Rupen Khajag: The distance between two graves
In the cultural centre of Vayk,
where the walls once echoed numbers,
where papers whispered names now buried in silence,
a painting hangs.
A pomegranate
split clean down the middle,
its red seeds caught mid-fall
like teeth knocked from a child's mouth.
It does not bleed.
It does not close.
It stays open.
To one side,
Tatik-Papik
the stone elders of Artsakh,
faces weathered into the hills,
watching as the earth beneath them
was signed away in ink and fire.
To the other,
Tsitsernakaberd,
that hollow needle in the capital's sky,
forever pointing upward,
as if memory were a sin
we must carry straight-backed.
The girl who painted this was thirteen.
From Herher.
Where fruit trees once shaded homes,
and the dirt roads knew her name.
Where I, too, once sat
after the last war,
coffee trembling in chipped porcelain,
listening to mothers
rebuild the future with their voices.
Then came September
And the people arrived.
In this very hall,
we took them in.
They stood in doorways,
dripping history,
hands still smelling of ash and diesel.
We checked boxes.
Counted heads.
Whispered prayers we pretended were instructions.
Now I return.
Not with aid.
Not with forms.
But with questions I dare not ask aloud.
The girl is still here.
Older.
Quieter.
She has painted what none of us can say:
that we live between two monuments—
two graves carved into opposite ends of a single scream.
One for what was taken before we were born.
One for what was taken while we watched.
But the fruit still hangs.
Broken
But not rotten.
And perhaps that's all we have now:
A wound that refuses to close.
Seeds that refuse to die.
A painting on a wall
that tells the truth
when the rest of the world
has turned the other way.
