It was a thick book with a worn and tattered black cover.

“Someday I have to get it re-covered” my mother would repeat, but she couldn’t bear to part with the book for even one day.

It was an encyclopedia compiled at the end of the 19th century and it had been published in several editions. It was the first encyclopedia I ever saw and leafed through.

I was ten nine or ten years old when I found an article in it entitled “Armenians”. Here is its content word for word:

Armenians inhabit Russia, Persia, Turkey, India, and to a lesser degree, Hungary, Dalmatia, and Africa. They number approximately 2.5 million. They are clearly divided into Armenian traders, who play a mostly sad role in economic life, and Armenian artisans, who are goodhearted and helpful craftsmen. Armenians are Christians adhering to a specific Armenian Grigorian confession.

Next to the article was pictured a scowling mustachioed head, who resembled neither a trader nor an artisan, but was no doubt Armenian, as witnessed by his nose.

But who I was began to interest me more than who the stranger was. I knew that I was the great-grandson of two bakers. But a baker was just between a trader and an artisan, so am I a helpful being or a harmful one?

My environment didn’t leave any doubt about this, taking every opportunity to make me understand that I was a stranger who ate their bread for free. And not only me, but all foreigners living in Russia.

“You found one old book and claim that all Russia thinks that way,” My Serious Friend objects, who even though he hasn’t set foot in my birthplace, instinctively understands more than somebody else can accumulate through life experience.

Who knows, maybe he’s right. We live in the 21st century now, a century of surveys and especially of “political correctness”. And we have the Internet at hand, unknown to our grandparents.

So if its accessible to you, then open one of the Russian search engines without delay, for example, www.yandex.ru, which offers the convenience of a Russian keyboard on the screen with the push of a button.

In the yellow window that opens, type the word “Armyashka” letter by letter, if, of course, you are familiar with the Cyrillic alphabet.

Then hit search. Excuse me; I didn’t explain what Armyashka means. I have heard it addressed to me hundreds of times, so sometimes it seems to me that everybody knows it. Armyashka is the dismissive and scolding form of the word Armenian, that is, our tribal name, which depending on the circumstances can be translated as dirty Armenian, wild Armenian, stupid Armenian, or tricky Armenian.

By the time you’ve read my explanation, the search results will have appeared. Now look at the blue number in the left-hand corner- 64,554. Which means that in our sensitive century this word has been used sixty thousand times not orally, but in writing; in writing not in spray paint in the piss-stinking corner of a wall, but typed on a computer, to be placed on the Internet.

And now let’s try to find disrespectful expressions addressed to us in any other language: Slovakian, German, Dutch, or French, without forgetting Turkish. We will immediately be convinced that the harvest is extremely poor. The champion of insults will remain the very country on whose lips we hang our fate.

My Serious Friend rubs his furrowed brow, and recites with bitter self-sacrifice, “Let the Russian ignore us, but if something happens, he will defend our borders against the enemy with his life.”

It is here that I can’t disguise my disappointment and I say, “Then we haven’t been honest until now… So it was political interest that made the Armenian nightingale sing for the love of the Russian rose? I am afraid, my friend, that the rose will not reciprocate our devotion, for at this point we are not the goodhearted artisan but the treacherous trader referred to in my grandmother’s book, with our own interests and expectations…”

Yenovk Lazeyan
Paris