Free The Doves of Ohanavank by Vahan Zanoyan Page A

question—Why does he care? Why is he so engaged, so connected to everything? There is absolutely nothing in it for him personally, and yet nothing seems unimportant to him. Why
does
he care?
    I think I just stumbled onto one possible answer.
The joy of helping someone whose plight I understand
. But does Edik understand my plight? Why would he give me those two poems otherwise? Who is Edik anyway? We know very little about him. He does not have to be here. Why does this man bother with me? With us? He has helped Avo, Avo has spent several days in his dacha as his guest, we all spent that magical night in his dacha after we killed Viktor and Sergei Ayvazian and their four bodyguards, he drives four hours each way from Vardahovit to visit us in Saralandj, he lent the money that Avo needed to start his pig farm, and the resounding question remains:
Why
?
    Is it really because it feels good to help someone whose plight you understand? But how on earth did he even begin to understand our plight, especially mine, even before he met me? Gago says he is the way he is because he is
connected
. But I do not believe that’s all there is to it. Perhaps this has to do with that third ear, the ear of his heart.

Chapter Eight
    M anoj Gupta has run many odd errands for his boss over the ten years that he has been in Al Barmaka’s employ, most of them in familiar territory, covering the Middle East, Asia and, once in a while, Europe. But he now has the uneasy feeling of entering entirely unfamiliar ground, even before leaving Dubai, as he boards the Armavia flight to Yerevan. It is presently the only airline that has a direct flight, and he opts for the unknown airline against the more complicated routes via Europe on airlines that he knows.
    He is the only one in First Class, which has two rows of four seats each. The aircraft is old and run down, the chairs squeak and shift on the floor bolts, there is rust on the armrests and tears in the dirty carpet. Although the First Class cabin is empty, economy class is full, and he guesses that the airline is doing well on this route, and so does not understand this degree of neglect. The flight attendants look bored and unmotivated. What Manoj does not know is that Armavia is controlled by yet another state-supported oligarch, who is running the company into the ground. This syndrome, which baffles outsiders whenthey encounter it, and disgusts locals, who leave the country in droves, somehow survives.
    It is a short flight, and Manoj keeps himself busy by reading about the country he is visiting and going over a stack of business documents. Before he knows it, they land. Being the first to disembark, he gets into an empty passport control line and, having no checked bags, is in the car sent by the hotel within minutes of touchdown.
    Manoj finds himself not just transported to a different country, but to a different world. From a hot and humid desert, he has landed in a cold, mountainous country, where the lowest point is six hundred meters above sea level, and well into spring there are still patches of snow at the side of the streets. While Dubai burns in forty degree Celsius heat only three hours away, he had watched with fascination from the window of the descending plane an almost magical winter landscape. He starts wondering if Al Barmaka did in fact have a business strategy in mind, for the first time giving him the benefit of the doubt that the alleged business motive for the trip may not have been just a cover to send him here to find Leila. He is in fact scheduled to see several businessmen to discuss trade and tourism, in addition to a planned trip to a village called Saralandj. His attempts to find a street address for the Galians’ home have been futile. “There are no street maps for small villages in Armenia,” the Armenian Embassy clerk in Abu Dhabi tells him. He does not want to disclose his interest specifically in Saralandj and the Galians to the Embassy yet, so he cannot