I plucked the word from the fissures of language, brought it over and planted it in my garden, watered it, weeded it out, made it porous, until the word sprouted, blossomed and filled my garden with its fragrance. People came, were thrilled, got a whiff of it, breathed on it, played “loves me, loves me not,” plucked the petals, wiped their noses, shined their shoes, and left. Bent down, banged around, bloodsoaked and near-death, I plucked the word from my garden, put it under the glass, and hooked up the IV to it. People came, tried to smell it, were unable to, wanted to touch but couldn’t. And the word stayed a long time under the glass, captivating the hearts of people with its dead-like beauty. Dried from the longing for love and life, pale, I took out the fragile word from under the glass, anointed it with fragrant oils, polished the nails, combed the hair, put a short skirt and fish-net stockings on her, and placed her on Baghramian Boulevard.
The cars came and took her away, tormented, disgraced her, impregnated her, made her contract a disease, pulled the accessories away, and threw her out on the street. Raped, beaten, blue under her eyes, I took out the sick word that had had a miscarriage from the garbage bin, brought her home, bathed, cured her, taught it to bark, and tied it in my backyard. People came, wanted to pat, it bit, they wanted to feed it, it growled, they made it bark, hit it with a stone, gave it a needle, and left. I summoned a word doctor for the word that was dying on my hand. He studied it and said that the word needed a meaning, a root, suffixes, that the word could not live outside language and dictionaries. So, I invented a meaning for the word, concocted a historical spelling, placed it in a dictionary, composed a sentence with the word, the sentence became a paragraph, the paragraph a short story, the short story a novel, the novel… Thus, I consecrated the word to the book. But the letters of the word fell off the pages of the book and came back like post office pigeons, sat on my laundry rope. I fed it grains and made it fly. People came, shot it with a slingshot and made it fall, slaughtered it, fried and ate it. Chewed up, undigested, I picked up the word all dried up like vomit in front of my doorstep, poured it in the toilet bowl and flushed it. The word went down and clogged up the sewage pipes. The plumbers came, pulled it out, put it on the chilly tile floor of the bathroom, and left. I picked up the word sautéed with a stranger’s gastric juice, hair, feces, and the contents of the sewage, and put it in my palm, flooded it with my love and hate, my longing and laughter, warmed, fondled, put it on my body and… killed it… When people came and saw the corpse of the word, they shuddered from its beauty, mummified her, placed her in a mausoleum, sanctified and put her statue in the square, on a tall pedestal. I stole the mummified, soulless, hopelessly dead word from the mausoleum, took her to the mountains of language and buried her there, a far and high place, from where she couldn’t see how the awestricken people were building temples, singing hymns, praying and saying that in the beginning there was the word…
Translated by Eva Martiosyan
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