An Armenian Sketchbook (5 page)

The inner yard! What constitutes the kernel, the heart and soul of Yerevan is not its churches or government buildings, not its railway stations, not its theater or its concert hall, nor its three-story palace of a department store. No, what constitutes the soul of Yerevan are its inner courtyards. Flat roofs, long staircases, short flights of steps, little corridors and balconies, terraces of all sizes, plane trees, a fig tree, a climbing vine, a little table, small benches, passages, verandas—everything fits harmoniously together, one thing leading into another, one thing emerging from another. Linking all the balconies and verandas, like arteries and nerve fibers, are hundreds of long lines on which the copious and motley linen of the inhabitants of Yerevan has been hung out to dry. Here are the sheets on which the black-browed men and women sleep and make children; here are the vast, sail-like brassieres of hero-mothers; here are the shirts of little girls; here are the underpants, discolored in the crotch, of Armenian old men; here are lace veils, swaddling clothes, and little babies’ trousers. Here we see the city as a living organism, stripped of its outer skin. Here we see all of Eastern life: the tenderness of the heart, the peristalsis of the gut, the firing of synapses, the power of both blood kinship and the ties that link everyone born in the same town or village. Old men click their worry beads and exchange leisurely smiles; children get up to mischief; smoke rises from braziers; quince and peach preserves simmer in copper pans; washing tubs disappear in clouds of steam; green-eyed cats watch their mistresses pluck chickens. We are not far from Turkey. We are not far from Persia.

The inner yard! It links different eras: the present, when a four-engined Ilyushin-18 can take you from Moscow to Yerevan in a few hours, and the days of camel paths and caravansaries.

And so I go on building my own Yerevan. I grind up, crush, absorb, and inhale its basalt and its rose-colored tufa, its asphalt and its cobblestones, the glass of its shop windows, its monuments to Stalin and Lenin, its monuments to Abovyan, Shaumyan, and Charents, the countless portraits of Anastas Mikoyan;[
13
] I absorb and inhale faces, accents, the frenzied roar of cars being driven at speed by frenzied drivers. I see a lot of people with big noses, a lot of faces covered in black stubble; I understand that it can’t be easy to shave iron beards.

I see today’s Yerevan with its factories, its huge, tall blocks of new apartments for workers, its splendid opera house, its magnificent pink schools, its academic institutions, its precious repository for books and manuscripts—the Matenadaran—and its famous Academy of Sciences. The academy looks graceful and harmonious.

I see Mount Ararat—it stands high in the blue sky. With its gentle, tender contours, it seems to grow not out of the earth but out of the sky, as if it has condensed from its white clouds and its deep blue. It is this snowy mountain, this bluish-white sunlit mountain that shone in the eyes of those who wrote the Bible.

The young and fashionable of this city love black suits. The shops are well supplied; there is plenty of butter, sausages, and meat. And the young women are lovely, though some of them really do have terribly big noses. One thing astonishes me: An old man or woman has only to raise their hand and a bus driver will stop for them; people here are kind and compassionate. Pretty young women walk along the pavement, clicking their thin high heels; dandies in hats lead sheep they have bought for the impending holiday; the sheep click their little hooves on the pavement, and the young women click their fashionable little heels; amid the fine buildings and the neon lights, the sheep smell their death. Some of them try to resist, to dig their little hooves in; afraid of dirtying their clothes, the dandies push the sheep, trying to get them to move; the sheep, full of the anguish of their coming death, lie down on the pavement; the behatted dandies, still afraid of dirtying their clothes, lift them up; the anguished sheep scatter their little black peas. Women with kind faces are carrying chickens and turkeys by their legs; the birds’ heads hang down. These little heads must be swollen and painful, and the birds arch their necks in order, at least slightly, to reduce their sufferings. Their round pupils look at Yerevan without reproach. There too—in the birds’ confused and spinning little heads—a city of pink tufa is coming into being.

Lord and creator, I wander through the streets of Yerevan; I build Yerevan in my soul. Yerevan—this city that Armenians say has existed for two thousand seven hundred years; this city that was invaded by both Mongols and Persians; this city that was visited by Greek merchants and occupied by Paskevich’s army;[
14
] this city that, only three hours earlier, did not exist at all.

But then this creator, this almighty ruler begins to feel anxious; he starts glancing around uneasily.

Whom can I ask? Many of the people around me do not speak Russian—I feel shy, embarrassed to address them. The lord and master is tongue-tied. And so I enter a courtyard. But no—not a chance. This courtyard is nothing like our own deserted Russian yards—it is an Eastern courtyard, an Eastern inner yard, and I am at once scrutinized by dozens of pairs of eyes. I hurry back out onto the street. Very soon, however, I enter another courtyard. My anxiety is growing—I am no longer meditating on how, in the East, the inner yard is the heart and soul of life. But it truly
is
the heart and soul of life—and so, once again, I go back out onto the street. What am I to do?

I rush into a third courtyard—and am filled with despair. I see a network of little staircases and balconies, an old man sipping coffee from a little cup, a group of women who break off their conversation to look at me. I smile confusedly and turn back. Everywhere I look, there is life! What am I to do? There is nothing poetic about my thoughts now. Should I try to find Martirosyan as quickly as possible? But what help would that be? I can’t turn up in his house and, ignoring his attempts to introduce me to his wife and family, ignoring everyone’s questions, make a dash for the toilet. I’ve heard that Armenian intellectuals are fond of gossip. I can’t burst into the apartment of one of the masters of Armenian prose and trample people underfoot as I dash towards the water closet. I’d never be able to live it down—people would be joking about this throughout my stay in Armenia. No, it was out of the question. And so—I jump into a half-empty tram. For three kopeks I acquire a ticket. I sit myself down on the hard seat, and for a while I breathe more freely. No longer am I a lord and creator—I am the slave of a base need. This need controls me; it has power over my thoughts and my soul. It has fettered my proud brain.

The whole world—architecture, the outlines of mountains, plants and trees, people’s customs and habits—everything is now subordinated to a single longing.

I see tall boxlike buildings; I see squares; I see a grocery store, a television shop, a bakery, a building site; I see a bridge, a deep gorge, houses clinging to its stone slopes, quick foaming water far down below. Everything is new to me; I am seeing everything for the first time. But no longer is the creator’s power of thought constructing an entire capital city—old quarters and new quarters at once. The creator’s thought is now obstinately focused on a single goal—yet open to all possible ways of achieving it. How, in a given building, are the toilets arranged? The construction sites are still largely unmechanized and there are crowds of workers everywhere—just what I don’t want. Behind every pile of bricks I’ll find people, people, and still more people. . . . But if I get out by the bridge and stand on top of the cliff, I might get dizzy. My blood pressure feels terribly high. . . . But the torrent at the bottom of the gorge is white with foam. It looks beautiful!

A children’s park. . . . Hopeless! You can see right through it from every side. The trees are mere twigs; they must have only just been planted. Even an infant would feel awkward behind a tree as small as these.

And then smoking chimneys—a factory with an entire settlement around it. . . . Districts like this are densely populated; the little houses are close together and there is a family in every room.

Then there’s a grating of wheels, and the tram makes a sharp turn. The road has come to an end; now there is only wasteland and scree. Nearly all the passengers get out; only two others are left, both unshaven, their faces covered in black stubble. One has a long nose, the other a snub Mongolian nose. And me. The conductress gives me a searching look. She walks down the car to the driver and says a few quick words to him in Armenian. Evidently, she is sharing her suspicions with him. Yes, she glances around at me: What is this strange man after—this strange man in glasses? What is he doing at the terminus, amid a wasteland of clay and scree?

In a moment the driver will walk up to me, and then, out of nowhere, a policeman will appear. What will I say? That I’m from Moscow, that this is my first time in Yerevan? And that, in order to get to know the city, I needed to see these wastelands and scrap heaps? I’ll get flustered, of course. I won’t admit the truth; I won’t say why I’ve made this journey to the city’s outskirts. And it really will all look very strange indeed: A man leaves his things in the left-luggage office, no one turns up to meet him, he wanders about the city for hours, he doesn’t register his arrival at any official institution; he makes no attempt to get a hotel room or even a bed in the House of the Collective Farmer. Instead, he makes his way to some outlying district where there is nothing but pits and scrap heaps. Yes, it’s all very strange indeed, very perplexing. Or rather, it’s all only too obvious.

Then, with my back to the wall, terror-stricken, I will admit the truth. I will admit the base and absurd need that has driven me to the outskirts of the Armenian capital. But no one will believe me—by then I will have told so many lies that the truth will seem like a joke. By then it will be only too obvious that I’m a saboteur—an old wolf of a spy who has finally given himself away. . . .

The tram has reached the end of the line, and no one has stopped me. I dash into some wasteland and find a safe place, out of sight among the ditches and scree. . . .

Happiness. Do I need to describe this feeling? For thousands of years poets have been striving to convey on paper the nature of happiness. . . .

All I will say here is that what I felt was not the proud happiness of a creator, the happiness of a thinker whose omnipotent mind has created its own unique and inimitable reality. It was a quiet happiness that is equally accessible to a sheep, a bull, a human being, or a macaque. Need I have gone all the way to Mount Ararat to experience it?

T
O 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.