War, Dead or Alive

But I will stop here and take an unsanctioned road: I am going to personalize the war, I am going to deliberately undermine the notion that the “great calamity” is a shared tragedy, that it concerns everyone. I am not an individualist, I denounce tribalism, and I equally doubt that I would make a reasonable centrist.

I was a creature that never for a day waited for the civilized world. All I was doing was waiting for my father.

I believed that he would definitely cure all of the people wounded in Hadrut and Stepanakert and come back home. The war was in full swing, it was the 1990s. I waited for him for seven years. During those years, I periodically saw a certain man: he would appear in our house, greet us the way my father would, get clean undergarments from our father’s closet, sip coffee in gentle, pensive sips, the way my father would, pack boxes of medical supplies, the way our father would, go into our father’s bedroom, lie down on his bed, exactly where our father would, and then vanish before daybreak, the way our father normally vanished before daybreak. I was assured that the familiar person who occasionally materialized in our house was my father himself, a descendant of displaced Erzrumians, surgeon Hakob Tamamyan, whom I should have recognized—after all, I was his son, one of those thousands of Armenian and Azerbaijani children who comprehended only one thing about war: their fathers’ return. From time to time, that man, whose photograph I had been shown and told, “Don’t you recognize him, he’s your father,” would make his existence known by sending home bullets extracted from people’s bodies, shards of an exploded shell, a Christmas tree made of spent cartridges, an aluminum spoon with “Tsavd tanem*, 1990” scratched into its handle with a needle-tip.

[*a ubiquitous term of endearment, which literally translates into “I will take away your pain.”— translator’s note]

My father would send his patients to our house in Yerevan for post-hospital rest and convalescence; they would stay with us, sharing our miserable days, the pale fire of the kerosene lamp, the barley coffee cooked over heat tablets, the matnakash flatbread, the cool heat of the wood-burning stove. Father’s patients arrived silently, went to bed silently, convalesced silently, left silently, and perished silently. I hated them; I didn’t want them to come. I hated them because if they came, it meant that they would have to leave. I hated them because if they lived, it meant they would eventually be killed. I hated them because if they existed, it meant that the missiles and bullets that killed them existed as well. Why did my father keep sending them? Why did he make me grow attached to his patients, love them—the most mortal among the living—with my heart and soul only so that I could relive over and over again how doomed my love for them was. After all, I didn’t actually hate them.

I kept waiting for my father, even after hearing the news that he had been killed. They said he had gotten buried under the ruins of the bombed hospital in Stepanakert. I continued to wait for him when the news of his death was retracted. I waited for my father when his death was re- announced and then retracted anew. How easily he died and how easily he came back to live! He had completely outdone the biblical Lazarus. As far as I know, Lazarus returned from the dead  only once. My father was a double Lazarus: dying and resurrection were his favorite pastimes, and I kept on waiting. Once a week, my mother, my sister and I would turn on the radio and hear the same voice announce, in the same tone, “Doctor Hakob Tamamyan is alive.” But why should I have cared whether my father was dead or alive? While I kept waiting for him, what significance did words like “alive” and “dead” have, if they had no power to stop my waiting, if they had no means to interrupt my waiting or free me from it. Incurable were my false illusion of rationalizing the war and my feverish waiting that defied the will of the entire world. Later, people kept telling me that the man we remembered, the man who had performed surgeries in the military and field hospitals of Artsakh, was my father, and that he had come back home. I did not recognize the person who’d come home, though; no matter how many times I was told otherwise, I kept looking at him and waiting for someone else.

In our home, he lived out all the stages of his collapse and terrible existence: his compassion, his shame, the habit he had picked up at the frontlines of drowning in drink his pain and the proximity of death, all of his virtues and transgressions. In that house, shovel by shovel, he buried his children and his wife alive, unhurriedly, torturously, and seemingly against his own will. He truly didn’t want it to be that way, but he also couldn’t want it any other way. The father who was merely a father, who in the eyes of the nine-year old boy was a doctor curing people’s pain, who was the best human in the world—the best if only because before leaving for the war he had somehow, unwittingly, “bribed” his son with trifles: he had uncovered for his son the world of books and reading, the magic of evening conversations and the beauty of kindness—was now killing the same child with the soil of death, feeding it to him spoon by spoon, with such solicitude and with such incredible care as to make sure that not a single crumb was wasted.

I know he didn’t want it that way, but he couldn’t want it any other way either.

Nobody comes back from war. The soldiers who fall on the front lines don’t come back. The peaceful civilians—mother and son—murdered, brutalized in their own home in the town of Hadrut, will not go anywhere, they will stay home, disembodied. Those who relive the war and come home neither actually relive nor come back. There is no coming back from war. My father passed away in 2017, in the very same hospital where he had worked for about forty years. In the ICU, with his last breath, he begged me to take him home.

The deceased seemed familiar to me: he resembled the man that I had seen at our house back in the 1990s, and he also resembled the man who never came home from war. That man didn’t belong to Europe’s artificial, money-driven “civilized world;” nor did he belong to the world of Russia’s militant authoritarianism. He was the father of a child, one of millions, who had gone to war and had never come back. In the meantime, his child keeps waiting to this day, while clearly realizing that his father will never return. Nevertheless, he keeps waiting. One must wait only for those who are destined never to come back.

Yerevan, October 20, 2020