occasionally with some sudden irritation and, half in jest, blame the war every time he reached for one of his cigars, their silk bands personalized by a loyal Armenian from Kuwait: HH KAREKIN II. In Beirut, even spiritual leaders had to behave like warlords.
We had lunch alone in his private dining room. There was a long table and two windows. One of them looked out on to the coast road and over the Catholicos’s shoulder I could watch the traffic limp up on to a battered fly-over. Beyond the fly-over was the sea.
‘Artichoke,’ he said. ‘I hope you like artichoke.’
‘Artichoke’s fine.’
‘My doctor says it’s good for the nerves.’
For a while we tugged at the leaves in silence. The Catholicos’s cook stood attentively at the kitchen door, an elderly Armenian with his shirt done up to the neck. He took away the plates and the Catholicos began to talk.
‘Can I make a point to begin with? That you look at the Armenian Church not, as so many others have, as a thing of archaeological interest, but as a living church.’
I told him that was exactly what I was looking for in the Armenians as a whole. ‘But perhaps some Armenians are guilty of that too.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Well, Armenian history – it’s quite a burden to bear’.
I told him of an image of the poet Gevork Emin’s that had particularly struck me: he had compared the Armenians and their past to a peacock and his fan – all that was most impressive was behind them.
He nodded. ‘Of course the Church must combine tradition and hope. In the East we integrate things much more. You in the West, you think religion and politics must be separate. It is absurd to divide things like that!’
And there I thought I heard the echo of his critics, the dilemma of his own position: a religious leader caught between the complexities of Armenian politics and the Lebanese civil war. For years he had struggled to keep the Armenians free of the local feuds and alliances. It had just about worked. Now, he said, the country’s leaders were coming to him privately and admitting that perhaps the Armenians had been right all along. ‘Positive Neutrality’ the Catholicos called it, but it made me think of the hammer and the anvil. Muslims suspected the Armenians because they were Christian, and Christians chastised them for not being true to their colours. But the real Armenian battle was always elsewhere – with the Turks and the lost lands of Anatolia. On the boat from Cyprus, a Lebanese had said that the Armenians were feared – ‘tough like old boots’, ruthless in the defence of their neutrality. If one Armenian died, he said, the next day there’d be two or three bodies lying in the streets of the perpetrators.
The Catholicos finished eating and unwrapped another cigar.
‘It was the shelling that got to you,’ he said.
The last year had been the worst. Aoun had been up there in the hills, the government forces down below. The monastery was in between.
The monks took shelter in the underground printing press. The young ones would run across the compound to the store for food. For two months they spent the nights down there, sketching each other by the light of hurricane lamps, playing Risk, while the Catholicos would sit apart from them all, grimacing at each blast, chewing on a cigar and writing a long meditation on the war entitled: Cross Made from the Cedars of Lebanon.
The Catholicos gave me a room in the monastery. There was a patch of new plaster where a shell had fallen through the ceiling. I spent the evening there reading Cross Made from the Cedars of Lebanon, struck by the sense of constriction of an urban war.
In the morning an engineer drove me into Bourdj-Hamoud. The deadline in Kuwait was ticking away; the engineer said Saddam would pull out, but I wasn’t so sure. More than seventy years earlier, in the wake of another war, the Armenians had arrived on the edge of Beirut. They were in rags and, for the most part, without shoes or possessions. They were the dazed survivors of the Turkish massacres and scavenged and combed the beaches for anything of value. In time a crude shanty grew up and this they called Camp Marash, after the region they had left. They knew that soon the order would be given to return. But it didn’t come. The Armenians were still there. The shanty had survived in pockets but in the main Bourdj-Hamoud was a modern town. And it was the only place I saw in Beirut that seemed busy. With the city centre off limits, it had come into its own. The place bustled and thrived with commerce, attracting Beirutis of all factions to do what Beirutis like doing best – shopping.
‘You know what the Armenian hobby is?’ The engineer was striding down Bourdj-Hamoud’s main street.
‘What’s that?’
‘Building. When a Lebanese gets some money, he’ll buy clothes or a car. But an Armenian, well, he’ll get some bricks and put them one on top of another.’
It was true – Bourdj-Hamoud was scattered with mini-cranes and cement-mixers. And there was something else. I had been nowhere yet where Armenians were in the majority, where shop signs were first in Armenian, then in Arabic, where Armenian was spoken in public, where Armenians were treated by Armenian doctors, had their teeth pulled by Armenian dentists, meat cut by Armenian butchers, and cloth cut by Armenian tailors, where the bookshops had whole sections on Charents, Totovents and William Saroyan. There was an Armenian football team and everywhere, splayed out beneath shrapnel-dented cars were the bodies of Armenian mechanics. The streets bore the names of the lost towns – Aintab, Marash, Adana – and there seemed to be in them an assurance, a swagger, I had not seen before. It was almost as if the Armenians belonged here.
I left the engineer at one of his building-sites and went off to track down a painter who they’d told me about at the monastery. Yervant lived on the second floor of a rocket-scarred block. It was his parents’ flat, but they were seeing out the war in Cairo. He was in his mid-thirties and had swarthy Armenian looks, with thick, wedge eyebrows and a heavy flop of dark hair. His stance was sprung with a peculiar, rigid intensity, as though in constant anticipation of something. He would often run his hand across the bristly nape of his neck.
His flat was a dark place. Though he’d been there for years, it still had an empty, itinerant feeling to it. There was a blood-red carpet on the tiled floor and blood-red seat covers.
Over the sofa, like an antimacassar, was a Manchester United scarf.
‘I have a Manchester United t-shirt, Manchester United socks and Manchester United pillow. You know why Manchester?’
‘Because of the Armenian community there?’ Manchester was where the first Armenians settled in Britain.
He shook his head, and flashed a smile. ‘When I heard the name, I thought – it is Armenian: manch-es-ter. “You are a baby!”’
Off the main room was a studio where stacks of canvasses leaned against the walls. Yervant was an expressive painter, with a pallet of subdued, earthy colours – grey-blue, brown, and a dull mustard-yellow which cropped up in all of them. Some were figurative – portraits with wide eyes and no mouth; others little more than swirls of colour slapped on like butter. The best ones were a series of dark, misty shapes which seemed partly dead rock and partly alive: mountains, he explained, Armenian mountains, which he’d never seen.
‘Eight months work. All of this.’ There were dozens. ‘Two hundred – when I began I could not stop. I had no control. Then last year two tanks were down there shooting. All night they
