An Armenian Sketchbook, Page 2

  Grossman’s own title for this memoir, Dobro vam, is a strange but effective phrase. The literal meaning, as I have said, is “Good to you.” This is not a Russian idiom but a literal, unidiomatic translation of a standard Armenian greeting, Barev dzez. The phrase works better in Russian than in English, because the Russian dobro is clearly a noun, whereas the English “good” could be either a noun or an adjective. For this and other reasons, it seemed best to give this English translation a different and more explanatory title. Grossman’s own title, however, was clearly important to him, and in the last lines of this memoir he returns to the Armenian greeting that inspired it: Barev dzez—“All good to you, Armenians and non-Armenians!” Since Grossman put such emphasis here on the word “good,” since the nature of true goodness is one of his central themes, and since, at least in retrospect, his memoir has the air of a farewell gift or blessing, it seems appropriate to end this introduction with a moving quotation from an article by Lev Slavin, a Russian writer who visited Armenia eight years after Grossman:

  In Tsakhkadzor I went to the house where Vasily Semyonovich had stayed and worked eight years before. A white two-story building like many other houses of recreation built in the 1930s. This was the small House of Creativity of the Armenian Writers’ Union. Outside on the veranda was a battered billiard table, the one Grossman had played on. The rooms were closed. Everything bore an imprint of neglect and sorrow. I looked attentively at everything round about, trying to look through Grossman’s eyes. Yes, I tried for a moment to adopt his slightly surprised, slightly amused gaze. A good-natured gaze. It was this good nature, probably, that came hardest to me. There had, apparently, been an old man who kept talking to Grossman in Armenian. When someone told him that Grossman did not understand, he got angry and said, “No, it’s impossible that a man with such good and kind eyes doesn’t understand Armenian.”[17]

  —YURY BIT-YUNAN

  and ROBERT CHANDLER

  September 2012

  AN ARMENIAN SKETCHBOOK

  1

  I FIRST glimpsed Armenia from the train, early in the morning: greenish-gray rock—not mountains or crags but scree, flat deposits of stone, fields of stone. A mountain had died, its skeleton had been scattered over the ground. Time had aged the mountain; time had killed the mountain—and here lay the mountain’s bones.

  To one side of the railway stretched endless barbed wire, several lines deep. It took me a while to realize that we were following the Turkish border. I saw a little white house, and beside it, a little donkey—not one of our own donkeys but a Turkish donkey. There were no people anywhere. The Turkish soldiers must have all been asleep.

  Armenian village houses are low, flat-roofed rectangles built out of large slabs of gray stone. There is no greenery; the houses are surrounded not by trees and flowers but by dense scatterings of gray stone. The houses seem not to have been built by human hands. Sometimes a gray stone comes to life and begins to move. A sheep. The sheep too must have been born from stone; probably they eat powdered stone and drink the dust of stone. There is no grass anywhere, no water, nothing but flat, stony steppe—nothing but large, jagged gray, greenish, or black stones.

  The peasants are wearing the uniform of all Soviet working folk: thick wadded jackets, gray or black. The men are like the stones they live among; their faces are dark both from a natural swarthiness and from being unshaven. Many are wearing long white woolen socks, pulled up over their trousers. The women wear gray scarves wound around their heads, covering their mouths and their foreheads down to their eyes. Even these scarves are the color of stone.

  Then I see a couple of women in bright-red dresses, in red blouses, red waistcoats, red sashes, and red head scarves. Every part of their dress is a different red, crying out piercingly in its own red voice. These are Kurds—wives to men who have been breeding cattle for thousands of years. Perhaps this is their red mutiny against gray centuries amid gray stone.

  A young man in the compartment with me keeps comparing the heavenly fertility of Georgia with the stones of Armenia. He is full of criticisms—if the conversation turns to the seven-kilometer railway tunnel built straight through the basalt, he says, “That was built back in the reign of Nicholas II.” He tells me about opportunities for buying dollars or imperial gold coins; he tells me the black-market exchange rate. It seems he really envies more serious wheeler-dealers.

  Later the young man tells me about a craftsman who fashions metal wreaths adorned with metal leaves. Apparently even the most modest of Yerevan funerals is attended by two or three hundred people—and there are usually almost as many wreaths as people; this creator of funeral wreaths has become rich. The young man treats me to a pomegranate. He bought it in Moscow. But the journey from Moscow to Yerevan is a long and huge country in its own right. When we boarded the train at the Kursk station, my fellow traveler was clean-shaven; by the time we reached Yerevan his face was covered with black beard.

  2

  ON A HILL above Yerevan stands a statue of Stalin. No matter where you are in the city, you can clearly see the titanic bronze marshal. If a cosmonaut from a far-off planet were to see this bronze giant towering over the capital of Armenia, he would understand at once that it is a monument to a great and terrible ruler.

  Stalin wears a long bronze greatcoat, and he has a forage cap on his head. One of his bronze hands is tucked beneath the lapel of his greatcoat. He strides along, and his stride is slow, smooth, and weighty. It is the stride of a master, a ruler of the world; he is in no hurry. Two very different forces come together in him, and this is strange and troubling. He is the expression of a power so vast that it can belong only to God; and he is also the expression of a coarse, earthly power, the power of a soldier or government official.

  This magnificent god in a greatcoat is, of course, the work of Merkurov.[1]

  It may be his best work. It may even be the finest monument of our time. It is a monument to our epoch—a monument to the epoch of Stalin. Stalin’s head seems to touch the clouds. The statue itself is seventeen meters high; together with the building on whose roof it stands, it is seventy-eight meters. When the monument was being assembled and parts of the vast bronze body were still lying on the ground, workers could walk through Stalin’s hollow leg without bowing their heads.

  This monument towers over Yerevan and the whole of Armenia. It towers over Russia, over the Ukraine, over the Black and the Caspian seas, over the Arctic Ocean, over the forests of eastern Siberia, over the sands of Kazakhstan. Stalin and the state are one and the same.

  This monument was erected in 1951. Scientists, poets, distinguished shepherds, vanguard workers, students, schoolchildren, and Old Bolsheviks all gathered at the foot of the bronze giant. The orators, naturally, gave speeches about the greatest, wisest, most brilliant, most dearly loved of all great, wise, brilliant, and dearly loved fathers and teachers. Every head bowed before the master, the leader, the builder of the Soviet state. Stalin’s state was the expression of Stalin’s character. And Stalin’s character was the expression of the state he had built.

  I arrived in Yerevan at the time of the Twenty-second Party Congress,[2] when the city’s most beautiful street, a broad straight street lined on either side with plane trees and lit by a central row of streetlamps, was renamed; I arrived when it was decided that Stalin Prospect should become Lenin Prospect.

  My Armenian companions, one of whom had been among the distinguished figures entrusted many years before with the task of unveiling the statue of Stalin, seemed very uneasy when I praised the titanic monument.

  Some expressed themselves elegantly: “Let the metal used to construct this monument return to its noble primordial condition.”

  Others abused Stalin—not so much for the terrible crimes and mass killings of 1937 as for being a nobody. They called him an ignoramus, a boaster, an upstart.

  My attempts to say a word about Stalin’s role in the creation of the Soviet state were in vain. My companions would not co
ncede that he had played even the slightest role in the construction of heavy industry, in the conduct of the war, in the creation of the Soviet state apparatus: Everything had been achieved regardless of him, in spite of him. Their lack of objectivity was so glaring that I felt an involuntary urge to stand up for Stalin. This absolute lack of objectivity might be said to resemble nothing so much as the lack of objectivity these same people had shown during Stalin’s life, when they had been so supremely worshipful of his mind and strength of will, of his foresight and genius. Their hysterical worship of Stalin and their total and unconditional rejection of him sprang from the same soil.

  Listening to these people in Yerevan, I recognized traits that I had already encountered in Russians. Kindness, reason, and nobility are clearly not the only qualities to be found all over the world. Meanness and cunning are no less widespread. They are to be found in the north and the south, among the fair-haired, the dark-haired, among every nation, race, and tribe.

  On the evening of November 7, 1961, together with two of my Yerevan acquaintances, I climbed the hill on which stood the statue of Stalin. The sun was going down. We sat in a small restaurant, looking at the pink snows of Mount Ararat. We talked about Stalin. We were eating some very salty and badly cooked fish—which may have made my companions all the more acrimonious.

  Darkness fell; cannons began firing a salute in honor of the forty-fourth anniversary of the Revolution. My companions went on talking; again and again I heard the words “Soso”[3] and “mama dzoglu,” which means “son of a bitch.”

  I went up to the statue and saw an astonishing sight. Dozens of cannons formed a half circle around the base of the monument. With each salvo, long tongues of flame lit up the surrounding mountains and the titanic figure of Stalin would emerge from the darkness. Bright incandescent smoke and flame swirled around the bronze feet of the Master. It was as if, for one last time, the Generalissimo were commanding his artillery. Again and again, fire and thunder split open the darkness; hundreds of soldiers were working away. Silence and darkness would return. Once again the command would be given and the terrible bronze god in a greatcoat would step out from the mountain darkness. No, no, it was impossible not to give this figure his due—this instigator of countless inhuman crimes was also the leader, the merciless builder of a great and terrible state.

  He could not simply be dismissed as a mama dzoglu. “Son of a bitch” was no more appropriate a title than “Father and Friend of the Peoples of the Earth.”

  Officials from the Yerevan City Party Committee told me that, at a general meeting of collective farmers in a village in the Ararat valley, in response to a proposal to take down the statue of Stalin, the peasants had said, “The state collected a hundred thousand rubles from us in order to erect this statue. Now the state wants to destroy it. By all means, go ahead and destroy it—but give us back our hundred thousand rubles.” One old man had proposed removing the statue and burying it intact. “Who knows? If some new lot end up in power, the statue may come in handy. Then we won’t need to fork out a second time.”

  How tragic this is. The affirmation of the power of the Stalinist state comes in the form of a condemnation, by its own leaders, of Stalin himself. And the spirit of rebellion takes the form of the affirmation of Stalin—one of the most terrible murderers in all human history.[4]

  At seven o’clock in the evening, in the quiet mountain village of Tsakhkadzor, sixty kilometers from Yerevan, there is not a soul to be seen. But Tsakhkadzor has its own madman: seventy-five-year-old Andreas. People say he lost his mind during the genocide[5]—members of his own family were murdered in front of his eyes. People say that, when he was young, Andreas served in the tsarist army, under the command of Andranik Pasha—the Armenian partisan leader and officer in the Russian army, worshipped by the Armenian peasantry, who died not long ago in the United States.[6] Andreas’s wife—a martyr who lived her whole life with a madman—died only a year ago. While she was alive Andreas had regularly beaten her, but when she died he refused to let her be buried. He kept on embracing her, kissing her, trying to sit his dear dead friend at the table, to give her something to eat. Nobody dared say anything to the old madman who refused to believe that his wife was dead.

  Now Andreas lives alone in a small stone house. He has two ewes who feel nothing but trustful love for him, seeing nothing the least strange about his madness, his singing during the night, and his fits of fury and despair.

  Whenever anyone mentions Andranik Pasha, Andreas weeps. Probably, no one since Shakespeare’s time could better have played the role of mad old Lear. Of average height, broad-shouldered, and quite stout, probably suffering from edema, wearing a warm, rather ragged peasant jacket, with a sheepskin hat on his head and a large, gnarled staff in his hand, Andreas wanders about the steep little streets of Tsakhkadzor. His gait is sad and magnificent; there is something funereal about it. His head is large and gray, and white curls spill out from under his hat. As for his face, it would make Rembrandt lay down his brush and say, “There’s nothing left for me to do. Nature’s done it all already.” And it’s true—you could capture his face best with a humble camera. Andreas has a leonine forehead, heavy overhanging brows, deep lines around his mouth, a large nose, the jowls of Field Marshal Hindenburg, and bulging yellowy-gray eyes that are at once watery and inflamed. These eyes contain kindness and exhaustion, indomitable rage and terrible anguish, deep thought and crazed fury.

  The inhabitants of Tsakhkadzor feel sorry for Andreas. The sly and thrifty Karapet-aga,[7] who once lived in Syria and who gave up a tavern in Aleppo for a restaurant-cum-bar in Tsakhkadzor, is always ready to give him something to eat. He speaks respectfully to him, and Andreas, for all his pride and general suspiciousness, is never offended by Karapet’s generosity; he trustingly enjoys his hot khash—a monstrously calorific broth made from calves’ feet with garlic. Sometimes Karapet-aga brings Andreas a small glass of brandy. Andreas drinks it, sings a war song about Andranik Pasha, and weeps.

  Khachik, the shepherd, grazes Andreas’s two sheep in the mountains without asking for payment. Siranush, a neighbor, sometimes brings around some dung, so she can light the old man’s stove for him and heat his little stone cell.

  Once I saw Andreas in a real fury. He was cursing in Armenian, bringing his Armenian curses to an incandescent heat over the dirty flame of ordinary Russian swearwords. Soon afterwards, I found out what had happened. During the night, on instructions from the Party committee, the gilt plaster statue of Stalin had been removed from the village square. Seeing this, Andreas had shaken his staff in the air. He had attacked drivers; he had attacked children; he had attacked Karapet-aga; he had attacked students from Yerevan who had come to the village to ski.

  For Andreas, Stalin was the man who had defeated the Germans. And the Germans were the Turks’ allies. It followed that the statue of Stalin had been destroyed by Turkish agents. And the Turks had killed Armenian women and children. The Turks had executed Armenian old men. They had done away with peaceful and entirely innocent people: peasants, workers, and craftsmen. They had killed writers, scholars, and singers. The Turks had killed Andreas’s family; they had destroyed his home and killed his brother. The Turks had killed Armenian merchants and Armenian beggars; they had tried to kill the Armenian nation. The great Russian general Andranik Pasha had fought against the Turks. And the commander in chief of the Russian army that had vanquished the Turks’ mighty allies was Stalin.

  Everyone in the village was amused by Andreas’s rage; he had confused two different wars—the First World War and the Second. The crazed old man demanded that the gilt statue of Stalin be returned to the main square—it was, after all, Stalin who had routed the Germans, who had defeated Hitler. Everyone laughed at the old man: He was insane, whereas the people around him were not.

  3

  SURPRISINGLY, many Armenians have blond hair and gray or blue eyes. I saw fair-haired children in the village. I saw a sweet little four-year-old girl cal
led Ruzana who had pale blue eyes and golden hair. I saw faces with a classic, antique beauty, perfect ovals, with small straight noses and pale-blue almond-shaped eyes. I saw people with high cheekbones, flattened noses, and slightly slanting eyes; I saw people with elongated, sharp faces and huge, sharp, hooked noses; I saw people whose hair was so black as to be almost blue, with eyes like coals; I saw the thin lips of Jesuits and the thick protuberant lips of Africans.

  Nevertheless, there is such a thing as a national type.

  And it is hard to say which is the more surprising: this diversity or the stubborn persistence of the national type.

  The diversity, I suppose, reflects thousands of years of raids and invasions, of people being taken captive, of commercial and cultural encounters. Here we can see all the other people with whom the Armenians came into contact: Assyrians and Babylonians; the ancient Greeks; Persians, Turks, and Slavs; the fearsome Mongols. The Armenians are an ancient nation, with thousands of years of culture and history. They have lived through many wars. They are a traveling nation, a nation that has borne the yoke of the invader for many centuries, a nation that has more than once struggled to win its freedom only to fall back again into slavery. Perhaps this is the reason for all the flattened Mongolian noses, the Assyrian jet-black hair, the pale-blue Greek eyes,[8] and coal-black Persian eyes.

  Interestingly, all this diversity—fair and dark hair, pale-blue and black eyes, and so on—is particularly evident in the countryside, in villages whose way of life is inward-looking and patriarchal. Here, at least, it cannot be the reflection of any recent events. The mirror that shows us the face of contemporary Armenia has been polished in the depth of time.