The Stories

These pieces of writing, whatever form they might take, are here to document the month that I am spending in Armenia (my birthplace) with the hope that they will offer a window into the lives and the world of a tiny country that the world once forgot and now willfully ignores. I hope that I can shed light onto the wonders of this weathered land and others will be able to see Armenia and the people of Artsakh through the eyes of a hopeless romantic searching for beauty and finding love in everything broken.

We drive out of the center of town, past broken and unfinished buildings, now overgrown and rusted, with their metal skeletons protruding through the brick. A portrait of a forgotten past, a frozen piece of history when there was promise, productivity, and plans for the future.

We pull into a driveway, colorful laundry hanging above through a teal green fence. A couple of children are running around outside. This is the orphanage.

Ani, my guide and partner on this project, leads me inside. The walls were colored in hot pink, sky blue, olive green and neon orange, with tall dark shadowing casting sharp lines across the lobby. We are greeted by a middle aged man with drooping eyes and a half smile. He takes us into a room with knock-off Lion King and Flintstones characters painted on its sides. Red book shelves in the shape of houses fill the spaces inbetween little beds. In the center of the room an old man sits in a wooden chair, draped in shades of gray, hands with a slight tremor. His skin hangs down his cheeks painting a permanent frown on his pale face. He acknowledges my presence in the room with a quick silent glance and proceeds to stare past the window.

On the beds are arranged three other old men, but these ones smile. Through their drooping olive skin, mountainous noses, gray stubble, and thick dark brows their eyes twinkle in greens and blues. They stand up in broken movements and motion me in to sit down, accompanied by a chorus of hellos and welcomes. With sweet smiles and hunched shoulders they position themselves in a red couch and apologize for their conditions saying that if they were home they would be better hosts. Before I can ask them questions, another man praces into the room with a mischievous grin composed of mostly missing teeth, hands on his hips. In a thirty minute incessant dance of exaggerated gestures around the room, multiple impersonations, and mildly misogynistic comments (that I allowed myself to ignore) he tells me a collection of tales from his life and how broken and useless our government is. There is no opportunity to interrupt him, and slowly more people gathered around to listen. Eventually we manage to escape, and see the rest of the families staying at the orphanage.

Each time a new door is opened we are welcomed with half smiles but fully open arms. Sometimes the conversation starts quickly, other times it takes time for the ice to melt in the room and nervous hands to open up, for their shoulders finally falling and their gaze to soften. The look in everyone’s eyes are identical. With their ever present wetness they shine like dark bottomless pools, even when they are shades of greens and blues. When my camera is up their eyes shift, unsure whether or not to look into the lens. The women take charge. The husbands disappear.

“We have nothing.” I can see the tears welling up in her eyes as Inga looks down at her shaking, weathered hands.

“20 years of building a home, laying it down brick by brick, and now we have nothing.” Her fingers are clasped together nervously, her graying hair untended, her glance constantly shifting. Behind her, yellow-beige wallpaper peels off concrete walls with cracks climbing up to the ceiling.

Inga and her family have fled from Artsakh, a territory between the countries of Armenia and Azerbaijan. It has been populated by Armenians for centuries if not thousands of years, but remains to be a disputed territory and Azerbaijan claims to have rightful ownership of it. After decades of conflict and occasional flare-ups following the collapse of the Soviet Union, a 43 day long war resulted in more than half of Artsakh being surrendered to Azerbaijan- leaving a majority of the current 150,000 displaced Armenians with no home to return to. Inga is one of these people.

This was the third time the mother of two had to flee her home due to an iteration of this conflict. First, she fled from Baku, Azerbaijan in 1990 when entire communities of Armenians were slaughtered, their homes burned, and forced to leave their lives behind. Inga fled to Artsakh following a promise of safety. Long gone were the times that Azeris and Armenians could coexist on the same side of the border. After she moved to Artsakh another conflict destroyed her home once more, but she was able to return and rebuild it.

This was the third time, and this time there would be no path to return.

“I’m done. I’m done. I’m never going back. I will never cross the Lachin again. How many times? Not again. Never. I don’t care where I am, just not there-I just can’t run again.” She is referring to the Lachin Corridor, which is a thin strip of land connecting mainland Armenia to Artsakh- now essentially land-locked in Azerbaijan. Currently it is being occupied and monitored by Russian peace officers but peace is far from guaranteed.

I approached the nervous family arranged around the metal beds and ancient floral armchairs: a woman, a father, and a young boy. When I asked him questions, his parents attempted to answer but we could cut in loudly and spoke for himself. He sat on his bed with a with eyes forward, and shoulders hunched. I asked what his name was and he responded with a certain ferocity, quickly, loudly and without looking at my face. "Norayr!" Otherwise he remained silent, until I asked to take his picture. He jumped back and off the bed as if I had pointed a gun at him. I put my camera down and away. He convinced his parents to refuse too. This was not surprising to me, in fact this was the reaction I had expected from everyone else, and was more surprised that this was the only family that refused. There was a moral and ethical battle that took place in my head every time I took a picture of one of these people. There was a certain helpless in their eyes, the way their bodies shifted as the black hole of a camera lense pointed in their direction. It felt to me that their reaction was an attempt to retain, express, or muster a sense of dignity. My heart broke as I took a picture of a woman with tears streaming down her face as she told me that she had lost everything. It broke again when a woman only allowed me to take a picture from behind and began to notice that she had began to cry as well, her delicate shoulders wrapped in a turquoise sweater shaking, her head dipping down, buried in her weathered hand. All I could do was continue to continue the mercieless lifeless shutter sound of my camera, being able to offer nothing else. With each picture I felt like I was stripping them from a little piece of their identity, their pride- selling their souls and exploiting their pain. I was violating a space that was not mine.

Maybe Norayr saw me as the violator that I saw myself to be.

The darkness brewing in this boy, and his rejection of the camera made left the impression he had lost his childhood.

"Which school are you going to go to?"

"The one at the village."

"No, that school isn’t ours anymore, we can’t go back." His dad chimes in.

"I’m only going to school at home. At home." His voice trembled and cracked at that word: home.

"Home is gone. This is your new home."

"I don’t know. I don’t know. I want to go home."

Each answer was quick and laced with a defiance and attitude that reminded of prideful old men who had lost their faith in the world.

But to my great surprise, he decided to join us on the rest of the interviews, asking to hold my camera case, my note book, but saying very little.

I offered him to use the camera. He cautiously took it and I swung the strap around his neck, explaining to him how it works: what to press and what not to touch. He didn’t smile, but as he figitted with the giant machine in his tiny, nervous hands, turning it over, playing with the knobs, I could see some of the deep anger and sadness in him be replaced by a childish curiosity.

As I had previously warned, I tend to romantasize and find metaphors in everything I see. So, while this event might simply have been a child playing a new cool-looking toy, to me it felt like reclaiming one's narrative and taking ownership of your fear. It gave me hope that through all the trauma, anger, and sadness, some innocence and hope could be preserved. A generation is not lost.

The “Lus” in Lusine means light.

"I planted a tree when I was pregnant. Can you imagine? Pregnant! It was heavy, heavy, with fruit every year. We worked on this land for twenty years, started from nothing. I slept with my mother on a pile of hay when we first got there. But we nursed it. We loved it. We built everything, our new home was almost done. Look look, look at this."

She pulls out her phone and to show me a the picture of a brand new beautiful home - celebrations and traditions, life and love in something they had built themselves. She shows me videos of young girls dancing- our traditional Armenian dances with rows of girls arm in arm in long dresses. Their chests are puffed, their chins up. Their legs in sync and their bodies unstoppable. Strong.

"Look, look! "

The girls are outside in an orchard, greenery all around, roses, smiles. They were almost done rehearsing for a recital when the war began. Lusine had been the event organizer of the town, putting together hundreds of them for the youth around town.

"I organized all of this, I did. Look there’s my daughter. Look." She points a shaky finger at the screen as tears begin to stream down her face from her blue eyes. She tells me stories of a happy life. Not an easy one, but one that they built with their own hands, with their own spirit, and conviction that they would be passing it down to their children. Watering a seed - a seed for a better world in which future generations wouldn't have to face the same hardships that they did.

"Look there’s my house! They took this video, the curtains are gone, 30 tons of grain are gone, our tractor, our tractor is still there! "

The video she’s showing me is filmed by Azeris or Turks who now occupy the land. The houses left behind were looted, everything stolen, destroyed and burned.

“The Turks now live in my house.”

"Why are you crying? That’s it. It’s done." Her mother in law interjects.

"I just want my land. I don’t care if it’s destroyed-it’s my land."

"We kept the taraz*. At least we kept the taraz."

She manages a sad smile.

"Can I see it?"

"Yes yes of course."

The young girl puts on the dress. It is cheaply made, but beautiful nevertheless. Deep velvet reds and dark blues with golden threads. The colors of our flag. She stands there shyly with her hands together as I take her picture, her pink slippers pointed towards each other.

We spend far more time with them than we expected to or were supposed to. But it is impossible to ask someone to stop telling their story when they are pouring their heart out to you. She was telling me these stories more for herself than for me. I think that in showing me those pictures she was hanging on to threads of a life that existed only in them. In telling me she was keeping more pieces of the life that she left behind. Perhaps it soothed her soul to share these stories, so that at least they remained alive in the memories of others and wouldn't simply be sent to oblivion.

I remember his face from a video that circulated during the war. A full beard on his face, thick serious brows drooping over his black eyes. Steady fingers with black soot nestled in every crack and wrinkle in his pale skin, loading bronze bullets into a gun. He never looks at the camera.

I see him approaching me from a distance, beard shorter, hands clean and free of bullets, but the eyes and brows unchanged. When we are near he whispers a hello and gives me a quick hug. Our families were close but I haven’t spoken to him since we were 6 and 7. Despite the fact that we barely knew of each other's existence, he had reached out to me letting me know that if I ever needed anything at all I should let him know and he'd be there in ten minutes.

At first his voice is quiet, he doesn’t quite look at me, his glance always over my shoulder. The conversation starts slow, questions about our parents and family. He says he ran away from the hospital, he has shrapnel in his leg but assures me that he’s fine. He’ll be sent back to serve after he recovers though the war is over.

The conversation inevitably shifts towards the war, towards the state of the country. He asks why I came back, that "there is nothing to see here, nothing to do."

“There is life in everyone’s faces out there. There is a future. Look at the faces here.”

He is referring to the perpetual and permanent gloom on just about every face in the city that is over the age of 20. We are standing in the center of town, there are people passing by from a distance. With each step they take they seem to sink a bit deeper into the ground. The younger folks still have some pep in their step, they look up sometimes. Maybe it's just the winter weather, maybe not.

I try not to ask him too many questions about the war but I really don’t need to. He tells me bits and pieces of his time there.

He had been deployed for three days as a part of the national mandatory draft when the war started.

I ask him if he remembers the exact moment he knew it began.

“Yes”, he chuckles.

We were standing by the canteen. Just as we are now. 6 bombs appear on the mountain in front of us: one, two, three, four, five, six, pillars of smoke flying up into the sky. Within a few hours we were given arms and sent to the frontlines, the trenches.

A smoke-bomb landed two feet away from me, luckily there were no shards but if it had landed on me I would have been gone. I laughed at my friend, he was further- he back jumped and fell flat against the ground.

That’s how it started.

Within a few days his officer told his brigade to leave if they wanted to make it out alive. The officer left the next day.

They all ran away, he says. Out of the 200 soldiers in his brigade, 110 ran away.

Why didn’t you run?

“Matter of principle. Our detachment never left. We would fight till we died or till the war was over."

Maybe he notices my sad and somewhat pitying smile, he says "But we kept our spirits up, there wasn't a day that we didn't laugh or smile." He pauses and turns grim. "Except the day they killed my best friend."

We had to bury their bodies so they wouldn’t rot, they [Azerbaijan] blocked the Red Cross from exchanging or returning bodies. We had no other choice- it would spread disease.

Did you feel anything for the enemy? Outside of hate or anger I mean?

He nods.

I never disrespected their corpses.

Except once, when I took a dead soldier's gloves off his hands; they were nice and it was cold. Oh and a lighter- as a souvenir. He looks up in a guilty smile.

It never felt real, we were just playing krakosti* I didn’t want to kill anyone. But it was either me or them. And I chose me.

From behind the glass windows of our car, the world outside feels frozen: rectangular stone buildings protruding from emptiness in front of impenetrable mountains born in fire and aged with wrinkled slopes and white heads, having seen and felt far more than we can fathom in our fleeting nature.

But as we arrive to the front of the house, I brace myself for the wind knowing that that stillness is an illusion - only betrayed by the flailing laundry hanging on a metal wire. The bright oranges, blues, and pinks of the sweaters, pants, and sheets barely hang on to their invisible lifeline, in danger of losing their grip and disappearing into empty purple gray skies behind them.

We are quickly ushered inside and a Persian miniature-like scene unveils in front of me.

The members of the family are arranged in the living room in their own little corners, unaware of their audience. In one side of the room two young women hold their children close to their chests. One of them sets her child down in a metal cradle with shimmering Christmas ornaments hanging above. The soft light of the window behind them gives them white halos. On the other side of the room an old man sinks deep into an armchair by a metal furnace, anchored by the weight of his belly and held steady with an arm over each armrest, his head centered and topped with a layer of white hairs gently combed to one side. A slightly younger man, sits at his side on a wooden chair leaning forward. Both of them are framed by the black fume pipe of the furnace. In the center of the room, two more children sit on the floor surrounded by dolls and toys, playing in their own little world.

The younger man acts as the designated spokesperson of the family, talking incessantly for half an hour, telling us stories of how he and his wife were the first couple to be officially married in the newly liberated Shushi, the wonderful adventures he's had, the life he's lived with a nostalgic smile on his face.

As he speaks, his father, Kamo, sits silently. Tears begin to gather in the purple bags under his eyes in deep shimmering pools.

When I finally get the chance to speak to the old man, I'm told that he has bad hearing so his son shouts my questions into his ear.

"What does your homeland mean to you?"

He stares at me for a second before answering.

“It’s gold! Gold! That’s what my homeland is."

He throws his shaky arm up as he nearly shouts those words, eyes opening wide. It's as if we've awaken a sleeping mountain.

“I can’t sleep- I can’t sleep at night. I think about my Shushi.”

The thick Karabakh dialect is like our mainland Armenian dipped in melted honey: the words softened, thick, and sweet with a rough kick.

His glossy eyes quiver, staring past me and my camera, at a point that doesn't exist in this room.

He describes Shushi, a small province in Artsakh that was surrendered to Azerbaijan during the conflict- meaning the family can't return home. He tells me that it is the heart of Artsakh and its gateway - whoever has Shushi has the rest of Artsakh. It was always revered for its natural beauty, its lush mountains, its mysterious presence above the fogs and clouds and its ancient churches. He had built his life there, and rebuilt his home once before.

As we continue to speak his body goes into billowing waves of passion and anger, and falls into quiet, still sadnesses marked by surrendered sighs and shrugs.

It’s an image of helplessness, of having so much inside you - so much you want and need and knowing that nothing - absolutely nothing - can change the circumstances you are in.

So instead all you can do is cry, or shout, or tell the story over and over and over until eventually you fall silent because none of it means anything.

That is of course, until the anger and the sorrow scrapes at your insides, until your heart claws at your chest, that you have to speak again to free yourself from it.

As the other adults in the room fall silent, a little girl is singing to herself, another is shaking her toy and shrieking, and a third is tugging at my hair. She has two tiny pigtails with ladybugs on them as she stares up at me with brown eyes too big for her little chubby face. She refuses to leave my side, curious about my camera, my bag, my hair. She climbs under the table, untying the laces of my boots and grabbing my leg as I try to hold the camera steady on the teary face of her great-grandfather. I'm told that her name is Lilit, she's four years old.

Lilit is completely unaware of her surroundings, of the heavy silence in the room, of the reason they are here. She'll grow up in the valley of barren snowy mountains instead of the peaks of forest covered ones. Her words will have no honey. She will not know what she has lost, and a loss like that, is no loss at all.