“THE FALKENSTEIN”

We were heading straight for a black wall.
“Isn’t this beautiful?” asked one of the German passengers who was standing right behind me.
My meager German was enough for me to understand the short question; unwilling to doubt a European’s words, I diligently directed my stare into the black mass, trying to discern some form or a shade of color in it. I was eager to agree that it was “beautiful,” but I felt that I should clarify, for my own sake, what was so special about the blackness. An Armenian’s politeness is always directed towards the stranger; the intent stare of an Armenian—at his inner self. I responded with a semi-nod, leaving myself some room for doubting and even disavowing my opinion, and went back to staring into the blackness. An Armenian’s intentness (if I may ascribe to myself purely Armenian qualities) either has no rhyme and reason to it, or is a product of a logic too deep to be fathomable. My poor brain! How I tortured you! And I keep on torturing you to understand something, or, at this very moment, to see something. But try as I might, I still couldn’t make anything out in that blackness. The growl of the Falkenstein’s engines—for that was the name of the ship—ran through my spine, and, as the bow of the ship sliced through the water, the monotonous, resentful, and dreary splashing of the waves imposed its mood and its will on me.
“Are you on your way to the lake as well? Asked the passenger who was standing right
behind me, with tickling politeness.
“Yes,” I grumbled, and felt compelled to clarify, “to the island.” For, in my desire to explore every corner of the world was leading me to the lake that was fabled for an island of peerless beauty. But if, unlike him, I didn’t see anything in the black mass, then…
“It’s beautiful,” reiterated the same passenger, this time in the affirmative, and I finally turned to look at him. He smiled at me, and I politely smiled back. If people always understood each other and perceived things with such ease and in this fashion, how would we ever arrive at the discovery of truth, the clarification of events, and the perpetuation of life on earth?
At dawn, a small opening split the black mass, and the Falkenstein passed through it.
“We’ll be there in an hour,” the passenger declared, reemerging next to me. I turned my head to him.
“The lake is so beautiful!” he said, this time facing me. Then he added with a smile,
“They say you can’t lie down on its shores.”
Prompted by the same politeness as before, I gave him a look of curiosity. He smiled again,
“They say the earth there is hungry…”
The word “hungry” must’ve had a second meaning in German; this was confusion typical of a person not fluent in a foreign language. Words sometimes took on new meanings when used in conjunction with other words. “Hungry” was the only meaning I got out of the sentence, so I smiled at him again but I didn’t really care about what he was saying.
The island was really a peninsula, but its connection to the mainland was so slight, and the tie to it so tenuous that this piece of land had become self-sustained and demanded complete independence.
The small creaky deck that served for mooring boats was almost completely hidden by the foliage of the trees that leaned over the water; a narrow road ran from it towards the center of the island. At some point, the road forked into smaller paths. One of these paths weaved, with mysterious whisper, through the moisture emanating from the water, and slid along the signposts for the lake.
A few geese emerged from where the lake path began. Magnificent, snow-white, with black circles around their eyes, they sent sparks through the dusk created by the thicket of trees, and the whole place had a mysterious glow. I was about to approach one of them, when it suddenly came at me and pecked me in the hand. I jumped aside, not yet fully grasping what had just happened. I had never been attacked by a goose before. From there, things took an even more bizarre turn: the second goose came charging at me. I got out of its way, walking faster and faster, but it caught up to me and starting furiously pecking me in my hand, my let, my hip… This one was a real predator. I was almost running. I could tell that the geese reveled in my shameful retreat because they stopped their chase. I expected to encounter more of these dangerous birds ahead; a thought flashed through my mind that they were protecting their turf—each its own part of the path.
The lake, better described as a lakelet, was peaceful and quiet, with types of vegetation familiar and unfamiliar to me. The shores were soft, as if covered with velvet. People, resting in the hammocks that swayed between the far-off trees, formed part of the night’s enchantment.
The reality that I discovered here rewarded me for all the difficulties and the unexpected inconveniences I faced: the caress of the air, the transparent surface of the lake that hid the lake itself, its layered subconscious, which lay over the unconscious and the eternal. It seemed that the lake had no bottom and that only its shores prevented it from falling into eternity. And everything existed beyond time and other dimensions.
In this place, I discovered the densest point of the aerial sphere, the simultaneous beginning and end, the unknown into which we plunge like small flashes of time.
Everything was inviting and enticing. My tired legs balked under me, and I sat down on the velvety green grass, then turned over to my side, and finally, my back aching for some rest, I stretched out my whole body out facing the skies. This complete unity of everything was astonishing, and in a strange, unusual way the lake was reflected in the sky. I looked on at the lake in the skies and the skies in the lake, and a sense of tranquility overtook my entire being. Suddenly weightless, my body rose upwards, and I found myself sinking into the lake in the sky, deeper and deeper. The ground split open, yielding to the weight of my body, and I felt myself falling into its bosom. After a while a dark frame encircled the sky, and I realized that I was seeing the edges of the gap into which I had sunk. I had literally fallen through the earth. I recalled the words of the passenger on board the Falkenstein about the earth being “hungry.” It turned out that I had grasped his meaning correctly. The earth was hungry and it desired me. And what was the strangest and most peculiar of all was that I desired it as well….

Kiel, Germany 2000

Translated, from the Armenian, by Margarit T. Ordukhanyan and Anna Avetisyan