A TRANSLUCENT DAY

“There’s a phone call for you.”

“Thank you.”

One hand in my pocket, tall, handsome, clean, I pick up the receiver; my “Hellooow” is drawn out with a French arrogance. And I am quite content with myself – here I am, yesterday’s peasant, having escaped the danger of becoming a goat-herder, of being pummeled by hail, and of developing arthritis; I have a secure job, I’m significant enough to be given my own phone line, my friends are important people, and that, too, makes me all the more important.

“Hello.”

“Remember how you wanted to see Ani*?”

“I wanted a lot of things.”

“Come, let’s go, just you, me, Minas, his sister-in-law, and a couple of architects.”

It’s hot; the snowcap on Masis is disappearing; the grapes rustle as the sweet juice fattens them up; we have some cognac, fifty grams or so; the sister-in-law ties a light nylon handkerchief around her head and sprays on some sunblock; her smoky glasses are foreign-made and very chic; time to get some coffee.

“So this García Lorka is like the Spanish version of our Isahakyan.**”

“Yes, our poets are truly splendid.”

“Why are you laughing?”

“Because I feel like it.”

“Why don’t you tell us, so we can laugh with you.”

“I’d rather not.”

Why shouldn’t I be laughing! I am not pushing a cart, my goat hasn’t broken its leg on some far-off path, I haven’t been chided by my supervisor, and, instead of admiring from afar the distant word “architect,” here I am conversing with real architects, with Minas the painter, whose works are mostly very good, although I don’t get some of them, and as I talk to Minas the painter, the world, with the best of its culture, weaves itself into our language. There’s a Cezanne, a Manet, and I think there’s also a Monet; I was born to say “plow” and instead I utter Cezanne, instead of discussing tanning methods, I casually inquire, “Who were those Czech people in your studio yesterday?” The howling of the wolves and the terror it inspires in dogs and the herders alike in faraway camps has become a distant dream, joints aching in anticipation of rain have become as real as lyrical poetry or the medieval locust plagues for today’s peasant. A caring hand has lifted me from the middle of the field and gently placed me in an office armchair in the middle of the city. And I am so elated over no longer being a hay-maker that sometimes I say critical things about hay-makers. And about goat-herders. And our leaders. And sometimes—about Mao Tze Dun. “This bridge connects one bank of the river to the other, said Mao, and had these words engraved in golden letters on the side of the bridge.” I, a herder and a herder’s son, talk of the Chinese deity with a sarcastic grin. I, a peasant and a peasant’s son, have completely grasped the composition of asphalt and insist that it cannot have potholes. Mine is this Volga,* speeding at over sixty miles per hour, this nylon headdress, this floral-printed thermos and the coffee it contains, the pregnant languor of the orchards we pass, the villages, the picturesque Aragats, the ancient road-side tavern, the cloud-shaped herds of sheep sprawled over the hills on either side of the road, and the cool breeze infused with a scent of flowers. Mine is this limitless sea of grassland and the city of Giumri. And the captain of the border guards, a Rostov native, with his deferential readiness to take us all the way to the border gates. Mine is this feeling that my country begins in the Masis mountains and stretches all the way to Chukotka.

Somehow, I can no longer tell Shirak from Kuban, the way a Russian can’t taste the difference between grapes grown in Crimea and the Ararat valley.

And here I am, happy and powerful, standing with my equally happy and powerful friends on an observation deck, peering through the binoculars at the waves that roll through the limitless sea of unspoiled greenery. I’ve seen better and more impressive vistas in the movies. And Yerevan is worth than seven Anis, and I am the gate-keeper of Yerevan.

“Why are you crying?”

There used to be Turkish settlements in our mountains. The Turks would come from their yellow valleys, get ripe and sun-baked in our mountains, and then they would load their belongings and tents on their goats and ho-hey-ho!—back they went to their yellow valleys.

Now, my older uncle and I have gone to buy butter from them; I hear foreign speech for the first time in my life and it petrifies me. Theirs are energetic, swearing, backstabbing and smiling devils of kids, with strangely unthinking eyes. I saw them in my dreams again twenty years later. I dreamt that we were at the Karno fortress, among its clay fortifications and those children were there; even at thirty, in my dreams, I found them frightening.

I remember there was one boy among them, who was sitting on the ground with his arms wrapped around his knees, and staring with his large, vacant eyes—I wasn’t sure if he was looking at us or out into space. A woman called him; he jumped up and I thought he’d gone off, but then the woman called him again—I guess he hadn’t moved after all. The woman walked over to him, her skirts moving with each stride, to give him a thrashing; he quickly jumped up and even pretended to be taking off, but after a couple of steps he stopped – either too lazy to run or simply forgetting what he was doing.

My uncle, a bolding man with triangular eyes and a prominent nose, was haggling; no, their price did not suit him. As if offended by their pettiness, he’d pull back, pretending he was leaving; to show that his mind was made up, he would turn to me and say, “Get up, let’s go, my boy,” and he’d wink at me. He had bragged to my family in the village and to me on the way there, “You’ll see how I am going to cheat those Turks,” and now he was putting on a show to prove to me and to himself that he almost had them in his pocket. And then, just as the Turks were about to meet my uncle’s price, he suddenly lost interest in haggling or just plain forgot his plan to cheat them, and paid them their original price. Not only did they sell it to him for their price, but they also mixed sheep’s lard into it—for which his daughters-in-law yelled at him later when he got home—but it no longer concerned him, because his mind was suddenly preoccupied with something else. He, too, had taken notice of the boy who was sitting with his arms wrapped around his knees, and was closely watching him. He let go of the scales, forgot his business and called out,

“Come here, Armenian boy.”

With his ear turned to the evening sounds of the encampment, the child sat there, immobile and unresponsive, staring off into the dusk of the gorges with his wide-open and slightly slanted eyes.

“Isn’t he Armenian?” my uncle asked, confused.

“He is, he is,” the Turks said. “You mind your butter, so that you don’t accuse us of cheating you later.”

“Aha,” my uncle called out triumphantly, “I will tell my kind from a thousand people.”

The boy had picked up his switch and was busy striking the bull with it. He kept hitting the bull across its chin, its eyes, its horns, but the bull barely felt anything. If the bull had taken a step forward, it would have squashed the little boy, but he kept standing there, under the bull’s chin and dealing it one blow after another, angrily, unevenly; all the while looking as if he regretted every second of it. The bull turned around to run away, and other children and their dogs chased after it; the boy sat down again, hugged his knees and stared off into the gorges, by now filled with darkness.

“I’ll recognize my kind in a thousand,” murmured my uncle again, as if that recognition had a special significance.

“I’ll find it in a thousand,” he said, as he was arranging me in the saddle, along with all his purchases.

In those olden days, a man lived in his native Zangezur, well known by everyone around. He was involved in the uprisings and the military actions, fought in winning and losing battles, thrust himself into politics, but in the end couldn’t make heads or tails of the events that were taking place in the region. So one day he packed up, crossed the Arax river to Iran, made his way down to Tabriz, and set up his business there, and the tranquility of life made him sleepy, and the singed smell of gunpowder gradually faded from his nose, the way the memory of a scorching or a freezing day fades into the recesses of the mind. Here I have my gate, and my house, and my pillow, and here are my wife and children, he thought.

“Does Armenia still exist, is it still in the same place?”

And exist it did, it simply had to because his son was now infirm with homesickness. Dear Lord, Dear Lord… so much pain and so much illness in the world, and here my boy is infirm with homesickness. The doctor said that it’s an infirmity that usually afflicts animals, not humans; a Persian tiger, he said, wouldn’t survive in Germany, and so on. And the doctor prescribed some medication but said it was all useless, and that the only thing that could cure the child would be returning to his homeland.

“Where was he born?” inquired the doctor.

“Zangezur or somewhere around there, in Ghapan.”

“Where is that?” asked the doctor.

“It’s on the other side of Arax, beyond there, towards Russia.”

“I don’t know,” said the doctor. “If you care anything for your child, you’ll take him back there, and if you don’t, no amount of medication is going to cure him.”

Dear Lord, Dear Lord…. These kinds of things used to occur only in the hashish-inspired tales of ancient Persia, ten thousand years ago; they happened once again in 1927 in Tabriz, in the family of Gerasim Atajanyan.

So Gerasim Atajanyan, in his past a member of the anticommunist resistance, strapped on his gun, took his son, crossed the Arax back to Armenia in the middle of the night, and went up into the mountains.

The morning dawned, and the sun rang over the blue cliffs and the yellow mountains. Smoke was rising from the chimneys of Artsvanik’s hut over here, and from Geranush’s over here, and David Bek’s, and Tsav’s. A blue mist, like a fog from the faraway mountains, climbed up the gorges; and a golden dust gathered around the peaks and the mountaintops. And Gerasim realized that his son was not the only one afflicted with homesickness.

The morning dawned, and the communist police unit lined up at the door of the Goris revolutionary committee headquarters, and marched to arrest Gerasim the border-crosser.

“Gianjunts Simon,” called out Gerasim, who lay in hiding in the recesses of the gorge, “Gianjunts Simon, show some mercy, have a heart, my child is ill.”

“Atajanants Gerasim,” yelled back the red police commander, “did you really think you’d get away with running off to Tabriz? Come out at once and turn yourself in!”

“Gianjunts Simon, go about your business if you want to keep your blood running in your veins.”

It might have been Gerasim’s reputation of a sharp shooter, the presence of his child, his good hideout, or the commander’s realization that the mountains belonged to Gerasim as much as to anyone else, but the red brigade turned back without Atajanyan, walked over the mountain slopes idly chatting with each other, went down to Goris and reported that nobody had crossed any borders. And the border-crosser roamed the valleys of his childhood, and, when he got thirsty, he drank water from the cold springs, as he said to his son,

“See, this here is the Cold Spring, that one is the Blind spring, remember, that’s the Arjut gorge, this is the oak tree. It’s not made of gold, and there’s plenty of oak in the world, but this one is a special tree; it was here when our grandfather was here, and now it stands by our side. Even if you make it to Egypt or America from Tabriz, this will always be your tree, and it will follow you wherever you go. When you fall ill and they ask you what you want, you have to say I want that tree that lived side by side with my grandfathers.”

And as Gerasim looked around, he saw his grandfather, the axe tucked under his belt, walking uphill on a path, with his mutt following closely on his heels. Gerasim knew the dog, it was the two hundred twentieth of his family’s seven hundred dogs, who carried in his blood the instincts and the acumen of his wise forefathers, and would some day pass them on to the next generation.

And Gerasim looked on and saw himself as a red-cheeked baby, as an adolescent with sweat on his upper lip, where the mustache was to grow some day, as a young man with his brow raised high, walking through to the gorge to the cold springs. And as he listened, the voices of himself at different ages echoed back from the mountain slopes. He was surrounded by a sea of red poppies, and meadows that were greener than green, and the larks were singing in chorus, enhanced and multiplied by the poppies, larks and meadows he had seen throughout his entire life spent in those mountains.

Gerasim Atajanyan lingered there with his son from that summer until the end of autumn, and then for two more full summers through late autumns, when the cool breeze from the mountains was replaced with a cold wind and the tents in encampments became empty, and smoke no longer rose from the chimneys, and the solitary mountains turned a deep autumnal green, and then, constantly looking back, he descended back to Tabriz. His son was cured, and Gerasim was the ailing one now. He ached for his mountains that remained on the other side of Arax, the same side where his past also rested.

When the writer Anton Chekhov got bored with his Moscow, he traveled over his Volga to his Ural Mountains, and from there to Western Siberia. On he went to Eastern Siberia, his Irkutsk, his Iakutia, his Far East, and then crossed over his Amur River to his Sakhalin. He made a full circle through Russia, and returned to his Moscow with his completed travelogue Sakhalin in his hands.

When writer Derenik Demirchyan* got bored with his Yerevan, he decided to travel to his Sakhalin, and it took him only two hours: he passed through the mountain of Sevan, descended to the Dilijan canyon, traveled along the gorge, and, at the spot where the canyon opened into a valley, Demirchyan remarked,

“Here is where Vardan held a brief battle.”

And he greeted the Azeri farmer he encountered on the border with “Nə var, nə yox, a kirvə, yaşayışın necədir, işlərin necədir …*”

Then he turned his car around and headed towards the other side of the land of Armenia, and that other border was a four-hour drive away. “Nə var, nə yox, a kirvə.” Four hours is what it takes a bad student to get four failing grades, a good student—four A’s, the rocket—to approach the moon, for the sea waves to crash upon themselves. In four hours, the blue basalt block perched at the entrance of Matenadaran will turn a few more shades of color, but alas, four hours will never make a travelogue. Six hours after the beginning of his odyssey, Derenik Demirchyan returned home to Yerevan. He summarized,

“We trod all of the land of Armenia. We covered the Gugark region of Armenia, the Kotaik region, the Chaghkot region, the Great Ararat region, the Siunik region, the Sisakan region, and the Shirak region.”

Had Napoleon’s march gone off successfully—after all, Russia wasn’t his final goal, he would have gone through the Caucasus to India, toppling on his way the Ottoman Empire and creating an Armenian kingdom. And he would have said to his army’s Armenian General, Joshim Murat, otherwise known as Hovakim Muradyan,

“Here, Murat, you can have your lost homeland back.” But Napoleon’s plans went awry at Borodino, because of a common cold, as some researchers would have us believe.

Oh, the naïve, beloved, weak, credulous ones….

We should examine closely the annals of history; we are bound to find some Armenian pundit of political history who has lied to our faces to appease a fellow historian somewhere else (say, in England), and in the process has himself childishly fallen for the legend of Napoleon’s common cold.

We were still barbarians back when the Greeks had already mastered the great secret of how to form armies out of people and spears with the same ease with which fingers fold into a fist. The Greeks, say their chroniclers, were eager to civilize us as well—for such is the fate of the strong nations, to forever bear the cross of their good intentions—and so the Greek army came and trampled through the entire country of Armenia, making its way from the West to the Armenian East, then from the East to the North and from the North to the South, and finally broke camp in the blue valleys of Mush. The victory came as effortlessly as in a military exercise; there was no army to stand up to the Greek military and no fortress to withstand the force of their catapults. And our pottery had never seen the inside of a kiln, and our copper was still separate from the bronze, because our potters were busy kneading clay for the good of the Great Persian Empire, and our blacksmiths were busy welding swords for it.

One night, in the field of Mush, at the Greek military camp, the guards captured a barbarian, who, with a bronze blade in his hand, was slithering in the dark to attack the great commander. What was he after, they wondered. He didn’t speak a word of Greek. Didn’t even know how to crawl properly. Didn’t know how to wield a knife. When they fell to beating him, he yelped—he didn’t even know how to bellow. And one wouldn’t describe him as particularly courageous; as they were slaughtering him, he rolled around on the ground and shrieked, says the Greek chronicler.

This misunderstood, weak, unequal barbarian emerged from the fog of two thousand five hundred years, and I recognized myself in him. And I embraced as my own his legacy of powerlessness, the softness of the blade, and the feebleness of the arm.

“Ever been to Crimea?”

“No, never.”

“Too bad, you should go. Picture this: the sea—but not the way we imagine the Pontic Sea, a watery abyss with endlessly raging waves, lost ships and loud prayers to the God of the seas. Now it isn’t even so much a sea as a basin of warm water and a continuous sensation of the healing powers of the salty seawater, which is very good for arthritis. Then, there is fine yellow sand and ten, twenty, fifty thousand bodies sprawled on it. A truck with a piano perched the sand, and a piano player strumming some upbeat melody on the keyboard as old actresses, accountants, and doctors exercise to the music. Girls and boys with firm bodies watch them from behind dark shades; they eat ice-cream as they talk to each other in Russian, Kazakh, Moldovan, and, here and there, in German. They eat, speak of love, joke, and count their money, and all around them are our old, measly, rugged, lost oleaster bushes. The old Armenians had brought them with them ages ago. The Armenians are no longer there but the oleasters remain. And they look very plain and are not particularly fragrant.”

And I embraced as my own those oleasters that timidly perfume the Crimean air.

And I embraced as my own our god, Mesrob Mashtots,* who said, “let there be light,” and there was light.

And that chronicler who spent forty, one hundred forty, one thousand forty years hiding out in a cave the path to which grew over with centuries of grass, so that he could record what did and didn’t transpire in this small valley.

And that insane inhabitant of Mush, who in that black summer of 1915 abandoned his wife, his child, and his daily bread, and carried the front doors of the Resurrection Temple on foot all the way to Edzmiatsin.

And Komitas,* the black-cassocked Armenian sun.

And Tumanyan,** who aged a hundred years in a single year.

And that poor dreamer who, in faraway Europe, molded a cannon with an insane hope of firing it from the hilltops of Siunik.

And those hundreds of boys, who, armed with books and gunpowder, went to spread the red flag over our shrinking blue land and who were mowed down like homeless dogs on the border from the front and from the rear.

And the terrible love stories that sprung up in 1915, the requiems people sang, the bread they ate, the seed they spread, the children they bore, and the songs they wove.

And here is the most astonishing part of all: the valleys turned green again, the fields and the shades still flirted with each other, the poppies reddened again, and laughter rang over our pastures. And the Master sat in his throne and contemplated the question of this terrifyingly cruel and irresistibly beautiful land, from time to time uttering words that were as precious as diamonds because in fifty years they had absorbed a thousand years of sunshine and rainfall.

“Why are you sad, and why are you happy?”

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* Ani, the capital city of the Armenian Kingdom in 961-1064, currently on the territory of Turkey.

** Avetik Isahakyan (1875-1957), celebrated Armenian poet, author of multiple collections of lyric poetry and the long epic poem Abu-Lala Mahari, among others.

* Here, a Russian-made model of an automobile, not the Volga River.

* Derenik Demirchian (1877-1956), Armenian writer, most notably author of the historical novel Vardanank.

* Polite Azeri greeting, usually used when addressing unfamiliar people.

* Mesrob Mashtots (360?-440), the creator of the contemporary Armenian alphabet, which he completed between 404-406, subsequently translating the Bible into Armenian. He was beautified into the ranks of a saint by the Armenian Church.

* Komitas Vardapet, born Soghomon Soghomonyan (1869-1935), Armenian composer and musician, credited with preserving and recording scores of Armenian folk music and composing the liturgy now used by Armenian Church.

** Hovhannes Tumanyan (1867-1923), Armenian poet and prose-writer..