An Armenian Sketchbook (15 page)

Next the Russian stove; the fair-haired children; my thoughts about the Russian character and how perfectly a log hut expressed the steadfastness of a Russian peasant who spoke Armenian as eloquently as the most golden-tongued of Armenians.

Then I had sat at table with an old, semiliterate man in a dirty jacket and canvas boots and felt in my heart an excitement I had seldom known.

By then Armenia and Russia no longer seemed to matter. I was no longer thinking about the nature of greatness or the characteristics of a particular nation. There was only the human soul, the soul that did not lose faith as it suffered anguish and torment among the scree and vineyards of Palestine, the soul that remains equally human and good in a little village near Penza, under the sky of India, and in a northern yurt—because there is good in people everywhere, simply because they are human beings.

This soul, this faith was alive in a semiliterate old man, and it was as simple as his life and his daily bread, without a single high-flown word or moment of lofty preaching. Reaching out to his faith, touching it and sensing its power, was enough to bring tears to my eyes, because I suddenly realized that it was less about God than about people. I understood that Aleksey could not live without this faith, just as he could not live without bread and water, and that, for the sake of his faith, he would not hesitate to subject himself to the torment of the Cross, or to the most terrible and unending penal servitude.

The gift possessed by a great poet or scientist is not the highest of gifts. Among even the most brilliant virtuosos of the mathematical formula, of the musical phrase and poetic line, of the paintbrush and chisel are all too many people who are weak, petty-minded, greedy, servile, venal, and envious—people like slugs or mollusks, moral nobodies in whom, thanks to the irritating pangs of conscience, a pearl is sometimes born. But the supreme human gift is beauty of soul; it is nobility, magnanimity, and personal courage in the name of what is good. It is a gift possessed by certain shy, anonymous warriors, by certain ordinary soldiers but for whose exploits we would cease to be human.

I
HAD BEEN
invited to a wedding—one of Martirosyan’s nephews was getting married. This nephew worked as a driver; his bride worked in a village shop. We had a long way to go, to the Talin region, on the southern slope of Mount Aragats.

I had been uncertain whether to go—I’d had a pain in my belly since the previous evening, and like a swimmer with little confidence in his own strength, I was nervous of swimming far from shore. But when the phone rang in the morning and Martirosyan told me that he was waiting for me outside, together with his wife and Hortensia, I decided to be bold.

Soon we were on the main road. We were going to have breakfast in our glassy coach—Martirosyan had not had time to eat anything at home. Afraid of disturbing the now-dozing beast in my belly, I did not touch the food; I just sipped a little coffee from the thermos.

The Ararat valley was to our left; we could see both the Greater and the Lesser Ararat. And to our right stretched the snow-covered slopes of Mount Aragats. The road ran through fields of stone—the bones of dead mountains.

A road is always interesting. I think that movement makes any road interesting. I do not know any uninteresting roads. Our road took us not only through space but also through time—we drove past silent thousand-year-old churches and chapels, past the lifeless ruins of a once-bustling caravansary, past villages bristling with television antennae, past labor-camp barracks festooned with cheery and optimistic slogans. We saw the mountain where Noah found refuge after the flood, and turning our heads in the opposite direction, we saw the mountain from which Ambartsumyan’s[
53
] telescopes are now exploring the structure of distant universes.

The stones scattered about in the valley were a reminder to Ararat and Aragats that everything passes: These overthrown stones were once mighty mountains with white crowns; now they are dead skeletons.

Nowhere else in Armenia, perhaps, have I seen such a stony desolation, impossible to escape from, as in the high valleys of Mount Aragats. I have no idea how to convey this improbable feeling. In three dimensions—height, width, and depth—stone, nothing but stone. No, there were more than three dimensions of stone; these stones were also an expression of the world’s fourth coordinate—time. The migrations of peoples, paganism, the ideas of Marx and Lenin, the wrath of the Soviet state had all found expression in this stone, in the basalt walls of churches, in gravestones, in elegantly built new clubs, in schools and palaces of culture, in quarries and mines, in the stone walls of labor camps.

Soon, however, all we could see was the overthrown stone of the valleys. Nothing remained of the Christian myth, expressed through the stone of churches, about a future happiness in the Kingdom of Heaven, nor did anything remain of the stone quarries and mines developed in the name of a future terrestrial bliss.

And when it became clear that before us lay nothing but the stone bones of long-dead mountains, we drove into the village where a young driver was getting married to a pretty young girl who worked in the village shop.

I had been told that the villages around Aragats were the poorest in Armenia, that they had languished until only recently under a heavy burden of senseless taxes. Bureaucrats had expected the collective farms to produce large quantities of meat, wool, and grapes from the thousands of stone fields around these farms. But you can’t press wine from stone; you can’t turn basalt into good mutton. These taxes had been lifted. Now the collective farms were responsible only for their small patches of fertile land. Life was a little less difficult, but people were still far from rich.

Our glassy coach drove slowly down the stone street of a stone village, amid stone hovels that had not only grown up out of the stone but also grown down into it. Stone walls stretched from one hovel to another. Long channels for watering the animals had been gouged out of huge stone slabs. Near the huts stood basalt water barrels, basalt laundry tubs, basalt troughs for feeding the sheep.

Hearths were carved out of stone. Stairs, porches—everything was stone. Both people’s homes and their household utensils were basalt. Here, we were still in the Stone Age. Even the dust being blown down the street seemed stony.

But music from a radio reminded us that the age of electricity had, in fact, dawned. Along the stone streets stood stone pillars, carrying wires to the Stone Age hovels, bringing them electric lighting. And we could hear the heartrending voices of wedding flutes: Yes, people were living amid these stones.

We drove up to some little houses, standing above a stone precipice, that looked particularly poor. We were expected. A drum was beating, and there was the sound of flutes.

The groom’s mother, a tall old woman with an emaciated face, hugged Martirosyan. They kissed and began to weep. They were weeping not because a young man was marrying and leaving his mother but because of the incalculable loss and suffering that Armenians have endured, because they couldn’t not weep for relatives of theirs who had perished during the massacres of 1915, because no joy in the world could make them forget their nation’s grief and their homeland on the other side of Mount Ararat. But the drum went on thundering deafeningly and victoriously. The expression on the face of the large-nosed drummer was implacably merry: In spite of everything, life would go on, the life of a nation making its way through a land of stone.

A crowd of peasants gathered around us. Martirosyan introduced me to his sister and her husband—a thin old man in a green tunic; his soldier’s belt was fastened by a brass buckle and a five-pointed star. He had sad eyes and his dress indicated real poverty. But the buckle and star shone in the sun; they must have just been polished. I shook dozens of hands, everyone wanted to meet the friend of Martirosyan the writer.

There was a table outside. We were led out and offered food and drink.

Unfamiliar customs and rituals demand respect. I always feel fear, even terror at the thought that I might offend people by failing to honor some custom of theirs. What would the villagers think if I refused food and drink offered to me by the groom’s parents?

I drank a glass of grape vodka and ate some green pepper and a piece of mutton. Anxious not to offend, I drank a second glass of vodka and ate some pickled green tomato. This was so fiery that I immediately needed another swig of vodka. This is how people drink in Armenia—they extinguish the fire of vodka with the fire of pepper; they extinguish the fire of pepper with the fire of vodka.

After my stomach troubles during the night, the vodka had an unaccustomed but wonderful effect. A sculptor, I imagine, can achieve something similar with a piece of stone: everything superfluous splits off and falls away. His chisel releases a life that had been hidden.

My perception of the world became altogether different and more wonderful. I made a great leap forward; I saw faces lit not only by the light of the sun but also by their own inner glow. I could read people’s true characters. My love and trust in people increased exponentially. I had moved from the auditorium to the stage. No longer did anything seem banal or merely habitual. I seemed to be taking part for the first time in a splendid and solemn, perfectly structured one-act drama—the drama of
life
. I was full of excitement and surprise: The sky above me was such a deep blue, the air so cool and clean, the snow on the mountaintops so brilliant! And there was such joy—and such sorrow—in the wedding music! The people gathered around the house of the groom’s parents entered unhindered into my soul; there was a place for them in its innermost depths. I could feel their immense labor, the poverty of their clothes and shoes, their wrinkles, their gray hair, the youthful mocking curiosity of the beautiful—and not so beautiful—young women, the mighty souls and wonderful straightforwardness of the laborers. I sensed their honesty; I understood the hardship of their lives, their kindness, how well disposed they were towards me. I was at home; I was among my own kind. We entered a stone room—what stern poverty! How good to be honest and poor! The walls, ceiling, and floor were all made from large stones. The ancient utensils had barely even been touched by the Iron Age; the jugs and dishes, the containers for grain, oil, and wine, the hearth itself—all seemed the very image of the Stone Age.

We went out again into the yard. Straight in front of me, shining in the sun, was the snowy peak of Greater Ararat. My feelings and thoughts became still more acute.

Humanity’s most important mountain—the mountain of faith

—called up innumerable associations in my mind. The Bible and the present day came together with astonishing ease, and I saw Mount Ararat through the eyes of people who lived on these mountain slopes before the birth of Christ. I saw the swift black waters of the great flood. I saw drowning sheep and donkeys. I saw a blunt-nosed boat, floating heavily on the water. I saw the animals saved by Noah and the bloody slaughterhouses where Noah’s descendants killed the descendants of these animals. But I did not only
think
about the biblical mountain; I also, without thinking, delighted in its beauty. The mountain was shining in its full glory; it was not obscured by the buildings of Yerevan, by the smoke of its factory chimneys or the clouds and mist of the Ararat valley. From its stone foot to its white head it was lit by the morning sun. It belonged to today and to the life of past millennia. It brought together today’s wedding and the flutes of three thousand years ago. Everything passes; nothing passes. . . .

What power lies in wine!

People hurried us on: We still had to go and fetch the bride, and it was eighteen kilometers to her village. The wedding procession consisted of two trucks and our glassy coach. The young stood in the back of the trucks. They danced, sang, and waved roasted chickens in the air—as well as round loaves of wheat and skewers of lamb shashlyk. Gleaming in some of their hands were captured German daggers; their blades, on which could be seen the words “
Alles für Deutschland
,” had been plunged into fresh apples.

The flutes sang out shrilly and the drums drummed on, but there was no one to admire the splendor of the wedding convoy—around us was only stone, flat, blind, and deaf. This wilderness of sullen stone was a challenge; it lent a particular power to our merriment. The human race was going to continue—our wedding flutes and drums were making fun of the sullen stone.

But about halfway between the groom’s village and the bride’s, just as on my first day in Yerevan, I was hurled down to earth from the heights of contemplation.

This time, however, things were a great deal worse. This time, I was not alone; I was a guest at a wedding. I knew I was being watched, albeit in the friendliest of ways, by the other people in the coach; they noticed every movement I made. And in the bride’s village they would be waiting impatiently: We were running very late. The tables would have been set long ago, and I knew that the moment we drew up outside the bride’s house, we would be surrounded by a huge crowd of her friends and relatives, and we would be ushered solemnly inside, to the sound of wedding music.

I was not going to reach the bride’s village without mishap. A terrible force was raging in my bowels; it was no longer subject to my pitiful will. A tiger with iron claws was determined to burst out of his cage, and it was impossible to resist this enraged beast. The pickled tomatoes and cucumbers had done their work. I was powerless, as powerless as if I had been trying to bridle my heart or my lungs or to prevent the eruption of a volcano. I was gripped, O God, by a terrible despair, by a wild, animal terror. A cold deathly sweat covered me from head to foot. My mind was working with insane speed. Should I stop the coach? It would be very awkward to make such a request—and anyway, what good would it do me? All around was a wilderness of stone, flat as an executioner’s block. And the coach was all windows, and behind us were two trucks full of young people, all singing away.