The Doves of Ohanavank (18 page)

A popular saying around here is, ‘the bear knows seven songs, all seven are about honey.’ It applies to Avo these days. All he talks about are the pigs and piglets. Six more have delivered, one a litter of nine, the others some seven, some eight. The rest will deliver by the end of next week, he says. The vet has been there often, and says the newborns are healthy, and will survive, if the new mothers don’t crush them during feeding due to their inexperience.

Avo has left the responsibility of planting the garden to my sisters, who also take care of the sheep and the cows. Sago and Aram help, but they’re too young for most of the tasks. I feel guilty for not being there to help out, but I cannot see myself making a real contribution. Before I left home over two years ago, both of my parents were alive and I had four older sisters, so I did not have any experience with tending to the animals. And a month after my Papa passed away, I was taken. So it has been my sisters and brothers who have learned to keep the house and animals in Saralandj in the past two years. Every time that I’ve tried to do something while in the village, my movements have been so awkward, clumsy and slow, that my sisters have laughed and taken over from me.

Meanwhile, Avo has agreed to sell to three different farmers from Aparan a total of fifty piglets, when they each weigh ten kilos. So it will be almost two months before he can deliver any piglets and get paid. But he will get the top price of 35,000 dram per healthy piglet. That is more money than Avo has ever earned. He has already borrowed against that future income to stock up on extra feed, because he expects feed prices to start rising a bit once all the farmers in the region start fattening their animals.

I am happy that Avo has found something positive to spend his energies on. Both Edik and Gagik have expressed concern about Avo’s anger and his drinking. I have seen it myself. But both seem to be under control when he is absorbed in his farm.

Alisia is my main source of home news and gossip. She is closest to me in age. We are also just close. She has always been the most jovial and energetic among my sisters. She tells me that Arpi is more and more withdrawn into herself, and that she reads all the time.

“She barely even talks to anyone,” she says. “Every minute that she’s not working, she’s reading. She’s finished the entire works of Teryan and Sevak, and now has started reading Raffi. She’ll read the whole collection of ten huge volumes!”

She tells me that Avo has not drunk all week, which is a major thing at the house. She also tells me that she thinks he has an eye for Ruben’s younger sister, Hermine. Alisia, who turned nineteen a few months ago, giggles like a little girl when she says this. Both Avo and Hermine are too young, but one never knows. In the village, a lot of couples get married before they are eighteen. She also tells me that she does not have any interest in meeting a man anytime soon. First, she says, we’ll marry off Sona, then Arpi, assuming she can take her nose out of the books long enough.

“Alis jan,” I say trying to laugh like her, “it doesn’t work that way. It’s not by turn, you know. It happens when it happens.”

Chapter Sixteen

T
he snow has disappeared even from the stubborn corners where the sun doesn’t reach. Lara’s sisters have been busy. The garden in Saralandj is fully tilled and planted. As usual, tomatoes, cucumbers, cabbage, green peppers, green beans, garlic, onions and potatoes take most of space. What little space is left is portioned off to the main herbs—parsley, mint and basil. In addition, the house is thoroughly cleaned and several large loads of laundry, including all the sheets and pillowcases, are done, ironed and put away.

Avo has been busy too. All the pigs have delivered, and the piglets already have started eating some solid food, even though they are still suckling. It will be another three weeks or so before they are weaned.

Sona and Simon have set the date of their wedding at the end of May. So in about a month she’ll leave home. But Simon, like Martha’s husband Ruben, is from the village. She won’t be going far.

Aram continues to excel at school. Laurian thinks he should be sent to a special school for gifted kids in Yerevan, but Avo is not in agreement.
We need him here, he says. Gagik thinks the real reason is that he does not want to borrow more money right now.

Sago was not good at school and dropped out over a year ago, and he is not particularly interested in any work that is available for him in the village. It saddens Lara to see him like that, scattered, almost depressed, with an indifferent detachment, even on relatively happy occasions. She finds him more worrisome than Arpi. At least Arpi has her books.

Al Barmaka has not made it to Yerevan, but has called several times a week. Lara’s initial excitement about hearing from him has waned. If he really wants to see her that much, why the delay? He had said a few weeks, and it has been almost four. Why should it take four weeks to sort out his schedule and free up three or four days?

“I’ll have some interesting news for you when I come,” he had said during his last phone call. “I’m sorry I’ve been delayed. This is our busiest time. We’re finalizing first quarter accounts, and have a few important audits which require my attention.” That is more about his business than Ahmed has ever said to Lara.

“It is okay, Ahmed. Please do not go to any trouble. Take as long as you need.”

Edik is about to return from overseas. He has called a few times. He tells Lara that Thomas Martirosian is making progress on Anna’s divorce case. There should be a breakthrough in a few weeks.

In the meantime, Anastasia has convinced Yuri to let her go back to Moscow, even though she has not told them much yet. She has convinced him that it will take time for Lara to open up to her, that she’s made a lot of progress already, and that if she pushes harder, she may scare her off. She also calls Lara regularly from Moscow.

The entire country is getting ready for the May 1 holiday when Avo gets a call from one of the farmers who have agreed to buy his piglets.

“Avo jan,” he says, “I’m afraid I have some bad news. I won’t be able to buy the twenty piglets as we had agreed.”

“What’s the matter, Aram
dzadza
, do you need some credit, or to make payment in installments?” Avo likes Aram. He is an old family friend from Aparan, about his father’s age, who was close to his parents. That’s where the
dzadza
honorific, which is a Russian word meaning ‘uncle’ that seeped into the Armenian lexicon during the Soviet era, comes from.

“No, it is nothing like that,” says Aram. “To tell you the truth, I wish it was. I could have sorted out that type of problem.”

“Then what is it?” It is more Aram’s depressed tone that has Avo worried than his message.

“Have you checked the price of pork lately?”

“No,” says Avo, and realizes that Aram’s call is more serious than he had assumed.

“It’s down. It was 3,200 dram per kilo, now it’s down to 2,500 dram, and many think that it will drop to below 2,000 soon.”

“But that could be temporary,” says Avo hopefully. “Prices rose during the New Year and Christmas season. Maybe they’re now coming down a bit, before we see another rise.”

“Avo, we’re talking about a forty percent drop in a matter of weeks. No one thinks this is temporary. And it certainly is not small. It changes the entire calculation.”

Avo is quiet for a while. He fights the wave of frustration and disappointment that is rising in his chest. He does not want to accept this as a final verdict on his pig farm.

“What is causing the price decline?”

“No one knows for sure,” says Aram, “The rumor in the market is that large quantities of live pigs have been imported from somewhere. Some are talking about as much as twenty thousand head.”

“Who? How? From where?” Avo is stunned.

“No one knows for sure. But that is not the entire story. You must have noticed what has happened to the price of feed, Avo. You’re feeding more pigs than any of us.”

“I bought a lot a few weeks ago, thinking that the prices might rise when all the farmers start to buy. So no, I do not know what has happened to the price of feed more recently.”

“You were smart to buy early, but I’m afraid that won’t help you when you run out. All grades of imported feed have gone up by twenty-five percent. But the worst part is not even that. The price of chaff has gone up
from 75 dram per kilo to 150 dram! When feed prices rise like this and pork prices fall by forty percent, how can we still make money at this business?”

Avo’s face turns red and his hands start to shake. He recognizes the rage. It is similar to the storm that rose in his chest when he returned home from Vardahovit last fall and found that his mother had just died. It gathered speed and mass in a matter of seconds, first directed at fate, at some invisible force, and then, as it got so strong that he could feel it even in his eyes, Sergei Ayvazian became its target. The frenzy was then transformed into an obsession, which, even after the rage was spent, turned Avo into a cold-blooded killer.

But now Ayvazian is dead, and this time the enemy is truly invisible. Is it fate? Bad luck? The market?

“Avo, are you there?” comes Aram’s voice.

“Ha, Aram
dzadza
. I understand. No problem with the piglets, please don’t worry.”

Just as Avo had managed to control his anger temporarily when his mother died, because he had the burial to attend to and because his family needed him calm and sober, now too he feels he has to save his business first, which means he has to keep a cool head and figure out how to overcome this setback. That is the most immediate task. But not the most important one. By far the most important task for Avo is to identify the enemy. His wrath is aching to burst out.

Laurian lands in Yerevan in early afternoon. He is anxious to get home to Vardahovit before dark. He thinks about calling Lara and Gagik, but decides against it. He does not want to be given a reason to stay in Yerevan. He gets his car from long-term parking and heads straight out of the city.

No one, not even Laurian himself, has been able to fully understand the Vardahovit phenomenon. It is a tiny village in Vayots Dzor, one of the regions south-east of Yerevan, with around 300 inhabitants, two-and-a-half hours from Yerevan, and thirty-five kilometers from the border with
Kelbajar, a region controlled by Nagorno Karabagh. The roads leading to it are in such disrepair that even the more adventurous travelers tend to avoid the place.

Laurian has bought a mountain plateau of over fifty acres, two-and-a-half kilometers from Vardahovit village. Down in the valleys below, creeks flow south and eventually merge into the Arax River, which marks the border with Iran. It was a major undertaking to build a house on this plain, which stands at two thousand meters above sea level. Moving construction materials, workers and supplies was a nightmare. Laurian had fallen in love with the place. He could have had a mountain house not just anywhere in Armenia, but anywhere in the world, including Switzerland, Spain or Italy, where he had long-standing connections, but he chose this place. “I just feel good here,” he says to anyone who asks why.

By three-thirty p.m. he has already reached the roadside restaurant where he likes to stop to break the drive. It is right before the Getap junction, which, for Laurian, signifies the beginning of his ‘area,’ as he calls this part of Vayots Dzor. Ten kilometers along the road to Getap, and the climb begins through Shatin, Yeghegis, Hermon and finally Vardahovit. That twenty-kilometer stretch is another road with which Laurian has his love-hate relationship. Catastrophic road conditions embedded into a breathtakingly beautiful mountain setting. But for Laurian this stretch has more than natural beauty. It was the crucible for a fascinating part of medieval Armenian history, the relics of which—ruins of fifth-century cities, forts, monasteries, tombs of medieval princes, graveyards of various ethnic groups—continue to keep watch over the peaks, valleys and rivers below, oblivious to the present day neglect around them.

Laurian makes his stop short. A quick coffee, a few words exchanged with Nerses, the owner, and he takes off again. He is anxious to see how many of the spring tasks Agassi, the caretaker who lives in the guardhouse with his wife, Vartiter, has managed to complete.