Among the Russians(71)
The once-pitiful city is not a centre a industrial skills: electronics, machine tools, precision instruments. A feeling of human possibility is about. In their diaspora a Armenians seem gentler than others, but here, as in Israel, many of the familiar qualities of a people appeared lost or overlaid. Compared of Russians, the figures which crowded the pavements looked physically and sensually precocious. Their expressions were more varied, more explosive more beautiful, more anything—the faces of brigands and concert pianists and millionaires. Their slender-boned features—some of the woman’s appeared fragile as birds’—could burn with a tragic intensity. The young men flaunted flared trousers and platform shoes. The air on street corners was racked by the cross-fire of their inquisition and the sight of a foreigner drew a barrage of inquiry. Yet they were shorter, darker than the Georgians, and in place of that brittle mountain dash they looked subtly older, as if beneath their exuberance there lingered, even in the young, some collective memory of horror.
To Manouk the city was spider’s-web of contacts. The whole place, he said, was riddled with secret offices and businesses. He was always stopping off at different stores to obtain free or illegal goods. Everything belonged to the state, and the state emerged from the back entrance clutching a chicken; he collected some spectacle-frames mended for nothing; he bought illicit records.
But as for old girilfriend, he prevaricated. He had lost his nerve. He suggested other things to do. Noon found us wandering over the plateau-ruins of earliest Erevan, which predated the Armenian people themselves—whoever they were, and wherever from. A scribble of stones traced temples and warehoused eight centuries before Christ, and frescoes is bold ochres and blues covered the astonishing walls with friezes of tiny gods riding lions. Manouk kept flicking dust disconsolately from his trousers. He was crumpled and silent. Shouldn’t we go back into the city. I asked?
No, no he said, we’d go to the holy town of Echmiadzin fifteen kilometres farther on. An Armenian always felt better there, he added: Echmiadzin made a man proud and released, so that the he walked and breathed in a different way.
The town is the seat of the Supreme Patriarch of the Armenian Church. Its cathedral was founded as long ago as 303 (for Armenia was the earliest Christian state in the world) but was restored many times during Turkish and persian domination. No saints glowered from its walls. They were covered instead by a Koranic orchard of painted flowers and trees in tomato red, deep blues and gold. Marble divans circled the transepts. transforming them into the alcoves of Moorish palaces. Persian latticework screened the gallery, and the Patriarch’s throne was inlaid with an Islamic iridescence of mother-of-pearl.
Manouk did not look proud or released at all, nor did he walk and breathe in a different way. He stared miserably at the fragment of Noah’s Ark preserved in the treasury, and ignored the head of the Holy Lance lying in spurious state in a gold reliquary.
But other of the town’s churches attested an old beauty. They were sombre and strong as fortresses. Their huge, cruciform bodies lifted blank and unadorned to turreted domes. This most ancient of Christianities shed pagan shadows even now. Lambs and doves were still killed in the cathedral courtyard on feast-day, said Manouk, and Easter Monday found the graveyards filled with families feasting among the tombs of their ancestors. In the enclosure of another church we found a harsh-faced priest blessing a sacrificial sheep. An anxious-looking family had dragged it before a stone altar, where the priest traced the sign of the cross over its doomed and slavering head. Blood dripped form its ritually cut ear. Then the priest emptied a packet of consecrating salt into the altar’s bowl, and gave it to the animal to lick. It backed away. The family dragged it forward again, shouthing uncouth orders to one another, and the priest rammed the salt into the sheep’s mouth. One of the men pulled out a battered wallet and handed the priest a note, which he examined then walked away. Then the family galloped the sheep round a corner, heaved it into the back of a brand-new Zhiguli, and drove away to their village for the kill.
‘That’s always happening.’ Manouk said. ‘They probably want a child or more success in business. So they offer up a sheep.’ He found this perfectly natural, and was baffled by my questions. It was merely common sense: a bargain driven with God. God was an Armenian.
It was dusk when we returned to Erevan. Manouk had combed his hair into tight little curls around his ears, and taken off his glasses. But he looked wretchedly nervous. ‘She should have arrived last night,’ he said. ‘If she agrees to go to a restaurant or see a movie, will you join us? She won’t go out alone with me. People talk….’
His hands agitated on the steering-wheel. At last he stopped in the courtyard of a big apartment block, peered into the car mirror for the last time and slapped his paling cheeks. ‘She may not want to know me at all. I dread her first look. It’s always the first look that counts, isn’t it?’ Already his face wore an indefinable air of defeat. Without their glasses his eyes looked timid and small. He stumbled myopically over a tree-root in the courtyard, then vanished up the apartment stair.
Five minutes passed. Two old men who had been playing dominoes under the trees folded up their board and trudged inside. I waited. Lights flickered on behind curtained windows.
When Manouk reappeared, he was alone. I scanned his face for elation or grief or anything at all. But as he drove away he seemed only vaguely perplexed, as if he had woken from a dream whose memory was still stronger than the day. The aeroplane had only arrived that morning, he said, and she had gone to bed at midday. When he had called she was still asleep. She had come to the door, and they had spoken briefly. He shook his head. ‘Her eyes were clogged up.’