Second — almost all Russian and Soviet symbolism has vanished from the streets. Russian signs, posters, portraits — it is all gone. The city is undergoing a period of intense and scrupulous de-Russification. Many Russians are leaving; Russian schools are closing, as are Russian theaters. There are no Russian newspapers or books. They have also stopped teaching Russian in Armenian schools. But because there is a shortage of English and French teachers, Armenians are increasingly sequestering themselves within their extremely difficult language, increasingly isolating themselves from the world. Already I can communicate with the children only through the mediation of the grown-ups, who know Russian.
Third — the fedayeen. They walk the streets in groups, drive around in trucks, have set up their guard posts at various points in the city. For someone who knew the customs of the old Imperium, the sight of these fedayeen is perhaps the most extraordinary thing. At one time, only a Red Army soldier could carry weapons here. Only several years ago, possession of arms entailed the risk of being imprisoned in a labor camp — or, more frequently, of being executed. And now there are, they say, as many as thirty-seven private national armies. They are dressed most outlandishly, fantastically, in whatever they happen to possess, just so long as whatever it is at least brings to mind a uniform or an improvisation of a partisan’s attire. How do they recognize one another, tell who is from what army? I think it must be by faces alone. It seems to me that in this small country everybody knows everybody else.
HERE, opposite the hotel in which I am staying, they are demolishing an old Yerevan neighborhood. They are tearing down the old houses, porches, bowers, hanging gardens, flower beds and vegetable patches, miniature streams and waterfalls, little roofs strewn with carpets of flowers, fences overgrown with thick vines; they are demolishing wooden stairs, destroying little benches standing beneath walls, tearing down woodsheds and chicken coops, arches and gateways. All this is disappearing from view. People watch as the bulldozers press down upon this landscape sculpted over the course of countless years (in its place will be erected concrete boxes made of large slabs), as they trample and turn these quiet, green, and cozy streets, alleys, and crannies into a heap of garbage. People are standing and crying. And I too stand among them and cry.
Everything has passed — the USSR, and the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic, and communism, but the habit of mind, the habit of mind whose first principle, first and foremost, is to destroy what one can, this habit of mind has survived; it feels fine; it is thriving.
HRANT MATEVOSIAN, their distinguished writer. Born in 1935. Thin, tall, slightly bent. He has an endlessly careworn expression, and his thoughts are endlessly careworn. They concern the future of Armenians. There are ten million of them in the world. Do they have a chance of surviving? Most important — of surviving in Armenia, where there are only three million of them and thousands upon thousands are constantly emigrating? Doesn’t the fate of the Jews await them: they will exist, but only in a diaspora, only as exiles, condemned to their ghettos scattered on all the continents?
With Armenians one must typically expect to talk only about Armenians. One finds out which countries they live in, what their last names and addresses are. One can ask, for example: “And are there any Armenians in Senegal?” A moment of reflection, then the answer: “There was one Armenian woman, the wife of a French doctor, but she has now left and is living in Marseille.”
Everywhere, Armenians are trying to perform good deeds. Did I know that the doctor attempting to bring Mickiewicz back to life after the Turks had poisoned him was an Armenian? I didn’t know? But it is a historical fact!
But with Matevosian we speak neither about Senegal nor about Mickiewicz. We talk about the past. Is it possible to leave the past behind? The Armenian past is a tragic tree that continues to cast a shadow. Were it not for the past and the massacre of a million Armenians in 1915, one could reach an understanding with the Turks, reach an understanding with Islam, and live peacefully. But there is the past. In the course of the conversation we cannot reach a conclusion about anything or find an answer to any question. I am reminded of the view of the French philosopher Antoine Cournot, that we do not resolve difficulties, we only displace them. “The art of clarification,” says Cournot, “like the art of negotiation, is often simply the art of displacing difficulties. There is, one might say, a kind of untouchable reserve of incomprehensibility in certain things that the calculations of human intelligence are capable neither of removing nor of diminishing, but only of arranging this way or that, sometimes leaving everything in a half-light, at another time illuminating certain points at the expense of others, which are then submerged by a darkness even deeper than before.”
When we say our farewells, Matevosian tells me: “Call me, call and shout — Hrant, I want tea!”
I am returning to the hotel. It is an early autumn evening, warm, mild. Crowds of strolling people. There is a kind of friendliness to these streets, to this town. In one of the back alleys, in the depths of darkness, live embers are glowing. A small boy is sitting by an iron stove. He is broiling shish kebabs. His large black eyes stare at the fire. A fascinated, almost unconscious gaze, as if beyond place, beyond time.
TIGRAN MANSURIAN, composer. His concertos for cello were played by the symphonies of Boston and London. Recently he composed “Le tombeau” to commemorate the twelve-year-old violinist Siranus Matosian, who died during the earthquake in Spitak.
“Here?” He repeats the question. “This part of the world is a cultural desert. We have a great singer, Araks Davtian, one of the ten best sopranos in the world. But no one here knows her, no one has heard of her. She would have to sing to an empty hall. Here? Here they know how to pull the trigger — that’s easy. When the year is ending, they say to themselves — what good fortune, another year has gone by!” Mansurian — animated, nervous, sensitivity incarnate. He doesn’t have his own record, not yet. No one cares about that here.
He gazes out the window. He lives on the fourth floor of one of those dreadful apartment towers from the Brezhnev era, which are so shoddily constructed, so crooked, lopsided, and squalid, that they should have been torn down before they were ever turned over to the tenants. It is hard to believe, but in the place of elevators they built cages like the ones for miners, and the bundles of electrical wiring, instead of being inside the walls, hang outside or lie along the edge of the stairs. Because there are no attics, and only the elite have washing machines and dryers, people hang their wash out on ropes and wires stretched between balconies, between buildings, between streets. On those miraculous days when there is soap in the stores, the washing and hanging out of clothes and linens take place everywhere. If the wind is blowing, the wash billows, undulates, and flutters, and the towns of Armenia resemble fleets of powerful sailing ships, riding upon a turbulent sea toward distant shores.
In front of Mansurian’s building grows a clump of tall poplar trees. One can see from the window their trembling leaves, gleaming silver in the sun. “My world,” Mansurian tells me as we sit in his cramped, neat apartment, “is Debussy and these leaves. I can listen nonstop to their music.” He falls silent, tilts his head, points with his finger in the direction of the window. “Do you hear?” he asks, and smiles. Against the rich musical background created by the recurring, rhythmic sough of the trees, one can hear, scattered into a delicate and mobile tonal motif, the rustle of the crisp, restless leaves, permeated, interlaced with the high, vibrating twitter of birds.