TO SAY that all Armenians are splendid is much the same as to say that they are all hucksters and swindlers.
Armenians are people, and people differ; there are both good and bad. Nevertheless, I can’t resist making the following, slightly less sweeping generalization: Armenian peasants are good people.
I spent two months in Armenia, almost half of the time in Yerevan. But I did not get to know anyone from the Yerevan literary world. I arrived in Yerevan knowing two people: one was Martirosyan and the other was Hortensia, the translator responsible for the literal version of Martirosyan’s novel about a copper works. And I left Yerevan knowing Martirosyan, Martirosyan’s family, and Hortensia the translator.
Now and again Martirosyan introduced me to writers he knew, but this led only to a few nods of acknowledgment. Not one of these writers even bothered to ask about my journey or how I liked Yerevan—although it’s true I was once asked if I was going to republish my Notes of d’Archiac.[15] The editor of the Russian-language Literary Armenia neither invited me to contribute to his journal nor showed even the least ordinary human interest in me. He did not ask me a single question; he made no attempt to bring about even a pretense of ordinary human intercourse. I was treated in exactly the same way by the secretary of the Writers’ Union and by two poets, one a man, the other a woman. All this upset me. I had heard that the intelligentsia of Yerevan was very patriotic, sensitive to what was written about Armenians in other languages. And I happened to have written quite a lot about Armenians: in my wartime articles for Red Star and in my novels The People Immortal and For a Just Cause. All these had been translated into Armenian, and I had received appreciative letters from Armenian readers. In short, I expected the Armenians to take an interest in me and my work, and I had imagined they would want to publish something of mine in Literary Armenia. I had even brought a short story with me—but no one asked me for anything. It was possible, of course, that all this was the consequence of my recent troubles. My new novel had been greeted by my editors with fury. It was not going to be published.[16]
This thought was disturbing. But I was not in a mood to exaggerate my own importance. I began to think up a still more painful explanation: It was nothing to do with my having fallen into disgrace—it was simply that I was a nobody, both as a writer and as a human being. I was a pygmy—so what did I expect?
After a while, I got used to being ignored. But there were still moments when I felt disheartened. I spent the whole of New Year’s Day in my hotel room—I would have been glad to receive a phone call even from a dog. The invention of the great Edison is of little use to someone as lonely as I was then.[17] It was some consolation to discover what kind of visitors Armenian writers did see as important: certain Moscow officials and a lady from the Literary Fund, whose role was to authorize holidays in sanatoriums and houses of recreation. And the writers of Yerevan had been truly dazzled by a few other figures whose importance as literary bureaucrats, in my view, greatly outweighed their gifts as writers.
Whereas I—I had been imagining myself as another Plato, generously honoring with my conversation not only Yerevan’s writers and artists but also its physicists, biologists, and astronomers.
The only person I ever, in fact, conversed with was the old woman whose job was to sit in my corridor in the hotel. She evidently thought well of me: a man who worked from morning till night, who never staggered drunkenly down the corridor, who didn’t sing in a hoarse voice at two o’clock in the morning, accompanying himself on a squeeze-box, and who didn’t bring young women back to his room. Forgetting my poverty, my various illnesses, and my age, the naïve old woman evidently ascribed my behavior entirely to my high moral standards.
Another source of comfort was Martirosyan’s response when I asked him about Osip Mandelstam’s visit to Armenia. I knew some sweet and touching details about Mandelstam’s time in Armenia and I had read his Armenian cycle of poems. I remembered his words about “an Armenian Christianity of beasts and fables.”
But Martirosyan did not remember Mandelstam. At my request, he phoned several poets from the older generation—none of them knew that Mandelstam had ever been in Armenia. Nor had they read his Armenian poems. Martirosyan told me that he remembered a thin man with a large nose who seemed to be very poor. There had been two evenings when Martirosyan had given him something to eat and drink. And this man with the big nose had read some poems—yes, it must have been Mandelstam. . . .
The impression made on Martirosyan by the lady from the Literary Fund had been infinitely more vivid. I was beginning to get the picture.
Mandelstam’s poems are splendid. They are the very essence of poetry: the music of words. Perhaps even a little too much so. Sometimes I think that the poetry of the twentieth century, for all its brilliance, has less of the universal humanity and passion that imbues the great poetry of the nineteenth century. As if poetry had moved from a bakery to a jeweler’s shop and great bakers had been replaced by great jewelers. This may be why the work of some fine contemporary poets is so complicated—as if this is the only way they can distinguish their creations from the platinum meter bar kept in Sèvres, which is now the measure of all things and all souls.
But there is an enchanting music in Mandelstam’s poems, and some are among the finest poems written in Russian since the death of Blok. Although, to be honest, Blok is not one of my idols either—he too never baked the holy rye bread that is the only true measure of all things and all souls. In his verse too there is much that has been fashioned not by the miracle-working hands of a baker but by the subtle talent of a jeweler. Nevertheless, some of his poems, some of his individual lines, stand up against anything written since the deaths of Pushkin and Lermontov. And although Mandelstam was unable to shoulder the entire great burden of the Russian poetic tradition, he is still a genuine and wonderful poet. There is an abyss between him and those who only pretend to write poetry.
And my acquaintances in Yerevan did not remember Mandelstam’s visit to Armenia. Yes, I was beginning to get the picture.
After a while all this ceased to preoccupy me and I began to think about other things. In many of the city’s museums I saw portraits of Decembrists who had been reduced to the ranks and sent to serve in Yerevan.[18] I read that it was they who put on the very first production of Woe from Wit,[19] playing both the male and the female roles. The local intelligentsia had felt proud that this premiere took place not in Moscow or Petersburg but in Yerevan. I read an unforgettable account of Nalbandian’s year of misery and illness in Kamyshin, a dusty little dump of a town in the Volga basin.[20] I read how Tumanyan was imprisoned in Petersburg and Korolenko was at the prison gates to greet him on his release.[21] Among other people still remembered in Yerevan are Davit Guramishvili, the Georgian exile who lived in Mirgorod in the Ukraine; Skovoroda, the Ukrainian wandering philosopher; and a certain Ukrainian soldier exiled to the sands beside the Caspian Sea.[22]
The verses written by a disgraced lieutenant of the Tengin Regiment[23] and the verses of a disgraced court councillor from Petersburg[24] live on in the minds of schoolchildren, students, and peasants up in the mountains. They do not fade with historical catastrophes or the passage of time.
And in Siberian forests and the tundra of Yakutia the work begun by revolutionary students and such exiles as Korolenko, Vladimir Bogoraz,[25] and Pyotr Kropotkin[26] still lives on. Their poems and stories, their fairy tales about universal human concerns still hold sway in schools and institutes, in dwellings high in the Caucasus, in Russian peasant huts and Siberian yurts. Here we have Russification at its most free, at its kindest and most indestructible—the process of Russification carried out by Pushkin, Dobrolyubov, Herzen, Nekrasov, Tolstoy, and Korolenko.[27]
But just think how many governors and generals, how many full privy councillors, dignitaries of state-sponsored science and state-honored literature—just think how many such figures have disappeared forever from the memory of the Caucasus.
True brotherhood and true lasting ties between people and nations are born not in offices, not in governors’ palaces, but in peasant huts, during journeys into exile, in camps and soldiers’ barracks. These are the links that last. It is the words written beneath dim oil lamps, the words read by people lying on bed boards in prison cells or sitting in peasant huts or smoky little rooms, that create the binding ties of unity, love, and mutual national respect.
These are the hidden arteries through which eternal blood goes on flowing even though life’s noisy surface remains entirely sterile. Like soap bubbles, this official life fills people who are nothing but soap bubbles themselves. The bubbles whisper, pop—and disappear without trace.
While the ties laid down by stonemasons, carpenters, tinsmiths, coopers, and old peasant women remain forever.
There it is—a pot of Russian borshch, now standing on a table in an Armenian home. And there, serious and silent, a group of bearded Molokan peasants[28] are eating a garlicky dish of Armenian khash.
In this respect, people’s receptivity and their conservatism are equally striking. There are, after all, thousands of customs, thousands of ways of doing things which, even after centuries of proximity, make no impression on the life of a neighboring people. A Russian peasant and an Armenian peasant bake bread in different ovens, and their bread is different. The Russian obstinately refuses to eat the flat Armenian lavash baked in a tandoor oven, and the Armenian is indifferent to the leavened rye bread baked in a Russian stove. And yet these two peoples have enriched each other’s lives through countless other customs, utensils, and ways of working.
One of Paskevich’s soldiers, after marching all over Armenia in his heavy boots, brought back with him new ways of laying bricks and cutting stone, borrowed from Armenian masons. This act of “Armenianization” was effected without rifles or cannon. A few men simply laughed and clapped one another on the back. One winked; another said, “Yes, very smart!” They had a smoke—and that was that.
And there are the links established in Soviet times: between Russian and Armenian factory workers and engineers; between Russian and Armenian students; between Russian and Armenian scientists working in libraries and laboratories; between Russian and Armenian agronomists, vintners, astronomers, and physicists.
When I first went out for a walk around the mountain village of Tsakhkadzor, I was a foreigner. Passersby stared at me. Women by the water pump, old men sitting under a stone wall and clicking their worry beads, chauffeurs (our twentieth-century cavaliers) laughing and shouting outside the restaurant—everyone fell silent as I, dragging my feet and embarrassed at being the focus of so much attention, made my way between the little one-story stone houses. I went by; everyone exchanged knowing looks.
I saw curtains twitching in the windows: A new Russian visitor had appeared in the village.
After this, I was thoroughly studied and analyzed. Everything known to the clerks in the House of Creativity quickly became public knowledge: I’d handed in my passport to be registered; I’d refused to eat khash; I didn’t speak Armenian; I was married, with two children; and I was from Moscow. I was a translator and I had come to translate a book by Martirosyan. The translator was not young, but he drank cognac, played billiards atrociously, and wrote a lot of letters. The translator often went out for walks, and he was interested in the old church on the edge of the village; he sometimes called out in Russian to Armenian cats and dogs. He’d gone into a village house where an old woman was baking lavash in a tandoor. The translator knew no Armenian and the old woman didn’t know a word of Russian. The translator had laughed and gestured to her: He wanted to know how lavash is baked. And the old woman had also laughed when the smoke from the dried dung that fueled her tandoor had made the foreigner weep.
Then the old woman brought out a little bench. The foreigner sat down—the silky column of smoke now hung safely over his head. The Muscovite admired the way the old woman flattened the dough in the air, not against a board but up in the air. She threw sheets of dough into the air and caught them in her outstretched hands, her fingers spread apart. The force of its own weight gradually made the dough thinner and thinner, turning it into a large fine sheet. The Muscovite admired the old woman’s flowing movements, which were both careful and confident; they seemed like a beautiful ancient dance. And the dance truly was very old, as old as the first baked lavash. And the shaggy seventy-year-old woman in her torn quilted jacket sensed the admiration of the gray-haired, bespectacled Muscovite. This pleased her, and it made her feel both merry and melancholy. Then her daughter and son-in-law arrived; the son-in-law’s face was covered with blue stubble. And then her granddaughter turned up; she was wearing pink stretchy trousers and dragging a little sledge behind her. Everyone laughed; then the old woman shouted imperiously in Armenian. The translator was brought a small plate of dry, greenish cheese. The cheese looked moldy, but it was very tasty—sharp and fragrant. The translator was given a hot lavash, taught how to wrap it around the cheese, and then brought a mug of milk.
And when the translator left, his eyes red from the smoke, the dog, instead of barking as it had done on his arrival, gently wagged its tail—evidently the translator too now gave off some familiar bitter smell. As for the old woman’s family, they all stood by the little stone wall to wave goodbye: the thin, black-haired daughter; the thin, unshaven son-in-law; and the little granddaughter with the coal-black eyes.
Then the Muscovite went to the post office and tried to send off some airmail letters, but they turned out not to have the right envelopes—though it took some time to establish this, since the black-eyed young women at the post office did not speak any Russian. This led to everyone shouting, laughing, and waving their arms about.
The following day the translator set off along a mountain path and came to a cemetery where an old man was digging a grave. The translator shook his head. The old man made a despairing gesture, threw away a half-finished cigarette, and returned to his digging. And then the translator went past a water pump and offered to help a woman carry a bucket of water back home. But the woman was overcome with shyness. She looked down at the ground and set off with the bucket, leaving the translator standing there helpless.
And then the translator stood for a long time by some masons who were building a pink tufa wall around a school yard. The masons were cutting and dressing the stone and fitting the blocks together; women in quilted cotton trousers, with scarves wound around their heads and faces, were preparing the clay mortar. When fragments of pink stone landed on the passerby, the women’s eyes gleamed with laughter from beneath their scarves.
And then the translator conversed with a mule and a sheep who were walking along the pavement towards their mountain pasture. He had noticed that people and dogs, for some reason, walked in the road, while the pavements were used mainly by sheep, calves, cows, and horses. At first the mule listened fairly attentively to the translator’s Russian words, but then it laid back its ears, turned away from him, and tried to kick him with a back hoof. Its kind, sweet little face with its wonderful broad nostrils was suddenly transformed. Now the mule looked vicious, curling its upper lip and baring its huge teeth. And the ewe, which the translator had wanted to stroke, pressed up against the mule, asking for help and protection. This was ineffably touching; the ewe sensed instinctively that the human hand stretched out towards her was a bearer of death—and so there she was, trying to get away from death, asking a four-legged mule to protect her from the hand that had created steel and thermonuclear weapons.
And then the new arrival went to the village shop and bought a piece of baby soap, some toothpaste, and a small packet of purgative. Then the translator made his way back home, thinking about the ewe.
The ewe had bright eyes, rather like glass grapes. There was something human about her—something Jewish, Armenian, mysterious, indifferent, unintelligent. Shepherds have been looking at sheep for thousands of years. And sheep, for their part, have been looking at shepherds. And so shepherds and sheep have become similar. A sheep’s eyes look at a human being in a particular way; they are glassy and alienated. The eyes of a horse, a cat, or a dog look at people quite differently.
The inhabitants of a Jewish ghetto would probably have looked at their Gestapo jailers with the same alienated disgust if the ghetto had existed for millennia, if day after day for five thousand years the Gestapo had been taking old women and children away to be destroyed in gas chambers.
Oh God, how desperately mankind needs to atone, to beg for forgiveness. How long mankind needs to beg the sheep for forgiveness, to beg sheep not to go on looking at them with that glassy gaze. What meek and proud contempt that gaze contains. What godlike superiority—the superiority of an innocent herbivore over a murderer who writes books and creates computing machines! The translator repented before the ewe, knowing he would be eating her meat the following day.
A second day passed, and a third. The new arrival ceased to think of himself as an exotic parrot in this mountain village. Now the people he met were beginning to greet him. And he was greeting them back.
He already knew many people: the young women from the post office; the man at the village shop; the night watchman—a melancholy man with a rifle; two shepherds; the old man who looked after the thousand-year-old walls of the Kecharis monastery. He knew Karapet-aga, the man with gray hair and light-blue eyes who had returned to Armenia from Syria and whom he often saw standing outside the village restaurant; he knew Volodya Golosyan, the handsome and imposing driver; he knew the physical-training instructor, who wore green ski pants and who had the protuberant brow and laughing face of a strong young ram; he knew mad old Andreas; he knew the woman who fed turkeys under a fig tree; he knew the young drivers of three-ton trucks, who tore along the steep little streets like hurricanes. These drivers had the souls of eagles and the fingers of a Paganini.
In the House of Creativity I had got to know the kind, sweet smile of Katya, the thin little cook; I knew how she blushed if someone praised the soup she had made. Katya told me that she had come to Armenia from Zaporozhye[29] and that her husband was a Molokan. Embarrassed, she told me how strange she found it that Molokans drink tea at weddings and don’t touch wine and how very strange the Leapers and Jumpers are.[30] She informed me in a dignified tone that “Our own Tsakhkadzor Molokans don’t leap and jump.” Katya is gentle and kind. Her voice, her movements, her gait are all timid and indecisive. Everything embarrasses her. Her little son, Alyosha, who is in his first year at school, comes in—and Katya blushes and looks down at the floor. And Alyosha blushes too, murmuring something barely audible in reply to my simple “What year are you in at school?” He even looks like his mother. He is pale and has light-blue eyes; he is covered in freckles and his eyebrows and eyelashes are the color of wheat.
“The Armenians are good people,” Katya tells me—and blushes. “Armenians are good to one another, they respect their elders,” she says—and blushes. But then it becomes apparent that Katya thinks that Armenians are no different from anyone else. Some are drunkards; some like to pick fights; there are even thieves; they’re neither better nor worse than us Russians. “But the Armenian peasants work very hard indeed,” Katya adds—and blushes profusely.
I know Rosa, the swarthy housekeeper. She has dark down above her upper lip, and she is always smiling, so that people can admire her dazzling, sugar-white teeth. Rosa wears tall box-calf boots, does not know a word of Russian, and keeps herself constantly busy with unproductive work. She always carries an accounts book in which she notes down what her creative workers ate yesterday and what they will be eating tomorrow.
I know Ivan, the boiler man. He is a tall man with blond hair, pale eyes, and a pale mustache; his face looks cruel. He is young and strong, sometimes rude, sometimes sullen. His face is large and round, pink and white, and for some reason this makes him look particularly unpleasant. He stomps about in tall heavy boots. And he talks just as he moves; his every word is like a boot—slow, heavy, and exact. Ivan is a Molokan. Because he is fair-haired and has pale eyes, white teeth, and pink cheeks, and because he is a Molokan, I imagine him drinking only milk and eating only white millet porridge. But Ivan does not keep to the laws of his ancestors; he smokes and he drinks vodka. After a drink, he becomes loquacious; he tells me how he goes up into the mountains and hunts goats and lynx. Once he killed a leopard. . . . His stories lack the iron of authenticity, but he is not so much a liar as a Romantic—a realist for dreamers, a charming fibber among realists. He likes me because I am bad at billiards.
Nearly everyone is competitive, but Ivan is insanely so. Every time he loses a game of billiards to Martirosyan, he truly suffers. Anyone else would just be a bit cross, but Ivan is in torment. “Do you want to play?” he says to me—and in his eyes I see a bloodthirsty gleam, a thirst for sheep’s blood.
I have got to know Astra, the cleaner, and Arutyun, the old night watchman, Astra’s father-in-law.
Astra is a beauty. I think of Chekhov’s “The Beauties”: “After leaving the inn, they were silent for a long time. Then the coachman looked round and said to Chekhov, ‘Hasn’t the little Armenian got a beautiful daughter!’ ”
Astra is so beautiful that I have no wish to describe her beauty. I will say only that her beauty is the expression of her soul. Her beauty lives in her quiet walk, in her shy movements, in her always lowered eyelids, in her barely perceptible smile, in the soft outline of her girlish shoulders, in the chastity of her poor, almost beggarly clothing, in her thoughtful gray eyes. She is a white water lily in a pond shadowed by the branches of trees, born amid still, contemplative water.
This white blossom is the expression of the water of the forest, an expression of the half dark of the forest, of the vague outlines of plants lying deep in the water, of the way silent white clouds slide over this water, of the reflection in it of the crescent moon and the stars. And all this—streams, backwaters, forest ponds and lakes, rushes and sedges, sunrises and sunsets, rustling leaves and reeds, the sound of air bubbling up to the surface, the strange lonely sighs from the silt—all this finds its expression in the white water lily.
And in the same way, the world of modest female beauty finds its expression in Astra. As for what may lie hidden in the depths of these waters, no one can say unless he breaks the water’s smooth surface, walks barefoot through the cutting sedge, and treads the silty, sucking mud—now cold, now strangely warm. But I only stand on the shore, admiring the lily from a distance.
I imagined that no one was aware of my quiet, modest admiration of Astra—I was, after all, known for my silent melancholy: I was an austere ascetic, doubly so in the presence of Astra.
One day, however, my dear co-translator burst out laughing like Taras Bulba and said, “And as for our dear Astra, Vasily Semyonovich really does like her a great deal. He could eat her for breakfast.”
I shrugged and pulled a face.
Really, if Astra’s husband is anything like his father, Arutyun, the mournful, dismal, round-shouldered night watchman with the big nose. . . . But what on earth has all this got to do with me?
Arutyun is sad. Sometimes his face and eyes take on a look of piercing melancholy. Sometimes I walk silently past him in the hour before dawn, the hour when every night watchman in the world is asleep—and there he is, looking at me out of the darkness, his eyes full of a vast, still yearning.
I think he never sleeps—some huge sadness prevents him. He never speaks to anyone; no one visits him. Sometimes I see him on the street. He runs into some jolly old Armenian granddad and I think, “Now Arutyun’s going to smile. He’ll stop, he’ll light a cigarette and have a chat about sheep, about bees, about wine.” But no—Arutyun shuffles on in his heavy tarpaulin boots, sunk in his vast yearning. What’s the matter with him?
It is hard to imagine that it is only a few days since I, a stranger from Moscow, first arrived in this little mountain village, whose existence I had not even suspected.
“Barev!” say the people I meet.
And I take my hat off as I reply, “Barev dzez!” (Good to you too!) All around me are people I know.
Time passes, and soon I know a great deal more about Ivan, about Katya, about Astra, and about old Arutyun. I have learned much that is sweet and touching—and perhaps still more that is cruel and painful.
Katya’s husband is paralyzed; he cannot move his legs and has been bedridden for several years. Quiet Katya, yearning for her distant homeland, for her parents and friends, goes on caring for him, saving every kopek she can in order to give him little treats: an apple, say, or candy. And she says to me proudly, “Our own Tsakhkadzor Molokans do not leap and jump.”
Arutyun had five sons. The eldest worked as a drilling engineer. He was killed a year ago in a drunken brawl; someone smashed him on the head with a piece of iron piping. The villagers say he was a bad man. They feel sorry not for him but for the man who killed him and is now in prison.
Arutyun’s second son is the husband of the beautiful Astra. Eighteen months ago he went to prison himself—after killing a truck driver in another drunken brawl, in Karapet-aga’s restaurant. The driver had come from Lake Sevan, from deep-blue Lake Sevan. With him he had brought his beloved—they wanted to drink, to eat Karapet’s famous kebab, to have a good time. Aramais, Astra’s husband, was sitting at the next table with a group of friends. He insulted the driver’s beloved, who was married to someone else. The driver took offense and hit Aramais in the face. Aramais then stabbed him with a Finnish knife. Apparently Astra never wanted to marry Aramais—he was a ne’er-do-well, a troublemaker, a gambler and drunkard. But Aramais was infatuated; he wept, threw himself drunkenly at her feet, and vowed to kill both her and himself. Astra, her mother, and everyone in the village knew this was no empty threat. And so now she goes about in ragged clothes and worn-out boots, saving every kopek she can in order to be able to take a little more food to her husband. Every month she travels two hundred and eighty kilometers to see him; he is in a camp now, working in a mine. His sentence is not going to be reduced; he does not have a good record in the camp—he drinks, shirks work, and gets into fights.
Arutyun’s third son was recently released from a prison in Yerevan, and Arutyun was himself recently released from the district hospital—this third son had knifed him in the ribs during a quarrel. Arutyun was in the hospital for three months, and his son was in prison for three months—the father saved his son from a worse fate by giving false testimony. Sometimes this third son, a narrow-shouldered young man with a thin face and a heavy, hooked nose, comes to the terrace outside the House of Creativity for a game of billiards. On his face is a schizophrenic smile: sometimes he looks guilty, sometimes insane, sometimes brazenly unconcerned. And his father, old Arutyun, comes along to watch. When the game’s over, the son walks past his father in silence. His father is no less silent.
I’ve heard that Arutyun’s fourth son, the wildest one of all, left Armenia three years ago; he was one of the young people who answered the call for volunteers to settle the virgin lands of Siberia. Away he went—and no one has heard from him since. No one has seen him, nobody knows how to find him or even if he is still alive.
Arutyun’s fifth son, though mentally retarded, is the least unsatisfactory. His baby face is covered with black down; he smiles affectionately and slobbers as he shows me a picture book—a book of Armenian tales about animals. The animals in the pictures all look Eastern; they have dark hair and Armenian faces. The wolf and the hare have dark hair, and so does the middle-aged fox in a bonnet, peering slyly over her spectacles. But the boy’s old enough to be in ninth grade next year. . . . Yes, now I understand why old Arutyun’s eyes contain such vast yearning, why his gait, his silence, his insomnia, his hunched back—why everything about him expresses such a vast sorrow.
One day we were having breakfast. The kitchen was unusually full of noise and merriment and I half opened the door to see what was going on. I saw Katya, laughing loudly and blushing deeply. I saw Rosa, the housekeeper, showing her white teeth as she laughed no less loudly. I saw the gloomy and always preoccupied Tigran; this father of six young daughters, this disgraced ex-Secretary of the Party District Committee who was now in charge of the House of Writers, was also laughing. The whole kitchen was laughing, listening to a small, nimble old woman. The old woman was merry, and her shining eyes were full of life. Listening to her talk, even though I didn’t understand a word, I began to laugh along with everyone else. Then I was told that this old woman—the merriest woman in the village—was the wife of Arutyun, our night watchman; she was the mother of his five sons. . . . As Knut Hamsun put it, in the wonderful title he gave to one of his novels: But Life Goes On.[31]
For some reason or other, or rather for a reason that is only too obvious, I started to remember my earlier encounters, on the streets of Yerevan, with people of standing.
Here in Tsakhkadzor I was learning more and more, getting ever more involved in the life of the village. And this human involvement continued in spite of everything. It hardly mattered that the people I met spoke Russian so badly that they put the word stress in quite impossible places and often even came out with quite the wrong word, and that I, the translator of an epic novel about a copper-smelting plant, knew only two words of Armenian: che (meaning “no”) and barev.
I learned the story of mad old Andreas—but that is something I have already written about. And handsome, white-haired old Armo told me the story of his own life: his father had been one of the richest landowners in all Armenia, and Armo had been one of the most ardent Komsomol members in all Armenia.[32] This had created difficulties. . . . Some Turkish Kurds, who still remembered the old days and who revered Armo’s father, heard of his troubles and sent him, from Turkey, a present of five hundred rams. This was when Armo was already an important figure in the Armenian Komsomol, nursing in his young and passionate heart a hatred for all landlords and capitalists, for all enemies of the working people—and, at the same time, loving his father with no less passion, taking pride in his father’s fame, in the way he enjoyed such honor and respect both on the Russian and on the Turkish side of the Araks River. But in the end Armo’s father was buried in Siberia—nobody knows where.
Then I heard the life story of a sweet, asthmatic old man by the name of Sarkisyan. In a peaceful little house, together with his elderly wife, he is living out the last years of a life that has been anything but peaceful. When he was young, he was an important figure in the Party; during his years as an émigré, he knew Lenin. And then he was denounced as a Turkish spy, beaten almost to death, and sent to a camp in Siberia, where he remained for nineteen years.
And then he returned home, not embittered but convinced that people are essentially good, glad to have enriched his heart through conversations in camp barracks, north of the Arctic Circle, with ordinary Russian peasants and workers, glad to have enriched his mind through conversations with Russian scientists and intellectuals.
He said a lot about how, though reduced almost to the level of animals, people in the camps still felt pity for one another, about how those who were on their last legs did all they could to help others who were on their last legs, about how neither blizzards, nor temperatures of minus forty, nor national differences ever got in the way of human kindness.
He told me how his wife had come from Armenia to visit him, how she had made a home for herself in a filthy old hut just outside the barbed wire of the camp, how happy her kindness had made him, how proud he had felt of her, how much the other prisoners had liked her. He had retained the ability to laugh heartily and, as he told me the story of his two decades of confinement, he found things to laugh about.
He told me how in the main prison in Yerevan, eighty people had shared a single cell; all were highly educated—professors, old revolutionaries, sculptors, architects, actors and singers, famous doctors. It had taken the guards a painfully long time to count them, and they were forever losing count and having to start again. One day the guards had come in with a sullen-looking old man; he had cast a quick glance over the human mass on the bed boards and on the floor and then left. The same thing happened day after day. Eventually they learned that the old man was a shepherd. The prison administration had decided to make use of his phenomenal ability to count, almost instantaneously, flocks of several hundred, or even thousands, of sheep. This really was very funny—a shepherd counting a flock of professors, writers, doctors, and actors. . . .
He told me how, after returning from the camp, he had worked for a while selling fizzy water on Abovyan Street. Once an old man from a collective farm had had a long conversation with him while drinking his glass of water. Sarkisyan told the old man how he had been involved in the political underground, how he had helped to overthrow the tsar in 1917, helped to build the Soviet state—and then spent years in a camp. “And here I am now, selling fizzy water on the street!” After a moment’s thought, the old man said, “But why did you have to get rid of the tsar? Was he preventing you from selling fizzy water?” As he told me this, there were tears of laughter in Sarkisyan’s eyes.
From Ivan, the boiler man, I learned about an event that had caused great excitement among the whole Molokan community—about how two large families of Russian Molokans, the family of a carpenter and the family of a miller, had crossed one night from Turkey to Soviet Armenia, fording the Araks River. Their preparations had taken many months. The carpenter and his family had moved from Kars to the home of his friend the miller, who lived right by the border. They had learned the ways of the Araks, which months it gets deeper or shallower; they had studied, in detail, the habits of the Turkish border guards. On a moonless night, the two families had gathered on the bank, had felt the damp breath of the river. The men set off first; the water was up to their chests and the powerful current pressed against them, making them lose their footing. The water howled and roared; round stones slipped and slid soundlessly under their feet, not wanting to bear their weight. The swift water seemed black and terrible, like death; the foam on its surface seemed no less deathly, a deathly white. The women followed the men, carrying their little ones. When they reached the middle of the river, the fathers took the children, lifting them up in the air; the water was now wetting their beards. But then the riverbed began to rise again. Astonishingly, in spite of the dark, in spite of being only just above the cold noisy water, the children were entirely silent; not one of them cried. The men then went back again, to help the old men and the young boys and girls across; both families were extremely large. When they reached the Armenian bank, everyone fell on their knees, weeping and kissing the ground, kissing the cold stones. The Soviet border guards failed to see them; it really was a dark night. One of the refugees whistled and a border guard called out. The head of the border post appeared and questioned the fugitives. He understood everything at once and felt deeply moved. His fellow officers all gathered there on the bank, and their wives joined them as quickly as they could, bringing dry clothes for the women and children.
There must have been something poignant about this nighttime return, about this meeting between a group of bearded Russian peasants from Turkey and a group of young Russian soldiers, about the weeping officers’ wives throwing their arms around these Molokan old women and children on the bank of the roaring river. Ivan wept as he told me the story and, listening to him, I wept too.
Meanwhile, life in Tsakhkadzor went on as usual. . . .
In Karapet’s restaurant shop assistants, teachers, and bricklayers gather to drink grape vodka, to sing songs, to lose their tempers, to tell scandalous stories, to eat kebabs, air-cured beef, sulguni cheese, spicy green beans and coriander, and then to drink more grape vodka and fizzy Jermuk mineral water.
There is much drunken boasting: Jermuk is better than Georgian Borjomi; it is the Armenians who first made sulguni cheese; cognac may be a French word, but Armenian cognac is the best cognac of all; no grapes are as sweet as Armenian grapes; it is the Armenians who first taught the Georgians to make shashlyk kebabs, although, to be honest, they still haven’t quite got the hang of it.
Sometimes I hear singing on the village streets, and the rumble of drums: A wedding is being celebrated.
After a few more days, someone invites me to their home to drink vodka. And a day after that, I visit the library, and a lady librarian with broad shoulders and a mustache shows me an Armenian translation of one of my books. It has been read. Some of the pages are a little swollen; the edge of the binding is frayed.
What more do I need? On the street people greet me with a smile: Barev! . . . Barev dzez! People share their stories with me; they tell me about their lives, about their sorrows. Ivan has told me the story of the night crossing of the Araks—and this man I had thought of as cruel had wept. A villager has invited me to his house to drink wine and talk about life. A book of mine has been read in Tsakhkadzor, some pages are a bit swollen. It’s all right here. I’m accepted; I’m one of them.