I called to my wife: “Look, it’s about to fall!”
Meanwhile, however, the tree was resisting with a kind of sentient force. It seemed to have become fully conscious again. It despised those who were harrassing it and the pike’s teeth of the saw.
Finally, they threw a noose of thin laundry twine around the dry place where the trunk forked—the very place that marked the tree’s great age, its lethargy, and its verdant outburst—and began to rock it gently back and forth. It shook like a tooth in a gum, but remained king of the hill. A moment later, the children ran up to the toppled idol.
That year the directors of Tsentrosoiuz [the Central Union of Consumer Cooperatives of the USSR] approached Moscow University with the request that they recommend a man who could be sent to Erevan. They had in mind someone to supervise the production of cochineal, a kind of insect few people knew about. An excellent carmine dye is made from the cochineal when it is dried and ground to powder.
The university selected B. S. K., a well-educated young zoologist. B. S. lived with his old mother on Bolshaia Iakimanka, belonged to the trade union, would snap to attention, out of pride, before anyone and everyone, and, out of the entire academic milieu, singled out for admiration old Sergeev, who had made and installed with his own hands all the tall red cabinets in the zoology library and who could unerringly name the wood of already finished lumber with his eyes closed, just by running his palm along it, whether it was oak, ash, or pine.
B. S. was not in any way a bookworm. He studied science as he went; had once had something to do with the salamanders of the famous Viennese professor Kammerer, who had committed suicide; and more than anything else on earth loved the music of Bach, especially one invention for wind instruments that went flying upward like some Gothic firework.
B. S. was a fairly experienced traveler within the USSR. In both Bukhara and Tashkent his field shirt had been sighted and his infectious military laugh had resounded. Everywhere he went, he planted friends. Not so long ago, a certain mullah, a holy man, since buried on a mountain, had sent him a formal announcement of his death in pure Farsi. In the mullah’s opinion, the fine, erudite young man—when he had used up his supply of health and engendered enough children, but not before—should come join him.
Hooray for the living! Every labor is worthy!
Reluctantly, B. S. got ready to go to Armenia. He kept running after buckets and bags to collect the cochineal and complaining about the slyness of bureaucrats who wouldn’t issue him packing materials.
Parting is the younger sister of death. For those who respect fate’s reasonings, the ritual of farewell contains an ominous nuptial animation.
Now and then the front door would slam and up the mousy stairs from the Iakimanka guests of both sexes would arrive: students from Soviet aviation schools, those carefree skaters on air; staff members of distant botanical stations; some who specialized in mountain lakes; people who had been in the Pamirs and in western China; and, simply, young people.
Then began the filling of goblets with Muscovite wines, and the sweet demurrals of the ladies and girls; tomato juice spurted, and so did a general, unsequential chatter: about flying, about looping the loop, when you don’t notice that you’ve been turned upside down, and the earth, like some huge brown ceiling, comes rushing at your head; about the high cost of living in Tashkent, about Uncle Sasha and how he had the grippe, about everything . . .
Someone told the story about the man with Addison’s disease who sprawled himself out on the Iakimanka and lived there: drank vodka, read the newspapers, vehemently played dice, and at night removed his wooden leg and used it for a pillow.
Someone else compared this Iakimanka Diogenes with a medieval Japanese woman, and a third person shouted that Japan was a country of spies and bicyclists.
The subject of the conversation kept merrily slithering away, like a ring passed behind the back, and dominant over the table talk was the knight’s move, which always swerves to one side . . .
I don’t know how it is for others, but for me a woman’s charm is augmented if she happens to be a young traveler, who has spent five days of a scientific trip lying on a hard bench of the Tashkent train, who knows her way around in Linnaean Latin, who knows where she stands in the dispute between the Lamarckians and the epigeneticists, and who is not indifferent to the soybean, the cotton plant, or the chicory.
And on the table there is an elegant syntax of confused, heteroalphabetical, grammatically incorrect wildflowers, as if all the preschool forms of vegetative being were coalescing into a pleophonic anthology-poem.
As a child, a stupid vanity, a false pride, had kept me from ever going out to look for berries or stooping down over mushrooms. Gothic pine cones and hypocritical acorns in their monks’ hoods pleased me more than mushrooms. I would stroke the pine cones.
They bristled. They were good. They were persuading me. In their shell-like tenderness, in their geometrical harum-scarum, I sensed the rudiments of architecture, the demon of which has accompanied me all my life.
I almost never spent any time in summer houses on the outskirts of Moscow. Of course, automobile trips to Uzkoe on the Smolensk road don’t count, past those fat-bellied log huts where the truck farmers had piled up heaps of cabbages like cannonballs with green fuses. Those pale green cabbage-bombs, heaped up in shameless abundance, reminded me vaguely of the pyramid of skulls in Vereshchagin’s dull painting.
It’s not like that now, but I suppose the break came too late.
Only last year on the island of Sevan in Armenia, as I went strolling in the waist-high grass, I was captivated by the shameless burning of the poppies. Bright to the point of surgical pain, looking like counterfeit badges from some cotillion, big, too big for our planet, fireproof, dream-faced moths, they grew on repulsive hairy stalks.
I envied the children . . . They hunted enthusiastically for poppy-wings in the grass. I would stoop down, then again . . . Fire in my hands, as if a blacksmith had lent me some coals.
Once in Abkhazia I came upon whole streaks of northern wild strawberries.
At a height of several hundred feet above sea level, young forests clothed that whole hilly region. The peasants hoed the sweet reddish earth, preparing little holes for botanical transplants.
How happy this coral coinage of the northern summer made me! The ripe glandular berries hung in triads and pentads, and they sang in batches, and in tune.
So, B. S., you’ll be leaving first. Circumstances do not yet permit me to follow you. I hope they’ll change.
You’ll be staying at 92 Spandarian Street, with those very nice people, the Ter-Oganians. Do you remember how it was? I’d come running to see you down Spandarian Street, swallowing the acrid construction dust for which young Erevan is famous. I still found pleasure and novelty in the ruggedness, the roughnesses and solemnities of the valley of Ararat, which had been repaired right up to its wrinkles; in the city, which seemed to have been upended by divinely inspired plumbers; and in the broad-mouthed people with eyes that had been drilled straight into their skulls—the Armenians.
Past the dry pump houses, past the conservatory, where a quartet was being rehearsed in the basement and one could hear the angry voice of the professor shouting “Lower! lower!”—that is, give a diminishing movement to the adagio—to your gateway.
Not a gate, but a long cool tunnel cut into your grandfather’s house, and at the end of it, as through a spyglass, there flickered a little door covered with greenery, so unseasonably tarnished that one might have thought it had been burnt with sulphuric acid.
When you look around, your eyes need more salt. You catch forms and colors—and it is all unleavened bread. Such is Armenia.