A Bird Between Two Stones
Three kilometers east of Vedi, where the Ararat plain lies flat as a poured floor under the mountain the maps give to one country and the eye gives to another, two low hills have been opened many times, though only once on purpose. The other openings are pits: round wounds left by men who came in the dark, certain that the dead keep gold. They were not wrong that the dead keep something. They were wrong only about what.
This spring a woman who reads the ground the slow way, Armine Gabrielyan, cut a single rectangle into one of the hills, fourteen meters by ten, and let the earth account for itself. It gave up walls: two-faced, a meter and a half thick, rubble at the heart, set square to the four directions as though the builders wanted the house to agree with the sky. Within them, a child, laid in a box of stone. And in the wall that closed the child in, holding the courses together, several dressed stones older than the grave, cut with the joint the Armenians name ծիծեռնակապոչ (tsitsernakapoch): the swallow's tail.
The swallow's tail is no metaphor in old masonry. It is a notch shaped like a spread forked tail, cut into the lip of two blocks so a clamp of lead or bronze set into the gap will bind them against earthquake and time; from Egypt to the citadels of Urartu to the temples the Greeks set on their headlands, men trusted the weight of stone to the outline of a bird in flight. Someone cut these stones, once, for something that mattered, a shrine or a king's threshold no tongue now recovers, and carved into them the bed where the bird would lie. Then the building came down, or was taken down, or was forgotten the way a name goes while the face stays; and the stones were carried here and laid, worked face inward, to wall a child. The sacred sunk into the nameless, the nameless made sacred by what it now guards.
The man who first led the diggers of meaning here, in an earlier spring, spoke of jar-burials in the slopes, the dead folded into great clay vessels the country calls կարաս (karas). In the caves above the Arpa they have found the oldest wine and the oldest shoe on earth, and laid their children too in clay, so that vintage and leather and infant all kept one posture underground, knees drawn up, sealed against a number of years with no number.
A bird in the stone is the right bird for a grave. The Egyptians knew it: among the spells a soul needed to leave its tomb by daylight, one taught the dead to take the form of a swallow, to fly into the light and come home at dusk to the dark room, in and out, the single liberty granted the dead being the liberty to return. The Greeks knew the swallow as the bird that will not lie about the year. Μία χελιδὼν ἔαρ οὐ ποιεῖ (mía chelidṑn éar ou poieî), Aristotle wrote, one swallow does not make a spring: a line about birds that is also about how one returning thing is not yet the return. Older and darker beneath it runs the tale Ovid tells, of two sisters changed to birds after a wrong too vast for speech, the unspeakable woven into cloth instead, until one rose a nightingale and the other a swallow, the bird that gave away its words and ever since only chatters in the eaves of sleeping houses.
The jar is the right house for a kindred reason. The Greeks shut their terrors in one: Pandora's was a πίθος (pithos), a storage jar the twin of the karas, and what stayed at the bottom when the rest had flown was ἐλπίς (elpís), hope, which is either the final gift or the final affliction. Diogenes took such a jar for a house, to prove how little a man needs; the highland dead lay down in theirs having surrendered even that little. One jar keeps wine until it is wanted and another keeps a body until it is forgotten, and the whole distance between them is how long you are willing to wait.
The lamp-bearers come for the bright thing instead, the eldest trade practiced near tombs. Herodotus tells of Rhampsinitus, the Egyptian king whose own architect set into the treasury a stone that could be drawn out, so the builder's sons might rob the royal silver at their leisure: the man who raises the wall and the man who breaches it are now and then one man, or two brothers, or one appetite in two coats. The work east of Vedi keeps an architect too, Hayk Kyureghyan, though he labors the honest way, unmaking the wall to learn how it stood and not what it hid. Looter and scholar go into the same earth with the same iron and come out holding opposite things: the one a hole, the other a sentence.
The spirit has hovered over a grave dressed as a bird before: once, far to the green west, over a sunken chamber where running water and painted wings were deeded to a shrine, the same law ran backward, birds let into the holy room there, the holy room cut to a bird's shape and lowered onto a child here. One figure, read in a mirror someone buried face-down.
The language keeps the rest in plain view. The word for the swallow, ծիծեռնակ (tsitsernak), opens the name of a hill not far off where the swallows are said to gather and never quite to leave, a fortress built, in the mouth at least, wholly of small returning birds. That is the whole of it. The bird goes out and comes back. The stone is cut and used again. The jar is filled and emptied and filled. East of a flat plain a child has lain under a flying shape for a span no one has counted, and a few steps away, the whole while, the men with the lamps go on digging in precisely the wrong place, sure the treasure is the gold.
Claudius, the Chelidonomant