Translated from the Armenian by Shant Norashkharian.
Fine. What could be done now...?
Kiazim Garabekir pasha - the commander of the Turks - had proposed very hard conditions for a cease-fire agreement. The military occupation of Alexandropol's fortress and station, the withdrawal of Armenian troops fifteen kilometers from the line of the Arpacha river and also, the occupation of the land within nine kilometers from the city of Alexandropol.
...Where did he come from? There was Beronian.
Snow covered everywhere and it seemed that the light from the snow made Beronian's body taller. He wore a bright red scarf around his neck, a light brown coat which looked very long and very strange and yellow boots.
His eyes were swollen and hanging out, his nose had become red and his mouth was constantly moving, as if he was chewing something.
"Beronian, where have you been...?"
"That's not the issue; the issue is that they have accepted the terms of the cease- fire. Brother, do you understand what I am saying? They accepted the terms of the cease-fire...I knew that it would end this way, and I said it...But who would listen...?
"Yes, it is terrible! Tell me, where did you buy your coat...?"
"At the bazaar in Tbilisi. It is English...Whoever has anything is selling it...No, do you understand...? We came and fell in this situation...One must see what is happening on all the roads...In this snow and wind, one person is escaping after another...they sink in the snow, in the mud, freeze and die..."
"And why are your boots yellow...?"
"Look at what I am telling you, and what you are answering...They are yellow, because that's the fashion in France; that's what they say...I am an artist, I like new fashions...Let them say what they want, there is no salvation without the Bolsheviks..."
"What are you saying...?"
"I say there is no other salvation. What? You want the Turks to come and become our masters? You want that we end up like the Armenians in Turkey...? The Bolsheviks after all are Russian, and with the Russians we have gone along for so many years, and we still will...Really, I used to say...No, the Americans will come...They came, we saw...Gars fell, Alexandrapol fell...My uncle with his whole family is there, and I myself am from there as well...If Gars is gone, Alexandrapol is gone, what is left? On top of Ararat we were to raise our tricolor flag, but it turns out that Ararat, with its slippers in its hands, is escaping barefoot...There, look, it is here now and then it is not..."
"And on the currency you were printing Ararat."
"What currency?"
"The ones that you were printing."
"I left long ago; they have replaced me with someone else. Oh, don't let me forget! I had gone to Batum for my cotton business and a Russian woman, who had heard that I knew you, had come to ask about you..."
"A Russian woman...?"
"Redhead, beautiful. You are not being good...! I understood what it was about and convinced her not to come to Armenia. She wanted to come by all means..."
"I don't remember."
"Don't say those lies; we are not children...! My God, my God, what will happen now? Captain Herian, I tell you, we are dancing on a volcano. The tragedy is that we don't have enough men and generally...Take me, for instance, I am an actor, but look at what I do: I print money, sell cotton...Really I don't understand...! My aunt and her children are also there..."
"We ought to do what we have to do and..."
Herian raised his hands just like Miss Butaghian had raised her hands, and becoming aware of that, remained with his mouth open.
Beronian looked at him surprised, put his head back and laughed loudly. In the cold air the laughter resonated.
"What are you laughing about...?"
"Why not, let us laugh a little...Yes, what was I saying...? Therefore it is so, Captain Herian, therefore it is so. Business is very bad, very bad... You must know what we went through these last couple of years...Sour, bitter, poisonous years filled with ghosts...Heroic battles, enormous effort to earn the right to live, endless victims...No other people could give more in these conditions...We thought we had reached our goal. We had gathered our misery, our refugees, our wounds, our malaria, our typhoid, our burned houses, our huts, our hearths, our two pairs of steam engines and ten pairs of worn-out wagons, our magnificent cold seasons, our glorious mountains, our rocks, our naked and barren deserts and we had said: 'This is ours! With that we are content, let them leave us alone and we will rebuild everything...No, they don't even want us to have that..."
"It's amazing..."
"The truth is that, they fear us...All our neighbors fear us...What are we? A few hundred thousand people, yet they are millions. Our country is ruined and poor, yet there countries are full of mines and all kinds of wealth. They all know; our troops don't even have shoes to wear in the freezing snowstorms; they have no arms, no clothes, no provisions...Yet look, they fear us."
When he was speaking, Beronian's scarf was flying on top of the snow like a flame. He was hitting his foot against the ground as the yellow boots glowed as if they were burning. His eyes were shining.
"You say they fear us", Herian wanted to object.
"Don't you understand?" exclaimed Beronian, "They know very well, that misery in the hands of a stubborn people like us is a terrible weapon...During the time of Peter the Great this world was almost emptied; the Persians and the Turks had destroyed everything, had burnt everything. The population was deported by force. In the abandoned and ruined temple of Echmiadzin there was not even one lighted lantern. The crosses and plates of the altar were taken to the houses of the khans. There was no Armenian. Today, even in present day Armenia and the Caucasus, there are two and a half million. The Armenians came, armed themselves, fought, rebuilt and multiplied...They know, that an independent Armenia would become an object of envy in twenty years...They know, that its desolate deserts would turn to wheat fields, its rocks would bring forth houses and sculpture, its poverty would be transformed through songs and novels to a great culture, and out of the countless bones of its victims it would prepare terrible weapons...They know and they fear."
"I don't understand; a while ago you were saying that without the Bolsheviks there is no salvation..."
"Brother, what can I do? I was saying, well...I was saying, that since we have come to this day, if our forces are not adequate to push the enemy back, the best is to come to an understanding with the Russians. First and foremost, Lenin has declared that our independence will be respected, and the rest is not important...They talk about a Communist system...and let there be a Communist system...We are a poor, working people, we don't have wealthy people, we don't have production, we don't have proletariat...If they are coming to divide the lands, to divide the... let them divide...What do we have to lose...? Isn't that so...? Let them push the Turks away and give us some rest, and then we shall see..."
"You're an optimist..."
"Me an optimist...?"
"What else...?"
"Don't you see, I am a man who has fallen in the fire, who is thinking of somehow saving his life...Let us breathe a little, you understand? Let us breathe a little...Let us collect our forces, let us clean our dirt and dust, let us heal our wounds, let us put our arms in order, so that we can begin again...It's already two thousand years, four thousand years, that we constantly begin but never finish...Constantly, constantly..."
With an abrupt move he threw back the edge of his scarf which was falling off his shoulder. At that moment -how did he not see it before- Herian noticed his gloves. Sewn with pieces of fur, fingerless, huge gloves.
Herian remained amazed.
The light yellow color of the fox skin of those gloves was like the color of his boots, and because of that it seemed to him, that if Beronian was standing on two legs, it was simply by chance, and that as soon as he finished talking, he would fall on his four feet and sticking his tail up, half lion half bear, would run swaying from one side to the other.
That picture was immersed in his brain and would not leave him. Beronian's movements, his facial expression, his eyes, his eyebrows, his nose which was meaty and rough, suddenly changed their appearance and chased his imagination.
That seemed to have been sealed on his look, since Beronian looked at him surprised and...
"What's that look in your eyes?" he asked.
"Me...? My eyes...?"
That question and answer was spoken with a half voice, almost secretly. They spoke, they forgot.
Beronian continued:
"This is what I am saying; for thousands of years we have leaned against our mountain sides, like wild beasts, to defend our existence..."
A cold shiver went through Herian's skin.
"Like wild beasts?" he stammered.
"Yes, surely..."
He took a breath noisily.
"Yes, surely...We lived fighting...fighting for every stone...The real Armenian people, who keep and defend our legends, our gods, our spirits, are sitting in their huts until today and waiting...Those true barons and princes - our peasants are barons and princes - come forward only for war; war against nature and war against people...They move a log as if it was the sword of David of Sassoon and the sword as if it was a log. Have you thought about that, Captain Herian? One century comes and follows another, and the enemies are always new; they come out of all corners, mountainous places, plains, valleys...Tamerlane, Jenghis Khan, Arabs, Tatars, Turks, Afghans, Persians, Lezgins...They come and ruin, burn, destroy and leave. Yet the Armenian people, being sand with sand and rock with rock, sit waiting. They sit waiting for that day of magnificent transformation, when people's souls will be filled with light, when the brave of Ararat and its spirits will crush their chains and yelling with sounds of joy will come down to the fields, when our legends will turn to blood and flesh and the Armenian will wear his crown of sun..."
Herian listened with astonishment.
"We say we are Armenians!" exclaimed Beronian, "anyone who comes and goes says he is Armenian, but what is an Armenian? They themselves don't know...Being an Armenian is a complex and difficult thing...They think it is just a name, a situation, a coincidence, and they drag and pull their 'Armenianness' like rags..."
He laughed angrily.
"Let me tell you! Being Armenian is something cruel and heroic. It is a destiny and a message. An imperative message which has come from the depth of centuries...Yes! That! We are pioneers; fighting pioneers of light and darkness from the beginning of life, burdened with great responsibilities...Yet they have come with ideas taken from here and there, things heard from others in mediocre places, and they want to measure and weigh that which is immeasurable and cannot be weighed...They don't understand that what may be true in other places, may not be true here...What can the knife do against the rock...?"
"What kind of things are you saying today...!"
Herian's widened eyes rested on him.
"You know, it has come and filled me up...it's too much, it's just too much...!"
"I understand, how can I not understand?"
At that moment, two men were passing by the street.
One short, square, with small Mongolian eyes, dark face, and the other round, with swollen cheeks, a belly falling out, short arms and red thick neck.
They saw Beronian and stopped.
"There goes our linguistic lexicons" , introduced them Beronian.
They were coming from the market. They each had in one hand a basket full of foods, and in the other a book.
They stopped, put their baskets down, and waited.
"Well, what news?" asked Beronian.
They lowered their heads, looked at the tips of their shoes and sighed together:
"What would you like it to be?" answered the round man (in old Armenian), "it's bad...our midday has been replaced with the darkness of the night..."
He looked at the other. The other continued (in old Armenian):
"Like beasts the pagan nation...is roaring...roaring...what was it...?"
He looked at the other. The other continued (in old Armenian):
"They roared...darn it, I forgot also...! whatever..."
They lowered their heads again, and being content with their knowledge, they smiled.
"Where was that from?" asked Beronian.
"Arisdages Lasdivertsi", the scientists answered with a full mouth.
"There, always the same story", said Herian, even though he had not understood the ancient Armenian. "That Lasditsetsi said it very well..."
"Las-di-vert-si", they corrected him.
They smiled.
"Anyway", asked Beronian, "that's not the issue; the issue is how shall we come out of this situation...?"
The scientists raised their shoulders up and remained that way.
They took the baskets, they said 'so long' and left.
Beronian was disappointed.
"Bags of words and quotes", he said, looking after them. "They read a book and urinate an article...They came, preached some psalms like a priest and left." Let's leave that! What about you, are you living in the ship...?"
"Yes!"
"I want to come and see. Oh, I don't want to forget, I have brought with me two bottles of fine oghi...something so special...We just need to come up with some food..."
"As for that, unfortunately..."
"I know. Wait let us see; there is pickled cucumber, canned meat, bread...There's no seafood...I had brought a few fish with me from Tbilisi, but they ate them on the way...Ah, when I think of the things I saw on my way back, my hair stands up...No, really, what will happen, what will happen...? Well then, Captain Herian, so long...I will come for sure..."
Putting his huge feet crookedly on the ground, he quickly went away.
Herian stared after him.
No, he was walking like a human being...