Revelation

38 Byurakan

In the summer the big thistles burned brown and there was a lot of fruit to be picked. Flies were everywhere.

Down in the Yerevan hollow, in the summer, it was stifling, and Mount Ararat had always disappeared into the blue by mid-morning. But summer weekends were good. Weekends were when Grandpa had expected his son Yerev, his lazy wife Asia, and their boy Piotr, to come and help with the orchard and the sheep. Early on Saturdays, they would pile into the Skoda and head for the mountains, where the air was cool and you could still see the white-topped cone of the biblical mountain.

But the routine had been upset following Grandpa's strange death. Yerev had gone off by himself more than once, on business, he said. He had rented out the orchard to another shepherd. The sheep had been sold off. I'm a teacher, Yerev had explained to a distraught Piotr. It's just not possible to be a schoolteacher in the city and a shepherd in the hills, both at once. Asia had expressed her satisfaction and thought maybe weekends could now be spent replastering the ceiling which had collapsed during the last earthquake.

Then, one Sunday night in July, Yerev had come home, wearily climbed the seven flights of their noisy high-rise and declared that he had found a buyer for Grandpa's house. Asia had gone out and returned with a bottle of good cognac. Fourteen-year-old Piotr, conscious that the final link with his grandfather was being broken, had wept quietly that night in his bed. While Asia snored at his side, Yerev had listened to his son in the dark, but had been too weary to comfort him.

Things were a little brighter in the morning. A colleague from school turned up with a truck borrowed from his road-sweeper brother, Asia filled bottles with wine and water, and plastic bags with fruit, grated carrots, beetroot and folded sheets of the Armenian bread lavash, along with vodka and home-made beer, and they set off for the hills before the sun was too high.

Within half an hour the truck had transported them up out of the polluted air, and they were moving along a steep climbing road which would take them to the Roman temple and the fluted basalt columns of Garni. The road was all but deserted. After another half-hour they reached a bumpy track which ended at a single-storey house after about fifty yards. The house was on the ridge of a hill overlooking dry, parched countryside. Down below, Piotr could see a man and a boy carrying long scythes over their shoulders; in fact, the boy's scythe was taller than the boy.

It took no more than half an hour to load the back of the truck with Grandpa's possessions. While Yerev's friend was securing the load with string, and Asia was preparing sticks of shashlyk for grilling over a charcoal fire, Yerev and Piotr went in for a last look round. Piotr pointed to a small trapdoor in the kitchen ceiling, and Yerev heaved his son up to the tiny roof space.

At first it was dark, but as his eyes adapted to the gloom, the boy became aware of a little metal box. He crawled along a beam. The box had a lid held shut by a loose clasp, and it opened easily. Piotr gasped. Glass marbles! And steel ones! To think that they had nearly missed this! He would be the envy of his friends.

The box was heavy and the boy had to raise himself into a half-crouching position in order to slide it towards the open trapdoor. As his back pushed against the rafters he heard a rustling noise, and a sheet of paper, which had been wedged between rafter and tiles, slid into view. Curious, he put his hand in the space and groped blindly. Feeling a bundle of papers, he pulled them out carefully so as not to tear them; they were old and brittle. Then he lowered the box of marbles to his father, handed down the papers, and let himself back down, brushing dust from his clothes and hands.

Piotr ran outside with the box to show his mother the wonderful collection of marbles. Yerev locked his father's door for the last time, and blinking in the sunlight, sat down at the picnic table and flicked through the papers.

'What have you got, Yerev?' his wife asked.

'It's very strange. Viktor, what do you make of it?'

Yerev's friend looked through the lined pages, torn from a jotter. The writing was in an uneducated hand, someone to whom forming letters was an unfamiliar business.

'Your father's writing?'

'Yes, without doubt.'

'But —'

'Quite, Viktor. Father could barely read and write.'

'But these are equations! And I can hardly understand the text!' This was an understatement: Viktor couldn't understand the text at all. And there were engineering drawings, accompanied by a text in Russian.

'Here are some words.' He flicked through the text and said, 'Electron. Positron. Lithium. Deuterium. Vacuum. Foucault's Pendulum, what's that? And Casimir pinch? And here are people's names. Gamow. Teller. Ah ah! Oppenheimer! Fuchs! I think I have heard these names.'

Viktor screwed up his face. 'Some of them. American scientists.'

'Oh-oh! Oh-oh!' Yerev jumped up from the table and walked up and down excitedly, flicking the pages. He turned to the astonished group. 'And here is something about hydrogen bombs.'

Asia squealed. Her eyes opened in fright. 'Burn that stuff. It's trouble.'

'Papa must have copied this from somewhere, but why?'

'His brother? Lev?'

'Of course,' Yerev said. 'Maybe Lev gave him papers for safe-keeping, and he copied them.'

'Forgive me, Yerev, but did Lev not spy for us?'

'For the Soviets, you mean. Maybe. So that visiting American said. But who knows the truth about these things?'

'Burn the papers, Yerev.' Asia tapped the charcoal grill with a skewer. 'They're trouble.'

Yerev thought about it, contemplated the glowing charcoal, looked at the papers in his hand. Then he said, 'No. They're good news. This stuff might be worth a few drams. We'll take them straight to the Byurakan Observatory. There are people there who know about things like this.' He turned to Piotr, beaming. 'Who knows, we might even get a new Skoda out of it.'

Asia sighed. 'Always dreaming.'