I can talk and argue with Rafik more than anyone else on this entire planet. I can’t think of another person with a command of as many topics for conversation and debate. Our incarceration, as well as our relationship, ended almost a quarter of a century ago, but there remain enough topics for conversations, arguments, and intellectual battles for centuries to come.
Rafik—Rafael Ashotovich Papayan, born in 1942, married, with two children—was arrested on November 10, 1982. He was sentenced to four years in maximum-security prison and two years of exile. In 1975, Rafik, along with Eduard Arutunyan, was one of the founders of the Armenian Chapter of the Helsinki Human Rights Union. When Arutunyan and two members of his group were arrested, the KGB searched Rafik’s home, as well as the home of Edmon Avetikyan. Rafik wasn’t arrested that time—he received only a stern warning. But that warning didn’t do much to stop Rafik’s activities. And so, he was arrested later on, along with Zhora Khomizuri, and sent to the Gulag.
In Armenia, Rafik’s father, Ashot (Aramashot) Papayan, was best known as an actor, but he was also the author of several plays (mostly comedies) and screenplays. Incidentally, Ashot Papayan was born in Batumi, like Dato and I, so Rafik was not only our compatriot—he was almost a true Batumian.
There were several reasons why I considered Rafael Papayan to be such a special person. For the first time in the history of the Barashevo political prison, he, along with yours truly, proposed organizing an international collective, or kibbutz, “the Christian Federation of South Caucasian Nations.” Before that, all the prison groups had been organized on a strictly national basis. Another reason Papayan was so special to me was that, among all the prisoners, he was my only true colleague, a philologist. Rafael had graduated from the Bruysov Institute of Russian and Foreign Languages in Yerevan. For his graduate studies, he went to the University of Tartu and there, at that excellent Estonian research center, he completed his Ph.D. in philology under the guidance of the renowned Yuri Lotman.
It didn’t take long for me to realize that Rafik was a truly amazing person. And precisely because he was so amazing, I observed him constantly. For me, Papayan was a phenomenon worthy of study. He was a man of many talents—a brilliant historian who specialized in the history of Armenia and Georgia, an expert in Russian language and literature, a refined prose stylist, a talented poet, and a truly erudite individual. He was a man of rare tact and thoughtfulness, a person with his own unique sense of melancholy humor, and a man of indefatigable industry and patience.
Apart from being a polymath, Papayan’s greatest talent was, in my opinion, his craftmanship. Anytime I try to describe Rafik succinctly, the life of Mesrop Mashtots invariably comes to mind. The preeminent medieval Armenian scholar and statesman, who is best known as the creator of the Armenian alphabet, was an educator, a missionary, and a saint of both Armenian churches—the Apostolic and the Catholic. But among all his merits, his grateful countrymen decided that Mesrop’s most important achievement was his translation of the Bible, and so they referred to him as “the translator.” In the same way, Rafik could be described by the word “craftsman.” Armenian craftmanship is well known, and Rafik is one of its most talented representatives. One of his masterpieces (or “master-crafts,” as Boris Manilovich would say) was a device that could make twelve makhorka cigarettes at a time. This unique device was my birthday gift the year I reached thirty-three, the age of Jesus Christ at his crucifixion. Unfortunately, the patience necessary for such a device was not included, so I mostly rolled my makhorka by hand.
In the prison workshop, he attached a handmade double fan propeller to his sewing machine. There was nothing better than sitting next to that sewing machine during the hot summers. He made so many improvements to his sewing machine that he was able to complete the daily quota of ninety-two pairs of mitts by 11 A.M. During the remaining hours, he worked for a rainy day—rumor had it that he’d stashed away several thousand pairs of mitts. I still wonder what kind of disaster he thought could make our days rainier than they already were.
Over the years, in his free time, Rafik created many marvels of engineering, such as an automatic garlic press (which was never used because where were we going to find that much garlic?) and an automatic nut chopper, which was mostly just a prototype, since nuts were such a rarity that only a few of the Georgians ever had any. He also designed a device for drawing lines on writing paper, a machine for waste-free fish bone extraction that left the flesh intact, a mechanical meat grinder made of wood (though, in my three years in the camp, I never saw any meat), an extremely precise scale that could measure weight to a milligram, and so on and so forth . . . He invented so many things it’s hard to remember them all.
Over the course of my life, I’ve heard many arguments attempting to prove that geniuses of different times and nations had Armenian roots—although not from Rafik, I must say. On several occasions, I’ve heard there is “undeniable proof” that Rustaveli, Shakespeare, Byron, Mozart, Julius Cesar, Jesus Christ, Buddha, Mohammed, Yuri Dolgoruky, Leo Tolstoy, and Leonardo da Vinci were of Armenian descent. If asked, I could offer some support based on Rafik’s ingenious technical inventions alone.
Rafik was also a devoted hoarder, always saving, storing, hiding, conserving, and slicing thin. He saw no issue with stashing a jar of kaurma (prepared by his beloved wife Anait) for so many months that the delicious lamb stew went bad, only to be consumed by Grisha Feldman. Compared to other incidents, that wasn’t even the worst. One New Year’s Eve, he opened some cured sturgeon of an even older vintage (three years), thinking that he might not be here to share it with us in the future and, of course, he didn’t want to eat it alone in exile!
After making a New Year’s cake from the butter he’d saved in the hospital, Johnny Lashkarashvili earned a scolding from Rafik, who declared that there was plenty of food (this, in my opinion, was a slight exaggeration), and that he should have saved the butter because, “Who knows what will happen next year!”
There were high-demand and low-demand products in the prison store. For example, sunflower oil was in high demand (with the bottle, it cost 1 ruble and 2 kopeks, but the bottle could be returned for 20 kopeks the following month), as was black tea (90 kopeks), makhorka (15 kopeks a pack—I, for example, went through 20 packs a month), matches (1 kopek a box—you had to have them because no one would share), round candies that could function as sugar (3 rubles per kilo, but you weren’t allowed to buy more than 200 grams a month), a composition notebook (a classic twelve-page Soviet one cost 2 kopeks), and a pen (30 kopeks, which was expensive). Products in lower demand included all kinds of jam (a jar cost 1 ruble, but an empty jar could be returned for 10 kopeks), fish pâté (76 kopeks), the unforgettable Soviet preserves called “Tourist’s Breakfast”—a unique combination of fish, tomato paste, and rice (80 kopeks)—and luxurious tobacco products (for example, unfiltered Prima cigarettes for 15 kopeks). And there were some products that came from mythic worlds that were considered a direct insult to the inmates. For example, Marlboro cigarettes, made in a Kishenev tobacco factory, cost one and a half rubles a pack. There was no demand at all for such products and so they stayed on the shelves month after month. This is how the popular prison expression “There’s butter in the store” was born. Butter wasn’t a part of the prison store’s meager stock, so this expression referred to an impossible situation and was often used as “Oh, c’mon!”
Rafik was born on December 22. During our first year of our prison life, Dato and I, being inexperienced, decided to surprise the birthday boy. From our combined monthly allowance of ten rubles, we sacrificed three and bought him an unparalleled gift—two packs of Marlboro cigarettes. We were sure that our friend would be overjoyed by such a financial sacrifice and, hearts pounding, we looked forward to giving him our precious gift. That evening Rafik invited us to a rather modestly laid table, and we gave him our elaborately wrapped present. The birthday boy began unfolding the newspaper and, as soon as he saw the cigarettes, he forgot the ancient wisdom about not looking a gift horse in the mouth, and reacted just like Ronald Reagan did when Mexican president Portillo gave him a real live horse. Rafik, the only son of the artist and playwright Ashot Papayan, appealed to his father in a tragic voice, denouncing us, his neighboring countrymen, to the heavens: “What have you miserable Georgians done? For three rubles, you could’ve bought three whole jars of jam!”
In one of the toasts during our celebratory tea, I called Rafik a knight of the hidden banners, and he loved it. He hid everything for a rainy day, and this is why Johnny called him the warehouse manager (he called me the museum director). In our prison camp, no one could compete with him in the realm of business. Once, an inmate desperately needed a stamp and, after searching the entire camp, he finally came to us. “I’m dead meat,” he said, “If I don’t mail this letter, I’ll lose my letter rights this month. Help!” It’s a terrible feeling when you can’t send a thirty-two-page letter you’ve been writing for two weeks just because you don’t have a measly three-kopek stamp. In prison, you can only reach your family by writing them a letter. If you miss out on the opportunity, you begin to descend into a vortex of emptiness and treachery, and after that, you don’t want to live anymore. When my Ukrainian prison mate was explaining all this to me, his voice was trembling, and I could see that he was falling into a deep depression. “Don’t worry, I’ll find you a stamp,” I said, trying to calm him down. I then set off on a search, like Vosh, the hero of Georgian folklore, or like Avtandil from The Lord of the Panther-Skin. Obviously, I went to see Rafik:
“Listen, Rafik, ahper-jan, tsavatanem [dear brother, I’ll take away your pain]. I need a stamp. A good man is in trouble.”
“A postage stamp is a rare thing,” said Rafik. “Its price changes with the market. Is your client ready to pay?”
“Why does he have to pay? The man needs a three-kopek stamp!” I had no skills in market affairs.
“Ahper-jan, Levan-jan, I don’t want to start on the subject of Georgian extravagance. You’ve wasted your own assets and now you’re lecturing me about the price of a three-kopek stamp, as you call it?”
“So how much does a three-kopek stamp cost? Ten kopeks?” I asked, trying to sound as business like as possible.
“Ten is a good number, but I wouldn’t treat this number as nonchalantly as you do. See, you’re stressing the fact that in the store, one postage stamp costs three kopeks. Here, I’ll multiply it by the emergency need coefficient of 10, and thereby set its emergency price at 30 kopeks, or two packs of makhorka.”
“Why so much? Two packs of makhorka?!” I said, unable to hide my disapproval.
“Are we going to bargain?” Rafik asked with an expression on his face that instantly made me lose any desire to negotiate. He then quoted Ilf and Petrov’s The Twelve Chairs: “This is no place for bargaining!” Rafik said it in a stern voice, just like the character Kisa Vorobyaninov from this almost sacred book of our generation. Then he began naming other products that cost thirty kopeks—two packs of Prima, one matchbox of black tea, and so on. I went back to my anxious Ukrainian brother, explained the situation to him, and asked for a pack of makhorka. He happily agreed to the price and delivered the makhorka right then and there.
“You know that if I had a stamp, I’d give it to you for free, right?” I said.
“Yes, I do,” he answered. “I would’ve done the same—if you needed a stamp and I had one. But now I need it so much that even a pack of makhorka can’t stop me. It’s good that he didn’t ask for two packs—or more!” Being a tactful person, he didn’t ask me who the owner of the stamp was, but I think he knew who in the prison traded in such rare goods. So, I added a pack from my own supply and went back to Rafik.
“You see,” Rafik said, “how easily the client agreed to two packs? I should’ve asked for three!”
I didn’t tell him that one pack was mine, especially after he divided the “profit” in two and handed my pack of makhorka back to me. I must confess that I added my own pack to my Ukrainian friend’s payment not because I was such a nice person, not at all. I just felt ashamed asking for two packs for one little stamp. Meanwhile, Rafik decided to increase the emergency coefficient to fifteen for future deals.
Rafik was a man of principle and took part in all protests, and our protests usually took the form of a strike. When we started a strike, we wouldn’t go to the workshop—we’d stop working completely. Some inmates would support the strike by writing a letter to Alexander Rekunkov, Prosecutor General of the USSR. A typical letter would say: To the Prosecutor General of the USSR, in protest against such and such, from this to that date, I declare a strike, to which I testify with my signature—inmate so-and-so. Then the letter would go into an envelope and the envelope into the mailbox. We Georgians didn’t miss a single demonstration, but we didn’t acknowledge the Prosecutor General of the USSR and so didn’t write him any letters. Either way, the powers that be knew who was on strike and who wasn’t. Everyone else would write letters, though, and put them in the mailbox. Johnny Lashkarashvili constantly said: Rafik’s from the Caucasus, there’s no way he’s writing letters to the Prosecutor General. When Rafik was dropping his letter in the mailbox one time, Johnny snatched it out of his hands, opened it, and beamed with joy at the blank sheet of paper in the envelope.
As I mentioned before, Rafik had been a student of Lotman for many years and, as it happened, Manilovich, Vadim Yankov, and I had also met this amazing scholar. Once we were playing the very intellectual and artistic game of charades. We formed several teams of two and began: One member of the group, using only pantomime, would try to relate a word or a phrase to the other member. In the end, Rafik and I (with the help of our coaches Khomizuri and Altunyan) beat the strongest team from Petersburg, Polyakov and Manilovich, coached by Donskoy and Tolstykh. Rafik was able to tell me with only gestures that the other team’s phrase was the Bible of all political prisoners: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. When the defeated team served us, the winners, tea, Rafik recalled how once, in a similar game, Lotman managed to explain to his partner a very difficult term—Salazar’s dictatorship. (During Rafik’s graduate school years, Salazar was still the dictator of Portugal.) First, he presented with gestures a classic dictator and then used wordplay in a rather untraditional way. In Russian, the word salo means “lard,” and the name of Lotman’s wife was Zara. So he invited her into the room and, with an invisible knife, pretended to cut off some of her salo . . . Then, using only mimicry, he suggested that we put the two parts together: salo-Zara. And that’s how they won the game.
And, of course, we talked about the Georgian alphabet. Rafik was irritated by the fact that Zhora had studied the Mrglovani script, trying to find some cosmic order in its graphics. Evoking the authority of the prominent fifth-century Armenian historian Movses Khorenatsi, Rafik insisted that Mesrop Mashots, with the help of the translator Dzhaga, created the Georgian alphabet, and that Tzar Bakur, along with the Georgian Archbishop Moses, assisted him.
“Is it true that Mesrop didn’t know Georgian?” I asked.
“According to Koryun, it is,” Rafik answered, refraining from lying.
“You’re a philologist, aren’t you? And you believe that it’s possible to separate phonemes without knowing the language?” I asked, preparing myself for a long discussion. My point was that you not only need to know the language—you need to have the deepest understanding of the language. You need to feel it in order to isolate the elements that carry meaning.
“Of course, it’s impossible, but the Georgian phonemes were likely isolated by the translator Dzhaga,” Rafik declared, suddenly discovering an unknown genius in fifth-century Georgia.
“You know the Georgians pretty well, don’t you? Tell me, is ingratitude a Georgian national characteristic?” I asked him directly.
“I haven’t noticed any particular ingratitude in the Georgians,” Rafik answered cautiously.
“So how could it be that Mesrop didn’t receive any acknowledgment after making such an enormous contribution?” I asked the question in a way that made it difficult for Rafik to continue a polite conversation.
“Maybe you Georgians acknowledged him before the schism between our churches,” Rafik answered, still trying to stay within the boundaries of politeness.
“Okay, let’s assume that after the schism, we forgot our benefactor Mesrop. But then what did Dzhaga do wrong?” I asked on behalf of my newly discovered genius compatriot.
“Let me ask you now. You know your Leonti Mroveli said in the eleventh century that Parnavaz created the alphabet. Do you believe that?” Rafik asked.
“Our Mrglovani alphabet was created based on the Greek model and is a product of Christianity. Perhaps Leonti Mroveli meant another alphabet or another principle (because he was taking about writing in general, not about any concrete alphabet), for example, alloglottography.”9
“If Parnavaz created another alphabet or laid the foundation for the alloglottographic principle, then can you tell me who created the Mrglovani alphabet?” Rafik asked, deciding to put me and all of Georgia up against a wall.
“We don’t have sufficient information,” I answered carefully.
“You Georgians never fail to surprise me,” Rafik declared happily. “You say that ingratitude is not a dominant feature of your people, but then what did the creator of your alphabet do to you? How could you forget his name? Doesn’t it seem a little strange that you Georgians don’t know the name of the creator of your alphabet, or Rustaveli’s biography, and that you’ve forgotten where Tsarina Tamar is buried? Is it normal that your finest poets—Rustaveli, Guramishvili, Besiki, and Baratashvili—died in an alien land?” my Armenian neighbor said, launching a full-scale attack.
“Is it normal that Vardapet Komitas spent twenty years in Paris and died in destitution in a psychiatric clinic in Villejuif? Is it normal that your real capital was in a foreign land and that our Tbilisi was your cultural center? Is it normal that, without a state of your own, you had your capital abroad?” I asked, refusing to yield.
At the mention of Komitas’s mental illness, a complete change came over Rafik’s face—apparently, he didn’t think I knew about that. I restrained myself from reminding him that it wasn’t the mental shock provoked by genocide that tormented Komitas, but schizophrenia and STDs, and who knew which of these would kill a man first.
“Who said that Tbilisi was the Armenian capital?” Rafik asked, as if he’d truly never heard this.
“Well, how about the Armenian Aghasi Ayvazyan, the author of the great short story ‘The Gospel of Avlabari?’ He was from Tbilisi.”
“So, you won’t acknowledge that your alphabet was created by Mesrop?” Rafik asked, returning to square one now that the conversation had started down a path he didn’t like.
“Of course, not,” I answered, feeling the breath of all Georgians born after the fifth century, and of all those yet to be born, on my neck.
“Then I’ll give you the last piece of evidence,” Rafik said, warning me of what was to come.
“I know you always have something saved,” I said, unable to resist alluding to the postage stamp incident.
“When the Greek alphabet was developing, did the capital and lowercase letters form at the same time?”
“No, of course not. Only one Greek alphabet was created, and it had only capital letters. The same happened with Latin and Cyrillic, as well as with the Georgian and Armenian alphabets. Only centuries later were lowercase letters formed as a result of rapid writing,” I retorted. With scholarly authority and confidence, I laid out the generally accepted theory of the development of phonetic alphabets.
“The Greeks, Romans, Slavs, and Armenians stopped at small and big letters, i.e., capital Mtavruli and lowercase Nuskhuri letters, but why didn’t you Georgians stop? Why did you create the new Mkhedruli alphabet?” Rafik asked, finally presenting his main argument.
“Because we’re such an unruly nation!” I answered, not very convincingly.
“No, Levan-jan, it’s not that, ahper-jan. To me, the fact that you created a new alphabet is sufficient evidence to prove the hypothesis that Mesrop created the Georgian Mtavruli alphabet. I believe our historians!”
“And I believe our historians!” I declared, standing my ground.
“Oh, what historians do you have? You’re a nation of poets!” Rafik said, trying to be cool by using my grandma Ivlita’s line.
“I’m surprised to hear a poet treat other poets with such sarcasm. If you don’t like Georgians poets, then why are you so attached to Rustaveli? Get your hands off Rustaveli!” I said, ending up with the slogan of the day.
“I never said that Rustaveli was Armenian. That’s a provocation invented by Georgians and stupidly continued by Armenians. Anyway, you can see the influence of the linguist Nicholas Marr here, who was a Georgian on his mother’s side. But, as Victor Astafyev rightfully pointed out, you’re far from a Rustaveli.”10
“Oh, no, no, no! Don’t mention Astafyev and the Russians,” Misha Polyakov interjected angrily. “Please, don’t make me remind you of what Astafyev used to say about the Russians and the Armenians—nothing good will come of it.”
“So, they performed the funeral rites of Hector, tamer of horses,” Vadim Yankov declared, reciting the final line of The Iliad to end the first round of our Caucasian debate.11
In November of 1986, Rafik finished his prison sentence and was sent into exile. According to prison rules, in the last two months before a convict’s release, he was allowed to let his hair grow long. Grow long, in this case, is something of an overstatement—hair can’t grow much in only two months when it’s been shaved down to the scalp. At least, that would be true for anyone but Rafik. In one month, Rafik’s hair grew so long that it caused a scene that would make even Arkady Raikin, the famous stand-up comedian, envious. It happened during dinner when we were talking about Rafik’s hair and about Armenian hair, in general. Suddenly, a tipsy Trifonov, one of the guards, stormed into the dining room and screamed at the top of his lungs: “Hats off!”
It was November, so a lot of us were wearing hats. Everyone took them off, including Rafik—all inmates become especially cautious before their release, even before their exile—and Rafik had never been a risk-taker to begin with.
“Take that sheepskin hat off, Papayan!” Trifonov yelled, approaching our table, but after everyone burst out laughing, he realized the origin of the sheepskin and joined in the fun:
“F . . . you all! Even hair grows differently for those Armenian democrats!”
“That will be the topic of my doctoral dissertation: The Role of Democracy in Hair Growth Acceleration,” Rafik declared. (Acceleration, alongside glasnost and perestroika, was one of the most popular words of the Gorbachev era.)
“The Role of Democracy in Hair Growth Acceleration on the Armenian Head,” Johnny Lashkarashvili corrected him, pointing in my direction: “As you can see, even democracy can’t help a Georgian head.” And he added a saying that only a Georgian can fully appreciate: “Even our ants are no use to us.”12
Rafael Papayan later became the chair of the human rights committee in the Armenian parliament. Now he serves as a judge on the Constitutional Court of Armenia. Adding a mustache and a beard to his famously thick hair gave him a very distinguished look. He wrote an equally thick book, The Christian Roots of Modern Justice, and published an article in Lotman’s journal. The Moscow publishing house UniPress SK printed a collection of his translations, Armenian Poetry of the 20th Century: Selected Pages, which includes his translations of sixteen Armenian poets, beginning with Hovhannes Tumanyan and ending with Hakob Movses. In the book’s foreword, Papayan wrote that he’d decided to translate these poets purely out of love for their poetry. I remember how he’d talk for hours about Tumanyan, Isahakyan, Charents, Shiraz, Paruyr Sevak, and Misak Metsarents, so I can testify to that. Rafael also belongs to a rather small group of translators capable of doing translations in two directions—from Russian into Armenian and from Armenian into Russian.
Some years ago, a serious conflict ended the friendship between Rafik and Zhora. Rafik even published a few newspaper articles against him. It seems that rising to power requires serious sacrifices, and that the three-kopek-stamp approach was still a valid one in Rafik’s life. But that stamp sent Rafik’s letters to the wrong address.
After reading one of Rafik’s latest newspaper triumphs, written in the most perfect Russian, of course, I recalled how he’d said that the Georgians forgot Mesrop’s merits after the religious schism. Rafik and his friends very quickly forgot the merits of Georgy Khomizuri, who for many years fought for the preservation of Armenian history and for Armenian rights. But even after this decisive ideological divide, I can’t forget the old Rafik, without his mustache and beard, a true craftsman who had yet to grow his hair back, sitting next to his nightstand creating, with his infinite patience, a device for making twelve makhorka cigarettes at a time.
9 Alloglottography refers to the phenomenon of writing a text in a language different from the one in which it is intended to be read.
10 Nikolai Marr (1865–1934) was a controversial Georgian linguist whose work reached the height of its influence under Stalin. Victor Astafyev (1924–2001) was a popular Soviet and Russian writer. In the 1980s he was criticized for the chauvinism and xenophobia of his work. In the novel Catching Gudgeons in Georgia (1987), he repeatedly mocks the cult of Rustaveli.
11 Homer. The Iliad. Translated by Robert Fitzgerald, Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1974, p. 594.
12 This is a reference to a passage in Nodar Dumbadze’s novel The Sunny Night, in which one character mentions hearing on Voice of America about the discovery of a secretion from Spanish ants that makes hair grow. Another character responds: “Dammit, that’s our luck! Even our ants are no use to us!” (See Dumbadze, Nodar. The Sunny Night. Translated by George Nakashidse, Washington Square Press, p. 172.)