Among the Russians(70)
‘After she left I went on drinking-bouts with friends and pretended to be happy. But this girl still sits behind my eyes, after two years. Everything reminds me of her’—he downed a compensatory vodka—‘and now she’s come back to Erevan for two weeks because her father’s ill. That’s why I don’t want to be down there. I’m staying up herew.’ In the semi-darkness his eyes and spectacles swam together in doleful concentric pools. Every time he went to the bar for more drinks, his legs slurred to worse shamble. He seemed in love with his own martyrdom—a classic Armenian, condemned to the chauvinism of suffering. He swallowed his drinks like medicine, but only sank deeper into the morass.
‘I saw her husband just once, and he looked a sympathetic man. So I hope she’s happy. I hope….’ The vodka lifted tenderly to his lips like a sacrament now. ‘I hear people earn good money in Marseilles…. they must be rich….’ I felt I was watching a man come up for the third time. But as he did so an ancestral resilience asserted itself, and his gaze lifted. ‘Did you see the girl who just went by? What did you think of her?’ The bespectacled eyes were suddenly satyr-bright. A fifth vodka vanished. A new wave of self-pity broke. ‘All the same, this order girl….’
Two brandies later he had decided to return to Erevan next day, and asked me to go with him. The morning round him in high spirits. He had dressed to kill, in silky black trousers and a carefully-pressed T-shirt. A heavy-stoned ring studded one finger and his wrist flashed a digital watch. I did not have to ask what plans had provoked this. While he started his clapped-out Zhiguli on the forty miles to Erevan, he crooned snatches of First and Last Love. A black-market Virginian cigarette dangled prestigiously from his lips, and the dashboard was littered with packets of contraband chewing-gum and Western cassettes.
As we clattered round Lake Sevan’s north-west shore, another symbol of romanticized suffering have into view: a statue of the mediaeval princess Tamara, who was incarcerated in a convent on the peninsula there. Every night, said Manouk, she was visited by her lover who rowed to her signal-fire over the water, until a storm extinguished the light and his corpse was washed up beneath her window. Now there are Tamara cigarettes, Tamara restaurants, Tamara comic-strips. You can read, munch or smoke Tamara. She is part of the national conscious. But in fact the legend was transferred wholesale from lake Van in Turkish Armenia. And Tamara never existed.
For three thousand feet through desert hills our road dropped into the cauldron of Erevan. The very air thickened into a fine powder as we descended. This bare country was easily desecrated. Pylons limped across its mangy hills, and power excavators were churning up flinty rack in the valleys, mining for obsidian or potash. Squat factories, visible twenty miles away, sent up wavering pillars of smoke and were echoed behind by chimney-shaped hill-peaks staked with smoky clouds. For half an hour we went down through a planetary waste. Here and there the police had set up crashed cars on concrete pedestals as a warning to motorists, without perceptible effect. Manouk exceeded the nationwide speed-limit of a hundred kilometres an hour whenever we reached a suitable slope, and soon the land fell away beneath us far into the marl-rich lowlands of Araxes river. Suddenly Manouk said: ‘Look! Ararat!’
I followed his gaze. Luminous with snow, the mountain had appeared as if from nowhere. It hung like a spectre over the plain. It was solitary, complete, severed in the sky. Only a dirty string of lesser hills drifted away from it to the west. I had failed to notice it because haze cut it off from the alluvial valley beneath, leaving its summit to swim in solitude. Unearthly, treeless, it belonged to another time and substance from the plains. Its andesitic slopes presented themselves not for mining but for worship—the patriarchal mountain of Noah, and landfall of the Ark.
‘We Armenians look at it with mixed feelings,’ said Manouk. ‘It’s our national emblem, but it stands in Turkey. Turkey! I’ve never seen it from that side. I long to. It must be beautiful….’
No, I said, two years before I had glimpsed it form the Turkish-Iranian border, where it was half obscured by other hills.
‘So, the Turks get a worse view?’ Manouk was vindictively pleased. ‘You see,, Ararat speaks something peculiar to us Armenians. When you look at it you see a mountain. But I see something else….’ He placed a melodramatic hand on his heart.
Half an hour later we were delving down into the inferno of Erevan, our gears crashing in eddies of traffic, rock music dinning from our cassettes. Erevan contains more cars per head than any other city in the Soviet Union. Its streets are jammed by frustrated drivers, fetid with exhaust fumes, dust-blown and clamorous with horns. It was a human labyrinth unimaginable in the north: thrustful, erratic. Manouk complained furiously about all other drivers, whose habits were precisely his own. ‘Nobody looks where he’s going. Everybody just does how he likes…look at the appalling U-turn…there’s pretty girl….’
After the heartless sameness of most Soviet conurbations, Erevan elated me. The whole city was built in a rosy, laval stone peculiar to itself. Sixty years ago it was so poor that its children are refuse in the streets. But it had risen again in these weirdly impressive squares and avenues, whose luxuriant decoration, fretted capitals and round-arched, secret windows, reproduced traditional Armenian motifs with an oddly moving faithfulness. Yet it was the quality of stone which personified it above all—walls of tufa and basalt, pink and black. Sunk in their airless cleft of river, they drank the light without refracting it. They looked still hot from the volcano—visceral, searing stones glinting (you might think) with minerals or blood.