Party. He went away.
From late 1988 to early 1992, after the Armenians had left, Shusha was
a defiant Azerbaijani outpost in the middle of Armenian-controlled
Nagorny Karabakh. When full-scale war broke out after the collapse
of the Soviet Union in 1992, Armenian fighters eventually captured
Shusha. Shusha Armenians, like the Khachaturians, came back to a
town that was now their home again—and was also utterly destroyed.
When the couple drink tea in their garden, they look across at their
ruined former place of employment. The neoclassical Realschule is one
of the saddest wrecks in the town. The three-story school, which was
built in 1906, once had four hundred pupils and educated all the chil
dren of the bourgeoisie. Its graduates went to universities in Moscow
and Saint Petersburg. Today, the school’s grand façade has three rows
of black windows, like an empty packet of pills in which the holes have
been punched out. As we walked in, an inscription on the marble floor
at the entrance still welcomed us in Latin: Salve. But a winding staircase
of pink marble led up only to more rubble and corridors of grass grow
ing between the stone floor tiles.
Re-creating the story of Shusha required traveling back and forth be-
tween the town itself in Karabakh, controlled by the Armenians, and
Shusha-in-exile, the community that carries on in Azerbaijan. The two
halves of the town have been wrenched apart, first by fighting and now
by the cease-fire line.
S H U S H A : T H E N E I G H B O R S ’ TA L E
47
I began on Azerbaijan’s Caspian Sea coast at a sanatorium, where
the name “SHUSHA” had been painted in thick white capitals on the
steps. Long webs of washing, suspended on wires, stretched from the
windows and crisscrossed one another. In 1992, thousands of Shusha
Azerbaijanis were washed up in this old seaside resort north of Baku. It
is a dry and sandy place, with only a few spindly pine trees to remind
them of the forests of Karabakh.
The Jafarov family lived in a dark room, piled high with cushions
and blankets. They told me that their son Chengiz was killed on 8 May
1992 by the Armenians as Shusha was falling. Yet when I asked about
Soviet times, they gave the sort of reply that I was to hear dozens of
times from both sides: “We lived normally with the Armenians.” As far
as they were concerned, the destructive germ of hatred had come from
outside, not from within.
Chengiz’s best friend, Zaur, a gentle man with a thick moustache
and the outsize stature of a rugby player, hobbled into the Jafarovs’
room with a stick. In the spring of 1992, he said, he had been a police-
man and one of the Azerbaijani defenders of the town. Six weeks before
the final Armenian assault, a “Grad” missile landed near him and its
shrapnel crashed into his legs. Zaur had had his left leg amputated and
had needed twenty-two operations to get back on his feet. He said he
does not have a full-time job and spends most of his time in the stuffy
sanatorium. “The summer is beginning here and in three or four
months time we will be dying of the heat. We are mountain people, we
are not used to this heat and that’s when our longing begins.”
Zaur had had two close Armenian friends. They had grown up to
gether on the street that runs down from the upper mosque, played vol
leyball and soccer, helped one another buy things on the black market.
When Zaur went into the army, one of them came to the barber and paid
for his haircut as a good-luck gesture. “During the war I was always
afraid that I would suddenly see Vigen or Surik through the sights of
my gun,” he recalled. “I had nightmares about that.”
Zaur gave me an entrée into a circle of Shusha Azerbaijanis in exile.
They were excited that I was actually planning to travel to their home
city. Yusif was a lawyer. He was in his late thirties or early forties and
had a rather Chekhovian sadness about him with his soft voice, thin
black moustache, and unhappy eyes. He was more introspective and
more bitter than Zaur and told me he had only recently broken his vow
not to get married until his town was liberated from the Armenians.
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Yusif wanted to know what had happened to his house. He drew a lit
tle map on a scrap of paper, giving me precise instructions on how to
find it in the town.
In the spring of 2000, fewer than three thousand people were living in
semiruined Shusha—perhaps a tenth of its former population. Most of
them were poor Armenian refugees from Azerbaijan. In a queue of peo
ple holding buckets to collect water from a water-jet in a marble facing,
I found only two original inhabitants who knew the town. It was quite
likely that Zaur’s friends had left. Eventually however, I was led to a
four-story apartment block next to the church and a stocky man with a
thick moustache and big black eyes. It was Zaur’s friend, Vigen. As I ex
plained my business, Vigen’s wife brought us coffee.
Vigen was puzzled at first, then overjoyed to hear the message from
Zaur, whom he had last seen more than ten years before. “How is his
family?” Vigen asked. “His father died, didn’t he?” The war vanished
for a moment, as he wanted to catch up on old Shusha news and gos
sip—which I was unable to supply. He already knew that his friend had
lost a leg. “I was fighting in the Martakert region,” Vigen explained. “I
heard an acquaintance from Shusha on the radio. I tuned in and we
caught up with the news. He told me that Zaur had been hit.” The
Shusha street telegraph carried on across the front line and some “ene
mies” still remained friends.
I told him what Zaur had recalled about fearing the appearance of
a friend in the sights of his gun. “I had the same fear!” he said with a
smile. But Vigen’s assessment of the future was much more sober. After
all, he too had fought in the war and was now working for the govern
ment of the separatist statelet of Nagorny Karabakh. Would it be possi
ble for the Shusha Azerbaijanis to return? “I think that his generation
will grow up before that can happen,” Vigen answered, pointing to his
six-year-old son.
My other errand seemed less promising: in this shattered city there
seemed little hope of finding anything left of Yusif’s house. All the
same, a few days later two journalist friends and I went looking for it.
We found one of Yusif’s former neighbors who recognized the name
and led us to his four-story apartment-block. Almost all the apartments
had been burned out, but half a dozen or so were inhabited. No. 28,
Yusif’s home, seemed to be one of them and there, leaning over the first-
S H U S H A : T H E N E I G H B O R S ’ TA L E
49
floor balcony of what should have been his home, was a dark-haired
Armenian woman whose name was Anoush.
Anoush called us up. We explained ourselves, rather apologetically.
She was agitated—not surprisingly—by this sudden visitation but in
vited us in. She was a teacher about the same age as Yusif, in early mid
dle age, with thick blue eye shadow surrounding her big black eyes.
Her daughter made more coffee while we sat on the sofa and heard
Anoush’s story of how she had ended up here. Hers was another ac
count of a life wrecked by war. Shusha was still burning, she said, when
she first arrived here on 10 May 1992, less than two days after Yusif and
his father had left. The Karabakh Armenian authorities were encourag
ing people who had lost their homes to move up to Shusha and they
wanted to act fast, because they were worried that the whole town
would be burned to the ground by looters. Anoush was a perfect can
didate for a new home: three months before she had lost her apartment
in Stepanakert to a “Grad” missile fired from Shusha and before that,
her house in her native village had also been burned in an Azerbaijani
assault. So she moved into Apartment No. 28, which was now her only
home. “The door was open, everything was gone,” she said. We has
tened to say that we had not come to assert the rights of its previous
owner or to query hers, but the difficult—and unanswerable—question
“Whom does this house belong to?” still hung in the air.
On one wall of Anoush’s sitting room was a floor-to-ceiling photo-
graphic reproduction of a Russian autumnal scene. It was the kind of
picture that hung on the walls of a million Soviet homes: a group of sil
ver birch trees turning to orange and gold in a northern forest. Anoush
pointed out an eight-inch piece of the picture on one side, which had
been torn away, and how they had repainted the missing section of tree.
She and her daughter had done the repair job with such care that it was
not obvious at first glance. She smiled nervously as if to say that here
was a token of her attachment to her home.
It was the birch tree photograph that confirmed that I had found Yusif’s
apartment. Back in Azerbaijan, I sought him out in his noisy lawyer’s
office in central Baku, taking with me a few photographic snaps of
Shusha. When we had shuffled through to a picture of the birch trees on
the wall, he drew in a breath and said, “Yes, that’s my house.” We got
up, went out into the traffic noise, and carried on talking in a café on
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Baku’s Fountain Square serving kebabs, but Yusif’s conversation be-
came more disjointed as he became sunk in thought. Perhaps I had been
wrong to act as I did. It was one thing for him to say in rather abstract
terms that he had lived at Apartment No. 28; quite another to be con-
fronted with the reality that it still existed, inhabited by the enemy.
Then Yusif became transfixed by another photograph, of his gar-
den. At the back of the apartment block in Shusha a water pipe
stretched out into a small square of green. Within a few yards, there
were tiled paths, fruit trees, and currant bushes: a tiny oasis of verdancy.
“We guessed it must belong to the apartment, when we saw where the
pipe comes from,” Anoush had told me. She grew her own vegetables
there. In Baku, Yusif told me how this garden had been his father’s
pride and joy. “I don’t know if my father could bear to see this,” he said,
intently studying my photograph of his garden at its glorious-May
greenest.
In Baku, I spent time with the exiled Shushalilar. Apart from Zaur,
the wounded policeman, and Yusif the lawyer, there were Kerim and
Hikmet, journalists, and Arif an artist. The fact that I had visited their
hometown, now out of reach, gave me a strange talismanic status
among them. My photographs reawakened the pain of the loss of
Shusha but also opened a door into a lost world of memories, on which
they feasted. My photos were studied and restudied and no detail was
too small. “What street is he standing on?” one of them asked of a pic
ture of a little boy on a street corner. Or “If you look past the mosque on
the left you can see a corner of Hussein’s house.”
One windy June afternoon the Shushalilar took me to lunch in a café
on the edge of Baku overlooking a lake. Over our four hours of conver
sation one subject kept recurring: their friend-enemies, the Armenians.
Kerim, who edited the Shusha newspaper, had the sharpest wit and
turned a few heated moments into irony. Zaur, dressed in a navy blue
blazer and looking like a professional rugby player on an evening out,
was the most moderate. He volunteered stories about his friends and
talked without hatred about Armenians, yet he did not believe any
progress would be made by peace negotiations.
The others were more aggressive. When I said that France and Ger
many had made peace after generations of conflict, for example, one of
them said, “Yes, and Armenian fascism must be defeated like German
fascism.” Arif, who had a ragged pepper-and-salt beard and a pinched
gloomy face, was the group’s hard-liner. He wanted to fight another
S H U S H A : T H E N E I G H B O R S ’ TA L E
51
war to “liberate” Shusha and was pinning his hopes on the next Azer
baijani leader after President Heidar Aliev. “After Aliev, we’ll have a
democratically elected president and he’ll fight to make sure there isn’t
a single Armenian left in Karabakh,” he declared. Arif was also the most
artistic of the group. He was a trained craftsman in stained glass, an old
Azerbaijani tradition that had all but died out. His expulsion from
Shusha had sent him on a downward spiral, and in Baku he was strug
gling to make a living. As the meal was ending, Arif revealed another
seam of his bitterness toward the Armenians. For eight months he had
been married to an Armenian girl, he admitted, but their marriage had
fallen apart.
I continually noticed how my new friends blamed Russia for every-
thing that had gone wrong. In their telling of it, the 1991–1994 war had
been fought just as much with Russians as with Armenians—although,
when pressed for details, they had very little actual supporting evi
dence. At table, one would say: “It wasn’t the Armenians who took
Shusha, it was the Russians” or “I don’t blame the Armenians, the Rus
sians are using them” or “The Russians settled Armenians in Karabakh
in the nineteenth century to drive a wedge between us and Turkey.”
There is evidence of Russia’s having supported the Armenians during
the war, but this went far beyond that. To hear my friends talk, it was al
most as if the Armenians had not fought in the war at all. Was this a ra
tionalization of Azerbaijan’s painful defeat by blaming it on big Russia?
Or are they exempting their former Armenian neighbors from blame by
attributing the conflict to Russia? In this matter, I noticed, no one ever
had any personal enemies; it was always mysterious outside forces who
were to blame.
Shusha is a good subject for a study of the conundrum of how neigh
bors can stop being friends and start fighting one another. The town
was burned to the ground three times in the past century, in 1905,
1920, and 1992, once by both sides, once by the Azerbaijanis, and once
by the Armenians. Even by the fratricidal standards of the Caucasus,
this must be a record. Yet in the intervals between these infernos, it
was a thriving town and there was widespread intermarriage between
the communities.
Two bonds that tied the two communities together were commerce
and Russian power, the first quite naturally, the second more artificially.
The devastating sack of 1920 came after the Russians had left and at the
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end of another period of economic disruption and civil war. On that oc
casion an Azerbaijani army rampaged through the Armenian upper
town, burning whole streets and killing hundreds of Armenians. When
the Russians returned, wearing Bolshevik uniforms, Stepanakert was
made the new capital of Nagorny Karabakh. The ruins of the Armenian
quarter of Shusha stood, ghostly and untouched, for more than forty
years. In 1930, the poet Osip Mandelstam visited the town and was
terrified by its silent and empty streets. In a poem he shuddered at
Shusha’s “forty thousand dead windows.”
Finally, in 1961, the Communist authorities in Baku gave the order
for the ruins to be demolished, even though many of the old buildings
could have been restored. Sergei Shugarian, who was an Armenian
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