The Crossing Place: A Journey among the Armenians. Philip Marsden
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,