An Armenian Sketchbook (9 page)

The young poet was delighted, overawed, to meet Martirosyan. I was introduced. The two of them continued talking in Armenian, which I did not understand. But I did understand that they were saying something good and important. Martirosyan and I sat down at a little table by the window, had a quick look at the lake, and then turned towards the kitchen door through which the young poet now disappeared.

Martirosyan summarized the poet’s words: They had a fresh trout in the kitchen. It had been caught that morning. They were going to boil it for us, in water from the lake. This would lend the fish a particular taste. We would be drinking cognac and Jermuk mineral water.

It grew quiet. The blue lake was silent outside the window, and we were alone in the empty room. The waiter from behind the serving table came up noiselessly and placed on the table a carafe of some yellowy-green liquid that looked like a young wine. Martirosyan explained that this was a special kind of wine vinegar, very soft and delicate. Then the noiseless waiter brought plates of salted peppers, eggplant, and fresh herbs. Then a bottle of cognac, which he uncorked. He opened a bottle of Jermuk, poured us each a glass of iced water, said a few quiet words in Armenian, and walked noiselessly away. We remained silent; we could hear the popping of the swift bubbles of gas in our now-clouded glasses.

We each sipped our water, tasted the fiery herbs and the still more fiery peppers, then gulped down more icy water. Everything was quiet. The waiter approached again. He inspected first the table and then us; he could, I felt, have been the organizer of a bullfight inspecting his bulls before releasing them into the arena. With the help of a napkin, he wiped a few nonexistent crumbs off the fresh white tablecloth and went back behind his serving table. We remained silent.

The kitchen door was noisily flung open. A short, very stout woman in a white gown appeared; she had black eyes and a pink face. Then came the sound of laughing voices—both men’s and women’s; there was a sense of restrained excitement. Then the young poet returned. Head thrown back, he held a large white dish high in the air; it was giving off clouds of steam.

Just as someone describing a wedding breaks off as the young couple enters the bedroom, so now will I—as the dish with the trout is placed on our table and Martirosyan pours out two glasses of cognac.

My meeting with Lake Sevan was a nonmeeting. I had no wings to fly; I was grounded by the trout.

A
FTER
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.

T
HE ROAD
to Dilijan is very beautiful.

We drove along the shore of Lake Sevan. We passed the Minutka restaurant, but I did not even give it a glance. Our coach began to climb uphill.

How mighty, how terrible, and how kind is the power of habit! People can get used to anything—the sea, the southern stars, love, a bunk in a prison, the barbed wire of the camps.

What an abyss lies between the first night of passion and a long, grinding argument about how best to bring up the children! How little there is in common between a first wonderful encounter with the sea and trudging along the shore in the stifling midday heat to buy something from the souvenir kiosk! How terrible the despair of a man who has just lost his freedom! And then there he is, lying on his bunk and yawning as he wonders what will be in today’s prison gruel: pearl barley or pickled cabbage? What creates this abyss is the power of habit. Dull as it seems, it is as powerful as dynamite; it can destroy anything. Passion, hatred, grief, pain—habit can destroy them all.

Nothing can withstand it. I am, now, accustomed to Sevan trout; I am even bored with it.

We drive through a village. There are boys standing in the middle of the road. They are showing us some trout, holding them up in the air.

“Let’s buy a trout. We can make trout shashlyks!” says Martirosyan. Trout shashlyks would, of course, be a novelty. The steamroller of habit has not yet rolled over them.

“All right—why not? Volodya, stop!”

The young vendors thrust bundles of fish at us. The bodies of the dead princesses are still beautiful, but their eyes are blind and their mouths half open, twisted by the grimace of death.

“How much?” I ask.

“Twenty-five old rubles a kilo,” say the ladies, translating the boys’ reply.

My question is hypothetical. I am a guest and I do not have the right to pay the bill in a restaurant, to pay for a glass of fizzy water, to pay for apples in the market or even for a bus ticket, a newspaper, or a postage stamp. At first this embarrassed me; it upset and irritated me. But the power of habit is infinite, and I have already grown used to being unable to spend even a few kopeks, let alone an entire ruble. Now and again, however, my serenity abandons me. Have I been too quick to adopt this strange new habit? Have I even begun to enjoy it?

Surely, this isn’t how I was taught to behave!

About thirty collective-farm workers are sitting by a stone wall. It is a weekday and still only morning, but there is no sign that they are constructing communism—most of them are clicking their worry beads.

Since the war, Armenian villages have begun to look different; the dark, cramped, smoke-blackened ancient hovels, part dug into the ground, part faced with large stones, are disappearing. Every year there are fewer of these thousand-year-old dwellings—and in many Armenian villages there are none left at all. After staying unchanged for millennia, these dwellings have gone.

First we inspect the new, bright collective-farm houses, and then the old smoky, stony burrows with bread ovens dug out of the earth; there is no doubt that the new, bright houses are better. We start to make our way back to the car.

The men gather around Martirosyan; they are talking animatedly. Then Martirosyan speaks. Armenian peasants are astonishingly good listeners. They look as deep in thought as if they were listening to one of the apostles.

Martirosyan approaches the car; he too now looks animated. He tells us that nearly everyone there had read his novel; they had become so deeply involved, grown so close to the main characters that they wanted the author to change their fates. They wanted him to return one leg to someone who had lost both legs in an accident. They also wanted him to bring several dead people back to life. They addressed him as if he were a god, the almighty master of the world where the people he has created live out their lives. He is the master of their lives and fates. What a sense of exaltation! It must be a great joy to see your own creations become a part of the lives of the people you love. And people are kind: Martirosyan never gets asked to tear away a man’s only remaining leg. No one ever asks Martirosyan to remove a general’s Order of Suvorov and replace it by a Distinction in Combat medal or a badge saying “An Excellent Cook.” Nor does anyone insist that a front-line soldier should fly into a furious rage on receiving an unctuous and hypocritical letter from his old mother. No one asks God to take it out on a responsible worker, who during icy blizzards and the dusty heat of summer, under the light of the moon and the light of the sun, never opens his mouth except to utter wise truths.

Yes, people are generous. What they ask for from God is indulgence and compassion.

Earthly gods—members of the Writers’ Union, the Artists’ Union, the Composers’ Union—create a world in their own image and likeness.

Here we have Hemingway’s world. And here—Gleb Uspensky’s.[
34
] It goes without saying that these worlds are different. Hemingway describes people who adore bullfights and hunting for big game; he writes about Spanish dynamiters in the Civil War and fishermen off the coast of Cuba. Uspensky, on the other hand, describes drunken craftsmen in Tula, junior policemen, provincial bourgeoisie, and peasant women.

But these two very different worlds are not created in the image of a Russian peasant woman or a handsome and dangerous toreador. These worlds are created in the image and likeness of Uspensky and Hemingway. And even if Hemingway were to populate his world with Russian policemen and drunken Tula locksmiths, it would still be the same world, Hemingway’s world. And everything there—the damp aspen trees, the muddy country roads, the dust, the puddles, the little houses, the gray sky of a Russian autumn—everything in this world would still be Hemingway’s. And in Gleb Ivanovich Uspensky’s painfully dismal world everything would remain painfully dismal—even the blue Spanish sky and the wonderfully handsome bullfighter eating young eels in garlic sauce and sipping Spanish wine.