AFTER a month of uninterrupted hard labor, we decided to have a rest. We went on an outing—“to have a feast,” as Armenians say—in the region around the town of Dilijan. The road goes past Lake Sevan, across the Semyonov Pass, and towards the border with Azerbaijan.
With us we took a basket containing some bottles and some uncooked meat; Arutyun had slaughtered a sheep the previous day. “Poor little sheep!” Martirosyan had repeated, though it was he who had been responsible for the murder. Martirosyan has been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of sheep; he enjoys shashlyks. Volodya, the driver, has also stowed some firewood in the trunk, and some skewers.
We are going in a small coach with large windows. The first to get in are the two ladies: Martirosyan’s wife, Violetta Minasovna, and Hortensia, my co-translator. They are followed by Martirosyan himself and by Tigran, the director of the House of Writers and the former secretary of the Party District Committee. I—the translator who knows only two words of Armenian—get in last.
Violetta Minasovna has beautiful gray eyes and is a fine cook. She makes wonderful Armenian chicken soup, stuffed cabbage and stuffed vine leaves, stuffed eggplant and peppers; she prepares peaches stuffed with nuts. She is kind and hospitable, but not without failings. Traveling with her is hard work; in her weak yet imperious voice she insists that we stop at every village shop, whether it sells food or clothes. She is obsessive in her determination to obtain some buckwheat, and she is also hoping to buy blouses and shoes for her daughters. She keeps criticizing her husband, saying his constant smoking makes it hard for her to breathe. I can’t understand what they say to each other, but sometimes they sound vicious and I can see real fire in the eyes of the author of the epic about the copper works. It is the same burning fire as when he looks at a “poor sheep.” As for Violetta’s gray eyes, they are moist with tears; she is hurt.
Hortensia gets into the coach sideways, with the grace often possessed by stout women. The Armenian youths look at her with the eyes of young wolves. Here she is a fantastic success—unlike in Moscow, where people have mixed feelings about her gigantic bosom and legendary hips. Here she is esteemed—like Gauguin, suddenly idolized by the elite after long years of obscurity. Her success is intoxicating, but it also makes her anxious. Such is the price of fame. Hortensia’s energy is immense. No flora or fauna on earth bears comparison with her—she is a female bulldozer, the daughter of an earth-moving machine. Every morning she “slims” with the help of a skipping rope; the entire house, built a long time ago by a rich Molokan called Slivin, starts to tremble. The earth around Vesuvius must tremble in the same way. Hortensia is impetuous, good-natured, straightforward, and cynical.
She cleans the shoes of her male friends, washes their socks and underpants, buys them apples and sauerkraut from the market, supplies them with medicines, is always ready to help the elderly by applying cupping glasses or even, if necessary, by administering an enema. She will give away all her money to a comrade or sit for a whole month at a sick person’s bedside. She is a true Armenian, an impassioned patriot. But she likes Russian men. She is sensitive. She loves music, poetry, painting, and flowers, yet she makes free use of the strongest Russian swearwords. Strangest of all is that she is both amoral and endowed with real Christian kindness. Sometimes she says, very seriously, “I’ll go and work, I’ll keep hard at it till supper.” And then she appears at the supper table, heavy with sleep, red-faced, radiating heat like a blast furnace; all afternoon the house has been filled by her powerful snoring. Sometimes she weeps—and her tears are like a tropical downpour. Usually this is because she feels personally offended by something; she seldom weeps from pain, and still more seldom from pity.
Yes, how can we say that someone is good or bad? Are kind people always good? Can bad people be kind? Can someone be kind and still be a bad person?
Such are our ladies.
Now a few words about Martirosyan. More than anything in the world, he loves his nation. He adores it passionately. History, world literature, architecture, philosophy, humanity as a whole, the solar system, the Milky Way, galaxies, and supergalaxies—all this is secondary. What matters is the global, even cosmic, superiority of the Armenian people.
Sometimes this passion is touching and wonderful; sometimes it is sweet and funny; sometimes it is so insane as to be shocking.
Martirosyan is about fifty years old. He is tall, and he has a pleasant, intelligent face, with dark eyes and a large fleshy nose. He is a good conversationalist and storyteller; he is a gourmet and a connoisseur of fine cognac, a man who, in the words of Anatole France, loves to praise the Lord through his creations. And the Lord’s creations are infinitely varied; they include not only the granddaughters of Eve but also the garlic soup called khash and the yogurt soup called spas, not to mention lamb-kidney shashlyks, pink trout, Jermuk mineral water, and the Armenian yogurt called matsun, not to mention billiards, stuffed eggplant, a house built from pink tufa on the shores of a gurgling mountain stream, the conversation of friends, sleeping compartments on international trains, and chairs on presidiums.
In the most natural of ways, Martirosyan has combined a cult of Armenia’s marvelous architecture, of the Armenian landscape, of medieval Armenian songs, of the wisdom literature written on parchment in classical Armenian, with the cult of his own personality. He deeply and sincerely loves his own self. He reveres himself in the same poetic way he reveres the deep-blue water of Lake Sevan, the snows of Aragats, and the Ararat valley when it is pink with peach blossom. He is as dear to his own self as all the priceless riches of the Matenadaran manuscript library. He likes to tell charming stories about ridiculous situations he has found himself in, about enemies who have furiously criticized his books, about students applauding not him but a rival writer by the name of Shiraz, about how meek and docile he himself was during Stalin’s day. But this is not self-criticism, even if it appears to be. On the contrary, all these stories are an expression of his love for his own self; they are stories about the weaknesses and eccentricities of God.