The Karabakh war entered every single settlement in Armenia, and almost every family, in one way or another, hitting some Armenian hearths more than once. The war came to the Khachikyan family of the village of Voskevan in the Tavush Marz three times.

Today - sixteen years after the unbearable events - seventy-nine-year-old Sonik Khachikyan doesn't remember the name of the Azerbaijani hostage she kept in the cellar of her house. "It was a man with a broken heart; he was afraid. Every morning I would give him breakfast. He told me that he had ten children; the oldest son was serving in the Army. He would only put a little bit of sugar in his tea - he felt shy, or afraid," the woman recounts, weeping.

Sonik Khachikyan's son, forty-two-year-old Khachik, was taken hostage on June 25, 1990, when the Soviet Union still existed, in the village Baghanis-Ayrum within the Azerbaijani administrative region of Ghazakh, wedged into Noyemberyan region of Armenia. His mother told us that in sixteen years she has had no news of her son. For the first several years after Khachik was taken hostage, his brother and uncle rarely slept, doing everything they could think of to learn of his whereabouts.

"What do you think-is it possible to find a man taken hostage sixteen years ago alive?" asked the woman who lost her son. "Our boys caught that Azerbaijani man and handed him over to us, so that we could exchange him for Khachik. But after we kept him for a couple of months my youngest son took him to the border and set him free. We just asked him to try to make inquiries in Azerbaijan about Khachik and let us know somehow. But we've never had any news from him," Sonik Khachikyan said.

The Azerbaijani village of Baghanis-Ayrum was wedged between the Armenian villages of Voskepar, Voskevan, and Baghanis. The Yerevan-Ijevan-Noyemberyan-Tbilisi road passed through this and another Azerbaijani settlement, Lower Aksipara. In the early 1990s, Armenian forces took these two Azerbaijani villages under their control. During the war and following the 1994 cease-fire, dozens of people were killed in this region by sniper bullets. This may be the only segment of the 500-kilometer-long Armenian-Azerbaijani border where the positions of Azerbaijani forces are superior to Armenian positions from a strategic point of view. These territories were mined and the Armenian villages of Barekamavan, Koti, Voskevan, Baghanis, and Voskepar were intensively bombarded from the neighboring heights during the war.

When Khachik Khachikyan's middle son, Vachik, was still in school, he found an unexploded mortar shell on their land and began poking it with a knife. The schoolboy lost his arm and an eye in the explosion. Kachik's youngest son, Sassun, served in the Army and returned home safe and sound. Two years ago Sassun ran across one of the scattered mines while pasturing his only cow in the border zone. The young man lost a leg in the explosion. Bleeding profusely, he managed to drag himself to the road and stop a passing car. Shirak Sahakyan, the driver who took the injured Sassun to the Noyemberyan hospital, was astonished at the young man's strength of mind: "After being blown up by a mine, he kept his head. He tore his rucksack to pieces and tied up his leg. On the way to the hospital Sassun was saying, 'Don't be afraid, it's nothing serious.' He was telling us not to be afraid."

Mine explosions, bombardments, hostage-taking - the war in general - hit the residents of the border areas worse than anyone else. The Khachikyans are just one family. The war, the tragedy, knows neither borders nor nationality.

Lala Sahakyan, or Adigyozalova Hamavakh Safar-kizi (her maiden name), lives in the neighboring Armenian village of Baghanis. She recalls the death of her husband, Derenik Sahakyan, on the land they were farming. "We kept his body in the cellar because the Azerbaijanis were bombing the village continually. Then some neighbors took Derenik to bury him," Lala said.

"My father was killed on June 8, 1992, near the beehives. We had a lot of bees. He had just returned from the sentry duty. When the ambulance came, he was already cold," added the Sahakyans' son, thirty-four-year-old Andranik, former freedom fighter, now a shoemaker.

When he was twenty, Andranik went to the army - to Meghri. Then he volunteered to go to Karabakh, having the experience of war in his native village behind him. People who have gone through war, who have been next to death, have amazing hearts and souls. They talk about the most dreadful things with a kind of a laughter mixed with irony, which doesn't resemble ordinary laughter much.

"There were fierce fights at the time. I was wounded in Horadiz and lost my leg. There were two guys from Goris with me - both were torn into pieces by a shell," Andranik recalled.

Today Andranik, who learned his craft after the war, is the best shoemaker in Baghanis. He is married and has two sons, nine-year-old Derenik and seven-year-old Yegor. It is people like Andranik who have defended and will defend our country, not the generals inflated under their epaulettes.

The Sahakyan family, like other families in Baghanis, have a hard life. As of several years ago, Andranik was receiving a pension. Recently he was awarded a medal for bravery. But this unassuming family doesn't want money; the only thing they want is peace. And they are not the only ones.

The fields of Baghanis are near the border. In Armenian-Azerbaijani border skirmishes, dozens of people were been killed, wounded, or taken hostages. The war brought misfortune to many families. Even now the villagers cultivate lands with fear. Every one has his or her own ideas about the border. For Andranik's mother, Lala, who speaks Armenian with an accent, though she has almost forgotten her native Azerbaijani and hasn't spoken the language since 1990 when her father's house was still intact in the Azerbaijani village of Baghanis-Ayrum, the border is not only the destroyed house. This unfortunate and good-natured Azerbaijani woman left a part of her life and her relatives on the other side of the border. Twice in her life she damned her countrymen - when her husband was shot dead next to his beehives, and when her beloved son, Andranik, lost his leg in an explosion.

Lala relates how she married Derenik in the summer of 1966 when she was just nineteen and didn't know a single word of Armenian. Derenik had divorced his Armenian wife in Yerevan, left with her their three children and brought his fourth child, Garnik, back with him to his native village.

"Our family, twelve brothers and two sisters, lived in the village of Baghanis-Ayrum in Ghazakh. My father had left us but he would visit us from time to time. Derenik spoke Turkish very well; his father's and my father's families were dosts (friends)," Lala recalled.
The Azerbaijani village of Baghanis-Ayrum and the Armenian village of Baghanis are just a few hundred meters apart. The former is in the Ghazakh region; the latter is in the Noyemberyan region. In the "good old" Soviet days, there was a tradition of having dosts -Armenian and Azerbaijani families made friends with each other.

"One day Derenik took me in his Zaporozhets to the Ghazakh bazaar, allegedly to do some shopping. And there he asked me, "Would you marry an Armenian?" And I replied, "Why not?" And then he said, "Would you marry me?" And he brought me to his home from the Ghazakh bazaar. Derenik was forty-five then, and Garnik was a fifth-grader. We raised him together, sent him to the Army. After military service, he went to his mother in Yerevan," Lala said.

The residents of Baghanis want peace, because they want to live without worrying, want to cultivate land and not get killed as they do. Azerbaijani Lala, too, wants peace. She had three children after marrying Derenik. Peace can connect her with her past and her relatives whom she left on the other side of the border.

"I married my daughter, Armine, off to a Turk before the war. The last time we saw each other was in 1988. Since then I've had no news either from my daughter or from my family. My brothers might have been killed during the war, I don't know. I miss them. I want very much to see my family in my dreams, but they don't visit my dreams," Lala wept.

Years ago, the local TV station in Noyemberyan did a piece on this Azerbaijani woman. Sonik Khachikyan saw the program, and knows the woman very well. "She is an unlucky woman," she said.

Baghanis-Voskevan-Yerevan