They forbade us to enter the church with weapons. Free candles were passed out to us, for the salvation of our souls. We lit the candles inside the church, leaving our weapons outside.
Then we took their villages with meteoric rapidity. We approached the town; the town also fell. We went in and out, running through broken telegraph poles, full-length portraits of leaders, unwound wires, metals, and villages with strange smells which surrendered one by one. The success of our attack was accomplished by the swiftness of our thrust. Headquarters and the generals forbade the reporters to follow us into the villages. Despite their complaints, they were forced into cars and sent back. The prisoners and wounded were driven to the rear in groups.
We slept in sleeping bags in wet, dry, cold, and warm weather. We woke up before dawn; with the tanks ahead of us, the earth shuddering beneath our feet, and in our ears the screech of metal wheels over caterpillar treads, we entered the steppe. Taking the village opposite us was not a difficult task, but we did not want to lose our guys. We stopped and, ignoring the forked tongues of the snakes that jetted out like blue-red electro sparks, slept in the yellow pumpkin fields.
At dawn the generals and commanding officers, the map spread out on their knees, confirmed the position of the village. Once again advancing through the telegraph and electrical poles, giant portraits of leaders, unwound wires, smashed metals, and disparate smells, leaving those who had fallen or injured to the ambulances heeling us, we crossed the cotton fields and, the earth shuddering beneath our feet, entered the village.
Somebody called out. I heard the voice from behind. I turned around but there was no one there. Then one of their woman soldiers, who was seated on a Shilka[1] and destroying our tanks, was abandoned by her comrades; disappointed, she surrendered. We took her diary out of her pocket. It contained some lines about the sun, bastard generals, suppliers not supplying bread, and how many of our tanks she had destroyed with her contraption. She unbuttoned the sleeve of her jacket, which was adorned with green leaves, rolled it up, and exposed the infected injection wound on the transparent blue vein.
“First give me a shot . . . I’m not afraid.”
We were sitting here and there around her. One of us was eating an apple. The apple exploded in his mouth; the apple tree was nearby. I knew what this woman wanted. On my arm, too, the indistinct scar under my skin had not yet healed; it lingered on like a cloudy, colorful dream, and ached. We all knew what she wanted. We also knew the secret of seeing nothing with glassy eyes. Around her, restraining the reeling pain of our swollen legs and spines, we went on with our smoking.
Someone who had joined us from the other detachment said, “Are you having fun? What are you waiting for? Take her away and plug her three holes—and look at what veins she has! Take her and do it—women like her love things like that.”
The woman stretched out her arm. I saw the transparent blue vein. I heard the apple and pomegranate exploding in their mouths. A voice came from behind again, and I turned around, but there was nobody there. I did not understand what I had missed, and refused any longer to hear the commanding officer from the other detachment. Kamo was injured in the arm and was vomiting. I went over to cheer him up.
Then, again, the earth shuddered beneath our feet. We were widely scattered on the endless yellow steppe. We tried to call to each other in friendly tones, without knowing where everybody was. We advanced, beating the thin dust under the metal caterpillars, and entered the valley of the Arax—the shores of our dreams! Our tanks were churning up the water. The sun stood in the middle of the sky, firing piercing, intense heat and burning our heads. Then I heard the same voice for the third time; it came from behind. I realized I should hide in a shadow, but there was not a single black spot on the yellow steppe—every shadow melted under the luxuriant, warm light of the sun. The small, grey, charred hills were steaming. In these boiling hills they could not find a guy from the other detachment. No one appeared on the distant plane of the steppe, which stretched far and wide. All the radios that connected the detachments, all the binoculars searched for Serob and could not find him. The air was howling. We smoked quietly. Our nostrils were clogged with dust, and our breath was warm and saturated with nicotine.
They showed us the village. The generals and those who gave orders by radio said “Take that village and establish a base there.”
The earth shuddered beneath our feet; again we went through metals, unwound wires, telegraph and electric poles, giant portraits of leaders, and different smells. The villagers had seen us approaching, and had fled. No one remained when we entered the village. Our commandant said, “Check the houses one by one; see if there isn’t somebody hiding.”
Their dogs tore us apart. Behind every padlocked door there were sheep dogs. They snatched at our guys as soon as they entered the houses, and we in turn raked as many as we could manage with fire when they jumped at our throats. Then, in the evening, our scattered detachment began to turn up from everywhere: from behind bushes, trees, houses, out of shadows and darkness. They came with the dust of the steppe on their eyelashes and beards. They came from the four corners of the village, one on a donkey, another on a horse, bearing a bunch of grapes, figs, apples, pomegranates from the valley and booty from the endless expanse of yellow desert. They called out to one another so the stragglers would not be lost.
As we gathered in one place and spat the sticky dust from our mouths, we noted that our water flasks were empty. We sensed the danger at once; none of us had noticed a spring in the village. Our thirst intensified. We poked around all over the village but found no water. Our men went away and fetched dry, insipid watermelons from behind the steppe and the charred, seething hills, but they did not quench our thirst. We were all dejected again. We tried to put the house with green and dark green verandas in order, to make it our quarters. Lone mosquitoes from the swarms that milled about kept eating us. The guys went all over the village again, looking for water, but in vain. Many of us grumbled and complained. Someone arrived from another base, in the neighboring village, looking for Serob. He addressed our commander: “We haven’t been able to find Serob, no matter how hard we look. Haven’t you seen him? He was in the right flank, constantly advancing.”
We wanted him to leave us in peace and go away. We gave him a juicy pear. There was dust on his chapped lips. As he bit into the fruit, a worm emerged from it; noticing nothing, he bit into it again. We waited for him to go away.
“I brought him here; he arrived with me. His wife is going to have a baby in a couple of months,” he said. His drowsy eyes were closing. “Well, I’m going. If you see him, let us know.”
Then Gegham arrived. “There mustn’t be any water in this village. How do you expect to find a spring on a steppe? I’ve discovered a well,” he said.
The commanding officer did not want us to drink that water. He repeatedly refused, knowing that wells were the best places to poison people.
“Be patient;” he said, “they may supply us with water from the rear; we’ll find out by radio.”
We switched on the portable radio. Again somebody was asking about Serob. We yelled at the operator, “Switch it off, you idiot! have you ever made contact with it? Whenever you’re needed, you’ve always had diarrhoea! Switch it off!”
“Let me connect you through the night line—it’s always free—and seventy nine may be vacant,” the operator replied.
Amid all the radio interference, both noisy and soft, someone was still searching for Serovbeh[2] in a monotonous voice. At that very moment, I heard a voice from behind again. I turned around, but nobody was there.
The guys were still yelling at the radio operator, “Switch it off, switch it off . . . !”
Our thirst was getting more and more intense. We needed water, and the commanding officer gave in; it was he, though, who drank the first glass of boiled water, and we loved him longingly.
Seven more days went by. The mosquitoes had left running wounds on our bodies. When our men returned from the night shift they could not sleep because of the flies and the toothache caused by the muddy, sour-tasting water. Many had eyes that were inflamed with ruptured capillaries; their sleeplessness, the dust, and the endlessness of the steppe had caused their blood pressure to drop.
More days went by. From all around the village, small and big, colorful cats and packs of dogs of various breeds showed up and filled our quarters; they had been injured by bombardments but survived. They meowed, wailed, and gnawed each other’s throats for bones. From our hands they snatched pieces of leftovers from the meals prepared by our cook. During the day they ate our bread, and at dusk they left us, sat before the open doors, licked their wounds, and barked violently at us, or turned the flames of their sparkling eyes to the sky and barked at the moon. We were irritated; our nerves could not stand it.
At night, for those of us who were on patrol in the village and around the base post, the natural silence was broken by the concealed displacements of their scouts and by the tracer shots sent up to help our friends in the dark, mixed with the meows and wails emitted by flabby, soft bodies, small and big, beneath our feet; the sounds of their rushing swiftly here and there, tormented in pain; and the enemy’s footsteps. We were unable to distinguish the sounds one from another. All through the night the winds that blew from north and south kept beating, banging, and screeching against the open and closed doors and windows of hundreds of houses. Although we were aware that the doors and windows were about to bang behind us, it made us jump all the same. Its voice was becoming doubled, as if blowing up inside us once more; furthermore, the night was spilling out under our feet like water from a shattered glass, on which we would tread as if walking barefoot, knowing full well that the blade of a sword was whirling around us in the dark. The pomegranate tree irritated us too. Suddenly, in the silence of the night, pomegranates fell and with a huge whack split the dense, fluid darkness. Groups of cats and dogs of various breeds started to invade our quarters. We knew that we would not be able to get rid of them; we had already tried that the day we entered the village. While raiding the houses, we shot the sheep dogs that leapt at our throats, and in order to get rid of the unbearable stench that their decaying flesh spread over the village, we poured gasoline from our vehicles on them.
On the twentieth day all of us were infested with lice. At dawn, as we sat along the wall wiping lice from our vests and crushing them with our thumbnails, the guy from the neighboring village base came again. His lips were chapped He was still looking for Serovbeh: “We couldn’t find Serob, no matter how hard we looked,” he said. “Haven’t you seen him? His wife is going to have a baby in two months. He arrived here with me,” he repeated as before.
We wanted him to leave us in peace and go away. We gave him some soup. As he ate and dipped his bread in it, his drowsy eyes were closing.
“Well, I’m going; if you see him, let us know.”
That day, from their hiding places in the gardens and the steppe, thumping down the deserted village streets on their horseshoes, came donkeys, mules, and old horses with broken hoofs; they had been abandoned during the escape. Crazed with thirst, they moaned and dug up the earth around our water containers with their hoofs, swallowing whenever they found something in the shade that was wet, persecuted by the swarms of blue-winged flies attracted by the moisture of their eyes. They glared at us and neighed continuously. We saddled them and had our pictures taken posed suitably on their quivering backs and puffing out our chests.
When Shahen and a few others came from the post and told us to set the house opposite our shelter on fire, the commanding officer objected: “No, you mustn’t do such a thing. Don’t do it, that’s all.”
Shahen did not seem to agree: “You say we mustn’t, but that makes being on patrol impossible. The roof is tiled; when the tiles move a little or rattle their wings or whatever, it sounds like a man walking. It goes on like that all night long; right across from our base. The house has got to go. Otherwise we’ll get used to the noise and one day the enemy will climb up on the roof.”
Karo and I were on patrol together, and were talking about wanting a woman.
“There’s one inside of me. I haven’t seen her yet, but one day, I’ll go to the half-ruined cathedral with her, near the pool of blood,” he said, “and she’ll give herself up to you.”
“No”, I said, “she would betray me under pressure.”
And the bats passed swiftly through the night.
“It’s weakness, filling the veins…otherwise, how do you get to know that what hasn’t happened yet is going to happen?”
There was a noise; it came from far away. We went forward and, holding our breaths, we entered the vegetable garden of a two-storey house from different sides. A famished sheep dog had a calf by the throat. On our way back, we smelled the strong aroma of an oleander tree.
“I heard a voice from behind four times,” I said.
We remained silent, and then it was he who spoke first: “It’s the tension. The big village we entered . . . anyone who goes there can hear everything you say. It’s quite impossible. It’s your brain inventing things. When you’re upset, the brain likes to concoct things . . .”
Suddenly, the darkness turned red. The house opposite our night shelter had been set afire. From the tiled roof hundreds of doves surged up into the air. The beating of their wings exploded in the red dark of the night. As we were running there, I again heard a voice from behind, and stopped. I did not want to go on.
Then the commandants and generals at headquarters issued the order not to desecrate any cemetery. And on the radio somebody was still searching for Serovbeh, in the same monotonous voice. The next day they brought a French reporter who had arrived at headquarters; all of us rushed outside. We heeded neither her speech nor those of the deputies in white shirts and glasses. We ogled her white teeth; moist lips; warm fingers; fine hair falling on her shoulders; supple, waving, delicate waist; and breasts swaying beneath her almost transparent red dress. Her sonorous laughter poured down through the intense heat onto our heads.
She said, “Give me a fig.”
The guys fetched some figs.
She said, “Give me a pomegranate.”
The guys picked some pomegranates.
She said, “Give me an apple.”
The fascinated guys fetched apples.
She said, “Give me some grapes.”
The guys broke the vines in their haste to pick grapes. Shirak first stretched his hands up to heaven, then, holding his head, he addressed her: “Oh, sweet Mother, good heavens, do you want a fig leaf, desire a fig leaf . . . ?”
And not until then had we laughed, not giggled until then, and we realized how furious, long, and brutal the fighting had been. The wave of laughter and giggles had come and opened up our faces, sleepless, beaten by rain and wind, at nights smoked by the wheel fire and by day scorched by the sun. And at that moment we all saw the shade of Andrey from our detachment, who had fallen under enemy fire in the distant mountains a year before, come up to us, strike, and pass through us. The commanding officer alone was sad.
When we were left alone, we went out to walk in the depths of the steppe, falling into the precipice of the night. We heard our own footsteps and the echo of our speech. For us the distant, starless sky was like the seclusion of a well that is covered with a lid, and it agitated us, and our conversation became incomplete, half-spoken, and inexplicable. The night was lightening. From somewhere in the village, still hidden, a cock crowed, admonishing the darkish shadows and the opposed forces of light to return to their places. We returned and switched on the radio to demand food from headquarters. And somebody in a tedious voice was again searching for Serovbeh on the radio. Without asking for bread and cigarettes, we hastily switched off the radio and sat at the table Everybody had already slept. In front of us were numerous green and dark green (unlike our souls) house doors, on the other side of which was darkness. We drank some wine. The commanding officer’s eyes were longing and sleepless, the night was dark and deep, like the well, and he asked: “We’ve reached the valley of dreams—what do you think, have we reached it yet?”
Again our conversation failed, and we poured more wine. I heard a voice from behind again. From somewhere in the village, still hidden, a cock crowed. It was getting light; it was already the fourth day since we had set the tiled-roofed house on fire, and for four days the doves hung from heaven, without ever landing, circling above us over and over.
Translated by Diana Hambardzumyan
