Narine Abgaryan. Stories about the Good

One Friday afternoon, while the sun is rolling towards the west rim of the valley, Sevoyants Anatolia lies down to die. Fifty-eight years of age, Anatolia is the youngest woman in Maran, the small mountain village in Armenia where the (big and small) events depicted in Narine Abgaryan’s novel „Three Apples Fell from the Sky” take place. But, even if the woman is convinced that for her everything is about to end, the truth is that everything is just about to start happening to her. More precisely, everything that is important. For it is not death that will come, but love, even if this is the last thing she would have ever thought possible.

„I wanted to write a book that ends in hope, because mankind needs hope and stories about the good”, the author stated. And „Three Apples Fell from the Sky” does indeed offer the reader not only the so-much needed hope, but also an extraordinary sense of the past that remains forever alive, of ever-prevailing life, of the everyday miracles that make the lives of the inhabitants of Maran – all elderly and burdened by their individual troubles, losses and sorrows – seem like the stuff of a fairy-tale. A fairy-tale in which good things, albeit occurring late, when least expected, still happen.

Born in 1971 in Berd, Armenia, to a family of intellectuals, her grandfather a survivor of the Armenian Genocide, Narine Abgaryan initially gained a reputation as author of children’s literature (her texts on Manyunya, the little girl with miraculous powers, instantly captivated readers all across Russia). Subsequently, with her published novels and short-stories (from „A Transplant Girl” – 2011 to „People Who Are Always with Me” – 2014, „Zulali” – 2016, or „People of Our Yard” – 2016), she was acclaimed as one of the most genuine and compelling voices of contemporary Russian literature and she also received prestigious literary awards for many of her books.

„Three Apples Fell from the Sky” was published in 2015 and instantly became a bestseller in Russia. It gained the writer the „Yasnaya Polyana” Award in 2016 and it was rapidly translated into several foreign languages (the thoroughly adequate and fluid, from beginning to end, Romanian version of the book, published by Humanitas Fiction Publishing House and translated by Luana Schidu, deserves a special mention). And, despite the fact that the text begins with the careful preparations which Anatolia makes for her own funeral – the foreboding of which she has – what Narine Abgaryan will particularly tackle in this book is life. Indeed, she will do so by availing herself of the pretext of the woman who thinks she is living her final moments. So, the image of Anatolia preparing to take her last breath is recurrent in the first part of this extraordinary work of fiction and the reader finds out how the youngest member of the Maran community feeds the chickens, tidies her house and lays aside her funeral clothes and her rosary for her neighbour to easily find them. But, before she dies, Anatolia starts remembering plenty of things about the past of her family and the past of her village, so that her personal history and the history of the small community imperceptibly engulf her. And they save her.

Obviously, the technique of postponement and the use of the particular detail are not new in literature. And, of course, the model – or at least one of the most important models of this book – is Gabriel García Márquez’s great novel „One Hundred Years of Solitude” which, as is well-known, opens as Colonel Aureliano Buendía stands in front of the firing squad, only for his death to be postponed several times and in that lapse of time for the entire history of Macondo to be narrated. Narine Abgaryan proves to be entirely familiar with this novel, which has undoubtedly also taught her the art of devising the miraculous chapters that are some essential features of her own literary work. For a white peacock appears unexpectedly and portents important events in the life of Tigran, one of the characters; young Akop forebodes the deaths of the inhabitants of Maran and puts up a fight, even managing, at one point, to rescue the villagers from a catastrophic landslide. However, apart from the mere creative appropriation of certain narrative strategies or of character-devising techniques typical of magical realism, Narine Abgaryan does offer her readers a book in which her own narrative voice stands out as it recreates an all-encompassing image of her native country, Armenia. For, even if they cannot be pinned on a real map, Maran and the mountainous region in which the events take place resemble north-eastern Armenia, where the author herself was born and raised. Narine Abgaryan resorts to her memory in order to re-enact and recreate on a literary level a space she holds dear, peopling it with characters that the reader will find it impossible to forget. It is a world which, much like Anatolia, believes it is living its final days as, from an establishment initially boasting over five hundred families, with their set-up households and a weekly fair, Maran now hosts only about twenty houses, inhabited by very old people who seem to do nothing but await their own passing. This is the aftermath of a series of tragic events, the consequences of which are of uttermost gravity: a devastating earthquake that occurred a few years before Anatolia’s birth, the Great Famine, which took place when the little girl was seven and which left her orphaned. Afterwards, when the war started and the links with the outer world were almost completely severed, no one could descend into the valley and no one from the valley could reach Maran any longer. It is only after things somehow calm down that the mailman and the village telegraphist instruments some desultory communication with the rest of the world, while the Maran community seems to decay and disappear little by little, all the more so as babies are no longer born to the villagers and young people no longer settle there.

But, alongside all these calamities, Anatolia must also deal with personal unhappiness, with a marriage devoid of love and laden with violence, with the years spent with a man who would hit her just in order to hide his own naught, but also with her unaccomplished longing for a baby. For, not coincidentally, Anatolia used to be the village librarian until the small library was destroyed by the war and by bad weather. Symbolically, Anatolia, the youngest member of the small community was, for a long time, the one who connected Maran with books, with that distinct universe passed on by writing, not just by memory. And perhaps for that reason alone, the death she awaits will be replaced by life, because the story of such a place cannot end without the mark of hope and love.

Nevertheless, „Three Apples Fell from the Sky” is not just the story of Anatolia, as the woman is a kind of a fake protagonist – the real protagonist being Maran itself, with all of its inhabitants and their flaws and blemishes, but also with their amazing generosity, their rare kindness and their capacity to resume everything, even under the direst circumstances. Azarya the priest, Mamikon the postman, Valynka Eigobants, Tigran and his wife, Nastasya, timely returned home with their little boy, all form an astounding group portrait, completed by the animals, so utterly important for one’s life in such a world, by nature and its elements, by the scented summer air, by snow and the mid-winter blizzards, by all the fragrances of the flowers and the flavours of the meals cooked by the village women. As if in front of a large, encompassing fresco, the reader contemplates these characters and gets some insight into the great truths of a patriarchal world that will eventually be given the chance of a new beginning.

Perhaps for this reason, even if male characters are not absent from the pages of the book, women always play the central roles – again, in a manner reminiscent of Márquez’s novel „One Hundred Years of Solitude”. Because women manage, every time, to find an antidote for loneliness and despondency by sewing, weaving, cooking or tidying up their albeit derelict houses, eventually saving the small world they inhabit from the ravages of history by their power to believe in the good, in a „better” they never tire to seek and to believe in. And, even if Maran seems to be suspended in time, a kind of symbolic faraway island, the links with the outer world are there, however sporadic. An interesting detail is the fact that they are mediated by Satenyk, the telegraphist, also a woman… The outer world is merely suggested, being illustrated by the wars started in the North, always the North (a clear hint at Russia) or by the exile that some of the inhabitants of the village, bereft of any other solution, choose to go on.

However, Anatolia remains the most striking character throughout the novel and Narine Abgaryan narrates everything that is related to her life with extraordinary delicacy and insight, without omitting, more than once, to give touches of humour. Because Vasily Kudamants, the village blacksmith, urged by Satenyk the telegraphist, his cousin, and by Yasaman, Anatolia’s friend and neighbour, shows up and proposes to her. However, he does not show up randomly, but carrying on his shoulders an unexpected gift for the former librarian, whom he has long admired both for her literacy and for her beauty and delicacy. He brings her… a scythe! So it is not death that crosses Anatolia’s threshold, but an unexpected, belated love… And, even if Anatolia initially says ‘Yes’ just for fear she might hurt Vasily’s feelings – the man himself has also lost a lot and many: his parents, his brother, his first wife and his children – she imperceptibly realizes that love does only not exist in books and she experiences such happiness that she almost fears to live it to the full. She will only gradually gain confidence in herself and in her new life – which will also symbolize the new life and the great hope of the entire community. This is further proof that miracles – big or small – can take place anywhere, anytime. Or, as Narine Abgaryan writes at the end of her book, providing an explanation for the title and the structure of the text, „and here these miracles have come, and they breathe lightly and gently, and so be it for a long time, and so be it forever, and the night shall cast wonders, guarding her happiness, and it will roll in its cool palms three apples which it will then, as the stories of the Maranian people would go, cast from the sky onto the Earth – one for whomever has seen, one for whomever has recounted and the third one for whomever has listened and believed in the good.”

Narine Abgaryan, „Three Apples Fell from the Sky”, translated into Romanian by Luana Schidu, Humanitas Fiction Publishing House, 2021

(Literomania, Cronici/ Reviews, No. 264 / 02.10.2022)

Translated into English by Mirela Petrașcu