless outlaw’s daughter. Yet she had become heated, lost her mind, imagined an armed fugitive. She went to her father-in-law’s house and sat with her hands inside her clothing: someone had seen him, she said, there was a fugitive in the village; he must give her Tevan to sleep in her house at night. Each of us looks at the world through our own eyes and sees what we want to see. Poor Grandfather Nikal, now gone to the light, gave him. He said, “That is not something you need ask, dear girl. He must supply his brother’s children with firewood and cheer their mother too. He is a child himself, but in the face of danger he must grow up, become an eagle defending his brother’s household.” Like an orphaned lamb, she must have led him home, that breastless, buttockless black witch, and cut away the child’s vital leaven. Tevik remained frail. The Asors’ boys are not particularly vigorous as it is, but Tevik is frail even among them. Standing behind her husband like a protective queen, the late Vardo would laugh at his struggles in the hayfield. With some cunning excuse she would keep him away from the mowing, saying he was worn out, he need not wear himself out further, and laughing. Whether on someone’s advice or out of his own upright nature, we do not know, Ohan enters the house of wrongdoing on some errand and refuses to believe his eyes: it did not happen, he says, and separates them. He narrows his blind eye, that is, reaches his staff between them: I saw wrongly. The shameless, heated woman says, “Blind man, if that is how it is, marry me. I will not remain without a husband.” Ohan says, “I will. Hold your tongue.” Such was the poverty of that time: it had taken an unripe child for a man. Life goes on, but the security of a proper life, lived openly and without shame, never comes. She defended herself in a thousand ways. “I am another family’s daughter, he is another family’s son—what is shameful about that?” “Let us say they had not asked for me for Hakob, but for his brother.” “So-and-so, so-and-so, so-and-so and so-and-so are involved with Hambo; so-and-so with so-and-so. I have kept your household’s disgrace inside your household. You ought to thank me.” “How is it an older man may marry a young girl, but a young woman may not marry a lad a couple of years younger?” “Why? Aren’t there peoples where a brother marries his dead brother’s wife? Think of me as one more Turk.” “Should I have thrown myself out into the street and brought back some vile infection like this woman, this one, this one?” “Would it have been better to abandon the three orphans and go singing off to marry a new man?” It was plain that the poor woman had gnawed at herself at night and prepared good answers for the court: she would stop society’s mouth. But what court and public hearing could there be in Tsmakut? Whoever heard spat, went inside, and felt disgust at his own little boy. Her brother Rostom turned his proud face away and would not speak to her until the grave; her father Tigran the policeman raged on his red horse: “A-a-ah, the breed... I’ll pour kerosene on it and burn it!”
As a dog follows a shepherd into the mountains, and the shepherd has been angry with it on the way, even struck it, and the dog follows a little way off as though it does not belong to him, though in truth it belongs to him alone, so Tevan came silently into the mountains behind Ohan. What advice he had given or what he had mocked on the way—surely he would have laughed, for Tevik’s deed was, after all, the deed of an uncomprehending calf—was not spoken of. Nor was the question of whether the Asors’ boys could become shepherds, whether the Asors could become mountain people. Among the mountain people the incident was not discussed at all. Everyone simply knew, in silence, that the king of the mountains, our brother, had brought someone to heal: shall we call him a wounded animal from the fields, a wounded dog, a child struck on the head, a trampled flower? Slowly he was helping him stand upright again.
But the village authorities, as far-sighted as they had been in sending the elder Sopni to Ohan, were equally short-sighted when a resolution of the board appointed Shushan storekeeper and sent her into the mountains. They had their own humanity too: with whatever there was in the store, she could feed her three orphans along the way. That is what man does: raises the little ones and crushes the grown. What was Ohan to do? Take Tevik behind him and go shepherding for the Turks? One-eyed Ahmad the Turk preferred Ohan to every shepherd in this country. Stand up and say that if Shushan was in the mountains, Tevik would have to be in the village? Surrender and say: here, I throw my kid into your jaws, eat? Ohan, all the shepherds, stood firm: that woman must not be in charge of our provisions; we have no supplies to entrust to her. The poor woman stood alone against the mountain people, and now you no longer know whom to pity. She said, “You are all enemies of my orphans.” Uncle Hamik was Tigran’s old companion in banditry, and besides, he had been weak in his conduct and was still very weak indeed. Restraint or lack of restraint had never been a question for him and still was not. As in his outlaw years, he relieved himself of his male animal’s preoccupation—a male dog’s, a stallion’s, any male animal’s—wherever he could. To his mind that was all there was to it, meaning he had neither concern nor opinion on the matter. He was still the farm manager; he stood up and said, “I will not oppose my board’s decision. They have sent her: let her work.” Meaning let anything happen, so long as Shushan did not get a chance to put his conduct before these people. Shushan took wing, found wings: “I’ll write a letter to Stalin in the city of Moscow: Hitler killed the elder brother, and now the blind man of the Meleks is killing the younger...”
Published in part. The complete version is available to download (PDF)