■ IRINA GURGENOVNA MELKUMIAN
Born 1960 Hairdresser Beauty Salon No. 7
Resident at Building 2B, Apartment 21 Block 41A
Sumgait
The most frightful tragedy befell our family, the Melkumian family. It's very difficult for me to talk about it. Five members of our family died all at one time: the father of the family, my father-in-law, Sogomon Markarovich Melkumian; my mother-in-law, Raisa Arsenovna Melkumian; my husband, Eduard Sogomonovich Melkumian; my brother-in-law, Igor Sogomonovich Melkumian; and my sister-in-law, Irina Sogomonovna Melkumian. On that day, February 29, the Ambartsumian family was visiting us. Uncle Misha Ambartsumian died along with the members of my family. Altogether six people, in a matter of minutes ... I am one of the daughters-in-law of the Melkumian family, Eduard's wife. I have a daughter of three and a half, her name is Lilia. In a matter of minutes she lost her father, her grandfather, her grandmother, her uncle, and her aunt.
I'll begin my story on February 27. I worked the second shift that day, I had to be at work at three o'clock. I was walking past the store between the fourth and eight microdistricts, not far from our police precinct station. And in the door there I saw a young man who had been beaten, his entire face was bloody. I stopped for a moment and saw policemen running from the direction of the station. When he saw them he got scared and started to run. In Azerbaijani, one of them said, "Look, he's probably an Armenian." And they shouted at him, "What are you afraid of? Stop!" Some young Azerbaijani fellows were walking past and smiling: "Look at that coward, the Armenian, they beat him and he's running away!" Well I paused for a moment . . . and set off on my way to work. Four Armenians work in our salon, only the manager is an Azerbaijani. When I got to work I told the oth¬er women what I had seen, and there were some Azerbaijani customers sit¬ting there, and they said: "What do you want? Look at what you Armenians are doing in Nagorno Karabagh, demanding our land ..." Well that was the first I had seen or heard.
I finished my shift and in the evening my husband, Edik, came by to pick me up. The family would always get together at his parents' home on Saturday and Sunday. We had only recently obtained an apartment, but we hadn't yet moved in, we had just started fixing it up. We were temporarily living at my father's. My mother had died recently, six months before. Papa was alone, and we had moved into his place. Anyway, we went home, to Block 41 A. Right away my mother-in-law told us that my father-in-law had gone to a wedding and hadn't yet returned. She said she was concerned. Well just then Igor arrived, he and Edik left us and went to get their father. Five minutes hadn't passed when their father drove up all pale, saying, "I hadn't even finished parking at the entryway, and someone broke my rear window with a stone. I got out to look, and there was no one there; I looked around the other entryways, and there was nobody there, either. It was someone from our building. He says, "Where are Edik and Igor?" We tell him, "They went to get you." He says, "Why did you let them go? In town they're stopping Armenian cars and buses ..." Soon Igor and Edik returned and said the same thing: "We were driving past the fourth microdistrict and they were stopping buses, they tried to stop our car, too, and we barely got away." And I ask Edik, "Edik, how will we get home to Father's?" He says, "It's impossible, we'll spend the night here."
We almost didn't sleep at all that night. On Sunday morning my sister called, she lives in Microdistrict 6. She says, "A neighbor came to our apart¬ment and told us we should take off the name plate with our Armenian sur¬name on it." We took the one saying Melkumian off of our door, too. And we thought, Where could we go? What would happen? I called work and told them that I wouldn't be leaving the house. And the manager tells me, "Well no one's coming to work today, are you on strike or what? For some reason," he says, "of four Armenians not one is coming in to work." I said, "I'm afraid because of what's happening in town!" And our neighbor had come by, too, saying that we Armenians were beating their people in Kafan. Well we did not believe it. It just wasn't possible.
That day we didn't leave the house at all. At lunchtime some boys, around 12 or 13 years old, came into the yard. There was a red Zhiguli there, it belonged to Armenians. They turned it over. I thought, they're not going to stop at this. I called the police. Speaking Russian, I say, "There's an attack in Block 41 A, they're beating people." They answered, "Wait there, we're on our way." Ten minutes later I called again and this time I spoke Azerbaijani. And they said, "What, you again? You just called." I say, "Well why aren't you coming?" Again they tell me, "We're on our way." Well I called three times altogether, and on the third time they told me, "We're sick of you, don't call us anymore." I called once again, but no one answered. So the police didn't come, they didn't even drive by to scare them . . . Well by this time they had already finished overturning the car, and had left. There were men nearby, sitting there playing dominoes, and no one went up to them and asked them what they were doing. So the car stayed turned over. It was only that night that the owner put it back on its wheels.
That night we couldn't sleep either. We thought, can this really go on tomorrow? Although by that time the military was already in the city. We had seen armored personnel carriers, trucks, and tanks drive by. And the next day, the 29th, at eleven o'clock, there were 15 vehicles with soldiers in our block. They had clubs, and they even got out of the vehicles. We thought, well that's it, it's over . . . There was a tank right in the middle of the road. This was right next to our building. They were there about an hour, and we calmed down. My sister called and I told her, "There's a tank and soldiers right next to our building, right under our balcony, so don't worry." And an hour later they drove off. They left...
By that point nothing had happened to us. Before cars had been driving by honking their horns, they had some sort of signals: the drivers would stick their arms out the windows and honk, meaning leave the car alone, our people. When the soldiers left the horns started again.
My father-in-law said, "Let's go to the dacha. That'll be better." This was somewhere around four-thirty. We were just getting ready to leave when there was a knock at the door. We opened the door and it was the building manager for Block 41A. He came in and said, "Sogomon, where are you going?" And he saw that we were getting ready, that we had our coats on, and that the children were dressed . . . "Where are you going? If you go out you'll be killed, it's safer to stay at home." Well my father-in-law believed him. We didn't leave. We undressed the children. Just after he left, about 15 minutes later, there was pounding and kicking on our door: "Open up in there! We know you're in there!"
I completely forgot to mention that before they came to our place there was a pogrom of an Armenian apartment in another building, not far from ours. We pulled back the curtains slightly and saw a refrigerator and a tele¬vision being thrown off the fourth floor. That was right after the building manager had left. So he knew everything, he saw it. And then those bandits came in a huge mob. They had a flag. There was a car with a loudspeaker on it. And now someone was talking over it, rudely: "Get out of here! This is our land! Long live Azerbaijan!" We were afraid to look, but you could hear everything.
We didn't think that anything would happen to us. We thought they'd throw out our belongings, but we didn't think they would kill us. They'd come in, steal, even beat us, but they wouldn't kill us?! My father-in-law said, "Even if ... Even if they kill me, they probably won't touch you ... cer¬tainly," he said, "they wouldn't go that far? . . . We'll defend ourselves." And Edik says, "You, Karina, and Ira, take the children and go into that room."
There were 13 of us in the apartment. My father- and mother-, and sister-in-law; Edik and I and our Lilia; and Igor and Karina, and their two chil¬dren, they have two: Kristina is five, and Seryozha is four. So there were our three families, plus a fourth, the Ambartsumians: Uncle Misha, Aunt Zhasmen, and their daughter, Marina. The Ambartsumians had come over on the evening of the 28th. A mob had passed by their building, young men and boys 12 to 20 years old. They were asking, "Are there any Armenians here?" A neighbor woman had said, "Yes, on the first floor." Rocks had been unloaded for them all over town. They started hurling them in the windows. Then Uncle Misha took some boards they had in the apartment and boarded up the windows, they got their things together, something to wear, and came over to our place.
And at five o'clock in the afternoon they started pounding on our door. There wore many of them, very many. There was din, and shouting: "We know you're in there, open up!" They raced into the courtyard, and then into the entryway. And they were all wearing something dark. It wasn't coats, it wasn't... I don't know, maybe a uniform or something they all had on? All of them were wearing dark clothing.
When they started breaking down the door Edik said, "Go out on the bal¬cony!" Lilia and I, Karina and her children, and Zhasmen went out onto the balcony. We lived on the second floor. The attack came from the courtyard side, but on the street side there was no mob, there were only passersby. We shouted: "Help! We're being killed!" A Russian woman was walking past, and I was shouting to her. Well the Azerbaijanis looked up, and nothing, and the Russian woman looked up and said, "What can I do?" I said, "Call someone, have them come!" Well she went on by, I don't know if she went to call or not. Meanwhile, apparently, they had broken the door down. My sis¬ter-in-law ran up, she had been with them, with the men. Ira runs up and says, "What, can't you get over to the other balcony?" We wanted to get over to the neighbors' balcony. We lived in the third entryway, and from our bal¬cony we climbed over to a balcony in the second entryway. If it weren't for the grape vines, for the vine supports, we wouldn't have made it over. Even if my sister-in-law had helped us we wouldn't have made it. Zhasmen went first. Meanwhile they broke the door down. When we were climbing over there was shouting in the room ... I was going to go after Zhasmen. I could not make it. I got our child, and supported myself with one hand against the wall so as to climb over, and the child started to fall. Her T-shirt tore. I could feel something tearing. I couldn't hold her tightly. I look, no, she's falling, and I went back. I went back and Karina says, "If you can't get over then there's no way I can do it pregnant." Karina was pregnant. . . And then Ira runs up. I say, "Ira, I can't get over there." She immediately grabbed the child and helped me, I helped her, too, by holding her child. She carried the child over to the neighboring balcony, and then she helped me climb over there. She helped Karina with her two children, and then jumped back over. She went to help the men. Ira had had a knife in her hand. She ran up to us and said, "Well, come on, what, can't you get over?" She threw the knife to the floor of the balcony and started helping us.
There were seven people left in the apartment. When we went out to the balcony my father-in-law had an axe in his hands, and Edik had a metal chair leg, and Igor had one too. My mother-in-law was empty-handed, she was so pale . . . And Edik too, when we went out, was entirely pale, he was just white. And Igor . . . Well we all sensed . . . we already knew that they were going to kill us ... or wound us ... Karina even told Igor, "Let's say good-bye." But Igor said, "What are you saying?! Go . . . cross over, quick, onto the balcony!" And Edik was so pale, just white . . . And my mother-in-law was whiter than white. My father-in-law and Misha were standing next to the door, and we were in the room . . . Our last words were, "Let's say good-bye." Karina said that to Igor and Edik. Igor even cracked a grin, but Edik, pale, looked at me, and at the children, we had a premonition . . . These were our last words and our last moments ...
Father had an axe, Misha had something, I don't remember, I just don't remember . . . But he had something, too. I do remember that Edik had his coat on, and Igor had even put on a helmet. We had a motorcycle helmet. We even asked, "Igor, why are you putting on the helmet?" He said, "Well just in case, I'll have it on my head." And Edik had a hat on, too.
At the last moment, when we were crossing over, Karina and I turned our heads to Ira and said, "Ira, are you coming?" She says, "I'm not coming, I'm staying with my parents, you have children, you go over." We wouldn't have gone over ourselves if it hadn't been for the children. If it hadn't been for the children, we would have stayed too. It was for their sakes. Ira helped us. There were Zhasmen, Karina and her children, Lilia, and I—six of us, the six of us were there on our Azerbaijani neighbor's balcony. The balcony door was locked, we started knocking, and she came to the window and waved with her hand as if to say, "I won't let you in." And we said, "We're going to break the glass!" Anyway, she opened the door and let us in. She let us in, we were in the bedroom, and she started shouting for us to leave. She has two boys around 14 years old, and they started shouting, "We'll kill you our¬selves! Get out of here or we'll kill you!" At this point the neighbor's brother appeared. He had apparently been in the courtyard and seen them attacking us. All the neighbors were either in the yard or on their balconies watching. The neighbor whose apartment we crossed over to was named Sevil. She shouted, "Get out of here!" We started pleading, "Let the children stay, we'll leave." She wouldn't do it. Her brother chased out Zhasmen and Karina and her children, but I held back, in the corner, I was hiding there. He chased them out and came back into the room and saw me: "Oh," he said, "are you still here?!" I started pleading, "Maybe you'll hide us, maybe you were afraid before when there were a lot of us, but now it's just me and the child." He began shouting again, but I had no intention of leaving. He took me by the collar and forced me and the child out into the entryway.
And through the wall you could hear noise and shouting. I heard the voices of my father-in-law, Edik, and Uncle Misha .. . They were talking and shouting, apparently, about how to ... I don't know, how to get away or how to defend themselves . . . You could hear the voices of those animals, "Kill them, don't spare them!
So Sevil's brother threw me and the child out of her apartment. I was on the second floor in the neighboring entryway. I couldn't see Karina or Zhasmen. I figured that they had gone downstairs, but then I thought because of the children Karina wouldn't go downstairs. I went upstairs to the third floor and knocked . . . This whole time I heard noise and shouting-It was in our entryway, in the courtyard ....
There were two apartments on each landing in our building. They opened their doors and said, "No, get away!" We were the only Armenian family in the building. I went up to the fourth floor and knocked, and an Azerbaijani woman opened the door. I say, "Take the child, I'll leave, maybe one of my relatives will come for the child." She took the child, who was ... she was screaming, she screamed until she was just blue. She was crying so hard, Lilia, that I thought she wouldn't survive, because she was all blue. I handed her over. The neighbor took her and slammed the door. And I went back downstairs. I had already gone down two flights and was going to the courtyard, to my family. Then the woman opened her door again and said, "No, take your child, if they come knocking here she'll cry and they'll know it's not my child." Well I was no longer even thinking, I couldn't take any¬thing in, I was just so ... I just started going up to the fifth floor, thinking, well now what will I do? Now they're going to throw me and the child off the fifth floor. I thought, let them kill us in the courtyard ... In those moments, from the noise and shouts of "Kill them!" I realized that it was all over, that we were lost.
I went up to the fifth floor and knocked. I knocked and a man opened the door, I didn't even know where he was taking me. He led me into the bath¬room. And just then the power was shut off in our block; the telephones had been out since lunch.
I went into the bathroom and saw Karina and her children and Zhasmen there. And Lilia was sobbing terribly, she couldn't stop. The man closed the door to the bathroom and wouldn't open it, afraid that we would come out and look down from the balcony. From his accent you could tell that he was Lezgin, not Azerbaijani. Later he told us he was a Lezgin. "Calm the child," he said, "they may come up here and it'll go badly for us, too." Karina's chil¬dren are a little older and calmer, and they fell asleep. I couldn't calm Lilia down. The bathtub was full of water, and I got into the tub, rocking Lilia.
I didn't know if I should rock the child or ... There were shouts from the courtyard, such wild shouting, oh, it was terrifying! At one point we even knocked, saying, "Open up, we'll go out, we can't stand it!. .. We'll go to our family!" We heard Ira shouting. It didn't even sound like her voice, she shouted, "Oh, Mamma!" As we later found out, they had burned her alive. .. they stripped her ... or they had killed Mother first, and she saw it. It didn't even sound like Ira's voice shouting, but I recognized it immediately and said, "That's Ira!" I can't even describe her voice when she shouted, "Oh, Mamma!"
Later we learned how our family had died. A Russian man who lived in the next building gave testimony. He described it and made sketches when he was at the Procuracy. First they stripped my mother-in-law, she was an older woman, 52, they stripped her and dragged her downstairs, they dragged her, and took her to the basement, and in the basement they beat her, they beat her and tossed her aside, she was on the verge of death, and they thought she was already dead. And those 12- and 13-year old boys took sticks and beat her and beat her and beat her to death. That's what the Russian said. They beat her and then threw her into the basement. He said they beat Edik, my husband, with sticks and shovels. They had axes and some sort of special shovels, and some kind of knives, it was all homemade, it had all been specially prepared. He said, "They beat your husband, they hit him in the head with the shovel, and then they burned him." They burned him to the point that he couldn't even be recognized later. Only by scraps of his clothing. There were scraps of his pants and his shoes, and that was all. His second cousin, he lives in Jorat, Grisha, he identified him. 1 said, "Maybe it wasn't him?" He says, "You know, it was hard to recognize him, but it was he." They burned Ira, too. They took her clothes off . . . and burned her alive! He saw all of it, the Russian man, he was in the courtyard. Almost all the neighbors were in the courtyard. He said they stripped her and poured gasoline on her and burned her next to the streetlight. Grisha identified her, too, I don't know how, but he did. They found my father-in-law behind the building. When they were dragging him, he shouted to one of those guys in Azerbaijani, "What, are you too attacking me? You too want to kill me?!" That means it was someone he knew. He was 52. Igor lay in the yard, off to the side from Edik and Ira. He was completely beaten, his legs were half- burned, and there were burned spots on his face, evidently they had put cigarettes out on his face. They found Uncle Misha across the street. While he was defending himself, they killed my family. They had forced Uncle Misha out toward the road, over where the bus lot is. And that whole crowd, all those people, and the neighbors, went to watch him. They threw stones at him, and he sat and covered himself with his arms so they would not hit his head. There were a lot of them, then ran up to him, one had a shovel... they all had those shovels and equipment pieces, one of them had a really odd shovel, not rounded, but squared off, and sharpened. And with this shovel... he hit him in the head. They burned Uncle Misha alive, too.
Seven people had remained in the apartment, and they killed six. Only Zhasmen and Uncle Misha's daughter, Marina, survived.
The whole time we were locked in at our Lezgin neighbor's. We heard the shouts from the courtyard, and asked him through the door, "What's hap¬pening to our family?" He walked by and in Azerbaijani, said, "It's some¬thing horrible. I can't tell you." We said, "Open up, open up," but he wouldn't open the door.
He let us out when everything was quiet. It was dark. We asked, "What time is it?" He says, "I'm afraid even to light a candle, because no one has any lights on." Then he lit a match and looked. I had a watch, too: it was nine o'clock. He let us out an hour after it was all over, when they had all left and it had grown quiet; the pogrom and the killing had gone on for three hours. He said, "Come out, have a seat." Well we told him right away, "Let's look off the balcony." He said, "No, I won't let you out onto the balcony." He pushed us right from the bathroom into the room. We sat down on the couch. He had a wife and three children, two boys and a girl. He even told one of the boys, "Don't tell anyone that there were Armenians here in the bathroom ..." We were silent a while and then we said, "Tell us." He said, can't tell you, it was awful." He couldn't tell us! Well, we asked, "What should we do?" He answered, "I can't keep you until tomorrow morning, afraid, if you can, leave now, if the neighbors see you in the morning they'll give me away." And what if one of those animals, one of those sadists, was from our building?! "I'm afraid," he said, "I'm a Lezgin, and I'm very fright-ened. If you can, leave now." We were crying, "Where will we go?" We didn't have any real clothes on, we had run out in robes, and the children ... we were wearing indoor clothes, we ran out wearing what we had on. Karina said, "I'll stay with the children, and you and Zhasmen go to my brother's, have him drive us away from here." Her brother lived in the fourth microdistrict. Karina's children fell asleep on the couch, but not Lilia. Lilia simply couldn't calm down. Karina took her in her arms, but she wouldn't stay there. Then Karina said, "I'll go with Zhasmen. You stay with the chil¬dren, we'll go." That man gave Karina some shoes, his old raincoat, and his wife's old scarf. I said, "Karina, if you can't reach your brother's, go to our place in Microdistrict 4." My Papa lived in Microdistrict No. 4, too. I said, "Maybe he won't' be home. We have Russian neighbors, they're friends, you can go to their place, tell them to have someone come for us."
They put clothes on and left. I stayed with the three children. The man watched from the balcony, and said that they had already made it out to the street. Fifteen minutes passed and he said, "If they don't come back in an hour, you and the children have to leave, I can't keep you until morning." I said, "What are you saying?! I can't even walk, I can't even go down the stairs. How will I make it with three children? We don't have outdoor clothes on, they'll recognize us ... and the children are sleeping!" Lilia had fallen asleep by this time, too. He said, "I don't know, but if they're not back in an hour you'll have to leave."
About an hour and a half later a truck drove up. He looked out the bal¬cony and said, "A truck! They've come for you!" I say, "No, I'm afraid, it's probably those bandits again." He said, "I don't know, but that truck is prob¬ably coming for you." I told him, "I'm not leaving until I see for myself." I went out onto the balcony and looked: Zhasmen was getting out. With sol¬diers. I woke the children. But I couldn't walk. I said, "Help me!" He said, "No, you have to go down by yourself, go down before the soldiers get up to the fifth floor." "I can't." He asked again, saying, "No, you have to go by yourself, and hurry, before the soldiers get here." I took Lilia into my arms, and Seryozha too, and told Kristina, "Kristina, you're a big girl, let's go." She was frightened, and grabbed at my hem. I went out. . . and my legs gave way. When I remembered how I had come up the stairs, I... I imagined that I would now go out and see our family, our balcony ... I went down to the fourth floor. I sat down. I sat down, I could go no further. I see the soldiers coming up, about ten of them. Armed. They took the children, and helped me up with their arms. I couldn't stand up by myself. And I was thinking if so many people came for me, it meant something happened to my family, The soldiers said, "You've held out for so long, just hang on." Then they said, "When you go out, get right into the vehicle, don't look around! You might shot." So we went down to the first floor, and they stopped. Several sol-diers went out to look. Then I and the children, we were in the middle, they were surrounding us, got into the vehicle. I looked at our balcony anyway: the windows were all broken, tatters of clothes were hanging there. Something was still burning next to the condominium building, and there was smoke coming from near the streetlight, too. It was Ira and Edik. But at the time I thought it was burning furniture ... It was cold, it was drizzling They pushed me into the vehicle and said, "We told you not to look." Zhasmen was already inside. There were other Armenians, too, from Microdistrict 4. The Armenians were being evacuated. They took us to the City Party Committee. We stood on the square in the rain, without clothes on. There were many guard dogs near the City Party Committee. We stood in line for 20 minutes until it was our turn to go in. We went in to the first floor, and there was no room at all, you couldn't even get your foot in there! We ran into a neighbor from Papa's microdistrict, he took the children into his arms and said, let's go upstairs, we're in a room upstairs. We walked upstairs to the fourth floor. What am I saying, walked upstairs? It probably took us half an hour to make our way up there, because there were people on the stairs, sitting, lying, standing, any way they could. There were about 30 people in the room, if not more, children and adults. A woman gave us her spot on the floor. We put the children to bed. Someone gave Karina their place on the floor, too. There were infants sleeping on the table, about five of them, really small ones, 2 or 3 months.
Despite everything we still hoped, we still had the fainiest hope that our family was still alive, only wounded. Although when we were on the fifth floor, besides Ira's cries we also heard the bandits shouting, "We've killed the five of them! Look—blood! We have Armenian blood on our hands!"
That same night the soldiers went around the floors of the City Party Committee asking people where their relatives were. We wrote about ours, too: Karina's brother, my father and my sister. The soldiers returned and said, "They weren't there, but the neighbors told us they're in a safe place."
On the morning of the 1st the children woke up and were hungry, they asked for water and tea, but no one had anything. We went around asking who had what, who had brought things from home. Then the soldiers began feeding us. On March 2 around evening time my Papa found us. He and my sister's family had hidden in Jorat. I could see it all in his eyes, he started crying, he already knew what had happened to our family. Papa's apartment was completely burned, too.
On March 3 we were taken to the village of Nasosny under armed guard. Things were better there, of course, and safer: no one would attack us, noth-ing could harm us there.
Already during those days I was often thinking about why specifically our family was treated so brutally and savagely. Perhaps because we fought for ourselves, defended ourselves as best we could? Indeed there had been four healthy men in there. But perhaps it was merely hatred, malice. We weren't poor, after all. But maybe someone gave us away—that Russian said that my father-in-law recognized someone in the gang ...
No other Armenians lived in the building besides us. They didn't go into any other entryway, they came right to our place, right up to the second floor, and didn't even knock on the neighbors' door. They knew that we were living on the second floor and in apartment 21. We had even removed the name plate. Someone sent them. And there was the building manager. He had come to our apartment. What were his intentions? "Don't leave, it's safer to stay at home." But when he was walking over he must have seen them stealing and throwing things down. That means he knew; he told us to stay home on purpose. He had never come to our place before. I told the investigator about the building manager. He says, "We asked him, too, what proof do you have?" I said, "The proof is that he came at four-thirty, and fifteen minutes later the attack began." He said, "Maybe he had good intentions, and genuinely thought that you'd be safer at home." He doesn't deny that he came to our apartment, and he gave the same time, too: four-thirty. I argued with the investigator, I was overwrought, and said, "Torture him like they show on television." He said, "What do you think I should do, smash his fingers in the door? Is that what you think I should do? Did you see him in the gang? You don't have any proof. Maybe the man had good intentions."
So that was how our lives were turned upside down. We had a family—but no more.
We had lived in friendship. Not long before that we had gotten an apart¬ment. My father-in-law said, "Now Igor's got a place and moved in, and you, Edik, have a place too. Now we'll fix it up. You'll sleep at your place, but eat your lunches and spend your birthdays and holidays at our place. Only sleep at your place, because I have to have you and my grandchildren around. I'd like to come home and have you already here." He was very kind to us, his daughters-in-law. He would call us over, smiling: "Irina, Karina, come over here. If your mother-in-law says anything wrong to you, you let me know." Well Karina and I would always laugh. He often told his wife, "Your words are heavy." Well he'd say it in Armenian, meaning that if she said anything to us our feelings would be hurt, but if he said something, they wouldn't be. He told her to keep quiet, that he would say anything that needed to be said. We, the two daughters-in-law, called him Papa, and our children called him dedulia [Gramps.] And my mother-in-law had taken the place of my mother. He'd come home from work and say, "Why are you all hanging around here? Air pollution get to you? Let's go to the dacha!" He couldn't get along an hour without his grandchildren, without us. He posi¬tively wanted all of us there in the evenings. That was on weekdays, and on Saturdays and Sundays he wanted us to come first thing in the morning, or after work, and stay till evening, till midnight.
At home we spoke Armenian, sometimes we spoke Russian. But my father- and mother-in-law would always speak Armenian among them¬selves and with us. We always had guests over, relatives or friends. At the able my father-in-law would always say, "Stay for the week!" That was his favorite thing to say, and he'd also say, "Eat, drink, and be merry!" Mother—mother was heavy-set, a short, red-cheeked woman, she loved to knit things for her grandchildren, she could knit very well. She knew how to sew, too. She was, you know, a calm woman. She preferred to be silent, lis-tening. But how she loved to laugh! Someone would be telling something and you'd hear her voice, her laughter.
Ira was 27, she worked at a pharmacy. She was single. She resembled her mother, she was short, but she was thin. How she would help us! She was the housewife. Her mother worked, she'd get home at six in the evening, but Ira got home at four, and all the housework fell on her. She loved to prepare meals, and she'd do the wash, and everything else so that things would be in order around the house. How she loved to straighten up!
Igor resembled his mother too: stocky and calm. True, he was tall and strong. He loved to relax. He'd come home after work and sit, but not Edik, Edik couldn't do that! He'd come home and always be doing something, be involved with something or other. He used to work at a tailor's, he'd come home and immediately be doing whatever people needed, something would have come unstitched or someone would need a button. He was a tailor before he went into the Army, and after that he did furniture covers. Edik served in Afghanistan. In 1978 he served for about two months off in the Baltic Republics, and then he was sent to Afghanistan. He was there almost two years. He told how hard he found it to be in the Army, but all the same he felt he had to do his duty. He told of being attacked by the Afghans. But he wasn't wounded in Afghanistan, he came back all in one piece, as the phrase goes, without a scratch, but here, on Soviet territory, he was killed, and so brutally! Even .. . even the fascists probably wouldn't have done that, kill and then burn beyond recognition. If it had happened in Afghanistan it wouldn't be quite so painful, but here, on Soviet territory, in our country, for something like that to happen. They had to be sadists, animals, to do some¬thing like that.
Edik also loved Lilia because she resembled him. He always said, "She's my daughter." My father-in-law named her. We didn't want to hurt his feel¬ings, so we named her as he wished; he liked that very much. When Edik would come home from work he would always bring her something, a toy or something else. He would open the door and say, "Lilia, come see what Papa brought you!" And she got used to it: "Papa's home, Papa, what did you bring me?" If he went anywhere he would always take her with him. And in the car she always had to sit up front, next to her father. She would get in and immediately turn on the tape player. Edik always said, "There's my daughter for you, she loves music." He played the accordion very well. At Detskiy Mir, the toy store, he would usually buy her a toy piano, or accordion, or a drum. Our Lilia had a birth defect, she was born with a dislo¬cated hip, and the doctors recommended either a cast or a brace. They said if she didn't wear a brace she'd have a limp. Of course we took this to heart: our first child, a girl, and she'd have a limp. We immediately got a referral and took her to the Traumatology Institute. The child was around five months old, and when she was 14 months the brace was removed. We wait ed so long, it was so hard. My mamma was still alive, she helped us. They took off the brace and told us she should be walking in a month. And when they took the brace off and then held her by her hand, she took her first steps. Edik said, "Watch her, watch her, in case she starts to limp ..." She started walking at 15 months. We were so happy! She started walking,and she didn't limp. She was completely healed. How we celebrated! How many guests were there!
Several days before February 29 Edik had bought her Finnish coveralls, and the marauders took even those. She had had a simple pin in her hat, it had cost four rubles, and they took that, too. So they took her coveralls, and her hat-pin, apparently they must have thought it was gold, but they left her hat.
On March 10 Karina and I were taken home. The investigator was there, and there were armed soldiers, one stood guard in the entryway, a second stood at the door, and a third was on the balcony the whole time we were in the apartment. It was awful and eerie to go inside, everything was over¬turned, and all the dishes had been smashed. And how they had destroyed the furniture! You had to have time to chop it up like that. They even broke the mirror in the bathroom. The lighting fixtures had been torn down. There had been meat in the freezer, they broke the freezer and took the meat, they even took the meat!
We buried our five people—I don't remember what date it was—in Baku, at Volchi Vorota Cemetery. Before that Karina and I had been summoned to the City Party Committee. We had hoped that someone from our family was still alive, for Edik's friend, Gamlet, a photographer, said that Edik was in serious condition, he was in the hospital. He was only trying to calm me down, but I went on hoping all the same. Someone from Moscow spoke with us, I don't recall his name. He started reading off a list: Sogomon Melkumian, Raisa Melkumian, Igor Melkumian, Irina Melkumian, and when he got to Eduard Melkumian, I thought he was going to say that they were all alive, or in serious condition. But he said, "Died." Then he said, "The funeral is today, your relatives are expecting you."
We didn't see their faces, the caskets were closed. About 20 of our rela¬tives were with us. There was Armenian music playing. They buried the parents, and at their heads, the three children. We weren't even allowed to finish mourning: "Hurry up, hurry up." There were people from the Council of Ministers there, from Moscow. And there was a police car. Karina and I were saying, "It was they who did this!" Our relatives told us, "Be quiet, stop saying that." They feared for us.
It was raining. There was a very strong wind. They put up five metal crosses. There were no names on them. The weather was so bad, they said they'd put them on later ...
June 3,1988 Ararat Boarding House Near the Village of Arzakan Hrazdan District Armenian SSR
