Excerpt: Armenian Sketchbook by Vasily Grossman

In the House of Creativity I had got to know the kind, sweet smile of Katya, the thin little cook; I knew how she blushed if someone praised the soup she had made. Katya told me that she had come to Armenia from Zaporozhye and that her husband was a Molokan. Embarrassed, she told me how strange she found it that Molokans drink tea at weddings and don’t touch wine and how very strange the Leapers and Jumpers are. She informed me in a dignified tone that “Our own Tsakhkadzor Molokans don’t leap and jump.” Katya is gentle and kind. Her voice, her movements, her gait are all timid and indecisive. Everything embarrasses her. Her little son, Alyosha, who is in his first year at school, comes in—and Katya blushes and looks down at the floor. And Alyosha blushes too, murmuring something barely audible in reply to my simple “What year are you in at school?” He even looks like his mother. He is pale and has light-blue eyes; he is covered in freckles and his eyebrows and eyelashes are the color of wheat.

“The Armenians are good people,” Katya tells me—and blushes. “Armenians are good to one another, they respect their elders,” she says—and blushes. But then it becomes apparent that Katya thinks that Armenians are no different from anyone else. Some are drunkards; some like to pick fights; there are even thieves; they’re neither better nor worse than us Russians. “But the Armenian peasants work very hard indeed,” Katya adds—and blushes profusely.

I know Rosa, the swarthy housekeeper. She has dark down above her upper lip, and she is always smiling, so that people can admire her dazzling, sugar-white teeth. Rosa wears tall box-calf boots, does not know a word of Russian, and keeps herself constantly busy with unproductive work. She always carries an accounts book in which she notes down what her creative workers ate yesterday and what they will be eating tomorrow.

I know Ivan, the boiler man. He is a tall man with blond hair, pale eyes, and a pale mustache; his face looks cruel. He is young and strong, sometimes rude, sometimes sullen. His face is large and round, pink and white, and for some reason this makes him look particularly unpleasant. He stomps about in tall heavy boots. And he talks just as he moves; his every word is like a boot—slow, heavy, and exact. Ivan is a Molokan. Because he is fair-haired and has pale eyes, white teeth, and pink cheeks, and because he is a Molokan, I imagine him drinking only milk and eating only white millet porridge. But Ivan does not keep to the laws of his ancestors; he smokes and he drinks vodka. After a drink, he becomes loquacious; he tells me how he goes up into the mountains and hunts goats and lynx. Once he killed a leopard. . . . His stories lack the iron of authenticity, but he is not so much a liar as a Romantic—a realist for dreamers, a charming fibber among realists. He likes me because I am bad at billiards.

Nearly everyone is competitive, but Ivan is insanely so. Every time he loses a game of billiards to Martirosyan, he truly suffers. Anyone else would just be a bit cross, but Ivan is in torment. “Do you want to play?” he says to me—and in his eyes I see a bloodthirsty gleam, a thirst for sheep’s blood.

I have got to know Astra, the cleaner, and Arutyun, the old night watchman, Astra’s father-in-law.

Astra is a beauty. I think of Chekhov’s “The Beauties”: “After leaving the inn, they were silent for a long time. Then the coachman looked round and said to Chekhov, ‘Hasn’t the little Armenian got a beautiful daughter!’ ”

Astra is so beautiful that I have no wish to describe her beauty. I will say only that her beauty is the expression of her soul. Her beauty lives in her quiet walk, in her shy movements, in her always lowered eyelids, in her barely perceptible smile, in the soft outline of her girlish shoulders, in the chastity of her poor, almost beggarly clothing, in her thoughtful gray eyes. She is a white water lily in a pond shadowed by the branches of trees, born amid still, contemplative water.

This white blossom is the expression of the water of the forest, an expression of the half dark of the forest, of the vague outlines of plants lying deep in the water, of the way silent white clouds slide over this water, of the reflection in it of the crescent moon and the stars. And all this—streams, backwaters, forest ponds and lakes, rushes and sedges, sunrises and sunsets, rustling leaves and reeds, the sound of air bubbling up to the surface, the strange lonely sighs from the silt—all this finds its expression in the white water lily.

And in the same way, the world of modest female beauty finds its expression in Astra. As for what may lie hidden in the depths of these waters, no one can say unless he breaks the water’s smooth surface, walks barefoot through the cutting sedge, and treads the silty, sucking mud—now cold, now strangely warm. But I only stand on the shore, admiring the lily from a distance.

I imagined that no one was aware of my quiet, modest admiration of Astra—I was, after all, known for my silent melancholy: I was an austere ascetic, doubly so in the presence of Astra.

One day, however, my dear co-translator burst out laughing like Taras Bulba and said, “And as for our dear Astra, Vasily Semyonovich really does like her a great deal. He could eat her for breakfast.”

I shrugged and pulled a face.

Really, if Astra’s husband is anything like his father, Arutyun, the mournful, dismal, round-shouldered night watchman with the big nose. . . . But what on earth has all this got to do with me?

Arutyun is sad. Sometimes his face and eyes take on a look of piercing melancholy. Sometimes I walk silently past him in the hour before dawn, the hour when every night watchman in the world is asleep—and there he is, looking at me out of the darkness, his eyes full of a vast, still yearning.

I think he never sleeps—some huge sadness prevents him. He never speaks to anyone; no one visits him. Sometimes I see him on the street. He runs into some jolly old Armenian granddad and I think, “Now Arutyun’s going to smile. He’ll stop, he’ll light a cigarette and have a chat about sheep, about bees, about wine.” But no—Arutyun shuffles on in his heavy tarpaulin boots, sunk in his vast yearning. What’s the matter with him?

It is hard to imagine that it is only a few days since I, a stranger from Moscow, first arrived in this little mountain village, whose existence I had not even suspected.

“Barev!” say the people I meet.

And I take my hat off as I reply, “Barev dzez!” (Good to you too!) All around me are people I know.

Time passes, and soon I know a great deal more about Ivan, about Katya, about Astra, and about old Arutyun. I have learned much that is sweet and touching—and perhaps still more that is cruel and painful.

Katya’s husband is paralyzed; he cannot move his legs and has been bedridden for several years. Quiet Katya, yearning for her distant homeland, for her parents and friends, goes on caring for him, saving every kopek she can in order to give him little treats: an apple, say, or candy. And she says to me proudly, “Our own Tsakhkadzor Molokans do not leap and jump.”

Arutyun had five sons. The eldest worked as a drilling engineer. He was killed a year ago in a drunken brawl; someone smashed him on the head with a piece of iron piping. The villagers say he was a bad man. They feel sorry not for him but for the man who killed him and is now in prison.

Arutyun’s second son is the husband of the beautiful Astra. Eighteen months ago he went to prison himself—after killing a truck driver in another drunken brawl, in Karapet-aga’s restaurant. The driver had come from Lake Sevan, from deep-blue Lake Sevan. With him he had brought his beloved—they wanted to drink, to eat Karapet’s famous kebab, to have a good time. Aramais, Astra’s husband, was sitting at the next table with a group of friends. He insulted the driver’s beloved, who was married to someone else. The driver took offense and hit Aramais in the face. Aramais then stabbed him with a Finnish knife. Apparently Astra never wanted to marry Aramais—he was a ne’er-do-well, a troublemaker, a gambler and drunkard. But Aramais was infatuated; he wept, threw himself drunkenly at her feet, and vowed to kill both her and himself. Astra, her mother, and everyone in the village knew this was no empty threat. And so now she goes about in ragged clothes and worn-out boots, saving every kopek she can in order to be able to take a little more food to her husband. Every month she travels two hundred and eighty kilometers to see him; he is in a camp now, working in a mine. His sentence is not going to be reduced; he does not have a good record in the camp—he drinks, shirks work, and gets into fights.

Arutyun’s third son was recently released from a prison in Yerevan, and Arutyun was himself recently released from the district hospital—this third son had knifed him in the ribs during a quarrel. Arutyun was in the hospital for three months, and his son was in prison for three months—the father saved his son from a worse fate by giving false testimony. Sometimes this third son, a narrow-shouldered young man with a thin face and a heavy, hooked nose, comes to the terrace outside the House of Creativity for a game of billiards. On his face is a schizophrenic smile: sometimes he looks guilty, sometimes insane, sometimes brazenly unconcerned. And his father, old Arutyun, comes along to watch. When the game’s over, the son walks past his father in silence. His father is no less silent.

I’ve heard that Arutyun’s fourth son, the wildest one of all, left Armenia three years ago; he was one of the young people who answered the call for volunteers to settle the virgin lands of Siberia. Away he went—and no one has heard from him since. No one has seen him, nobody knows how to find him or even if he is still alive.

Arutyun’s fifth son, though mentally retarded, is the least unsatisfactory. His baby face is covered with black down; he smiles affectionately and slobbers as he shows me a picture book—a book of Armenian tales about animals. The animals in the pictures all look Eastern; they have dark hair and Armenian faces. The wolf and the hare have dark hair, and so does the middle-aged fox in a bonnet, peering slyly over her spectacles. But the boy’s old enough to be in ninth grade next year. . . . Yes, now I understand why old Arutyun’s eyes contain such vast yearning, why his gait, his silence, his insomnia, his hunched back—why everything about him expresses such a vast sorrow.

One day we were having breakfast. The kitchen was unusually full of noise and merriment and I half opened the door to see what was going on. I saw Katya, laughing loudly and blushing deeply. I saw Rosa, the housekeeper, showing her white teeth as she laughed no less loudly. I saw the gloomy and always preoccupied Tigran; this father of six young daughters, this disgraced ex-Secretary of the Party District Committee who was now in charge of the House of Writers, was also laughing. The whole kitchen was laughing, listening to a small, nimble old woman. The old woman was merry, and her shining eyes were full of life. Listening to her talk, even though I didn’t understand a word, I began to laugh along with everyone else. Then I was told that this old woman—the merriest woman in the village—was the wife of Arutyun, our night watchman; she was the mother of his five sons. . . . As Knut Hamsun put it, in the wonderful title he gave to one of his novels: But Life Goes On.

An Armenian Sketchbook

by Vasily Grossman

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