Siro

by David Ignatius

  “Vot adris,” said the woman, pointing to the apartment on the third floor.

  “Spasiba, spasiba,” said Anna, handing the driver a five-ruble note.

  She got out of the car and looked around. The streets were empty and quiet. The city was asleep. She saw no sign that she had been followed, but then, in deference to Stone’s advice, she hadn’t been watching. She looked up at Aram’s third-floor apartment. It was dark. Maybe he was asleep. Maybe he was with another woman. It didn’t matter. She only needed to tell him two words: Don’t go.

  Anna looked carefully, left and right, and then stepped into the entryway of the building. She climbed the stairs as quietly as she could. When she reached the third floor, she stood on the landing a moment, letting her eyes get accustomed to the dark, and then tapped quietly on the door.

  No answer. Come on, you bastard, open the door. She knocked louder, still trying to avoid rousing the neighbors, and then louder still. She heard a door open on the floor above, and saw the lights switch on across the hall. But still there was no response from Aram. She gave one last, loud knock, and then sat down on the stairs to ponder her options.

  She had half decided to sit there on the steps and wait for Aram to come home. But that possibility faded when the door across the hall opened and a nosy-looking old woman in a frayed bathrobe stuck her head out and stared at Anna. She would have stayed there anyway—damn the old woman—but the door opened again several minutes later. It was the same old woman, but this time she was making a motion with her hands, as if to sweep Anna away. Anna suspected that if she stayed, the woman would summon the militia.

  Hastily, Anna scribbled out a message on one of her traveler’s checks, the only clean piece of paper she could find in her wallet. She wrote it in French, their lingua franca. She tried to compose it in a way that would be obvious enough for Aram to understand, but not so obvious that it would incriminate him if someone else read it first. It read: “Hello, my darling. I’m in town for a quick visit. The friend you were going to meet tomorrow has unfortunately caught a cold. I’m staying at the Armenia Hotel. I ache for you.” She threw in that last phrase for cover, but she realized, as she wrote it, that it was also true. She did ache for him. She folded the check in half and slipped it under the door.

  It was now almost one o’clock. Back at the hotel, the hall ladies who monitored each guest’s coming and going would be waiting up for her. If she didn’t come back soon, they would probably sound the alarm. Anna loitered a few more minutes across the street, hoping that Aram would show up, and then gave up. Where was he? Probably sleeping with some dark-haired Armenian woman. Or more likely, Anna decided, he was with some of his friends planning the next day’s rendezvous.

  Anna walked back to the main street, feeling very conspicuous. Fortunately, a cab drove up after several minutes, and Anna was back at the hotel by one-thirty. The night desk clerk gave her a naughty wink. She set her alarm for five-thirty but lay awake more than an hour, assembling the pieces of her plan of action.

  44

  Anna got up at dawn on November 10. She showered, dressed, and was downstairs by six-fifteen. Fortunately, the desk clerk was on duty. Unlike the stolid Slavic personnel who manned the Intourist hotel in Moscow, he had a friendly, slightly larcenous look about him. God bless the Armenians, thought Anna.

  “Good morning,” she said.

  “Good morning,” said the clerk. “What we need, please?”

  “I would like to go sightseeing today.”

  “Intourist,” he said, motioning down the hall. “Service bureau open nine-thirty.”

  “Yes, but I want something special,” said Anna. “Not just the regular Intourist tour.”

  “Something special?” he asked, lifting his eyebrow.

  “Yes. I want to see the old monastery at Khor Virap, where St. Gregory the Illuminator was kept underground.”

  “Not so good trip. Not permitted trip. Khor Virap near border. Restricted area.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Anna sweetly. “But my Armenian friends said I could probably arrange a special trip. You know, for dollars?”

  “For dollars?” He looked around to make sure that nobody had heard. That was a good sign, thought Anna. He was already a co-conspirator.

  “Yes,” she said. “If that’s all right. Do you know anybody who could help me arrange a special tour like that?”

  “Car we got,” said the desk clerk. “My brother has very nice car. Maybe I call him. If it is a very special trip.” He said the word “very” with some emphasis, as if it signified an extra twenty dollars.

  “Could your brother take me in his car? That would be wonderful. I have a friend who may want to come along, too. Maybe we could stop and pick him up on the way.”

  “Why not.”

  “And one more thing. I would love to visit some of the little villages in the Ararat district. There is one I am told is very beautiful, called Kiarki.”

  “Why not,” he repeated. He lowered his voice. “Not telling anybody, please. This business for us.”

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I won’t tell a soul.”

  “When you go?”

  “Now,” she said.

  “Now?” He looked at his watch.

  “Yes, please. I want to see Ararat at dawn.”

  The desk clerk shrugged his shoulders, picked up the phone, and called his brother. The only word Anna made out was “dollar.” He showed up thirty minutes later driving a shiny red Zhiguli sedan. He was a burly man with a big mustache who spoke some English and said he worked at the cognac plant. A serious crook, thought Anna. His name was Samvel.

  Anna got in the back seat, then realized that she would attract attention there and moved up to the front, next to Samvel. She gave him Aram’s address. Her plan was to stop there first, to see if he had returned home. If he hadn’t, she would go to the little village of Kiarki herself and try to head him off. She hoped the trip south wouldn’t be necessary, that she would find Aram at home—bleary-eyed after a late night of drinking and scheming with his friends—and spend the rest of the day with him. In bed, perhaps.

  Please be home, Aram, she thought as the Zhiguli turned the corner onto his street. Please be home. She got out of Samvel’s car and walked up the three flights of stairs to the apartment. She pounded hard this time, not caring who heard her. But there was no answer. She crouched on all fours and peered under the door and saw that her note, written on the folded check, was still there. He’s slept somewhere else the night before the pickup, for security, she thought. Anna took a deep breath, steeling herself for what she had to do next. She returned to the car and got in next to Samvel.

  “My friend isn’t here,” she said. “Maybe he has gone ahead of me. Let’s drive south. There’s a pretty little village I would like to see, called Kiarki, and then I want to go to Khor Virap.”

  “Fine and dandy,” said the driver. Somewhere, he had learned a few such phrases of American slang.

  It was now seven-fifteen. They headed south out of town, descending the hills of Yerevan toward the flat plain beneath Ararat. The sun was bright, warming the morning air. The driver sped along, past low-slung suburban houses and collective farms with numberless rows of grapevines. It was a tidy little world—the vines carefully maintained, the houses clean and decorated with ornamented metal rainspouts, each crowned with animal figures and other designs.

  Samvel, the driver, kept up a steady stream of patter in a combination of languages. He seemed to be a kind of Armenian Sancho Panza, a genial rogue of the road. When they passed a militia station, he turned to Anna and said with a wink: “Permission for this we no got. If anyone stopping us, you my Armenian cousin from America. ‘Very sorry,’ you say, ‘I come all the way from Fresno to see Khor Virap.’ You give me dollars. I give to him. Everything hunky-dory.”

  “Hunky-dory,” agreed Anna. She handed him a ten-dollar bill. He tilted his head in a gesture that said “more” in any language, and she gave
him another ten. This commerce done, she began to relax slightly, whizzing along the open road on a sunny day with her fixer at the wheel.

  They were heading down a four-lane highway, straight toward the great tufted cone of Ararat. Samvel gazed toward the brooding peak and began to wax poetic. He was, like many Armenian men, prone to make speeches at the slightest provocation. He gestured toward Ararat and put his hand on his heart. “This mountain is like a magnet to me,” he said grandly. “In the shadow of this big mountain I feel immortal!” The big magnet of Ararat was actually across the border in Turkey, but never mind. The poetry of the Armenian soul overflowed from Samvel. He exhibited the national love of the grand gesture, the fatal romanticism. Anna wished that Aram could hear him.

  The Soviet-Turkish border was visible a few miles farther on, as they neared the Aras River. “Don’t look too close,” said Samvel. “Border area closed.”

  But Anna couldn’t resist. Every four hundred yards or so, she saw a tall tower, like the guard towers at prisons. As they got closer, she could see the frontier itself, half a mile away across the plain. What struck her was the fact that all the barbed wire faced inward; she had known it, intellectually, but it was still appalling to see that the fences had been constructed to keep Soviet people in, rather than to keep strangers out. And there were so many layers of them. First came a chain-link fence, with solid-concrete posts every few yards and what appeared to be insulation and conductors for electrified strands of wire. Next came a barrier of coiled razor wire, then another chain-link fence, then a patch of ground that had been raked smooth, so that it would show the slightest footprint, and then a paved road for the vehicles of the border guard. Across this road there was another barrier of razor wire, and then a last fence, crowned with that admission of national defeat—the inward-facing tier of barbed wire.

  The border looked utterly impassable, even to the wiliest smugglers. But Ascari’s men weren’t coming this way, across the plain from Turkey, Anna reminded herself. They were coming over the trackless mountains from Iran, where even border guards lost their way.

  “And now we are coming to famous Khor Virap,” said Samvel. “Maybe you would like to stop here first?”

  “No, let’s stop here on the way back,” said Anna. “First I want to see Kiarki, the village near the border.”

  “But that is Azerbaijani village. People there are Turks. Why go there? It will be ugly.”

  “My friends say it is very pretty. I’d like to go.”

  Samvel grumbled but agreed to go. It was now past eight-thirty. Anna looked now at every car they passed, hoping she might see Aram’s face. She was determined to get to the village before he did, but with each additional minute she became more worried that her plan wouldn’t work. Samvel looked over at her, nervously drumming her fingers against the dashboard of the Zhiguli. Armenians don’t like to see people anxious. It is an affront to the national character, which feels comfortable with laughter or tears—and abhors what lies in between.

  “I will sing you a song,” said Samvel.

  “An Armenian song?”

  “Of course. What you think I would sing, Turkish?” Anna laughed, and he began to sing in Armenian, in a rich bass voice that had an almost operatic resonance and filled the little Russian car with sound. He sang several verses, full of genuine if well-dramatized emotion.

  “It’s a beautiful song,” said Anna. “What do the words mean?”

  “I am singing about my grandfather’s village, called Moush, in Turkish Armenia. Now there is no more Moush. People all gone, all dead. But we sing this song to our sons, so they will know what it was like. The song says:

  Get up, my boy, let us go to our homeland.

  We will drink from our own water and milk.

  I will satisfy your longing.

  Get up, my boy, let us go to Moush, the land of our fathers.

  Even if it is in a dream, let us go and come back.”

  Anna closed her eyes. The ribbon of asphalt rolled under them, bringing them closer to the enclave where the borders of Turkey, Iran, Armenia and Azerbaijan all meet. A highway laid over the bones of the dead.

  “Sing me another song,” she said. “It makes me forget about my problems.”

  “You bet. But this is a sad song.”

  “That’s okay. I like sad songs.”

  Samvel’s voice was even deeper and richer this time, like the bass pipes of a great church organ. He sang only four verses and then stopped, overcome by the emotion of the song and the moment. “I am sorry,” he said. “It is hard for me to sing this song.”

  “Translate it for me,” said Anna. The more she saw of Samvel, the more he seemed to embody his countrymen—at once so robust and so sentimental. These Armenians were like small boats with too big sails, always in danger of becoming swamped.

  “I should not have sung this song. The words will make you too sad. It is a song about death. This song says:

  Everywhere you go,

  Death is the same.

  But I am jealous of the man,

  Who can die for his country.”

  “What is that song?” asked Anna. “I think I heard a friend of mine humming it once in Paris.”

  “It is our national anthem,” said Samvel.

  A few miles farther, Anna saw a sign in Russian pointing to the village of Kiarki. She looked around her. In the distance, to the southeast, were the jagged sawtooth mountains that marked the border with Iran. They were almost crimson in the morning sun. Ahead was the border with the Azerbaijani enclave called Nakhichevan. It was a ramshackle crossroads marked by a traffic circle, an army garrison and, on separate sides of the border, two derelict wineries. Anna felt that she had come at last to the very armpit of the world, this remote place that was at once in the shadow of Turkey, Iran and the Soviet Union.

  “Kiarki,” explained the driver, in case Anna had missed the sign.

  “Slow down,” she said as they neared the village.

  She looked around for signs of anything unusual. The houses were small, one-floor bungalows, perhaps a bit messier than those in the neighboring Armenian villages, but otherwise identical. Many of the houses had grapevines in the front yard, growing up metal pipes that stretched from the street to the roof. A few women sat in the shade of these vines, preparing food. And there were children, dozens of them, playing in the streets and in a small park near the center of town.

  “It’s dirty here,” said Samvel as they neared the town square. “Turks.”

  “Is this the only road from Yerevan?” asked Anna.

  Samvel nodded. “There is small road, on other side of town, but it only goes to next village.”

  “Stop the car,” said Anna. “I want to get out here.” Samvel steered the car off the main street of the town and stopped about forty yards from the square. From where the Zhiguli was parked, Anna would be able to see any other car arriving from Yerevan on the main road.

  She covered her hair with a simple scarf and got out of the Zhiguli. Samvel got out with her. She surveyed the road, up and down. Behind them was only dust. Nobody seemed to have followed them into this windswept little pea patch of the Caucasus. She looked toward the town square—with its little bust of Lenin alongside a drinking fountain—and to the streets beyond. There was no sign of the militia, or the army, or the KGB. It was all calm and ordinary—as numbingly ordinary as only a border outpost in a remote region could be. She saw no sign whatsoever of Aram. The only odd thing was how few adults there were in the streets. Maybe they’re all out working at the collective farm, thought Anna.

  “What you want to look at?” said Samvel. He still thought visiting Kiarki was a stupid idea. Why spend a minute visiting Turks when there were so many Armenians nearby? But he was trying to cooperate.

  “I’d just like to walk around,” said Anna.

  Her immediate problem, in fact, was how to stay put; how to contrive some way to stay right where they were until Aram arrived. She had an idea, one th
at would require good acting—especially to convince a histrionic character like Samvel—but was worth a try. She walked gingerly across the pavement, testing her ankles, toward the fountain and the bust of Lenin. As she climbed the stone stairs toward the monument, she took a sudden, terrible tumble—twisting on her left ankle, falling hard on her hip, and then rolling over on her shoulder.

  Samvel was horrified. He came running over to Anna, calling out to her in Armenian and English. She lay on the ground, moaning and holding her ankle.

  “You need doctor?” asked Samvel. “I take you to doctor.”

  “I don’t think it’s broken,” said Anna. “It just hurts like hell. Let me try to walk on it.”

  She stood up and dusted herself off. Samvel offered his arm as a crutch, then his shoulder. Anna leaned on him and limped along, marking each step with an “ouch” or an “argh.” The ankle did, in fact, hurt slightly, but it was the hip that had really taken a pounding. She walked back to the car, making just enough of a show of agony to impress Samvel, but not so much that she attracted people from the village.

  “I’d like to just sit in the car for a little while, if it’s okay,” she said. “Then when I’ve rested my leg we can go to Khor Virap.”

  “They got Armenian doctor in next village, probably,” said Samvel. “He fix you up good.”

  “No, I’d like to stay here for a little while. Maybe you could get me a bottle of mineral water or something from the store. I’m thirsty.”

  “Jim-dandy,” he said. “I bring back to you in few minutes. You stay in car. You not supposed to be here, according to rules. But everybody in Armenia break rules all the time, so don’t worry. But stay here.”