Selected Essays

Journey to Armenia

SEVAN

On the island of Sevan, which is conspicuous for two most dignified architectural monuments that date back to the seventh century, as well as for the mud huts of flea-bitten hermits only recently passed away, thickly overgrown with nettles and thistles, but not scarier than the neglected cellars of summer houses, I spent a month enjoying the lake water that stood at a height of four thousand feet above sea level and training myself to the contemplation of the two or three dozen tombs scattered as if they were a flowerbed amidst the monastery’s recently renovated dormitories.

Daily at five o’clock on the dot, the lake, which teems with trout, would boil up as though a huge pinch of soda had been thrown into it. It was what you might fully call a mesmeric seance for a change in the weather, as if a medium had cast a spell on the previously tranquil limewater, producing first a playful little ripple, then a bird flock twittering, and finally a stormy Ladogan frenzy.

It was at such a time impossible to deny oneself the pleasure of measuring off three hundred paces along the narrow beachpath that lay opposite the somber Gunei shore.

Here the Gökcha forms a strait five times broader than the Neva. The superb fresh wind would tear into one’s lungs with a whistle. The velocity of the clouds kept increasing by the minute, and the incunabular surf would hasten to issue a fat, hand-printed Gutenberg Bible in half an hour under the gravely scowling sky.

Not less than 70 percent of the island’s population consisted of children. They would clamber about like wild little beasties over the monks’ graves, bombard some peaceful snag on the lake bottom, whose icy spasms they took for the writhing of a sea serpent, or bring out of their murky tenements the bourgeois toads and the grass snakes with their jewellike feminine heads, or chase back and forth an infuriated ram who could in no way figure out how his poor body stood in anybody’s way and who would keep shaking his tail, grown fat in freedom.

The tall steppe grasses on the lee hump of Sevan Island were so strong, juicy, and self-confident that one felt like carding them out with an iron comb.

The entire island is Homerically strewn with yellowed bones—remnants of the local people’s pious picnics.

Moreover, it is literally paved with the fiery red slabs of nameless graves, some sticking up, others knocked over and crumbling away.

At the very beginning of my stay the news came that some stonemasons digging a pit for the foundation of a lighthouse on the long and melancholy spit of land called Tsamakaberda had come across a cemetery containing burial urns of the ancient Urartian people. I had previously seen a skeleton in the Erevan Museum, crammed into a sitting position in a large clay amphora, with a little hole drilled in its skull for the evil spirit.

Early in the morning I was awakened by the chirring of a motor. The sound kept marking time. A pair of mechanics were warming the tiny heart of an epileptic engine, pouring black oil into it. But the moment it got going, its tongue twister—something that sounded like “Not-to-eat, not-to-drink, not-to-eat, not-to-drink”—would fizzle out and extinguish itself in the water.

Professor Khachaturian, over whose face an eagleskin was stretched, beneath which all the muscles and ligaments stood out, numbered and with their Latin names, was already strolling along the wharf in his long black frock coat, cut in the Ottoman style. Not only an archeologist, but also a teacher by calling, he had spent a great part of his career as director of a secondary school, the Armenian gymnasium in Kars. Invited to the chair of archeology in Soviet Erevan, he carried with him both his devotion to the Indo-European theory and a smoldering hostility to Marr’s Japhetic fabrications, as well as his astonishing ignorance of the Russian language and of Russia, where he had never before been.

Having somehow struck up a conversation in German, we sat down in the launch with Comrade Karinian, former chairman of the Armenian Central Executive Committee.

This proud and full-blooded man, doomed to inactivity, to smoking long cardboard-tipped Russian cigarettes, to such a gloomy waste of time as reading Onguardist¹ literature, evidently found it difficult to give up the habit of his official duties, and Lady Boredom had planted her fat kisses on his ruddy cheeks.

The motor went on muttering, “Not-to-eat, not-to-drink,” as if it were reporting to Comrade Karinian. The little island rapidly dropped away behind us, as its bearlike back with the octagons of the monasteries straightened. A swarm of midges kept pace with the launch, and we sailed along in it as in a veil of muslin across the milky morning lake.

In the excavation, we really did unearth both clay crocks and human bones, but in addition we also found the haft of a knife stamped with the ancient trademark of the Russian N. N. factory.

Nevertheless, I respectfully wrapped up in my handkerchief the porous, calcified little crust of somebody’s skull.

Life on any island—be it Malta, St. Helena, or Madeira—flows past in precious expectation. This has its charm and its inconvenience. In any case, everyone is constantly busy; people drop their voices a bit and are slightly more attentive to each other than on the mainland with its thick-fingered roads and its negative freedom.

The ear lobe is more delicately molded and takes on a new twist.

It was my good fortune that a whole gallery of clever, thoroughbred old men had collected on Sevan: there was the respected regionalist Ivan Iakovlevich Sagatelian, the archeologist Khachaturian whom I have already mentioned, and finally a vivacious chemist named Gambarian.

I preferred their quiet company and the thick black coffee of their talk to the flat conversations of the young people, which revolved, as they do everywhere, around examinations and sports.

The chemist Gambarian speaks Armenian with a Moscow accent. He has voluntarily and merrily Russified himself. He is young in heart and has a dry, sun-baked body. He’s the pleasantest man, physically, and a wonderful partner at games.

He was annointed with a kind of military oil, as though he’d just come back from a military chapel, which proves nothing, however, since this is an air that sometimes clings to quite excellent Soviet people.

With women he is a chivalrous Mazeppa,² flattering Maria with his lips alone; in the company of men, he is the sworn enemy of caustic remarks and vanity; yet, if he is insulted in a quarrel, he will flare up like a Frankish fencer.

The mountain air made him younger; he would roll up his sleeves and fling himself at the little fishnet that served the volleyball court, drily working his small palm.

What is there to say about Sevan’s climate?

“Gold currency of cognac in the secret cupboard of the mountain sun.”

The dacha’s little glass-stick oral thermometer was carefully passed around from hand to hand. Dr. Gertsberg was frankly bored on this island of Armenian mothers. He seemed to me the pale shadow of an Ibsen problem, or some actor from the Moscow Art Theater at his dacha.

The children would show him their narrow little tongues, sticking them out for an instant like chunks of bearmeat . . .

But, toward the end of our stay, we did have a bout of foot-and-mouth disease, brought in via milk cans from the far shore of Zeinal, where some ex-Khlysty,³ who had long since ceased to rejoice, had lapsed into silence in their somber Russian huts.

For the sins of the grown-ups, however, the foot-and-mouth disease struck only the godless children of Sevan.

One after another, the wiry-haired, pugnacious children would droop with a ripe fever onto the arms of the women, onto pillows.

Once, competing with Kh., a youngster from the Komsomol, Gambarian ventured to swim around the whole island of Sevan. His sixty-year-old heart couldn’t make it, and even Kh. was exhausted and had to leave his friend and return to the starting point, where he flung himself half-alive onto the pebble beach. Witnesses to the accident were the volcanic walls of the island fortress, which at the same time precluded any thought of mooring there . . .

What an alarm went up then! There turned out not to be any lifeboat on Sevan, although one had been requisitioned.

People rushed about the island, proud in their awareness of an accident that was irreparable. The unread newspaper rattled like tin in the hands. The island felt nauseated, like a pregnant woman.

We had neither telephone nor pigeon-post to communicate with the shore. The launch had left for Elenovka about two hours before, and, no matter how you strained your ear, not even a chirring could be heard on the water.

When the expedition led by Comrade Karinian, equipped with blanket, cognac bottle, and so on, returned with Gambarian, all stiff with cold but smiling, whom they had managed to pick up on a rock, he was met with applause. That was the most splendid hand-clapping I ever heard in my life: a man was being congratulated on the fact that he was not yet a corpse.

At the fishing wharf in Naraduz, where we were taken for an excursion that fortunately managed to cast off without any choral singing, I was impressed by the hull of a completely finished barge that had been pulled up in its raw state onto the trestle of the wharf. It was a good Trojan horse in size, and its fresh musical proportions resembled the box of a bandore.

There were curly shavings around. The salt was eating into the earth, and the fish scales glimmered like little discs of quartz.

In the cooperative dining room which was just as log-cabin and Mynheer-Peter-the-Great as everything else in Naraduz, we sat side by side to eat the thick artel soup of cabbage and mutton.

The workers noticed that we had no wine with us and, as befits proper hosts, filled our glasses.

I drank a toast in spirit to the health of young Armenia, with its houses of orange stone, to its white-toothed commissars, to its horse sweat and its restless stomp of waiting-lines: and to its mighty language which we are unworthy to speak and of which, in our incompetence, we can only steer clear. “Water” in Armenian is dzhur. “Village” is g’iur.

I shall never forget Arnoldi.

He walked on an orthopedic limb, but in such a manly way that everyone envied him his walk.

The scholarly high command of the island lived along the highway in Molokan⁴ Elenovka, where, in the half-shadow of the scientific Executive Committee, the gendarmelike mugs of formaldehyde-preserved giant trout turned blue.

Ah, these visitors!

An American yacht, swift as a telegram, that cut the water like a lancet, had brought them to Sevan—and Arnoldi would step out onto the shore, that terror of science, that Tamerlane of good spirits.

I had the impression that a blacksmith lived on Sevan who used to make his shoes, and he used to visit the island in order to consult with him.

There is nothing more pleasant and instructive than to immerse yourself in the society of people of an entirely different race, whom you respect, with whom you sympathize, of whom you are, though a stranger, proud. The Armenians’ fullness of life, their rough tenderness, their noble inclination for hard work, their inexplicable aversion to any kind of metaphysics, and their splendid intimacy with the world of real things—all this said to me: you’re awake, don’t be afraid of your own time, don’t be sly.

Wasn’t this because I found myself among people, renowned for their teeming activity, who nevertheless told time not by the railroad station or the office clock, but by the sundial, such as the one I saw among the ruins of Zvartnots in the form of the zodiac or of a rose inscribed in stone?