Among the Russians(69)
We drank to women and to ‘little Georgia.’. Our bill came to nearly fifty roubles, two days’ salary for a working Soviet man. But Zahari laughed at it. ‘You think I live on a salary? Huh! Nobody can live on a salary here. Everyone lives on the side. But I can tell you we’re not so bad as the Armenians.’ He whistled with admiration. ‘Even the dogs live on the side there….’
As we tossed back the dregs of the wine, the band’s singer began crooning a new melody. ‘You know that?’ Zahari asked. ‘It’s a song about Stalin.’
‘What does it say?’
‘It says that Stalin’s ours—ours.’ Suddenly his eyes were shining with a deep, atavistic fervour, almost with love. ‘It says Stalin was born here and belongs to us. Us!’ His hand groped for a glass and I guessed that he was about to propose a toast to Stalin. I think I turned white. I made no move. I imagined the evening’s camaraderie, which was in any case built on transience—the traveller’s dishonesty—plummeting into wounded national pride and breached hospitality. Yet no, I could not toast Stalin. But as Zahari’s first closed around the stem of the glass to lift it, we both saw that it was empty—my own glass empty too, and the bottles drained—and we let the song pulse and die in a forgotten river between us.
8. Armenia
THE LITTLE REPUBLIC of Armenia is the remnant of an ancient splendour which once stretched over half eastern Turkey to the Mediterranean. Spread where the Lesser Caucasus mountains break into tableland, the province now occupies a mere tenth of Armenia’s historic empire. It is the refuge of a people all but annihilated by the Turks in 1915, and decimated in a second nightmare under Stalin—a people half lost in a worldwide dispersion as awesome as that of the Jews. But now this stony region, suffocated by quarter of a million refugees after 1915, has farmed and industrialized itself and achieved a modest wealth, so that its very existence helps to heal those psychic wounds which far outlast a people’s physical degradation.
South from Tbilisi, crossing the north-west tip of Azerbaijan, the road travels through a premonitory barrenness. The wooded valleys and sky-splitting rocks of Georgia have gone. In their place the earth folds into volcanic hills glazed with yellow grass. They ripple into one another. Their trees drop dust. Here and there a river paints a line of green, and vineyards appear. But all around, the scarps are smeared with etiolated saffron and umber strata, or erupt in discoloured fangs as if some deep unrest in the earth were not yet allayed. The land has a seared, Asiatic beauty. It is at one with the Turkish and Iranian plateaux which bleed away from it to the south.
Then, for forty miles, the road twines among the last Caucasian mountains, and climbs through valleys soft with oak, hornbeam and beech, billowing in green ramparts from pass to pass. In their nondescript villages the people show the gentle, aquiline faces which have come down from Armenian antiquity.
But police posts multiply. In a single day’s journey I was stopped eleven times and was refused permission either momentarily to turn back or to turn aside. The Turkish border was less than eighty miles away. The road became a thin ribbon through the forbidden. At evening I broke through cloud onto a stark plateau under clear sky. In front of me the horizon flattened to lunar ranges and the glassy stillness of Lake Seven. It is one of the biggest inland lakes on earth. It cut through the hills with a clean, surgical strangeness, and shared their dead eternity.
I settled by the north-west shore in a there-year-old motel which already looked derelict. Order and conformity, even in small things, dissipate southward from the Baltic. In Riga and Tallinn cars could be parked in safety for weeks in front of the hotels; here they were locked in clanging cages and the keys entrusted to porters.
But in the huge dining-room at night, a clamour of jubilation rose. All evening people drove up from the dust-bowl of Erevan, Armenia’s capital, to the lakeland air six thousand feet above sea-level, and crowed the motel dance-floor. Tables brimmed with the lake’s salmon trout, and groups of swarthy, womanless man sat in gluttonous circles, talking of money, their little glass of cognac uplifted in an endless flurry of toasts. My solitude distressed these parties; they shouted at me to join them. But the music throbbed and drowned our talk.
The Armenians danced as if they meant it, in a whirl of writhing arms and bottoms, and clapped themselves delightedly; while form their long, organized tables, fifty-strong tour-groups of Czechs and East Germans watched as if staring into a lit room which they could not enter. Only when the music quietened did they stand up and waltz slowly and gracelessly all together. In the north I had often seen Russian woman dancing puritanically with one another. But here it was the Armenian men who flaunted themselves by twos, without touching, in a parade of peacock ego. They glided between the northerners like water round stones. The German girls began to flirt with them. The pop band bawled out old British numbers. It seemed as if everything which people considered important—beliefs, systems, ideals—were fatally divisive, and that the miracle of human unity was performed instead by pop songs.
Between these outbursts of sound the sad-faced Armenian beside me dropped isolated sentence. He name was Manouk…. he was a clerk is local government…what did I think of The Rolling Stones?…his job was deathly boring…. His plaintive eyes flinched behind their spectacles, and his hair was already receding at the age of twenty-six. We sat in the motel’s rowdy night-club together, drinking vodka, coffee and fruit juice, while he grew maudlin about women. His first love had married an Armenian living in Marseilles, and he had never got over it. He stared lugubriously into successive glasses of vodka, and his small, persecuted eyes grew moist as he remembered her.