The Doves of Ohanavank Read online

  This book is a work of fiction. All names, persons, organizations, places and events are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, events and places is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 Vahan Zanoyan

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 1499582749

  ISBN 13: 9781499582741

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014909772

  CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

  North Charleston, South Carolina

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  Our house in Saralandj has two rooms. Before our parents died and Martha got married, one served as bedroom to the eight children. The other had our parents’ bed in one corner, and otherwise it was the kitchen, dining room and bath for all of us. We have no indoor plumbing. Our kitchen and bath have only one appliance, the manure-burning stove in the middle of the kitchen section of the second room. Almost every task is done by hand.

  Now that there are fewer of us, my siblings have offered me my parents’ bedroom, they say because I slept there with my mother the night before Ayvazian’s men took me away. The remaining six now share our old bedroom.

  My name is Lara Galian. Today I turn eighteen. I’m not big on birthdays, but my family wanted to do something special for me. My four older sisters and three younger brothers still live in this impoverished village. Saralandj used to be my home too, until everything changed and I moved to the city after being freed. My oldest sister, Martha, is married and has a three-month-old baby girl, Ani. The second oldest, Sona, got engaged a month ago. My oldest brother, Avo, is fourteen months younger than me, but, as the oldest son, he is now the head of the Galian household.

  Six months ago I was a prostitute in Dubai. When they took me there I was sixteen. People would stare at me. My manager would say it was because of my age and good looks, but I never understood what that meant. My father and mother used to talk about the legendary beauty that I had inherited from my great aunt, Araxi. That didn’t mean much to me either, because I never met Araxi Dadik.

  In Dubai, I received around twenty clients a day, mostly foreign workers from Asia and other parts of the Middle East. Then my captor negotiated a contract with Ahmed Al Barmaka, a very rich and influential man, and I became exclusively his and lived in his estate. It was a relief not to have many clients every day, and although Ahmed treated me well, I guess with affection and maybe even respect (in that profession, one can never be sure of respect), the fact remained that I was his property, whom he had bought and paid for.

  I betrayed his trust and ran away. I betrayed others too, including some who had been kind to me, to get away from that life and return home.

  But home is not what it used to be. My mother died while I was away. I knew she was ill and it was one of my worst fears that I’d never see her again. The fear came true. Avo, who is the closest a human being has ever been to me (possibly next to my father), is different. Before Sergei Ayvazian killed my father and took me away, I had never seen Avo angry. Now he is angry all the time. He drinks, sometimes too much, he smokes, and he has participated in the killing of six people before turning seventeen. He killed these people because of me, two of them in my presence and one with my participation; he did it in order to protect our family and avenge my father’s death.

  Avo has changed physically too; he has grown, his skin looks darker and more weathered, his face has hardened, is bonier and more angular. He is handsome and looks a lot more like my father now than he did two years ago. Like my father, his beauty does not seem to belong to the present; with his wild curly hair, large black eyes and eagle nose, he looks like some mythical character from ancient Armenia.

  It is March, and it is still winter in Saralandj. There is a small hill of snow at the side of our house, where my brothers have gathered the snow shoveled from around the house; it reaches half way up the kitchen window. The snow starts to melt during sunny days, but then everything freezes at night, and once in a while it still snows. Spring does not arrive here until well into April, and in some years even into May. Nevertheless, the villagers are restless after four months of winter inactivity, and have started venturing out, getting ready for spring. Gardens are being raked and, by the more impatient, even tilled for late April planting, stables are being cleaned, and the remaining bales of grass and hay, gathered in late summer and early fall to feed the animals in the winter, rearranged, aired and re-stacked.

  All my sisters and brothers work in the garden and the stables. Avo does most of the heavy outside work. Aram is the youngest and is the only one who still goes to school, but he is not exempt from doing his share. My sisters are also busy indoors, getting the house ready for spring; not much gets washed around here during the winter months, because it is very cold and heating large quantities of water on the small manure-burning stove is cumbersome. It is old and rusty, and its stovepipe, which passes through the first bedroom as its only source of heat, has many tears and holes, which Avo keeps repairing. Besides, they have to make sure that the stock of dried manure will be enough for heating the house all winter, and they don’t want to take chances until winter approaches its end, when they can be sure that they will not run out.

  I miss the smell of this house. It is a combination of dried manure mixed with hay—our main fuel—smoke, sweat and the lingering aromas of cooking and spices. As much as anything, it is this smell that signifies home for me. I missed this smell when I was overseas, first in Moscow and then Dubai, and nearly as much as my family, it was this smell that I yearned to return to.

  It reminds me especially of my father, who, even though dead, was the most important influence in my life during my eighteen months in forced prostitution. I recalled the countless tales that he used to tell, and the stories that he used to read to us during holidays. My father always had something to say about any situation; he spoke casually, without showing any presumed import in his message, and I later came to understand that it was that style that allowed every word to sink in, without questioning or resistance from any of us. He simply talked and we simply listened. I probably wouldn’t have made it back home had it not been for my father’s words and the strength that they gave me.

  Almost nothing has changed in this house physically since I left for the first time two years ago. Our old bedroom has the same five beds, made a long time ago by my grandfather, from wood and plywood. The only difference is th
at now only six of my siblings sleep there, so only my two youngest brothers have to share a bed. Other than that, every detail is the same as when I left.

  The other room has not changed either, except that next to the picture of my father on the wall over the bed, now also hangs the picture of my mother. After her death, Avo chose an old photograph of her, enlarged it, made a frame from the pruned branches of our apricot tree, and hung it. That is all. Other than that, everything—the stove, the bed, the low dining table with the low stools around it, the pots and pans stacked together in one corner, the shelves holding the jars and sacks containing food preserved for the winter, the dishes and tea cups lined up along a single wooden shelf, the large pot where we heat water for baths and where we do laundry—all are exactly where they have always been. This became my bedroom after I returned home from Dubai, and it is mine every time I visit from Yerevan. No one else sleeps here. They just use the room to cook, eat, bathe, and do laundry.

  No one in this house, let alone in this village, knows or could possibly understand what I’ve been through. Most women in this village will know only one man in their lifetime, with the exception of the rare widow who remarries. I have been with more men than the entire female population of this village combined, probably a hundred times over. I used to keep track of the number in my little spiral-bound green notebook, but I stopped when I reached the first several hundred men, within a few months of my abduction. I tore those pages from the notebook. There did not seem to be any point in keeping track, and besides, it was depressing me.

  Although no one here knows exactly where I’ve been and what I’ve done, everyone who knows my family has lurid opinions, and some are not far from the truth. Fortunately, I do not have to admit to anything; I treat the rumors for what they are, no matter how close to the truth they may be. My sisters do not ask any direct questions of me, and they try their best to ignore the rumors. In my presence, they act as if nothing has changed, which is not difficult for them, because in fact very little changed in their lives when I was gone, except for the fact that I used to send a lot of money home, which helped them get back on their feet financially after my father’s sudden death.

  But dealing with Avo is different. He has killed for me. He and I pushed Sergei Ayvazian down a five hundred meter cliff, from the same spot where my father was pushed after he refused to let them take me away and manage my career as a ‘model.’ That was in Sevajayr, a village far from here, in Vayots Dzor, a different region of Armenia than Aragadzotn, where Saralandj is. Avo also killed Ayvazian’s nephew, Viktor, and four of their bodyguards. He could never have pulled that off had it not been for two people—a crusty revolutionary called Gagik Grigorian, who was a friend of Papa’s, and a Swiss-Armenian investigative reporter called Edward Laurian, who somehow got tangled up in our family saga. We call him Edik.

  Avo knows more than anyone else, and suspects a lot more. Six months ago, when he first brought me home, he waited for a couple of days for me to recover, and then he asked, point blank, if I had been raped and whether I actually had been a model in Greece, as Ayvazian had promised, or whether the more sinister rumors of prostitution were true. My only request was for him not to ask where I had been and what I had done. I told him that in time I may be ready to tell him certain details, but I asked that he let that be in my own time. I could tell from his face that the simple fact that I did not deny anything confirmed his worst suspicions. He stared at me for a minute, then turned his back and left without saying another word.

  I know I owe Avo more. Sometimes I think that telling him either an outright lie or the full truth would have been kinder than leaving things hanging like that. He is deeply involved in my story, and now has his own difficult story. His life and his future have changed irreversibly because of me, and not for the better. But I could not bring myself to outright lie to him, nor could I tell him the truth. I’m not even sure I can repeat the truth to myself. How could I look Avo in the eye and tell him that Sergei Ayvazian brutally raped me the first night that they took me, that his nephew Viktor and his bodyguards subjected me to all kinds of indignities in Moscow in the following few days, that a Ukrainian prostitute called Anastasia taught me the basic skills of the trade, and I started working as a prostitute only a few days after leaving home? Then in Dubai I was a prostitute, and later became a local dignitary’s concubine? How could I look Avo in the eye and tell him that all the money that I sent home, that helped the family recover from its debts, came from my captivity and degradation?

  My return home last fall was not uneventful—actually, Edik might say that is the understatement of the year. I had to convince the manager of Ahmed’s concubines, Ms. Sumaya, to let me secretly go home for a few days while Ahmed was away on business in Beijing. I later found out that she and two of the other concubines in the estate, Natalia and Farah, wanted me gone anyway, because they felt threatened by Ahmed’s deepening interest in me. It turned out that they were plotting to have me ‘disappear.’ So instead of a ticket directly from Dubai to Yerevan, Sumaya routed my flight through Istanbul, where an Armenian trafficker called Abo was to meet me. As I understood the plan, Abo would then put me on a flight to Tbilisi, where I would catch the train to Yerevan.

  Of course I never intended to go back to Dubai once I got home; that was my part in the web of deceit. Sumaya, in turn, had planned for Abo to put me on a flight to Moscow, accompanied by one of his soldiers, where I would be met by Natalia’s uncle, who, in turn, would take me to Krasnodar and make me ‘disappear.’ Apparently they paid Abo a lot of money to execute that part of their scheme. But Abo had ideas of his own. He wanted to make a deal. He’d return me to Ayvazian, in exchange for access to the lucrative sex trade in Dubai, from which he had been blocked for years. So I did not head home as I had thought, nor to Moscow as Sumaya had thought, but back into Ayvazian’s hands. Abo had assumed that Ayvazian would then return me to Ahmed Al Barmaka and save face in Dubai. Instead, they brought me back to Armenia, and took me straight to the remote village of Sevajayr, drugged and bound.

  That is where Ayvazian and his men were once again taken by surprise. Just when they felt that they had finally regained control over the situation, Avo shows up with Gagik, in the middle of a deserted village road on the way to Sevajayr, where no outsider ever appears; he causes Viktor Ayvazian’s car to roll off into a ravine, killing him and his driver on the spot, and then brings Sergei Ayvazian and his bodyguard tied and gagged to the safe house where they were holding me and another woman. How on earth did Avo, a sixteen-year-old kid from Saraladj, almost four hours away from Sevajayr, happen to be on the same deserted road as the Ayvazians at the same time on that fateful afternoon? No one could even begin to understand the truth, unless they understood Edik Laurian’s and Gagik’s involvement. And that has not happened.

  But my country is a small place. And even though a dozen or so corrupt and greedy oligarchs control its economy and trade today, it is home to one of the oldest civilizations on earth, with a culture and history that goes back several thousand years. I myself would not know this had my father not read to us for hours on every holiday. But all that did not matter when Ayvazian, one of the most ruthless and venal of these oligarchs, wanted to recruit me into his network of prostitutes. Apparently he thought a sixteen year old with my apparent allure would be a great asset in his business.

  Ayvazian had no friends. Many feared and hated him, and no one liked him. That made it easier for the investigators to close the case of his death as an unresolved murder, as I found out later.

  But the rest of the oligarchy could not be as complacent about these deaths as the law was. The six deaths in Sevajayr on that fall afternoon were so shocking, so unprecedented, and so inexplicable, that every other oligarch in the country was immediately on full alert. Their first concern was to make sure that this was not some kind of vigilante strike against oligarchs in general; but soon they started to focus on the potential spoils. They had only an inkling
of the type of business that Ayvazian was into. He had managed to keep his operations secret and the competition out. Thus began the race for who among them would fill the void left by his death. With Viktor, his nephew and top lieutenant, gone also, there was no heir apparent in Ayvazian’s family that could take over the businesses he had left behind.

  Avo is not the only person with whom I have not come clean. I have not yet begun to honestly face my own emotions. While away, I had only one obsession: to get back home. There never was the slightest doubt in my mind that this is what I should, and would, do. Even during the most comfortable period of my exile, when I lived in my own villa on Al Barmaka’s estate and accepted the flattering expressions of his devotion, I had only one thought: to get home. Home was what I knew. My life in the village with my family defined me. At heart, I was afraid that if I did not return soon, there would be no going back; I would be too changed.

  Once the intoxicating effect of the extraordinary events in Sevajayr faded, after that magical night that we spent in Edik’s house in Vardahovit, which was the first night of freedom that I had since my abduction, and after we returned to Saralandj, I tried desperately to force myself to truly return: return and belong, return and embrace, return and become part of this village, this family and this reality again—and I failed.

  I failed, not because anything has physically changed here, even though Mama has passed away. I failed because I am different. And although I reject the thought, I know deep inside that I wonder if I did the right thing by returning. Of course if I had stayed a common prostitute prowling the nightspots of Dubai under the management of our pimp, Madame Ano, and under the supervision of Viktor Ayvazian, I would never have these doubts. But the experience of Al Barmaka’s estate was life-changing. I realized its significance then, but that did not change my resolve to return home. Quite the contrary, I saw my vastly improved situation as an opportunity to escape. The doubts about where I really belonged began to haunt me only after my return.