Philip Marsden - The Crossing Place - A Journey among the Armenians

But he had resisted going to Turkey. Someday he would, but for the moment, well, Armenians are not welcome. I tried to describe for him Lake Van and its high, blue light and the mountains around it. He sighed and shook his head; it was a world away from here.

Hagop’s grandfather had been seven when he’d seen Lake Van for the last time. The Turkish zaptieh came to the village and drove them all out. Those who weren’t shot at once were marched down from the mountains towards the desert. Twenty-five of his family left; only he and a cousin survived. The old man never spoke of these things. But shortly before he died he sat young Hagop at his feet and calmly told him everything.

The village was not big. There’d been a fountain in the square where the horses drank and sometimes water from the trough would slop over into the square. The people gathered at the fountain before the march. He remembered then how silent the older marchers were and the shouts of the zaptieh. He remembered them taking his sister, and the woman who wandered off into the desert with the guards running after her and shouting, ‘Come back! Where are you going?’ and she saying simply, ‘I am going to the funeral of God.’ He recalled the thirst of those dry regions of southern Anatolia; the marches followed the old road beside the river but they could not drink. His brother cried and begged for water and his mother scooped a cupful from the imprint of a donkey’s hoof. A day later the boy died; his mother was dead within a week.

Hagop’s grandfather and his surviving cousin had somehow reached one of Aleppo’s orphanages. From there they moved to Beirut. They both married at about the same time orphaned girls from the same region around Van. But for his cousin the weight of what they had been through overwhelmed him. With his wife expecting their first child, and the next generation ensured, he hanged himself.

Hagop’s father meanwhile built up a business in Beirut retailing European clothes and again had one child, a son. Hagop himself grew up to an easy life. He was bright, indulged by his father and exposed to all the temptations of Beirut in the late 1960s. Studying at the American University he became involved in the lucrative fringes of Beiruti commerce. Within a few years he was running a dubious venture trading antiquities. The war stifled that operation, but soon all sorts of other things were passing through the crumbling capital: raw opium, guns, hashish from the Bekaa valley.

Hagop was drawn in by it. His business spun higher; the possibilities seemed limitless. But he began to make mistakes and for six months fretted in an Egyptian jail convicted of currency smuggling. Then he began to dip into his own bags.

One night in northern Iraq, in the town of Mosul, he stepped on to the flat roof of an apartment block. It was a hot night and he was twitchy and wide-eyed from months of cocaine use. He stood on the parapet and saw the edges of the night flashing with orange. Part of him knew these were the well-head fires of the desert oil stations, but as he watched them, they grew, ringing his own horizons so that he could no longer move. He thought he was in Hell. All that his grandfather had told him came back. He saw the Turkish zaptieh riding beside the convoy. He felt his throat parched and saw the damp imprint of the donkey’s hoof. He felt his tongue fur up and stick in his mouth. His face flushed with heat. When he looked down and saw his own skin peeling, he tore off his shirt and ran inside. Drinking from a bottle of water, he had hallucinations of a quite different kind: the village near Van with his young grandfather squatting in the shade of a walnut tree, splashing in the fountain’s overspill.

‘That was worse than the flames,’ said Hagop. ‘I realized then what it was to be Armenian. That village I saw is now always with me.’

Thereafter Hagop was a different man; he became a committed Armenian. He started to study music seriously and combined it with his other resolution – to live in Armenia, Soviet Armenia. He gained a place at the Conservatoire in Yerevan. That was two years ago.

He lit another cigarette and looked at me darkly. ‘Let me tell you about Armenia. Great Armenia! When I first arrived in Yerevan, I couldn’t believe it. Armenians in an Armenian city, in the shadow of Ararat. I got involved in everything – political meetings, the arts. I spoke to the composers and the poets and read many books of Armenian history. I even started to write an opera based on the court of the Bagratids at Ani. I became a “Good Armenian”. But after a while something changed.’

Hagop was there when they started to kick against Moscow. Yerevan became charged with the idea of change; intellectuals saw the hold of the Kremlin weakening. At last they could speak out. But the new climate had its darker side: liberalism belied anarchy, nationalism became a by-word for banditry. Guns fell into the wrong hands and decades of bitterness and frustration spilled over in peculiar ways.

Late one October night Hagop was walking home through Yerevan. A car pulled up and the rear door opened. Two Armenians climbed out and bundled him into the car. They pressed the muzzle of a Kalashnikov to his cheek and drove him up to the mountains. There they forced him to kneel and to clear the rocks from a small patch of ground.

‘Now, dig a grave!’

For three hours they toyed with him, threatening to shoot him, abandoning him for a while, then returning. Just before dawn they took him down to Yerevan and dumped him outside the railway station.

‘I still don’t know what they wanted. They knew I was from abroad. I offered them dollars – but it wasn’t money. I stayed in Yerevan a few months longer, but after that night, things were not the same. If you reach Armenia, be careful.’

‘And are you still a “Good Armenian”?’

He smiled for the first time. ‘I’ve no idea. But I am certainly more Armenian.’

When I left Hagop it was almost dark. For some time I wandered, half lost, through the narrow streets around the souk. Not for the first time I felt numb and baffled by Armenia. I was haunted by the image of a flame and the Armenians spinning round it like moths; like Hagop I now felt by turns drawn in and repelled by it. At the end of the evening I returned to the gate of the Armenian compound. I rang the bell but there was no response. I called and threw pebbles at the guard’s window. Nothing. I was tired and distracted and abandoned myself to going into the city centre, and the hotels I had been warned against.

Two of them turned me away when they saw my passport. In a third they grunted and gave me a room. I lay on the bed and idly watched the cockroaches pad across the wall. In my fatigue they became allied tanks in the Iraqi desert …

I woke from a sweaty dream in which Palestinian guerrillas were kicking down the door. I took off my shirt and saw with some alarm the Hebrew letters of its label. I’d bought the shirt in a department store in West Jerusalem. All the anxiety of the past few days spilled over. Convinced I’d be taken for a Mossad agent, I pulled out the label and cut at it until the patterns of the letters were no more than formless shreds of cotton on the floor.

The following morning I took a bus to Aleppo and saw again the wide-open face of Syria. Between the bunched-up chaos of Damascus and Aleppo the horizons fell to a flat, featureless desert. The gates had closed on the hubbub of the souk, the everyday mayhem of Arab towns, and the world was suddenly still and quiet. I thought of the silence two years ago at Shadaddie and the dark silence of the cave, and before that the silence of the hills around the plain of Kharput. Silence was the seal on the Armenian massacres: Turkish silence, Armenian silence, desert silence.