The Doves of Ohanavank by Vahan Zanoyan Read Free Book Online Page A

photographs and small hand-woven carpets, the walls in my room are bare. I share the kitchen and bathroom with her, and help her with household chores. The rent is low, around twenty dollars a month, and she asks me to use it to buy her groceries. I do, and I give her the receipt, because she is always surprised how little it buys. She remembers the food prices of a different era. With the amount of money that I sent home before escaping, and with what I brought with me, I can afford to keep a place like this in Yerevan for a very long time.
    But why am I here and not at our home in Saralandj? It is, after all, not really the pigs. After struggling for eighteen long and excruciating months with one aching obsession, namely to return home, why am I not at home? Why was it so easy for Edik to convince me to sign up for two courses at the history department of Yerevan State University, and for one English language course? I later heard that the professors were bribed to let me audit the courses, but I did not want to ask Edik about it. I’m sure he was the one who had done the bribing, even though he argues against bribery and corruption with a passion. Why was I so eager to have an excuse to move to Yerevan?
    Sumaya told me once that she had long stopped wanting to go home, and that my desire to return reminded her of when she still missed home. “I now miss the days when I used to miss home,” she said. “There’s something sweet about missing home. It gives one hope, and I’ve lost that now.” That touched me deeply then and I felt close to her for opening up to me like that. But I also swore then that I’d never get to that point, I’d never stop missing home.
    But missing home is one thing and being able to return an entirely different thing. Sumaya was right. It is easy and sweet to miss home whenyou’re away. And it gives you hope, because you constantly count on the nostalgia, no matter how painful, to drive you to freedom. Without the nostalgia, hope is lost because you no longer have something to look forward to. But all the missing, the pining, the obsession, and the life sustaining hope is lost the minute you return. It’s done. You’re back, against all odds, having conquered incredible obstacles, having beaten people a thousand times more powerful than you…and then you ask, now what?
    It is difficult in Saralandj. My family never confronts me directly, but there are the silent stares and unspoken questions on my sisters’ and brothers’ faces. Village gossip can be ruthless. And although the gossip is about me, the malicious tales deliberately reach my brothers and sisters, hurting them, as much if not more, than me.
    There is a difference between the solitude that I enjoy and the loneliness from which I suffer. The loneliness is anchored in hiding the truth, in the fear of being rejected, in the inability to share my story with a single soul who can relate to it. I have known girls who could not handle that kind of loneliness. It pushed them into such severe depression that they were unable to have any social interaction. In the most severe cases they became suicidal.

    Soon after I found this place, I met a girl on the bus coming home one night. She is my age, and lives in one of the buildings around here. We take the same bus from center city Yerevan, to the same bus stop. After seeing each other a few times on the bus, we started talking. We were both careful and reserved at first, starting with a simple nod the second time we saw each other, then a smile and a hello, and then taking a seat next to each other and striking up a conversation.
    Her name is Anna, and she is from a village in the Lori region in the North. A year ago, when she was seventeen, her parents agreed to marry her off to a man in his thirties from a nearby town. She says she was horrified, because she did not like his demeanor, but had no say in the matter. Soon after they were married, her husband, who used to work in a