Among the Russians(73)
Manouk’s mother had emigrated here from Lebanon, where many Armenians fled after 1915. All her childhood had been spent on the edge of starvation. She was frail now, and I never saw her. But his father was a florid-faced old man with a mellow smile and kindly, rather simple eyes. He had been brought out of Turkey at the age of four, before the massacres, but his parents had returned and been slaughtered.
‘I was reared in Erevan, in an orphanage run by Americans.’ He spoke detachedly, as if about somebody else. ‘They were good people.’ He seemed deeply contented as he presided over a meal of chicken, grapes and brandy all together, and urged me to eat. He spoke of his parents as he might have spoken of mine. ‘I don’t even remember them.’ He detached a twig-full of grapes and dropped it onto my chicken. ‘I grew these myself on the side of the house. You can’t grow anything else here. The land’s dead. In Turkey we had better land, but it’s deserted now. Everyone’s gone.’
He constantly pressed more chicken on me, transferring it carefully, proudly on two forks. This tenderness with food was the only sign of his childhood deprivation. He was entering an old age sheltered by his own house, his own family. A colour television tyrannized the dining-room and was switched on even while we ate. ‘A wonderful thing, these pictures. Do you have television in Britain?…Yes, I suppose you would.’
He was attended by his elder son’s wife, who always cooked and served for him. He and Manouk ordered her about. When I asked why she didn’t eat with us, they only said: ‘She’s got too much to do.’
I might have been in an Arab village. The talk was all of sons. ‘My elder son drinks too much,’ said the old man, dropping a grape onto his tongue, then he gazed fondly across the table: ‘but this one hardly drinks at all.’ Manouk shot me a warning—he drank like an elephant. ‘Well, my elder son doesn’t drink too much, but rather a lot…’. The old man paused, smiled, settling himself again into peace. ‘I’ve got good sons.’
He himself had given up first drinking, then smoking. He was a Stalin-era health-addict. He would splash icy water over his head every morning, and engage in press-ups, running-on-the-spot and improvized shadow-boxing against enemies of the Socialist Motherland. Manouk said that his own generation privately ridiculed such antics, and that his father’s readiness ‘for Labour and Defence’ (as the national fitness programme demanded) was aimed not at America, but at the Turk. When we touched on Armenia’s two-and-a-half years’ independence, quenched by the Russians in 1921, the old man’s face turned wooden. He said sombrely: ‘If the Russians hadn’t come, the Turks would.’
As for Manouk, he tried to ignore politics. Only once, when we were driving past a memorial to Soviet power in Armenia, he said: ‘That’s a monument to our union with Russia—our freedom. It’s nonsense, of course, but what can you do? We’re utterly different from the Russians. They’re cold, you know. If a man was dying in a ditch a Russian would leave him alone and a Turk would murder him—but an Armenian would lift him up’ (and take his wallet, a Russian later suggested).
Manouk, like so many others, escaped the ubiquity of politics into an intensity of personal life. His sitting-room was a shrine to other gods. He had plastered its ceiling with black gypsum, whose stalactites gave it the feel of a night-club grotto, and two record-players and a tape-recorder detonated sentimental pop songs through enormous loudspeakers. The shelves were lined by empty defitsitny drink bottles kept for ornament, and the walls were studded with the posters and pendants of a plotless cultural pantheon: The Beatles, the Virgin Mary, Brigitte Bardot, Bambi, an Armenian folk-hero galloping over Ararat, Raquel Welch, six plastic cherubs.
Nostalgic and slightly drunk, he leafed through his photograph albums to the rhythms of Elton John. These albums seemed to encapsule and circumscribe his life. Their snapshots were all of picnics and outings: holidays by Lake Sevan or in the Caucasus. They were suffused by a Levantine intensity of friendship, and a love of self-enhancing things—cars, clothes, style. In these photographs Manouk always seemed to be on his back among a knot of revellers, with a buxom woman looming overhead. He lay supine and ecstatic under dripping wine or kisses—tickled, teased, made drunk. ‘There’s Lucy!’ he groaned. ‘Ooh! I remember that! When I got home I had love-bites all over my shoulders. I took off my shirt by mistake, and my mother asked what on earth had done it? Friends, I said…’—he lingered over the pages with eager hands on which one fingernail each had been left long as a mandarin’s in the Middle Eastern way. ‘…And my mother said: What sort of friends do you have, that they hit you all over? Oh, there’s Helen….’
Yet the snapshots were already turning sepia, as if they had been taken long ago, of people now old or dead. Soon they were making him lugubrious. Past classmates, past girlfriends—their faces were too callow and clear. They waved bottles or guitars at the camera, or grouped themselves self-consciously in a brotherhood irreparably gone. Their oddly dated-looking faces stared out from another time. He closed them away.
He suggested a movie, a party, the circus, anything.
I chose the circus. Soviet circuses are like no other, and scarcely relate to the mendicant European bell-tents, with their friendly stench of dung and bruised grass. There are more than a hundred in the country, sixty of them working all the year. They take place in miniature palaces. The ring at Rostov is a domed and gilded opera-house-in-the-round, belted with Corinthian columns and seating two thousand. Even the one at Erevan was enfolded by a generous ambulatory, seething with smokers in the intervals, and furnished with a twenty-man band which played in a balcony under its dome. But in place of the blond, sleepy children of north Russia, its tiers were brimming with the olive skins and exclamatory hands of Armenia. Beneath their immaculate hair and feathery, strong-marked brows, three thousand eyes, circled in black lashes, filled the ring with a half-adult scrutiny.