by Lee Forsythe
Lee Forsythe is a writer and husband of American diplomat Rosemarie Forsythe, currently assigned to the U.S. Mission to the European Union in Brussels. She was the political and economics officer at the U.S. Embassy, Yerevan from 1992-93 and subsequently, the Director of Russian, Ukrainian and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council.
Exchanging post hardship stories with my wife's diplomatic colleagues sometimes reminds me of a sketch in which two crusty Scotsmen were arguing over which of them had experienced the harsher upbringing.
"Why, we licked the pavement for breakfast," the first proclaimed in a thick burr. "Luxury!" sniffed the second.
Risking similar one-upmanship, I, nevertheless, present this account, with apologies to Mark Twain, of the coldest winter I ever spent on an Arctic expedition - the winter I spent living in an apartment in Yerevan, Armenia. Of course, many other experiences in Armenia etched themselves in my memory just as clearly as that frigid season.
On the night of March 11, 1992 I arrived in Yerevan with my wife Rosemarie, the first foreign service officer permanently assigned to our new U.S. embassy there. Later that evening we were escorted into our temporary living quarters, an icy room in the Hotel Armenia. When the electricity promptly went out, we summoned help. The floor matron glided in with a candle-lit tray of tea as two electrical engineers criss-crossed the room examining the outlets by the glow of their cigarette lighters. Suddenly, as if to demonstrate that the room was not totally devoid of amenities, a torrent of water gushed out of the middle of the ceiling, sending Rosemarie, curled up in her clothes and covers in the bed, into a fit of laughter so hysterical it raised the final few reclining hairs on the back of my neck.
The buoyant spirit of the Armenian people was on display Friday nights at the Yerevan Opera House . Every week the Armenian Philharmonic Orchestra delivered a moving performance in an often freezing hall. The audience regularly remained in their coats during the concerts while the musicians, clad in elegant tuxedos and gowns and seemingly oblivious to the extreme temperatures, played with a precision and fervor belying the circumstances.
Sitting in the presidential box at our initial concert, we were introduced by the maestro to a wildly applauding crowd. Amid a sea of smiling, upturned faces, I saw a craggy, gray-haired gentleman in a shearling coat angrily shaking his fist in my direction. Willing, seconds before, to take credit for any and all positive feelings toward the United States, I sat back down, startled and offended that the man's apparent rage should be directed toward me, an innocent bystander.
I wondered how safe I was in such an auditorium. Wasn't there a Hitchcock movie something like this? I imagined a curtain being pushed aside by a hand with a luger in it. With my eyes on the cymbalist I listened nervously as the music built to a crescendo, but the piece finished uneventfully and intermission arrived.
We moved through the crowd, shaking hands and talking with the people. In the reception room we continued to soak up kind words of welcome. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed the man in the shearling coat working his way toward us. He stopped with his face inches from mine.
"What are you going to do about Karabakh?" he thundered, somehow having mistaken me for the diplomat in the family.
"I'm going to stay away from it," I said, "I understand they're fighting a war there." He stepped back with his mouth ajar. I referred the question to my wife, luckily by my side, who answered him a bit more substantively and with considerably more tact. He eyed me suspiciously as he listened, shaking his head, then faded back into the crowd.
We visited Gyumri, still virtually in ruins from the devastating 1988 earthquake, to commemorate the beginning of the rebuilding of the city's concert hall. Despite a blustery day the entire population of the city seemed to have turned out for the dedication.
The instruments of the musicians who had perished inside the former hall were welded together in a monument next to the building. Attempting to lay a wreath at its base, my wife sank up to her ankles in the cold mud, prompting a nice woman in the crowd to reach into her purse and make an impromptu gift of a new pair of hand-knit socks. The entire scenario was captured by a TV news crew, turning Rosemarie into a minor celebrity at our Yerevan hotel the next day.
The Armenians seldom lost their sense of humor. During our hotel stay our maid recognized the voice of one of her co-workers yelling up from one of the frequently stalled elevators several floors below. "Lisa?" she shouted back down to her in what I was certain was the initial stage of a heroic rescue. "Yes," came the hopeful reply. Our maid cupped her hands around her mouth and, bending forward in the direction of the stalled car, laughed at the top of her lungs.
Armenia is a starkly picturesque country filled with ancient churches and ruins, some set against colorful broad vistas in the Caucasus range. On clear days in Yerevan snowcapped Mount Ararat would loom up on the horizon like a beautiful hologram. By night an overcrowded streetcar clicked and rumbled up a nearby hill, sparks showering down from its overhead power line like the Frankenstein monster of mass transportation.
Unfortunately the springtime night air was also frequently filled with the sound of automatic weapons as criminal groups carried out bloody vendettas against one another in the lobby of a neighboring hotel and opposition groups sprayed gunfire along the back perimeter of a government compound on the Hrazdan River. At an informal gathering I asked an Armenian official about the source of all the shooting. He looked me in the eye and in the sincerest of tones said, "I think those are picnickers."
By summer we had moved into a spacious apartment at the foot of Bagramian Avenue. Warm, sunny weather had arrived, noticeably lifting spirits. One weekend we were returning from a sight-seeing trip to the remote fortress and church of Amberd. Winding down a steep mountain road that was a series of switch-backs with sheer drop-offs on both sides, our driver's labored breathing alerted me to the fact that he was pumping the brakes to the floor and trying to pull back on the already fully-extended emergency brake, both actions without effect. He leaned on the horn as we careened around two slow moving trucks, onto what little shoulder there was on the opposite side of the downgrade, then back onto the road, picking up speed.
He kept hurriedly crossing himself, either in thanks for the previous curve or in preparation for the next. Five tire-screeching switchbacks later we were flying down a relatively flat stretch of straight pavement at the base of the mountain. "I think it will be okay from here on," he asserted once the Volga had finally come to a stop. We piled out and, with less difficulty than I would have imagined, hitch-hiked back to Yerevan.
The next month our embassy consular officer and I went on another journey, billed in advance as a fishing trip. As we loaded our stuff into the back of the white Neva that had come to pick us up early on Saturday morning, I noticed we were the only ones who had brought fishing equipment and the only ones not carrying sidearms. Although it was a warm July day, the driver, who had several shaving cuts oozing an impressive amount of blood down his face, wore racing gloves. He was introduced to us as a surgeon. I hoped I wasn't going to require surgery before the day was over.
Sixteen hours later we were dropped off where we had been picked up, having enjoyed the fishing excursion turned road trip. We had been near the water only once, for about fifteen seconds, only to hear an extreme version of that old hard luck story "you should have been here last week, they were really biting." In this case one of our hosts turned to us at streamside as the third of four outdoor banquets was being set up in the distance and said, "Twenty years ago this water had fish in it."
The day was one incredible feast after another - a dizzying assortment of food and drink interrupted only by travel to the next site and the occasional stop alongside the road for target practice. The Macharov handgun, I can say now from experience, has a remarkably smooth action.
The most memorable part of the trip was our time on the road. Our driver's gloves were no affectation. He negotiated the rutted, serpentine mountain passes like a veteran of the Pike's Peak Hill Climb and the Baja 2000. An avid conversationalist and ever the gentleman, he insisted on maintaining eye contact with us, his main interlocutors, even though we were riding in the backseat. During one particularly breath-taking moment he looked back at us as we sped along a dirt ridge with mountains rising immediately to the left and a riverbed a mile below us to the right. After pausing for dramatic effect, he said, "Up here you'll see a monument to the school bus that went off the cliff," turning back toward the road just in time to put the vehicle into an expertly controlled four-wheel drift around a fallen boulder the size of a two-car garage.
I experienced similar thrills flying in and out of Yerevan on trips to our embassy in Moscow. Before the imposition of free market prices, the flights tended to be overbooked to the extent that the boarding process usually resembled the final flight out of a war zone. When the heated discussions over who owned what seat had died down, the aisles were crammed with musical-chair losers, sitting on their luggage or stoically standing for the duration of the flight.
Many seemed obsessed with being the first ones off the plane although the flights were usually running days behind schedule. On a flight from Moscow a stewardess announced over the intercom that we would be landing in twenty minutes. Seventy-five percent of the passengers promptly stood up, put on their coats, pulled their luggage down from the overhead, and lined up in the aisles with the plane still at 20,000 feet. That wasn't enough advanced preparation for some, however, who pushed to the front, opened the stairwell hatch to the luggage compartment and exit door in the belly of the plane, and filed down-apparently intent on riding the landing gear down onto the runway.
The deep-seated economic and social problems in Armenia had many causes, including the blockade due to the war with neighboring Azerbaijan, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and its trading systems, the lingering effects of the 1988 earthquake, and Armenia's centuries-old predicament - an island of Christianity surrounded by Muslims and strife-torn neighbors. In late 1992, already reeling under those conditions, the country was unknowingly on the brink of their coldest winter in more than forty years, when their only remaining energy source, the gas pipeline through Georgia was blown up, plunging them into a pitch-black deep-freeze straight out of the middle ages.
In a city of more than a million people the nights were now so completely dark and eerily silent that pedestrians suddenly emerged from the gloom and immediately disappeared back into it like shambling zombies in a bad horror movie. And the cold was one I'd never experienced growing up in Wisconsin and Chicago: it was continuous and without relief.
There was no going inside to warm up; it often felt colder in our meatlocker of an apartment than on the frozen streets.
Early in the winter we could still sleep in one of the bedrooms by wearing several layers of clothes including hats, gloves, and boots and piling on so many blankets that I occasionally woke up thinking that a mini-van had parked on my chest. Once it became too cold to do that, we slept on the kitchen floor in front of an open fireplace. Sometimes the unseasoned wood popped and exploded, sending glowing embers everywhere. I would brush them from my sleeping wife's hair and the blankets and wait for the fire to die down before drifting off.
I did discover a use for those otherwise annoying blow-in cards that fall like rain from many of today's magazines. Sitting close to the fire, I would flip one in, lean forward, and read half a page as it flared up.
For most of the winter we received an average of one or two hours of electricity per day, prompting what we called "The Yerevan Firedrill." We left the lights in the kitchen in the on position so that if the current came on in the middle of the night we could wake up and spring into action - cooking something to eat, collecting enough warm water for sponge baths from the hot plates set up throughout the apartment, and fine-tuning the electrical flow until the circuit breaker would stay on.
Because the water supply was sporadic, the bathtub functioned as an all purpose reservoir, filled up whenever water was available then drawn upon as needed for drinking, cooking, washing, and flushing. Before running water into the tub of his shadowy apartment one night, one of the embassy's political officers removed what he assumed was a loofa sponge left by the previous tenant, only to hold it up to a candle and find a frozen rat.
It was difficult to convey the quality of such a life. I'll always remember my brother asking," If you don't have electricity, doesn't your food spoil?"
"Not unless we put it in the refrigerator and shut the door," I told him.
One day in the middle of January I squeezed into a crowded cafe illuminated by a single shaft of sunlight from a small window at the end of the room. Each diner was in full outdoor attire and huddled over a bowl of soup so hot in comparison to the room temperature that clouds of steam rose everywhere in the muted light. Every seat was taken, but no one said a word - the room was a symphony of slurping and sniffling. As soon as my soup arrived, I eagerly joined the chorus.
Of course whatever discomfort we Americans endured was minor compared to that of most of the population. Having enjoyed a comparatively high standard of living among the Soviet republics, the newly-independent Armenians found themselves in a precipitous downward-spiral punctuated with nightmare visions: a totally blacked-out capital of overnight breadlines, roving packs of starving dogs attacking people, and a proliferation of stumps along avenues once lined by full-grown trees.
I look back on those strange days with mixed feelings. My wife and her co-workers got our new embassy up and running in a troubled land under extremely difficult conditions. I wrote subsequently published fiction, non-fiction, and a government guidebook for U.S. personnel bound for Armenia - probably believed by some to be a blend of the two. The Armenian people, despite their plight, always went out of their way to offer hospitality, genuine friendship, and a helping hand. Although working and living conditions have improved for American embassy employees since those early days and Armenia has made significant democratic and economic progress, life for the Armenians continues to be an upward struggle.
Image
Armenia: A New Era
