The story became sketchier past this point. Up on the slopes, Galian tripped on a fallen branch and plunged into the valley below. A terrible accident, the eyewitnesses said. Of course, there was absolutely nothing that Ayvazian and his men could do. It was early evening by the time they recovered the body from the valley and brought it to a hospital in Yeghegnadzor, the largest city in the region and the capital of Vayots Dzor. He was declared dead on arrival. A quick autopsy showed death from the fall, with several broken bones and severe head injuries. A police report was written the next day confirming the accidental death. The case was closed, and the body released to be returned to his family.
III
Ayvazian’s men did not wait the customary forty days of mourning before appearing at the Galian home again; they returned four weeks after Galian’s death. This time Lara was inside helping her mother in the kitchen. The place was dark, and smelled of sheep manure. It was the most depressing place the men had ever seen. It felt as if even the old cracked walls were mourning; they could almost hear a wailing in the air, coming from no one in particular.
This time the men had come with gifts. New clothes for Lara, a wool shawl for the mother, a crate of fresh fruit, coffee and canned meats, all compliments of Mr. Ayvazian, they said.
Once again they expressed their deep regret for the accident and asked about how the other children were doing. The main topic about Lara’s future as a model followed very quickly. This time they offered $500 as advance payment for the right to be her managers. The mother hesitated but then agreed, as they knew she would. It was all arranged very quickly. They would return the next day for Lara. The first stop would be Yerevan, then Moscow to finalize paperwork, then off to Greece. Lara would be able to stay in touch with her mother. They gave the mother a cell phone and told her that they would pay for it. They promised that soon Lara would have her own phone too, and they would be able to call each other anytime.
That night, Lara and her brothers and sisters stayed up very late talking. There were five beds, a chest of drawers and a long and narrow closet crammed in their bedroom. Two of the beds were narrower than a twin, crafted a long time ago by their grandfather from wood and plywood; Martha and Avo each occupied one. The other three beds, also homemade, were a bit wider, and four sisters shared two and the two youngest brothers shared the other. Lara and Alisia shared a bed. There was hardly any walking space between the beds. They all sat on their beds that night in their homemade pajamas, all of which were sewn over the years by Silva Galian and handed down to the next sibling as each outgrew it. Their conversation centered around their efforts to understand what was happening to Lara. This type of thing didn’t happen in Saralandj. The best that a girl could hope for was to marry someone from the village and start her own family, living pretty much the same life as her parents.
The girls didn’t know what to make of Lara’s new life. There was a cautious excitement, mixed with a hint of jealousy in the air. Alisia was the least reserved; she was combing Lara’s hair and telling her how beautiful she looked and how she’d have such an exciting life traveling around the world. A visit to Yerevan alone would have been an adventure for them. Martha was more quiet and reserved, absorbed within her own thoughts.
But Avo was by far the most somber and sad.
“Kurig, mi gna,” he said. “Sister, don’t go.”
That broke Lara’s heart. She jumped down from her bed, wistfully walked to him and gave him a hug. This normally would have made Avo uncomfortable, but at that moment he found it acceptable and comforting.
“Avo,” she said warmly, “don’t worry, it will be fine. I’ll return soon. We’ll all be fine.”
“Mi gna,” repeated Avo, this time whispering so quietly that only Lara heard him. She held him tighter and rocked him for a few minutes. “Don’t worry,” she repeated. “Everything will work out.”
Lara tried to change the mood. She started asking what each one of them wanted her to bring from Greece. They had no idea what to ask for, but the topic was exciting nonetheless. After a month of living in an oppressively mournful house, they all felt the need for something happy, something hopeful. Lara started teasing Alisia. “I know why you’re happy to see me go,” she said laughing. “You want to have our bed all to yourself.” Alisia chuckled and the traces of a smile appeared even on Martha’s face.
Lara went from bed to bed, giving her sisters and brothers hugs and stroking their hair. She stayed a while with Martha, the oldest, who was engaged, but the wedding had to be postponed because of Galian’s death, and because the family now was far too poor to provide the most basic dowry. Lara held her for a long time, almost as if she was the older sister. “You’ll get married very soon,” she whispered in her ear. She then went to her youngest two brothers, held each under one arm and kissed each on the cheek. “So what would you like me to bring you from Greece?” she asked.
“Do they have good sling shots there?” asked Aram, the youngest.
“I guess so,” laughed Lara. “I’ll look for the best one in Greece!” At the end, Lara went back to Avo and just sat with him for a while, without speaking. He had not smiled or laughed all night. He had not said anything except his two pleas for her not to go. After a while, Lara gave him a kiss and left the room. She went and got in bed with her mother and stayed the night with her.
Silva Galian was far too drained to be emotional the next morning as she saw her daughter off in the black Mercedes SUV, the same one her husband had boarded only a month earlier. She was dressed in black, with a black scarf covering her hair that accentuated her paleness. Her face looked like that of a ghost. Heavy bags had formed under her bloodshot eyes that were totally void of any expression or human emotion. A month of crying had exhausted her. She had already said her goodbyes the night before, when she explained to Lara as best as she could what was happening, how she was to get the rarest chance of a lifetime to make something of her life, how she should always keep herself well, treat her new sponsors with respect, never get too spoiled or demanding, and endure whatever hardship came her way.
“Never forget where you are from and who you really are,” she said.
Lara listened carefully, and understood most of what her mother was trying to say. But the last instruction was not easy. Where I am from is easy, Saralandj, of course, she thought. But who I really am? What does that mean? She realized, even at her tender age, that she would probably struggle with that question for a long time.
Lara’s mother had prepared a bag for her. It was a blue, old and overused shopping bag from a department store in Moscow, which one of the relatives had brought years ago. The colors and some of the lettering along the sides had long faded, but the bag was still sturdy enough to carry the few items that she packed for her daughter—a pair of socks, underwear, a blouse, a pair of pants, and an old dress, which she had washed and ironed the night before.
There was one more item, which she took out and showed Lara, before putting it back carefully at the bottom of the bag and making sure that the clothes covered it thoroughly. Wrapped in an old, embroidered handkerchief was a small, thin gold ring, a plain wedding band that had once belonged to Araxi Dadik. “Your father wanted you to have this,” she said without much emotion. “He loved you very much, Lara. He loved all his children. But you are his youngest daughter, and with you he felt a tie to his past.”
Lara had lost much of her own vitality in the past month. She had never thought about how much her father had meant to her until he was gone. His death was far too sudden and unexpected, and she missed him terribly. What she missed the most was his reading. She was not afraid that she might forget his face one day, which Avo had told her was what he was worried about. Lara was too old for that, and besides, she thought his face was too impressive to forget. But she did worry that she might forget his voice, his reading voice, and the way he read all those stories. Toumanian’s stories in rhyme, “One Drop of Honey,” “The Dog and the Cat,” and especia
lly “David of Sassoun,” which could captivate anyone from three years old to eighty-three, her father would say. Why eighty-three? No one knew or asked. That was Galian’s way of talking.
Lara loved the Bible stories too. Her father took many liberties with the Bible reading. He would read them the first verse of Genesis, immediately followed by John 1.1, moving from the Old Testament to the new in the same paragraph. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was in the face of the deep. In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. And the spirit of God was hovering on the face of the waters….
Although Armenia had many lakes, Lara had never seen a large body of water. But she had seen the fog descend from the mountain peaks down to the forests in Saralandj, thick, slow and overwhelming, covering and owning everything in its path. She thought maybe that too was the spirit of God, and that’s how it must have been back then, except it hovered over the face of the waters instead of the forests of Saralandj. Lara loved all the Jesus stories, especially the miracles, but there never was any real religious context to any of the readings. They read the Bible just like they would read Toumanian. It was literature and stories that captured the children’s imagination and uplifted them from the daily realities of Saralandj. Galian’s grandfather had given that gift to his father in the freezing and dark nights in Siberia. His father had read to him too, in this same house in Saralandj.
Most of all, the children and Lara loved Merelots days. There were at least five in the Armenian calendar, four falling on Mondays, and the fifth being the big one, held on January 7, the day after Armenian Christmas. No one worked on those days. They first went to the cemetery to pay their respects. The dead are revered in Armenia, often more so than the living. Even though this is supposed to be a sad day—an opportunity to re-mourn the already mourned dead—the Galians did it differently by turning it into a family outing, which, on nice days sometimes turned into a picnic. The cemetery of Saralandj is on top of a steep hill. The kids would start with their traditional race from the bottom of the hill to the top, and Lara would normally win. Up there, they would burn Khung, incense, and say prayers for the dead. For Galian, what mattered was keeping the memory of his parents alive. Sometimes he would borrow a tape player from the village and play old duduk music. Their family had a fenced section in the cemetery where Galian’s parents and few aunts and uncles were buried. There were stones and crosses for his grandfather and aunt Araxi who had died in Siberia, but no graves. Their remains were lost in Siberia.
The addition of Galian’s grave had changed the meaning of Merelots forever for his children, who, until his death, had not personally known anyone buried in their family cemetery.
She cried with her mother, often moved as much by her mother’s grief as by her own. The sudden disappearance of her father had brought Lara closer to her mother. Her sisters and brothers had also fallen silent. They all had more work to do; the happy playful times of village life had abruptly ended for them all. Everything had happened far too suddenly for Lara to be able to sort through the avalanche of different emotions passing through her. She desperately tried to push aside the feelings of fear and anxiety as she left her whole life behind and climbed into the car. That too was a relatively new experience. She had ridden in a car a few times before, but only in her uncle’s old and dilapidated Russian Niva, nothing like the shiny, clean SUV that she was climbing into now. She kept telling herself that this was another chore she had to do, probably not much more difficult than milking the sheep or cleaning the barn. The drive away from the village had not been a drastic life-changing experience.
But as they entered Yerevan, that sense began to give way to the fear and anxiety that she had managed to suppress at first. Almost nothing seemed familiar. The traffic, the street noise and smell, the tall buildings and the general clutter suddenly heralded not only a new world but also the loss of the world she had left behind.
Except for two female servants inside and two bodyguards outside, Ayvazian was alone when they dropped off Lara that day. His mansion was impressive, with marble pillars marking the entrance and two statues of lions at each side of the main gate. Inside, more white marble and more pillars.
“Now remember, this man is your new lord and master. You belong to him. You obey him in everything,” one of the female servants instructed her sternly as she brought her to him. She was a middle aged, portly woman, better dressed than anyone Lara knew in Saralandj, with short wavy hair that already displayed some gray around the temples. Her eyes seemed warm and stern at the same time, the latter a reflection of a dismissive ‘I’ve seen it all before’ attitude exuding impatience.
Lara could not help feeling hopelessly in awe of the opulence surrounding her. How could such places actually exist? Was this one of the palaces of kings that her father used to read to her about?
Ayvazian was seated in the living room in a huge armchair, smoking, and reading the paper. He was in his early fifties, with a bald head, round face and a substantial belly, which seemed in a struggle to break free of the buttons of his tight black shirt.
“Paron Ayvazian,” the female servant said, “Oriort Lara Galian. Mr. Ayvazian. Miss Lara Galian.” Then she left the room.
Ayvazian looked at his new possession for a long moment. Meanwhile, Lara observed the maroon velvet sofas, heavy overstuffed chairs, a cupboard full of crystal glasses and bottles, thick drapes at the windows and a white marble table between two of the chairs. And now a heavy man was staring at her.
“Barev,” he said. Hello.
What a heavy room, thought Lara, and to her surprise, was actually amused for having had that thought. “Barev!” she chirped, a bit too enthusiastically, which could easily have been a sign of her nervousness. But despite her nervousness, there was no fear in her voice or posture. She looked and sounded confident, young, innocent. Until her father’s death, Lara had not experienced anything bad in life, except their poverty, which, to her, was not bad or good, just normal. Her father’s death, traumatic as it was, was not an ongoing “threat” to her. It was a catastrophe that had happened and changed her life forever, but it had ended. She stood there like those species of animals that have never faced a natural predator, and therefore do not have the instinct of defensive measures.
“Sit down,” said Ayvazian pointing at a chair near him. “How was your trip?”
“It was fine, sir.”
“Are you tired?”
“No sir.”
“Are you hungry?
“No sir.”
“You must be hungry,” said Ayvazian. “Anoush will fix you something.”
Anoush must be the servant, thought Lara. “Thank you, sir.”
“You know you’re starting on an incredible journey, don’t you?” said Ayvazian, aware of the fact that he had to break this girl and her innocence. “Are you prepared for it?”
“Yes sir.”
But all that Lara could think at that point was how unusual the man looked. His black eyebrows stuck out on his broad forehead above his clean-shaven face, but seemed unusually still even when he spoke. He had a deep voice and spoke in slow, deliberate sentences, with minimal intonation. It was a formal, impersonal style of speech that belied the expressive face and eyes. Unlike his voice, which sounded detached and bored, Ayvazian himself was very much interested in everything, and seemed to observe all.
“I have some work to do now, but I will talk to you again later. Tomorrow you have to go to Moscow. But tonight you will stay here. In a few hours you can call your mother, if you wish.”
“Thank you, Paron Ayvazian.” Lara decided to try saying his name out loud; that somehow helped her understand the individual better. The man did not look like an ‘Ayvazian’ to her. Perhaps more like a ‘Papazian’ given his size and deep voice. But Ayvazian seemed pleased by the sweet mention of his name.
He pushed a button on the side table next to him,
and Anoush appeared again at the door. She walked Lara outside, and returned for instructions. After a minute she came out again, and asked Lara to follow her.
Their first stop was a small bedroom with a queen-size bed. There was a small suitcase on the bed, open, with some clothes in it.
“This is your room for tonight,” said Anoush, still in a stern, almost military voice. “This is your suitcase. There are pants and shirts, some underwear, and a nightgown for you in there. I think they will fit, at least well enough for now. You can do more shopping in Moscow tomorrow. There are shoes beside the bed that you should try on later. One or two pairs of them should fit you. Now come with me.”
Lara had no chance to answer, as Anoush was already leading her out of the room. She had never had a suitcase before. She remembers seeing an old, very large suitcase in their house, all torn and the locks broken, which her mother used as storage. But she did not know what it was or was normally used for. It was just beginning to sink in that things were truly changing for her. She’ll have to learn a lot very quickly if she is to survive what’s coming her way.
The next stop was a bathroom, adjacent to the bedroom. Anoush led her in, closed the door, and proceeded to draw a bath.
“Take your clothes off,” she ordered. “You have to take a bath now.”
A Place Far Away Page 4