I remember Sumaya once telling me how everything is attributed to God’s will. Everything, she would stress. All the beauty, all the ugliness, the fair, the unfair, the good, the bad, everything has one and only one source, which is God. I believed then that she believed that, and that belief helped her cope with every difficulty that she faced. After all, it is God’s will. Once you accept that, she’d say, you can answer all the questions that haunt you. But that did not answer any of my questions. Did God create Ayvazian too, I’d ask? Did He make him do what he did to me? Why?
Now, sitting here in this quiet restaurant in Yerevan, a place I not only had not been to before, but I did not know existed, a place where I could not afford to buy a meal, while Ahmed probably could buy the entire neighborhood, he looks at me, and I wonder if he’s thinking God is the source of this evening, He made us meet, He made me escape, He made Manoj find me, He made him come here to see me.
“You’re beautiful when you’re deep in thought,” he says suddenly. “I did not want to disturb you, but I cannot resist. What’s on your mind?”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to drift. A lot has happened since you arrived that makes me think.” He doesn’t ask again; he just waits.
“Thank you for your interest,” I say. “In the Madenataran, in the Art Gallery, in Tzitzernakabert, in everything.”
“And in you,” he smiles. “Why don’t you want to thank me for my interest in you?” Because I don’t understand it, I want to tell him. Because you bought me for sex, and now, is that your interest in me? If it has changed, how has it changed?
“Yes,” I say instead, “and for your interest in me.” But Ahmed is sharp and shrewd, and he senses that I did not say that with conviction. She did not mean quite the same thing as her words, he’s probably thinking. But he lets it be.
They bring several dishes of dolma, cabbage and grape leaf wraps, stuffed eggplants, tomatoes and peppers, yoghurt with mashed garlic, and a couple of salads.
“I was told to order this. It is supposed to be like grandmother makes it.” He laughs and serves some onto my plate.
“So how long are you going to keep me in suspense?” he asks after a few bites.
“Okay, I’ll tell you what’s on my mind. First, I want to tell you some basic facts, and then come to the main point. I hope you’ll be patient with me, as always.”
“Where can I go?” he says, raising his hands. “You have my ears.”
“I have a friend, who is hiding here in Yerevan. She lives in fear that her own husband will again force her into prostitution. She cannot trust her own parents. There are young girls in orphanages here who will be homeless when they turn eighteen. They have no place to go, and they are prime targets of sex traffickers. There are poor and broken families, with a single parent, most often a single mother, who cannot provide the very basics to their children, let alone an education or protection from organized crime. During my own eighteen months of captivity, I met some others like me. They all live in fear, because they have no place to go.” I stop and look at him for a minute. He shows no sign of disinterest.
“What I’d like to do with Viktor’s three million euros,” I continue, “of course only if it is possible for you to get your hands on it without too much trouble, is to open a shelter for such girls in Yerevan. A place where they can be safe, cared for, and they can go to school, learn how to support themselves and be independent. Ahmed, do you see how that would be the only correct way to spend Viktor’s ill-gotten gains? Let’s use it to help the victims of his crimes, both the existing victims and the potential victims, and I assure you there will be a lot of them.”
He stays quiet for a long time. He watches me, looks away for a minute then returns his gaze to my eyes.
“Lara, I told you the money can be yours. Why don’t you take it and do what you want with it? Open your shelter, if that’s what you want.”
“You don’t know this country,” I say. “I could never pull something like that off. An eighteen-year-old girl spending three million euros to open a shelter? They’ll rip me apart in one day. The money will disappear in all types of complications, taxes, fees, rip-offs. You know how you said you can ‘uncomplicate’ things in Dubai? Well, the world’s best experts in complicating things are right here. That’s where you come in.”
“How do I come in? Where?”
“You open the shelter.” There’s new enthusiasm in my voice. “They cannot touch you. It would even be better if your government lends its name to it as some type of sponsor. Then they really won’t dare mess with it. A humanitarian gesture from you, supported by your government. I’m not asking you spend a penny more than Viktor’s money. Just lend it your name. Visit once a year or send Manoj to check how things are going. Let the news cover it. Have the accounts audited, to let the vultures know that they cannot scavenge the shelter’s resources. If you can, even appoint a manager of your choice from Dubai. A foreigner.”
He looks tired just listening to me.
“What you’re proposing is commendable. It truly is. But do you have any idea how much I have on my plate? Why do you think it took me a month to free up a few days to visit you? I’m on the board of ten companies and four government agencies.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, deflated. “I thought perhaps you could delegate this to someone, if not Manoj then maybe someone more junior. You were looking into business investment opportunities here, right? You’ll have managers here to run them. You could delegate it to them.”
“It is my turn to ask you to drop the subject for now,” he says after a long silence. “Let me think about it tonight. We’ll talk again before I leave.”
“The subject is dropped!” I say, as he did last night. The difference is, I do not say habiby. Come to think of it, I have never called him that.
We leave the restaurant.
“Where can we go for a walk?” he asks. I remember my short walk with Anastasia near the Monument, and I try to give directions to the driver to go there. After a few wrong turns, mostly because of my own ignorance of the streets in Yerevan, we get there.
“You have to learn to get around this city, Lara,” he chuckles. “You do live here, don’t you?”
“Yes, Your Excellency,” I say. “But in one day you seem to know more about this city than I do, and you’re not a bad tour guide. If you ever want to change your day job, the Ministry of Tourism here will certainly consider your application.”
We walk around the Monument, the Statue of Mother Armenia, and we stop at the edge of the park to watch Yerevan sprawled across the valley below. He puts his arm around my shoulder and pulls me to him, and I let myself be pulled, squeezed between his arm and the side of his chest. He gives the top of my head a kiss. “Habibty,” he whispers. I fight the impulse to reciprocate with a “Habiby.” The past is not yet dead enough for that kind of moment between us.
“I will take a taxi home,” I tell him when we get back in his car. “Your car is arousing too much interest in my poor neighborhood.”
“I can’t let you do that at this hour.”
“Ahmed, please, how do you think I got around before you arrived in Yerevan yesterday?”
“Very funny, Lara, and I hope you weren’t wandering in the streets of this great city alone at this hour. But now I’m here, so things are different. Besides, we were both too good not drinking at dinner, we can’t end the evening like that. We need to have a drink first. Then we’ll figure out how to get you home.”
We walk into the lobby and see Manoj and Edik sitting together at the bar. Several men in the lobby and at the bar watch me cross the room, oblivious to the fact that I appear to be with another man. Ahmed notices, and seeing how I ignore them, says nothing. From the looks of it, Edik and Manoj are having a great time. Edik is telling him a story, God knows from what part of the world, and Manoj is laughing his heart out. They both have snifters of cognac in front of them, and it doesn’t look like it is their first dri
nk. Edik finishes his story and raises his glass to a hysterically laughing Manoj when we approach them.
Manoj notices us and jumps from his chair.
“Your Excellency, Ms. Lara, a very good evening to you both,” he exclaims.
“Hello Mr. Manoj,” I say in English. “Edik jan, bari yereko.” Good evening.
Edik stands up and without any hesitation gives me a short kiss on the forehead. Then he turns to Ahmed.
“Good evening, Mr. Al Barmaka, I am Edward Laurian.”
“Barev, Edik jan,” says Ahmed with a smile. “Please drop the Mr., my name is Ahmed.”
We must both look so surprised at his greeting that he continues.
“What?!” he says. “You think your language is so difficult that an old Bedouin like me cannot learn a few words? I’ve been here for more than twenty hours already!”
Edik bursts out laughing and I know right then and there that his problem with Ahmed as an enabler of the traffickers has been ameliorated somewhat.
“Lara here has kept me on the straight and narrow all evening,” says Ahmed, throwing his arm around Edik’s shoulder, and leading him back to his seat. “We’ve had dinner without a single drop of wine.” He pulls out a chair for me. “We’ve talked about humanitarian issues,” he says looking past me at Edik. “Now I need a drink, and I see you two are a few steps ahead of us.”
Poor Manoj is forgotten to Edik’s right. I’m squeezed between Edik and Ahmed, who are now talking to each other, even though I get the feeling that I’m the unspoken and unacknowledged catalyst in everything they say.
Then Ahmed asks Edik about his assignments in the Middle East, and that opens the floodgates of a boisterous dialogue between them. I no longer spark their conversation. In fact, I feel that I’m in their way, and I lean back so they can face each other more easily, leaning over the bar from either side of me. They talk about the civil war in Lebanon, the various Arab-Israeli wars, the emergence of oil as a political weapon in the early seventies, when Edik was still a teenager and Ahmed was around two years old. Edik tells him stories about OPEC meetings that he covered early in his career, about various oil Ministers of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Venezuela and Iran, some of whom Ahmed remembers. Edik lived in Beirut for several months and learned some Arabic, so they use Arabic phrases here and there. They talk about Beirut, which they both love as a city, and describe places and recount memories, even though they’ve been there at different times.
Over an hour and three cognacs later, they fall silent. The halt in their conversation is abrupt. They stare at their snifters, each absorbed in the thoughts and memories that their conversation has awakened.
“You know,” says Ahmed after a while, “the oil boom changed how the world perceives the Middle East forever. And on the surface, it also changed the Middle East itself. But if you scratch the surface, the region has not changed much.”
“That reminds me of what a Lebanese politician I once knew used to say,” says Edik. “‘The world today thinks of the Middle East as one huge oil reservoir,’ he used to say. ‘But people forget that, even in the Gulf, in the beginning there was no oil. That’s not how it started, and that’s not how it will end,’ he’d say. ‘In the beginning was the desert. Every brain cell of the endogenous population of the Gulf is conditioned by the desert,’ he’d insist. ‘Then came religion. But even the religion that came was conditioned by the desert. Later, much later, came oil, and when oil came, there was no less religion nor any less desert.’” Edik takes a sip of his cognac, and Ahmed leans over, surprised.
“A Lebanese politician told you that?” he asks. “He has understood the Gulf pretty well. Do you remember his name?”
“Of course I do. But wait, there’s more,” says Edik, “Then he’d discuss Lebanon. ‘Some Western journalists come here and talk to me as if I was born with oil too,’ he’d say. ‘But in Lebanon there never was oil, nor any desert, nor much religion for that matter. In the beginning was the sea. Then came trade. And trade came because of the sea. Then came more trade, and with trade, came the West,’ he’d say, showing a bit of disappointment. So you see, Ahmed, this man saw the long-term cultural history of the Middle East as the Sea-Trade-West versus the Desert-Religion-Oil dynamic. What a fascinating study of identity politics in the region one could do based on that!”
“Indeed,” says Ahmed raising his glass. He looks at me, as if he has forgotten that I’ve been there all this time.
“Sorry Lara, I hope we didn’t bore you. But you’re taking history courses at the university, right? Some of this might have been interesting for you as well.”
“The whole thing was interesting.” Which, strictly speaking is not a lie, since I find the rapport between them fascinating.
“I need to get going,” I tell them, checking the time. It is approaching midnight. “What do you want to do tomorrow?” I ask Ahmed.
“I managed to extend my stay by one day,” he says. “So I have tomorrow and the next day. The following day early we have to leave. I want to see the Genocide Museum. Aside from that, let’s ask Edik. What do you suggest?” he asks, turning to Edik.
“If you had two weeks,” says Edik with a smile, “I would have suggested all types of trips. But for two days, I have only one suggestion. You take one day to visit Vardahovit, and the second to finish seeing a few places in Yerevan, like going back to that art gallery and a few other museums.”
“Lara has told me a little bit about your place,” says Ahmed. “Varda…?”
“Vardahovit,” says Edik.
“Vardahovit.” Then he turns to me. “What do you think? Maybe you’d want to seat me on that bench of truth and redemption and ask me a few questions?”
Edik bursts out laughing. “Anyone who knows about that bench is obliged to visit it,” he says. “So it’s done. Why don’t we make a day trip out of it tomorrow? We can leave in the morning and be back here by evening. Then you’ll have a full day for museums and the Genocide Memorial. Manoj,” he says turning to him, “you’re most welcome also. I think you’ve been in the desert too long.”
“Thank you, Mr. Laurian.” Manoj smiles his ‘grateful’ smile.
“If in the Gulf in the beginning was the desert, and in Lebanon the sea, what was here in the beginning?” asks Ahmed.
“The mountains, of course!” says Edik triumphantly. “In the beginning were the mountains, and we are our mountains.” Ahmed does not understand the significance of the last phrase, but it sounds good to him anyway. I make a mental note to explain to him later that “we are our mountains” is the name of a monument symbolizing Nagorno Karabagh.
“Very well, Edward,” says Ahmed, laughing. “Many thanks for the invitation. Shall we leave around ten?”
“Perfect. Now, may I take Lara home tonight?”
“No you may not,” I jump in. “You’ve had far too much to drink. Besides, I already told Ahmed that I’d be taking a taxi home. See you gentlemen tomorrow at ten.”
“That simply won’t do, young lady.” A slight slur is noticeable in Ahmed’s speech. “Manoj’s driver Armen is outside. He’ll take you home. End of discussion.” And Ahmed smiles benignly at me.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Avo has come up with a new idea. He wants to keep honeybees and produce honey for export. How can they mess with that? he asks himself. I don’t have to buy feed for honeybees; I take my beehives to a nice meadow, preferably by a mountainside, and the bees feast on wildflower pollen. Once a year, in the fall, I draw the honey from the frames in the hive. If we find a good export market, he says, Russia or Ukraine, maybe even Iran, then they cannot mess with that either.
Saralandj is a good place for beekeeping. His father kept a few hives a long time ago. But he stopped when Avo was still a small child. Avo does not know why. The old hives are still in the underground storage area—old, worn out wooden boxes, holding around a dozen frames each. He’ll have to get a lot more, he reckons at least a hundred to start with. He’ll als
o need smokers and extractors. They probably sell second hand ones in the big market in Yerevan. Eventually, as the business picks up, he’ll need to have a brand, labels and unique looking jars.
Avo calls Lara to tell her about his idea.
“Honey smells better than the pigs,” she laughs. “Avo jan, that is really a great idea. And the work is substantially less. I couldn’t imagine you cleaning those pigpens much longer anyway.”
“Do you remember Papa’s hives?” asks Avo.
“Sure I do. And I remember how good our honey was!”
“Do you know why he stopped keeping bees?”
“I have no idea. We were young. Maybe Martha can remember. But it doesn’t matter. You’re doing the right thing. You see, something good can come out of a catastrophe. The pig farm was not meant to be.”
Al Barmaka notices her excitement and looks at her expectantly, but does not ask.
“I just quoted you to my brother,” she says, pleased with herself.
“You did? I can’t imagine about what.”
“That something good can come out of a catastrophic event, but this time, unlike when you said that, it actually is applicable.” She smiles mischievously.
They have already left Yerevan. Laurian has taken Manoj in his car and is leading the way. Lara points to the right of the road to a sign.
“Remind me to tell you about Khor Virap. I don’t want to forget.”
“I’ll try,” laughs Al Barmaka. “I’ll remember Khor, because it is close to an Arabic word, and you remember the second word, because I’ve forgotten it already. All right? Now tell me why your statement was more applicable than mine.”
“Because it is exactly what I told you before, it is one business venture gone bad, but another and much better idea has now replaced it. Avo would never have thought of the better idea if the first one had not blown up in his face.”
The Doves of Ohanavank Page 24