I find nothing objectionable in the fact that the young scholar, as may be observed even in my retelling, was flirting a bit with erudition. Later on, scholars began to flirt with illiteracy and achieved in this regard a suspiciously natural effect.
– Fazil Iskander,
’The Story of the Prayer Tree’
(Sandro of Chegem, p. 162)
We were discussing the eternal struggle between age and youth in one of our classes, teenagers wanting to listen to loud music and choose their own friends, parents and teachers wanting very different things (homework to be done, for instance). The book referred to 86 being the average lifespan in some country and Tigran1 piped up: ‘Well in Abkhazia, the eighties are still considered young! Since they live to be over a hundred…’ Words cannot express how satisfying it was to hear a remark in class that was not mandated by a textbook or a mere expression of boredom or laziness. Even if it was in Armenian rather than English.
This chance remark also reminded me of two collections of stories that I’ve been reading: Fazil Iskander’s Sandro of Chegem and The Gospel According to Chegem.2 While not quite the rip-roaring picaresque I had hoped for, the stories had a wry, local-color charm.3 The picture of Caucasian life is very familiar – visiting, drinking, all moderated by tradition – but what I liked best about the interrelated stories is something one doesn’t see much in Armenia: interaction between different ethnic groups. The Abkhaz trick the Georgians and Russians – speaking in Abkhazian to work their conspiracies in plain sight and trick the foolish foreigners – the Georgians do the same to the Russians, and Armenians and Greeks and Turks and Azeris appear with naturalness and a sense of belonging, a nativeness, if you will. The stories are usually quite digressive, particularly in the second volume, and a wide range of personalities intrude on the reader’s notice, if only for a few paragraphs. One of my favorites is the coffee chef, Hakop-Agha, who insists that coffee must be made by burying the jezves in hot sand rather than on a stove.
It all began with Turkish coffee and a bottle of Armenian cognac, and then, well, things went on as usual. During the session Khachik photographed us about ten times from various angles, on one necessary condition, that the prince be at the center of the picture. Sometimes he had the coffee chef Hakop-Agha join us. Here’s a fuller description from the story ‘Uncle Sandro and the Slave Khazarat’:
This tall old man – his face a deep brown, as if cured by the coffee fumes and his long wanderings through the Near East, from where he had been repatriated – would sit down at our table from time to time and turn the conversation toward the Armenians. His fervent Armenian patriotism was touching and comic. From what he said it appeared that the Armenians were a terrible nation because they didn’t want to do anything good for Armenians. His bitter grievances began with Tigran the Second and ended with Tigran Petrosian, who from his point of view had flippantly frittered away the chess crown. This seemingly illiterate old man knew the history of Armenia like the biography of a neighbor down the street. (230)
The passes are probably closed.
We’ve been waiting for the school to be remodeled for a long time. We were supposed, at first, to move in on the first of September 2008; this was quickly adjusted to 1 Sept. 2009. Knowledge day1 came and went and the building was still not ready. The director clenched and fretted in her tiny makeshift office, but the workmen could not or would not hurry things along. The date changed to October first, then November, and finally in December they said, well, maybe in February. But then on the second trucks came ’round to the temporary building2 and all the male teachers and the oldest male students started packing furniture to take over to the remodeled school.
The remodeling was, finally, nearly complete. The school needed to be cleaned, of course, and everyone had a different idea how this cleaning was to be done. Some said the parents should do it; some said the female students; and finally everyone agreed it would be best to hire some women from the town to do it. Which they did, during an impromptu break given by the Ministry of Science & Education due to an outbreak of seasonal flu.3
The new school is large and airy and bright, and almost every subject has its own room.4 I was quite pleased because moving into the new building meant that the foreign language centre5 for which I had written a grant could finally be assembled in some sort of usable form. And the heaters work! Definite cause for celebration and congratulation.
After the last of the teachers’ meetings before the winter break, I brought in a carefully wrapped Armenian translation of Black Garden and gave it to my director to congratulate her on the completion of the remodeling. It’s the first time in eighteen months that I’ve ever seen her look entirely pleased at anything. I’d forgotten to inscribe it, though.6 So the director called me in the next day and made me inscribe it, in Armenian, for her amusement. I had been afraid that she would be offended by the book, as it is not uncritical of Armenia, but she didn’t seem to mind at all, and thought it rather sweet that I would give her a history book, since she is a history ‘specialist’.7
The teacher with whom I regularly worked was a bit worried when she heard that the director wanted to see me so urgently, and when she heard that I had given her a book she wasn’t at first sure why. For Christmas? For New Year’s? When I told her, though, she relaxed and laughed and said that I had շնորհք (shnorhq) which is one of those untranslatable words that means something like aptitude or talent, but also means a gift for doing the right thing at a given moment. Shnorhq and a new English room. It’s been a good year.
The new English room.
More winter is on the way.
Cabbages drying outside an apartment building.
The Vice-director of education at my school saw me taking this picture from her fifth floor apartment. She asked me about it at school the next day: ‘what, don’t people get ready for winter in America?’
PF took this picture looking out over Goris.
The test included an essay question: ‘write about your fall holidays.’. Although I correctly translated ‘vacation’ into ‘holiday’, I forgot to change ‘fall’ into ‘autumn’. One of the students asked about it. Made me think about what a ‘fall holiday’ would be: bungee-jumping – or Halloween.
She’s down on the street, and she says it’s a good bargain. The woman on the second floor shakes her head and makes a sleepy downward swat of the hand to signify disagreement. The woman on the fourth floor shouts down and asks how many there are. The woman on the street flings her right arm upward, generously, praisingly, and says there are enough. A woman on the third floor points out the distant plains to her baby, whose mouth drops open in surprise, allowing her to spoon in some porridge. The baby shakes its head. A child tugs at the curtain next to her and looks down at the street. The baby is distracted into another mouthful.
The woman on the balcony upstairs is crying, low humming moans punctuated by sobs; I can see one of her hands spasmodically grasp the splintery wood of the railing will the other covers her eyes. A second voice croons; it seemed at first just the hum of the rain, but it is a sound of comfort. The hand on to the railing begins to relax.
Just around the corner of the building, in the new sunlight that comes after the sudden brutal summer rain, three boys are playing at the drinking fountain, collecting puddle water in a glass, diluting it at the fountain, and flinging the water at a garage door to form endlessly new patterns that wash away with the next rain. An older brother rounds the corner, shakes his head and says it’s not allowed; he continue on towards the center of town. The boys decide to use a discarded water bottle instead of a glass.
A trailer has brought a car from the Kapan road; it is a Volkswagen, new and silver, but the front is crumpled and three of the tires are flat. It pulls into the driveway of the apartment building, next to the dark Ladas and Zhigulis and pauses. A woman leans out of a third-story window and shouts at one of the boys, who shrugs and continues playing. The trailer backs up, across the almost empty road into the police station compound. Three dogs disagree in the middle of the road, just next to a fan of cigarette butts and other detritus washed out of the gutters by the storm.
When the sun is shining in the morning it is warm enough to drink coffee on the balcony with a book, perhaps something on regional politics, and listen to the swifts cross the sky. I had thought at first they were starlings, because the starlings paused on the wire linking the apartment building to the police station, but after watching them for a few mornings, it seems they are swifts after all. At nine o’clock one can see the last of the schoolchildren running desperately to fifth school, anxious glances darting back to the loitering policemen, or perhaps even further behind to the parent darkening a doorway or window. One can follow the progress of the sun by watching the bedding – mattresses and pillows – move from balcony to balcony, plumply perched on railings, soaking in the sun, from east to south to west.
The journey from the capital to the southern cities has an allegorical feel, especially when leaving through the equinoctial twilight. We speed along the straightaways through the floodplains beneath the summits of unattainability, then slow to twist and turn through the vale of woe, night and snow falling hard through the trees. We rise through a series of switchbacks, spiraling upwards to the pillar of righteousness, the storm growling, then abating reluctantly with each inch we drew closer to our destination.
During this trip I listen to the Enchiridion1 at least once and, depending on the speed of the car and the type of weather, sometimes more than once.
We make the rounds, going from house to office to house to office, from tea to coffee to tea again with fruit and runny syrup. Mostly we talk about the weather. It is a never-ending source of conversation. The weather and health are the sacred fonts of social feeling. One is always cold, or has just caught a cold, or is recovering from having caught a cold. It’s an excellent excuse to practice one’s tenses.
We have winter two times here: once before spring, and then again after spring.
The room is warm and smells of expatriates, a peculiar blend of locally unavailable spices and foreign laundry detergent. There is a pile of completed books by the door, dwarfed by the stacks still unread beneath the window in the opposite wall. I am finishing up a few things I’ve been meaning to do for many months, small projects, minute tidyings, a scribble here and there. I thought I’d lost a handkerchief, but I hadn’t. There is coffee in a thermos and milk – carried 68 km, aseptic packed, from the nearest market that stocks such things – in the fridge, which has been turned on in deference to the unseasonably warm weather.
On Sunday it was warm enough to air the bedding, the sky blue and clear, ice thawing on the roadway. We stacked everything outside in the sun, wool-filled blankets and mattresses fluffed and drooping, feather-filled pillows plumply perched on the balcony railing. We groom the bedding, turning it, rotating it to absorb air and sunshine, the smell of smoke and winter. Toward evening, we bring the bedding back inside, the mattresses softer than ever, the blankets rested and ready for sleep, and everything soaked with soporific freshness.
In the morning we wake to the sound of the neighbor’s two cows walking up the road to pasture. They walk slowly, as though their feet hurt. That’s at about quarter after six. The temptation to stay in bed, rather than venturing into the dismal cold of the room (especially shocking after a night of rain) is great, but overcome. The first person up makes coffee and sits and reads in the warmth of the kitchen (preparing even a small pot of coffee heats the whole room) for a half hour or so, with the kettle on for tea and laundry. In the half-sleep of that time, the pattern on the kitchen rug fascinates, geometric flowers and rectangles with eyes squinted shut.
By seven the water is hot and it’s time for breakfast: an egg boiled or fried (but usually boiled), yesterday’s bread, maybe some cheese or butter or even շոռ1 if we’re lucky. Sometimes we make oatmeal,2 but that hasn’t happened often. After breakfast it’s time for tea: one teabag lasting for cup after cup – saving on sugar and honey, and tea of course, since there’s no milk to make the difference; and we set a small load of laundry to soak in the washroom. Up to this point the morning moves slowly and it seems a small eternity must pass before it’s time to go to work. Around eight, though the family begins to wake and it’s time to put papers in bags and prepare a lunch if needed and put on shoes and socks. Even the neighbors are awake and phalanx upon phalanx of schoolchildren march down the main road, two blocks away – out of sight, but still within hearing. The light tumbles down into the valley through the fog and clouds.
From the balcony.
Though ethnie and nationality might be distinguished in any number of ways – size, attachment to territory, secular versus religious identity, ‘soft’ versus ‘hard’ boundaries – the most fundamental difference is not some ‘objective’ characteristic internal to the group, but rather the discursive universe in which it operates and realizes itself. A modern nationality, with all its familiar qualities and political claims – popular sovereignty, ethnicity as a basis for political independence, and a claim on a particular piece of real estate – are only possible within the modern (roughly post-American revolution)1 discourse of nationalism. Whatever Greeks in the classical period, or Armenians in the fifth century, were, they could not be nations in the same sense as they would be in the age of nationalism. The discourses of politics of earlier times must be understood and respected in their own particularity and not submerged in understandings yet to come.
– Ronald Suny,
(The Revenge of the Past, p. 13)
We had mock language proficiency interviews the other day, just so our instructors could get a better sense of where we were in our language interview and whether they need to panic about our chances of passing the actual language proficiency interview at the end of training.1 The format was simple, the first part being recorded: tell us about yourself, tell us about your host family, tell us about your plans, ask us some questions, do this role-play.
After the formal interview was complete, the interviewers reviewed our errors. Most of my errors were fairly stupid, and I was aware of them when I made them, but there was one rather consistent error that set me thinking: I was leaving off auxiliary verbs. This is not an uncommon learner error, but what troubled me about it was I was completely unaware that I was saying, for instance: ես ուզում իմանալ… (yes uzum imanal…: I want know.)2 instead of ես ուզում եմ իմանալ… (yes uzum em imanal…: I want to know). I am not unaware that the auxiliary is required in certain tenses and if asked to read or listen or write, would notice or include it without fail. So why was it disappearing (or failing to appear) when I spoke? Assimilation is partly to blame, I think, especially in the phrase I used as an example: too many /m/ sounds. Otherwise, I leave it to theorists of language learning to sound clever about my confusion.
Another thing: so at the end of the interview, when the examiner was reviewing my errors, she said to me, ‘I understand that you’re thinking in English and then translating…’ and that got me thinking, because I didn’t think it was quite accurate. I wasn’t thinking in English so much as I had a mess of meaning (apart from language) that I wanted to communicate; the thought itself (or the meaning) was not in any particular language, and when Armenian failed, my brain supplied German,3 and when German failed, only then did my brain revert to English. It felt like I was dipping into my pool of language knowledge to find the means of communication, and due to the limits of what I have been able to learn, was coming back dry, in Armenian at least. Thus if I were asked, ‘what do want to say,’ I would have an English response, not because the original thought was in English but because English was the means by which I was able to express it.4
The family cow ate some noxious weeds and fell and was butchered. The neighbor’s dog ate five of the youngest chicks and was thereafter executed. One chicken wandered into the latrine and drowned. Ten chicks mysteriously died in their box. For the anniversary of a death in the family, they slaughtered a sheep, slitting its throat to the spinal cord, its legs twitching like a dog asleep. The sad-eyed white dog watched with her pups.
In October and November the apples will be as large as a fist and sweet to eat. Now they are the size of cherries and bitter or sour, as chance strikes them. The cherries are sweet from the tree, red and cream colored. The apricots are ripest and juiciest and respond to bruising with increased sweetness. This cannot be said of most things.
The rooster runs across the bare uneven ground towards the barn like a samurai from some black and white film you can half remember seeing, sunlight pooling on his rusty black feathers.
In the kitchen there is hope for another cup of coffee, thick with sugar, and lavash with a hard-boiled egg, yolk apricot-colored, and a pinch of salt.
But the chariot waits outside the church and there is no stay, even for the purple.
There is something outrageous in a person’s misdirecting a traveller who has lost his way and then leaving him to himself in error, yet what is that compared with causing someone to go astray in himself? The lost traveller, after all, has a consolation that the country around him is constantly changing, and with every change is born a new hope of finding a way out. A person who goes astray inwardly has less room for manoeuvre; he soon finds he is going round in a circle from which he cannot escape.1
– Kierkegaard, Either/Or
(but taken from The Seducer’s Diary, p.6).
In Jerusalem, I had spent much of my time among the books of Gulbenkian library, following the loose threads of Armenian history. But the massacres, I put off until the end. What I’d been reluctant to start absorbed me at once; it was that that I had been afraid of. Everything else seemed meaningless when set against the reports of 1915.
Leaving the library after those sessions, I struggled for understanding. I wanted the courtyard outside to look different. I felt dazed and curiously grubby – as though simply by reading about it, I had participated in the obscenity.
Philip Marsden, The Crossing Place, p. 66
ἀρχαιολογία δέ τίς ἐστι περὶ τοῦ ἔθνους τοῦδε τοιαύτη· Ἄρμενος ἐξ Ἀρμενίου πόλεως Θετταλικῆς, ἣ κεῖται μεταξὺ Φερῶν καὶ Λαρίσης ἐπὶ τῇ Βοίβῃ, καθάπερ εἴρηται, συνεστράτευσεν Ἰάσονι εἰς τὴν Ἀρμενίαν· τούτου φασὶν ἐπώνυμον τὴν Ἀρμενίαν οἱ περὶ Κυρσίλον τὸν Φαρσάλιον καὶ Μήδιον τὸν Λαρισαῖον, ἄνδρες συνεστρατευκότες Ἀλεξάνδρῳ· τῶν δὲ μετὰ τοῦ Ἀρμένου τοὺς μὲν τὴν Ἀκιλισηνὴν οἰκῆσαι τὴν ὑπὸ τοῖς Σωφηνοῖς πρότερον οὖσαν, τοὺς δὲ ἐν τῇ Συσπιρίτιδι ἕως τῆς Καλαχηνῆς καὶ τῆς Ἀδιαβηνῆς ἔξω τῶν Ἀρμενιακῶν ὅρων. καὶ τὴν ἐσθῆτα δὲ τὴν Ἀρμενιακὴν Θετταλικήν φασιν, οἷον τοὺς βαθεῖς χιτῶνας οὓς καλοῦσιν Θετταλικοὺς ἐν ταῖς τραγῳδίαις, καὶ ζωννύουσι περὶ τὰ στήθη καὶ ἐφαπτίδας, ὡς καὶ τῶν τραγῳδῶν μιμησαμένων τοὺς Θετταλούς· ἔδει μὲν γὰρ αὐτοῖς ἐπιθέτου κόσμου τοιούτου τινός, οἱ δὲ Θετταλοὶ μάλιστα βαθυστολοῦντες, ὡς εἰκός, διὰ τὸ πάντων εἶναι Ἑλλήνων βορειοτάτους καὶ ψυχροτάτους νέμεσθαι τόπους ἐπιτηδειοτάτην παρέσχοντο μίμησιν τῇ τῶν ὑποκριτῶν διασκευῇ ἐν τοῖς ἀναπλάσμασιν· καὶ τὸν τῆς ἱππικῆς ζῆλόν φασιν εἶναι Θετταλικὸν καὶ τούτοις ὁμοίως καὶ Μήδοις. τὴν δὲ Ἰάσονος στρατείαν καὶ τὰ Ἰασόνια μαρτυρεῖ, ὧν τινα οἱ δυνάσται κατεσκεύασαν παραπλησίως ὥσπερ τὸν ἐν Ἀβδήροις νεὼν τοῦ Ἰάσονος Παρμενίων.
– Strabo, Geography, 11.14.121
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ego hoc feci mm–mmx
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