Free An Armenian Sketchbook by Vasily Grossman Page B

Christian kindness. Sometimes she says, very seriously, “I’ll go and work, I’ll keep hard at it till supper.” And then she appears at the supper table, heavy with sleep, red-faced, radiating heat like a blast furnace; all afternoon the house has been filled by her powerful snoring. Sometimes she weeps—and her tears are like a tropical downpour. Usually this is because she feels personally offended by something; she seldom weeps from pain, and still more seldom from pity.
    Yes, how can we say that someone is good or bad? Are kind people always good? Can bad people be kind? Can someone be kind and still be a bad person?
    Such are our ladies.
    Now a few words about Martirosyan. More than anything in the world, he loves his nation. He adores it passionately. History, world literature, architecture, philosophy, humanity as a whole, the solar system, the Milky Way, galaxies, and supergalaxies—all this is secondary. What matters is the global, even cosmic, superiority of the Armenian people.
    Sometimes this passion is touching and wonderful; sometimes it is sweet and funny; sometimes it is so insane as to be shocking.
    Martirosyan is about fifty years old. He is tall, and he has a pleasant, intelligent face, with dark eyes and a large fleshy nose. He is a good conversationalist and storyteller; he is a gourmet and a connoisseur of fine cognac, a man who, in the words of Anatole France, loves to praise the Lord through his creations. And the Lord’s creations are infinitely varied; they include not only the granddaughters of Eve but also the garlic soup called khash and the yogurt soup called spas , not to mention lamb-kidney shashlyks, pink trout, Jermuk mineral water, and the Armenian yogurt called matsun , not to mention billiards, stuffed eggplant, a house built from pink tufa on the shores of a gurgling mountain stream, the conversation of friends, sleeping compartments on international trains, and chairs on presidiums.
    In the most natural of ways, Martirosyan has combined a cult of Armenia’s marvelous architecture, of the Armenian landscape, of medieval Armenian songs, of the wisdom literature written on parchment in classical Armenian, with the cult of his own personality. He deeply and sincerely loves his own self. He reveres himself in the same poetic way he reveres the deep-blue water of Lake Sevan, the snows of Aragats, and the Ararat valley when it is pink with peach blossom. He is as dear to his own self as all the priceless riches of the Matenadaran manuscript library. He likes to tell charming stories about ridiculous situations he has found himself in, about enemies who have furiously criticized his books, about students applauding not him but a rival writer by the name of Shiraz, about how meek and docile he himself was during Stalin’s day. But this is not self-criticism, even if it appears to be. On the contrary, all these stories are an expression of his love for his own self; they are stories about the weaknesses and eccentricities of God.

9
    T HE ROAD to Dilijan is very beautiful.
    We drove along the shore of Lake Sevan. We passed the Minutka restaurant, but I did not even give it a glance. Our coach began to climb uphill.
    How mighty, how terrible, and how kind is the power of habit! People can get used to anything—the sea, the southern stars, love, a bunk in a prison, the barbed wire of the camps.
    What an abyss lies between the first night of passion and a long, grinding argument about how best to bring up the children! How little there is in common between a first wonderful encounter with the sea and trudging along the shore in the stifling midday heat to buy something from the souvenir kiosk! How terrible the despair of a man who has just lost his freedom! And then there he is, lying on his bunk and yawning as he wonders what will be in today’s prison gruel: pearl barley or pickled cabbage? What creates this abyss is the power of habit. Dull as it seems, it is as powerful as dynamite;