Siro by David Ignatius (short books to read txt) 📕

She gave him Aram’s address. Her plan was to stop there first, to see if he had returned home. If he hadn’t, she would go to the little village of Kiarki herself and try to head him off. She hoped the trip south wouldn’t be necessary, that she would find Aram at home—bleary-eyed after a late night of drinking and scheming with his friends—and spend the rest of the day with him. In bed, perhaps.

Please be home, Aram, she thought as the Zhiguli turned the corner onto his street. Please be home. She got out of Samvel’s car and walked up the three flights of stairs to the apartment. She pounded hard this time, not caring who heard her. But there was no answer. She crouched on all fours and peered under the door and saw that her note, written on the folded check, was still there. He’s slept somewhere else the night before the pickup, for security, she thought. Anna took a deep breath, steeling herself for what she had to do next. She returned to the car and got in next to Samvel.

“My friend isn’t here,” she said. “Maybe he has gone ahead of me. Let’s drive south. There’s a pretty little village I would like to see, called Kiarki, and then I want to go to Khor Virap.”

“Fine and dandy,” said the driver. Somewhere, he had learned a few such phrases of American slang.

It was now seven-fifteen. They headed south out of town, descending the hills of Yerevan toward the flat plain beneath Ararat. The sun was bright, warming the morning air. The driver sped along, past low-slung suburban houses and collective farms with numberless rows of grapevines. It was a tidy little world—the vines carefully maintained, the houses clean and decorated with ornamented metal rainspouts, each crowned with animal figures and other designs.

Samvel, the driver, kept up a steady stream of patter in a combination of languages. He seemed to be a kind of Armenian Sancho Panza, a genial rogue of the road. When they passed a militia station, he turned to Anna and said with a wink: “Permission for this we no got. If anyone stopping us, you my Armenian cousin from America. ‘Very sorry,’ you say, ‘I come all the way from Fresno to see Khor Virap.’ You give me dollars. I give to him. Everything hunky-dory.”

“Hunky-dory,” agreed Anna. She handed him a ten-dollar bill. He tilted his head in a gesture that said “more” in any language, and she gave him another ten. This commerce done, she began to relax slightly, whizzing along the open road on a sunny day with her fixer at the wheel.

They were heading down a four-lane highway, straight toward the great tufted cone of Ararat. Samvel gazed toward the brooding peak and began to wax poetic. He was, like many Armenian men, prone to make speeches at the slightest provocation. He gestured toward Ararat and put his hand on his heart. “This mountain is like a magnet to me,” he said grandly. “In the shadow of this big mountain I feel immortal!” The big magnet of Ararat was actually across the border in Turkey, but never mind. The poetry of the Armenian soul overflowed from Samvel. He exhibited the national love of the grand gesture, the fatal romanticism. Anna wished that Aram could hear him.

The Soviet-Turkish border was visible a few miles farther on, as they neared the Aras River. “Don’t look too close,” said Samvel. “Border area closed.”

But Anna couldn’t resist. Every four hundred yards or so, she saw a tall tower, like the guard towers at prisons. As they got closer, she could see the frontier itself, half a mile away across the plain. What struck her was the fact that all the barbed wire faced inward; she had known it, intellectually, but it was still appalling to see that the fences had been constructed to keep Soviet people in, rather than to keep strangers out. And there were so many layers of them. First came a chain-link fence, with solid-concrete posts every few yards and what appeared to be insulation and conductors for electrified strands of wire. Next came a barrier of coiled razor wire, then another chain-link fence, then a patch of ground that had been raked smooth, so that it would show the slightest footprint, and then a paved road for the vehicles of the border guard. Across this road there was another barrier of razor wire, and then a last fence, crowned with that admission of national defeat—the inward-facing tier of barbed wire.

The border looked utterly impassable, even to the wiliest smugglers. But Ascari’s men weren’t coming this way, across the plain from Turkey, Anna reminded herself. They were coming over the trackless mountains from Iran, where even border guards lost their way.

“And now we are coming to famous Khor Virap,” said Samvel. “Maybe you would like to stop here first?”

“No, let’s stop here on the way back,” said Anna. “First I want to see Kiarki, the village near the border.”

“But that is Azerbaijani village. People there are Turks. Why go there? It will be ugly.”

“My friends say it is very pretty. I’d like to go.”

Samvel grumbled but agreed to go. It was now past eight-thirty. Anna looked now at every car they passed, hoping she might see Aram’s face. She was determined to get to the village before he did, but with each additional minute she became more worried that her plan wouldn’t work. Samvel looked over at her, nervously drumming her fingers against the dashboard of the Zhiguli. Armenians don’t like to see people anxious. It is an affront to the national character, which feels comfortable with laughter or tears—and abhors what lies in between.

“I will sing you a song,” said Samvel.

“An Armenian song?”

“Of course. What you think I would sing, Turkish?” Anna laughed, and he began to sing in Armenian, in a rich bass voice that had an almost operatic resonance and filled the little Russian car with sound.