The Doves of Ohanavank (33 page)

“If you had two weeks,” says Edik with a smile, “I would have suggested all types of trips. But for two days, I have only one suggestion. You take one day to visit Vardahovit, and the second to finish seeing a few places in Yerevan, like going back to that art gallery and a few other museums.”

“Lara has told me a little bit about your place,” says Ahmed. “Varda…?”

“Vardahovit,” says Edik.

“Vardahovit.” Then he turns to me. “What do you think? Maybe you’d want to seat me on that bench of truth and redemption and ask me a few questions?”

Edik bursts out laughing. “Anyone who knows about that bench is obliged to visit it,” he says. “So it’s done. Why don’t we make a day trip out of it tomorrow? We can leave in the morning and be back here by evening. Then you’ll have a full day for museums and the Genocide Memorial. Manoj,” he says turning to him, “you’re most welcome also. I think you’ve been in the desert too long.”

“Thank you, Mr. Laurian.” Manoj smiles his ‘grateful’ smile.

“If in the Gulf in the beginning was the desert, and in Lebanon the sea, what was here in the beginning?” asks Ahmed.

“The
mountains
, of course!” says Edik triumphantly. “In the beginning were the mountains, and
we
are our mountains.” Ahmed does not understand the significance of the last phrase, but it sounds good to him anyway. I make a mental note to explain to him later that “we are our mountains” is the name of a monument symbolizing Nagorno Karabagh.

“Very well, Edward,” says Ahmed, laughing. “Many thanks for the invitation. Shall we leave around ten?”

“Perfect. Now, may I take Lara home tonight?”

“No you may not,” I jump in. “You’ve had far too much to drink. Besides, I already told Ahmed that I’d be taking a taxi home. See you gentlemen tomorrow at ten.”

“That simply won’t do, young lady.” A slight slur is noticeable in Ahmed’s speech. “Manoj’s driver Armen is outside. He’ll take you home. End of discussion.” And Ahmed smiles benignly at me.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

A
vo has come up with a new idea. He wants to keep honeybees and produce honey for export. How can they mess with that? he asks himself. I don’t have to buy feed for honeybees; I take my beehives to a nice meadow, preferably by a mountainside, and the bees feast on wildflower pollen. Once a year, in the fall, I draw the honey from the frames in the hive. If we find a good export market, he says, Russia or Ukraine, maybe even Iran, then they cannot mess with that either.

Saralandj is a good place for beekeeping. His father kept a few hives a long time ago. But he stopped when Avo was still a small child. Avo does not know why. The old hives are still in the underground storage area—old, worn out wooden boxes, holding around a dozen frames each. He’ll have to get a lot more, he reckons at least a hundred to start with. He’ll also need smokers and extractors. They probably sell second hand ones in
the big market in Yerevan. Eventually, as the business picks up, he’ll need to have a brand, labels and unique looking jars.

Avo calls Lara to tell her about his idea.

“Honey smells better than the pigs,” she laughs. “Avo jan, that is really a great idea. And the work is substantially less. I couldn’t imagine you cleaning those pigpens much longer anyway.”

“Do you remember Papa’s hives?” asks Avo.

“Sure I do. And I remember how good our honey was!”

“Do you know why he stopped keeping bees?”

“I have no idea. We were young. Maybe Martha can remember. But it doesn’t matter. You’re doing the right thing. You see, something good
can
come out of a catastrophe. The pig farm was not meant to be.”

Al Barmaka notices her excitement and looks at her expectantly, but does not ask.

“I just quoted you to my brother,” she says, pleased with herself.

“You did? I can’t imagine about what.”

“That something good can come out of a catastrophic event, but this time, unlike when you said that, it actually is applicable.” She smiles mischievously.

They have already left Yerevan. Laurian has taken Manoj in his car and is leading the way. Lara points to the right of the road to a sign.

“Remind me to tell you about
Khor Virap
. I don’t want to forget.”

“I’ll try,” laughs Al Barmaka. “I’ll remember
Khor
, because it is close to an Arabic word, and you remember the second word, because I’ve forgotten it already. All right? Now tell me why your statement was more applicable than mine.”

“Because it is exactly what I told you before, it is one business venture gone bad, but another and much better idea has now replaced it. Avo would never have thought of the better idea if the first one had not blown up in his face.”

Al Barmaka waits for more information, and Lara starts telling him the story, reluctantly at first, but then she gets into it and describes the entire saga with the pig farm, Avo’s initial enthusiasm at starting something new, how well the farm was doing at the beginning, then the way LeFreak manipulated both the feed market and the pork market, how over fifty small famers were driven out of business almost overnight, and how Avo was devastated, not just financially, but also emotionally. She skips over LeFreak’s bloody fence and Avo’s incarceration.

Al Barmaka is shocked. He understands monopoly power well. His country has a few big monopolists, and he himself is one of them. So that’s not what he finds shocking. Illegally ruining the livelihoods of a large number of poor farmers is entirely alien to him. The monopolists in Dubai and the Emirates can exist without affecting the livelihood of any citizen, because the government has its own vast financial resources and does not collect taxes. To the contrary, it subsidizes virtually everything for the citizen. But here?

“Now you know why last night I asked you to spearhead the shelter,” says Lara. “This, unfortunately, is what this country has come to.”

“We’ll talk about the shelter later. I have some ideas. By the way, did you tell Edik about the money?”

“Yes,” she says sheepishly. “Sorry, but I needed his advice. He’s a good friend. Actually, the shelter was his idea.”

“I’m glad you did, Lara,” he says. “I want to talk about what I have in mind with him and you together. But that’s later. Now, coming back to Avo, one of my companies is in the import-export business. We mostly import consumer electronics, but also some unique foodstuffs. We import only natural, organic and high quality foods. It seems to me your brother’s honey, from bees exposed to nothing other than wildflowers in mountain meadows, is ideal. If he doesn’t mess with the purity of the honey, we will buy all his output.”

“That would be incredible!” says Lara. “But please listen to me on a very important point, you do not have to do this for me.”

“Relax, when it comes to business, I am purely business. I
am
looking for pure, clean, old fashioned, natural, healthy, foods that have no hormones and are not genetically modified. Do you know what one of the ironies of that search is? One cannot find that in advanced economies. They all are so far down the road with their ‘advanced’ agriculture that it is difficult to say what is what. But, excuse me, the more backward countries, and Armenia is definitely backward in that respect, have a huge advantage. Their soil and water and air have not yet been corrupted, even if their politicians can put the most corrupt people elsewhere in the world to shame.”

What does he want
? Thinks Lara. If he helps me with the shelter, and imports Avo’s honey, we won’t just go our separate ways and forget each other. Is that what he wants? To what end?

“So, I’ll import Avo’s honey without hesitation. But let me tell you this: If he deviates even one millimeter from the quality specifications that
we have, we’ll drop him so fast that he won’t know what hit him. Now do you believe that I am not doing this for you? It is just business.”

Lara is impressed. She had never thought of her village as Al Barmaka described it. Clean soil, clean water and air, dirty homes and stables, corrupt politicians. So at least there still is something worth holding on to, something that is pure, in this country.

“I believe you,” she says.

“There is another point, which I have been debating whether I should even bring up. Avo thinks the oligarchs cannot harm his honey business, but the same man who manipulates the import duties can also manipulate export taxes. Do you have export taxes in Armenia?”

Every trace of optimism escapes from Lara’s expression.

“I don’t know,” she whispers, “but even if there aren’t any now, they’ll slap one on right when we start exporting.”

“Stop,” says Al Barmaka. “It won’t matter to us, because we’re willing to pay top prices if the quality is how I described. You tell your brother that. Let him secure purity. That’s worth more than the honey itself.”

They drive in silence for a while, each lost in thought. Al Barmaka seems to be absorbed in the countryside. He stares out of the window, at the agricultural fields and orchards, he sees farmers tilling the land with ploughs pulled by oxen, he sees irrigation systems of a kind that are long gone in Dubai, with hand dug canals manned by farmers, redirecting the water with shovels, a system replaced by automated sprinklers in the Gulf more than thirty years ago. He sees a dark brown, rich soil, instead of the desert sand, and rivers and creeks cascading by the side of the fields. To his right, he sees the ever-present two peaks of Mount Ararat, keeping watch over everything.

They reach Surenavan, a small town along the road where Laurian always stops to buy fruits and vegetables from stalls lined up by the roadside. There isn’t much in early May, but they find some apples and pears kept refrigerated from last year and some fresh vegetables grown in green houses. These roadside stalls would be full of fresh fruit starting in June, when the legendary apricots and cherries ripen, and all the way from July to early November, when every other fruit and vegetable comes into season.

In the spring, Surenavan has another attraction. It is the favorite nesting place of the storks. They are all over, filling the sky with a joyful commotion that conjures homecoming, because they are building their nests.
On top of telephone poles, poplar trees, rooftops of barns. Huge white birds with black and white wings gliding gracefully and descending with new twigs.

“They raise their chicks here, and then migrate in the fall. But they always return home in the spring,” says Lara, pointing to the nests.

They pass Yeraskh, go around an ill-kept circle in the road, and start to climb up the mountain.

“That leads to Nakhijevan,” she says, pointing to the right, “that’s where Edik’s ancestors come from.”

“Really?” asks Al Barmaka surprised, “then why didn’t he settle there?”

“It’s a long story, Ahmed. The bottom line is, that thanks to someone called Joseph Stalin, Nakhijevan is no longer part of Armenia. I’ll let Edik explain that to you later if you’re still interested.”

Al Barmaka looks at Lara, and then at his surroundings, in amazement. This is history in the making, he thinks. Wherever he has travelled through Europe and Asia, he has encountered a lot of history, but everything there is
settled
now. History has somehow slowed down, if not stopped altogether. After hundreds of years of wars, today France is France and England is England and Germany is Germany. But Armenia is not Armenia. Not yet. Nothing is settled here. History has not yet come to a stop. In all his travels, he has not seen anything like this, except of course in the Middle East, but even there, he has not been to the unsettled parts personally.

“You look so handsome when you’re deep in thought,” says Lara, with her mischievous smile.

“
Habibty
.” Al Barmaka makes a superhuman effort to control his urge to reach for her and kiss her passionately. Then he looks away, to the incredible layers of mountains unfolding in front of them, a watercolor symphony of purple, azure, green, and a hundred shades of each of those colors, across mountain after mountain in an unending chain clear to the horizon.

“In the beginning were the mountains,” he says.

“We are our mountains,” says Lara, and tells him about the Monument in Stepanakert, the capital of Nagorno Karabagh.

Carla’s study has turned into a war room. She presides from behind her desk, wearing a black pantsuit and white shirt. Her hair is short, recently cut. She wears no makeup, nor any jewelry. Her feet are not on the desk.

Yuri and two other men sit on the sofa and side chairs facing her. The other men do not look like Yuri. They look like the typical bodyguards kept by oligarchs—big, muscular, with clean-shaven heads. They don’t feel at ease. They sit straight and stiff, unsure where to look and how to behave. One of them, named Ari, works for Carla. He’s one of the two men that she’s assigned to Yuri. He is the bodyguard that accompanied Yuri to Stepanavan to talk with Hov. He has a round face, with dark brown eyes and bushy eyebrows that seem to twitch every time he turns his head. Ari’s here because he has killed before. He is one of Ayvazian’s old soldiers, whom Carla has seen with her father several times. He is also another one of the lovers she’s known in the past seven months, although she has not required his services in the bedroom as regularly as she’s called upon Yuri.