Selected Essays

ASHTARAK¹⁷

I managed to observe the clouds performing their devotions to Ararat.

It was the descending-ascending motion of cream poured into a glass of ruddy tea, dispersing in all directions like curly-puffed tubers.

And yet the sky in the land of Ararat gives little pleasure to the Lord of Sabaoth; it was invented by a titmouse in the spirit of most ancient atheism.

Coachman’s Mountain,¹⁸ glittering with snow, a small field, sown as if for some mocking purpose with stone teeth, the numbered barracks of construction sites and a tin can jammed with passengers—there you have the outskirts of Erevan.

And suddenly—a violin, divided up into gardens and houses, broken up into a system of terraced shelves, with crossbars, interceptors, dowels, and bridges.

The village of Ashtarak hung on the purling of the water as on a wire frame. The little stone baskets that were its gardens would make the finest gift for a coloratura at a charity performance.

A place to spend the night was found in a large four-bedroom house that had belonged to some dispossessed kulaks. The collective farm administration had scattered its furniture and set it up as the village guesthouse. On a terrace that might have given refuge to all the seed of Abraham a milky washstand was grieving.

The orchard was a dancing class for trees. The schoolgirl shyness of the apple trees, the vermilion competence of the cherries . . . Look at their quadrilles, their ritornelli and rondeaux.

I was listening to the purling of the kolkhoz accounts. In the mountains a drenching rain slanted through, and the abysses of the street gutters ran more swiftly than usual.

The water rang and welled up on all the floor-levels and terraced shelves of Ashtarak—permitting the camel to pass through the eye of the needle.

I have received your eighteen-page letter, completely covered in a hand straight and tall as an avenue of poplars, and to it I answer:

First sensual encounter with the material of an old Armenian church.

The eye searches for a form, an idea, expects it; but stumbles instead on the moldy bread of nature or on a stone pie.

The teeth of your vision crumble and break when you look for the first time at Armenian churches.

The Armenian language cannot be worn out; its boots are stone. Well, certainly, the thick-walled word, the layers of air in the semivowels. But is that all there is to its charm? No! Where does its traction come from? How to explain it? Make sense of it?

I felt the joy of pronouncing sounds forbidden to Russian lips, secret sounds, outcast, and perhaps, on some deep level, shameful.

There was some fine water boiling in a pewter teapot and suddenly a pinch of marvelous black tea was thrown into it.

That’s how I felt about the Armenian language.

I have cultivated in myself a sixth sense, an “Ararat” sense: the sense of attraction to a mountain.

Now, no matter where I might be carried, it is already speculative and will abide with me.

The little church in Ashtarak is of the most ordinary kind and, for Armenia, submissive. It is a little church in a six-sided headdress with a rope ornament along the cornices of the roof and the same sort of stringy eyebrows over the meager mouths of its chinklike windows.

The door is quieter than water, lower than grass. I stood on tiptoe and glanced inside: but there was a cupola in there, a cupola!

A real one! Like the one in St. Peter’s in Rome, above the thronged thousands, the palms, the sea of candles, and the Pope’s sedan chair.

There the recessed spheres of the apses sing like seashells. There we have the four bakers: north, west, south, and east, who, their eyes plucked out, knock into the funnel-shaped niches, rummage about the hearths and the spaces between the hearths and find no place for themselves.

Whose idea was it to imprison space inside this wretched cellar, this beggars’ dungeon—in order to render it there a homage worthy of the psalmist?

When the miller can’t sleep, he goes out bareheaded to inspect his millstones. Sometimes I wake up at night and check on the conjugations in Marr’s grammar.

The teacher Ashot is immured in his flat-walled house like the unfortunate character in Victor Hugo’s novel.

Having tapped his finger on the case of his sea-captain’s barometer, he would go out into the courtyard that led to the reservoir and plot the precipitation curve on a chart of graph paper.

He worked a small-scale orchard of a tenth of a hectare, a tiny garden baked into the stone-grape pie of Ashtarak, and had been excluded from the kolkhoz as an extra mouth to feed.

In a hollow space in his bureau he kept a university degree, a high-school diploma, and a wishy-washy packet of water-color sketches, innocent hallmark of his character and talent.

In him was the hum of the past imperfect.

Hard worker in a black shirt, theatrically open at the neck, with a heavy fire in his eyes, he retired into the perspective of historical painting, in the direction of the Scottish martyrs, the Stuarts.

A story has yet to be written about the tragedy of semieducation. I think the biography of the village teacher might well become the coffee-table book of our day, as Werther once was.

Ashtarak, a rich, snugly nested settlement, is older than many European cities. It was celebrated for its harvest festivals and for the songs of the Ashugs. People who grow up close to vineyards are fond of women, sociable, skeptical, and tend to be touchy and idle. The people of Ashtarak are no exception.

Three apples fell from heaven: the first for the one who told the tale, the second for the one who listened, and the third for the one who understood. That is the way most Armenian fairy tales end. Many of them were written down in Ashtarak. This region is the folkloric granary of Armenia.