to take shelter, I came to my studio and painted. I could not stop!’
Through Yervant the war began to come into focus. It seemed to have forced out of those who did not flee a kind of raw volatility, which became so ingrained that no one noticed it any more. If they did, it was as a matter of pride. Liberté totale was something Yervant mentioned often. To him it was the principle for which the war was fought, but to me it seemed no more than a description of its worst excesses.
We walked later by the sea. Yervant loved the sea. He did not notice the years of dirt and broken things that swilled about in its swells. He breathed in deeply and squinted along the shore.
‘I like the peace here, don’t you?’
The traffic bumped and growled along the freeway behind us. A couple of fishermen argued on the rocks. I nodded.
Yervant carried on answering my questions about the war. He ran through a catalogue of chaos, bombings, kidnappings, snipers, checkpoints when they killed at random, days when they fired ten shells a minute, all day.
One morning last year he had been shaving when there was a massive explosion. He thought it was an earthquake; on the radio they said it was an earthquake. But in fact it was a gas storage-tank hit by a shell. One piece of the tank had landed outside an Armenian school in Bourdj-Hamoud, nearly two miles away. The piece, said Yervant, was big enough to park two cars underneath.
On another occasion a running street-battle had spilled over into Yervant’s building. There was shooting on the stairs and a militia man burst into the flat. Yervant was waiting there with a revolver. He killed the man before he even knew anyone was there.
Yervant gripped my arm. He pointed to a flock of herring-gulls gathered to squabble over some waste. ‘You like birds?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Me too. In the war I would come down and shoot them with my gun. My friend in Canada says there you cannot do it. You must have a licence. A licence – imagine that!’
One afternoon, through a series of introductions, I traced another side of Beirut’s Armenians in another darkened room in Bourdj-Hamoud. Here the atmosphere was quite different. Half a dozen men in track-suits sat around a television, cracking pistachio nuts. There was none of Yervant’s eccentric tension, but instead a kind of palpable toughness.
The youngest of them was Manouk. He was little more than twenty and was small and wiry and wore a neatly clipped moustache. It didn’t take long before we were talking about Karabagh. The Turks and Soviets, he said, were helping to flush the Armenians from their villages. Every day they were being killed. Driven from their villages and killed – just like 1915. Now. Today! And what was the West doing? Nothing. As always. Just carrying on their love affair with the Russian reformers.
I told him that Armenia would have to fight its own battles from now on and he agreed. And in fact I knew that they were, these ones in this room. I had heard of the arms that filtered through from Beirut to Karabagh. There was a sharper spirit here. It was in Manouk and the others, in their crunching of pistachios, in the pages of the Armenian magazine GAYDZ! (meaning ‘flash of fire’), with its images of oppression, of heads under boots, nooses and cages, and the technical diagrams of a Chinese grenade-launcher, an M-16 and a Kalashnikov. It had been there also, in the late 1970s, when the Armenians too learned the effectiveness of small paramilitary units.
Both were based in Beirut: ASALA (Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia) and JCAG (Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide). Of the two the JCAG were much the more secretive and sinister, and operated with surgical efficiency. One FBI officer was quoted as saying, ‘The Justice Commandos were known as a singularly effective group of assassins. When they went to work somebody usually died.’ There was something very Armenian about the JCAG. Their operation in sixteen different countries, their attention to detail and meticulous planning, their expertise with firearms and explosives, the way they traced the movements of their victims (invariably Turkish diplomats), getting so close to the cars when shooting that powder burns were often found on the skin.
And it occurred to me, listening to Manouk recounting their methods, that I’d heard precisely the same language used to explain the pre-eminence of Armenian goldsmiths.
This is how it would happen. You’d be in a taxi. You’d be watching a wrecked building pan across the window or the sun play on a sheet of high glass. You’d be thinking about something else entirely. In Kuwait there would be some atrocity and you wouldn’t yet know and the taxi would pull up in a strange courtyard and there they’d be waiting for you, five of them in black t-shirts tugging at your door. And then? Would the Armenians be any help? Part of me wanted to find out. But another part, and much the larger, feared kidnap more than death.
I was thinking about that after my meeting with Manouk. It was a bright afternoon and I was in a taxi with three Arabs. I was looking at the sun play on the sea and thinking that I now had only two days before the land offensive was due to begin when the music on the radio was interrupted and I could make out the names – America, Saddam Hussein, Kuwait, Britain. The Arabs started talking with the driver – about what? About the Bastard Americans, about the Bastard British! About the Great Satan and the Little Satan! About me. I cursed my foolishness. We plunged into the back-streets, heading west. I leaned forward and said where are you going, I wanted Bourdj-Hamoud. But the driver just shook his head. Damn it, what’s happening? The car slowed and turned into a courtyard and the Arabs got out and one of them leaned back in and said: ‘My friend, you better be careful.’ And the driver pulled away again and the buildings in the streets seemed suddenly sharper as I searched desperately for something I recognised.
Armenian script. When I saw it appear above the shops, I felt for the second time the relief of sanctuary and realized how much, in a Middle East where I felt an unwelcome alien, I depended on the Armenians. So much so that later that day I gave in. I’d promised myself I would not go into West Beirut: West Beirut was under Muslim control, kidnap country. But there was an Armenian there going to Yerevan and I needed to speak to her. The Armenians said they’d get me in, by ambulance, and we were waved through all the checkpoints.
As I waited to meet my contact, the door of the office suddenly burst open. A man stumbled over the threshold, sweating and short of breath. ‘You have a British here?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘You must leave at once. You have been seen.’
I left. I climbed into the back of the ambulance and we headed out of West Beirut towards the Ring and the burnt-out strip of the Green Line. An Armenian nurse sat with me. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll soon be through the checkpoint.’
‘I’ll be glad to get back to Bourdj-Hamoud.’
‘They took two yesterday. A French and a Belgian.’
‘Where?’
‘Just near here, but they were drug dealers. They shouldn’t have gone in. We have an expression in Armenian that a broken jar breaks again on the way to the rubbish tip.’
The evenings in Antelias, with the monastery gates locked after sundown, were long and dark and empty. On my last night a thunderstorm tumbled down from the mountains. The lights failed, came on again, then disappeared altogether.
I stood up from the desk in my room and went to the window. The rain was falling with
