The land
of tortured souls
The novelist D B C Pierre reports from Armenia
More than a decade after a disastrous war, Armenia is still entrenched in poverty and neglect. Among the most vulnerable are a staggering number of mentally disabled people living in appalling conditions.
Here I am in a sunny house with an unexploded rocket-propelled grenade embedded in its cellar floor. Granted, I’ve had some brandy. I look out onto the back garden where white mountains rise, humps of ice cream towering into a cobalt sky. The lesser reaches of the mighty Caucasus; just there, in the garden, sparkling, where the bird table should be. And I struggle to reconcile the extremes of this place.
Noah’s ark came to rest in Armenia. Leopards still roam here. Apricots and cherries originated here, as did wheat. All still rustle wild. Armenian minds disproportionately dot the catalogue of human achievement. Forests whisper with oak and almond, pistachio and wild jasmine. The first Christian state arose here. Winston Churchill declared the brandy finer than any cognac. And it’s impossible to pass a dwelling without being invited in for coffee and chocolate, if not brandy.
Paradise. I’m in paradise with a live missile. It blasted a hole through two storeys and, without exploding, set fire to the roof. It’s one of 11 lobbed over the mountain one winter’s day. The others went off. The man who owns the house takes me to see this one. It’s stuck two-and-a-half feet into the floor, at a slight angle. Outside in the sun it’s supposedly -20C. In here it feels -30. The man mutters, frowns at the projectile, then kicks it. There’s a pause. We remain unexploded.
Leaving the house for the warmth of an icy, still sunlight, I take in the mountains around us and pinpoint the man’s problem: a hostile border straddles them. Azerbaijan, a bullet’s flight away. We stand for a moment, gazing. A man dressed like a shepherd passes on the road behind us. I ask the obvious question: how does the man with the missile live with such a threat in his house? He tells me he’s moved his family of six into the garden shed until the missile is made safe.
“And how long have you lived in the shed?” He crinkles his eyes, has an empty chew behind his whiskers. “Thirteen years,” he says eventually. “But I have many acquaintances in Azerbaijan,” he adds. “I’ll ask them to come and fix the thing.” He looks at me; a smile creases his face. “Come – we’ll have some brandy.”
Nothing prepares you for Armenia. My stated aim was to get as close as I could to the Caucasus without getting shot; but the journey is wilder than fiction. For all her ripe beauty, her whimsical charm, I see hardships that challenge belief. I’ve come to sniff out Transcaucasian settings for the heroine in my next novel, Ludmila’s Broken English. At least, that’s what I thought when I boarded the plane. But my stupid duty-free bag, my pointless choice of chicken or beef, the tinkling crap on the plane’s speakers, all became an insult to reality when we ploughed the mists over Yerevan and set down on a runway carved into snow and ice.
Within memory of those little comforts, the little plankton cloud of ego-floaters that is our western sustenance, I sat in a stench of shit and piss for lack of running water, in the one-room apartment of an 83-year-old woman. She said to me: “When the war started, I wanted to bring my family to safety. It was midsummer. My son, my daughter-in-law and my grandchildren – an eight-year-old, a six-year-old and a six-month-old baby – I made them go in a different car to me. But the Azeris set them on fire. I went to the hospital to find them. There were five coffins there, made for them.”
With the unravelling of the Soviet Union, Armenia – Hayastan as she’s known here – was the first firework in the Transcaucasian chain to go off. Now watch the rest of them bang. She has an unfriendly border with Turkey to the west, the result of Turkey’s refusal to admit the genocide of one-and-a-half million Armenians early last century. She has a hostile border with Azerbaijan to the east, after the conflict that raged from the late 1980s into the early 1990s over the disputed Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. The only open route left is north to south, from Georgia to Iran. And with war came a repatriation of Armenians and Azeris to their respective territories, whole villages being swapped in some cases, furniture, livestock and all. For most, however, it was an ugly flight; luckier families were forced from their homes in the clothes they stood up in; intermarried couples and their children were split apart.
But not too many steps away from the old lady wearing socks over her boots for traction on the ice in her apartment, I begin to learn that war isn’t the whole story here. The story of this small, landlocked jewel between the Black Sea and the Caspian is more deeply layered.
The man harbouring the missile comes to best symbolise Armenia’s situation for me. Malicious fortune blasted into the country over a decade ago; the earthquake of 1988 took more than 20,000 lives and made 500,000 homeless; the eruption of hostilities with her larger neighbour Azerbaijan; and the collapse of the Soviet Union, under whose control she enjoyed a measure of stability and growth. At the time, there was much attention paid to her plight, and helpful forces rallied from near and far. But as the flashpoint passed, as more exotic and pressing catastrophes caught the popular mind, much of that support melted away. And as high-priority crises grew out of control here, important strands of more basic existence fell into neglect.
More than a decade after the announcement of ceasefire, much of Armenia still lives in a state of poverty, her infrastructure in decay. Pensions, when they’re paid, amount to little over $6 a month, yet fuel costs approach those in the United States. A young republic for the third time in her history, Armenia has no mineral resources to speak of and relies heavily on diaspora Armenians for support. She struggles to find the tools to clear the mess that the 1980s lobbed into her house. In a world intent on the immediacy of conflict, on the savage, newsworthy glamour of unfolding crises, this forgotten place seems a bitter taste of things to come. The taste of a chronic, festering aftermath.
With occasional shelling and sniper fire still erupting around the eastern defences, and having been told in one town that the mayor has a new gun and might be out shooting stray dogs on the street, I hook up with a team from Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), who have large “no Kalashnikov” symbols plastered over their vehicles. These suddenly seem more helpful than the skull design on my snowboarding jacket.
MSF came here in the immediate aftermath of the 1988 earthquake, and never left. When issues of front-line care were dealt with, MSF crews saw a disturbing residue emerge. As a result, and unusually, the medical charity decided to channel some of its resources into perhaps the most vulnerable target of trauma and neglect – mental health. From a regional base in the lakeside town of Sevan – a collection of glum Soviet buildings scattered over a high plateau, with a decrepit Ferris wheel strangely creaking in the wind at its entrance – the young Belgian sociologist Luk Van Baelen leads me on a journey into the dark world of the uncared-for mind. Nothing could have prepared me for what I was about to see.