The Crossing Place: A Journey among the Armenians

Crossing the Rialto that evening I saw the Grand Canal just beginning to ice over. In Trieste there was a night train to Yugoslavia. It snowed heavily in the night and at Belgrade a guard stumbled along the track to thaw the points with a flaming torch. The train ploughed on, south through Serbia, through dead valleys and silent forests, beneath swollen clouds. The day slid past in a series of frozen images: a man with a gun on an icy pond, the breath of a horse at a level-crossing, a yellow pig leaping in the snow.

The following afternoon at Piraeus was warmer. A ship from Odessa was in port and the Ukrainians lined the docks’ perimeter fence. By their feet lay piles of china plates, plastic dolls, knives, forks, and tins of caviar. I bought a bottle of Armenian brandy from a stern Russian woman and carried on past the ones with smiles and powder-blue eyes and no goods at their feet, prepared to go to any lengths for hard currency.

The ship to Cyprus was practically empty. Half a dozen people gathered in its burgundy lounge as if for a bad joke: a Jew, a priest, a London cabbie, and a Greek cabaret artiste. The Orthodox priest settled down to watch a TV game show while the cabbie vilified Saddam Hussein for the ‘artiste’. I took the brandy and sat with the Jew, an antiques dealer with shoulder-length hair and dark, smiling eyes. He was on his way to marry a girl he’d never met. A friend in Lithuania had sent him her picture and now they were to meet at a certain hotel in Cyprus, go through the civil ceremony, and start anew in Haifa.

‘Call me a fool,’ he said. ‘But I feel good about it.’

I drank to his bride and he asked me what I was doing in Cyprus.

‘I’m on my way to Armenia.’

‘Armenia? What are you going to find there?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘So we are both on a mystery tour!’

It was well after dark when the ship hauled in her warps and eased away from the dock. The antiques dealer suddenly thought of something: ‘I remember there were some Armenians in Cairo. Extraordinary people. They had an expression – perhaps you’ve heard it. They used to say that the Armenians were “caught between the hammer and the anvil”.’

‘And they say that if the hammer falls often enough you end up with a diamond.’

After a day and a half we berthed in Limassol and I took a bus up to Nicosia. There I went to find Garo Keheyan whom, I hoped, would be able to advise me. I was trying to get back to the Armenian communities of Syria. There were two options: to go straight there, by boat to Latakia, or to go via Beirut. A lot of Armenians lived in Beirut; it had at one time been the most important city of the diaspora. But while the Gulf war continued, I was not keen on going in. Nor did I have a Lebanese visa. But then I had no Syrian visa either; in fact I had no visas for any of the countries I wanted to visit before Armenia – nor for Armenia itself.

In part this was due to the confusion of the Gulf war and the mess of the Soviet Union. But I saw it also as a test. The Armenians have travelled these regions more consistently, more zealously than any other people. They have always lived by travelling – as merchants, adventurers or pilgrims – with all the cunning and enterprise that it requires. That the Armenians remained so mobile, and yet survived as a distinct people, was a miracle that I still had not understood. When borders were sealed by warring empires – Mameluke and Seljuk, Seljuk and Abbasid, Ottoman and Safavid, Safavid and Mogul – the Armenians’ network of exiled communities spanned them all. Often they were the only link between rival courts and carried messages in their own script like a code. Because of the eternal instability of Armenia itself, the rigours of a peripatetic life were part of being Armenian; frontiers and wars just an everyday obstacle. My own journey would have to be an experiment in this.

Garo shrugged when I asked him if I should go, and in truth I’d already decided. He knew the Lebanese consul and telephoned her to vouch for me. All I needed, she said, was a letter from the British High Commission to free them of any responsibility. I secured the visa and arranged – through Garo’s own travel agency – a passage to Beirut. I had two days before the boat left; the Armenian network was already proving its worth.

Garo was not just a travel agent. He was also Cyprus’s Brazilian consul, director of a bank, a property developer, a would-be publisher and a power-broker of the Armenian republic’s burgeoning foreign affairs. But his real enthusiasm was reserved for esoteric thought. He had a library full of ancient wisdom and a Great Dane named Plato.

Nicosia, he explained, had its own mystic – the Magus of Strovolos; not his favourite, by any means, but worth a hearing. That week he was giving a series of lectures. We drove through Nicosia to Strovolus, known to be the city’s dullest suburb. The day’s lecture was in a large shed in a leafy garden. A group of Germans filled the room and hung through the open window to catch the Magus’s words. He started by talking about psychotherapy. Literally the word meant ‘healing the soul’. A misnomer, explained the Magus, for the soul is the one part of us that is never sick. It is the other things, the worldly things like doubt and desire heaped around the soul that make us sick.

The ‘Magus’ took his title from the priestly caste of Zoroastrians and displayed in his teaching some of the dualism that they had taught. Dualism was outlawed by the early Church, like so much else that was good, but it survived in Armenia. It found its way eventually into Western Europe to become the basis for the great medieval heresies, the Albigensians and Cathars. It was Armenian exiles – ever the carriers of Oriental ideas – who are believed to have introduced it.

The Magus sat on his stool in a grey, button-up cardigan, spreading his appealing heresies in mellifluous tones, speaking of the powers of auto-therapy, of modern evils, of peace. And it was all grist to the mill for the gentle Germans who sat with eyes closed, palms upturned. His American supporters, wary of the war, were not so loyal. They had stayed at home and sent as proxy a set of small tape recorders which whirred and clicked at the Magus’s feet.

For fifteen hundred years Armenians had been fleeing to Cyprus – heretics, subversives, exiled princes and kings, poets, monks, pogrom survivors and orphans. Once there, things have become little easier. They watched the island shift from one power to the next – from Abbasid to Byzantine, Byzantine to Knights Templar, to French Crusader, to Venetian, to Ottoman, to British, and from British into civil war. Looking at the island on the map, it appears somehow anvil-shaped, and there’s never been a shortage of people to wield the hammer.

The Nalchadjians had been particularly unlucky. On a hot June afternoon in 1963 the Nalchadjians were married at Nicosia’s Armenian church. It was a glamorous occasion. The Nalchadjian factories in Famagusta and Kyrenia were large and prosperous, and the couple stepped from the church into a cheering bay of Armenian well-wishers, who had gathered beneath the cypresses.

Mrs Nalchadjian had kept something of her dark, Armenian beauty, but the factories had all gone. I went to see her in a small, third-floor flat in Greek Nicosia, which had the advantage of being close to the new Armenian church.

‘Yes, it was a wonderful service,’ she sighed, turning the page of her photograph album. ‘The shooting didn’t start until the reception.’

When he heard the shots the vartabed left the party and hurried through the deserted streets to lock up the church. It was never used again.

Mrs Nalchadjian turned the album’s last page, which was empty. ‘For our daughter’s wedding. She’s engaged to an Armenian doctor, a lovely man. But he lives in Beirut and things are still a bit difficult there.’

‘The church,’ I said. ‘What has happened to the old church?’

‘I don’t know. Some say it’s a café, others that it’s destroyed. No one’s been back.’

At the Greek checkpoint, I signed some papers and they let me through. I walked on past the UN checkpoint, through no man’s land, to the Turkish checkpoint. There, I signed more papers and pledged I’d be back before the border closed at dusk.

While Greek Cyprus has grown fat since the occupation, and its roads purr now with German cars, the Turkish side has become something of a backwater. It is like a sleepy Anatolian town, with peasant families living in the wrecks of old Ottoman villas, grazing sheep and moustachioed cloth merchants with rolls of suiting tucked under their arms. All that still lives of a non-Turkish past are the rusting hulls of Morrises and Hillmans.

The church was hard to find. Victoria street had looked easy on the map, but it was a Greek map and all the names had been changed. Asking for an Armenian church was even less tactful here than in Anatolia. So I idled past the fruit stalls and abandoned hans, the foundries and workshops, followed the zig-zag of the Green Line until, not far in from the western wall, I spied the telling pinnacle of a church tower.

The high gate was padlocked. Its wrought-iron whorls were trussed with barbed wire. A board had been crudely tied to the gate: a victory targe with a soldier bursting from the red and crescent moon of the Turkish flag. Behind it the courtyard appeared untouched from the day of the Nalchadjian wedding. The cypresses were gone and the flagstones bordered with weeds, but it had about it the air of neglect rather than destruction.

Nor was the church a café. That too was abandoned and tufts of grass billowed from its walls. Another Armenian church in ruins. I tried to get in but on the other side was a military assault course, all raked dirt and poles and rope-nets and pits. When I went a little later to Famagusta to see what had become of the fourteenth-century church there, I found it also adjacent to an assault course. There were the poles and rope-nets and pits. I began to wonder whether Armenian churches might form some essential part of Turkish military training.

The following day I left Nicosia to catch the boat to Beirut. In Larnaca a warm wind blew off the sea. The gulls spun in idle circles above the empty hotels. Pinned to the menu-board of one, coyly avoiding any mention of the Gulf War, was a letter from the Cyprus Tourism Organization: ‘We regret the decision of certain tour operators to repatriate their clients from Cyprus. It is as calm and safe as it used to be, and as beautiful for holidays.’

That evening on the docks, waiting for the French to load their military supplies, a Lebanese came up to me. He had a three-inch scar on his jaw.

‘You going to Lebanon?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why do you go to Lebanon? Lebanon is not a good country.’

‘I’ve heard it’s a beautiful country.’

‘You have friends in Beirut?’

‘Yes,’ I lied.

‘Good, but don’t go to West Beirut. If you go to West Beirut, you know what will happen.’

I could guess.

‘They will take you away.’

2

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!’