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 Russia
n 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.
A second day passed, and a third. The new arrival ceased to think of himself as an exotic parrot in this mountain village. Now the people he met were beginning to greet him. And he was greeting them back.
He already knew many people: the young women from the post office; the man at the village shop; the night watchman—a melancholy man with a rifle; two shepherds; the old man who looked after the thousand-year-old walls of the Kecharis monastery. He knew Karapet-aga, the man with gray hair and light-blue eyes who had returned to Armenia from Syria and whom he often saw standing outside the village restaurant; he knew Volodya Golosyan, the handsome and imposing driver; he knew the physical-training instructor, who wore green ski pants and who had the protuberant brow and laughing face of a strong young ram; he knew mad old Andreas; he knew the woman who fed turkeys under a fig tree; he knew the young drivers of three-ton trucks, who tore along the steep little streets like hurricanes. These drivers had the souls of eagles and the fingers of a Paganini.
In the House of Creativity I had got to know the kind, sweet smile of Katya, the thin little cook; I knew how she blushed if someone praised the soup she had made. Katya told me that she had come to Armenia from Zaporozhye[29] and that her husband was a Molokan. Embarrassed, she told me how strange she found it that Molokans drink tea at weddings and don’t touch wine and how very strange the Leapers and Jumpers are.[30] She informed me in a dignified tone that “Our own Tsakhkadzor Molokans don’t leap and jump.” Katya is gentle and kind. Her voice, her movements, her gait are all timid and indecisive. Everything embarrasses her. Her little son, Alyosha, who is in his first year at school, comes in—and Katya blushes and looks down at the floor. And Alyosha blushes too, murmuring something barely audible in reply to my simple “What year are you in at school?” He even looks like his mother. He is pale and has light-blue eyes; he is covered in freckles and his eyebrows and eyelashes are the color of wheat.
“The Armenians are good people,” Katya tells me—and blushes. “Armenians are good to one another, they respect their elders,” she says—and blushes. But then it becomes apparent that Katya thinks that Armenians are no different from anyone else. Some are drunkards; some like to pick fights; there are even thieves; they’re neither better nor worse than us Russians. “But the Armenian peasants work very hard indeed,” Katya adds—and blushes profusely.
I know Rosa, the swarthy housekeeper. She has dark down above her upper lip, and she is always smiling, so that people can admire her dazzling, sugar-white teeth. Rosa wears tall box-calf boots, does not know a word of Russian, and keeps herself constantly busy with unproductive work. She always carries an accounts book in which she notes down what her creative workers ate yesterday and what they will be eating tomorrow.
I know Ivan, the boiler man. He is a tall man with blond hair, pale eyes, and a pale mustache; his face looks cruel. He is young and strong, sometimes rude, sometimes sullen. His face is large and round, pink and white, and for some reason this makes him look particularly unpleasant. He stomps about in tall heavy boots. And he talks just as he moves; his every word is like a boot—slow, heavy, and exact. Ivan is a Molokan. Because he is fair-haired and has pale eyes, white teeth, and pink cheeks, and because he is a Molokan, I imagine him drinking only milk and eating only white millet porridge. But Ivan does not keep to the laws of his ancestors; he smokes and he drinks vodka. After a drink, he becomes loquacious; he tells me how he goes up into the mountains and hunts goats and lynx. Once he killed a leopard. . . . His stories lack the iron of authenticity, but he is not so much a liar as a Romantic—a realist for dreamers, a charming fibber among realists. He likes me because I am bad at billiards.
Nearly everyone is competitive, but Ivan is insanely so. Every time he loses a game of billiards to Martirosyan, he truly suffers. Anyone else would just be a bit cross, but Ivan is in torment. “Do you want to play?” he says to me—and in his eyes I see a bloodthirsty gleam, a thirst for sheep’s blood.
I have got to know Astra, the cleaner, and Arutyun, the old night watchman, Astra’s father-in-law.
Astra is a beauty. I think of Chekhov’s “The Beauties”: “After leaving the inn, they were silent for a long time. Then the coachman looked round and said to Chekhov, ‘Hasn’t the little Armenian got a beautiful daughter!’ ”
Astra is so beautiful that I have no wish to describe her beauty. I will say only that her beauty is the expression of her soul. Her beauty lives in her quiet walk, in her shy movements, in her always lowered eyelids, in her barely perceptible smile, in the soft outline of her girlish shoulders, in the chastity of her poor, almost beggarly clothing, in her thoughtful gray eyes. She is a white water lily in a pond shadowed by the branches of trees, born amid still, contemplative water.
This white blossom is the expression of the water of the forest, an expression of the half dark of the forest, of the vague outlines of plants lying deep in the water, of the way silent white clouds slide over this water, of the reflection in it of the crescent moon and the stars. And all this—streams, backwaters, forest ponds and lakes, rushes and sedges, sunrises and sunsets, rustling leaves and reeds, the sound of air bubbling up to the surface, the strange lonely sighs from the silt—all this finds its expression in the white water lily.
And in the same way, the world of modest female beauty finds its expression in Astra. As for what may lie hidden in the depths of these waters, no one can say unless he breaks the water’s smooth surface, walks barefoot through the cutting sedge, and treads the silty, sucking mud—now cold, now strangely warm. But I only stand on the shore, admiring the lily from a distance.
I imagined that no one was aware of my quiet, modest admiration of Astra—I was, after all, known for my silent melancholy: I was an austere ascetic, doubly so in the presence of Astra.
One day, however, my dear co-translator burst out laughing like Taras Bulba and said, “And as for our dear Astra, Vasily Semyonovich really does like her a great deal. He could eat her for breakfast.”
I shrugged and pulled a face.
> Really, if Astra’s husband is anything like his father, Arutyun, the mournful, dismal, round-shouldered night watchman with the big nose. . . . But what on earth has all this got to do with me?
Arutyun is sad. Sometimes his face and eyes take on a look of piercing melancholy. Sometimes I walk silently past him in the hour before dawn, the hour when every night watchman in the world is asleep—and there he is, looking at me out of the darkness, his eyes full of a vast, still yearning.
I think he never sleeps—some huge sadness prevents him. He never speaks to anyone; no one visits him. Sometimes I see him on the street. He runs into some jolly old Armenian granddad and I think, “Now Arutyun’s going to smile. He’ll stop, he’ll light a cigarette and have a chat about sheep, about bees, about wine.” But no—Arutyun shuffles on in his heavy tarpaulin boots, sunk in his vast yearning. What’s the matter with him?
It is hard to imagine that it is only a few days since I, a stranger from Moscow, first arrived in this little mountain village, whose existence I had not even suspected.
“Barev!” say the people I meet.
And I take my hat off as I reply, “Barev dzez!” (Good to you too!) All around me are people I know.
Time passes, and soon I know a great deal more about Ivan, about Katya, about Astra, and about old Arutyun. I have learned much that is sweet and touching—and perhaps still more that is cruel and painful.
Katya’s husband is paralyzed; he cannot move his legs and has been bedridden for several years. Quiet Katya, yearning for her distant homeland, for her parents and friends, goes on caring for him, saving every kopek she can in order to give him little treats: an apple, say, or candy. And she says to me proudly, “Our own Tsakhkadzor Molokans do not leap and jump.”