Translated from the Armenian by Shant Norashkharian.
Beronian had come to the ship looking formal and sad. He had brought some oghi and foods.
"In the morning, at daybreak, I shall leave here to go to the battlefield...Now let us sit in this virtual palace of your dreams, on this dreamy silhouetted ship standing on top of adversities, and let us drink in peace..."
"You speak with a high style...What is it? Have you come from Istanbul...?"
"Have you noticed? Every time things go bad, so to speak, and there is nothing left to say, Armenians speak with a high style...Let's leave that! At exactly four o'clock, a car will come to pick me up. The night is ours; I am in no mood to sleep; even if I were, I could not close my eyes..."
"You're going to the battlefield...?"
"Yes! I am taking money on behalf of the Finance Ministry etc."
"I don't understand; they said a cease-fire was reached."
"At the last moment the Turks changed their minds and declared that the terms were unacceptable. They had heard that the League Of Nations had refused to accept Armenia and Georgia as members, not to get under the obligation of coming to the aid of those nations, and the Turks seeing that, have imposed such conditions that what remains for us is to die with honor and nothing else..."
"The League Of Nations...what humanity...!"
"There is no humanity, there are only wolves..."
Beronian looked outside.
"There is no humanity", he repeated. There is this thick, starless, dark night, which has worn rubber shoes and has been going around the world and putting its foot on, crushing, extinguishing everything which looked like light...Look outside, darkness and silence..."
"Where are the other friends...?"
"They should be here soon..."
Soon came Mardiros Ouranian and Stepan Pandouni. They had also brought foods and wine.
When Feodor Bandeleyevich saw the bottles, he combed his hair quickly and took a formal posture. They laid everything on the table and sat down. No one had any appetite. There was no oil in the lantern; they had lighted candles. The cabin was narrow and half dark.
"Such things", sighed Ouranian and fell silent.
Ouranian was a dark, vivacious, hard-bodied man. A doctor. In spite of his university education and the years he had spent in Petersburg, he had remained a peasant. Simple, kind, stubborn, like the peasants of Karabagh, in whose veins runs the blood of old Armenian nobility. He had similar ideas as the Russian Socialist revolutionaries; he sympathized with the federation of nations, terrorism, the philosophy of Pagunin and Mikhaelovski. When he was alone, he would read Garalenko with a loud and strong Armenian recitation, and his eyes filled up with tears.
Stepan Pandouni was a tall, spectacled personality which swayed like a badly planted trunk. He had good teeth and short-sighted eyes. In spite of the tearful literature he created, he loved life and searched for its enjoyment with complete selfishness. He was from a religious school, and like all others from such schools he smelled of incense, even though he always spoke against the clergy.
"Brother, you have filled up the glasses but you're not drinking..."
The only one drinking was the Russian. After his second glass of oghi, he had withdrawn to the corner and his shoulders were shaking. The color of his face had disappeared, his eyes were veiled. Herian had started getting worried about him; he was turning old quickly. He was constantly complaining about his health. He carried a small icon in his pocket; when he was alone, he kissed it and talked with it for hours.
"...You filled them up but you're not drinking..."
"Send that Russian to bed. It's a pity...well, Feodor Bandeleyevich, in that case..."
"Right here, doctor, right here...I don't understand, it squeezes..."
"One day I'll come and examine you well...but now you must sleep..."
"Can you believe it? I sleep and...where do they come from? I don't know...spirits, mobs of spirits...may they be cursed...!"
"You are not alone. We are all surrounded with spirits...chained..."
"Why aren't you drinking, I don't understand...?"
"I neither have the appetite, nor the mood..."
"You said it right, doctor! All of us are surrounded with spirits...evil, cruel spirits; vengeful...no, when one thinks..."
"The spirits are inside us; in the flesh and brains of men...The evil spirit is the spirit of mediocrities..."
"We were not prepared to overcome such events..."
"There is the problem. We were prepared for minor, everyday life...We practiced medicine, taught, practised law; we covered ourselves with the comforter of mediocre places in the party, we got mixed up in clerical, scholastic matters, collected money for the refugees, transported a few arms, organized secret meetings...I am talking about the so-called intellectuals...While the events came so horribly, wildly, radically..."
"Against the diplomat wolves we put forth old schoolmasters."
"At the Berlin Summit, the cunning Jew called Disraeli found that the man facing him was the gullible, glory-seeking Khrimian..."
"We needed a Garibaldi."
"Great events, small people."
"It was the Armenian people only, who remained at their spiritual height. It was them, who bore the weight of the events with magnificent endurance and unforeseen heroism. Any other people, under the blows of such tragedies, would have been pulverized long ago, yet as you see, the canons continue roaring while the Armenian peasant, sticking his chest against the enemy, continues to resist..."
"Let's drink to our people's life..."
"That indeed, let's drink...!"
...The night which was sliding by the ship was getting deeper. From the far vague, restrained thunders were being heard, and by echoing they died like crushing waves near the city borders.
"Beronian, I definitely want to come with you..."
"If there is a place in the car...What about your ship? How can a ship navigate without its captain?"
"The ship is stuck to the rock and won't move. The seas, alas, have gone away and we are navigating over the waves of darkness...You see, I am also speaking in high style...No, you definitely must take me with you..."
"Tomorrow's battle will determine everything. Either we become annihilated, or..."
"No matter what happens, the Russians will come. They have already reached Sevan."
"They are not the Russians, but the Bolsheviks."
"What's the difference...?"
"There's a difference, Pandouni, there's a difference. Of course, it's the same Russian expansionism, which to promote itself must become nourished by others' bodies...Some kind of bestial appetite, which never rests...However, the myths of Tsarist Russia and today's Russia are different. The motives of Tsarist domination, so to speak, were metaphysical; brute force, assimilation, tyranny. Those of the Bolsheviks are different, Robinsonian. Today's Russia is a chaos, and since it realizes that, it is making an effort to organize that chaos. For that reason it is drunk with economics. It is drunk with land, objects, basic things...Life is running by it, escaping, yet it wants to chain it; it wants to seize objects, cultivated lands, the hot water faucet in the kitchen, the piece of soap, and as if it was a supreme ideal, the American razor...And, of course, I exaggerate a little, but that's how it is..."
"I don't understand! In order to reach that goal, why does it want to take us with it...?"
"That is a different matter, Pandouni. That impulse comes from the time of Peter the Great. Russians are afraid of being alone; They are people who escape from themselves...A raging sea unable to find its shores...The most contradictory people that one can imagine...Who knows what the reason is? Perhaps its steppes, monotonous, sad, endless. It searches for something different than itself, the sun, the mountain, the rich vegetation...Also consider that the Russian's imagination is theatrical; he imagines and then believes his imagination...Yesterday it was hitting its arms against the ground, roaring like a wounded beast in the name of noble spiritual values, and today it crushes everything around it, wildly throwing itself right and left, in the name of material values. A third-rate thinker, that Marx; In their imagination he has grown and become the undeniable disciple of truth, while the spirit and the cursed spiritual matters have already been thrown into the wastebasket."
"Who is telling you, that the same will not happen tomorrow with the economy...?"
"There is no doubt, it will happen. In the meantime, what's left for us is to take advantage of that historic break and to heal our wounds..."
"Lenin has said that Armenia needs irrigation, canals, active cultivation of lands...", said Herian.
"Lenin has spoken like Zarathustra."
"Zarathustra...?"
"Yes! The whole moral science of the Zoroastrian religion was founded on work. The ones who went to the heavenly kingdom were those who were good to the earth, who watered it, irrigated it, planted a tree, plowed the field, sowed, reaped. The wheat sower was planting the good, benefiting the development of the Mazdean religion, feeding that religion with as much as the efforts of a hundred men, with a thousand women's breasts, with ten thousand prayers...Ahura Mazda had chosen Zarathustra to shepherd the poor..."
"Interesting..."
"Very much. In India, where the land was rich, blessed with abundant vegetation, the religious mind yearned to make the body disappear, to leave the world, to be liberated from desires and by the means of supernatural science to reach magnificent non-existence. Mitra, having moved to Persia and Armenia, changed its nature. Here nature was poor and inhospitable; fiercely cold, fiercely hot; waterless lands, naked rocks, barren mountains. Man was surrounded by visible and invisible enemies; to overcome them he had to be aware of his surroundings, brave, vivacious. Work-loving, builder. He had to convert the waterless lands to wheat fields, the rocks to buildings, the deserts to forests. From here also come forth the Armenian man's fundamental characteristics, nature-worshiping and affirming."
"It turns out that we are born materialists!" exclaimed Beronian.
"I didn't say that", complained the doctor. It is amazing how little we have researched the development of our spirit...We do not know the history of our gods, of our spiritual wanderings, the history of our searchings...I do not know of any book which speaks of the Armenian spirit; not in general abstract words, empty adjectives, but with deep psychological burrowing. Beronian was speaking of materialism...To be nature-worshipping and affirming - the Greeks were also nature-worshipping and affirmating - that does not mean being materialistic. The materialist subjects himself to matter, he deifies it, but we have dominated matter, and made it serve us. Even our gods have been helping powers rather than oppressing, ordering, punishing, revenging supreme entities. When they have ceased to benefit us, we have left them and created new ones. But I have digressed from the main subject...What were you saying...?"
"We were talking about the Bolsheviks..."
"There! That's what I was saying...One ought to look at the historical classification of things from some height, with birds' eyes...It seems, as it is written in the great book of secrets, that the country of Armenia will be reborn and recreated, otherwise all those sufferings would remain inexplicable...The great drama of that recreation is divided to acts...First act, the horrible tragedy of the Armenian provinces in Turkey. Second act, the concentration of Armenians here, the exodus of the foreign masses, and the unavoidable reality of creating the Armenian Republic by means of heroic battles. Third act, the return of Zarathustra and the physical rebuilding of Armenia. Fourth, the material and spiritual renaissance of the Armenian people and the beginning of a new historical era..."
"How optimistic you are, Mardiros!"
"It is not optimism, it is my conviction. I know one thing; when the body is subjected to surgery, it needs rest to rediscover its energies. We must rediscover ourselves, rebuild ourselves. Isn't that so, Pandouni?"
"No, it's not so! Rebuilding ourselves is possible only spiritually, in the way of free and unrestrained searchings and not as mandated by others..."
"Those are the words of an intellectual", interrupted Beronian, "and they don't correspond to the reality."
"How is that? Are you denying the principle of freedom...? Historical materialism and Mardiros' Zarathustra are simply antiquated, an escape back to twenty centuries ago..."
"First it is necessary to think of the people..."
"People! People! What do we know about the people...?"
"There is the problem...!"
"I am the son of a peasant", said Ouranian, "and I can tell you, that the people will remain undisturbed in their places, as the mountain remains in its place when there is hurricane, blizzard and storm. We do not know the people well; our world and their world, the ways that we feel and they feel are different. I have lived in the village, I know...We have lost that fundamental simplicity, that depth, that connection with nature to which they are dedicated...We are running after time while they stand firmly on the land, letting the hours pass by them...Impatient and nervous, we participate in the events of life with the capacity of the mind while they, comfortable and undisturbed, let those events pass by them and look at people and events from an inner height which is unknown to us. They feel that they are real, as real as the field, the mountain, the sky and the sun. They are permanent and whole and of course, that is the reason why they are unable to express themselves, they stammer, they look with blurry eyes. That look and that inability of self-expression is a great brain which we do not comprehend. In those circumstances, what importance does it have for them that the Bolsheviks are materialists? They will let them pass by as well, as they have let other colossal people and events. They have been, are and will be..."
"Ah, well, you're just talking, my dear doctor. They will come, they will destroy, they will kill...you shall see..."
"You forget that we are forced to choose between two enemies, the Turks or the Bolsheviks..."
"The Turk kills the body, and the Bolshevik kills the soul..."
"That's being gullible; there is no power in the world which can kill the soul..."
"And you think you said something! It's possible to bring a thousand examples..."
"You talk about the soul...but what do we know about the soul...? It comes to existence, develops in the depth of entities, as the sap in the tree, as the juice which is cultivated and enlivened in the heart of the land...The soul is that enormous current which passes under the seas, breaks mountain and rock, and opens secret ways, whose sources are for us as mind-boggling as the causes of the existence of nature, the sun's revolution around the earth, the beginning of life...No! There is no power that is able to kill the soul. It is possible to veil it temporarily, digress its natural flow, but to make it disappear, it is impossible. And if it so happens, that they put obstacles in front of it, they try to strangle it, it will collect itself inside the entities, like dangerous gases which accumulate under the soil and someday everything explodes because of their tremendous pressure, it will explode like a volcano and destroy that in whose name they were trying to strangle it. I am not afraid of new preachings...They come, then they deny them and after all, with the bubbles on their mouths and beating their fists against their chests they repeat that which we now say...This country has always been that way; it has swallowed the enemies, adapted them to its demands, Armenianized them..."
"That is true", said Beronian. That was the Byzantines' big complaint; wherever Armenians came together, everything became Armenianized..."
"Brother!" exclaimed Herian with an irritated voice, "You're talking about all kinds of issues and you're forgetting one thing; what about the problem of our borders...? Without Surmalou, without the lands that we lost, how shall we be able to live...?"
Everyone fell silent worried.
"That, of course, is an important problem", said Beronian, "very important...however, we ought to accept, that most of our misfortunes came from that problem. Everywhere they put pressure on the government; every Armenian wanted that the place where he was born fall within the borders of the Republic.They tied our hands, they exerted moral tyranny upon us and, it's possible to say, they forced us into defeat..."
"They acted with partisan mentality rather than with the whole state in mind..."
"That's to be condemned."
"No doubt!" agreed Ouranian. One of the calamities of our century, after the state, is the existence of the so-called parties...The state must be simple administration and not political organizations..."
"There is Pagunin coming out", said Beronian laughing.
"Why only Pagunin? It was in the Bolsheviks' plans to eliminate the state, but it turned out that the world had not yet seen such tyranny..."
"You have changed the subject again. I wanted to talk about the problem of the borders, and you're bringing up Pagunin", complained Herian.
"What do you think, Ouranian?"
"I believe that right now the problem of the borders is secondary. The goal of peoples is culture; and culture is depth and not area. Today, the best organized, the most civilized peoples are the small nations of the Northern countries. Norway is as poor as Armenia, but look...The people who stand in front of dry, dead lands, piles of stones, mountains frozen in the silence of centuries, are forced to make newer and newer inventions to bring those lands to life. To invent means to put the brain to use, to wear out the soul, to make an effort, to conceive, to struggle. To feed the surrounding environment with body and soul; to bring about victories over the passivities of nature and men. That is culture!"
"That is so", said Beronian. "It is necessary to begin from the most elemental things. It is necessary to forget the past, at least temporarily, and to start everything all over with a simple heart and bright eyes."
"That, yes!"
"...There is still one bottle of wine left..."
Feodor Bandeleyevich, who had remained half-asleep the whole time, suddenly opened his eyes, looked around surprised and, shaken by a tormenting thought stood up and said in a begging voice:
" Please! Gentlemen, I want to leave..."
"Whereto like that, Feodor Bandeleyevich?"
"Whereto, I don't know...I know nothing, I know nothing...! I want to leave, I want to take my head and run away...Please! I had a son who had little yellow mustaches, blue eyes, intelligent forehead...When he was a little child, he built ships with pieces of wood. In the fourth grade of the elementary school he was the top student in Mathematics and used to give lessons to his classmates for pay...You see what kind of son was my son...? And now..."
He moved his hopeless hands and his eyes filled with tears.
"My child...had little yellow moustaches...I can't...you understand? I can't...I am leaving..."
He said and sat back in his place.
"He is overwhelmed with emotion...Let him alone, he will rest..."
"Like this, we rest and drink, talking, arguing...Man argues because he fears to think...Isn't that so, by my sun...?"
"Yes, sure..."
"It's true. When one stays quiet for a moment, it is as if someone starts approaching him with rumbling steps...So one starts talking, arguing...Isn't it so?"
"Yes, sure..."
"One really becomes suffocated and unable to scream or call someone...Even the wine does not have an effect; the more you drink, the more aware you become...Sometimes one gets numb, his body gets neutralized; he says 'I am not here'...no! It's hopelessness..."
"Let us leave these sentimentalities..."
"What sentimentality? I am telling you something...!"
"Whatever will happen, let it happen...What can we do...?"
"It is easy to say so...But are we Moslems, to say that all that is written above the same will happen here...?"
"Even if it is written, it is mixed-up...Koran, Bible, Zarathustra..."
"Karl Marx's 'Capital', Lenin's volumes..."
"Let's put joking aside; I would like to know what the Catholicos is thinking at this moment..."
"At this hour the Catholicos is asleep and is not thinking anything..."
"If there is someone who is wandering all over Armenia beaten by grief, it is our neighbor Abovian..."
"Wandering and preparing the second volume of 'Wound Of Armenia'..."
"Well, he has also seen some days..."
"...Golejski's assessor Abovian, on the second of the month of April, near dawn, left his home and never returned..."
"Armenia's darkness swallowed him as well..."
"Brother! What a long night this is...!"
"Let it be long. It's the same, dawn will not bring us joy and laughter."
"This uncertainty is terrible. Every one of us is an Abovian; you were and you are no more..."
"The act changes, the stage decorations change, and you escape the ghosts. Events put new masks on your face, and you're no longer what you thought you were..."
"If you're not that, what are you...?"
"That is a poor philosophy; Man does not think what he is, he is! The Self remains unchanged."
"The Self...?"
"The world is falling apart, and here we are talking about the Self and the I."
"Let him explain."
"Fine, let him explain."
"...Even the wine is gone..."
"That is a very important issue. Everyone struggles for his 'I' and with his 'I'. When he becomes conscious of that 'I' completely, he thinks that he has reached the highest level of individuality. While, in reality, the 'I', like a log fallen into the sea, sways over the waves of events, and the winds pull it and push it right and left, until it reaches and falls on an unknown shore. The consciousness of the Self is different. He who reaches the Self, becomes deeper and whole with it, is already able to look at the 'I' from an inner distance and no matter what changes that 'I' is subjected to, the individual who is anchored firmly in himself, remains unchanged and faithful to his being."
"I didn't understand anything..."
"And who said, that you must definitely understand?"
"I know one thing; if tomorrow a blind bomb falls on us and explodes pieces of our body into the air, then what difference is there whether it is the 'I' or the Self?"
"If that's the case, then no problem exists."
"What time is it?"
"I will get ready in any case."
"Wait, I think I hear a sound..."
"No, nothing can be heard..."
"It seemed to me that I did..."
"There, it's him...!"
"Feodor Bandeleyevich, I will return this evening...Keep your eyes on the ship, I beg you! It is so many days now that the dog has not returned to the ship, who knows where it is wandering? When he comes back, tie that useless thing up...And, generally, Feodor Bandeleyevich, let the devil take it, keep your spirits high, high...!"