Later, when they were taking apart the old floorboards of the room, the uncle’s sons discovered Lev’s toilet, which he had made right under the takht; he had sawed the boards and made a half-meter hole. The boards were rotten from the excrement and simply crumbled under the blows of the crowbar, leaving only the heads of rusty nails on the logs. Together with Abgar, Khanna pulled out a few pieces of board, breathing in the urine-soaked wood dust. They took up the floor in all the rooms, filled the open hole with big rocks, then concrete, and both rooms started to look bearable.
Many years ago, the grandma had barbed wire put up between Lev’s and their gardens. In general, she had something like a sick feeling towards Lev; a certain intolerance, indigestion, disgust, revulsion to this next-door neighbor, whose degree of madness was hard to assess because he didn’t interact with anyone. No hello, no goodbye, only when he saw the grandma he would say, “My son,” would constantly repeat, “My son, my son,” to which the grandma’s vomit would almost fill her mouth, threatening to spill from her toothless gums. Other than that, he said nothing. He wore his gray coat all year round, the belt tied above his waist; he stood on the little mound in the yard and looked unblinkingly at the only tree in the garden. Nobody knew what he ate, how the meat filled up his body; Lev’s way of life was completely unknown to the world.
The death of the lonely, crazy old man was not a very unexpected thing, but the sons who arrived from Russia, who were representatives of the criminal world, searched long for the cause of their father’s death. News spread that Lev had been killed but nothing was confirmed or denied until the older and middle sons left empty-handed, having sold the house and front garden to Khanna’s Uncle Abram. The grandma, who had a ritualistic attitude toward all ceremonies and was their first visitor, locked herself up at home and didn’t go to Lev’s funeral. For months, she didn’t let them take down the barbed wire, to open the door to Lev’s house, fastened with a piece of cord. Her implacability applied also to Lev’s space; she wouldn't allow fruit to be picked from the tree; she had taken from the pantry and thrown in front of the chickens a sieve full of plums that the daughter-in-law had picked from a branch reaching over on their side.
But since business plans having to do with the space were ripening in the family, the uncle finally removed the barbed wire, his hands bleeding, and for the first time Khanna and Aksel set foot in Lev’s sooty rooms.
Khanna had decided to turn Lev’s house into a guesthouse where they would take in tourists, feed them, and give them a place to sleep.
The grandma did not understand the point of the idea; how could people stay at that insane man’s house? Where would the collected soot of all those years go?
Abgar, the uncle’s youngest boy, was excited. He had dropped out of the history department, was hurriedly learning English and preparing for the business. Khanna had found a co-financed grant program specifically for Shirak province, and was trying to secure a grant. She was constantly having discussions with Abgar about what they could offer the tourists. All they had was Shirak province’s untouched nature and the history of the nearby city of Artik, from which they needed to squeeze some kind of concept to offer as a tour product. Khanna was imagining an indescribable experience for incomers, an alternative world, a Shirak Shambhala, a Shoragyal Eldorado, an enchanting vision seen through the fog of trails and stories which still needed to be deciphered and defined. The area’s plants, animals, sandstone, mines, prison, the mountain’s rockiness, as gold . . .
Aksel, the uncle’s oldest boy, was responsible for the plants and animals, as he was an agronomist. They first needed to explore, talk to people, get a sense of the area and the history, compile scripts, and then give them to the guides to recite.
Khanna was done with procrastination. She didn’t want to spend her whole life teaching children, teaching them right and wrong, especially since she herself wasn’t sure of anything. She had never attained the ambition of a teacher, especially because she didn’t want to. She liked the world of the ephemeral, where it was possible to swing and wave this way and that. Terms never completely stuck with her, everything was confirmed and denied again, and teaching also didn’t change the state of things. More or less that’s what she taught. The changeable and the unstable. It was only the borders that were firmly denied in Khanna’s head, and she wasn’t afraid to turn the unimaginable into reality.
From the series of the unimaginable was her feeling for Abgar. What was clear was that the borders in her head were like the dilapidated fences of the village’s pear field, which were woven with the branches of a slender bush. Very little effort, and she could pass through.
“What if my feeling for you is wanting love?” she had messaged him.
Abgar was resisting.
“Girl, you know, your rating with me should have gone down after saying something like that, but it turns out, it went up. How is that?”
Khanna hated the halo planted on her head, which Abgar had braided, and now he was resisting his own creation. She wanted to take it apart, like the floorboards of Lev’s toilet.
That short time in summer that she spent in the village was decisive. The days stretched and filled with something emanating from Abgar that enveloped and adorned him in Khanna’s eyes. Her body grew and surpassed itself, her insides deepened, darkened purely, and trembled. Khanna was afraid for him, for his potential emotions, for his affliction. She was afraid he wouldn’t understand, he would be shocked, he would go crazy. She was scared, but she told him and met his understanding, but unaccepting, curious, and rejective, genuineness. Abgar was twenty-two, with the whole youth of his age, with the fervor of his body, with his thin belly, his firmness of a tree.
“Don’t touch!”
She didn’t touch, she maintained a distance, maintained the faint borders.
“I have never swallowed before,” she said to Atom.
The sperm was bitter, with some kind of metal taste. Then her lips and teeth began to stick to each other. Atom didn’t like the way the sperm was smeared over his body, spread and stuck all over his hair. Khanna openly spread it over her whole abdomen, then brought her hands to her nose, breathing in the smell.
They had met at a forum for businessmen․ She had immediately felt that it was him. Atom was seated confidently, his leg crossed, the two fingers of his right hand leaning on his temple. Khanna didn’t have enough time to think. Everything was decided by itself. When he was taking her home after drinking tea at the Chainy of Tsaghkadzor’s curves, Khanna said she didn’t want to go home. As soon as they had passed under the small bridge at the entrance of Avan, Khanna started to tremble so much that the silhouette of the full moon dropped in and out of the sharp border beneath her glasses. Then they passed the row of poplar trees, and Khanna, looking at their trunks, thought that they probably hadn’t been grown from seed-grown saplings, but rather from a side cutting that had shown root and was transplanted. Aksel was teaching how to differentiate how they were planted by looking at their trunks. This would have been unnecessary and uninteresting information for her husband if Khanna had voiced her thoughts. And immediately the decision fell from thought to tongue. She wanted to tell Atom, subconsciously wanted to check to what degree he would share it with her.
“The poplar trees are grown from cuttings.”
“How do you know?”
“The trunks are black, whereas they should be like birch trees: white, with black marks on the smooth bodies.”
“I saw.”
“There are two in the row that are white.”
“They look healthier.”
“They are pretty.”
“Should I take you home?”
“I’m trembling.”
“I know.”
“No.”
The car stopped in the red light of the petrol station. The smell of petrol filled the end-of-summer air. Khanna liked that smell; some fragments of memories left from childhood would always swim out of it. She would see the rainbow created by the petrol in the water spilled on the ground. While the car was filling, Khanna put her hand on her throat, from which the hormones of the trembling were produced. Later on, Atom said that he had understood that Khanna had liked him from the very first day, because she had constantly put her hand on her neck. Khanna, having the stone of the guilty feeling in her throat, the fear, the despair, thought that was probably something else, but she didn’t tell Atom about it.
Fog appeared from somewhere, the lights of the oncoming cars started shining white on the road. The wave of fog was hitting the windshield and running down the walls of the car, leaving glittering drops of wetness on its black shell. Khanna was feeling that although Atom was constantly looking at the road running in front, he kept her in his peripheral vision, in which she didn’t know where to put her hands, how to place her body, so that she wouldn’t look confused. She didn’t feel like crying.
The whole landscape was unchanging, parched to stoniness. A bit of grass, a couple of trees are growing on the crag's mines. On the whole surface of the soil, if it’s not farmland, are scattered pock-marked stones, the yellow moss of years on them. The surface of the soil is curly. The color is a mix of cinnamon and laurel. Shirak is soil-colored, treeless. Rich with its bareness. With its up-and-down ground. In summer, a few strong flowers, bitter plantains, lizards, sun skewers; in winter, a storm covers the sky in darkness, spinning, snowy, smoke wheezing out from the chimneys. Icicles. Small little lakes in the mountains’ little bosom.
Little world of Armenia.
Khanna was neither that country’s child, nor was she not. She didn’t love the country like her childhood cradle, but she loved it as a thought that had entered her conscious mind, obscure and naked. When she was driving through those places, there was always some kind of ode circling in her head, she was coating those lands with some kind of immaterial thing, but she wasn’t embracing it: she wanted to remain an observer. It wasn’t nature, with its agricultural or curative side, that she was indifferent to. She was indifferent to the green-loving vibe, to the eco issues, to vitamin D. She was feeling something else. Those fields had sexuality, were breathing inexplicably, strange burning, outflowing. The stones and leaves of grass were shooting slant arrows from a thousand directions into Khanna’s heart․ Were they memories, or imaginary stories taking her captive? The fields were desire. That was the scenery uneasily fitting in her head. She didn’t want woodsy, she didn’t want grassy; this rockiness was somehow running parallel with her inside. To this environment belonged the landscape of her hidden thoughts, as soil’s color to soil.
She remembered how they were going to pick ghmi, probably in the beginning of summer, when in the oat fields finger-sized worms were ripening and hanging heavy-colored from the heads of the oat flowers. The ghmi was being grown together with that plant, and she needed to overcome her dread of worms, to bend over, push it to the side and pick it. She was imagining that someone was looking at her from the field, from between the oats, that it was necessary to not just be a good harvester, but a field witch Indian movie, flower and mighty. By overcoming her fear, she was filling the sacks. The whole field was women with colorful headscarves, as the oat worms: They were opening and contracting. In the far distance, the bus was visible rusty yellow, which was continuing to work ceaselessly even after a hundred years. With that they had come, and with that they were going to leave, loaded with sacks. Loaded with scenery.
Khanna couldn’t rid herself of the memories, but the country had changed, her aunt with whom they used to bring home so many fields had died. What remained was to fold up the memories, to put them aside or turn them into a saga or a tale for tourists, who are so keen to listen to many made-up and unmade stories.
“I’ll tell you,” say the tour guides.
“I’ll tell you,” says Khanna, as a master of experiences.
Was it possible that Khanna’s story would ever turn into something that they would tell?
The gate creaked.
The dog started barking.
The uncle had painted the gate silver and the leaves of the tall standing poplar tree were falling into the yard by sliding down the silver surface. The grandma swept them the whole day, gathering them up, making one pile. Later the wind blew again, spreading them over the yard. The head of the village, Mayilyan, came through the leaves. The puny puppy was following him. He shook hands with the men, and he nodded to Khanna. In the backyard of the house, the chained dog was cutting itself on its leash.
“I have come about the cemetery.”
Khanna wanted to include the reconstruction of the old cemetery in her grant program, and for that the agreement of the local government, in the form of a signature, was necessary. But there was one problem: they had buried Lev in the old cemetery, and the tomb was still fresh, in the middle of the cemetery. It was impossible to do anything with that. But the other stones were old, from the 1800s, grouped by families, surrounded by forged bars and climbing plants. Khanna remembered the red clover growing between those stones, the tiny flowers that she later saw in the pharmacy on the box of Persen. She was picking them by small handfuls, while the grandma was sitting on one of the tombstones waiting for the herd.
They were thinking of lifting the tombstones fallen aside from the graves, grouping them on one side, cleaning the area, and they were hoping that in that part, filled only with sand and trash, a small space would open in the adjoining part of the road for tourist bus parking. But in the middle was planted Lev’s grave, and it didn’t fit at all with the idea of a bus.
“You need to wait,” said Mayilyan.
“Why?”
“The son is coming to exhume him.”
“Whose son?”
“Lev’s.”
“What for?”
“You know what they do. They are criminals, they suspect something, they have some new evidence.”
“What kind of evidence?”
“I don’t know much. I’ve only heard that they are suspicious of Pashik’s sons.”
“Who would give a shit about that poor geezer?”
“They’ll know.”
“You’re not going to sign?”
“Wait a bit.”
Khanna put the papers next to the coffee cup, stood up, and caught sight of the grandma’s whitened face. Whenever the conversation turned to Lev, the grandma would become possessed. She was starting to push the one tooth, turned yellow and elongated, into the hardened gum wall in her mouth. Khanna put her hands on her hips because Lev had been planted in the middle of the work, and the village head was not signing the papers. The grandma looked so upset that she had forgotten her concern to force-feed the guest, and she had sat, black hands on her lap, eyes looking out the window at the yellowed bushes of cucumber.
This was the grandma’s mythical life story, woven into bravado and little legends, that she was not letting be forgotten. She had had a bad childhood. After the wars, the family struggled against hunger. They were five sisters, one brother. The grandma was the second oldest. She had always studied well in school, and after graduating she had been accepted into the university, the history department. She didn’t have shoes to go to school, and the mother baked bread to sell in the city to buy her shoes. The bread sold well. The mother decided to bake again. It turned out that if she left and went to study in the city, her sisters and brother would stay hungry. She didn’t go to class. She didn’t study. At twenty-five, when she was already considered a spinster, she got married. She had five girls one after another, cursing her mother that she had left her female-bearing genes. The sixth one, by some miracle, was born a boy. She was a believer: she had gone to a thousand chapels. She had gotten to Saint Hovhannes barefoot and knelt. She had sat on the doorsill and, howling, had demanded a boy, had hit the unyielding door of the chapel with a galosh. She had come back home running; she hadn’t stopped anywhere on the way. Her knees were completely bloody. She had jumped on one of the girls and beat her.
She had books at home: the Bible, gospels, hymns. In all of them, on one of the pages, was laid a lock of Aksel’s long childhood hair. The books, from much leafing through with candle-waxed fingers, smelt like parchment. In general, her whole house emitted a smell of fanatical faith that came from her bedding: from the blankets and heavy pillows, in which she had searched for hexes for years. In her faith she was inserting fury, the source of which nobody understood. Was it Catholicism that demanded that? But, for example, the neighbor Mariam was gentle, and she was also going to church.
Khanna had seen a photograph of the grandma, hair tied like a Spanish flamenco dancer, with gold hoops and a telling expression, who knows what number child placed on her lap, looking at the camera in a furious way, like someone who knew something. If you look down, she’s wearing galoshes.
Every house in the village had a prayer corner. The grandma also had one. The uncle had made rows of shelves with thin boards in the corner of the wall, and on them the grandma had lined up images of saints: photographs and embroidered cloths. On the back of each image was pinned a single paper rose, and colorful rosaries, candles, and artificial flowers lay on the surface of the embroidery-covered row. Every row had its thin embroidered curtain, and the whole stage decoration of the shelves gave it the look of an old archaic theater, the performers of which were saints, especially Mariam, with her permanent halo, plump hands, and round breasts.
The village considered itself Catholic—the grandma was a staunch defender of that—but neither the grandma nor anyone in the village could explain to Khanna what that meant specifically meant. They were just different, and that difference was their faith. The only explanatory sentence in everyone’s mouth was this: we are Franks; we won’t believe it until we see it.
Ten times a day, the grandma wiped the dust off the saints, shook out the buds of the roses, lit the candles two times on each shelf, and yawned while praying, with a wide-open windpipe. In front of the candles, the little handmade curtains and the gold-plated edges of the lined pocket-sized books gleamed yellow. The corner filled with the smell of candles, as if everything was moving from the air, the saints came to life and started breathing, the roses were rippled deep red dust. The grandma’s hours of prayer seemed like a dream that Khanna was seeing in wakefulness. She had inherited something from that devotion and theater: the ability to experience things dramatically, the dream, the movement of the air, the fury.
Her crumbled up subconscious was flooding into her dreams. The soul of sex. All the objects, the areas, the people were pounding with sex. Some kind of karot, longing, toska, a desire to be wrapped up by them. Existence soothed, softened, and faint from sex. Sometimes work that is done by hands, small movements, corners, blurriness. And only the dream gives it away. Khanna loved the theater of glances and touches, which was done under the veil of sincerity, carelessness, and effortlessness. Her husband had no merit in that, hesitating, an asker, a tangler, idle in movements, his gaze always lowered.
In her dream, she had seen her former coworker, who had moved on to a new position and had left the previous workplace. And in the dream, she had been waiting for him, waiting for his call, and suddenly realized she had his email password. She put it into some incomprehensible device, and the room of the parents’ old house filled with paper letters, pictures, and notes. Khanna’s childhood girlfriends were also there with her—they also wanted to read the letters—but Khanna, like a rabid dog, leaped at their faces and bit them. Only she was going to read them. She was seated on the top of the pile of letters, and within reach were some little postcards from which she could not distinguish anything clearly. Suddenly he came, the man for whom she had been waiting for so long, whose name she didn’t want to give. But he didn’t need to see his letters being dug through. Khanna forgot that she was in pajamas, jumped up, hoped that the girls would pick up and put back the letters in the otherworldly way they had arrived. She led him away from the door and took him to the room where she used to sleep with the grandma as a child. The room had crumpled blankets and pillows. She was aware of her ugly yellow pajamas, which her mother had sewn. But nothing was stopping Khanna. And she embraced him. Not with hands, but besieged him with her gaze and got back the answers. The dream made their whole silent confrontation turn into sex. Khanna had him inside her. She woke up. Her husband was sleeping peacefully next to her.
The country had to be fitted into the grant. Khanna was thinking the words.
Country.
On a transit road set in the mountains. The history and the dream of the sea stretch from end to end. From end to end it’s a couple of hours. By foot, a couple of days. One big mole had dug and filled the land with stones here and there. They spread oxygen. Filled the laughter here and there. We are covered with old days. Black soil and seasons. Twelve seasons. Solid summer and lean winter. In the middle, colored stripes of fields that do not fit and roll down the hills. Roads dug on the slope of the mountain. Forests of thorn and wheat. Crop rows and horse. A church at the foot of a mountain, wherever possible. Monks’ stories. Crossroads in every book. Heirs. Heritage. Black and blue eyes. Wheat-colored skin. Yard and tiny garden. Crooked little door. Callous hand. Callous and soft heart. Basket. Dry greenness of trees. Bud. Poplar. Raven. Decrepit stones. Pipes and wires. From the edge of the mountain, a dome. Monuments. Unknown soldier. Worship. Grapevine. Mint, thyme. Abandoned railway. Turk. Thistle, bush, and prickly thrift. Dead body. Snow posters. Manure and egg. Enemy tanks. Tulip greenhouse. Footpath. Closed trail. Thin rivers. Trickling waterfall. Blue deer. Earth’s motion. Three colors. Mine vein. Round dance. Reservoir, ash tree. Rough facial features. Tractor. Yogurt. Armenian cochineal. Closed mouth. Forest beauty. Anna rose. Frontline. Twilight.
There was one day until the deadline for submitting the grant application. Khanna stuffed her thoughts into the grant language, which politicians and N.G.O.s speak even when there is nothing to say. It is always possible to say words. She had grant-speaking guru girlfriends, one of whose language had assured her the position of deputy minister. Khanna did the writing, fighting against the grant windmills, and sent the application to the provided email address. The village head’s signature was missing.
