Gilgamesh

by Joan London

  ‘You have to understand the stubbornness of Armenian men,’ said Nevart, with a smirk at Edith.

  The house of Hagop’s friend, Bedros, was on the outskirts of a tiny village, no more than half a dozen rough stone houses with smoke rising thinly out of tin chimneys, and chicken and sheep wandering among sparse orchards. A country silence settled as they made their way along the dusty track, the noontime hum of insects, the rustle and chewing of goats hidden among thorny bushes.

  Bedros had arranged everything. A woman from the village served them yoghurt and dolmas and lavash bread made fresh in a pit down the street. They drank tea on the porch sitting in a line-up of old chairs. Here in the clear cold air they could see beyond the orchard to a valley folded between great bare rocky hills. Far away you could just make out the cone-shaped roof of a little stone church. Behind it were mountain peaks lost in drifting cloud.

  The Armenians gazed out, silent and dreamy.

  ‘This is very beautiful,’ said Edith. She remembered her touchy, proprietary attitude to Nunderup. The Armenians too liked their country to be praised.

  Bedros had been a student with Hagop and Nevart at the music school. Now he was a Party official. Although he did not have any outward signs of injury, he was thin and stooped like an old man, his forehead creased into a knot of lines. He and Nevart fell into intense conversation. Bedros was giving Nevart figures, holding up his fingers. He was pointing to the factories further down the valley.

  ‘You’re a good little Party member now, Bedros,’ Nevart said, in sugary tones. ‘Better than playing third horn, eh?’

  He and Hagop went for a walk down the lane. As they turned a corner, Edith saw Hagop take a swig from his brandy flask and hand it to Bedros.

  ‘Why did you speak like that to Bedros?’ she asked Nevart.

  Nevart shrugged. ‘After the bombing all the students were under suspicion. We all hated Moscow. Bedros was cleared and immediately joined the Party. Some of the students were arrested, never to be seen again. Hagop, of course, Saint Hagop, was spared.’

  Nevart fell asleep, slumped down in her wheelchair. Suddenly Edith took Jim’s hand and ran with him through the orchard to a sloping meadow, faster and faster, Jim laughing, through the stones and yellow grass. They came to a stream about to dive into the valley, far away from everybody, and they threw themselves down. They lay panting, listening to the water and the wind in the poplars and the call of the ravens soaring far above them. Space at last.

  The wind in the trees reminded her of the sound of the surf. She remembered that they were landlocked, that this was a country with no sea.

  August 12th, 1942

  Dear Leopold,

  Do you remember the hot day that was like summer when we went swimming, and the sea was smooth as a lake, as far as the eye could see?

  In summer here the sun is a little high white fire-ball. There’s a haze of heat over Yerevan which covers the hills. Ararat rises above it like a giant cone with an icecream tip. There’s an icecream seller in Lenin Square, ringing his bell. But Yerevanis aren’t in an icecream mood these days. In the evenings all that people do in the parks and squares is talk of the invasion. The Germans panzers have nearly reached Rostov. That’s about five hundred miles north of Yerevan as the crow flies.

  All that I would like to do is to go swimming and forget everything.

  There’s Lake Sevan in the north, it’s a famous summer resort for families, but who would go north now? And only Party members could afford it. Besides, most families are only half families now. All the men, apart from the old or the lame, have gone to fight the Germans. Three hundred thousand Armenians are fighting in Russia’s great patriotic war. Stalin says that there is to be no retreat. Anyone running back will be shot.

  The avenues and the cafés are empty of men. Women queue for buses to the factories. Women drive the buses. Women distribute the ration cards and serve behind the counters in the government stores. It was a woman who came to show our apartment block how to tape our windows against explosions, and to explain the importance of the blackout. Women rush along the dusty streets in overalls and headscarfs. There’s no one to look at them any more. Anyway they’re too tired and worried to think about being looked at.

  In the evenings it’s so hot in the apartments that the women gather in the courtyard. They turn kebabs over little outdoor fires. There’s the smell of charred peppers and eggplant. There’s no meat any more. Children play evening games and the sparrows go mad in the trees. It’s so light that women hang out washing, or water the vegetables. All along the back steps, women sit calling out to one another as they soak their feet or dry their hair.

  Then at nine o’clock they all rush inside to the corridor outside the apartment with the wireless, to listen to the news.

  I can’t understand much of the broadcasts. I let Jim go out to play and I sit with Tati and N. looking out from our balcony. Of course Jim and I cannot have a ration card. We share Tati’s coupons, and the food that N. and H. barter for at the markets. We survive because of the markets. H. (who is not fit enough for the army) also works for the State now, in some sort of war-effort job. He is usually away and N. is usually in a bad mood. It’s only safe to be with her if Tati is around.

  Jim is big and strong. He does not speak as much as most four-year-olds, perhaps he is confused between languages. He loves Tati and his friend who is ten. She teaches him everything, even how to read. Soon he will have to go to school.

  The brightness of summer seems put on to tease us. Funny to walk beneath green leaves and feel so on edge. Not that life is so bad—not when you think of Leningrad. But will Yerevan go the same way?

  I haven’t found A. and I know he’s not around. I can’t feel him any more. Does this mean he’s at the front? Does this mean he’s dead? I’m cut off from him, as from everything else in my life before the war. Except from you, I don’t know why. I know you’re there. Leopold, stay safe and well please, please survive. Your loving cousin, E.

  In autumn when the Eastern Front reached down as far as Grozny and Ordzhonikidze in the north of Georgia, Nevart was summoned to play the piano for the Russian officials in the grand hotel in the main square. It seemed there was a shortage of pianists in Yerevan, as well as of everything else. A car was to be sent for her at six o’clock. Nevart ruthlessly cut a strip of gold-threaded turquoise silk from a bolt of the Essayan family inheritance, and sewed it to the bottom of her black woollen shawl. She enlisted Edith to dye and curl her hair. By evening she was very nervous. She looked at herself in the long mirror in Tati’s room and her face crumpled in rage. Edith had placed the shawl on her shoulders around the wrong way. ‘You are very Antipodean, aren’t you, Ee-dit?’ she said, rearranging it with her little beringed hands. ‘Everything upside down.’

  ‘Why do you worry, Nevart?’ Tati asked her. ‘The Russians will be so drunk they will hardly listen to you. Just play Tchaikovsky for them, and let them cry into their vodka.’ The Russians. Ada’s fabled exotic people were boorish oppressors here.

  Nevart’s breath came in short gasps as Edith carried her down the stairs. She rubbed her hands to warm them. ‘Oh, Ee-dit, I have not touched a piano for years.’ A large black Russian limousine was waiting for her in Sakian Street. A uniformed driver took Nevart from Edith’s arms and placed her in the back seat. Nevart swept off, her head just visible behind the limousine curtains, held high like a filmstar’s.

  Edith waited up for the limousine’s return. The evening had been a great success. The Russians had complimented Nevart on her biting wit, her excellent Russian, the amazing span of her tiny hands. They offered her a job playing for them three times a week. ‘So now at last I earn my living as an artist,’ she said, as Edith carried her back up the stairs. ‘I have become a circus freak. Well, somebody has to make some money around here.’ Her eyes were bright, her cheeks flushed. Edith placed her on her bed and she fell straight asleep.

  Nevart began to live only for her performan
ces. She rose late and attended to her clothes, her nails and hair. She had Edith wheel her to visit her old piano teacher in an apartment on Lenin Avenue so that she could practise and learn new pieces. She was beginning to sing a little, a few comic songs. Bah, she said, it was no great thing to perform for barbarians. ‘Though I must say, Ee-dit, one or two of the comrades are quite civilised men.’

  Edith kept the cloth stall at the markets open for an hour or so each day, though usually she sold nothing. She stood in queues for bread and kasha and milk. Nevart sent her on errands, for honey to soothe her throat, black-market stockings, hairpins. At night she was Nevart’s dresser. She was too tired now to find a response to Nevart’s sharp tongue. Besides, she depended on the few roubles Nevart threw her way. She told herself that putting up with Nevart was how she earned her living.

  Late one night as Edith tiptoed out from putting Nevart to bed, Hagop came softly up the corridor. He put his head to one side. ‘Edith, mairig,’ he whispered. ‘You are tired.’ His hair was cut ragged and short as a soldier’s now and he carried a briefcase. Edith had not seen him for days. He was even thinner, haggard, unshaved. A single bulb swung above them in the draughts of the corridor. A point of soft light shone in each of his eyes. For the first time she thought of him as sad. ‘Get your coat. It is time we make a party. Look.’ He took the blue silk scarf out of his briefcase. ‘Remember this?’ He went into the kitchen alcove and stowed his briefcase in a cupboard. He splashed his face in the sink and wrapped the scarf around his neck. ‘Come, Edith.’

  ‘I’d better not. Somebody might wake

  ‘You have become so dutiful, Edith. God smiles on you, I am sure.’

  ‘God has more important things to do these days.’

  ‘True. He doesn’t seem to be paying much attention to us any more. That leaves us free to enjoy ourselves.’ He smiled at her. ‘Ah, Edith, you need music, you need vodka. You need kisses. I can tell.’

  Edith fetched her coat from Tati’s pitch-black room, blinking away a sudden spurt of self-pitying tears.

  Their way was lit by the moon, for there was not a chink of light showing along the empty streets. Even the great hotel, where just an hour before Nevart had performed, was nothing but a dark outline as they crossed the deserted square. Hagop’s club was not far away, in a basement entered from an insignificant side door. It was a small room crowded with tables, lit by candles. They were greeted by the owner, who hugged Hagop in the Armenian way. He introduced himself as Manouk to Edith, as if he knew her already, and in English invited her to sit at his table. All the candle-licked faces at the tables were male. Some were in uniform and some perhaps were on leave, but some, like Manouk, were not imaginable as soldiers. His hands, as he lit Edith’s cigarette with a gold lighter, were plump and white and there was a ruby in his heavy gold ring. Hands that had never done a day’s work, her father would have said.

  Manouk snapped his fingers and brandy and vodka appeared. He excused himself, moving as smoothly as water between the tables, a word here, a handshake there, not smiling, but pleased and imperturbable. There were others like him there, in smart cut suits, their hair sleeked back from sharp carefully-shaved faces, smelling of pomade, men like boys, pulling wads of roubles from their pockets, men you never saw on the streets.

  ‘Hagop,’ Edith whispered, her mind looping and darting from the brandy, ‘is this the underworld?

  ‘No, Edith. You are in heaven.’ Hagop’s eyes glittered, he seemed at ease, elated, as if he had come home. He clapped loudly as the music began. The sound curled up like smoke, Armenian music, familiar to her now, as were the instruments that looked like weird root vegetables, the doudek, the kamanchar, the saz. Soon the men were dancing, whirling and clapping. Back at the tables they raised their glasses again and again, making toasts, swallowing their vodka like medicine. A woman came out and sang, a beautiful woman with a slender-boned face and long curling black hair like a gypsy, in a dress made from red and purple gauzy scarfs, so you could see her plump body moving free within it, her breasts loose. The audience went wild with clapping and toasts and fondness for each other.

  It was good, Edith thought, to be among happy people. It was good to feel so warm she could take her coat off. She realised she no longer had any expectation of seeing Aram. She put her head down on the table and slept.

  She was sitting on the steps of the verandah, warm in sunlight. Her father was coming across the clearing. Oh, she thought, I have been here all the time. I must have dreamt Armenia and the war… Manouk was helping her up from her chair, kindly as a father. There was no music, no guests, as if they too were a dream.

  ‘Where is Hagop?’

  ‘Hush. He is going to rest. He will be a little while.’

  Sure enough, as Manouk led her through the empty tables, she saw Hagop’s feet disappearing up a staircase.

  ‘I must go home.’

  ‘Hagop says that you are to wait for him. He will take you home, do not fear.’ They too were climbing the staircase. Manouk had his arm around her. Her legs were spongy. ‘You can rest here while you wait.’

  They were in a store room crowded with boxes and furniture. There was a tattered lace curtain across the window but no blackout. Manouk helped her lie down on a narrow couch beneath the window. He covered her with a blanket. He pulled up an armchair and sat beside her. From the light through the curtain she could see the powdery smoothness of his skin, his trimmed moustache. He lit a cigarette, which was comforting. He was so calm. She felt high above the city. The ceiling whirled down close to her. Manouk stroked her arm. ‘Rest,’ he murmured. He stroked her forehead. He stroked her calf beneath the blanket, her thigh. He did not once leave his armchair. ‘Rest.’ He wheezed slightly, like an asthmatic. His wheezes grew rhythmic. ‘Rest,’ and she obeyed. Whoever would have thought those hands-which-hadn’t-done-a-day’s work could be so firm, so dedicated? This was their work. They made her skin into silk. They made her move like silk.

  Pale light filled the window. The city was quiet. The roosters crowed in the courtyards of Yerevan. Another night had passed and still the Germans had not invaded.

  Jim was sitting up in Tati’s bed when Edith let herself in. Who had opened the curtains and untaped the blackout? It could only have been Jim. Tati was sitting up against her pillows, muttering to herself, writing in her notebook while Jim watched her. They were peaceful. The room was cold. ‘We’ll have to go to the park for some kindling,’ Edith whispered to Jim. Everything was different, as if they had all become separate. She ran her hand through Jim’s hair. She was grateful for his silence, that he didn’t ask questions.

  Tati lay back and closed her eyes.

  ‘What are you writing, Tati?’ She had never seen the old woman so alert in the morning.

  ‘Memories. A poem.’ The words were large and sprawling across the page. Tati couldn’t read them back. Later Nevart or Hagop or Nora’s mother, Nelly Gasparian, would read them to her, and she would dictate changes, line by line. Then she would know it by heart.

  Through the wall they heard a crash, a tinkling, and words choked out between sobs. Hagop must have woken Nevart and now she was throwing china.

  Winter deepened, and the whole city held its breath for the Soviet counter-attack. Nevart spent most of her day in Tati’s room to save on fuel. Even when she was talking she watched herself in Tati’s mirror, curling her hair around her fingers. Edith took Jim with her on her errands although the streets were so cold. She could not leave him with Nevart who only had to turn her eyes on him to torture him. Once Edith turned to see that Jim had squeezed his eyes shut and was spinning round and round.

  ‘Jim, what are you doing?’

  ‘He is trying to make me small,’ Nevart said. ‘So I will disappear. I know his tricks. He is not a normal child.’

  She leant back in her chair with her hands behind her head and her cigarette burning beside her. There were dark half-moons beneath her eyes. ‘Have you heard Tati’s poem?’ she
said. ‘Do you know what it is called? “Footsteps At Dawn”. She says that is the time that invaders arrive, and babies, and lovers tiptoe home.’ She threw her cigarette into the stove and spoke softly. ‘Why did you come here, Ee-dit? Did you want to kill your child? Because you want to be free, don’t you? If you found a man to love you, even a weak drunk with rotten teeth, you’d run away with him, wouldn’t you.’

  The water froze and the plumbing did not work. Edith fetched water from a tap in the courtyard. She put newspapers under Jim’s coat and took him with her to collect twigs from the frozen park. Jim rustled like a parcel as he walked. She found herself singing old songs that she had learnt at school, ‘The Skye Boat Song’, and ‘The Ashgrove’ and ‘Botany Bay’. English was beginning to sound exotic to her.

  Only her childhood solitude had allowed her to survive.

  She thought of the skin of cream on the top of a mug of Bourneville cocoa and of sucking hot marrow from bones boiled on the woodstove. She thought of food all the time now, she was too cold to think of anything else.

  They heard Nevart’s wails as they came up the stairs. Her door was open. Hagop was standing in the middle of the room with his hands in his pockets and his sad uneasy smile. His battered bag was at his feet. Nevart sat in her wheelchair by the window. She was clutching a small bolt of red silk. She lifted her head to him, pleading. Tears poured black down her cheeks.

  ‘I beg you, Hagop.’

  Hagop’s smile stayed fixed as he shook his head.

  There was a creaking and a shuffling. Tati crept into the room, one hand holding her stick, the other grasping the door frame. Edith ran for a chair for her. Nevart bowled across the room and threw her head on Tati’s lap. She closed her eyes and wailed shamelessly, like a child.

  Hagop turned to Edith. ‘I have to tell you, I am leaving. It is necessary. I must make a trip and I do not know when I will return. Nevart does not need me now, Edith. She has money and friends. She has you. And, as you may have noticed, I do not make her happy.’ He smelt of vodka.