THE TRAP
THESE EVENTS TOOK place in the summer of 1990. I could not recount them earlier, for doing so would have endangered the people who had helped me.
THE DAY BEFORE leaving for Yerevan I met with Galina Starovoytova in Moscow. (Galina Vasilievna Starovoytova, professor at the University in Petersburg. At the time a deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, from Armenia. Subsequently an adviser to Boris Yeltsin on affairs of nationalities.) I was seeing her then for the first time. She was a portly woman, with an engaging manner and a warm, friendly smile. I knew that she was flying to Yerevan the next day. “We will meet there,” she said. And added: “Maybe we will be able to help you, but I don’t know, we will see.”
The skepticism in her voice was understandable to me. I was asking to get into Nagorno-Karabakh, which was a practically hopeless matter. Access via an overland route did not exist: the entire district of Nagorno-Karabakh — which is an Armenian enclave in the territory of Azerbaijan — was encircled by divisions of the Red Army and of the Azerbaijani militia. They guarded all passages, highways, tracks, and paths, guarded the rocky clefts and faults, the passes, precipices, and peaks. There was absolutely no question of forcing one’s way through this vigilant, tightly woven net. Even those who knew these parts well did not make such attempts. Therefore only the air route remained — namely, a small Aeroflot plane that flew from time to time (most irregularly) from Yerevan to Stepanakert, the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh. But with this too I had no chance. It wasn’t merely a matter of getting a seat on the plane — difficult enough since people camp out for weeks at the airport in Yerevan (and I had neither the time nor the money to do this). The greater problem was that buying a ticket required a Soviet passport with proof of residence in Nagorno-Karabakh, or a permit from the General Staff of the army in Moscow. In my case, neither one of these documents could possibly be obtained.
I ARRIVED in Yerevan during the night. The entire next day I spent in the hotel, waiting for a telephone call. I had some ancient Armenian chronicles with me. Beautiful, thousand-year-old texts, but one cannot read much of them, for they contain so much despair, so much pain, and so many tears. The fate of Armenians: centuries of persecutions, centuries of exile, diaspora, homeless wandering, pogroms. All that is recorded in the chronicles. On each page someone is praying for endurance, someone is begging for his life. On each page there is terror, in each verse trembling and fear.
THE NEXT MORNING the telephone rang. I heard the voice of Galina Starovoytova. “Since yesterday,” she said, “we have been thinking about you. We are deliberating, we are searching for a way. Wait patiently until a young man comes to you.”
The young man was called Guren. He was well built, stocky, with energetic, vigorous movements. When he saw me, he immediately became worried. “What’s wrong?” I asked. He opened his briefcase, in which he had several Soviet passports. They were the passports of Armenians, but of teenage Armenians; the oldest was twenty-four years old. All of them were no longer alive.
“This one was burned to death in Sumgait,” said Guren, “and this one was choked to death in Nagorno-Karabakh.”
“And this one?”
“I don’t know how this one died.” From the photographs, eyes equally black, serious, and concentrated stared out at us. Finally Guren picked a passport in which the photograph was somewhat blurred (water? sweat?) and told me to take that one.
Next, he put me into a completely dilapidated Moskvich in which nothing but the motor and (I hoped!) the brakes were working, and we set off across town. Immediately I felt that I was in the Third World, as if I had suddenly found myself on a street in Tehran, in Calcutta, or in Lagos, where no one observes any regulations, any lights or signs, and yet all the deranged, chaotic, frenzied traffic follows some sort of internal logic (invisible to the eye of a European), which ensures that although everyone drives exactly as he pleases, in a manner chosen purely at will — across, backward, in a zigzag, in a circle — in the end everyone (in any case, the majority) reaches his goal. We too — a particle of this rickety, wildly honking mass reeking of exhaust fumes — were heading toward our goal. What that was, I had no idea. But experience has taught that whenever people are taking me on a hazardous, uncertain, improbable expedition, it is inappropriate to ask questions. If you ask, it means you don’t trust them; you are uncertain; you are afraid. But you had said that you wanted to do this. Make up your mind — are you ready for anything or not? Besides — there is no time! It is too late for indecision, for hesitation, for alternatives.
An old apartment building in the center of town. Guren leads me to the second floor. A typical Soviet apartment — cluttered, crowded. A daily, murderous struggle to maintain even a touch of cleanliness and order. A struggle without allies — without soap, without detergents, often without water. Actually, most frequently without water, because the city is drying up; there is water only rarely, sometimes here and sometimes there. One must search for it; one must wait for it. In the apartment in which I now find myself, the balcony has been converted into a veranda whose glass walls give onto a courtyard planted with trees; on this veranda a table stands and several people are sitting. I know only one of them — Galina Starovoytova. The others are mainly young men with beards. The presence of the bearded men indicates that there is a battle front somewhere in the vicinity, one front or another — for liberty, for power. In Armenia there are two fronts — the one in the war against the Imperium, and the other against Azerbaijan. The city is full of fedayeen — they stand on the streets, ride in trucks, armed with whatever they can manage to obtain, dressed in any old way, but all of them with beards. The fedayeen sitting at the table greet me very warmly, but after the initial effusiveness they all grow still, silence descends.
“Ryszard”—I hear someone’s voice—“you will fly today to Stepanakert. On the same plane as Deputy Starovoytova. But you will fly as a pilot. And you and Galina Vasilievna do not have to know each other. You understand?”
“Of course,” I said, “I understand.” It sounded almost as though I had sworn a grand, solemn oath.
I wasn’t in this apartment for long before Guren said it was time to drive to the airport.
SHALL I DESCRIBE the airport in Yerevan (which I also know from various other occasions)? Shall I describe morning at this airport? How a crowd of hundreds, of thousands of people awakens, people who have slept on benches, on the marbled concrete floor, on the stone steps? How these people begin to rise amid profanities, curses, the crying of infants? How long have they been sleeping here? Well, some not so long; this is only their first night. And those over there, the crumpled up, unshaven, unkempt ones? Those — a week. And those others one cannot even get closer to because they stink so terribly? Those — a month. So all of them, like one man, awake, look around, scratch themselves, yawn. A man gets up and attempts to stuff his shirt back inside his pants. A woman tries to stick her hair under a kerchief. Black, shining hair, magnificent, like Scheherazade’s. It is the time when everyone would like to relieve himself. The glancing around begins, an increasingly anxious glancing around — where is there to go, where is there to hide, where is there to squat down? There are four toilets at the airport. Even if one were to assume, optimistically, that they are working, it would take several hours for everyone to visit them. Unfortunately, they are out of order, or, more accurately, one cannot avail oneself of them. This is what happened. Once, long, long ago, the toilet bowls became clogged. Because they were clogged and a towering mountain grew in them, people started to fill up the space around the toilet bowls. With an extraordinary, astounding punctiliousness, they filled up every square centimeter of the floor. Because they could no longer find any field of activity for themselves in the area around the toilets, they started to advance farther, to spread out, with an understandably natural determination to conquer new territories, ever wider and wider.