Bombardirovka
by Crystal Allene Cook
Reprinted from ARARAT (Spring 2006)
BACKGROUND
As the Soviet Union fell apart, many of its former regions broke into conflict. Among the bloodiest of these, the Armenian-Azeri war consisted of active combat from 1991 to 1994 over the territorial and governmental sovereignty of the Nagorno Karabagh region, an area on the border between these two countries. Although the territory now has its own government as well as strong ties to Armenia, it remains in a state of "permanent" ceasefire as a peace agreement has yet to be reached by all three entities.
What follows are sections from chapters 7 and 9 from Cook's forthcoming novel, Bombardirovka. Along with the USSR's disintegration and its misjudgment of the roles of ethnicity and religion within its own and former borders, the escalation into and the aftereffects of war are the book's central themes.
The main character, Jada Perlmutter, has gone to Moscow in 1991 to attempt working as a stringer, a low-rung freelance journalist. There she meets Yervand, a Karabaghtsi veteran of the USSR's war with Afghanistan. A series of subsequent events leads her later to travel with him to Stepanakert in December of that year.
FROM CHAPTER 7
Yervand wiped at his face with a kerchief, then tucked it into the front of his trousers. He puffed out his cheeks once. Then his lip curled.
"I don't eat out. Ever," he said.
The Georgian waitress set down chicken baked in a red sauce, fried eggplant stuffed with walnut paste, a green bean salad, and red bean soup. She returned with another plate of khachapuri, bread filled with salty cheese. Yervand scanned the table, picked up the bottle of wine and refilled my glass, then his own. With each sip he took, he made a face. He'd already commented that this wine was not nearly as good as that from Karabagh's vineyards. Gorbachev had them destroyed in a policy to reduce drinking in the USSR. Not the only reason Yervand didn't think much of him. Yeltsin had just paid a visit to Yervand's hometown of Stepanakert in the Nagorno-Karabagh region of Azerbaijan, trying to ease tensions, attempting to put a lid over the boiling and building mess there. Yervand retained no faith that the Soviet or the Armenian or the Azeri government could keep a wide-scale war in the region from breaking out
at any moment. Everybody everywhere was pissed: Armenians about massacres a few years before in Sumgait, Azerbaijan and the 500,000 of them subsequently kicked out of that country; the Azerbaijanis then tossed out on their ears from Armenia in retaliation; and especially his fellow Karabaghtsi-Armenians, caught in the middle, and wanting to be on their own, free from independent Azerbaijani, or what he called Turkish, control, and free to make closer political and other ties with now independent Armenia. My mini-tape player ran to a stop and I flipped the side over. This early in the evening the restaurant was relatively quiet. It would fill to capacity soon. At our second one-on-one meeting, I made notes as he spoke. As promised, I'd gone to visit him at the shashlik stand near the Arbat. The first time we met, again on his free day, again at Dom Xydojnika, across from Gorky Park, he'd wanted to know about me. Wow, he'd said, New York
must be beautiful. It was many things, but I had never considered it that. Saint Petersburg was beautiful.
No, no, he insisted, from what he'd seen in movies, it must be great. I could agree that it was. This second time, however, he seemed to come ready to talk. For all I knew, though, he could've been describing the people, the life, and the wars on Mars. I had to hit an American news magazine archive (if they'd let me), or something soon, and look all this stuff up.
I cut the chicken side in two, slicing around the bone with the steak knife sticking out of it and dumped a hunk onto Yervand's plate, assuring him that I ate here all the time and the food was excellent- he wasn't going to get sick from it.
Russian-woman style, without asking, I spooned out other food to him. He leaned back into the booth, seemingly pleased at my service.
He sipped wine again, made another face. "May we change topics now? It's not good to talk about this sort of thing during a meal." "Of course," I answered, addressing him in casual Russian- whatever he wants. The last time we met, I'd broken him of the formal habit, threatening that I wouldn't meet with him at all if he kept it up.
He picked up his fork in his hand like a Soviet, fingers underneath. My American Southern manners felt like shoving thorns into my eyes, but I breathed to myself, thinking, who gives a shit how someone holds a fork? The peeve passed; I concentrated instead on Yervand's bronze-toned face. Like my dad, Yervand's every thought stood out in block letters. Now there registered doubt. He popped a rolled eggplant slice into his mouth, chewed. The first dish passed the test. He grinned, picked up his knife as well in an unsightly grasp. I kept myself from staring at that, too, and being prickled. He started eating.
The cave-shaped restaurant began to fill. Its walls were narrow and low. The ceiling tilted with curves and was painted white. What I guessed must be Georgian folk art or sections of traditional dress hung at various places along the walls. Sharp-nosed like the Gypsies I'd pepper-sprayed (ugh!), but taller, with prouder posture, the two waitresses were thin, ruddy-skinned women with long hair pulled back away from their faces. They wore long skirts with aprons and moved smoothly and quickly between the kitchen in the back of the next larger room and this smaller front almost-antechamber.
In the window next to the door, two short men with round, olive-skinned faces were seated at the table for two across from our booth. At their arrival, Yervand's posture immediately changed. His expression grew worried-he'd clocked these guys in some way. His forehead wrinkled and then his otherwise expressive face fell as poker-still as his cousins' had been upon Lyosha's arrival two weeks before at the cafe.
The men had also noticed me. Everyone here almost always did. I pulled the tape player off the table, rolled the mic cord around it and shoved it into my black bag. I hated silence. Our table now was silent. I figured this was far enough away from the sad parts of what he told me. I stuttered into speech.
"K-k-karabagh had vineyards," I asked brightly. "I don't know anything about vineyards. How do you take care of them? Do you know much about taking care of them?"
The man facing me at the next table looked over. A waitress approached. She blocked their view as she set more cornbread on the table. Yervand shifted in his seat.
"My mother's father, my dedushka, before the Russians, vineyards had been in his family for generations," he said. He spoke quietly. "As a little boy, I walked through the fields with him; the fields that used to be ours. When they were destroyed, I was in Afghanistan. I came back and they were gone."
As soon as the waitress moved, the man to my left turned slightly towards us, studying Yervand as he spoke. My fourth such accident in two weeks after the Gypsy incident then took place. I reached for another piece of khachapuri and in doing so, knocked the bottle of wine clear off the table, where it crashed to the floor and splashed into the air, all over the bottoms of the pant legs of the two men across in their black suits. I then visualized myself ramming my head into the wall next to the door, then slamming myself once or twice in the chest with the horn on a chain that hung on the wall behind the two men. I leapt from the booth gushing forth a thousand and one excuse me's, this is horrible, what can I do, oh no, and five to fifteen full speeding rounds of pardons.
The man closest to me seemed genuinely unperturbed, as if having his suit ruined with wine was what he'd come to the joint for. His fellow diner, on the other hand, was instantly and thoroughly enraged. In some sort of American sense of propriety and manners, I looked to my right, expecting that Yervand had also instantly sprung from his seat to help. He remained right where he was, though his eyes were locked with those of the second man. A chill went up my spine and around my chest, as if I'd walked into a dog fighting ring a few seconds before the beasts would spring, when they still stared each other down, waiting for the drop of chicken blood from the handlers that whet the appetites for full-on attack. The younger of the two waitresses appeared. The whole front room stared. I looked to the unperturbed man and back at Yervand, not sure which way to run.
The man to my left reassured me. "Devushka, it's not the end of the world. It's okay. It's okay." He had an accent that I recognized from being stopped on the street a few times by men wanting to talk to me, but I couldn't, at the moment, place it. The waitress tossed a filthy rag at the floor, and walked back towards the kitchen. I picked up the cloth napkin from my table, knelt in a clean spot, and began to wipe at the bottom of his pants.
Yervand was standing behind me. "Don't do that," he said. The second man had also stood and was shaking wine from his trousers onto the floor.
"No, it's okay, devushka," the man agreed. "The Karabakhli is right."
"What do you mean by that?" Yervand asked, his accent thickening, the last word swooping in a strong lilt.
The man shrugged, as if completely perplexed. Yervand pulled me to standing. I stood there with the damp napkin in my hand.
"What the hell is that supposed to mean?" Yervand asked again, his face reddening.
"He doesn't mean anything," I said. "I'm sorry," I repeated, turning to the man. "Please, if there is something I can pay to have cleaned-"
"Listen to the girl," the seated man responded, in what I thought a polite and friendly tone.
Yervand spun me his way. "This doesn't concern you," he said.
"We just want to eat," the man said.
"No," Yervand said, pushing my hands off his forearm. "You don't understand." He turned back to the man. "What do you mean, 'Listen to the Karabakhli.'"
The standing guy took the charge. His voice was as low as Yervand's and his accent emphasized its depth by speaking Russian in a rolling monotone. "He doesn't mean anything," he said. Then he stood up fully, and was a little taller than me, but much broader in build than Yervand. He turned to his friend and looked back at us. I knew I'd fallen into some alternate world, stumbled into some cosmic pissing contest.
"Karabakhli? It doesn't mean anything at all-" he said.
As the first punch hit, the heavily-mustached and very large chef appeared in the front room as if blasted there by rocket. I ran screaming to the side. The sitting gentleman had also shuffled out of the way, now looking as if he'd received a turd in his soup. The chef shouted in one language at the two cooks now appearing and wrestling with the second man in a black suit while he himself jimmy-armed Yervand. The previously seated gentleman called out feebly in something other than Russian. A few people entered, spun on their heels, and rushed back out. Our delicious table full of food shook and
the chicken I wanted so much slid into the booth. People glanced at me and back to the fight. I was brighter red than the wine I'd sprayed everywhere. Within a minute, the whole conflict had been pushed into the lot outside. The waitresses slid to the front, their faces steady as if nothing unusual was occurring. I came to help, but they looked at me as if I'd done enough for one night. As the two cooks and the chef struggled with Yervand and the other man outside, I asked for the bill. The seated gentleman walked forward from the other side of the passageway.
"Allow me," he said.
In a cartoon gesture, I hit my ear as if I hadn't heard him correctly.
"Really," he repeated. "We ruined your meal."
"Unthinkable," I said. I didn't know what thi was all about, but Yervand would kill me if I let this man pay.
"I insist," he said and intercepted the waitress as she returned. "It's only a misunderstanding," he turned to me.
"You can't pay," I reached for the small leather folder.
"Devushka," he said, holding it away. "They know me well here. Let's not ruin the evening with further quarrels."
Stupified, I stood there. He extracted his wallet. "I suggest you get your things," he said. "The police most likely will be here soon."
I picked up my sausage-long parka with its hanging lining from the rack on the pole attached to our booth. The man grabbed its collar and in what, at the time, seemed like the most surreal gesture I'd ever encountered, helped me on with my coat. He then slid back into his. I took down Yervand's items. The man held the door for me to pass outside.
"Where are you from?" he asked, as we stood under the awning, and watched the fighting and shouting match still underway.
I didn't have it together at that moment to fib. "America," I stuttered on the 'k' sound in the last syllable.
"We are from Armenia," he said.
My brain was about to explode. Armenians? He registered my confusion.
"From Yerevan. We are Yeraz."
I shrugged at what that was.
"Azerbaijanis," he clarified and his short face twitched.
A small white and blue Sovetsky militia car pulled up. The man left my side, walked forcefully towards the vehicle. Again he took out his wallet. The chef held onto Yervand, but not so strongly. The fight had died down, and Yervand was holding onto his side, wheezing. His nose was bleeding and he had a cut above his eye. The police car choked, then sped away.
The Armenian-Azerbaijani man waved out at a passing car. They stopped and he gestured towards me. I looked over at Yervand. He seemed in a lot of pain. Stepping out of the way, the Yeraz came back towards his younger, also now bleeding friend. I came towards the car. The chef walked Yervand forward. He shrugged the guy's hands off, took the coat from my hand, leaned his head back and plugged his nose with his toboggan cap, then stepped into the front seat. I slid into the back.
"Kievsky," I said.
Story continued in the full issue of ARARAT
[ARARAT]
