Special
War
10 stories, October 2020 — February 2023
The autumn of 2020, and what came after. Children from Artsakh in a kindergarten in Aghtsk. The villages of Karabakh the day before the end and the day after. A man who lost an eye and looked in the mirror. A girl waiting for the only road home to reopen. And Nata, cut off from the world in Martuni.
About 40 children and 20 women are living in the kindergarten in the village of Aghtsk — guests or people temporarily displaced from Artsakh. At the kindergarten they avoid the word “refugees”: so it won't be for long, so the war won't linger. Melanya is one of them. On September 27 the Azerbaijani armed forces shelled her village of Ivanyan in the Askeran district with a Smerch multiple-launch rocket system.
“How can we let them destroy temples where every lit candle is someone’s dream?”
‘The House Where Heroes Are Born’ — with this phrase, Alik, who was accompanying us, unwittingly supplied a title for the article that had not yet been born as we were leaving the Sloyans’ house.
There are no borders anymore. There are mountains shrouded in fog, burning houses and villages that life has left behind. The only inhabitants of this zone of emptiness are cats and dogs that became strays overnight. We went to the villages in eastern Karabakh to see them one last time: the day before—and the day after the end.
After Armenia’s capitulation in the war with Azerbaijan, many Armenian villages disappeared from the map of Karabakh. The editor of “Kalemon” recounts the last hours of emptiness spent on the eastern border.
VII
When I Died
Understand herself. Move forward. Not get drawn into the general despondency. Grow and change the world around her. Not shut herself away in grief for those she lost in the war, but live — in their stead too. Be a bright sun, not murky water. That is what little Nina decided, having grown several years older in just a few days.
Enter the story
“When I found out I’d lost an eye, I made a mental note of the fact. Thought, the other eye is still there — good, I can see. When I could finally walk to the toilet on my own two feet, I looked in the mirror. I was curious to see what was left of the eye. I like anatomy in general, the structure of the body.”
At the beginning of December, Maral Apelyan came from Mets Shen to Yerevan for surgery. Now she is waiting for the only road linking Artsakh to Armenia to reopen so that she can return home.
“There are things in this life that you can neither understand nor accept. You just have to live through them”
- I Dad Works for the Spider
- II So Dreams May Live
- III The House Where Heroes Are Born
- IV Those January Nights
- V Tomorrow After the End
- VI Black New Year
- VII When I Died
- VIII A Machine Gun Against a Grasshopper
- IX On Either Side of the Road
- X Don’t let God down
Text is over, story goes on
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