A short story from To Go On Living by Narine Abgaryan, translated by Margarit Ordukhanyan and Zara Torlone.

In February, Mayinants Tsatur turned exactly as old as his father had been when he left for war. Tsatur still remembered how his mother, her arms wrapped around his father’s neck, shook her head and begged him, in a voice gone hoarse from crying, “Please don’t leave, I won’t let you go!” Her bare feet dangled in the air. She was short of stature, with her head barely reaching her husband’s shoulder, thin, almost translucent, light as a feather. For her delicate beauty, Arusiak had earned the nickname Doll. Everyone marveled at how a simple village woman could possess so much grace. She toiled in the fields and washed her linens in the river, but nonetheless resembled a porcelain figurine: delicate, slender, outlandish.

Tsatur was all of fourteen then, and he stood, pressing his weeping sisters to himself and summoning all of his strength to not break into tears himself. His father caught his eyes and mouthed to him: “Take her away.” Tsatur gently took hold of his mother by her armpits and pulled her toward him. He expected her to resist, but she loosened her grip and went limp on his chest.

“Look after the girls,” his father said curtly, and walked out without waiting for him to respond. That’s how Tsatur remembered him: standing in the doorway, stooping a little – even though he knew that his head did not reach the top of the door frame, he still bent it slightly when he walked out the door. It was as if he shrank a little every time he left home.

Tsatur couldn’t recognize his father in old photos: a large, prematurely gray-haired and incongruously happy man with sloping shoulders and eyes narrowed into tiny slits by laughter. The premature grayness turned out to be hereditary – Tsatur started going gray when he was still in high school and didn’t have a single dark hair remaining in his mane by the time he turned thirty. His mother insisted that he looked just like his father; he didn’t see the resemblance but didn’t argue with her. Not that the resemblance brought her much comfort, but at least it made it easier for her to come to terms with her loss.

Martiros Sarian, Evening in the Garden, 1903. Used by permission.

In late February, Tsatur turned thirty-three. His sisters came to visit, with their husbands and kids. Everyone stayed up late, reminiscing about childhood. Nobody brought up their father: they all preferred to think about him in private. The guests stayed until close to midnight. The kids were all nodding off by the warm wood-burning stove – bellies full, sleepy, having played their hearts out. While the sisters were saying their goodbyes, Tsatur’s wife, Agnessa, handed out small presents: homemade necklaces for the girls, handmade gulpa1 for the boys. The kids all kissed her hands, and only the youngest girl grabbed on to her and pulled her down toward her; her brother chastened her – Have you forgotten that it’s hard for her? Tsatur picked up the little girl and brought her face to his wife’s. She laughed and kissed the little girl on the nose. Their own children stood in a row, one younger than the next: a boy of five, another boy of four, and a two-and-a-half-year-old girl. Agnessa had always wanted a girl and finally got her wish.

They went to bed long after midnight: first they put the kids to sleep, then she did the dishes while he mopped the floors; she wouldn’t have managed – it was hard for her to bend down, and she was exhausted after spending the entire day on her feet. “On her feet,” Tsatur thought bitterly.

Agnessa, sensing his mood, asked, without turning away from the sink, “What are you thinking about?”

“About how hard things have gotten for you. Mom used to help, but now …” He stopped mid-sentence. She shrugged – this is not hard! He nodded in agreement. True, this is not hard.

Tsatur has been burying the people of Berd for seventeen years, ever since the day his father’s remains were returned to them. That’s when he went to the cemetery and asked Mehrab, the gravedigger, to teach him how to dig a proper grave. Mehrab explained all the intricacies concerning the depth and width of a grave, the properties of the soil and the groundwater. He explained where the head should be and drew a rectangle on the ground with the blade of his shovel. Tsatur handled the rest with his own two hands. While his mother and sisters were at home mourning his father, Tsatur readied his grave. After the funeral, he stayed to work at the cemetery, first as an apprentice to Mehrab, then, after his death, as the gravedigger. And so he lived, ferrying people between this world and the next. He selflessly dedicated himself to raising his sisters, making sure that first the older and then the younger finished school and got married. His mother fretted that he never got married, but he always dismissed her concerns: “Later, later. What talk can there be of marriage now, with so much grief around us?”

Martiros Sarian, Flowering Branch, 1903. Used by permission.

One time, he was asked to dig two child-sized graves. At the funeral, only one of the caskets was open. He assumed that the second child must have been maimed beyond recognition by an explosion, but somebody told him that the second casket contained a woman’s legs. The family had been sheltering from a bombing in a cellar. It was cold out, and they didn’t have time to get properly dressed – they had rushed out of the house in nothing but their sleepwear. The mother fretted that the girl might catch a cold and kept berating herself – if only I had grabbed warm tights for her, if only I had grabbed some tights. During a lull between explosions, she darted out to grab warm clothes, and her daughter chased after her. The child was killed by an explosion, and the mother had both of her legs blown off.

“She’s alive, then?” asked Tsatur.

“You call that living?” came the retort.

He first saw Agnessa a few months later. She was sitting on the veranda of her father’s house sorting peas. Her hair was cut short and tucked behind her ears, revealing a tiny pink scar on her left cheek, just below the cheekbone. Rumor had it that the scar was the handiwork of her former husband who never forgave her for the death of their child. Tsatur was stunned by the deathly pallor of her fingers and by how, even when she was finished with her task, she kept moving them, as if sorting the air. He watched her, unnoticed, for a while and then couldn’t help asking, “Why do you keep moving your fingers?”

“It distracts me from my thoughts,” she answered artlessly.

Her mother brought out steaming coffee in a jezve;2 she didn’t drink it herself but offered to read the grounds. The coffee patterns on the sides of the cup weren’t promising: they portended disappointment, gossip, and worries. “I know what those worries are,” said her mother plaintively, setting her cup aside, “I can’t find prosthetic legs for her. I’ve been to town three times already, but no luck. She needs to learn to walk again!” She sighed and added bitterly, “My poor child.” Agnessa leaned in and pressed her face to her mother’s cheek. She didn’t kiss her but just sat like that, her lips pressed against her mother’s face, and there was so much tenderness and guilelessness in that gesture that Tsatur’s heart felt a pinch.

“I’m going to town tomorrow anyway. Why don’t you give me the clinic’s address?” he said with a cough. And, in order to dispel any doubts, he added, hurriedly, “I have to go for work. I’ve got to buy a couple of tools.”

He used the same pretext to explain his sudden trip to his own mother. Arusiak asked no questions, she just sighed.

Prosthetics were in high demand during the war, so civilian orders were constantly delayed. Nevertheless, Tsatur, after raising a considerable row at the clinic, managed to procure them. He ended up buying two bus tickets for his return trip; the prosthetic legs turned out to be so bulky that he couldn’t just carry them in his arms, and he was afraid to put them in the luggage compartment – what if they got damaged? He traveled the entire way back with his arm over them in the seat next to his to keep them from sliding off.

Together, they learned how to do everything anew: how to walk, how to smile, how to breathe. Tsatur proposed with the arrival of spring. She asked him for some time to consider and accepted his proposal reluctantly, after much hesitation. There was no wedding – what revelry could there be amid so much grief? Agnessa dreamed of having a girl, but they had two boys back to back. The doctors, worried about her fragile health, recommended that she wait before having a third, but she didn’t heed their advice and finally had a girl. She named her after her dead daughter because she firmly believed that if the name lived on, so did its bearer. Tsatur didn’t try to talk his wife out of it even though he wasn’t particularly thrilled with the idea of having his daughter named after a dead child. He never mentioned it – what was the point of discussing things that couldn’t be changed? Agnessa loved her children more than life itself and always gave them everything they wanted. She fussed over them; she feared, to the point of panic, that they might catch a cold, and so, not sparing any expenses, bought them piles of winter clothes, to make sure they had spares and things to grow into: sweaters, jackets, warm boots, mittens, and scarves. The only thing she never bought were tights. So in the winter her kids waddled around like clumsy goslings, each wearing two pairs of woolen pants. And the funny hats with pompoms made for them by Ginamants Metaksia.

Footnotes

1. Hand-knit woolen socks.
2. A small pot with a long handle used for making coffee in Turkey, Armenia, and the Balkans.