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Towards Lifelong Freedom

By Mher Yenokyan

BY MHER YENOKYAN

Shall I open my eyes?

I am already awake.

I feel the light upon my closed eyelids.

When I was a little boy, I thought the day started from dawn. I did not even suspect that the elders’ day could start in darkness, at night. I was sure the New Day woke up as people did, in the morning, with the sun. I grew absorbed in thought when I discovered I had been counting the day from the wrong end for years. Something broke inside me; the childish candid and natural delusion was so naively pleasant.

I opened my eyes.

There are only the photos of the Woman-Girl; there is nobody around.

I stare at them for a long while; I kiss all the photos one by one, especially her honey lips.

She exists, thank God...

And now I will tell you everything from the very beginning. I would ask the emotionally frail to take care of themselves and to abstain from listening to my story...

The Death House

When I was 20 years old, I received a death certificate. Yes, yes; it was a paper saying that I no longer exist. All my efforts to prove that I was ALIVE, that I could Love, Miss, Cry, Devote Myself, Sadden, Suffer and Rejoice…The robot-gravedigger-judges could never see; they had no eyes of the soul. I have been in the Death House since last century, whence I am writing.

It will be 20 years soon since I have been here. How did I endure against all efforts of the soulless system to kill us? Many died in the round prison, unable to find the formula of survival.  After each such death we thought, “Who will be the next one?”

From the first days I found myself in the Death House I put my imagination to work... Believe it or not, it worked. I imagined I was living in a spaceship that had lost its way and hovered in boundless space. I never saw daylight, irrespective of when the day started or ended; it never made any difference… I lived on according to the earthly time of my memory; I believed I would reach light one day. It was pitch-dark outside. There were no people, no cities, no feelings and no civilizations. I found a refrigerator in the spaceship, with a large-lettered label that said, “To freeze feelings”. I immediately grasped the function of the refrigerator. I stored my Love, Longing, Sadness, Devotion, and Conscience…all of these in the refrigerator. Had I not done it, I would have gone insane in 3 days, but the trip was a long, a very long one. It was the only way to survive.

I found a library in the Death House, full of old, damp and frayed books. I was either going to read them all or to watch the grey walls for 60 hours a day (that was the precise duration of a day here). It was great to have a choice. I chose the books. I read whatever came across; I read incessantly. Another formula not to lose one’s wits.

I had not looked into my eyes for four years; there was no mirror. Though I sometimes sought to capture the human reflection of me in an aluminum mug, at least to feel I was not alone, it was not possible to talk that way; I only saw the outlines. And suddenly one day I found a tiny piece of mirror amongst the four-layered prison bars. To a bystander it might seem as if a little child were given a new toy. I stood, stupefied; I was looking carefully. I didn’t recognize the sad eyes looking at me in surprise. How could a person have changed so much in just 4 years? My hair had thinned closer to the forehead, fine wrinkles showed around my eyes, and the expression in them resembled that of a martyr. And I had naively thought I was the same young man, smiling with slightly naughty eyes! We looked at each other for a long while; I didn’t withstand his stern, examining stare and smiled and winked at him. It seemed the man in the mirror smiled back a little belatedly, but he recalled me and rejuvenated; he, too, winked at me alternately with left and right eyes and then totally lapsed into childhood; he even stuck his tongue out and laughed aloud. How interesting a person’s eyes are! The body grows old, yet with even a little childhood left in the soul, the eyes never age…

I tried to touch his face.

“Don’t you understand you are dead?”

I withdrew my hand immediately.

“I am not dead; you are mistaken.”

“You are dead, I tell you. I have been hiding from you for years lest you should learn the truth and grow horrified with yourself. See, you leave your window open day and night, summer or winter. Don’t you feel the room is deadly cold now?”

“I leave it open because I am afraid. A single slot needs to be left open; otherwise one may lose their wits, confined within the four walls of the room the entire time. I repeat it again; I am ALIVE, ALIVE, can’t you see? I see you, and we are talking to each other!”

“True, but for you to survive, Longing, Conscience and Love have been removed from your soul, don’t you remember?”

“No, they haven’t been taken away; they have just been frozen in a special fridge. You know well the formula of Survival here; not to believe anyone, not to ask for anything, not to be afraid of anything or anyone, not to love, not to miss, not to pity…”

“You see you know the laws here better than myself,” the man in the mirror grew sad again and was carried away by thoughts.

“Look at me, look carefully, you have no right to give in, can you hear? I am talking to you, hey; everything is going to work out, you know it well enough! You are strong, your heart thumps: I hear its beats every day when you go to bed, your heart wants to jump out of your chest but I keep telling it, “Wait!”

“For how much longer? You know this is no world of mine; it’s a huge blunder I am here, I am not guilty, I am not dead, I am alive!”

“Do you believe me?” I asked the man in the mirror looking at me.

The man nodded.

“Look into my eyes, I will definitely find the way… We will return to the World of the Living; most importantly, you shouldn’t lose faith.”

7 years in the Same Cell

In the Death House people are confined in a cell. They are not allowed to grow indoor plants or to keep pets; they are not allowed to have paints or colors or musical instruments. I wish I could play the piano, keep fish or care for pot plants! This is how we lived for the first seven years; without pure air, without leaving the cell. Whenever I tried to cut the bars with whatever came to hand to escape, I was taken to the punishment cell. They threw me there and forgot all about me. Once I was almost starving there. However, I was singing loudly to keep my spirits high, to drive away dark thoughts. I saw some superintendent who had remained humane approach the door.

“Mher, Mher, come to the door!”

“Who are you?”

“It’s Armen; I have brought you some bread and potatoes.”

I bit into the bread and kept humming my song. I never lost faith toward my struggle, toward God. If I am here, then it has to be this way; I must have some mission. I may not realize why God allowed my friend to die, for me to be deemed dead, based on the death paper, and to have been brought here. Yet I realize my struggle for LIFELONG FREEDOM started 20 years ago. The old inhabitants of the Death House told appalling stories about those who had died in the cells. I remember Joko’s story as if it were today.

 “In those cells people were brutally beaten half-dead, denuded, splashed with cold water and left overnight. The prison officers knew another method as well: they would soak the pea-coat in cold water, put it on a life-term prisoner, tie them to the chair and leave them in the punishment cell for the whole night. The prisoner would freeze, and fall ill with pneumonia. Within a short while the prisoner would die. In the death paper they would mention pneumonia as the cause of death. That’s it, true to the famous “No man, no problem” formula. This was how they killed some 14 people.”

I learnt afterwards that they wouldn’t even give their bodies to the relatives…

Who is to assume responsibility for the cannibalistic actions of the system? Until Armenia became a member of the European Union, those 5 cells continued to deprive people of lives. Only through impositions by the Europas did those cannibalistic cells close down.

Butter in the Prison

I received a pack of butter in the hungry years. It was a unique occurrence in the prison back then. I divided it equally among my cell-mates. I spared everyone a piece and was about to throw the wrap away. Sevo said, “No, Mher, don’t throw it away,” he snatched the wrap out of my hands, took off all his clothes and started rubbing the butter wrap against his body, “Yeah, let my body absorb it; I won’t feel hungry for 2 days.”

You should have seen Sevo’s delight.

A Pot of Honey

Nothing was allowed to enter into the Death House from the World of the Living. My dear ones would find the way. Even with huge amounts of money they managed to pass food through the footmen (prison attendants who pass necessary things and news to the prisoner for money). Yet there was a secret here; the whole food had to be eaten at night, and the tracks were to be covered up. Honey once arrived via the same route. A whole big pot of it. There were three of us in the cell. We waited for the night to fall. At midnight we started hastily eating spoonfuls of it.

“Well, suppose we eat all of it, chokingly, what are we to do with the pot?” I thought aloud.

We thought about hiding the pot the whole night. If they found it out, they would beat us half-dead. I remember until now how they thrashed an old prisoner, all skin and bones, for two candies. Hearing the footsteps of the superintendents, the poor soul had started swallowing the candies with their wraps on. He didn’t manage to push down those two, though.

Remembering the story of the candies, we dug a cache for the honey pot the whole night. It was never found.

Idleness

A prisoner sat down with a serious face and started writing letters to various state bodies; the Security Service, the Police, the Prosecutor’s Office, the Presidential Administration… 

“Argam, what happened?” the cell-mates asked him.

Argam carried on with his work in silence. In several days the representatives of all those bodies arrived at the prison. Argam was called for; the situation was serious. Everyone was afraid, but Argam only laughed in his beard. I felt he had played some trick. In some half an hour he returned to the cell with a bruised eye.

“They just don’t get jokes! I wanted to play a game out of idleness. I summoned them all here on the same day and time. I wrote it was an issue of state security. I am idle, what should I do? Let them assign me some job, and I shall work! As soon as they learnt I had written the letters out of idleness, they grew mad and hit me in the eye.”

The Satan in the Prison

It was deaf silence around; I started reading a book, locked up in a tiny cell of the Death House. Suddenly a commotion started in one of the neighboring cells, and loud voices were heard all around. Everyone approached the locked doors and listened. I heard the voice of one of the old-timers of the Death House. It turned out he had tightly tied his mouth with an adhesive tape, thrust pen caps into his ears and sat, stupefied, in the corner. The cell-mates had somehow managed to open his mouth, and he was shouting across the whole prison. “I have plugged all my holes, the front and back ones, guys, you should plug them, too! There is a Satan in this cemetery! It penetrates through the holes! The Satan doesn’t like the vigil ones! When someone stays vigil during the night, it tries to enter through some hole in the body, to take possession of the soul and make them stop struggling for life!”

Another old-timer was shouting from behind the bars, “The man has lost his wits; he is seeing Satans, why are you beating him? Let him block his holes if he wishes to, why should it disturb you?”

There was silence for a moment, and then the answer was heard, “I woke up in the dead of the night, half-asleep, to go to the bathroom, and I saw a devil before me, with his mouth tied with a masking tape, his disheveled hair and something sticking out of his ears, looking straight into my eyes! At first I thought I wasn’t awake and was dreaming, I kicked that devil and rubbed my eyes, but it was no dream!”

My thoughts were interrupted; another prisoner had approached the closed door of the cell and was shouting loudly, “Eh, Eh, Eh, Eh, ha, ha!” I approached, “What happened?”

The question circulated along the round parlor, thud, bumped against the wall that had witnessed horror and echoed like in a cave, “Happened, happened, happened!” After keeping silent for awhile, the strange resident said, “You are asking what happened! These cursed round walls echo you back, “Happened, happened, happened!”, while the true reason is that nothing happened; my thoughts are bearing thin, I have nothing left to talk to myself, so I am shouting… What do you do, not to lose your wits in this hell?”

“I read, not to lose my wits, while you are driving me crazy with your shouting, got it?” I answered abruptly.

“Would you read to me whatever you are reading, please, if it’s not too much trouble?”

I approached the table, took my book I was about to finish, returned to the closed door and started reading from the very beginning.

The strange resident burst into tears like a child.

“What happened, man?” I asked, but he was sobbing. When he calmed down, he said he was writing a book about a simple truth that had a huge secret behind. He stopped crying for some minutes and started to read, “If a human being is left without air for 3-4 minutes, he will die, about 10 days without water, he will die, about 2 months without food, he will also die. What is food? In simpler words, we are biological and animal organisms…We live, we reproduce and we die. What is life? A human clashes with a human, the society, the state; the state clashes with other states… Silent wars break out that often grow into real ones, gory and fierce. Here is where a human’s mask is torn off, to reveal the hiding beast inside.”

The strange inhabitant interrupted himself and moaned loudly. That dreadful moan was responded with a long echo in the silence of the night. All the dwellers of the hell had approached the perpetually closed doors of their cells.

“What happened, man?” I asked.

“I am not a man; I am a beast. I am writing this about myself.” The strange resident started crying again. Later he continued, “A human understands what a human is and stops being humane. Then he turns to God for him to rediscover the Human inside him.”

The day was already breaking.

Silence. Screaming silence. Sobbing silence.  You can close the book and think a little, and then continue.

Seto’s Legs

No connection with the outer world, not even having a TV or a radio was allowed. There were 7-8 of us locked in the cell. One of the residents was a prisoner of about 30, no different than others in behavior. Yet he was behaving strangely the recent days. Before going to bed at night and after waking up in the morning he had started dressing very quickly and inconspicuously, as if he were hiding something. There were few plank beds; only three slept in the beds, the rest 4 of us, on the cold and hard asphalt. One of the cell-mates decided to keep an eye on him. “Hey, Seto, have you shaved your legs? That’s it, you are to change your cell now… How come, have you become one of those…? I will crack you head open now!” He jumped off his bed to give Seto a good beating. “That’s none of your business; keep your nose out!” Seto was shouting and running around the cell. “Hey, and how did you paint your toenails red? Pen ink? Have you gone insane?”

Seto was deeply insulted, “Fuck this system! I am a 30 year-old man, I haven’t seen a woman for ages! What can I do? I have shaved my legs to stroke myself, to imagine I am sleeping with a woman…”

We all froze and looked, stupefied, alternately, at Seto’s legs and his red nails.”

Newspapers as a Blanket

Without any grounds my cell-mate Sasha and I found ourselves in the punishment cell. They had found wrung and tightly tied bed sheets and a spoon with a sharpened handle with us. The prison attendants immediately raised dust; they invited experts, spread the sheets on the floor, switched on strong lights and took multiple photos. The investigator was running from room to room, interrogating me and Sasha in turns. “Write it, write it, give up on your fairy-tales, your friend already confessed in the neighboring room that you were planning a prison break! You were to go down the sheets from the roof to the prison camp and dig the wall with the sharpened spoon!”

“I don’t know what Sasha told you in the neighboring cell, but fairy-tales are what you are saying! We have no opportunity to exercise, so we had to tie a couple of bed sheets together, stretch them from bed to bed, to walk over them instead of a rope, like rope-walkers, to exercise. In a word, there is nothing of a criminal case here; we are just exercising, the law doesn’t prohibit this, the sheets are those provided by the prison, and tying them together isn’t restricted by any law.”

The investigator stared at me with his bloodshot eyes and shouted, “All the same, I am going to reveal the case of these rope-walkers! Those two keep repeating the same; the other guy next door is saying he wrote an appeal to the president pleading for amnesty and in case of a negative answer was going to execute his death penalty! On top of all, he wrote in his declaratory note that if he were compelled to commit suicide, the president of the country was to be blamed for his death!”

Naturally, they couldn’t charge us with anything but were utterly infuriated that they couldn’t kill that quench for freedom in us in any way.  We were locked up in the half-buried punishment cell in the winter’s hard frost. They removed the high windows for the frosty wind to enter; they ripped our clothes off and left us in mere underwear. In 15-20 minutes we were shivering with cold, frostbitten, unable to move our fingers. We found newspapers and several matches shoved behind the iron shelves that were fastened to the wall; the prisoners that had been here before us had left them. Leaving matches is a usual thing among prisoners. Long let them live! We made a small fire in the corner of the cell and squatted around it, trying to at least warm our hands a little. The attendant looked through the door slot. “It won’t help; you are going to freeze all the same!”

Sasha took several newspapers, lay down on the plank bed that was dryer than a log, and covered himself with the papers. “You will freeze, get up, move!” I yelled.

“I used to have a friend, a professor that had become a tramp; it’s a long story, I will tell you one day. In short, he slept on a bench covered with papers. He gave me a long scientific explanation of how a body keeps warm that way.”

In half an hour Sasha was snoring, covered with the newspapers.

The New Year Cake and the Fisherman

In several hours it was going to be New Year. Nado went to bed; he didn’t like that day, perhaps even more than other days, which were all alike, like the years here. Those who remained awake decided to make a cake. Apart from the tightly-bolted table, two couches and two plank beds, there was an electric coil, some milk powder and sugar procured especially for that day. We divided the brown prison bread into two shares, mixed the milk powder and the sugar with a little water and spread it between the two layers of the bread like cream. Then we spread the coil on the ground and plugged it into the socket. Succeeding one another, we held the prison cake above the red hot coil. Soon our New Year cake was ready. It had burnt a little but it was still delicious. At dawn, Nado, who always welcomed the New Year asleep, refused to have his share of the cake and sat motionless on the edge of the couch, staring at the imaginary lake before him, with an imaginary fishing rod in his hand.

“What are you doing, Nado man?” we asked.

“Don’t disturb me; if need be, I will sit like this the entire year to catch a fish; my mom always cooked fish for New Year.”

For a long while afterwards, Nado sat staring at the same spot on the ground, waiting patiently for the goldfish of his childhood… 

I perceived the imperceptible…

14 years have passed since I was brought to the House of Death. I was searching; I was looking for a way out, for the purpose of my stay here. I was trying to perceive the imperceptible; that “why” behind the punishment I took, being innocent-guilty.

The impossible became possible within a second. I found her again; her who I had lost ages before; I recognized her eyes the size of large grapes. It turned out the way to find her again lay through this hell. God had prompted the Woman-Girl my place, whispered into her ear that I was in the Death House. When I looked into the dear eyes, I understood that the fridge of the feelings was a mere illusion; I understood that Love, Longing, Conscience and Faith hadn’t left me, nor had been frozen; they were waiting in the House of my Soul. Yet here, one is allowed to see their Beloved with bodily eyes, embrace them with bodily arms and kiss them with bodily lips only three times a year. The rest of the days I do it with my spiritual lips, my imaginary arms and eyes. I imagined I was with her, my Woman-Girl. Now we talk to each other via letters, drawing each other closer with inconceivable mental power, like a magnet. Her letters are always before my eyes and at my fingertips; I have arranged them at my bedside, to open my eyes and instead of seeing the gloomy walls of the cell, to see her, my second half, who I was separated from by this soulless system. It’s the lack of love that builds prisons in people’s souls.

The Longing Logics Theory

It is morning; I kiss her photos as always, and then I read for the hundredth time the letters that substitute oxygen to me.

“The last fish of the aquarium lived only for another day after the Half’s death… In the morning I found it floating motionless on its side. It didn’t withstand longing. While a human is hard as a rock; I must be made of stone as I have lived without You and with You for 1000 years already. And You are always writing that one should miss by logic, that there is logic for longing. Love and Longing have no logic. You have invented that Longing Logics Theory of yours not to go insane with the same Longing yourself!”

I understood her perfectly… She must have been crying as she wrote these lines. I will come back, for sure. I continue to swallow the food of my soul.

“My favorite spot on the planet is your arms. You will come, I will gift seven children to You, and we will call them all with the same name, and when we call them home from the yard with that one single name, they will all come running at once, and we will sit down all together at a big table for dinner …”

Why, why, why separate the loving hearts? We laugh and cry together, we breathe through the letters…

Landing

My prison-spaceship has already landed on planet Earth. But the doors won’t open for now, while I am being waited for… Behind the cruel, thick walls, a heart is beating in the Wonder-Woman’s tender and fragile bosom, and I am in that heart.  

Before I found her, it felt as if I were in a spacesuit; I breathed artificial air as I wasn’t perceived as a human alive in this savage, airless space.  

Now I breathe through Her, with Her help; I see the world through Her eyes.

I promise I will come, and we will live five days in one and appreciate every moment. And when we grow old, I will present You a nightgown with white kitties, will put a night-suit with pink elephants myself, and we will fall asleep and wake up TOGETHER.

Translator Anna Talalyan

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