Gilgamesh

by Joan London

  ‘Yes,’ said Hagop, turning to look out the back window. ‘And they are going to watch you all the way.’

  They were driving down tree-lined avenues, past houses of faded stucco with vine-entwined balconies and shutters. It looked like a sleepy seaside town.

  So this was the Caucasus. By some fluke or magic, she, Edith Clark, had slipped across the line, left the safety of the pink territory and crossed over into the vast unknown green.

  ‘There’s an Armenian proverb, do you know it?’ Hagop was saying. ‘He crossed the sea safely but was drowned in a brook. You must understand about these parts. Someone will always be watching.’

  In the train from Batum to Tiflis, two men in hats and overcoats came to take up occupation in their compartment. They each opened a newspaper, causing the other passengers to squeeze up. From time to time the men looked up and pretended to peer out the window, their eyes running across faces with exaggerated casualness. They were dark and moustachioed like all the men here, but less anxious, more solid, better dressed. When they coughed or crossed their legs the whole compartment stiffened. In the end they fell asleep like everybody else, their necks lurching, their thick hands open on their crumpled newspapers, their hats knocked askew over anonymous, unloveable faces.

  ‘Are they not charming, Edith, the gentlemen of the NKVD? And so hardworking. But today we’ll give them a little holiday.’ They had been the first to leave the train in Tiflis and now they were rushing in a taxi through dark squares and cobbled roads in the old quarter of the city to a guesthouse run by Hagop’s friend. Tiflis was a favourite city of his, he said. Edith glimpsed wooden balconied houses tumbling down a cliff and high above the predawn mist a white church with a pointed roof like a witch’s hat. She heard a rooster crow as she and Jim fell asleep in a high bed with pillows like bolsters. It was sunset, and the rooster was crowing again when they woke. Up a dark stairway, in the kitchen, a buxom woman in high heels, with a dead white face, snub nose and shock of raven-black dyed hair, was laying food out energetically on the table. Plates of sliced fatty sausage, a pink vinegary salad, boiled eggs, saucers of jam and flat stale bread. A kettle boiled and there was tea, and milk for Jim. Her name was Dodie and she kept laughing and touching Hagop’s arm as she served him pale red Georgian wine.

  Across the table Hagop handed Edith a slip of paper written in Armenian. ‘An address in Yerevan. An apartment of a friend, a wonderful old friend. She is almost blind. She needs somebody to help her. You can stay with her. I live in the apartment next door. I am married, did I tell you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It is a marriage of convenience.’ He lit a cigarette. Dodie squeezed his shoulders as she passed.

  ‘It is better now if we do not travel together,’ he said in the taxi back to the station. ‘In Yerevan it is better if we do not go together to the apartments. Let the NKVD wonder where you are living for a little while at least.’ He put a few roubles into Edith’s hand. ‘For your taxi ride in Yerevan.’ When she tried to hand them back, he closed her fingers over them. ‘No no, you must take the taxi straight from the train. Do not try to change money. Give the driver the written address. There will be time later for you to pay me back.’

  No sooner had she and Jim settled down into their seat than a man let himself into the compartment, tow-headed with high cheekbones and flattened Slavonic features. Once again the other passengers sank into sullen reverie. There was something counterfeit about his coughs, his absorption in his newspaper, as if he were only pretending to be human. As night came on he slept, and Edith gathered up Jim and the Globite and tiptoed out. She found a place in a compartment at the furthest end of the train, between slumped and snoring bodies. Jim sprawled on her lap, awake but silent, as if he too realised this was the last lap. She caught his eyes on her, studying her face. He looked thinner, she thought with a pang, and older, flushed from a rash on his cheeks, perhaps from all the tears he had shed on this journey. Perhaps, in a way that was too deep yet to trace, it was his tears that had saved them? But they were not saved yet. She sat up straight, stiff with tiredness, and Jim slept. As the train whistled and rocked across the dark mountains into Armenia, she fancied for a moment that it was she who powered it, her will, her energy, her luck, and, like the driver, she must stay awake.

  ARMENIA

  Everybody said that war was coming, it was only a matter of days.

  Zakian Street was short and quiet, lined on one side by five-storey apartment blocks and on the other by a grove of slender yellowing poplars, the Twenty-Six Commissars Park. At night it was so still you could hear the clock strike a few blocks away in Lenin Square. At six when the early morning traffic started up it seemed to set the air moving. Curtains stirred at the balconies. Light flickered in the long windows. In Tati’s room, Edith woke.

  She had trained herself to rise at once. She dressed where she stood, in the clothes she had taken off the night before. With minute turns of the key she let herself out and left the tiny boy and the old woman in their separate worlds of sleep. She shut the door on the smell of the room, musty old books, cigarette smoke, brimming chamber pot. She was still half asleep herself, but nothing was more important than leaving that room on her own. This was the time when she bought the bread, when she moved free in the city.

  Nevart’s wheelchair was parked in the corridor. Nevart had lost the use of her legs in the same explosion at the music school that had injured Hagop. The stage on which she had been singing had collapsed. She was a wonderful singer, the most promising the school had ever produced, Hagop said. With scholarships she had studied in Moscow and spoke many foreign languages. Three students had been killed by the bomb. Afterwards she and Hagop had married. That way they could share an apartment. Nevart needed constant help.

  Edith tiptoed past their door. Nevart had sharp hearing: she was no patient invalid and did not hesitate to call out. More and more, Hagop depended on Edith to help look after her.

  Edith splashed her face in the sink in the communal kitchen, taking care not to turn the tap on too hard so the pipes did not shudder and wail. She used the privy at the bottom of the stairs.

  A little girl came running as Edith crossed the courtyard. She stopped short when she saw that Edith was not carrying Jim.

  Bari lous, Nora.

  Lous bari, the little girl said gravely. She had black hair cut into a fringe, serious black brows. Her pigtails were tightly plaited, and she trailed a satchel, ready for school. Dmitri?

  Edith mimed sleep, laying her cheek on her clasped hands. Even with Nora she was careful to avoid talking, to draw attention to her foreignness. Of course it was known she was odar, a stranger, but Hagop had set off a rumour in the block that she was Tati’s goddaughter. This wasn’t impossible, as Tati had lived abroad when she was young for many years. Tati meant grandmother, and everyone called her that. For some reason, although she never left her room, Tati was known to all, respected and beloved. Her neighbours were glad that Edith was here to look after her. Edith was sheltered by goodwill for Tati. All the same, she aimed to be noticed as little as possible, until people grew used to her and she had learned the language. But little Nora Gasparian had befriended Jim. She lived in the apartment beneath Tati’s, with her parents who both worked in the Yerevan wine factory. Sometimes when Edith was hanging out washing in the courtyard, she would turn to see Nora staggering about with Jim clutched to her chest. Or in the Twenty-Six Commissars Park, she would gather her friends around him, little dark, lively, neatly-dressed girls, and they would try to teach ‘Dmitri’ how to count and say their names. And Jim, who hated to be constrained or crowded, suffered these attentions with a strangely pleased, almost sensual look on his face.

  The façade of the apartment block on Zakian Street was genteel, built like most of the buildings in Yerevan from blocks of pink tufa, the local vocanic stone. Neatly spaced plane trees waved in front of the little porticoed balconies and their leaves gathered in the arched doorways. But behind
the building the apartments fell into a jumble of tack-ons, shaky wooden steps, patchy windows with broken panes. The large courtyard was almost rural. There were vegetable plots in wire enclosures, vines growing over chicken runs. Washing was strung from trees to windows on a web of pulleys and lines.

  The courtyard led through an archway onto Lenin Avenue, one of the city’s busiest streets. Ancient tin buses wheezed past carrying workers to outlying factories. Trams and trolleybuses trundled up and down. Heavy black Russian tourers threaded their way through the traffic, the drivers’ hands on the horn. Like all the avenues and parks and squares here, Lenin Avenue was generously planned. Beneath the plane trees, on the wide pavements, old women with shawls wound across their mouths sold carnations and sunflower seeds in newspaper cones. Shops like cupboards carved into the gracious tufa façades sold newspapers and cigarettes. The signs on street corners, above doorways, on bus fronts, Cyrillic or Armenian, were indecipherable to Edith. She was illiterate here. The street ran on beyond the haze of petrol fumes to the city’s gaunt surrounding hills.

  Dry leaves rattled along the gutters. It was autumn, early September, the wind was cold. She had been here three months now. The winters in the Ararat basin were freezing, she’d been told. She had no calendar and could not read the newspapers. She knew the date by asking Hagop or Nevart. When she first arrived here everything was so bewildering that for a while she had taken to marking off days by pencil strokes on the back of an old book, like a prisoner. She’d been terrified of being lost in time as well as space.

  She had lost ‘Armenia’. It had been swallowed up by Yerevan’s dusty, bustling streets. ‘Armenia’ could no longer comfort her at night. It was like a phrase of music that had slipped her mind. She understood now that ‘Armenia’ belonged, if anywhere, back home. In the hazy, petrol-laden air of Lenin Avenue, she thought of the blue-gold air of autumn in Australia.

  She walked fast to keep pace with the crowds hurrying to work. The Armenians were industrious people, they swept along the footpaths like the blowing leaves. There was something expectant about the autumn chill that had to do with the coming war. Their faces were serious, aquiline, dark-browed. She felt her face showed up in the street and wished it did not. She knew her pallor was different from theirs, it had an Anglo-Saxon fairness to it. The darkness of her hair and eyes was less intense, as if darkness was a state of mind. She wondered if in time she would come to look Armenian.

  I am surrounded by Armenians. When she’d arrived in Yerevan this was her first thought. The streets were full of dark men in tight black suits. She thought she saw Aram ten times a day. A profile in a bus, the stance of a figure in conversation under a plane tree, a driver stepping out of a car and lighting a cigarette. Her heart beat almost before her eyes registered. In the next moment she would see it was not him. It never was. Every face was put together differently, and yet, looking for Aram, she saw how much a race was marked by the way they moved and talked to one another, by the way they thought.

  Had Aram lost his ‘Armenia’ too?

  Hagop said he was making enquiries. He had heard of a Sinanien who was teaching in Leninakan, whose mother lived in Yerevan. Aram has no mother, cried Edith. Hagop punched his forehead. But he had another lead, he said. Don’t give up hope yet. She had not. She was reminded of childish treasure hunts. Warm, warmer, getting hot … She felt he was here. There must be a reason he refused to step out of the ranks of his countrymen, stand in front of her on the footpath and declare himself. Or come running across a park to scoop Jim up in his arms. There was a reason, which she would find out.

  Meanwhile she kept on looking, ducking her head when men looked back at her. It was easier when she was alone, Jim took so much of her attention. On the other hand, when she was with Jim she was more anonymous on the streets. A mother and child. It was her camouflage. The NKVD must know she was here, must be keeping an eye on her, but for some reason had not made their presence felt.

  The bread shop was a cellar fragrant with baking that opened onto Lenin Avenue by a sliding window, the round soft flat loaves steaming on the sill. Hatz, bread, bought fresh each day with Tati’s roubles. Tati insisted on paying for it, though she ate so little, while Edith and Jim tore at it all day like animals at a carcase. Edith bought milk for Jim from the roubles Hagop changed for her.

  The bread-seller down in the window had a long pale oval face like a saint and eyes so velvety and expressive they seemed to hold the secret of the world. ‘Have you ever seen a really beautiful Armenian woman, Ee-dit?’ Nevart had asked her. ‘To Armenian men no woman is more beautiful than an Armenian woman.’ Edith counted out her money into the bread-seller’s slender fingers, and imagined Aram bending down low across the sill, buying his bread from the beautiful Armenian woman.

  It was always a struggle not to tear a piece from the bread as she carried it home. It was good to hold its warmth against her, and think of the tea she would make. Before she crossed Lenin Avenue she looked down a side street, and up at the far left-hand horizon. The day was hazy, but there it was like a shadow, a snowy flank so enormous that it looked to be on the outskirts of the city, although it stood far away, over the Turkish border. Ararat, the Armenians’ mountain. In this she was becoming a Yerevani: each day, like a ritual, she scanned the horizon, hoping that Ararat would show itself to her.

  Nevart and Hagop were awake. Every morning they went to the markets where Hagop had a stall to sell his cloth. She could hear Nevart’s voice from the end of the corridor. She must have heard Edith coming up the stairs. ‘I smell bread,’ she called out. ‘Oh, Ee-dit, tea, pleez. I cannot move this morning.’

  ‘Ha,’ Edith called back. ‘OK.’ She put the black tin pot of water onto the little spirit stove in the kitchen alcove that they shared.

  When she opened Tati’s door, her eyes went first to Jim lying on the pallet in their corner. He lay quietly, his eyes open. With Tati he always stayed calm. Edith opened the curtains at the balcony window and a shaft of morning light fell across him. Gadou, he said, holding up Tati’s black velvet pincushion in the shape of a cat. Gadou. Cat. His first word in Armenian. He took things to the pallet like a bower bird to its nest. Edith gave him a piece of warm bread.

  The apartment consisted of one room, about the size of a bedroom at the Sea House, but cluttered with the remnants of a lifetime’s possessions. In the centre of the room was a faded red and blue Armenian carpet beneath a round dining table with four heavy studded chairs. In one corner was a little iron stove on which was placed a tarnished samovar. In another was a wooden folding screen hiding the tin washjug and basin and the chamber pot. Crowded against the walls were armchairs filled with embroidered cushions, and sideboards piled with dusty books. Paintings hung one beneath another down the walls. Edith held Jim up to look at them, they were so strange, like dreams or children’s drawings, some blue pears on a table, a black-haired woman with roses instead of breasts, two ducks joined bill to bill. They were painted by Tati’s friends, in Paris, in a former life.

  In the high brass bed next to the window lay Tati, no more than a hank of silver hair, the curve of a skull on the pillow.

  ‘Bari lous, Tati,’ Edith whispered, bending over the bed, but the old woman did not stir. Asleep, it was as if she was already transformed into another state, withered and speckled, becoming nature, like old leaves or bark or stone. It took Jim, scrambling up the bedspread, crouching beside her, his warm breath on her cheek, to make her open one milky eye.

  ‘Te?’ Edith asked. ‘I will bring you tea.’

  By mid-morning she would have Tati sitting in her chair by the balcony, washed and fed, her white hair brushed, her hands on her lap, her high cheekbones dusted with powder. This was Edith’s task, and she had discovered she was good at it. To give Tati form, bring her back into the world for one more day.

  But this day was different. A commotion started up, loudspeakers in Lenin Square bellowed voices across the city. They echoed down Zakian Street. Out i
n the corridor, Hagop was pulling his jacket on over his braces, shoving his feet into his shoes. He ran towards the stairs, laces flying. Edith snatched up Jim and followed him. Nevart was screaming for her but she pretended not to hear. This is it, this is it. What? The end to waiting.

  In the vast square cars and buses had pulled up anywhere, and people were running to join the crowds clustered around the loudspeakers set up under the porticoes of the monumental concert hall. The announcer’s voice spoke slowly, with dramatic official pauses. Ear-splitting rings and pops blared out in the transmission. Everyone was silent. Edith understood nothing. She had lost sight of Hagop. Military music signified the end of the broadcast and the crowd broke up into talk. Men were talking by the fountains, around the giant statue of Lenin, under the plane trees. A carnival hum filled the square. I am surrounded by Armenians. Was Aram here?

  She started to walk back to Zakian Street and Hagop was suddenly beside her, swinging Jim up onto his shoulders. Germany had invaded Poland, Hagop told her in low tones amongst the crowds. England and France had declared war on Germany. Ten days ago Russia had signed a non-aggression pact with Germany. ‘You and I, Edith, are officially at war.’ Already the pink tufa buildings behind the waving plane trees looked faintly unreal, prewar.

  It was almost a celebration. They all drank tea and brandy in Tati’s room. They smoked cigarette after cigarette. There were gusts of rain in the autumn wind outside the balcony. For once Hagop and Nevart were united as they instructed Edith. Armenians would have to fight for Russia, but it was not a patriotic war. All Armenians knew that whatever side they were on, some invader, Germany, England, or, worst of all, Turkey, was bound to try to trample across the Caucasus to get to Baku on the Caspian, for its precious oil. ‘We are a crossroads. Over and over we have been invaded, for thousands of years.’