The Doves of Ohanavank by Vahan Zanoyan Read Free Book Online

Edik gave it to me.
Naked as a poet’s soul
…spoken to the statue of beauty. Every time I read something like this, I wonder what it would be like to have an hour with the author. Just one hour, over a cup of coffee, to get a glimpse of
his
naked soul…
    I know Edik would have a lot to say about that. But we have not had the chance to talk privately for a while, at least not about poetry. Gagik and Edik seem to be worried about Yuri. Edik thinks that sooner or later they’ll figure things out, and wonder how I managed to return home after just eighteen months. No girl working for Ayvazian has ever done something like that.
    And then there’s this other oligarch, Manvel Aleksyan, whom everyone refers to by his nickname, LeFreak. No one knows how the nickname came about, but it stuck. Edik thinks it was a French journalist who coined it. At any rate, LeFreak was one of the Ayvazian’s competitors. According to Gagik he is trying to find out how to get his hands on the business Ayvazian used to control. The problem is that as he digs deeper into Ayvazian’s business, he may stumble upon my story. So the whole notion that once we got rid of the Ayvazian menace we could live in peace, a notion that Avo had believed and worked for, has now come into question.
    Fortunately, Avo is too busy with the countless tasks of spring to give a lot of thought to Yuri and LeFreak. Aside from his normal duties, he also has to deal with his pig farm. That was Gagik’s idea. Pork prices have risen; the government has started a program to import a good quality special feed mix from Holland, they say with no hormones or chemicals, which, when mixed with local chaff, makes an excellent feed which many small farmers in the region are now using. Avo is excited about the pig farm. So much so that he agreed to borrow money from Edik to start it. With Gagik’s help, he bought twenty pregnant pigs last fall, expected to deliver in a few weeks. That will keep him busy all spring and summer, and hopefully out of trouble, even though in our family, trouble has always found its way to us.
    As for myself, I will be happy to spend the warmer months far from Avo’s pigs, in my rented room in an apartment in the outskirts of Yerevan, with an old lady who lives alone. It is a two-bedroom apartment on the eleventh floor of an old Soviet-style building. The elevator goes up to the tenth floor, and we have to go up the last flight of stairs on foot. This can be difficult for my landlady,
Diqin
(Mrs.) Alice, who is in her late seventies, so she does not leave the apartment often. Her husband has passed away, and her two sons live and work in Russia. They send her money every month, but she says they are waiting for her to die so they can sell the apartment. They have no desire to return to Armenia, she says. I sense the bitterness in her voice, but I can’t tell whether it is directed at her sons or at the country. Too many people leave these days out of desperation.
    Bitter or not, Diqin Alice is among the few fortunate ones. Many old ladies her age have become homeless, abandoned by family members who do not have the means to care for them. Edik says that these old women would have been better off under the Soviet system; in spite of all its faults,he says, the Soviet system provided basic economic security to the elderly. I wouldn’t know much about that. I was born after that system collapsed, but my father did not have anything positive to say about the Soviet days. Our family paid dearly during those years, he used to say, especially during the reign of Joseph Stalin. But I guess none of that matters much to anyone in Armenia today, unless you are talking to someone like Edik, for whom everything seems to have some relevance, no matter how old or distant.
    My room is small but comfortable. I have a narrow wardrobe and a single bed, a window that overlooks a small park and, unlike Diqin Alice’s room where the walls are lined with countless family