In the second poem, he talks about how secrets liberate you, how they are all that you have, the only things that you do not share, do not bequeath, do not give away, and the only things that will in the end go with you to your grave.
He read both to me, and then asked which of the two I preferred. He was in an unusual mood that afternoon. We met on campus. As we sat on a bench, he took two folded sheets of paper from his coat pocket and started reading. He was more serious than usual, appearing almost in a dark mood, and it seemed he had come specifically to read the poems to me.
The second poem reached deep into my heart. “It is your secrets that liberate you,” was the recurring line. He read it with such force, such conviction, or maybe it sounded like that to me because that is exactly what I wanted to hear.
It is your secrets
that liberate you
do not confess!
do not expose!
…
confession is for the weak!
for those who do not have the will
to endure
…
I want you to live
with your secrets
within your secrets
by your secrets
I want them to be
your sanctuary
I want them to be
your only refuge…
I did not answer his question then. I thanked him and promised to read them again. I was taken as much by the topic of the poems as by the forcefulness of the two opposing views.
“Why did you write about secrets?” To me, that was a more interesting question than which poem he or I preferred.
“We all have secrets,” he said. “All of us,” he stressed, looking me in the eye. “The difference between people is how they handle their secrets.”
I read and think about them often. I want them to be your sanctuary…or are they my prison, Paron Edik? You have no idea how many secrets I have, how I protect them, how they’ve taken over my life, how I live in the dark prison that they have woven around me, through layers and layers of barbed wire surrounding my soul, my life. Do my secrets liberate me? Maybe yours do, but mine do not. It is your first poem on secrets that I should relate to and memorize. But why do I remember the second? Why do I repeat the verses of the second every night, and choose to forget the first?
The time for a final reckoning with all my secrets will come, and that is a scary thought. I am not talking about reckoning as in confession or facing death. I do not feel I have to explain anything to anyone, except to myself, and, someday, to Avo. By far the most difficult demon I have to face is myself. Why do I want to feel liberated by secrets, why do I want to start loving my secrets so much? I no longer want to feel like I’m imprisoned by them. I want to feel at home with them. That desire is difficult to understand.
Yes, the most difficult demon I have to face is Lara Galian. And maybe Avo. I’m responsible for his rage. He’s fighting the Lara Galian demon too, in his own way, which may be a much more difficult fight than mine. At the end of the day I can look into the mirror and face myself; whom does he face?
I’m so glad Edik came up with the idea of taking courses at the University. I would have had no other legitimate excuse to move to the city. Besides, it had been my father’s wish to see his children graduate from college, so I had an added justification.
But I do not need to pretend and turn this into yet another secret. The history courses I am following are boring, but I am enjoying the English language class. Edik says understanding our own history is the most important thing we can do. Frankly, I don’t see the point; I mean, I don’t see the point from an everyday practical point of view, even though if I begin to think beyond the everyday like he does, maybe there is a point to understanding it all.
Do your secrets imprison you, or do they set you free? Today, as I struggle with several situations at the same time, that, and only that, is the question. And you’d be mistaken if you think that the question is academic and irrelevant. If I cannot feel at home with my secrets, then I cannot feel at home anywhere. Even my most important memories, which are the voice and stories of my father, now appear to me in the framework of my secrets. They acquire meaning only through my secrets; I understand them only in the context of my secrets. What did they mean before I had so many secrets? What did they mean to him? What do they mean to my brothers and sisters? I find it impossible to even imagine. If even his sayings and stories are now woven into my secrets, then nothing is left from the old Lara Galian. Nothing.
It is your secrets that isolate you
whatever you feel
wherever you are
with those who love you
or with whom you love
you remain alone …
Leave it to Edik to sum it up in a few verses. What exactly did he ask me to choose? Did he want me choose between his poems, or between two Laras, between two lives?
I thought a few times about reading the poems to Avo, but then gave up the idea. Avo is not the poetic type.
Anna asks me more about Saralandj and about my family. I repeat the names of my sisters and brothers, starting with the oldest, giving brief explanations; “Martha (married, one daughter), Sona (engaged), Arpi (quiet and reserved), Alisia (a delight, I used to share a bed with her when we were young), Lara (me, I smile), Avo (the man of house, I smile again. He is tall and handsome, I add, too bad he’s younger than you—now Anna smiles), Sago (quiet and reserved), Aram (the smartest Galian kid, he probably can teach more to his schoolteachers than they can teach him).”
“And your brothers-in-law?” she asks.
“Ruben, Martha’s husband, who is wonderful; Simon, Sona’s fiancé. I don’t know him well yet, but he seems very nice.”
“Wow!” Anna exhales. She is an only child. Her father has treated her as if she was an enemy, and her mother has been powerless to help her.
We are having a light supper at a coffee shop near the Opera.
“Have you heard from your aunt’s sister in-law?” I sense that Anna is depressed thinking about her father and husband, and I want to remind her of the one person who has helped her.
“We talk once a week. The important thing is that my husband has not tried to contact her again. I’ll be so happy if he’s given up on me, but I think that’s wishful thinking on my part.”
“You never know,” I say hopefully. “We’re both still young, you know. We can do a lot with our lives. You’ve had a very bad experience, of course. But that’s all it is, one really bad experience.”
“Which is not over yet…” Anna lowers her voice.
Is living in fear like living with secrets? Anna is no less a prisoner of her constant fear of being found and reclaimed by her husband, than I am a prisoner of my secrets. But, according to Edik, secrets can also set you free; not so with fear. Even Edik could not write a poem showing how fear can be liberating. Overcoming fear may liberate, but not fear itself.
“There is only one way to be rid of your fear of this man,” I tell her, also lowering my voice. “You have rights, you know. You can divorce him, and he cannot touch you after that.”
“Divorce him?”
“Sure. Divorce him, and you’ll divorce your fear of him.” I know that probably it is not that simple, but I know that technically I am right.
Can one divorce one’s secrets too? I guess so, by just disclosing them. The problem is that exposing secrets doesn’t really get rid of them. Everything is still there; it’s just not a secret anymore. Divorcing a secret doesn’t kill it, it multiplies it, it increases it by as many times as the number of people you tell it to, and then even more as they start telling it to others. Before you know it, the secret you try to kill by sharing it multiplies like a virus.
“I had not thought about that,” says Anna, looking at me as if I just opened her eyes. “How do I go about doing that?”
“I have no idea,” I say. “I haven’t even been married yet! But I have some incredible frien
ds, Anna. You’ll meet them one day. They’ll help us figure this out.” I haven’t even been married yet, my dear Anna, but I’ve been forced to have sex with well over a thousand men, and that is something that you’ll never understand, and I can never tell you. There is no ‘divorcing’ that particular fact.
Anna looks like a huge weight has been lifted from her shoulders. She looks a lot prettier when her face is not distorted by stress. She has cut her hair very short since moving to the city, which makes her eyes look larger and more expressive, and when her face relaxes, they dance in an amazing transformation.
Anna has seen a way out, a ridiculously simple and obvious way out. I can tell, from the ‘I just saw the light’ look in her eyes. Then she throws her arms around me and kisses my cheeks. She is so emotional that some people in the coffee shop notice and turn around to look at us.
“You’re the sister I never had,” she says, no longer whispering.
I feel I now have a confirmed friend, one whom I may be able help. Anna, with her reaction, has taught me the joy of helping someone whose plight I understand, and I have not even done anything yet. I’ve just given her an idea, about which I myself know little.
As I think about my discovery, I realize that it is so simple, as simple as the advice I gave Anna, and yet it had not occurred to me before. Then I see something else: Could it be that this what Edik feels? Everyone I know who knows Edik has, at one time or another, raised the question—Why does he care? Why is he so engaged, so connected to everything? There is absolutely nothing in it for him personally, and yet nothing seems unimportant to him. Why does he care?
I think I just stumbled onto one possible answer. The joy of helping someone whose plight I understand. But does Edik understand my plight? Why would he give me those two poems otherwise? Who is Edik anyway? We know very little about him. He does not have to be here. Why does this man bother with me? With us? He has helped Avo, Avo has spent several days in his dacha as his guest, we all spent that magical night in his dacha after we killed Viktor and Sergei Ayvazian and their four bodyguards, he drives four hours each way from Vardahovit to visit us in Saralandj, he lent the money that Avo needed to start his pig farm, and the resounding question remains: Why?
Is it really because it feels good to help someone whose plight you understand? But how on earth did he even begin to understand our plight, especially mine, even before he met me? Gago says he is the way he is because he is connected. But I do not believe that’s all there is to it. Perhaps this has to do with that third ear, the ear of his heart.
Chapter Eight
Manoj Gupta has run many odd errands for his boss over the ten years that he has been in Al Barmaka’s employ, most of them in familiar territory, covering the Middle East, Asia and, once in a while, Europe. But he now has the uneasy feeling of entering entirely unfamiliar ground, even before leaving Dubai, as he boards the Armavia flight to Yerevan. It is presently the only airline that has a direct flight, and he opts for the unknown airline against the more complicated routes via Europe on airlines that he knows.
He is the only one in First Class, which has two rows of four seats each. The aircraft is old and run down, the chairs squeak and shift on the floor bolts, there is rust on the armrests and tears in the dirty carpet. Although the First Class cabin is empty, economy class is full, and he guesses that the airline is doing well on this route, and so does not understand this degree of neglect. The flight attendants look bored and unmotivated. What Manoj does not know is that Armavia is controlled by yet another state-supported oligarch, who is running the company into the ground. This syndrome, which baffles outsiders when they encounter it, and disgusts locals, who leave the country in droves, somehow survives.
It is a short flight, and Manoj keeps himself busy by reading about the country he is visiting and going over a stack of business documents. Before he knows it, they land. Being the first to disembark, he gets into an empty passport control line and, having no checked bags, is in the car sent by the hotel within minutes of touchdown.
Manoj finds himself not just transported to a different country, but to a different world. From a hot and humid desert, he has landed in a cold, mountainous country, where the lowest point is six hundred meters above sea level, and well into spring there are still patches of snow at the side of the streets. While Dubai burns in forty degree Celsius heat only three hours away, he had watched with fascination from the window of the descending plane an almost magical winter landscape. He starts wondering if Al Barmaka did in fact have a business strategy in mind, for the first time giving him the benefit of the doubt that the alleged business motive for the trip may not have been just a cover to send him here to find Leila. He is in fact scheduled to see several businessmen to discuss trade and tourism, in addition to a planned trip to a village called Saralandj. His attempts to find a street address for the Galians’ home have been futile. “There are no street maps for small villages in Armenia,” the Armenian Embassy clerk in Abu Dhabi tells him. He does not want to disclose his interest specifically in Saralandj and the Galians to the Embassy yet, so he cannot inquire further. All they tell him is that, “Small villages don’t have street names. A family name is enough to locate any house in any village. If you have both the first name and family name, even better.”
He checks into the Marriott hotel at two-thirty in the afternoon. The food on the plane was inedible. He decides to stay in the hotel for his first meal in the country, and goes to a restaurant in the lobby. The menu has some familiar items, while others sound too exotic for him. He goes for what he knows: a cheeseburger with fries. He’s been told to avoid raw vegetables and tap water. But Manoj is from India, even though he has lived in the Middle East for most of his life. Until several years ago, while his parents were still alive, he used to visit family in India. He can handle foods that will make most foreigners sick for weeks. So he is not too concerned about water and raw vegetables, but he orders a Coke anyway.
He’s had a few fries and a bite of his cheeseburger when a man in his early thirties approaches his table.
“Welcome to Armenia, Mr. Manoj,” he says enthusiastically in a heavy accent, smiling broadly, and not bothering to introduce himself.
Manoj is taken by surprise. The young man adds, “My name is Armen. I am your driver, and I’m at your service. Again, welcome.” The explanation answers a question for Manoj, but does nothing to reduce his surprise. He had called the driver earlier to say that he has arrived and that he’ll call back with the schedule. The idea that a driver he’s never met before can identify him so easily, and just barge in, is unheard of in Dubai. Drivers usually do not even come in; they wait outside until the boss is ready for them.
But Manoj takes a liking to Armen almost immediately. Maybe it is the relief of having someone who works for him in this foreign environment, or maybe it is Armen’s relaxed, simple demeanor, which somehow transcends all class barriers. He has not seen such behavior anywhere else: not in India, where the class consciousness is far too strong to permit this type of casual interaction, not in the Middle East, where the local VIP versus expatriate hired labor distinction is even a thicker wall, and not in Europe, where the old, stuffy aristocratic class structure, reincarnated as service sector protocol, dominates. He stops wondering how the driver found him, recognized him, and what gave him the nerve to walk in and greet him as if he was an old childhood friend. He takes one more look at Armen’s beaming, ready-to-serve smile, and smiles in return.
“Thank you,” he says. “Good to meet you. You’ll be with me for the next three days, right?”
“Twenty four hours a day!” responds Armen with another huge smile. “What’s the program?”
What’s the program? No hired help has ever talked to Manoj like this. Spoken as if he’s excited about an outing with an old friend. After a decade of service to Al Barmaka, he has never dared to address him in such an informal manner.
As his nervous tension melts away, Manoj starts to
laugh. He chuckles, first in short bursts, and then more fully. Armen starts to laugh with him, which reinforces Manoj’s good mood. What the hell, he might as well befriend this driver for a few days. That may serve him much better than a more formal relationship.
“The program,” he says, still chuckling, “is…wait, what was your name again?”
“Armen”
“Armen. Okay. The program, Armen, is that we start with a lunch other than a cheeseburger and fries. Where can we get a good lunch that will not kill me by this evening?”
“A local lunch!” says Armen laughing. “Come, we go to the Dzor.”
“We go where?” Manoj is still laughing.
“To the Dzor,” repeats Armen. Then he realizes that he might be expected to explain further and adds, “Mr. Manoj, there are only four places one can be in Armenia. Dzor, which means valley. Sar, which means mountain. Kaghak, which means the city, meaning Yerevan; and khaghakits durs, which means outside the city. That is all. You cannot be anywhere other these four places in Armenia!” Armen looks like he has just solved the mysteries of the Universe. “So,” he adds, “the closest local restaurants are in the Dzor. Fifteen minutes from here. I know a good one by the bank of the river. You’ll love the food and I guarantee that it will not kill you.”
“Let’s go!”
Armen reminds him of the smart, enterprising but underprivileged youngsters in Mumbai, whose only asset is their wit, and who manage to scrounge a living in the streets, appearing always happy and full of energy, but in reality they live much darker lives when they end their public day and return to the privacy of their living quarters, which, for the lucky ones could be a room in a deserted building, and for most others a street corner partially protected from the elements.
The Doves of Ohanavank Page 6