An Armenian Sketchbook (8 page)

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.

M
Y FIRST
long trip was to Lake Sevan.

Sevan lies in the middle of a great scattering of stones. It is very strange—amid the stones you suddenly see deep-blue water. Sevan has nothing in common with the dry, stony earth—just as a bright faceted jewel has nothing in common with the black velvet on which it rests. The dry hills and mountains have been baked by the summer heat and winds, smoothed by the geological weight of time—and there amid them lies deep-blue water. Usually water and dry land are connected. Usually there is a gradual transition between them—damp sand, a squelchy, boggy, gradually descending shore, lush grass, reeds, willows whose leaves are constantly peering into the lake, as if they breathe not air but water. Here, though, the baked mountain stone and the deep-blue water are separate and equally self-contained. This blue water seems unearthly; it seems to have peeled off from the sky. Probably it is closer to sky level than to sea level. It even seems strange that fish can live in this cold, transparent, deep-blue water; what one expects to see, flying beneath the surface, are the birds of heaven. Admittedly, there are some very special fish in this lake—the silvery-gray trout, speckled with stars, that the Armenians call
ishkhan
, or prince fish.

A tunnel has been drilled into the side of the stone bowl that contains Lake Sevan, and through it the water crashes into a valley, driving turbines with its deep-blue weight, creating light and electricity. There in the valley the water loses its deep blue and turns gray or green; perhaps it is its special blue, its Sevan blue, that is transformed into electric light.

The whole of Armenia is awash with light. Villages lost in the mountains, the ancient caves of Zangezur, inhabited to this day—all are lit by electricity. These caves were inhabited for thousands of years before our era, before the rise of ancient Sumer, probably even during the Stone Age and the Bronze Age.

Most of these caves’ present inhabitants, however, are working in factories that make precision instruments. These electrically lit caves now contain radios and televisions. Electricity is everywhere—in the action of motors, in electric trains, in music, in the changing frames of a film, in the smooth rotation of the telescopes on Mount Aragats. Lake Sevan is burning its blue body, turning it into light and heat. The water level in the lake has dropped by eleven meters; where there was once deep-blue water, there is now only a band of dark, murky stone. The lake is disappearing from its stone basin. Armenia, awash with electric light, grieves for Lake Sevan, which is perishing. There is now a project to redirect a mountain river and make it flow into Lake Sevan. But in the meantime, the deep-blue pearl is melting away, becoming smaller every day.

What will artists do if Lake Sevan dries up? I have seen any number of Lake Sevans in Yerevan—in the picture gallery, in hotel rooms, restaurants, railway-station halls, and public places of all kinds. I have seen Lake Sevan on postcards, in book illustrations, and in advertisements for food and industrial products.

What will Armenians do if they cannot come to Lake Sevan, if they cannot come and eat trout in the Minutka restaurant?

After yet another twist in the road, our car seemed to be soaring over the lake: We saw the snowy crests of mountains lit by the sun. They were pale blue, as if the snow had absorbed both the blue of the sky and the blue of the lake. And there on a rough stone dish—a dish that was black and brown and the color of rust—lay Lake Sevan, deep blue, almost boundless.

On a humpbacked island, now joined to the mainland because of the drop in the water level, stands an ancient chapel, built with a simplicity and a perfection incomprehensible to modern man. According to legend, Princess Mariam built this chapel for a young monk whose beauty had filled her with awe. The air here is transparent and clear, and so, every morning, the princess was able to see the young monk from the windows of her mountain castle.

Goethe once said that during eighty years of life he had known eleven happy days. I imagine that everyone, in the course of their life, must have seen many hundreds of sunrises and sunsets; they must have seen rain, rainbows, lakes, seas, and meadows. But of these hundreds of scenes only two or three enter a person’s soul with a miraculous power and become for them what those eleven happy days were for Goethe.

One person may never forget a little cloud lit by a quiet sunset, even though he entirely forgets hundreds of more splendid sunsets. Someone else will never forget a moment of summer rain or a young moon reflected in the pockmarked surface of a forest stream in April.

For a particular scene to enter into a person and become a part of their soul, it is evidently not enough that the scene be beautiful. The person also has to have something clear and beautiful present inside them. It is like a moment of shared love, of communion, of true meeting between a human being and the outer world.

The world was beautiful on that day. And Lake Sevan is one of the most beautiful places on earth. But there was nothing clear or good about me—and I had heard too many stories about the Minutka restaurant. After listening to the story of the love-struck princess, I asked, “But where’s the restaurant?”

Nothing came of my meeting with Lake Sevan; it did not enter my soul. What is pure and divine in me did not get the upper hand. As if I were a base animal, with no wings of imagination, all I could think about was Sevan trout. Unfortunately, just as we were setting out, Martirosyan had poisoned me with the words, “They don’t have trout at the Minutka every day.” These words had troubled me all through the journey.

In Moscow it is impossible for an ordinary mortal to eat Sevan trout. Apparently it is sent from Yerevan on the fastest planes and then delivered straight to the various embassies. And the catch, in any case, is small. It really would have been upsetting to travel three thousand kilometers, drive to Lake Sevan, and then learn that on that day the Minutka had no trout.

Or was it the thousands of paintings I had seen? Were they what poisoned my encounter with the high-altitude lake? We always think of the artist’s role as entirely positive; we think that a work of art, if it is anything more than a hack job, brings us closer to nature, that it deepens and enriches our being. We think that a work of art is some kind of key. But perhaps it is not? Perhaps, having already seen a hundred images of Lake Sevan, I thought that this hundred-and-first image was just one more routine product from a member of the Artists’ Union.

I have to say that the paintings by Saryan[
33
] that I had seen in Moscow did nothing to help me sense the reality of Armenia. My own perception of Armenia is different. To sense Armenia’s tragic landscape and its misty, ancient stone I found I had to erase from my soul the brilliant joy of Saryan’s paintings. Maybe poetry and painting can be harmful. Maybe they can limit the soul rather than deepen it.

That day, however, the Minutka restaurant
did
have trout. This meeting, at least, really did take place.

The restaurant, a single-story wooden building with a terrace, stands a little above the lake, at the foot of a mountain. The plank floor in the vestibule creaks loudly as we walk in. We enter a large, chilly room. There are fifteen tables with white tablecloths. The windows look out onto the lake, but the room is somewhat dark—because of a covered terrace that goes all the way around it.

We go up to a serving table. There, under a glass cover, on round and oval dishes like ancient shields, lie marinated green and red peppers, fresh herbs, stuffed eggplant; beside them stand tall bottles of wine and cognac. This was the trout’s escort, its entourage—its drummers, pages, and maids of honor. The trout itself was evidently waiting behind the half-open door. A few minutes later, a smiling gray-haired waiter took up his position behind this table, and a tall pale young man with curly disheveled hair came into the room. You could see at a glance that he was a poet.