The country my father didn't name

I looked out my window, and Mount Ararat looked back at me; white as ever, silent as ever. Had it snowed last night, while people were deep in sleep? I stood there for a while, wondering when Ararat became Ararat. There it stood, proud and still, veiled in white like a saint; witness to all our suffering, yet only ever speaking through the snow.

“One day, you will become a sparapet,” my father used to tell my brother. “You’ll liberate our mountain and plant the Armenian flag there.” He said it with such conviction, as if history itself depended on that promise.

I glanced at the time. It was still 9am. I had an hour before I had to leave for class. So I stayed by the window, glued there, thinking about how my brother would turn eighteen any day now. Then I thought of my father. I’ve always given him credit for my patriotism. I believed I learned it from him, to give all of myself for Armenia.

But then I caught myself, confused. Was it really him? Did he ever teach me about the glory of Armenia? About the bravery of Sasuntsi Davit? I know he wanted to name me Khandut. But I didn’t even know who Khandut was until I was fifteen. Khandut, the wife of the almighty David of Sasun. So who told me that? Who said he wanted to name me that?

It wasn’t him.

Did he ever really talk to me about our history at all?

10:45 am, and I’m late for class. I walk in, twenty minutes behind, catch my breath, and catch up with the professor in five minutes. My day moves on. I get lunch, see my friend, crack some jokes, smile. I learn. And then I’m back home. When I walk in, I see that same mountain again, just standing there, looking at me. In the morning, it’s still. But now, in the evening, the swallows are dancing around in the wind, singing songs of hayrenik.

And in the sound of birds and the mountain watching over a bustling city, I find stillness. I find myself wrapped in silence, wrapped in cold. My heart sinks so low it touches my stomach. Panic mode: I don’t remember anything.

I know I was six years old and summer was coming, or maybe it was already here; it didn’t matter, school was over anyway. I was about to start school in September. My mother, my sisters, my newborn brother, and I were finally coming back home. I remember the gates. I remember them opening and the neighborhood kids greeting us. My grandparents must’ve been there too. Was it my father who was driving us home? It had been a long year. I remember I would run out of breath all the time. What happened then? Suddenly I’m thirteen, coming home from the robotics club, feeling anxious and undervalued. It was the competition I disliked. I bought my gouaches then, only about 600 drams, or something like that. That’s when it started: the creative flooding. I painted every single day. It was the only way I knew how to forget. Memories spilled across cheap paper with even cheaper brushes, the kind that shed bristles like sick animals. I didn’t care. The gouaches were mine. They didn’t ask questions. They didn’t need me to explain the border or my father or why I never really felt afraid until years later, when I started confusing helicopters for UAVs. Even now, I paint. Even now, I forget like that.

What happened in between?

I have these ideas. I remember something else; I was twelve, at a Catholic camp. My father was a strong atheist. I remember him joking about Armenian saints sitting next to God in heaven, glancing down at Armenia, and then pushing God off the edge of a cloud for letting the country down. I remember my own undeniable atheism too. I was twelve. But I had an identity crisis at that camp. I actually started believing in God. I found notes from my diary from that time. I had written that God is actually there, that God actually exists.

But that’s not how I remembered it, at least not until I opened the diary again. I thought I had been cynical and sarcastic at that camp. I thought I was a strong atheist. But I wasn’t. I had an identity crisis. I stayed up thinking about it, questioning what I believed in, what my values were... Core values, at twelve years old, that’s funny.

I’m hiding there. There’s a small cabin next to the apricot tree in my school. I go inside with a classmate, the one I had a crush on for who knows how long. We hide there because the enemy is here. There’s an explosion in the clouds. The soldiers come in. We hide under the floor. They notice us through the cracks. I wake up. It was only a dream. It was only ever a dream.

Was it?

But I saw it when I was a child. The sound of gunshots gave me nightmares of them attacking my village. Was it ever that bad? The gunfire never scared me. Not really. It was just part of the noise, like dogs barking or mothers yelling children home for dinner. The border was close, but it was just… there. Like the mountain. Like my father’s silence. I grew up thinking peace was something you could feel in your bones, even when it wasn’t real. Even when the sky cracked open now and then.

When did my patriotism become a willingness to give everything for Armenia? Was it the day Armenia lost Artsakh? Was it before that? Was it when my dad never told me to liberate Western Armenia?

It’s blank. Completely blank.

I remember nothing in between. A whole childhood, gone. I remember my village. The lush greenery. I remember running around with classmates, chasing each other, trying to be the smartest one of them all.

But when did I become me?

When did the song about putting a flag on Ararat start bringing tears to my eyes? Why did I want to become a physicist when I didn’t even like the subject? Why did it take me so long to admit that maybe I’m not an atheist?

Ararat is still there. Watching again. It’s morning. I’m running late. Might as well sip my coffee.

It was your silence, Ararat. I even convinced myself the name Khandut would suit me, because I thought I was brave. I would go to war, even if I’m a girl, just to liberate my mountain. I would win the Nobel Prize in physics, even though it was the only subject I couldn’t wrap my head around. I would refuse to believe in the Divine, even if The Poet himself said he was only a lucky reader. I became a person stitched together from the dreams of others, from words that weren’t meant for me, from expectations I mistook for identity.

I look at Ararat as I leave for my lecture. It’s still there, watching. Familiar. Heavy.

And maybe I do accept it now, the words that were never really mine. The stories I clung to without knowing why. The names, the beliefs, the promises. I’ve spent years trying to untangle what I wanted from what was given to me. But maybe I don’t need to anymore. Maybe it’s not about whose dream it was. 

Not born into it, but forget through war, through silence, through the ache of everything we kept losing. We became who we are in the ruins. 

The moment Ararat became Ararat was the moment it began silently observing our longing, our dreams of finding a way back home, our stubborn, stupid efforts to survive.