An Armenian Sketchbook (12 page)

We sit down around the tablecloth. The trout shashlyk is good; there are places where the princesses’ charred skin has burst and you can see their royal pink bodies. I drink a lot, more than I am used to. But the cognac only makes me feel heavy. My head does not fill with spirit, with a bright haze. Fire does not run through my body; my fingers and ears are still freezing in the cold wind. My nose is running and, though I can’t see it, I know it has gone purple. I eat and drink and keep worrying that the cold wind is making the women drink too, and that two bottles of cognac won’t be enough for us all. At least Volodya isn’t drinking—after all, he’s our driver and it’s a difficult road. But Martirosyan says something to him in Armenian—and Volodya laughs, nods, and downs a small glass. I drink a great deal, but the cognac has no effect. Sometimes this happens. Sometimes you drink a hundred grams and the world is miraculously transformed; everything—both your inner world and the outer world—becomes as clear as a bell. What is secret becomes manifest; masks fall from faces, and every movement someone makes, every human word, is filled with particular meaning and interest. A bland and boring day is imbued with charm; this charm is everywhere, it excites and delights. And your sense of your own self becomes equally special; you are aware of yourself in a way that is deep and strange. These fortunate hundred grams come your way most often in the morning, before lunch.

And sometimes you drink and drink—and become more and more gloomy, as if you are being filled with splinters of broken glass. You feel weighed down. A kind of lazy stupidity takes over your brain and heart; it binds your hands and feet. This is when drivers and mechanics start knife fights. They are in the grip of a terrible rage that emanates from the gut, from a soul overcome by nausea, from arms and legs gripped by anguish.

At times like this, you drink a great deal. You want to force your way into paradise, to escape from the clutch of this groundless despair, this disgust with your own self, the burning resentment you feel against your nearest and dearest, this crazy anxiety and fear, this terrible sense of foreboding.

And when you eventually grasp that the doors of paradise are closed to you, you drink still more. Now all you want is to stupefy yourself, to sleep, to reach the state that will make the ladies say, “He’s made a beast of himself.”

We make our way back in the sunset. The immense evening silence is something we do not so much hear as see. We see it through the coach’s large windows. It is an ocean, and our small trembling vehicle is moving through an ocean of silence, barely troubling its surface.

When we began to climb the loops of the mountain road, the setting sun suddenly lit up dozens of snowy peaks and the sharp white light of day yielded to an improbable wealth of colors and hues. This was extraordinary, beautiful, truly wonderful—the quiet evening, the deep shadow of the valley, and pine trees that seemed black in the twilight while the mountains’ summits and upper slopes turned blue, purple, copper, pink, and red. Each summit had its own particular light, and they all came together to form a single miracle, a miracle it was impossible to look at without deep emotion. In the presence of this excessive beauty I felt close to panic, even to terror. The snowy summits seemed perfect in their rounded contours, against a pale-blue sky, and their colors—vital and clean, simultaneously tender and bright like African flowers, hot, even though they were born of winter sunlight on cold snow—filled the air with a music that did not infringe upon the deep silence. At moments like this, it seems something improbable is about to happen, some radical transformation of people, a transformation of one’s whole internal world and of everything all around. Strangely and sadly, however, this expectation of a profound change engendered in me not only an unbearably happy excitement but also a very different feeling. I wanted this unbearable picture to fade away at once. I wanted these bright colors to yield to the calm of twilight and its dear, familiar ash: Let everything be as it was. There was no need for intolerable change. Let everything remain as usual. I did not want this liberating, bone-breaking newness that was tearing me apart.

This feeling must have sprung from the darkest and most fated—and perhaps most lifesaving—depths of the human soul. A terror shared by all men and all women.

Soon enough, needless to say, my pathetic desire was realized: The African flowers withered. Twilight set in. When we got back to our village, I asked to stop outside the restaurant. I went up to the bar, waited my turn amid the general hubbub, and said, “One hundred and fifty grams, three-star.”

The Armenian barman did not know Russian, but he did, of course, understand me. After I had drunk my cognac, he looked at me questioningly and I ran a finger across the empty glass, just a little way up from the bottom. Once again the barman understood; he poured me another fifty grams.

On the whole, I had achieved my aim: I was now stupefied. When I got back to my room, I undressed quickly, so as not to fall asleep fully clothed, and lay down straightaway, so as not to fall asleep in the chair. Usually I opened the window at night—our good Ivan always kept the boiler very hot and I slept better if the room was cool. Sometimes, through my sleep, I would hear the soft plashing of the stream beneath my window. But this time I did not open the window. Perhaps because of the lack of air, or perhaps because my heart could no longer cope with so much alcohol, I woke up during the night.

Middle-aged and elderly brothers, all of you who like to drink, you probably know what it’s like to wake up in the night after drinking heavily.

Silence. My heart is beating rapidly, anxiously, but I don’t feel any pain. My breathing is not constrained, but my body is covered in cold sweat. All around me is silent. But the absence of any physical pain, the lack of any clear reason for my waking up, is in itself rather alarming. Something must have happened, but what? I want to jump up, to move about, to turn on the light, to open the window—but I feel scared of making the least movement. I’m frightened of coughing, even of looking at the clock on my bedside table. The close night air is filled with a sense of invisible dread. Any moment now, something terrible is going to happen. To ward it off, I need to move, I need to make a loud noise, but I also fear that the least movement I make—even just lifting a finger or turning my head—may bring this terrible thing closer.

When you wake up like this, after drinking heavily, you are seized by a feeling of terrible loneliness. Whether your wife is asleep beside you and you can hear the sound of her breathing or whether there is no one else in the room, you are alone and helpless.

At this point I realized that I was dying. My chest and shoulders were covered in cold sweat. My heart seemed to be beating separately from me; I was breathing evenly, but it felt as if there were no air in my lungs, as if I were breathing only useless nitrogen. I was overcome by mortal anguish. The horror of dying, of the end of life, grew from second to second. There was a terrible sense of lightness about my body—except that it was no longer my body, my only true home, the home of my “I.” My body seemed to be forsaking me, abandoning me. Hands, feet, lungs, heart—all were leaving me. My “I” was no longer present in them; I could no longer sense my fingers from the inside, as I had felt them all through my life, but only from the outside. The indissoluble union of my “I” with my forehead, with my ears, with my knees and my hairy chest had been ruptured. This was terrible. I was becoming something apart; my body was separating from me. I felt my pulse; I held my palms against my cold, clammy forehead, but there was hardly anything of me, hardly anything of my “I” either in these fingers or in the pulse beating beneath these fingers now denying my “I” refuge. Both the cold palm and the cold forehead beneath this palm contained ever less of me; with every second we were growing farther apart. The ineffable union of me and my body—a union in comparison with which the closeness between husband and wife, or between a mother and a beloved child, is nothing—this ineffable unity was being violated. It was as if a river, single since it had sprung out of the ground, had split in two, forking into separate channels, peeling apart into separate layers.

In the sultry darkness—though already almost forsaken by my body, which was still slipping out from me, still slipping away from me—I went on thinking with a terrible clarity about what was happening. I was dying. And what gave rise to this mortal anguish, to this feeling of death, which is so unlike anything in life, was that my “I” was still present, not obscured in any way; it was continuing quite separately from my body. And yet this rejection of me, of my cold clammy chest, of my pitiful damp fingers meant the end of me. It meant something unprecedented: It meant I was being destroyed, once and for all; it meant my death. I had been in those fingers, in those fingernails, in those armpits, in that snuffly nose. But now—and this was what was so terrible—I was no longer present in my fingers, in my armpits, in my navel. I was present only in some disembodied “I”—along with the ocean, with the Great Bear, with April’s blossoming apple trees, with my love for my mother, with my passionate attachment to those dear to me, with my troubled conscience, with the books I have read, with Beethoven’s music and Vertinsky’s and Leshchenko’s songs,[
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] with all my sense of shame and my bitter resentments, with my pity for animals, with my hatred of fascism, with the elation I felt on first seeing the sea fifty years ago and on looking, only eight hours ago, at snow-covered mountains, with my memories of fights I got into as a child, with all the wrongs I have wittingly and unwittingly done to others.

And this incorporeal world—this incorporeal universe that had been my “I”—this was perishing because my fingers, my skull, and the muscles of my heart were peeling away from me, slipping out from my “I.” A dark, stifling room was the scene of a cosmic catastrophe; an elderly man was dying, far from his loved ones, somewhere near the Turkish border. As he lay dying, he felt still more anguished because he was so alone. None of his loved ones were with him. There was no one in whose despair he might have found consolation, no one in whose soul, in whose tear-stained eyes his incorporeal world might leave some bitter imprint.

So I lay in a sweat, a passenger caught without a ticket, thrown out from a moving train with all my heavy suitcases. So I lay, watching as tens of thousands of suddenly useless, stupid thoughts, feelings, and memories slipped out from my tightly packed cases and baskets and flew off into the eternal darkness of winter.

I was dying, and I was slow to take in that my fingers had once again become my fingers, that I was once again inside them, that my heart was there inside me again and I inside it, that my “I” was back inside my lungs again, and that my lungs were now breathing oxygen. I was no longer outside them. A skull covered by cold clammy skin had once again become my warm dry forehead, the forehead I was used to. My body and I were no longer peeling apart; we had fused back into one, into Vasily Grossman. And it was still quiet and dark. There had been no sound of traffic, no noise at all. I had not changed the position of my body; I had not struck a light. But my anguish, my terror had gone. In the darkness, life had taken the place of death. I wanted to sleep, and I fell asleep.

All this leads me to think that this world of contradictions, of typing errors, of passages that are too long and wordy, of arid deserts, of fools, of camp commandants, of mountain peaks colored by the evening sun is a beautiful world. If the world were not so beautiful, the anguish of a dying man would not be so terrible, so incomparably more terrible than any other experience. This is why I feel such emotion, why I weep or feel overjoyed when I read or look at the works of other people who have brought together through love the truth of the eternal world and the truth of their mortal “I.”

T
HERE
are many old churches, chapels, and monasteries in Armenia. One of the most famous is the Geghard monastery, which is gouged out of a mountainside. This miracle born within stone is the fruit of thirty years of labor; it is the work of a man endowed with colossal talent and also with colossal faith. The man who hewed out this graceful and harmonious church also chiseled out, in classical Armenian, the words “Remember Me in Your Prayers.”

A road planted with flowers has been laid from Yerevan to Echmiadzin, the small town that contains the official residence of Vazgen I, the Catholicos of All Armenians,[
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] and also a fine cathedral, a monastery, and a seminary.

Mankind has been laboring on earth for millennia, creating many objects of spiritual value. These creations often amaze later generations with their elegance, their grandeur, their opulence, their complexity, their boldness, their brilliance, their grace, their intelligence, or their poetry.

But only a few of these creations are perfect—and these perfect creations are not remarkable for their opulence or their grandeur, or even for their extreme elegance. Sometimes perfection appears in the work of a great poet, but not in every line that he wrote. Every line may bear the hallmark of genius, but there are only two or three lines where nothing can be changed or added to, lines about which one can say, “This is truly perfect.” A work of music, or part of a work of music, can also be perfect. A mathematical proof can be perfect—and so can a theory in physics, or an experiment, or an aircraft propeller, a machine part turned on a lathe, the work of a glass blower, or a jar made by a potter.

I think that ancient Armenian churches and chapels also embody perfection. Perfection is always simple, and it is always natural. Perfection is the deepest understanding and fullest expression of what is essential. Perfection is the shortest path to a goal, the simplest proof, the clearest expression. Perfection is always democratic; it is always generally accessible.

I think that a perfect theory will be understood by a schoolchild; that perfect music will mean something not only to people but also to wolves, dolphins, grass snakes, and frogs; that perfect verse can find a place in the heart of a quarrelsome old woman or a supervisor in a strict-regime labor camp.