An Armenian Sketchbook (3 page)

Listening to these people in Yerevan, I recognized traits that I had already encountered in Russians. Kindness, reason, and nobility are clearly not the only qualities to be found all over the world. Meanness and cunning are no less widespread. They are to be found in the north and the south, among the fair-haired, the dark-haired, among every nation, race, and tribe.

On the evening of November 7, 1961, together with two of my Yerevan acquaintances, I climbed the hill on which stood the statue of Stalin. The sun was going down. We sat in a small restaurant, looking at the pink snows of Mount Ararat. We talked about Stalin. We were eating some very salty and badly cooked fish—which may have made my companions all the more acrimonious.

Darkness fell; cannons began firing a salute in honor of the forty-fourth anniversary of the Revolution. My companions went on talking; again and again I heard the words “Soso”[
3
] and “
mama dzoglu
,” which means “son of a bitch.”

I went up to the statue and saw an astonishing sight. Dozens of cannons formed a half circle around the base of the monument. With each salvo, long tongues of flame lit up the surrounding mountains and the titanic figure of Stalin would emerge from the darkness. Bright incandescent smoke and flame swirled around the bronze feet of the Master. It was as if, for one last time, the Generalissimo were commanding his artillery. Again and again, fire and thunder split open the darkness; hundreds of soldiers were working away. Silence and darkness would return. Once again the command would be given and the terrible bronze god in a greatcoat would step out from the mountain darkness. No, no, it was impossible not to give this figure his due—this instigator of countless inhuman crimes was also the leader, the merciless builder of a great and terrible state.

He could not simply be dismissed as a
mama dzoglu
. “Son of a bitch” was no more appropriate a title than “Father and Friend of the Peoples of the Earth.”

Officials from the Yerevan City Party Committee told me that, at a general meeting of collective farmers in a village in the Ararat valley, in response to a proposal to take down the statue of Stalin, the peasants had said, “The state collected a hundred thousand rubles from us in order to erect this statue. Now the state wants to destroy it. By all means, go ahead and destroy it—but give us back our hundred thousand rubles.” One old man had proposed removing the statue and burying it intact. “Who knows? If some new lot end up in power, the statue may come in handy. Then we won’t need to fork out a second time.”

How tragic this is. The affirmation of the power of the Stalinist state comes in the form of a condemnation, by its own leaders, of Stalin himself. And the spirit of rebellion takes the form of the affirmation of Stalin—one of the most terrible murderers in all human history.[
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]

At seven o’clock in the evening, in the quiet mountain village of Tsakhkadzor, sixty kilometers from Yerevan, there is not a soul to be seen. But Tsakhkadzor has its own madman: seventy-five-year-old Andreas. People say he lost his mind during the genocide[
5
]—members of his own family were murdered in front of his eyes. People say that, when he was young, Andreas served in the tsarist army, under the command of Andranik Pasha—the Armenian partisan leader and officer in the Russian army, worshipped by the Armenian peasantry, who died not long ago in the United States.[
6
] Andreas’s wife—a martyr who lived her whole life with a madman—died only a year ago. While she was alive Andreas had regularly beaten her, but when she died he refused to let her be buried. He kept on embracing her, kissing her, trying to sit his dear dead friend at the table, to give her something to eat. Nobody dared say anything to the old madman who refused to believe that his wife was dead.

Now Andreas lives alone in a small stone house. He has two ewes who feel nothing but trustful love for him, seeing nothing the least strange about his madness, his singing during the night, and his fits of fury and despair.

Whenever anyone mentions Andranik Pasha, Andreas weeps. Probably, no one since Shakespeare’s time could better have played the role of mad old Lear. Of average height, broad-shouldered, and quite stout, probably suffering from edema, wearing a warm, rather ragged peasant jacket, with a sheepskin hat on his head and a large, gnarled staff in his hand, Andreas wanders about the steep little streets of Tsakhkadzor. His gait is sad and magnificent; there is something funereal about it. His head is large and gray, and white curls spill out from under his hat. As for his face, it would make Rembrandt lay down his brush and say, “There’s nothing left for me to do. Nature’s done it all already.” And it’s true—you could capture his face best with a humble camera. Andreas has a leonine forehead, heavy overhanging brows, deep lines around his mouth, a large nose, the jowls of Field Marshal Hindenburg, and bulging yellowy-gray eyes that are at once watery and inflamed. These eyes contain kindness and exhaustion, indomitable rage and terrible anguish, deep thought and crazed fury.

The inhabitants of Tsakhkadzor feel sorry for Andreas. The sly and thrifty Karapet-aga,[
7
] who once lived in Syria and who gave up a tavern in Aleppo for a restaurant-cum-bar in Tsakhkadzor, is always ready to give him something to eat. He speaks respectfully to him, and Andreas, for all his pride and general suspiciousness, is never offended by Karapet’s generosity; he trustingly enjoys his hot
khash
—a monstrously calorific broth made from calves’ feet with garlic. Sometimes Karapet-aga brings Andreas a small glass of brandy. Andreas drinks it, sings a war song about Andranik Pasha, and weeps.

Khachik, the shepherd, grazes Andreas’s two sheep in the mountains without asking for payment. Siranush, a neighbor, sometimes brings around some dung, so she can light the old man’s stove for him and heat his little stone cell.

Once I saw Andreas in a real fury. He was cursing in Armenian, bringing his Armenian curses to an incandescent heat over the dirty flame of ordinary Russian swearwords. Soon afterwards, I found out what had happened. During the night, on instructions from the Party committee, the gilt plaster statue of Stalin had been removed from the village square. Seeing this, Andreas had shaken his staff in the air. He had attacked drivers; he had attacked children; he had attacked Karapet-aga; he had attacked students from Yerevan who had come to the village to ski.

For Andreas, Stalin was the man who had defeated the Germans. And the Germans were the Turks’ allies. It followed that the statue of Stalin had been destroyed by Turkish agents. And the Turks had killed Armenian women and children. The Turks had executed Armenian old men. They had done away with peaceful and entirely innocent people: peasants, workers, and craftsmen. They had killed writers, scholars, and singers. The Turks had killed Andreas’s family; they had destroyed his home and killed his brother. The Turks had killed Armenian merchants and Armenian beggars; they had tried to kill the Armenian nation. The great Russian general Andranik Pasha had fought against the Turks. And the commander in chief of the Russian army that had vanquished the Turks’ mighty allies was Stalin.

Everyone in the village was amused by Andreas’s rage; he had confused two different wars—the First World War and the Second. The crazed old man demanded that the gilt statue of Stalin be returned to the main square—it was, after all, Stalin who had routed the Germans, who had defeated Hitler. Everyone laughed at the old man: He was insane, whereas the people around him were not.

S
URPRISINGLY
, many Armenians have blond hair and gray or blue eyes. I saw fair-haired children in the village. I saw a sweet little four-year-old girl called Ruzana who had pale blue eyes and golden hair. I saw faces with a classic, antique beauty, perfect ovals, with small straight noses and pale-blue almond-shaped eyes. I saw people with high cheekbones, flattened noses, and slightly slanting eyes; I saw people with elongated, sharp faces and huge, sharp, hooked noses; I saw people whose hair was so black as to be almost blue, with eyes like coals; I saw the thin lips of Jesuits and the thick protuberant lips of Africans.

Nevertheless, there is such a thing as a national type.

And it is hard to say which is the more surprising: this diversity or the stubborn persistence of the national type.

The diversity, I suppose, reflects thousands of years of raids and invasions, of people being taken captive, of commercial and cultural encounters. Here we can see all the other people with whom the Armenians came into contact: Assyrians and Babylonians; the ancient Greeks; Persians, Turks, and Slavs; the fearsome Mongols. The Armenians are an ancient nation, with thousands of years of culture and history. They have lived through many wars. They are a traveling nation, a nation that has borne the yoke of the invader for many centuries, a nation that has more than once struggled to win its freedom only to fall back again into slavery. Perhaps this is the reason for all the flattened Mongolian noses, the Assyrian jet-black hair, the pale-blue Greek eyes,[
8
] and coal-black Persian eyes.

Interestingly, all this diversity—fair and dark hair, pale-blue and black eyes, and so on—is particularly evident in the countryside, in villages whose way of life is inward-looking and patriarchal. Here, at least, it cannot be the reflection of any recent events. The mirror that shows us the face of contemporary Armenia has been polished in the depth of time.

The same can be said of Russian faces and—still more—of Jewish faces. There is certainly nothing uniform about Russian faces. There are Russians with gray or light-blue eyes, with snub noses and flaxen hair; there are Russians with hooked noses, so-called “Gypsies,” with southern, black eyes and pitch-black curls; and there are Russians with high cheekbones, flattened noses, and narrow Mongol eyes. And as for the Jews! Black-haired, hook-nosed, snub-nosed, swarthy, blue-eyed, fair-haired. . . . Faces that look Asian, African, Spanish, German, Slav. . . .

The longer a nation’s history, the more wars, invasions, wanderings, and periods of captivity it has seen—the greater the diversity of its faces. Throughout centuries and millennia victors have spent the night in the homes of those they have defeated. This diversity is the story of the crazed hearts of women who passed away long ago, of the wild passions of soldiers intoxicated by victory, of the miraculous tenderness of some foreign Romeo towards some Armenian Juliet.

I
N YEREVAN
, and in towns and villages in the mountains and on the plains, I met people of all kinds. I met scientists, doctors, engineers, builders, artists, journalists, party activists, and old revolutionaries. I saw the foundation, the taproot of a nation that is thousands of years old. I saw plowmen, vintners, and shepherds; I saw masons; I saw murderers, fashionable young “mods,” sportsmen, earnest leftists, and cunning opportunists; I saw helpless fools, army colonels, and Lake Sevan fishermen.

And all of these different people were individuals—overbearing, direct, sly, shy, angry, gentle, practical. . . . I saw old villagers clicking their amber worry beads between brown fingers—nearly a century of hard labor amid basalt stone had not hardened or coarsened these men; there was a gentle smile on their faces, and their eyes shone with intelligence.

I saw warriors, knights, thinkers, swindlers, hucksters, poets, builders, astronomers, and preachers. I saw collective-farm chairmen, physicists, and engineers who built bridges.

But what about our usual caricature of the Armenians? The silly, smutty clichés and jokes that have become so ubiquitous? Yes, of course—Armenians are primitive! They are pederasts and swindlers, funny little people. The jokes are endless: “Karapet, my poor fellow, how come you’re so yellow?” Yes, where would we be without all those “Radio Armenia” jokes? “Tell me, Karapet. . .” Again and again, with a mocking chuckle: “Our professor, he’s an Armenian, you know.” Or: “Just think, she’s gone and married some little Armenian!”

It is upsetting to think that the world’s greatest literature has played its part in reinforcing this stereotype: of the Armenian as huckster, voluptuary, and bribe-taker.

Why has Russian literature been so eager to appeal to the barrack room? Why has it inculcated such mindless, chauvinistic hatred?

Now, after Hitler, it has become more important than ever to look at the question of nationalism—of nationalistic contempt and nationalistic arrogance.

What a distance there is between the caricature Armenians of these jokes and the thousands and thousands of real Armenian peasants, soldiers, scientists, doctors, and engineers—each with their own complexities and idiosyncrasies.

What is it that gathers the diversity of individuals into the unity of a national character?

For individuals, no matter how diverse they may be, all partake of a particular national character. In all these different people there exists some hint of a national character, some coloring with which it has endowed them.

I have spoken to hundreds of people, all with their own interests, passions, sorrows, and hopes, their own destiny, their own friends and enemies. What is there in common between the life and fate, the sorrows and hopes of an elderly shepherd living on the slopes of Mount Aragats, and the life and fate of a young graduate student, yearning for her boyfriend in Moscow, writing a thesis about eighteenth-century French literature and desperately wanting to buy a coat of artificial fur? But just as thousands of streams running through forests, mountain rocks, and desert sands, just as thousands of silent, thoughtful, roaring, foaming, transparent, and turbid streams can spring from the same underground source and contain the same minerals—so all these human characters and fates are united by thousands of years of Armenian history, by the tragedy that befell the Armenians in Turkey, by the longing every Armenian feels for the lands of Kars and Van.[
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]

What constitutes the character of a nation is the character of many individual human beings; every national character is, in essence, simply human nature. All the world’s nations, therefore, have a great deal in common with one another.