I was listening to the purling of the kolkhoz accounts. In the mountains a drenching rain slanted through, and the abysses of the street gutters ran more swiftly than usual.
The water rang and welled up on all the floor-levels and terraced shelves of Ashtarak—permitting the camel to pass through the eye of the needle.
I have received your eighteen-page letter, completely covered in a hand straight and tall as an avenue of poplars, and to it I answer:
First sensual encounter with the material of an old Armenian church.
The eye searches for a form, an idea, expects it; but stumbles instead on the moldy bread of nature or on a stone pie.
The teeth of your vision crumble and break when you look for the first time at Armenian churches.
The Armenian language cannot be worn out; its boots are stone. Well, certainly, the thick-walled word, the layers of air in the semivowels. But is that all there is to its charm? No! Where does its traction come from? How to explain it? Make sense of it?
I felt the joy of pronouncing sounds forbidden to Russian lips, secret sounds, outcast, and perhaps, on some deep level, shameful.
There was some fine water boiling in a pewter teapot and suddenly a pinch of marvelous black tea was thrown into it.
That’s how I felt about the Armenian language.
I have cultivated in myself a sixth sense, an “Ararat” sense: the sense of attraction to a mountain.
Now, no matter where I might be carried, it is already speculative and will abide with me.
The little church in Ashtarak is of the most ordinary kind and, for Armenia, submissive. It is a little church in a six-sided headdress with a rope ornament along the cornices of the roof and the same sort of stringy eyebrows over the meager mouths of its chinklike windows.
The door is quieter than water, lower than grass. I stood on tiptoe and glanced inside: but there was a cupola in there, a cupola!
A real one! Like the one in St. Peter’s in Rome, above the thronged thousands, the palms, the sea of candles, and the Pope’s sedan chair.
There the recessed spheres of the apses sing like seashells. There we have the four bakers: north, west, south, and east, who, their eyes plucked out, knock into the funnel-shaped niches, rummage about the hearths and the spaces between the hearths and find no place for themselves.
Whose idea was it to imprison space inside this wretched cellar, this beggars’ dungeon—in order to render it there a homage worthy of the psalmist?
When the miller can’t sleep, he goes out bareheaded to inspect his millstones. Sometimes I wake up at night and check on the conjugations in Marr’s grammar.
The teacher Ashot is immured in his flat-walled house like the unfortunate character in Victor Hugo’s novel.
Having tapped his finger on the case of his sea-captain’s barometer, he would go out into the courtyard that led to the reservoir and plot the precipitation curve on a chart of graph paper.
He worked a small-scale orchard of a tenth of a hectare, a tiny garden baked into the stone-grape pie of Ashtarak, and had been excluded from the kolkhoz as an extra mouth to feed.
In a hollow space in his bureau he kept a university degree, a high-school diploma, and a wishy-washy packet of water-color sketches, innocent hallmark of his character and talent.
In him was the hum of the past imperfect.
Hard worker in a black shirt, theatrically open at the neck, with a heavy fire in his eyes, he retired into the perspective of historical painting, in the direction of the Scottish martyrs, the Stuarts.
A story has yet to be written about the tragedy of semieducation. I think the biography of the village teacher might well become the coffee-table book of our day, as Werther once was.
Ashtarak, a rich, snugly nested settlement, is older than many European cities. It was celebrated for its harvest festivals and for the songs of the Ashugs. People who grow up close to vineyards are fond of women, sociable, skeptical, and tend to be touchy and idle. The people of Ashtarak are no exception.
Three apples fell from heaven: the first for the one who told the tale, the second for the one who listened, and the third for the one who understood. That is the way most Armenian fairy tales end. Many of them were written down in Ashtarak. This region is the folkloric granary of Armenia.
ALAGEZ
What tense do you want to live in?
“I want to live in the imperative of the future passive participle, in the what ought to be.’”
That’s the way I’d like to breathe. That’s what pleases me. There is such a thing as mounted, bandit-band, equestrian honor. That is why I like the splendid Latin “gerundive”—that verb on horseback.
Yes, the Latin genius, when it was young and greedy, created that form of imperative verbal traction as the prototype of our whole culture, and it was not merely “that which ought to be,” but “that which ought to be praised”—laudatura est—that which pleases . . .
Such was the talk I carried on with myself as I rode horseback among the natural boundaries, the nomads’ territories and the gigantic pastures of Alagez.
In Erevan, Alagez had stuck out in front of my eyes like “hello” or “goodbye.” I saw how its snowy crown melted from one day to the next and how in good weather, especially in the morning, its tinted cliffs crunched like dry toast.
And I felt drawn to it, over the mulberry trees and the earthen roofs of the houses.
A piece of Alagez lived right there with me in the hotel. For some reason, a heavy specimen of the black volcanic glasslike mineral called “obsidian” lay on the window sill. A fifty-pound calling card left behind by some geological expedition.
The approaches to Alagez are not fatiguing, and it is no trouble at all on horseback, in spite of its fourteen thousand feet above sea level. The lava is contained in earthen blisters, along which one rides easily.
From the window of my fifth-floor room in the Erevan hotel, I had formed a completely wrong notion of Alagez. I thought it was a monolithic ridge. Actually, it is a system of folds and develops gradually—proportionately to the rise, the accordion of diorite rock uncoiled itself like an alpine waltz.
And a spacious day it was that fell to my lot!
Even now, as I think back on it, my heart skips a beat. I got tangled up in it as in a long shirt extracted from one of the suitcases of my ancestor Jacob.
The village of Biurakan is known for its baby-chick hunt. They rolled about the floor like little yellow balls, doomed to be sacrificed to our cannibal appetite.
We were joined in the school by a wandering carpenter, an experienced and adroit man. Taking a swig of cognac, he told us he had no use for either artels or labor unions. He said his hands were made of gold, and he was respected and could find a place anywhere. He needed no labor exchange to find a customer: by smell and by rumor he could guess where his work was needed.
Seems he was Czech by birth, and the Pied Piper.
In Biurakan I bought a large clay saltcellar, on account of which I had a lot of trouble later.
Imagine a crude Easter-cake mold—a peasant woman in farthingale or hoop skirt, with a feline head and a big round mouth right in the middle of her robe into which you could easily thrust your whole hand.
It was a lucky find from what was, by the way, a rich family of such objects. But the symbolic power with which some primitive imagination had invested it had not escaped even the casual attention of the townsmen.
Everywhere there were peasant women with weeping faces, shuffling movements, red eyelids, and cracked lips. They had an ugly way of walking, as if they had the dropsy or had strained a tendon. They moved like hills of weary rags, stirring up the dust with their hems.
The flies eat the children, gathering in clusters at the corners of their eyes.