Sarkis Mardirossian was a small man with a large head. His deep hollow
cheeks and dark yellow teeth confessed of all the days when he had skipped a
loaf of
bread to get that precious pack of "Ararat" cigarettes. "Esbes gam enbes yola
gertank"
(This way or that way we go along), he used to say, blowing a large puff out
of his
mouth with every other word. Who needs bread? For this Armenian making a
statement was more important, and the "Ararat" cigarette was the biggest
statement he
was allowed to make in his life.
His cheekbones looked like two peaks, two Massises, the right one larger than the other, and they gave this otherwise unnoticeable man a look which said: "You better take me seriously." The greater Massis on the right cheek designated the large forehead as the Araratian plain, the Armenian side, since that is the only way Armenians have seen Ararat from the time the world decided that we only needed ten percent of our lands to live on.
And that seventyfive year old forehead, like the Araratian plain, looked like the battlefield for all the armies that had crossed over the earth from times unknown. A thousand plows on the hard and stubborn Armenian soil would have produced many vineyards. And many vineyards would have produced many Armenian feasts. But there were no rewards or feasts for the toils and pains that this forehead invested in its homeland. Nothing but new and old memories. And all were sad. And all were tragic.
Except maybe a treasured few. Those hollow cheeks sometimes gave way to a great smile when he proudly talked about meeting Tcharents as a teenager, a year or two before the great poet was thrown in Stalin's jails and was never heard from again. Tcharents in those days incarnated Armenia's indestructible spirit. For the people he was the only spiritual father left, like Apovian had been a hundred years before. That spirit refused to die; after twentyseven years of Turkish massacres and eighteen years of Bolshevik massacres. But the Turks were outside of the border, like all the older enemies. One could identify them when they came too close, then grab an axe or a spade and head to the Araratian plain and fight them man to man. But this new Bolshevik curse, was like cancer, internal, much harder to identify, and it was impossible to cut off without also cutting part of one's own body. This new enemy was the taxi driver, the baker, the closest high school friend, the neighbor next door or even the relative sleeping in the next room. How could one deal with that? Who said there was nothing new under the sun? This enemy was new even to the four thousand year old Armenian spirit.
"You know why we have the same word "odar " for a foreigner and a stranger, even though many languages have separate words for them?" he asked me one day.
When he did not hear an answer after three long puffs, he decided it was time to educate me: "It is because everyone outside of our borders has not only been a foreigner to us, but also a stranger. For us there was never a difference between a foreigner and a stranger, so our language never needed a separate word to distinguish them." He continued with the look that now it was appropriate that I buy a glass of oghi for him if I wanted to learn more: "One day my uncle was gone. After a month our neighbor who had six kids was gone. Then it was my teacher's turn. Everyone was terrified. They could not even ask questions. Those who asked questions followed those who did not ask questions. Those motherf...ers..." The Armenian language changed to Russian, when important words like motherf...ers had to be used. "Those motherf...ers...is this what we had waiting for us, after Sardarabad? After the Tajiks we had to have a mass-murdering Georgian to finish the job?" He took another deep puff, with another look saying: "The time for that oghi is getting real close." Then he turned his eyes to an infinite distance, beyond the clouds, then beyond the white peak of Ararat, then into the infinite blue. I saw that same look that I had seen as a child on the faces of many Armenians when they must remember, when there is no way but to remember, because it cannot be forgotten. That same infinite question mark, which refused to go away, refused to be answered, refused to become separated from the Armenian history. And with that look he said: "Tcharents was our soul; Tcharents was the only mouth we had left; Tcharents was our mother, the only one whom we could still trust. But when they took Tcharents from us, it was all over. After that, we had nothing else to lose. We stopped fighting and started dying."
It was late evening when I finally bought Sarkis his glass of oghi , which like the Holy Spirit blew new life into his nostrils, and now he would not stop talking. The point of no return had been reached. He could not stop talking. It was as if that night was the night of the Last Judgment, and he had to put every word, every claim, every complaint on the judge's table before it was too late. Was I that judge, or just a young messenger who might still be around when Sarkis had to go. Who knows what he was thinking? He felt that if he did not empty his soul like he was determined to empty that glass of oghi that night, it would be too late. Every plow on his forehead would be in vain, every tear and every suffering would be forgotten and gone. So he continued. There was nothing else to do since power was cut as soon as it became dark, as if it was not needed anymore, and Yerevan, the onetime sea of lights had turned into a vast shadowy desert.
"I will tell you something else about our language", he said with another look that hinted to a second glass of oghi , "many languages have one word for a person who wanders, that is a wanderer. Ah, but not us; we have two. The word taparogh , that is a person who wanders because he wants to, and the word taparagan , that is a person who wanders because he is forced to. This is our history...those two words sum up our whole history." Again, Sarkis turned his eyes toward that question mark somewhere in the infinite distance above Ararat, froze for a few moments, and came back with the same frustrated look, the look that knew there was no answer after the question; it also knew, that the alternative of not asking the question was much more terrible than the frustration of not having an answer. So he turned his eyes again, as if hoping that there was an answer somewhere which he had just happened to miss the first time.
Why do I have to hear all this, I thought? Next week I shall be back in Los Angeles, and all this, the Massises, the power outages, Sarkis' puffs, the suffering faces on the buses and the question marks will all be lost in a hazy memory. Even if they did come back into my memory, I could always go to the remote control of my television set and escape into Hollywood fantasy land. What can I do about it anyway?
I read once, that it was not just difficult to be an Armenian, but it was impossible. Sometimes it is better for an abused child never to return to the horrors of his childhood years. The brain shuts off, because if it did not, it would burn out like an electric coil which carried too much current. I would rather talk to my neighbor John, who has never heard of the word Armenia, far from knowing where it is, whose greatest suffering has been losing a bet at a football game, whose world consists of a desk job in the same cubical of the same building for the last thirty years, pushing the same papers from the left side of his desk to the right, and whose greatest happiness is somewhere between his shiny truck and his six packs of beer which he drinks with the baseball boys after church every Sunday. John does not philosophize, he does not look into the infinite distance trying to find answers to metaphysical questions, he could not care less for what went on beyond the two oceans. For him the most serious questions were what kind of polish one must use for the truck, or what kind of lawnmower blade was needed to give the grass the proper cut, and of course, whose team won that week.
"Why can't I be like John?" I thought. "Let's cut that "ian" off and throw it into the wastebasket of history. Let's live and die as if we did not come from anywhere and we are not going anywhere. We do not even have to watch the Armenian Television program every Sunday, which uses fifty five minutes to sell dental work and groceries, two and a half minutes of news and two and a half minutes for an Armenian priest's preaching which has never changed since my childhood, except in the way the same words and sentences are arranged. Of course this Armenian program tries its best to avoid a hint of our four thousand year old Armenian culture. Why remind everyone of it when you have to sell dental work and groceries? You want culture? Instead of the news you can have "culture". A music video of a song which is foreign in every way except the words.
No, being like John is more impossible than being an Armenian. I want to be Sarkis, I want Sarkis' eyes, I want Sarkis' hollow cheeks and cheekbones and forehead, I want to have Sarkis's smile when he raises the glass of oghi and says "voghch lines enger " (To your life my friend), I want to speak with Sarkis' words of true caring when he says "Tsavt danem " (Let me carry your pain), I want to speak in Sarkis' language only, and I want to write in Sarkis' language only. How true were Shahan Shahnour's words when he wrote: "What you wrote cannot speak to any Armenian, as long as the word "garod " does not exist in them. Yes, don't laugh! Because that is not the only thing missing; you already know, but let me remind you that there is no French for the word "mayr ", the word "hay ", the word "aksor "...there is no French for our "kaghtagan ", our "vorp "...!"
After living four years with my television remote control and hearing John and his buddies yell at the baseball game every Sunday, I decided it was time to go back to Yerevan and find Sarkis again. "It is better to be a weed with roots I thought, than a rose plant without roots, if that were possible". But of course, it was not possible. I did not have to be around a million Johns for twenty years to realize that. So I went back to Armenia. So what if I had to sleep with a few sweaters, or get used to cold showers and dark nights. If my people could do it for six years, then why couldn't I? While I was busy with my remote control, they were fighting battles and freeing our ancestral lands. I was sure Sarkis would have approved of that, even if now he had to skip both the loaf of bread and the "Ararat cigarettes".
I took the taxi straight to his apartment. Two small rooms in the outskirts of Yerevan which some engineering magician had forced to include the living room, bedroom, kitchen, dining room and bathroom. I knocked on the door. Another old Armenian, with the classic pensioner look opened the door. I saw more pensioner types inside. "Parev", I said, "I have come to see Sarkis." All the pensioners examined me as if I had just stepped out of a flying saucer. I took this opportunity to examine them as well. I had heard many horror stories, about how these pensioners, after spending forty or fifty years of their lives working for the homeland, now ended up carrying the great burden of moving from a communist to a capitalist economy. The communists had taken everything from the homeland, plundered it, destroyed it, polluted it. When it had nothing left to give, they had dropped it like a dead mouse. We had no Marshall Plan, no gold, no oil to help us start from nothing. But we had something that we always had. War and enemies. Enemies who did not even exist as a nation a hundred years ago, and yet they claimed our lands of four thousand years. The pensioners looked at me hoping that I had brought them something from another world. In the communist years they could at least buy bread, clothes, utilities, the basics. Now their monthly pension could not even buy potatoes to eat with their bread. Many of them had college education, teachers, engineers, doctors. But like Sarkis, the past had taken all the rewards and had left them only with sad memories.
The pensioner led me to Sarkis' room. He was asleep, but everyone decided that he must wake up to welcome his guest from America. We hugged each other and cried. "What happened to your apartment, Sarkis jan ?" I asked. "I had to rent the other room to some friends", he answered, "it is impossible to live on my pension alone". I opened the bottle of oghi and took out the loaf of bread that I had brought with me. His eyes lighted up, the Holy Spirit repeated the one thing that It had never failed to do for the Armenians, and their came the words flooding out of the mouth of that very ancient man. "I have been thinking about you", he said. "You and I, thirty years and fifteen thousand miles apart. But what does it matter? I look with your eyes, you speak with my words. We look out of this window, we see Ararat with the eyes of our souls, as one soul, as one spirit, which has looked at Ararat since it was declared to be the point of beginning for everything pure, everything sacred, the new covenant of God with man. What did it matter if we lived without cheese and without heat? We were independent! Gedtse (Long live) our independence. They can't break our backs, because we are harder than our rocks. Indestructible, eternal, omnipresent. Let them leave us alone for twenty years, and you will see what we shall do. I shall see it with you, because I do not intend to go anywhere."
Sarkis searched for his pack of cigarettes, and finally found them under his sheets, but they were all gone. "Not to puff with these words", I thought," must hurt. It must hurt bad. Can't this government do something? Can't they at least give back his cigarettes? This man wants to make a statement, his only statement."
I knew I was going to see that look, into the infinite and beyond. I knew it was coming. But then he remembered that he had been a respectable linguist in his time, and that he must teach this young man another lesson. "Bantoukhd ", he said, "I challenge you to find that word in any language beside Armenian. I will bet you on a pack of cigarettes. My brand. You think the Russians have it, you think the Americans have it, you think the Arabs, the French, the Chinese have it? A pack of cigarettes, tsavt danem , my brand only!" "Sarkis jan ", I said, "now you are going to tell me this word sums up our whole history, I know, that's where you are taking me!" "Now you know! Our whole history, yes our whole history; now you know! A bantoukhd is not only an Armenian who lives far from his land. There are many Armenians for whom their home is where they were born. A bantoukhd is an Armenian who knows what garod is, because he carries it like a blade under his skin which reminds him with every move where his true home is. Where he belongs. A "bantoukhd " is the Armenian for whom being anything but an Armenian is impossible. Our bantoukhds die when they are transplanted, and they feel transplanted even when they are born on foreign soil. You have been dying. You have been bleeding. I see it in your face. Tsavt danem . You have been dying."
My eyes went up past the clouds, past the peak of Ararat, where I found that question mark. The one which had no answer. The one that had been there from the beginning, next to the rainbow of the covenant. It was not Abraham with whom God made his first covenant, it was Noah, the first Armenian, the first dweller of the Araratian plain. And every time God forgot him, the Armenian searched the skies looking for that rainbow but found nothing but a question mark. But he still looked for it in the same place where the rainbow was supposed to be, because he believed that as long as there was a question, there was hope for an answer, and that the most terrible thing was to stop asking the question, to stop searching for the rainbow. The bantoukhd was the Armenian who never stopped asking the question, who never stopped searching for the rainbow.
I finally knew I was home.
______________
March 1996
Ontario, California
Feedback/Comments: The email address of Shant Norashkharian is:
MASSISSAR@AOL.COM
ARI (ARMENIAN REFORM INSURGENCE)