THAT OLD ARMENIAN in the shade of a roadside tree. All the conspiracies of the East depend on such people. They dwell motionless as boulders in the rocky landscape of this country. They sit leaning against canes in the clay back alleys of Oriental cities. They see everything; they know everything. Nothing can throw them off balance. No one can cheat them. No one can defeat them. Now, too, thanks to the presence of this man under the tree, I felt better.
I AM DEVISING a story in the event that they catch me.
Where did you get the uniform? the interrogating officer will ask me.
Where? I bought it in Warsaw. You can buy any uniform you want there from the Russians. A captain’s, a colonel’s, even a general’s. You can also buy arms, but, as you can see — I’m not carrying any.
If what you are saying is true, why did you buy the uniform of an Aeroflot pilot?
Because for a long time now I have wanted to get into Nagorno-Karabakh, and I knew that there was no other way to get myself here. I wanted to be in this place at all cost, because I have always been moved by the fate of people condemned to extermination, and the inhabitants of Nagorno-Karabakh are condemned to extermination.
You think so? the interrogating officer will ask.
Alas. I fear that yes. This is a small island of Christianity, which in a few years will be flooded by the ocean of Islamic fundamentalism. The waves of this ocean are already rising. Don’t you see them?
Where did you get the passport of that man from Sumgait?
That passport was lying on a windowsill at the Yerevan airport. No one was paying any attention to it.
Who let you onto the plane?
No one did, I walked on myself. I got on the bus together with the passengers, and we went on board together. It would have been strange if the passengers were to ask a pilot why he is flying on a plane.
Guard! The interrogating officer calls the militiamen. Take this prisoner to his cell!
I had a lot of time on my hands, and so I composed various other alternative depositions in which I had one aim only — not to implicate anyone, not to burden anyone.
FOUR HOURS had passed since our landing when, from the direction of the town, a black limousine pulled up and stopped at a certain distance from the guard post. It was the kind of car in which only higher officials of the Imperium ride, so I thought, Aha, they sent the car, so they’ll probably let Starovoytova into town. A moment later the bearded man appeared (the whole time very tense, conspiratorial) and said: “Walk in a decisive way!” He didn’t have to say that — I knew that in such situations walking decisively is half the battle.
We got in, slamming the door energetically behind us, and the car took off at once. We were driving in the direction of the town, several kilometers along an asphalt road lined intermittently with armored cars and small tanks; the entire area resembled a large army camp. Suddenly, tall, massive concrete blocks appeared before us on the highway, forming a labyrinth. Cars had to slow down and maneuver cautiously between them before stopping to be inspected by the soldiers stationed here. At the sight of this obstacle, the bearded man said: “Lie down and pretend to be dead drunk.” He couldn’t think of anything else. I immediately collapsed on the rear seat and covered my face with the cap. I heard the bearded man saying to the soldier who stuck his head into the car: “Drunk. Drunk and tired.”
Once again we were speeding toward town, on our right a hill, on our left a deep ravine with the thread of a dead railroad line visible at its bottom. “You can sit up now,” the bearded man said, “but if they stop us again pretend again to be drunk.” But all the sentry posts we subsequently passed just waved us on. Little streets soon appeared, planted with many trees, shady, at right angles to one another. Then the car entered a courtyard surrounded by apartment buildings, and the bearded man said: “Get out.” I jumped out, and the car pulled away at once. I didn’t even have a chance to take a look around before an elderly woman ran up to me, pulled me by the arm, and shoved me into a stairwell, saying only, “Third floor,” before disappearing. I walked up to the third floor, where a door was already open, and I found myself in an apartment encircled by a crowd of women and children. Everyone was shouting with joy, hugging me, embracing me, calling something out to me. I saw flushed, triumphant faces. “Rogues! Knaves! Occupiers!” The women were getting carried away. “How much longer still are they going to torment us this way, hold us captive!” And as they uttered their unceasing and ever more inventive curses and threats against the regime, they heated up for me a dinner that had long gone cold.
Several men came in, and they too embraced me. With their arrival, the whole brouhaha momentarily died down; the children disappeared somewhere into the corners; the women stopped lamenting and execrating. I could go change. They gave me some civilian clothes.
THE EVENING PASSES in conversation. That is why I have come here. I have come in order to meet the people from the Karabakh Committee, who are not permitted to leave this place, who are condemned to silence, to a mute resistance, whereas what they want is for the world to know about the fate of the local Armenians, their adversity, their drama. That desire — for one’s voice to be heard somewhere — is characteristic of enslaved peoples, who cling to their belief in the possibility of justice in the world the way a drowning man clings to a plank, who are convinced that being heard is being understood and that by that means alone they can prove their argument and win the case.
Darkness is starting to fall. We are sitting in a large room, at a long, heavy table. It is a typical Armenian apartment: the table is the most important piece of furniture, the central point of the house and home. The table should always be set with whatever one has, with whatever is at hand, just so that it is not bare, for a table’s nakedness alienates people, freezes conversation. The more things a table is set with, the greater the goodwill and respect being shown.
“Our question,” says one of those present, “is, How do we survive? It has been weighing on Armenians for hundreds of years. For centuries already we have had our own culture, our own language and alphabet. For seventeen centuries the Christian religion has been the national religion of Armenians. But our culture has a passive character, it is the culture of the ghetto, of a defensive fortification. We have never imposed our customs, our way of life, upon others. A sense of mission or a desire to rule are foreign to us. But we find ourselves surrounded by people who, brandishing the banner of the prophet, have always wanted to conquer this part of the world. In their eyes, we are a poisoned thorn in the healthy body of Islam. They are thinking about how to remove this thorn, meaning, how to efface us from the surface of the earth.”
“Nagorno-Karabakh is in the worst predicament,” someone else speaks up. “We were once an inseparable part of the territory of Armenia, but in 1920 the Turkish army came in here and cut down to a man the Armenian population that lived between the border of today’s Armenian republic and Nagorno-Karabakh. Our forefathers saved themselves by hiding in the mountains of Karabakh. The depopulated belt of land between Armenia and Karabakh was settled by Caucasian Turks, meaning Azerbaijanis. This belt is barely thirteen kilometers wide, but it is closed off by them and one cannot drive or walk through there. In this way we have become a Christian island in the heart of the Islamic Republic of Azerbaijan. And on top of that the Azerbaijanis are Shiites, their inspiration is Khomeini; they will not rest until they have disposed of us.”