Among the Russians(72)
‘What?’
‘Her eyes were clogged up.’
His voice held bafflement and a faint, crestfallen distaste. Two films of sleepy-dust, and his passion gone. By the time the lights of Erevan had been snuffed in the night behind us, he was laughing quietly, self-mockingly, consulting his digital watch and throwing cassettes into the breach.
You know you can’t hold me for ever,
This boy’s too young to be singing the blues….
I stayed five nights by Lake Sevan, and every morning its waters fascinated me again. Sometimes, shaken by wind, the whole lake would appear to be shuddering southward in foam-flecked ripples whose agitation seemed outlandish in those dead shores. But more often the water lay in a trance—less a lake than a huge, unblinking eye of glass, sated and colourless: the eye of the earth itself.
At night when I returned, usually after drinking with Manouk, the concierges chattered at ease. One woman in particular—a soft-faced Ukrainian who was married to a Russian factory-hand in Sevan-lingered at my door. She was lonely in Armenia, she said, she wanted to return to her own people, or anywhere farther north. She spoke in a sad, musical drawl. ‘You’ve seen so much of the Soviet Union, and I haven’t been to Leningrad or even Pyatigorsk. Is Georgia as beautiful as they say? My husband hasn’t a car….’
She looked too young to be married—her mouth an adolescent bud, her expression stopped at seventeen—yet she talked of a ten-year-old son. For over an hour she stood in my bedroom and asked the guileless, personal questions which come naturally to many Russians. ‘I thought you were Polish, because I heard you speak Russian. Why are you alone? Why aren’t you married?’ Her chatter held no undertone but an oddly desolating innocence. ‘But my job’s not so hard. Sometimes I sleep in my chair. You can’t complain, it’s just a job.’
The soft face and brown eyes became very appealing in my fuddled gaze. She wore no ring on her finger. I guessed her marriage was unhappy. I remembered stories of KGB prostitutes in tourist hotels, but she didn’t look like anybody’s idea of one. If I touched her, I thought, she might respond out of her loneliness with the same childishness as she spoke. But I was bound to another, and a little afraid; and I let her wander back down the passageway holding one of my torn shirts, which she said she would mend before dawn.
In the mornings I would drive down to Erevan alone or with Manouk. Once I stopped above the city to visit the memorial to the victims of Turkish genocide, and was glad that he was not with me. If I were to feel nothing in the presence of those million dead, I wanted to feel nothing alone. But as I took the long path to the monument, I fell in with a robust man and his two little girls. He stopped by the pathside and sliced open a watermelon with his penknife, thrusting the icy segments into my hands: ‘Here, eat! Tell me, how are things in Britain? Not so good as before?’ He clapped me on the shoulder. ‘It’s the same with us…. Here’s more melon…. Things have been going downhill for over five years now.’ I had grown used to this dirge about worsening conditions. So long as things had been better than before, life was bearable. But now the dogma of inevitable economic growth under Communism had faltered strangely. ‘Everything gets spent on arms! America gets stronger, then Russia gets stronger, and so on. Where’ll it all end? And here we are eating watermelon together!’
His daughters were staring at me excitedly, as if I might conclude peace in person. We were approaching the platform of the monument. They walked meekly on either side of me. Their golden hair betrayed a Russian mother. The elder wore the blue shirt and red neckscarf of the Young Pioneers. But she did not like it much, she said; she preferred playing the piano. ‘We haven’t enough room in our flat for one,’ she whispered, ‘and not enough money either. We’re getting our first car next month.’
‘You’ll probably buy a piano after that,’ I said, for her father to hear.
He grunted and smiled. Then he, in turn, whispered: ‘She’ll end up in a language school…she’s better at languages.’
We were walking across the memorial platform now, overlooking the whole city. Ararat’s snow rose in haze beyond. At the platform’s end a circle of leaning pillars enclosed a pit where muffled music rose. Its chorus was tumultuous and faint—perhaps the recording had grown thin with use, but I think this haunting was intended. It was as if the voices of those unimaginable dead were sounding from the grave. It was tragic and somehow final. There was nothing else but a flame. We stood silent. The man’s bluffness had gone. He was too young to have lost his parents in 1915, and I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. The little girls shuffled their feet and stared mutely into the fire and music, inheriting their people’s pain. That, I supposed, was why they had been brought here. Only after a long time did they begin to fidget with the chewing-gum which I’d given them, and we tramped back down the long path, talking of language-schools and munching melon.
Manouk’s family was an object-lesson in Armenian resilience. His father and elder brother had built their home with their own hands at a time when the suburbs were no more than a camp. Even now the house was reached over planks across open sewers. Its courtyard was cluttered with the concrete dividing walls of other families and with beds canopied by rotting blankets, and narrow-gauge goods trains jangled past the windows at bedroom level, so close that you could almost reach forward and pluck a package out of the trucks. But this clutter around a shared courtyard was no barometer of poverty. Beside houses all around, the battered sheds were full of shining cars.