The Doves of Ohanavank (2 page)

I know I owe Avo more. Sometimes I think that telling him either an outright lie or the full truth would have been kinder than leaving things hanging like that. He is deeply involved in my story, and now has his own difficult story. His life and his future have changed irreversibly because of me, and not for the better. But I could not bring myself to outright lie to him, nor could I tell him the truth. I’m not even sure I can repeat the truth to myself. How could I look Avo in the eye and tell him that Sergei Ayvazian brutally raped me the first night that they took me, that his nephew Viktor and his bodyguards subjected me to all kinds of indignities in Moscow in the following few days, that a Ukrainian prostitute called Anastasia taught me the basic skills of the trade, and I started working as a prostitute only a few days after leaving home? Then in Dubai I was a prostitute, and later became a local dignitary’s concubine?
How could I look Avo in the eye and tell him that all the money that I sent home, that helped the family recover from its debts, came from my captivity and degradation?

My return home last fall was not uneventful—actually, Edik might say that is the understatement of the year. I had to convince the manager of Ahmed’s concubines, Ms. Sumaya, to let me secretly go home for a few days while Ahmed was away on business in Beijing. I later found out that she and two of the other concubines in the estate, Natalia and Farah, wanted me gone anyway, because they felt threatened by Ahmed’s deepening interest in me. It turned out that they were plotting to have me ‘disappear.’ So instead of a ticket directly from Dubai to Yerevan, Sumaya routed my flight through Istanbul, where an Armenian trafficker called Abo was to meet me. As I understood the plan, Abo would then put me on a flight to Tbilisi, where I would catch the train to Yerevan.

Of course I never intended to go back to Dubai once I got home; that was my part in the web of deceit. Sumaya, in turn, had planned for Abo to put me on a flight to Moscow, accompanied by one of his soldiers, where I would be met by Natalia’s uncle, who, in turn, would take me to Krasnodar and make me ‘disappear.’ Apparently they paid Abo a lot of money to execute that part of their scheme. But Abo had ideas of his own. He wanted to make a deal. He’d return me to Ayvazian, in exchange for access to the lucrative sex trade in Dubai, from which he had been blocked for years. So I did not head home as I had thought, nor to Moscow as Sumaya had thought, but back into Ayvazian’s hands. Abo had assumed that Ayvazian would then return me to Ahmed Al Barmaka and save face in Dubai. Instead, they brought me back to Armenia, and took me straight to the remote village of Sevajayr, drugged and bound.

That is where Ayvazian and his men were once again taken by surprise. Just when they felt that they had finally regained control over the situation, Avo shows up with Gagik, in the middle of a deserted village road on the way to Sevajayr, where no outsider ever appears; he causes Viktor Ayvazian’s car to roll off into a ravine, killing him and his driver on the spot, and then brings Sergei Ayvazian and his bodyguard tied and gagged to the safe house where they were holding me and another woman. How on earth did Avo, a sixteen-year-old kid from Saraladj, almost four hours away from Sevajayr, happen to be on the same deserted road as the Ayvazians at the same time on that fateful afternoon? No one could even begin to understand the truth,
unless they understood Edik Laurian’s and Gagik’s involvement. And that has not happened.

But my country is a small place. And even though a dozen or so corrupt and greedy oligarchs control its economy and trade today, it is home to one of the oldest civilizations on earth, with a culture and history that goes back several thousand years. I myself would not know this had my father not read to us for hours on every holiday. But all that did not matter when Ayvazian, one of the most ruthless and venal of these oligarchs, wanted to recruit me into his network of prostitutes. Apparently he thought a sixteen year old with my apparent allure would be a great asset in his business.

Ayvazian had no friends. Many feared and hated him, and no one liked him. That made it easier for the investigators to close the case of his death as an unresolved murder, as I found out later.

But the rest of the oligarchy could not be as complacent about these deaths as the law was. The six deaths in Sevajayr on that fall afternoon were so shocking, so unprecedented, and so inexplicable, that every other oligarch in the country was immediately on full alert. Their first concern was to make sure that this was not some kind of vigilante strike against oligarchs in general; but soon they started to focus on the potential spoils. They had only an inkling of the type of business that Ayvazian was into. He had managed to keep his operations secret and the competition out. Thus began the race for who among them would fill the void left by his death. With Viktor, his nephew and top lieutenant, gone also, there was no heir apparent in Ayvazian’s family that could take over the businesses he had left behind.

Avo is not the only person with whom I have not come clean. I have not yet begun to honestly face my own emotions. While away, I had only one obsession: to get back home. There never was the slightest doubt in my mind that this is what I should, and would, do. Even during the most comfortable period of my exile, when I lived in my own villa on Al Barmaka’s estate and accepted the flattering expressions of his devotion, I had only one thought: to get home. Home was what I knew. My life in the village with my family defined me. At heart, I was afraid that if I did not return soon, there would be no going back; I would be too changed.

Once the intoxicating effect of the extraordinary events in Sevajayr faded, after that magical night that we spent in Edik’s house in Vardahovit, which was the first night of freedom that I had since my abduction, and
after we returned to Saralandj, I tried desperately to force myself to truly return: return and belong, return and embrace, return and become part of this village, this family and this reality again—and I failed.

I failed, not because anything has physically changed here, even though Mama has passed away. I failed because I am different. And although I reject the thought, I know deep inside that I wonder if I did the right thing by returning. Of course if I had stayed a common prostitute prowling the nightspots of Dubai under the management of our pimp, Madame Ano, and under the supervision of Viktor Ayvazian, I would never have these doubts. But the experience of Al Barmaka’s estate was life-changing. I realized its significance then, but that did not change my resolve to return home. Quite the contrary, I saw my vastly improved situation as an opportunity to escape. The doubts about where I really belonged began to haunt me only after my return.

Edik Laurian and Gagik Grigorian have somehow become an integral part of our lives. That is another novelty; before I left home, we had never had such people involved in our lives. Everyone we knew was from the village or a close relative. Gagik lives in Ashtarak. He has lived here all his life, and was close to my father. He is wild and crazy, with an intensity about him that I have not seen in any other man. They say he was a revolutionary who fought in the Karabagh war. His nickname is
Khev Gago
—Crazy Gago. He strikes me more as a crazy philosopher than a crazy revolutionary, but Edik says that’s because he has mellowed with age. Ashtarak is only around thirty minutes from Saraladj, so he visits often.

Edik is different. Although he is not from here, he is more interested in what happens here than anyone I know. He is interested in our family, in me personally, in Avo, in the country and he is obsessed with what Ayvazian did to me. Unlike
Crazy Gago
, Edik likes to talk to me. He is a journalist, has been all around the world, a poet, a hunter, and perhaps a bit of a revolutionary himself. I wouldn’t be surprised if he turns out to be a little
Khev
too, just like Gago.

Chapter Two

I
t took His Excellency Ahmed bin Abdullah bin Saif Al Barmaka several months to figure out what had happened. He finally put enough pieces of the puzzle together to form an idea, even if he had to assume certain details. The maze of schemes and counter schemes, every single one of which had blown up in the schemers’ faces, was so intricate and interwoven, that, without the full cooperation and confessions of the schemers, there was no way to discover every detail.

What matters to him most is that Lara had in fact campaigned hard to go home. The fact that Sumaya had plotted with two of his other concubines to get rid of Lara surprised him, but was less significant.

Sumaya, Natalia and Farah are dismissed and gone. He has brought a Chinese woman, whom he was bedding when Sumaya called to inform him that Lara had escaped, with him from Beijing. She now occupies Natalia’s villa.

That was a little over six months ago. The news hurt him deeply then, and the pain has not eased with time, as he had hoped. He never understood
why
Lara had wanted to escape. Keeping concubines was a way of life for
him. None had ever wanted to escape before. On the contrary, they competed for his affection and aspired to have their contracts renewed. Most became emotional and cried when their term ended. So it had never occurred to Al Barmaka that any of his women could be unhappy being with him. Why then would Lara, to whom he was getting attached and whom he treated better than he had ever treated a concubine, want to escape?

She was hauntingly beautiful, very young and, although she was a prostitute, there was an innocence about her that disarmed Al Barmaka. She simply did not fit the mold of the sex worker. It was not just her youthful face and truly magical eyes—large, charcoal-black, with a depth that pulled Al Barmaka in and held him long after he had stopped looking into them. It was her mannerisms, her way of moving, so desirable, so seductive and yet so simple and innocent, or perhaps so seductive
because
it was so innocent. It was later, much later, that Al Barmaka would discover that it had been that same captivating beauty that had made Ayvazian notice Lara in the first place, resorting even to murdering her father in order to achieve his objective of recruiting her.

Lara had been the only one among his concubines whom he allowed to call him by his first name. He had arranged for her to take Arabic lessons, and even though he had not thought about any specific plans, he certainly had intended to keep her much longer than the one-year term he had approved. “What is amazing about this girl,” he had confided to one of his cousins, “is that she stays with you long after you leave; her
feel
stays with you.”

Al Barmaka does not know what exactly he will do next regarding Lara; all he wants to do now is find out as much as he can about her and why she left. He also knows that the Chinese girl is not a replacement for Lara. The hard truth is that no one could replace Lara.

Replacing Sumaya is proving to be difficult as well. She had been with him for more than eighteen years. First as his lover, later as the manager of his concubines. She ran the ladies’ quarters with superior skill and effectiveness, and was devoted to his needs. It took a lot to convince Al Barmaka that Sumaya had been involved in the plot to get rid of Lara. The manager of his private office, an Indian man in his mid-forties called Manoj, had suggested the possibility of her involvement early on, but he had dismissed it as vicious intra-staff rivalry. But as more details of the episode had come to light, it had became clearer to him that it would have been next to
impossible for Lara to leave the compound without Sumaya’s assistance. Al Barmaka feels the void left by Sumaya every day. He plans to replace her with an experienced manager from China, but the process is proving to be more time consuming than he had imagined.

His only source of information about Lara in Dubai is Ano, the middle-aged woman who manages all of Viktor Ayvazian’s prostitutes. She is zaftig, with a disproportionately large behind, making the tight pants that she wears less than flattering. She dyes her short, curly hair dirty blond, and has turned bright red nail polish into one of her distinguishing features.

The death of the Ayvazians has wreaked havoc in Ano’s life. After over a decade of working for them, she suddenly is alone, which presents an enormous opportunity for her to ‘inherit’ the Ayvazian empire in Dubai, but at the same time poses risks that until that day she had not had to worry about. Local protection, for one, had been Viktor’s responsibility. And although in her everyday dealings the buck stopped with Viktor, she knew that there is more to the Ayvazian empire than Viktor. Someone could show up anytime and hold her accountable.

Ano is trying to sort all this out when she is summoned to visit Al Barmaka’s office. The time and date are precise. She knows enough about Dubai and Al Barmaka’s influence to know not to argue. The summons reaches her around noon, for a two o’clock meeting on the same day. She knows that Viktor met with Manoj and Sumaya after Lara disappeared, before Al Barmaka returned from China. And she knows that he had to concede to everything they demanded. If Viktor had to give in, who is she to resist? She makes up her mind to go with the intention of answering their questions as truthfully as she can. She has nothing to hide, either about Lara’s disappearance or about the Ayvazians’ death. Her activities in Dubai are well known to the authorities, and she knows some key people, as she has been involved in freeing the girls from jail on occasion, as well as in helping close the deal with Al Barmaka on Lara’s contract. She also has heard that Sumaya was fired for her involvement in Lara’s escape, so this clearly was an inside job, and she would not be under suspicion. Her only concern then is to make sure that she continues to operate in Dubai with the twenty-plus girls now working for her.

Manoj arranges to meet her at the entrance of the Al Barmaka compound. The office is deliberately built right outside the main gate, to receive visitors without having to invite them inside, thus avoiding the
tedious formalities of registering guests. It is roomy but simple; the large window-mounted air-conditioning unit blasts away, and the solemn faces of the rulers of the confederation keep watch from photographs on the wall across from the couch.