My first encounters with Vazgen Sargsyan date to when he was thirty and I was fifty-five. Thirty is a man’s most beautiful age, but fifty-five is not ugly either: it has not forgotten its thirty years, and it has substantial achievement along the road travelled. Who knows, however successful the young friend’s physical and mental make-up, however swift his progress, whether he will have such achievement? Does everyone have it?
We were talking about one of the leaders of the movement and the clashes, and my suspicious, reserved attitude towards that man and that type of man must have been showing: someone who values only his own game and does not consider grave, destructive consequences. Suddenly Vazgen, instantly as was his way, as though refusing to let me be narrow-hearted and narrow-minded, refusing to let me see a flaw in a person, quickly burst out:
“You know what a fellow he was!.. Tricked a Georgian, sold him a talking sheep, supposedly a lost circus sheep. You know what fellows there are!.. He died in our arms, testing a mine.”
All I could do now was laugh at the “talking sheep”, retreat from that conversation, fall silent, and later understand that Vazgen and I were different people. He stood at the head of the human mass with open arms and outstretched hands, seeing and accepting each person and personality within it as they were, with all human flaws and virtues. I, on the contrary, recoil from, fear and push away anyone who differs even a little from my ideal of a human being. And this is so because Vazgen sees himself as capable of embracing and encompassing them all, subjecting them to a single will: they are governable for him. In short, Vazgen was a man of the temper and force of a ruler and commander, and I could only be a soldier in his regiment, a law-abiding inhabitant of his world, leave the reading of my fate to him, and among everyone and with everyone trust that the direction of his gaze became a path of light and hope, his step the beginning of a road, his extended hand turned an enemy into a friend, and his gaze cast into black desolation raised multitudes of friends.
That was what he was. He was the sparapet, the commander.
If his powerful person and progress, those of a Caucasian, an all-Caucasian black bear, do not grow in tomorrow into Saint Sargis on a white horse; if his bright, luminous radiance bears a black stain tomorrow, then we, his contemporaries, are to blame, you and I. If future generations do not have that holy commander on a white horse in their past, which is our present, their march will scatter and stop, just as Vazgen himself and we would have succumbed to confused panic had the luminous images of Vardan and Nzhdeh not stood at the head of our march.
Knowledge of your people’s history is, of course, a virtue, all the more if in its rising and falling whirlpools you see yourself and claim as your own the proud and stubborn, the faltering and vanishing, the rare clear-minded ones, each of them. But the great virtue is to see today as history, to see today’s hero as great, unblemished, luminous and beloved as the heroes woven from historical tales.
And so our word today, mine and that of us all, will be a word of blessing and praise… Glory to Vazgen, glory to this faithful people that gave birth to him and nourished him, that believes in the one it has borne and nourished and fills him with light.
5 March 2001.