ROADS AND OF FORTUNE
Kingdoms
Feb 13 2013
My grandfather, an Armenian shoemaker from Tabriz, Iran, lived the
last leg of his life in Southern California, a haven for Iranian and
Armenian diasporas who had traded war and revolution for a bit of
peace in the sun-soaked landscapes from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
In his new house, thousands of miles away from air raid sirens
and the nights he and my grandmother spent with my family in our
Tehran basement when I was a toddler, he hung up a painting of Mount
Ararat, the landing place of Noah and his ark. Even though Ararat has
technically been part of Turkey for a century, the Armenians still
remember it as theirs. And the mountain sits, framed, on a wall in
nearly every Armenian home from Fresno to Sydney, so they can wake
to its snow-capped peaks and dream of a home that once existed.
The mountain haunted me throughout my adolescence. As an adult,
its pull became too magnetic to ignore. In a moment of passion, I
handed in my resignation at my job as an editor. I wanted to go back,
travel the length of the diasporan string that had forever tied me to
my immigrant identity and tell stories in the process. My boyfriend
joined in on the idea, and soon we had broken our apartment lease,
crammed our belongings into my parents’ garage and headed to the
South Caucasus for three months.
***
In July, we found ourselves in the parking lot of an abandoned train
station in the Northern Armenian city of Vanadzor, while a cold haze
crept in and swirled with the heavy cigarette smoke in the air.
“There are no seats left, so you’re going to have to sit on this,”
the burly Armenian bus driver said, shaking a flimsy miniature wooden
stool in the air.
A faint laugh escaped from my lips. I thought he was joking.
He was not.
I watched family members who stayed behind wave goodbye to their
loved ones and looked up to the see the bus completely full, the
faces of passengers brimming with stories hidden in wrinkles and
creases pressed against the foggy windows.
This detail, of course, did not matter to our bus driver.
With one big push, he wedged the worn stool, called a “taburetka”
in Russian, tightly between two pleather seats on the bus and shook
his hands vigorously once more, beckoning me to get in.
He then turned in the direction of my horrified boyfriend who was
trying to convince me to wait for a roomier bus that would come by
tomorrow morning, but it was too late. We were both mute by then.
“You. Sit in the front with me,” the bus driver said, hauling him away.
As a woman, I wasn’t eligible for the front seat. In the
patriarchy-soaked South Caucasus, the idea of a woman sitting for
hours on end in the company of a male driver was too bold, too taboo.
I didn’t understand this at the time, but weeks later on another trip,
I watched a woman miss out on a ride despite the seat next to the
driver remaining bare.
It was the middle of summer and the relentless Armenian sun lit up
the shimmery flecks on her opaque panty hose.
“Can someone at least move upfront so I can get a seat in the back?”
she called as she stuck her head in the bus.
No one budged. The bus drove away, leaving her shadow outlined in
the amber colored dust.
Instinctively, I reached for a seat belt and soon realized that I was,
in fact, sitting on an unbolted stool in the middle of a van bursting
at the seams with bodies. The only thing forcing my chair to stay
in its place through a mountainous journey across Armenia and into
neighboring Georgia was the weight of my own backside and the fleshy
hips of the big-boned women on each side of me.
This was not just any bus. This was a marshrutka-Russian for “routed
taxi”-the mythical minivans used throughout most of the former Soviet
Union that give new meaning to the concept of public transportation.
Sturdy and cheap to both operate and ride, the marshrutkas are the
only things strong enough to withstand the raw South Caucasian roads.
In Armenia, they are the most common mode of travel both city and
countrywide, and for less than $5, they got me to the capital of
another country in record time.
The marshrutka, with its rattling floorboards, rusty exterior and
baseball-card sized photos of Jesus and the Virgin Mary plastered to
the dashboard, was filled with the wafting odor of fried meat piroshki
and potato-filled buns. An evil eye pendant, used to ward off danger in
this part of the world, hung from the rear view mirror and swung like
a pendulum, capturing every single pothole in its stride. The windows
remained closed, despite the dry summer heat. The driver continued
to smoke, despite a smoking ban for marshrutka drivers. And more
people continually climbed on board, despite a dangerously depleting
oxygen supply.
For hours, my legs remained buried under oversized luggage. Without
thinking twice, the overwhelmed mother sitting next to me plopped
her crying infant onto my lap. The constant swerving by our driver
combined with copious amounts of sweets proved too much for my newly
adopted 2-year-old. The rest of the ride, with a stop at the border
where the circulation slowly came back in my limbs, was spent helping
his mother clean him, while she tossed bags of projectile vomit out
the window into the picturesque Caucasian hills.
The most dangerous threat the marshrutka carried however, wasn’t
vomiting children, but grandmothers, who, noticing my male travel
companion, turned to sweetly ask if we were married. I quickly
learned, that unless I was prepared for silent scorn, I had to fib
and enthusiastically nod “yes.” In turn, they rewarded me with smiles
and handfuls of exotic Russian candy.
The marshrutka had no buttons to push to get off, no chords to
pull, no announcements about where we were. If you could manage, an
enthusiastic “stop” from the barrels of your gut that echoed through
rows of intimidating locals who carried everything from groceries to
bulky furniture, did the trick. The worn-in seats jiggled back and
forth, vibrating to loud nostalgic Russian pop songs as the driver
negotiated the pockmarked mountainous roads. I sat on a stool in
a 12-seat bus that had probably seen the fall of the USSR, with 20
other people, suffering through children with uneasy stomachs and
ear-numbing music. Passengers struck up conversations that ended with
invites insisting we spend the night at their house. It was terrible
and wonderful at the same time, and I loved every single minute of it.
The Caucasus is a place where the road to love and hate run parallel
and intertwine, where anything and nothing is possible, where tea
and blood boil in the same pot. Armenia lies in its southern tip,
its borders continuously fought over by vast empires, its diaspora
spread throughout every corner of the world, divided by genocide,
immigration, communism and war.
Its collective psyche, romantically shackled to the past and longing
for the future without much regard for the present, could be defined by
the singular striking image that haunted me, the snow-capped peaks of
biblical Mount Ararat. Beyond the walls of diaspora homes, it appeared
on posters, in books, even crudely taped down on the check-out counters
of ethnic Armenian grocery stores and printed on the labels of jams
and juices on their isles.To the world, Ararat was in Turkey. To
Armenians, it would always remain theirs. I often saw Mount Ararat
while on my marshrutka trips and wondered about my identity as part
of a diaspora created through survival rather than choice.
Just a couple hours away from Tbilisi, the marshrutka came to a slow
stop. A heard of cows passed through and in these hills, they always
had the right of way.
I remembered my grandfather, who would spend hours sitting in a
sun-bathed corner of his house rubbing rosary beads between his
wrinkled hands and dreaming of his ascent to Ararat. I would find him
with his eyes full of tears looking out of the window, half-expecting
Ararat to appear. When he died, I dreamt that he had floated in
his sleep across the ocean and found his final resting place in its
snowy peaks.
The herd moved along the bumpy road in southern Georgia and so did
the marshrutka. I, too, had felt like I was moving, and leaving beyond
the frames of the oil painted-mountain neatly hung against the wall.
“I am looking for the people who have always been there and belong
to the places they live,” travel writer Norman Lewis once said.
But with a growing diaspora uprooted and displaced at various
junctions throughout history, the idea of ‘home,’ of belonging, had
never really settled in. It was not Ararat, but the roaming marshrutka
that was encompassing the soul of Armenia for me. Home was a dusty
minivan plastered with placards of the Virgin Mary that was full of
people and always stopped for cows. The marshrutka was the embodiment
of Armenia’s gravitational pull that jerked you back no matter how
far away you were-a ground zero for the world’s opposite forces,
destined to live so closely intertwined: love and hate, peace and war,
joy and pain, rich and poor.
There were upscale taxis and even tour buses commonly used by diasporan
groups that would have perhaps been a more logical choice for the
trip my boyfriend and I took, but the decision to ride across the
country in marshrutkas was, ultimately, the right one. The lack of
safety, the strangers who spoke to me as if I was one of their own,
was thrilling. It taught me that identity doesn’t stop at kebab shops
or paintings of snowy mountains. Identity expands and changes and if
you let it, it makes room for new narratives. Being Armenian, for me,
now also means riding around in a decrepit minivan among locals with
stories to tell, the wind furiously blowing in your face while sitting
on an unbolted wooden stool.
Giddy from the long ride and the melt-in-your-mouth apricots Armenia
is famous for, we took more marshrutka adventures after we crossed
the Armenia-Georgia border. We soon headed to Nagorno-Karabakh,
the de facto republic that was the scene of a bloody war between
Armenia and neighboring Azerbaijan in the early 90s. The physical
and psychological scars of the ‘frozen’ conflict remain. Even today,
the only way to enter Karabakh is through Armenia, which retains
control of the landlocked region.
Traveling there by marshrutka did not require much thought, but I
couldn’t decide if it was misfortune, or perhaps luck that led me
back to the wooden stool again.
“Problem chika. Problem chika,” the driver said as he pulled the
taburetka out from the van’s trunk. “There won’t be a problem, there
won’t be a problem.”
I spent much of the journey grabbing onto anything I could find
inside the van-the door, seats, my boyfriend’s legs-that I thought
would keep me remotely stable, while we twirled up and down deep
within the forested Caucasus mountains. I caught our driver smirking
in the rear view mirror.
Droplets of sweat swelled beneath my cardigan, dancing to the
soundtrack of Russian love ballads. From Karabakh’s capital,
Stepanakert, we rode another van to Shushi, visited a defunct
mosque-its damaged minarets still showing signs of the war-and ate
watermelon with two elderly men in the town square who happily told
us the sad, rich stories of Shushi’s past.
On the day we had intended to leave Karabakh, a bus strike began. With
time to waste, we ventured to the back of the station, randomly picked
a minivan and hopped on. The mountains hugged the marshrutka as it
chugged up the landscape, Stepanakert no longer in sight.
We were anomalies on the bus, foreigners who spoke Armenian. A woman
turned around and enthusiastically practiced her limited English
with us. A family cajoled us into coming home with them. In the West,
receiving an invitation from a stranger on a bus might make you change
your seat. In the hospitable Caucasus, refusing it is tantamount to
committing murder.
Lost in the ancient city of Amaras, where Mesrop Mashtots, the founder
of the Armenian alphabet, established his first school, we found
ourselves sitting on a mattress in a backyard with small children, wild
chickens and a vineyard as our backdrop. I gritted fresh honeycomb
between my teeth as our hosts poured the thick, mud-like Armenian
coffee I had once hated back home, but now couldn’t wait to drink.
On the long drive back to the bus station, we stopped to rest at a
waterfall. “Here,” our new host Anahit said, handing me a plastic cup.
“Drink.” The waterfall was a good omen, the bearer of much
luck. The crisp water slid down my throat, its essence-or maybe its
luck-lingering there for hours.
Back in Armenia, we traveled to Gyumri with locals, a glorious city
once part of the Silk Road still reeling from an earthquake that left
upwards of 25,000 dead. What it lacked in infrastructure, it made
up in immense, and at times overpowering, soul. During Vartavar, a
national water festival, we went to Garni, a village that was the site
a pagan-era temple of the same name. We hopped back on the marshrutka
completely drenched. The damp van reeked as we passed decrepit Soviet
buildings left unfinished for decades. We almost missed the marshrutka
to Ashtarak, spending half of the 20-cent journey catching our breath
while cheap, Soviet-era cars with watermelon-filled trunks drove by.
In the Southern Armenian city of Sisian, we attended a pagan new year
festival on the 3500-year-old site of Zorats Karer, an astronomical
wonder older than Stonehenge.
Months after I left Armenia, I found out the marshrutkas were slowly
being phased out, set to be replaced with shiny, new buses. They
will have no Virgin Mary photos or wooden stools, but rather leather
seats and clean dashboards and perhaps even seat belts. The vomiting
children however, would always be around.
The change won’t take place for a few years, but I have hung a framed
photo of a marshrutka on my wall back home in the U.S., just in case
I can’t make it back in time.
Liana Aghajanian is a Los Angeles-based journalist who can also be
found in London and the South Caucasus. She has written for Foreign
Policy, the BBC, and Mental Floss, among others. She also runs Ianyan
Magazine (http://www.ianyanmag,com), an online mag dedicated to news
and views from the Caucasus. Follow her on Twitter @writepudding
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