The Doves of Ohanavank (6 page)

Sumaya told me once that she had long stopped wanting to go home, and that my desire to return reminded her of when she still missed home. “I now miss the days when I used to miss home,” she said. “There’s something sweet about missing home. It gives one hope, and I’ve lost that now.” That touched me deeply then and I felt close to her for opening up to me like that. But I also swore then that I’d never get to that point, I’d never stop missing home.

But missing home is one thing and being able to return an entirely different thing. Sumaya was right. It is easy and sweet to miss home when
you’re away. And it gives you hope, because you constantly count on the nostalgia, no matter how painful, to drive you to freedom. Without the nostalgia, hope is lost because you no longer have something to look forward to. But all the missing, the pining, the obsession, and the life sustaining hope is lost the minute you return. It’s done. You’re back, against all odds, having conquered incredible obstacles, having beaten people a thousand times more powerful than you…and then you ask, now what?

It is difficult in Saralandj. My family never confronts me directly, but there are the silent stares and unspoken questions on my sisters’ and brothers’ faces. Village gossip can be ruthless. And although the gossip is about me, the malicious tales deliberately reach my brothers and sisters, hurting them, as much if not more, than me.

There is a difference between the solitude that I enjoy and the loneliness from which I suffer. The loneliness is anchored in hiding the truth, in the fear of being rejected, in the inability to share my story with a single soul who can relate to it. I have known girls who could not handle that kind of loneliness. It pushed them into such severe depression that they were unable to have any social interaction. In the most severe cases they became suicidal.

Soon after I found this place, I met a girl on the bus coming home one night. She is my age, and lives in one of the buildings around here. We take the same bus from center city Yerevan, to the same bus stop. After seeing each other a few times on the bus, we started talking. We were both careful and reserved at first, starting with a simple nod the second time we saw each other, then a smile and a hello, and then taking a seat next to each other and striking up a conversation.

Her name is Anna, and she is from a village in the Lori region in the North. A year ago, when she was seventeen, her parents agreed to marry her off to a man in his thirties from a nearby town. She says she was horrified, because she did not like his demeanor, but had no say in the matter. Soon after they were married, her husband, who used to work in a butcher
shop, lost his job. He tried to earn money by buying foodstuffs from nearby villages and selling to shops in the town, but could not make enough. He started drinking heavily, and asked her to get money from her parents. She went home once for help, but her father refused to give her money. Her mother didn’t have any money herself. Her husband started beating her and telling her how useless she was.

One day, he came home drunk and asked her to come with him. “I’ll take you to see someone,” he said. “Just do whatever he tells you.” He dropped her in front of a house in the outskirts of town, where a man was waiting for her. They went in the house, and it turned out that the man expected to have sex with her, because he had already paid her husband for it. Anna was horrified and tried to run away, but the man grabbed her and raped her. “I paid your pimp a lot of money for you,” he kept yelling.

Her husband was waiting for her when she came out. She refused to get back in the car with him. She was shaking with shame and anger, but he was acting as if nothing unusual happened. “Since you cannot earn money any other way, this is what you’ll do from now on,” he told her. “Get in the car right now!” Anna refused, and started screaming, threatening to tell the police what had just happened. She screamed so loud that her husband, wanting to avoid attention, drove away. “Fine, walk home!” He yelled as he left her.

Anna did not walk home. She walked to the bus stop and caught the last bus to her village. She went home, but her father refused to accept her. “Go back to your husband,” he said. “Married girls don’t run away from home like mad dogs.”

I cannot imagine how any father can treat his daughter in that manner. Anna spent that night with her aunt. The next morning she borrowed some money from her and took the bus to Yerevan. Her aunt arranged for her to get in touch with her sister-in-law, and she found a job as a sales girl in a women’s clothing store. Her husband found out that she was in Yerevan, but could not find her. He visited the aunt’s sister-in-law, who denied having seen her. A month later Anna moved to a room like mine, a few buildings down the road from me.

Now Anna lives in constant fear. Her husband can show up anytime and force her to return. No one can stop him from abusing her if he finds her—neither her family nor the police. She believes the only reason he has
not found her yet is his fear that she’ll tell the police the story of how he sold her for sex. She uses a different last name to rent her place and at work.

Anna’s story has made me realize how lucky I am and how great my own family really is. My father would never have treated any of his daughters like hers treated her. My sisters and brothers have accepted me in spite of the stigma I carry. I have heard stories of angry brothers who slit their sister’s throat when they found out that she had worked as a prostitute; that is a matter of family honor in some of our villages. I have not faced any of these threats. I have been welcomed.

And yet I cannot accept their kindness. I often find it crueler than outright rejection. It gives me no room for retaliation, for escape. It gives no justification for my being in Yerevan, rather than at home. No one asked me to leave; they all asked me to stay.

It has always been easier for me to deal with those who have wronged me than with those who have been kind. It is not easy to reject kindness.

My father used to say that there is a pathway between hearts. “Wisdom is taught by love,” he’d say, “that’s why it cannot be taught in schools. Wisdom gets transferred through that pathway.” I was young then, maybe twelve or thirteen, and he would look at my baffled face, kiss my forehead, and add: “Lara, the pathway between hearts is real; it can be very busy with traffic. One day you’ll understand. When you do, do not turn a deaf ear to it. Right now, don’t you feel a pathway from my heart to yours?” I would throw my arms around his neck and hold on to him. He was so real, so solid, and so eternal…my father would never have told me to go back to an abusive husband.

I worry about Avo the most. I know he is struggling with the ‘family honor’ thing, even though he won’t say a word about it to me. Deep inside he knows where I’ve been and what I’ve done; of course, not any of the details—that would certainly drive him off the edge. But he knows the basics. He knows, and yet he still calls me “
Kurig
,” sister. He hugs me and acts in deference whenever I’m around; and all that anger in him, which sometimes explodes and is enough to blow up our entire village, is never directed at me, even though I know it is about me, it is
because
of me.

I used to see Avo in my dreams when I was in Dubai. He would appear angry and old, and he would always seem rushed and distracted. We would be somewhere in the fields of Saralandj. He would come and say, “
Kurig jan
, Mama is very ill,” and then he would disappear. These were scary dreams; I
would wake up in a cold sweat, trembling. What is amazing to me is that now, in real life, he looks like he did in my dreams. This is even scarier than the dreams.

I look at my older sister Martha and see how happy she is. She still has the old happiness that I had before my abduction. Her husband Ruben is kind and decent. Their baby daughter is a delight. They live a hard and difficult life, in primitive conditions. The work that Martha does in a day is more than women in much of the world do in a week. But she is happy. She loves life, and that love radiates from her face, through her smile, even from her tired eyes at the end of a long day. My other sisters have the same joy of life, in spite of their miserable living conditions. Only Arpi remains withdrawn and quiet, burying herself every night in books that she brings home from the Aparan Public Library. But melancholy is her nature; it is not unhappiness.

My sisters’ happiness is what I tried to come back to. I remember in Moscow when Anastasia was trying to explain to me that what we did was not so bad, that I could be big in that business, and how jovial and happy she looked all the time. I remember fighting her, resisting even my own inner curiosity to understand her joy, I remember thinking, “I want the happiness I left behind, not yours.”

The question that I don’t want to face now is whether I
cannot
have that happiness back, or I no longer
want
it back. It is much easier to believe that I cannot have it back; that takes the moral burden away from me and puts it on something else. That would be very convenient, if it were true. But the demon that haunts me every day is this question: What if I no longer want it back? What if I have outgrown all this?

Anna and I have become friends. Some evenings, after she leaves work, we go out and walk for hours in Yerevan, in and around Republic Square, up Abovian Street and Mashtots Street, by the Monument, and once in a while on Northern Avenue, which neither of us likes. It is a short stretch of pedestrian promenade between the Opera and the National Art Gallery, and it is the most artificial and superficial part of Yerevan. It is a new development, boasting the most expensive real estate, and showing off stores of the biggest names in fashion in the world. It is not part of Armenia. But Anna and I walk there sometimes anyway, just to see, to compare, to listen to the street musicians performing, and, once in a while, to indulge and have a cup of coffee in one of the coffee shops for a price that would exceed
Diqin Alice’s monthly grocery bill. It does not matter where we go. I like her, even though I have not yet told her my story.

One night I invite her to my room and read her Daniel Varujan’s poems. She is amazed at the language, the thought, the strength of emotion. She asks me to read over and over the first verse of the poem,
“To The Dead Gods.”

Under a cross glorified by blood
,

Whose arms drip sorrow over humanity at large

I, defeated, mourn your death through the bitter heart of my Art
,

Oh Pagan Gods…

Thought is dead, and Nature bleeds

Only boredom survives, ornate with its crown of thorns…

Man has fallen under the giant heel

Of a Hebrew God, deaf and still…

I am surprised that Anna is so taken by that verse. Christianity is not as big in Armenia today as it was historically. Religion was banned during the Soviet rule. But Armenia was the first country in the world to adopt Christianity as the state religion, back in 301 A.D. Edik says for several centuries Armenians took the Christian teachings literally, especially teachings like turn the other cheek and love your enemy. So they lost everything to invading armies. He says that is the context in which Varujan’s
Pagan Songs
should be understood.

Anna knows nothing about all that, and yet she memorized that verse. Varujan is intense. I guess it is that intensity that is so appealing to Anna. I make a note to introduce her to
Khev Gago
one day. He is intensity personified, even though often detached. His intensity is his own, unto his own. Edik, on the other hand, is intensity personified and
connected
. His intensity is for all. I’ll introduce her to both, because I’ve made up my mind to befriend Anna fully. I probably can help her; I have a feeling that one day she will need my help. And I think it is possible to build a pathway from my heart to hers.

Chapter Six

Y
uri is frustrated as he drives back to Yerevan. He has spent the entire day in unproductive meetings with a couple of Ayvazian’s henchmen in Aparan, who he suspects are now on the payroll of another oligarch and feel no need to cooperate with him. He gets the feeling that they are taking the time to talk to him in order to record his questions, and that those questions will one day come back to haunt him. Ayvazian’s influence in this region is lost, and it is not clear to whom.

He passes through Ashtarak, the capital of the region and
Khev Gago’
s hometown, wondering whether he should stop for a bite. It has been over eight hours since he’s eaten, even though he’s had countless cups of coffee. Aside from the two former employees of Ayvazian, he’s gone to see the head of the Aparan post office, an elderly, soft-spoken and docile man named Artiom, who, around two years ago was Samvel Galian’s boss, when Galian worked at the post office for $25 per month. The postman had no light to shed on either the Galians or on Ayvazian; he sounded as though he descended to Aparan from outer space yesterday. Of course Yuri knows better, because the money transfers to the
Galians were made through the post office, but he keeps his mouth shut. In this deadly game, it is as important to understand the lies and the liars as the truth, because the lies, if one understands them, can often reveal more than the truth.