An Armenian Sketchbook (6 page)

The only person I ever, in fact, conversed with was the old woman whose job was to sit in my corridor in the hotel. She evidently thought well of me: a man who worked from morning till night, who never staggered drunkenly down the corridor, who didn’t sing in a hoarse voice at two o’clock in the morning, accompanying himself on a squeeze-box, and who didn’t bring young women back to his room. Forgetting my poverty, my various illnesses, and my age, the naïve old woman evidently ascribed my behavior entirely to my high moral standards.

Another source of comfort was Martirosyan’s response when I asked him about Osip Mandelstam’s visit to Armenia. I knew some sweet and touching details about Mandelstam’s time in Armenia and I had read his Armenian cycle of poems. I remembered his words about “an Armenian Christianity of beasts and fables.”

But Martirosyan did not remember Mandelstam. At my request, he phoned several poets from the older generation—none of them knew that Mandelstam had ever been in Armenia. Nor had they read his Armenian poems. Martirosyan told me that he remembered a thin man with a large nose who seemed to be very poor. There had been two evenings when Martirosyan had given him something to eat and drink. And this man with the big nose had read some poems—yes, it must have been Mandelstam. . . .

The impression made on Martirosyan by the lady from the Literary Fund had been infinitely more vivid. I was beginning to get the picture.

Mandelstam’s poems are splendid. They are the very essence of poetry: the music of words. Perhaps even a little too much so. Sometimes I think that the poetry of the twentieth century, for all its brilliance, has less of the universal humanity and passion that imbues the great poetry of the nineteenth century. As if poetry had moved from a bakery to a jeweler’s shop and great bakers had been replaced by great jewelers. This may be why the work of some fine contemporary poets is so complicated—as if this is the only way they can distinguish their creations from the platinum meter bar kept in Sèvres, which is now the measure of all things and all souls.

But there is an enchanting music in Mandelstam’s poems, and some are among the finest poems written in Russian since the death of Blok. Although, to be honest, Blok is not one of my idols either—he too never baked the holy rye bread that is the only true measure of all things and all souls. In his verse too there is much that has been fashioned not by the miracle-working hands of a baker but by the subtle talent of a jeweler. Nevertheless, some of his poems, some of his individual lines, stand up against anything written since the deaths of Pushkin and Lermontov. And although Mandelstam was unable to shoulder the entire great burden of the Russian poetic tradition, he is still a genuine and wonderful poet. There is an abyss between him and those who only pretend to write poetry.

And my acquaintances in Yerevan did not remember Mandelstam’s visit to Armenia. Yes, I was beginning to get the picture.

After a while all this ceased to preoccupy me and I began to think about other things. In many of the city’s museums I saw portraits of Decembrists who had been reduced to the ranks and sent to serve in Yerevan.[
18
] I read that it was they who put on the very first production of
Woe from Wit
,[
19
] playing both the male and the female roles. The local intelligentsia had felt proud that this premiere took place not in Moscow or Petersburg but in Yerevan. I read an unforgettable account of Nalbandian’s year of misery and illness in Kamyshin, a dusty little dump of a town in the Volga basin.[
20
] I read how Tumanyan was imprisoned in Petersburg and Korolenko was at the prison gates to greet him on his release.[
21
] Among other people still remembered in Yerevan are Davit Guramishvili, the Georgian exile who lived in Mirgorod in the Ukraine; Skovoroda, the Ukrainian wandering philosopher; and a certain Ukrainian soldier exiled to the sands beside the Caspian Sea.[
22
]

The verses written by a disgraced lieutenant of the Tengin Regiment[
23
] and the verses of a disgraced court councillor from Petersburg[
24
] live on in the minds of schoolchildren, students, and peasants up in the mountains. They do not fade with historical catastrophes or the passage of time.

And in Siberian forests and the tundra of Yakutia the work begun by revolutionary students and such exiles as Korolenko, Vladimir Bogoraz,[
25
] and Pyotr Kropotkin[
26
] still lives on. Their poems and stories, their fairy tales about universal human concerns still hold sway in schools and institutes, in dwellings high in the Caucasus, in Russian peasant huts and Siberian yurts. Here we have Russification at its most free, at its kindest and most indestructible—the process of Russification carried out by Pushkin, Dobrolyubov, Herzen, Nekrasov, Tolstoy, and Korolenko.[
27
]

But just think how many governors and generals, how many full privy councillors, dignitaries of state-sponsored science and state-honored literature—just think how many such figures have disappeared forever from the memory of the Caucasus.

True brotherhood and true lasting ties between people and nations are born not in offices, not in governors’ palaces, but in peasant huts, during journeys into exile, in camps and soldiers’ barracks. These are the links that last. It is the words written beneath dim oil lamps, the words read by people lying on bed boards in prison cells or sitting in peasant huts or smoky little rooms, that create the binding ties of unity, love, and mutual national respect.

These are the hidden arteries through which eternal blood goes on flowing even though life’s noisy surface remains entirely sterile. Like soap bubbles, this official life fills people who are nothing but soap bubbles themselves. The bubbles whisper, pop—and disappear without trace.

While the ties laid down by stonemasons, carpenters, tinsmiths, coopers, and old peasant women remain forever.

There it is—a pot of Russian borshch, now standing on a table in an Armenian home. And there, serious and silent, a group of bearded Molokan peasants[
28
] are eating a garlicky dish of Armenian
khash
.

In this respect, people’s receptivity and their conservatism are equally striking. There are, after all, thousands of customs, thousands of ways of doing things which, even after centuries of proximity, make no impression on the life of a neighboring people. A Russian peasant and an Armenian peasant bake bread in different ovens, and their bread is different. The Russian obstinately refuses to eat the flat Armenian
lavash
baked in a tandoor oven, and the Armenian is indifferent to the leavened rye bread baked in a Russian stove. And yet these two peoples have enriched each other’s lives through countless other customs, utensils, and ways of working.

One of Paskevich’s soldiers, after marching all over Armenia in his heavy boots, brought back with him new ways of laying bricks and cutting stone, borrowed from Armenian masons. This act of “Armenianization” was effected without rifles or cannon. A few men simply laughed and clapped one another on the back. One winked; another said, “Yes, very smart!” They had a smoke—and that was that.

And there are the links established in Soviet times: between Russian and Armenian factory workers and engineers; between Russian and Armenian students; between Russian and Armenian scientists working in libraries and laboratories; between Russian and Armenian agronomists, vintners, astronomers, and physicists.

When I first went out for a walk around the mountain village of Tsakhkadzor, I was a foreigner. Passersby stared at me. Women by the water pump, old men sitting under a stone wall and clicking their worry beads, chauffeurs (our twentieth-century cavaliers) laughing and shouting outside the restaurant—everyone fell silent as I, dragging my feet and embarrassed at being the focus of so much attention, made my way between the little one-story stone houses. I went by; everyone exchanged knowing looks.

I saw curtains twitching in the windows: A new Russian visitor had appeared in the village.

After this, I was thoroughly studied and analyzed. Everything known to the clerks in the House of Creativity quickly became public knowledge: I’d handed in my passport to be registered; I’d refused to eat
khash
; I didn’t speak Armenian; I was married, with two children; and I was from Moscow. I was a translator and I had come to translate a book by Martirosyan. The translator was not young, but he drank cognac, played billiards atrociously, and wrote a lot of letters. The translator often went out for walks, and he was interested in the old church on the edge of the village; he sometimes called out in Russian to Armenian cats and dogs. He’d gone into a village house where an old woman was baking
lavash
in a tandoor. The translator knew no Armenian and the old woman didn’t know a word of Russian. The translator had laughed and gestured to her: He wanted to know how
lavash
is baked. And the old woman had also laughed when the smoke from the dried dung that fueled her tandoor had made the foreigner weep.

Then the old woman brought out a little bench. The foreigner sat down—the silky column of smoke now hung safely over his head. The Muscovite admired the way the old woman flattened the dough in the air, not against a board but up in the air. She threw sheets of dough into the air and caught them in her outstretched hands, her fingers spread apart. The force of its own weight gradually made the dough thinner and thinner, turning it into a large fine sheet. The Muscovite admired the old woman’s flowing movements, which were both careful and confident; they seemed like a beautiful ancient dance. And the dance truly was very old, as old as the first baked
lavash
. And the shaggy seventy-year-old woman in her torn quilted jacket sensed the admiration of the gray-haired, bespectacled Muscovite. This pleased her, and it made her feel both merry and melancholy. Then her daughter and son-in-law arrived; the son-in-law’s face was covered with blue stubble. And then her granddaughter turned up; she was wearing pink stretchy trousers and dragging a little sledge behind her. Everyone laughed; then the old woman shouted imperiously in Armenian. The translator was brought a small plate of dry, greenish cheese. The cheese looked moldy, but it was very tasty—sharp and fragrant. The translator was given a hot
lavash
, taught how to wrap it around the cheese, and then brought a mug of milk.

And when the translator left, his eyes red from the smoke, the dog, instead of barking as it had done on his arrival, gently wagged its tail—evidently the translator too now gave off some familiar bitter smell. As for the old woman’s family, they all stood by the little stone wall to wave goodbye: the thin, black-haired daughter; the thin, unshaven son-in-law; and the little granddaughter with the coal-black eyes.

Then the Muscovite went to the post office and tried to send off some airmail letters, but they turned out not to have the right envelopes—though it took some time to establish this, since the black-eyed young women at the post office did not speak any Russian. This led to everyone shouting, laughing, and waving their arms about.

The following day the translator set off along a mountain path and came to a cemetery where an old man was digging a grave. The translator shook his head. The old man made a despairing gesture, threw away a half-finished cigarette, and returned to his digging. And then the translator went past a water pump and offered to help a woman carry a bucket of water back home. But the woman was overcome with shyness. She looked down at the ground and set off with the bucket, leaving the translator standing there helpless.

And then the translator stood for a long time by some masons who were building a pink tufa wall around a school yard. The masons were cutting and dressing the stone and fitting the blocks together; women in quilted cotton trousers, with scarves wound around their heads and faces, were preparing the clay mortar. When fragments of pink stone landed on the passerby, the women’s eyes gleamed with laughter from beneath their scarves.

And then the translator conversed with a mule and a sheep who were walking along the pavement towards their mountain pasture. He had noticed that people and dogs, for some reason, walked in the road, while the pavements were used mainly by sheep, calves, cows, and horses. At first the mule listened fairly attentively to the translator’s Russian words, but then it laid back its ears, turned away from him, and tried to kick him with a back hoof. Its kind, sweet little face with its wonderful broad nostrils was suddenly transformed. Now the mule looked vicious, curling its upper lip and baring its huge teeth. And the ewe, which the translator had wanted to stroke, pressed up against the mule, asking for help and protection. This was ineffably touching; the ewe sensed instinctively that the human hand stretched out towards her was a bearer of death—and so there she was, trying to get away from death, asking a four-legged mule to protect her from the hand that had created steel and thermonuclear weapons.

And then the new arrival went to the village shop and bought a piece of baby soap, some toothpaste, and a small packet of purgative. Then the translator made his way back home, thinking about the ewe.

The ewe had bright eyes, rather like glass grapes. There was something human about her—something Jewish, Armenian, mysterious, indifferent, unintelligent. Shepherds have been looking at sheep for thousands of years. And sheep, for their part, have been looking at shepherds. And so shepherds and sheep have become similar. A sheep’s eyes look at a human being in a particular way; they are glassy and alienated. The eyes of a horse, a cat, or a dog look at people quite differently.

The inhabitants of a Jewish ghetto would probably have looked at their Gestapo jailers with the same alienated disgust if the ghetto had existed for millennia, if day after day for five thousand years the Gestapo had been taking old women and children away to be destroyed in gas chambers.

Oh God, how desperately mankind needs to atone, to beg for forgiveness. How long mankind needs to beg the sheep for forgiveness, to beg sheep not to go on looking at them with that glassy gaze. What meek and proud contempt that gaze contains. What godlike superiority—the superiority of an innocent herbivore over a murderer who writes books and creates computing machines! The translator repented before the ewe, knowing he would be eating her meat the following day.