An Armenian Sketchbook (11 page)

And then we were at the top of the Semyonov Pass, on the wonderful road that leads to Dilijan. Maksim Gorky traveled this road in 1928. And my aunt Rakhil Semyonovna traveled this road in 1941, after being evacuated from Odessa. . . . But this is not how one is meant to write literary memoirs. Gorky is a world-famous writer, while my aunt has nothing whatsoever to do with literature—her father, Simon Moiseyevich, was an insurance agent and his family thought him stupid and narrow-minded. And my aunt, I’m told, was anything but a brilliant student at the Lebenzon gymnasium, the secondary school where she studied in Odessa. She seemed to have inherited her father’s obtuseness with regard to both literature and algebra; she seemed to have little in common with her mother, Sofya Abramovna. But Rakhil Semyonovna was greatly loved by all her family—she never complained, she was always friendly and welcoming, and she was extremely kind. She did not have an easy life. Her husband, an economist, was arrested for no reason in 1937 and died in Kolyma. Her son Volodya, who, when still very young, had been accepted to study microbiology at the university, was arrested and then killed in prison by his interrogator; he had refused to confess to the charge that he had been poisoning wells. Her daughter Nina, a remarkably sweet and beautiful young woman, committed suicide on the day that she graduated with distinction from the Chemistry Institute. Her youngest son, Yasha, who was in the cavalry, was killed at the front. And all her friends and relatives who stayed in Odessa died terribly; the Germans took ninety thousand Odessa Jews to the village of Domanevka and shot them there.[
39
]

This meek woman’s journey to Dilijan is out of place in a literary memoir. Did she weep, looking back over her life as she gazed at the wonderful beauty of the mountain road, or did she smile wistfully and feel a moment of hope? Did all this beauty give her comfort and hope?

Does it matter?

I asked my companions to tell me about the great men who had traveled this wonderful road. It didn’t occur to me to say to them, “You know, my aunt went along this same road in the winter of 1941.” The old woman wasn’t important enough; she was just one of many, an anchovy or sardine in a great shoal of anchovies or sardines. And, as you know, the biographical details of anchovies and sardines do not enter the pages of history.[
40
]

We had crossed the Semyonov Pass. But the road continues through high mountains, making sixteen long turns before descending into a valley. Driving fast is out of the question—the road is narrow and the drop is sheer. Even Armenian drivers hold back—cars move slowly, decorously, like rational beings that fear for their lives.

Slowly and smoothly, wonderful vistas open up. They appear, float past our eyes, disappear, then reappear after a bend in the road. They begin to grow, to take on a more definite form, but now slightly changed, in a slightly different position. New, unseen miracles appear too.

Pine trees cover the mountain slopes. The trees are very large; the sun has not stinted its strength on them. The summits are covered by snow. Their outlines are smooth and rounded; they look like sugarloaves. That is, they look like sugarloaves to anyone over the age of fifty—it is already several decades since factories last produced those conical sugarloaves wrapped almost up to their peaks in thick blue paper.

What simple and frugal means nature uses to create a picture of extraordinary power. A calm and clear winter’s day, snow on the mountains, pine trees. Some white, some green, some deep blue. . . . I do not know if it is the vastness of the sky and the infinite forest, or the stern peace, or the extreme purity of the colors (no white can be whiter than the white of this fresh mountain snow, no blue can be clearer, purer, and deeper than the blue of the sky above this mountain snow), or whether it is the breaths of smoke drifting about the valley, or all these things together—but the view has an astonishing charm, a simplicity, an inner wisdom.

A man looks at this clear silent world, a world of crystal peace and purity, and decides that he doesn’t need the valley of everyday life, that its vain bustle is destroying his soul. Tempted by the great purity of the snowy summits, he imagines feats of asceticism. He sees a little shack in the woods; he hears the sound of a mountain stream; he gazes at the stars glimmering among the pine needles.

Involuntarily I began to think such thoughts. Life in the valley, after all, really is very bitter and turbid indeed. And I had inflicted a great deal of grief on people, probably more than they on me. It would be better for me to live on my own.

But while I was thinking about life on top of a snowy mountain, our glassy coach had made its way down into the valley. The road was now flat, and we were picking up speed.

Here the side of the road was covered not with snow but with liquid mud. These muddy puddles reflected the sun, and no one would have suspected it of being only a December sun—it was far too bright and warm.

We came to another village, and that was the end of my dream of becoming a hermit. The little houses stood among pines; the terraces and balconies around them were full of the lives of women, children, and old men. I tried to imagine the village at different times of day and as it changes over the seasons. And I found myself imagining this life very clearly: here in these little houses and in the shelter beside the village spring; during an April dawn; during a summer evening, when the men are singing, the cows mooing, and someone is playing the
zurna
;[
41
] during a sultry noon, when old men doze in the shade, click their worry beads, and glance at the young women going by on their way to the spring, carrying their pitchers and buckets.

Murderers with kind honest faces are dividing up the bloody body of a sheep they have just killed. A drunk staggers down the road. Here it is—the sinful life of the sinful valley.

And for some reason I feel a little embarrassed by what I have just been thinking. I remember Sasha Chorny’s mocking lines:

Is the life of a hermit really a manifestation of courage? Can there be courage in withdrawing from life? What about suicide? This too is a withdrawal from life. A retreat into being a hermit forever. Is suicide an act of weakness? Is it a cowardly escape? Maybe not. Sometimes I think that suicide is the very highest strength of a weak man. A man is weak; he has not lived cleanly and purely. And for the sake of his own lost purity, and because of his inability to live as he ought, he chooses to leave life. Is this weakness? I don’t know. But it cannot be easy for a weak man to give up everything he possesses: borshch with haricot beans, wine, the sea, love, the spring sky.

Sometimes suicide seems to be a manifestation of something very different: the desperate act of a capricious person who is used to being spoiled. They cannot bear being denied what they want. And so they withdraw from life, away from their hurt at not being given their share of sweets, away from an irritation that has grown into despair.

Sometimes suicide is the logical act of someone with a great mind. While the stupid and the shortsighted crawl about in the mire of hope and optimism, he or she can see that in front of them is only a bog, a wall, or a precipice.

Sometimes suicide is a manifestation of blindness, of psychological limitation: all that can be seen is a wall. Someone falls into despair and is too shortsighted to see that there is a path, and a door, right beside them.

And suicide is often the consequence of mental illness. For alcoholics and drug addicts, amongst others, the sea and the sun and the green of the grass are obscured by a dry crust of anguish and pain.

These people die of their own accord because the world they live in has been made meaningless. And it is they who have killed it.

Sometimes suicide is loyalty to a cause. What does my own life matter to me now that the great cause I serve has been defeated?

Sometimes suicide is the betrayal of a cause. What does some great cause matter to me now that my beloved, the one I adore, has left me?

But I do understand at least one thing: Suicide is not just an act like any other act. Whether we are talking about the weak or the strong, suicide is a supreme act. Few people, weak or strong, are able to take this terrible step—this last, dreadful, voluntary step.

Twentieth-century hermits do not live in cells or caves; they do not live in the wilderness or in a hut in the forest. And so we imagine that there are no hermits left in the modern civilized world. Really, however, there are a great many of them, more than in the days when Christians were being martyred. Their cells are disguised; they are located in modern cities, in communal apartments, on the streets of Moscow and Kiev. And the hermits themselves work as painters and decorators, or in factories and ministries. They wear smart jackets, autumn coats, and hats made of Astrakhan fur.

But they too have withdrawn from the world. They too are desert hermits—like those heroic ascetics who, long ago, wore torn animal skins and shirts woven from dry grass as they sought for some supreme revelation.

Some of these modern hermits repent before God in the solitude of their cells. Some sing of freedom, love, and beauty in verse they compose in secret. Still others, like the monk in
Boris Godunov
, write chronicles. What unites all these different groups of people is that their worldly lives do not matter to them; what matters to them are their hours of seclusion, their lives as hermits. All serve their god in secrecy. None aspire to return from the wilderness and tell other people about the illumination that has visited them there.

Our twentieth-century hermits illustrate with exemplary clarity two different qualities that laypeople have always detected in those who have chosen to retire to the wilderness; the laity see something sublime in the lives of hermits, but they also consider them impotent. There is a huge gulf between the fate of the hermit who withdraws from the world in the name of some secret truth and the fate of the prophet who preaches this truth. Communal-apartment hermits, especially, are always aware of this gulf.

A contemporary hermit never even thinks of stepping across this gulf, or anywhere near it. There are many hermits in our modern world, but few prophets and preachers.

Dilijan is a wonderful town. It is not on a railway line; no airport links it to the rest of the world. It is a hermit-town, at least to a degree. Mountains have protected it from modern forms of transport and it is hidden by forest. Its wood and stone houses stand on the slopes of a mountain, amid tall pines. Dilijan is full of silence; it is at once a town, a village, and a dacha settlement.

It is filled with peace. It has retained all that was sweet in a patriarchal past that was far from sweet. It is not hostile to nature; it has trustingly allowed the mountain forest to enter deep inside it. Town and forest live together.

Most of the houses in Dilijan are painted light blue. They are built of wood, but the forest does not seem frightened by this; the garden and orchard trees stand close to their tamed wooden brethren. Fruit in Dilijan is cheap—with no railway, little of it can leave the town. The apples are large, sweet, and juicy. There is a great deal of wine in the bazaar. Cool, cloudy, and opalescent, it is sold in bottles, decanters, mugs, and glasses. There are more sellers here than buyers.

Dilijan is a town you fall in love with at first sight. And your first thought as you fall in love is: “Yes, this is where I must come to heal my soul. Here I can find peace, tranquillity, and silence. Here I can enjoy the charm of the evening mountains, the silent forest and babbling streams.”

None of this, however, is true. The young Lermontov was mistaken when he wrote: “Then the anguish of my soul is stilled. . . . ”[
43
] The anguish of the human soul is terrible and unquenchable. It is impossible to calm it or escape from it. Quiet country sunsets, the lapping of the eternal sea, and the sweet town of Dilijan are all equally powerless before it. As for Lermontov, he was unable to still the anguish of his soul even at the foot of Mount Mashuk.[
44
] No outward tranquillity can save you from grinding anguish; no mountain air can cool you when flaming pitch burns your insides; no bloody and gaping wound can be healed by life in the wonderful town of Dilijan. Take my old aunt, Rakhil Semyonovna. Do you think she slept calmly and peacefully here, after being evacuated from Odessa? Or did she lie awake at night weeping? Was Rakhil not weeping for her children? Did she not “refuse to be comforted for her children, because they were not?”[
45
]

Now we are driving towards the border with Azerbaijan. To our right is a noisy mountain river. To our left are villages brimful of the rustic charm that is so pleasant to admire in passing and which the villagers themselves, in their obstinate determination to move to the city, value so little. Farther on are high hills, then craggy mountains. The forest has come to an end; the hills are covered with prickly grass that has been baked by the summer heat. The crags are precipitous, red or dark brown. But the country will soon flatten out; the mountains will disappear, yielding to the steppe that stretches as far as the Caspian Sea.

Martirosyan points to some steep red cliffs and says that wild bees live there. The cliffs are so steep that no one has ever managed to climb them, and the honey accumulated through the labor of countless generations of mountain bees overflows the crevices in the rock and pours down from above. It is collected by the people who live near the foot of the cliffs.

We choose a place on the bank of the river. Volodya makes a hearth out of some large stones, lights a fire, puts pieces of lamb on skewers, guts the princesses, and washes their bodies in the river. Meanwhile our ladies spread out a tablecloth and place large pebbles along its edges. From their string bags and baskets they take bottles, glasses, fresh herbs, and flatbreads. The clink of knives and forks mingles with the noise of the mountain river.