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Hasmik Hovhannisyan

A Story of a Woman

N street in Aresh district of Yerevan seems to reappear from the stories of Nar-Dos, a genius Armenian storyteller of human destinies. On the narrow, ruined streets of the district a drunkard in an unbuttoned shirt, with wild eyes and half empty bottle is a common sight. 

A conversation generously peppered with foul language is natural. An order given to a child must be backed-up with a kick or a slap. Someone came up with the insightful expression, “ a woman needs a visa to leave the kitchen”. It’s a saying that’s become popular in Armenia and fits this district and this street mainly populated by refugees from Baku and Kirovabad to a tee.

In one of the houses on  N Street lives a woman called Nairuhi. This slim woman with mild features differs from her female neighbors. She is the kind of person who lives closed-off in her inner world; never taking decisions herself even if they are about her own life. 

She was born 43 years ago in the village of Chiva in Yeghegnadzor. Graduating with a red diploma in Yerevan she gained specialization as a hotel administrator. Then she moved to the town of Jermuk to work. Nairuhi was absolutely indifferent to the rosy dream of her peers - to find a “good husband” and build a family. In fact, she wanted to have children some day so as not to be left alone when she grew old, and not to leave this world without successors. Getting married however would be considered only as a necessary step in the fulfillment of that desire. 

When the Karabakh war started Nairuhi had another dream, to take part in the war. In 1989 she left for Stepanakert without informing anyone and got admitted into the Pedagogical University. But war was much more horrible in reality than in her dreams. There was no place in the hotel and she had to share the narrow bed with an old woman who lost her family in the Spitak earthquake of a year prior. It was hot and dirty in the hotel. Outside there was a hell of a noise.  Besides all this her relatives and five brothers and sisters kept calling her on the phone, telling her “Crazy, what are you doing there alone? Come home!”

Nairuhi returned home and became employed in the Yeghegnadzor hotel. Once she went to visit her parents who would spend most of the year in the mountains with their livestock. Her brothers and sisters were spread all over Armenia and even in Russia. They could not visit their parents often. 

Her father objected, “We raised six children and now no one comes to knock on our door and ask how we are doing here”. 

These words pierced Nairuhi’s heart. How lonely they are! She cannot leave them alone! Giving up her job in the hotel and later turning down a job offer in her mother’s village school, Nairuhi stayed with her parents in the mountains. She would spend her days helping them look after the house, writing poems and riding horses in the endless fields. 

Several years passed. Her father died and Nairuhi along with her mother moved down to the village where they started to live in the same house with her brother’s family. Nairuhi started teaching English language in the school. She knew English quiet well since it was a required subject in her faculty.  She already was 30 years old and her mother kept pointing to her former classmates, who would marry, one after another, unlike her daughter. 

One day Nairuhi was in the school when her family sent a boy to tell her that people from Yerevan had come to see her on the matter of marriage. Nairuhi’s old friend led the “delegation”. The guy from Yerevan was handsome, well dressed and serious. But Nairuhi did not like him at the first sight. “He is just a fop from the city”, she whispered to her mother. But her relatives, especially her mother, liked the potential groom Sargis at once.   

“Let it be”, decided Nairuhi who still was absolutely cold towards marriage. They married within a week. Their marriage was only civil.  On the wedding day it came out that Sargis was married before but that his wife left him “sweeping the entire house and taking with her”. So he was very cautious about legal marriage. 

Sargis was busy mainly in construction work but had “hands of gold” in any craft. In the first days of their marriage the reason why his previous wife left him became clear - Sargis was an alcoholic. At the age of ten he was expelled from school for hooliganism and started working with his father, a total alcoholic, in the factory. He would work on an equal level with the men and drink on par with them as well. 

Nairuhi spent the first months of her marriage in deep shock. Sargis would be sober very rarely. On those rare occasions he was a pitiable, weak creature. But when he was drunk he would become a wild animal, cursing and beating his wife. Nairuhi would respond only by crying and keeping silent. Her weight dropped from 54 to 39 kilos. 

To sacrifice personal life and happiness for the children is an old Armenian habit. Many women even believe that for the sake of the child it is better to have an alcoholic father than no father at all. But Nairuhi and Sargis did not have kids as yet. A sense of shame was the reason why Nairuhi did not run as far away from her husband as far as possible. She was horrified at the   thought that everybody in the village would point to her and whisper “divorced” behind her back. In Yegegnadzor that label is equal to being called a “prostitute”.  A divorced woman is condemned to live the rest of her life in loneliness, or at best, as someone’s lover. Nairuhi had no place to go except to her mother’s village. 

“Why? she asked the friend who introduced her to Sargis,  You knew who he was!”
“Yes, I knew him. And I knew you and believed you would be the only one who could save him”.

Alas, Nairuhi failed to be a savior. Moreover she herself started to drown in the bog of hopelessness. After three years of marriage they had a boy and a daughter a year later. After three years had passed Nairuhi’s patience finally gave out. She took the kids and went to Russia, to her brother. She lived 2 years there. She would earn a living writing for an Armenian newspaper “Nor Dar” but the honorarium was never enough for supporting two kids. 

One day, while passing a shop specializing in gravestones, she saw the announcement “Carver needed”. She entered and asked for a try-out. They gave her a piece of marble and she offered to carve a flower. From the next day she started working with them. The staff was good, the money as well. But a year later the owner of the shop killed a man in a fight and fled the city. The shop was closed and Nairuhi again was left without money. While her brother loved her kids as his own, his wife did not like the idea of supporting “that drunkard’s kids” and she never even tried to hide it. 

Nairuhi and her kids returned to Yeghegnadzor in Armenia. Nairuhi did not care anymore about the gossip regarding her. To her great surprise there was no gossip. She was even taken back as an English language teacher in her school. During the three years Nairuhi lived with the kids in the village her husband never tried to see them. Then Nairuhi got fired out from her job. Someone needed her position, someone whom the principle could not refuse. She was again left dependent on another brother’s support. Nairuhi had no choice than to return to her husband.  

Now Nairuhi works in the kindergarten as a nurse with 20 000 drams monthly salary. From time to time she has students to whom she teaches English. Each of them pays her around 8000 drams a month. This fee is not a big deal in the family budget. Those children take the additional lessons mainly to get good marks in school. In the summer they have holidays. Since school starts in September they don’t need to prepare for good marks as yet, the same going for the start of school in January-February. In December good marks are already secured, so again there’s no need to take private classes. In addition to this kindergarten is going to be closed in January-February because they will have no heating.

Nairuhi’s children are aged 11 and 10 but look as if they’re much younger. Both the girl and the boy are excellent students in the school and good painters. Their father does not bring a penny into the house but takes out anything that he can to sell and buy vodka instead. First it was the TV, then what poor furniture they had, table and chairs and even the cornice to hang the curtains on. 

It has been several years that the kids prepare their homework on the floor because they have no chairs. For that reason both of them suffer from spinal curvature. The doctor in the local polyclinic prescribed massage, swimming and dance but Nairuhi has no money for that. The kids are malnourished and live in constant fear. Only once in their life did their dad gave each of them 1000 drams and kindly allowed them to buy whatever they wanted. They wanted to buy paints. They always save for painting details those 50 drams their mom gives them to buy a roll for lunch. Once they even saved money to buy bleach for their mom and were very proud of it. Nairuhi decided to buy chocolate bricks with the money Sargis gave to the kids. The children would not have breakfast in the morning at least they could eat chocolate at school for a whole week. In 2 days Sargis required a report on how the money spent. Learning what it was spent on he started crying out that they wasted his money. 

Once, Nairuhi’s ten-year old daughter Marine said, “Mom, I do not have this desire very often, but sometimes I want our dad to die”. 

Sargis’ parents and brother’s family live on the same street. But they do not communicate with Sargis’ family. They are fed up with him. Before neighbors would intervene whenever Sargis would completely loose consciousness and wind up breaking his wife’s bones or beating the kids. Then they also got sick and tired of it.  

Nairuhi dreams of running away from her husband but with her salary she will not be able even to rent a flat. She is ready to take any job that will allow her to rent a modest flat and provide the minimum for the kids. She dreams of having a house in the village, taking the kids there from the life they have now. “But how?” she asks herself and everybody who is ready to listen to her. She has gotten tired of thinking, of thinking and coming up with no way out. And she keeps writing poems and stories about the people surrounding her and confesses that if not for this passion she would have gone crazy a long time ago.

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