Читать книгу The Crossing Place: A Journey among the Armenians - Philip Marsden - Страница 11

The exile understands death and solitude in a sense to which an Englishman is deaf.

Storm Jameson

The sun rose behind a bank of dark clouds, spreading shafts of light into the pale sky above. It gave the impression of some vast Georgian fanlight and I stood at the ship’s rail, watching its reflection in the still water, watching the bow-wave as it flopped over and shattered the water. It was just before seven.

The clouds grew larger and turned out not to be clouds at all, but the mountains of Lebanon. They ran up and down the coast, sheer and very dark. Ten miles to the south they fell to a strip of flat land which stuck out to sea like a tongue. From it rose the square blocks of Beirut. Looking at the distant, sun-lit profile I felt as though I was seeing for the first time some notorious celebrity, a mass-killer, a rampant dictator, there in the flesh. Since the Syrians had mopped up the last of General Aoun’s forces a few months before, there had been peace, but it was an uneasy peace. Much of the city remained in the hands of the militias, and almost all of the land outside. Beirut at that time was still the most lawless city on earth.

But for me, it was indispensable. Beirut had long been Armenia’s unofficial capital-in-exile. In the good years the Armenians had operated like a semi-autonomous republic; more than a quarter of a million of them had lived here, with powerful links all over the world. They controlled a great deal of Beirut’s trade and much of its industry. Although half of them had emigrated, the community had survived. The Armenians were the largest of the Lebanese minorities to have remained neutral throughout the war.

I had exactly a week here before the deadline for the land offensive expired in the Gulf. I did not want to be in Beirut for that. I wanted to be well clear of the Lebanon, to have reached Syria. It had been a long, sleepless night. The bars and decks of the ship echoed with the chatter of returning Lebanese. They were all young, all Christian, and all draped in a kind of transparent, satin-jacketed machismo. Among them tottered the relief guard for Beirut’s French embassy, making the most of their last few hours of leave. I talked for a while with a group of officers while they gesticulated over half-bottles of claret; others played roulette with fat, gold-chained Beirutis, while the ranks with their tanned Legionnaire faces burnished with sweat, bellowed at each other around the bar, then dozed head-down on the saloon tables. And over the whole scene, ignored by all, the Saudi desert flickered from two televisions.

In the morning, the French looked groggy and depressed. I waved goodbye on the quay at Jounie and headed up the short ramp and on to the street. I watched the open-backed trucks take them away and the bleary faces staring back as if from a guillotine tumbrel.

I placed my bag on the sea-wall, contemplating my next move. I looked up the road, and looked down the road. I leaned against the wall. Beside me were a couple of crates of red mullet and a fresh ray which flapped about in the dust. A fisherman sat on the rocks mending his nets. The sun had cleared the mountains and shone on the wheelhouse of a scuttled coaster; the torn fringes of a shell-hole curled out of its top-sides. It was a lovely Mediterranean morning, but I felt ill-placed to enjoy it. Who could I trust? Which areas of the city were safe?

I found a taxi; the St Christopher dangling from the driving-mirror was reassuring. We drove in towards Beirut along a coast road littered with the signs of war, between the shoreline and the stern rampart of the mountains, beneath a thirty-foot, Rio-style Christ and the church of Notre Dame de la Délivrance crying ‘Protégez-nous!’ from its concrete pediment. And everywhere hung the faces of half-ruined buildings, shrapnel-scarred and lifeless.

Ten miles was about half-a-dozen checkpoints. We were waved through them all. A convoy of war-weary tanks rattled past. I watched the phalanx of Beirut’s tower blocks grow larger in the windscreen and thought how normal they looked. But their approach made me nervous. When in Antelias I saw a church and its drum and the distinctive crenellated cone, I felt a sudden relief; I recognized it as an old friend.

‘Here!’ I leaned forward. ‘Drop me here.’

The taxi swung off the main road. Weaving to avoid the shell-holes, it pulled up to a pair of black, wrought-iron gates. On them were fixed the twin crosier and mitre of the Armenian Catholicosate of Cilicia.

From Cyprus I had tried to telex the monastery in Antelias, the main centre for Beirut’s Armenians. But my message had failed somewhere. At the gate they had no idea who I was. I presented a to-whom-it-may-concern letter, in Armenian, from the patriarch in Jerusalem and the young priest nodded. He led me to the residence of the Catholicos and left me with a secretary who in turn took me into a large, teak-panelled office. At the far end, behind the broad raft of his desk, sat an elderly cleric.

His Holiness, Karekin II, Catholicos of Cilicia, spiritual leader of perhaps a third of the world’s Armenians, was a man of some presence. He was a small, thick-set man with canny blue eyes that missed nothing. He had had a difficult war; that much was clear from the weariness in his face. He would tense occasionally with some sudden irritation and, half in jest, blame the war every time he reached for one of his cigars, their silk bands personalized by a loyal Armenian from Kuwait: HH KAREKIN II. In Beirut, even spiritual leaders had to behave like warlords.

We had lunch alone in his private dining room. There was a long table and two windows. One of them looked out on to the coast road and over the Catholicos’s shoulder I could watch the traffic limp up on to a battered fly-over. Beyond the fly-over was the sea.

‘Artichoke,’ he said. ‘I hope you like artichoke.’

‘Artichoke’s fine.’

‘My doctor says it’s good for the nerves.’

For a while we tugged at the leaves in silence. The Catholicos’s cook stood attentively at the kitchen door, an elderly Armenian with his shirt done up to the neck. He took away the plates and the Catholicos began to talk.

‘Can I make a point to begin with? That you look at the Armenian Church not, as so many others have, as a thing of archaeological interest, but as a living church.’

I told him that was exactly what I was looking for in the Armenians as a whole. ‘But perhaps some Armenians are guilty of that too.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘Well, Armenian history – it’s quite a burden to bear’.

I told him of an image of the poet Gevork Emin’s that had particularly struck me: he had compared the Armenians and their past to a peacock and his fan – all that was most impressive was behind them.

He nodded. ‘Of course the Church must combine tradition and hope. In the East we integrate things much more. You in the West, you think religion and politics must be separate. It is absurd to divide things like that!’

And there I thought I heard the echo of his critics, the dilemma of his own position: a religious leader caught between the complexities of Armenian politics and the Lebanese civil war. For years he had struggled to keep the Armenians free of the local feuds and alliances. It had just about worked. Now, he said, the country’s leaders were coming to him privately and admitting that perhaps the Armenians had been right all along. ‘Positive Neutrality’ the Catholicos called it, but it made me think of the hammer and the anvil. Muslims suspected the Armenians because they were Christian, and Christians chastised them for not being true to their colours. But the real Armenian battle was always elsewhere – with the Turks and the lost lands of Anatolia. On the boat from Cyprus, a Lebanese had said that the Armenians were feared – ‘tough like old boots’, ruthless in the defence of their neutrality. If one Armenian died, he said, the next day there’d be two or three bodies lying in the streets of the perpetrators.

The Catholicos finished eating and unwrapped another cigar.

‘It was the shelling that got to you,’ he said.

The last year had been the worst. Aoun had been up there in the hills, the government forces down below. The monastery was in between.

The monks took shelter in the underground printing press. The young ones would run across the compound to the store for food. For two months they spent the nights down there, sketching each other by the light of hurricane lamps, playing Risk, while the Catholicos would sit apart from them all, grimacing at each blast, chewing on a cigar and writing a long meditation on the war entitled: Cross Made from the Cedars of Lebanon.

The Catholicos gave me a room in the monastery. There was a patch of new plaster where a shell had fallen through the ceiling. I spent the evening there reading Cross Made from the Cedars of Lebanon, struck by the sense of constriction of an urban war.

In the morning an engineer drove me into Bourdj-Hamoud. The deadline in Kuwait was ticking away; the engineer said Saddam would pull out, but I wasn’t so sure. More than seventy years earlier, in the wake of another war, the Armenians had arrived on the edge of Beirut. They were in rags and, for the most part, without shoes or possessions. They were the dazed survivors of the Turkish massacres and scavenged and combed the beaches for anything of value. In time a crude shanty grew up and this they called Camp Marash, after the region they had left. They knew that soon the order would be given to return. But it didn’t come. The Armenians were still there. The shanty had survived in pockets but in the main Bourdj-Hamoud was a modern town. And it was the only place I saw in Beirut that seemed busy. With the city centre off limits, it had come into its own. The place bustled and thrived with commerce, attracting Beirutis of all factions to do what Beirutis like doing best – shopping.

‘You know what the Armenian hobby is?’ The engineer was striding down Bourdj-Hamoud’s main street.

‘What’s that?’

‘Building. When a Lebanese gets some money, he’ll buy clothes or a car. But an Armenian, well, he’ll get some bricks and put them one on top of another.’

It was true – Bourdj-Hamoud was scattered with mini-cranes and cement-mixers. And there was something else. I had been nowhere yet where Armenians were in the majority, where shop signs were first in Armenian, then in Arabic, where Armenian was spoken in public, where Armenians were treated by Armenian doctors, had their teeth pulled by Armenian dentists, meat cut by Armenian butchers, and cloth cut by Armenian tailors, where the bookshops had whole sections on Charents, Totovents and William Saroyan. There was an Armenian football team and everywhere, splayed out beneath shrapnel-dented cars were the bodies of Armenian mechanics. The streets bore the names of the lost towns – Aintab, Marash, Adana – and there seemed to be in them an assurance, a swagger, I had not seen before. It was almost as if the Armenians belonged here.

I left the engineer at one of his building-sites and went off to track down a painter who they’d told me about at the monastery. Yervant lived on the second floor of a rocket-scarred block. It was his parents’ flat, but they were seeing out the war in Cairo. He was in his mid-thirties and had swarthy Armenian looks, with thick, wedge eyebrows and a heavy flop of dark hair. His stance was sprung with a peculiar, rigid intensity, as though in constant anticipation of something. He would often run his hand across the bristly nape of his neck.

His flat was a dark place. Though he’d been there for years, it still had an empty, itinerant feeling to it. There was a blood-red carpet on the tiled floor and blood-red seat covers.

Over the sofa, like an antimacassar, was a Manchester United scarf.

‘I have a Manchester United t-shirt, Manchester United socks and Manchester United pillow. You know why Manchester?’

‘Because of the Armenian community there?’ Manchester was where the first Armenians settled in Britain.

He shook his head, and flashed a smile. ‘When I heard the name, I thought – it is Armenian: manch-es-ter. “You are a baby!”’

Off the main room was a studio where stacks of canvasses leaned against the walls. Yervant was an expressive painter, with a pallet of subdued, earthy colours – grey-blue, brown, and a dull mustard-yellow which cropped up in all of them. Some were figurative – portraits with wide eyes and no mouth; others little more than swirls of colour slapped on like butter. The best ones were a series of dark, misty shapes which seemed partly dead rock and partly alive: mountains, he explained, Armenian mountains, which he’d never seen.

‘Eight months work. All of this.’ There were dozens. ‘Two hundred – when I began I could not stop. I had no control. Then last year two tanks were down there shooting. All night they fired. First one, then the next. I took my brushes and after that, when there was shooting and everyone went to take shelter, I came to my studio and painted. I could not stop!’

Through Yervant the war began to come into focus. It seemed to have forced out of those who did not flee a kind of raw volatility, which became so ingrained that no one noticed it any more. If they did, it was as a matter of pride. Liberté totale was something Yervant mentioned often. To him it was the principle for which the war was fought, but to me it seemed no more than a description of its worst excesses.

We walked later by the sea. Yervant loved the sea. He did not notice the years of dirt and broken things that swilled about in its swells. He breathed in deeply and squinted along the shore.

‘I like the peace here, don’t you?’

The traffic bumped and growled along the freeway behind us. A couple of fishermen argued on the rocks. I nodded.

Yervant carried on answering my questions about the war. He ran through a catalogue of chaos, bombings, kidnappings, snipers, checkpoints when they killed at random, days when they fired ten shells a minute, all day.

One morning last year he had been shaving when there was a massive explosion. He thought it was an earthquake; on the radio they said it was an earthquake. But in fact it was a gas storage-tank hit by a shell. One piece of the tank had landed outside an Armenian school in Bourdj-Hamoud, nearly two miles away. The piece, said Yervant, was big enough to park two cars underneath.

On another occasion a running street-battle had spilled over into Yervant’s building. There was shooting on the stairs and a militia man burst into the flat. Yervant was waiting there with a revolver. He killed the man before he even knew anyone was there.

Yervant gripped my arm. He pointed to a flock of herring-gulls gathered to squabble over some waste. ‘You like birds?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘Me too. In the war I would come down and shoot them with my gun. My friend in Canada says there you cannot do it. You must have a licence. A licence – imagine that!’

One afternoon, through a series of introductions, I traced another side of Beirut’s Armenians in another darkened room in Bourdj-Hamoud. Here the atmosphere was quite different. Half a dozen men in track-suits sat around a television, cracking pistachio nuts. There was none of Yervant’s eccentric tension, but instead a kind of palpable toughness.

The youngest of them was Manouk. He was little more than twenty and was small and wiry and wore a neatly clipped moustache. It didn’t take long before we were talking about Karabagh. The Turks and Soviets, he said, were helping to flush the Armenians from their villages. Every day they were being killed. Driven from their villages and killed – just like 1915. Now. Today! And what was the West doing? Nothing. As always. Just carrying on their love affair with the Russian reformers.

I told him that Armenia would have to fight its own battles from now on and he agreed. And in fact I knew that they were, these ones in this room. I had heard of the arms that filtered through from Beirut to Karabagh. There was a sharper spirit here. It was in Manouk and the others, in their crunching of pistachios, in the pages of the Armenian magazine GAYDZ! (meaning ‘flash of fire’), with its images of oppression, of heads under boots, nooses and cages, and the technical diagrams of a Chinese grenade-launcher, an M-16 and a Kalashnikov. It had been there also, in the late 1970s, when the Armenians too learned the effectiveness of small paramilitary units.

Both were based in Beirut: ASALA (Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia) and JCAG (Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide). Of the two the JCAG were much the more secretive and sinister, and operated with surgical efficiency. One FBI officer was quoted as saying, ‘The Justice Commandos were known as a singularly effective group of assassins. When they went to work somebody usually died.’ There was something very Armenian about the JCAG. Their operation in sixteen different countries, their attention to detail and meticulous planning, their expertise with firearms and explosives, the way they traced the movements of their victims (invariably Turkish diplomats), getting so close to the cars when shooting that powder burns were often found on the skin.

And it occurred to me, listening to Manouk recounting their methods, that I’d heard precisely the same language used to explain the pre-eminence of Armenian goldsmiths.

This is how it would happen. You’d be in a taxi. You’d be watching a wrecked building pan across the window or the sun play on a sheet of high glass. You’d be thinking about something else entirely. In Kuwait there would be some atrocity and you wouldn’t yet know and the taxi would pull up in a strange courtyard and there they’d be waiting for you, five of them in black t-shirts tugging at your door. And then? Would the Armenians be any help? Part of me wanted to find out. But another part, and much the larger, feared kidnap more than death.

I was thinking about that after my meeting with Manouk. It was a bright afternoon and I was in a taxi with three Arabs. I was looking at the sun play on the sea and thinking that I now had only two days before the land offensive was due to begin when the music on the radio was interrupted and I could make out the names – America, Saddam Hussein, Kuwait, Britain. The Arabs started talking with the driver – about what? About the Bastard Americans, about the Bastard British! About the Great Satan and the Little Satan! About me. I cursed my foolishness. We plunged into the back-streets, heading west. I leaned forward and said where are you going, I wanted Bourdj-Hamoud. But the driver just shook his head. Damn it, what’s happening? The car slowed and turned into a courtyard and the Arabs got out and one of them leaned back in and said: ‘My friend, you better be careful.’ And the driver pulled away again and the buildings in the streets seemed suddenly sharper as I searched desperately for something I recognised.

Armenian script. When I saw it appear above the shops, I felt for the second time the relief of sanctuary and realized how much, in a Middle East where I felt an unwelcome alien, I depended on the Armenians. So much so that later that day I gave in. I’d promised myself I would not go into West Beirut: West Beirut was under Muslim control, kidnap country. But there was an Armenian there going to Yerevan and I needed to speak to her. The Armenians said they’d get me in, by ambulance, and we were waved through all the checkpoints.

As I waited to meet my contact, the door of the office suddenly burst open. A man stumbled over the threshold, sweating and short of breath. ‘You have a British here?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘You must leave at once. You have been seen.’

I left. I climbed into the back of the ambulance and we headed out of West Beirut towards the Ring and the burnt-out strip of the Green Line. An Armenian nurse sat with me. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll soon be through the checkpoint.’

‘I’ll be glad to get back to Bourdj-Hamoud.’

‘They took two yesterday. A French and a Belgian.’

‘Where?’

‘Just near here, but they were drug dealers. They shouldn’t have gone in. We have an expression in Armenian that a broken jar breaks again on the way to the rubbish tip.’

The evenings in Antelias, with the monastery gates locked after sundown, were long and dark and empty. On my last night a thunderstorm tumbled down from the mountains. The lights failed, came on again, then disappeared altogether.

I stood up from the desk in my room and went to the window. The rain was falling with a tropical ferocity. It sluiced off the flat roofs and filled the headlight beams of the traffic – bobbing Buicks, battered Mercedes, empty trucks swishing into the night. A pack of wild dogs splashed through the puddles. Two Lebanese soldiers crouched beneath their rain-capes on the turret of a tank. Then for an instant Beirut was lit up by lightning and the thunder again took a whip to the hills.

There was a knock on my door. A young priest holding a candle said His Holiness would like to see me. I followed him through the darkened passages to a room with a great arched window that rose from the floor and surveyed the courtyard below. Often I had looked up at that window and watched the bishops pace behind it like caged birds. Now the rain spotted its surface and ran down it in wide rivulets. The Catholicos sat alone watching it in the dark, preying on a large cigar.

‘Please, sit down,’ he said.

We sat in silence for a moment, looking out at the rain.

‘You will not see me again,’ he announced.

‘Oh?’

‘Lent is coming and I am tired. I shall go to Oxford to rest.’

‘A retreat?’

‘A retreat.’ He looked away and again we were silent while the rain hissed outside. The Catholicos looked down on the flooded courtyard like a brooding general. Then he asked, ‘And you?’

‘Damascus,’ I said. ‘I will leave tomorrow for Syria.’

‘You will have trouble in Syria.’

‘I was hoping perhaps you could help me cross the border.’

‘I will leave a letter for you, but I would not go to Syria. The police will make trouble.’

I could not tell him that in fact I would be relieved to be out of the Lebanon, that at least in Syria there were police. So I thanked him for his advice and for all his help, and wandered back through the unlit cloisters to my room.

Early the next day an Armenian photographer took me into Bourdj-Hamoud to find a lift to the Syrian border. It was a bright morning. The night’s storm had left its mark in shining pond-sized puddles and the traffic was heavy. Cars queued three deep at the checkpoints, impatient to get into the city to trade and shop and busy themselves in the Beiruti way. No one, except me, seemed at all bothered that in about twelve hours’ time the deadline for the land offensive in Kuwait was due to expire.

Coming through the checkpoints in the other direction were dozens of vehicles with skis strapped to the roof. That year on Mount Lebanon the snow had been frightfully disappointing.

‘Terrible,’ the photographer lamented. ‘All thin and slushy.’

‘I’m sorry to hear it,’ I said.

‘But this year they are all going skiing. If there’s one thing the Beirutis are good at, it’s forgetting,’ he chuckled. ‘I mean, does this seem to you like a city that’s been sixteen years at war?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It does.’