“A Translucent Day” by Hrant Matevosyan

Hrant Matevosyan (1935-2002) truly deserves to be described as one of the outstanding writers of Soviet Armenia. Best known for Menk enq, mer sarere [We and Our Mountains], and Ashnan Arev [Autumn Sun], both of which became feature films, Matevosyan created works that combined ironic sentimentality, a humorously critical yet affectionate representation of Soviet Armenian society, an exploration of individual fates and emotions, and an endless fascination with what it meant to be an Armenian. Matevosyan’s unique prose style, his representation of topics that teetered on the edge of the forbidden, and the honesty of his portrayal of life in Armenia set him apart from his contemporary writers, and certain phrases from the cinematic adaptations of his works have become permanent fixtures of Armenian folklore.

While Matevosyan is justly considered the master of the genre of short story, “Translucent Day” does not rank among his most published (or accomplished) works. Despite this, it aptly catalogues the themes that were to punctuate his entire oeuvre: a nostalgic representation of the historic past, the “Armenian dream” of transitioning from rural to urban living with the concomitant elements of successful integration (ability to discuss fine arts, interact with foreign visitors, a private phone line), and a contemplation of how the centuries of losses have left Armenia bereft of its creative potential. Significantly, the short story was written in 1965, during the brief period of intellectual thaw in the Soviet Union between Stalin’s demise and Brezhnev’s rise to power, allowing Matevosyan to introduce some subtly subversive elements into the story. Among these is a proud and sympathetic secondary character who participates in the anti-communist resistance, an only thinly veiled wish for Russia’s defeat in Napoleon’s 1812 war, and a strong nationalistic spirit. The latter lies in especially stark contrast to the concept of “nation-mindedness” (narodnost’) defined by the Soviet Writers’ Union in the 1930s, which allowed for only store-front representation of ethnic diversity in the Soviet Union while suppressing any notion of true difference between national identities forming the union. As the first-person narrator travels farther and farther from the urban center that provides the comfort of his existence, his happiness is gradually replaced with sadness. His comments may suggest that he is happy to have transitioned from living the difficult life of a shepherd to the desired life of an urban office-worker, but it is his drive through rural Armenia that allows him to reconnect with his own national past and recognize the irreparable losses and, at the same time, the unique beauty of his native country.

— Translator’s note

“Phone call for you.”

“Thank you.”

Tall, handsome, and clean, I pick up the receiver, with one hand in my pocket, and draw out my “hello” the French way. And I am quite content with myself – here I am, yesterday’s peasant, having escaped the danger of becoming a goatherd, of being pummeled by hail, and of being crippled by arthritis; I have a secure job, I’m significant enough to be given a personal phone line, my friends are important people, and that makes me all the more significant.

“Hello.”

“Remember, you used to say you wanted to visit Ani?”

“I used to want a lot of things.”

“Come, let’s go today, just you, me, Minas, his sister-in-law, and a couple of architects.”

It’s hot; the snowcap on Masis is shrinking; the grapes rustle as the sweet juice stretches their skin; we stop to have some cognac, fifty grams or so; the sister-in-law ties a light nylon handkerchief around her head and sprays on sunblock; her smoky glasses are imported and very chic; and now, it’s time to get some coffee.

“So this García Lorca is like the Spanish equivalent of our Isahakyan.*”

“Yes, our poets are truly splendid.”

“Why are you laughing?”

“I just feel like it.”

“Tell us so we can laugh with you.”

“I don’t want to.”

Why shouldn’t I be laughing! I am not hauling a heavy cart, I don’t have to worry about an ox breaking its leg on some godforsaken path, I haven’t done anything to displease my bosses, and, instead of contemplating from afar the unattainable word “architect,” here I am conversing with real architects, with Minas the painter, some of whose works are very good, although I don’t get some of them, and as I talk to Minas the painter, the world, with the best of its culture, threads through our language. There’s a Cezanne, a Manet, and I think there’s also a Monet; I was born to say “rake” and instead I pronounce “Cezanne”; instead of discussing infectious cattle diseases, I casually ask, “Who were those Czech people in your studio yesterday?” The terror inspired by howling wolves has become but a distant dream; arthritic pains foretelling an oncoming rainstorm seem as real as lyrical poetry or the medieval locust plagues to today’s peasant. An invisible caring hand has lifted me from the middle of the field and gently placed me in an office armchair in the middle of the city. And I am so elated that I am a hay-maker no more that once in a while I say critical things about haymakers. And about goatherds. And our leaders. And sometimes — about Mao Tse-tung. “This bridge connects one bank of the river to the other,” said Mao, and then he had these words engraved in golden letters on the side of the bridge. I, a herder and a herder’s son, talk of the Chinese deity with a sarcastic grin. I, a peasant and a peasant’s son, have completely grasped the chemical makeup of asphalt and insist that no, it is impervious to potholes. Mine is this Volga,[i] speeding at over sixty miles per hour, this nylon headdress, this floral-printed thermos and the coffee it contains, the pregnant languor of the orchards we pass, the urbanized villages, the picturesque Aragats, the ancient roadside tavern, the cloud-shaped herds of sheep sprawled over the hills on either side of the road, and the cool breeze infused with a floral scent. Mine is this limitless sea of grassland and the city of Gyumri. And the captain of the border guards, a Rostov native, with his deferential readiness to take us all the way to the border gates. Mine is this feeling that my country begins in the Masis mountains and stretches all the way to Chukotka.

Somehow, I can no longer tell Shirak from Kuban, the way a Russian can’t taste the difference between grapes grown in Crimea and the Ararat valley.

And here I am, happy and powerful, standing with my equally happy and powerful friends on an observation deck, peering through the binoculars at the waves that ripple through the limitless sea of unspoiled greenery. I’ve seen better and more impressive vistas in the movies. And Yerevan is worth seven Anis, and I am the gatekeeper of Yerevan.

“Why are you crying?”

There used to be Turkish settlements in our mountains. The Turks would come from their yellow valleys, get ripe and sun-baked in our mountains, and then they would load their belongings and tents on their goats and ho-hey-ho!—back they went to their yellow valleys.

Now, my older uncle and I went to buy butter from them once; I heard foreign speech for the first time in my life, and it petrified me. They had energetic, swearing, backstabbing and smiling devils of kids, with strangely unthinking eyes. They came back to haunt me in my dreams twenty years later. I dreamt that we were at the fortress of Karin, among its clay fortifications, and those children were there; even at thirty, in my dreams, I found them frightening.

I remember there was one boy among them, who was sitting on the ground with his arms wrapped around his knees, staring ahead with his large, vacant eyes — I wasn’t sure if he was looking at us or just out into space. A woman called his name; he jumped up and I thought he’d gone off, but then the woman called him again—I guess he hadn’t moved after all. The woman walked over to him, her skirts swaying with her stride, to give him a thrashing; he quickly jumped up and even pretended to be taking off, but soon stopped, either too lazy to run or simply forgetting his own intentions.

My uncle, a balding man with triangular eyes and a prominent nose, was haggling; no, their price wouldn’t do. As if offended by their pettiness, he’d pull back, pretending he was leaving; to show his resolve, he’d turn to me and say, “Get up, let’s go, my boy,” and he’d wink at me. He had bragged to my family in the village and to me on the way there, “You’ll see how I am going to cheat those Turks,” and now he was putting on a show to prove to me and to himself that he almost had them in his pocket. And then, just as the Turks were about to cave in, he suddenly lost interest in haggling or just plain forgot his plan to cheat them, and paid them their asking price. Not only did they get their price for the butter, but they also mixed sheep’s lard into it—for which he later got a mouthful from his daughters-in-law—but he no longer cared because suddenly his mind became preoccupied with something else. Like me, he’d taken notice of the boy who was sitting with his arms wrapped around his knees, and was observing him closely. He let go of the scales, forgot his business and called out,

“Come here, Armenian boy.”

With his ear cocked to the evening sounds of the encampment, the child sat there, immobile and unresponsive, staring off into the dusk of the gorges with his wide-open and slightly slanting eyes.

“Isn’t he Armenian?” my uncle asked, confused.

“Sure he is,” said the Turks. “You mind your butter now; we don’t want you to say later on that we cheated you.”

“Aha,” my uncle called out triumphantly, “I can tell my own kind from a thousand people.”

The boy was whipping the bull with a switch he’d picked up. He kept striking the bull across its chin, its eyes, its horns, but it barely felt anything. The bull could have crushed the boy in a single step, but he kept standing there, right under the bull’s chin and dealing it one blow after another, angrily, unevenly, all the while looking as if he hated every second of it. The bull turned around, trying to escape, and other children and their dogs chased after it; the boy sat down again, hugged his knees and stared off into the gorges, by now filled with darkness.

“I’ll recognize my own kind in a thousand,” murmured my uncle again, as if it was a special gift of his.

“In a thousand,” he said again as he arranged me in the saddle along with all his purchases.

In those olden days, there lived a man in Zangezur, well known to everyone around. He took part in the uprisings and the military actions, fought winning and losing battles, got involved in politics, but in the end he still couldn’t make heads or tails of the events unfolding in his native parts. So one day he packed up his things, made his way across the Arax River to Iran, went down to Tabriz, and set up his business there, where the tranquility of life made him sleepy, and the singed smell of gunpowder gradually faded from his nose, the way the memory of a scorching or a freezing day eventually fades into the recesses of one’s mind. Here I have my gate, and my house, and my pillow, and here are my wife and children, he thought.

“I wonder if Armenia still exists…”

And exist it did, there was no other way, because his son was now ill with homesickness. Dear Lord, dear Lord… so much pain and so much illness in the world, with just as much medicine and remedies, and here’s my boy, ill with homesickness. The doctor said that it was an illness that normally afflicted animals, not humans; a Persian tiger, he said, wouldn’t survive in Germany, and so forth. And the doctor prescribed some medication but warned that it was useless, and that the only thing that could cure the child would be going back to his homeland.

“Where was he born?” inquired the doctor.

“Zangezur or somewhere around there, in Ghapan.”

“Where is that?” asked the doctor.

“It’s on the other side of Arax, beyond there, towards Russia.”

“I don’t know,” said the doctor. “If you care anything for your child, you’ll take him back there, and if you don’t do that, no amount of medication is going to cure him.”

Dear Lord, dear Lord… These kinds of things used to occur only in the hashish-inspired tales of ancient Persia, ten thousand years ago; they happened once again in 1927 in Tabriz, in the family of Gerasim Atajanyan.

So Gerasim Atajanyan, in his past a member of the anticommunist resistance, strapped on his gun, took his son, crossed the Arax back to Armenia in the middle of the night, and went up into the mountains.

The morning dawned, and the sun shone over the blue cliffs and the yellow mountains. Smoke was rising from the chimneys of Artsvanik’s hut over here, and from Geranush’s over here, and David Bek’s, and Tsav’s. A blue mist, like a fog from the faraway mountains, climbed up the gorges; and a golden dust made halos around the peaks and the mountaintops. And Gerasim realized that his son wasn’t the only one afflicted with homesickness.

As the morning dawned, the communist police unit lined up at the door of the Goris revolutionary committee headquarters and marched to arrest Gerasim the border-crosser.

“Gianjunts Simon,” called out Gerasim, who lay in hiding in the recesses of the gorge,

“Gianjunts Simon, show some mercy, have a heart, my child’s ill.”

“Atajanants Gerasim,” yelled back the red police commander, “did you really think you’d get away with running off to Tabriz? Come out at once and turn yourself in!”

“Gianjunts Simon, go about your business if you want to keep the blood running in your veins.”

It might have been Gerasim’s reputation as a sharp shooter, the presence of his child, his ingenious hideout spot, or the commander’s realization that the mountains were as much Gerasim’s as anyone else’s, but the brigade turned back without Atajanyan, walked over the mountain slopes, idly chatting, went down to Goris and reported that nobody had crossed any borders. And the border-crosser roamed the valleys of his childhood, and, when he got thirsty, he drank water from the cold springs, as he said to his son,

“See, this here is the Cold Spring, that one is the Blind Spring, remember, that’s the Arjut gorge, this is the oak tree. It’s not made of gold, and there’s plenty of oak in the world, but this one is a special tree; it was here when our grandfather was here, and now it stands by our side. Even if you make it to Egypt or America from Tabriz, this will always be your tree, and it’ll follow you wherever you go. When you fall ill and they ask you what you want, you have to say I want that tree that once lived side by side with my grandfathers.”

And as Gerasim looked around, he saw his grandfather, the axe tucked under his belt, walking slowly uphill, with his mutt following closely on his heels. Gerasim knew the dog; it was the two hundred twentieth of his family’s seven hundred dogs, and it carried in its blood the instincts and the acumen of its wise forefathers, which it would pass on some day to the next generation.

And Gerasim looked on and saw himself as a red-cheeked child, as an adolescent with sweat on his upper lip, where the mustache was to grow some day, as a young man with his brow raised high, walking through to the gorge towards the cold springs. And as he listened, the voices of himself at different ages echoed back from the mountain slopes. He was swimming in a sea of red poppies, and of meadows that were greener than green, and the larks were singing in chorus, all of these images and sounds enhanced and multiplied by the poppies, larks and meadows of his memory, ones he had seen throughout his entire life in those mountains.

Gerasim Atajanyan lingered there with his son from that summer until the end of autumn, and then for two more full summers through late autumns, when the cool breeze from the mountains was replaced with a cold wind and the tents in encampments became empty, and smoke no longer rose from the chimneys, and the solitary mountains turned a deep autumnal green, and then, his glance cast back over his shoulder, he made his way back to Tabriz. His son was cured, but Gerasim was the ailing one now. He ached for his mountains that remained on the other side of Arax, the same side where his past also rested.

When the writer Anton Chekhov got bored with his Moscow, he crossed over his Volga to his Ural Mountains, and from there—to Western Siberia. On he went to Eastern Siberia, his Irkutsk, his Iakutia, his Far East, and then crossed over his Amur River to his Sakhalin. He made a full circle through Russia, and returned to his Moscow with his completed travelogue Sakhalin in his hands.

When writer Derenik Demirchyan[ii] got bored with his Yerevan, he decided to travel to his Sakhalin, and it took him only two hours: he passed through the mountains of Sevan, descended to the Dilijan canyon, traveled along the gorge, and, at the spot where the canyon opened into a valley, Demirchyan remarked,

“Vardan[iii] led his armies in battle here.”

And he greeted the Azeri farmer he encountered on the border with “Nə var, nə yox, a kirvə, yaşayışın necədir, işlərin necədir …”[iv]

Then he turned his car around and headed towards the other side of the land of Armenia, and arrived there only four hours later. Again, “Nə var, nə yox, a kirvə.” Four hours is what it takes a bad student to get four failing grades, a good student—four A’s, the rocket—to enter the orbit of the moon, for the sea waves to churn up foam. In four hours, the blue basalt block perched at the entrance of Matenadaran will turn a few more shades of color, but alas, four hours will never translate into a travelogue. Six hours after the beginning of his odyssey, Derenik Demirchyan returned home to Yerevan.

[…]

Had Napoleon’s march gone off successfully—after all, Russia wasn’t his final goal—he would have gone through the Caucasus to India, toppling on his way the Ottoman Empire and creating an Armenian kingdom. And he would have said to his army’s Armenian general, Joachim Murat, otherwise known as Hovakim Muradyan,

“Here, Murat, have your lost homeland back.” But Napoleon’s plans went awry at Borodino, because of a common cold, as some researchers would have us believe.

Oh, the naïve, beloved, weak, credulous ones …

We should closely examine the annals; we are bound to find some pundit of political history who lied to our faces to appease a fellow historian somewhere else (say, in England), and in the end became the only one to childishly fall for the legend of Napoleon’s common cold.

We were still barbarians back when the Greeks had already figured out the great mystery of putting people and spears together into armies with the same ease with which fingers folded into a fist. The Greeks, say their chroniclers, were eager to civilize us as well—for such is the fate of the strong nations, forever to bear the cross of their good intentions—and so the Greek army came and trampled through the entire country of Armenia, making its way from the West to the Armenian East, then from the East to the North and from the North to the South, until it finally broke camp in the blue valleys of Mush. The victory came as effortlessly as a military exercise; there was no army to stand up to the Greek military and no fortress to withstand the force of their catapults. Back then, our pottery had never seen the inside of a kiln, and our copper was still separate from the bronze, because our potters were busy kneading clay for the good of the Great Persian Empire, and our blacksmiths were busy welding swords for it.

One night, in the field of Mush, at the Greek military camp, the guards captured a barbarian, who, with a bronze blade in his hand, was slithering in the dark to attack the great commander. What was he after?, they wondered. He didn’t speak a word of Greek. Didn’t even know how to crawl properly. Didn’t know how to wield a knife. When they fell to beating him, he yelped—he didn’t even know how to bellow. And one wouldn’t describe him as particularly courageous; as they were slaughtering him, he rolled around on the ground and shrieked, according to the Greek chronicler.

This misunderstood, weak, unequal barbarian emerged from the fog of two thousand five hundred years, and I recognized myself in him. And I embraced as my own his legacy of powerlessness, the softness of his blade, and the feebleness of his arm.

[…]

And mine is our god, Mesrob Mashtots,[v] who said, let there be light, and there was light.

And that insane inhabitant of Mush, who in the black summer of 1915 abandoned his wife, his child, and his daily bread, and carried the front doors of the Resurrection Temple on foot all the way to Edjmiatsin.

And that chronicler who spent forty, one hundred forty, one thousand forty years hiding out in a cave, the path to it overgrown with centuries of grass, so that he could record what did and didn’t transpire in this small valley.

And Komitas,[vi] the black-cassocked sun of Armenia.

And Tumanyan,[vii] who aged a hundred years in a single year.

And that poor dreamer who, in faraway Europe, molded a cannon with an insane hope of one day firing it from the hilltops of Siunik.

And those hundreds of boys, who, armed with books and gunpowder, went to spread the red flag over our shrinking blue land and who were mowed down like homeless dogs on the border from the front and from the rear.

And the terrible love stories that sprung up in 1915, the requiems people sang, the bread they ate, the seed they sowed, the children they bore, and the songs they wove.

And here is the most astonishing part of all: after all of that, the valleys turned green again, the fields and the tree-shades still flirted with each other, the poppies reddened again, and laughter rang over our meadows once more. And the Master sat in his throne and contemplated the question of this terrifyingly cruel and irresistibly beautiful land, from time to time uttering words that were as precious as diamonds because in fifty years they had absorbed a thousand years of sunshine and rainfall.

“Why are you laughing, why are you crying?”

* * *

ENDNOTES

[i] A Soviet-era large sedan, frequently driven by ranked officials.

[ii] Derenik Demirchyan (1877-1956), Armenian writer, most notably author of the historical novel Vardanank.

[iii] Legendary Armenian military commander and symbol of Armenian struggle of independence from Persia in the 5th century; protagonist of Demirchyan’s Vardanank.

[iv] Polite Azeri greeting, usually used when addressing unfamiliar people.

[v] Mesrob Mashtots (360?-440), the creator of the contemporary Armenian alphabet, which he completed between 404-406, subsequently translating the Bible into Armenian. He was beatified and elevated into the ranks of saints by the Armenian Church.

[vi] Komitas Vardapet, born Soghomon Soghomonyan (1869-1935), Armenian composer and musician, credited with preserving and recording scores of Armenian folk music and composing the liturgy now used by Armenian Church.

[vii] Hovhannes Tumanyan (1869-1923), Armenian poet and prose-writer.