He sat on his knees, among the cool, dark furrows of the garden. The land of his solace. She was watching his hands. He spoke very softly with them - holding two grey stones together and by slowly, quietly grinding them, brought a coarse dust into being. Breathing slowly, she fought off the rising panic his tension caused in her. She declined to reach out and touch him as yet, but waited. Then, as if words were only latecomers to his abstract voice, he began to explain.
"She wouldn't have come with me, us. Not any of them. Not even when the mortars fell on the fields. When there were great gouges in the ground and she cried, I remember, because of the harvest and the sight of it. We stayed away from our ruined fields then, except at night when we sneaked out into the darkness. Until the militia came, anyway. They went through the towns and drove everyone into the hills in the winter."
He paused, after his words grew faint with remembering, distance gathered in his eyes. She frowned at the formal tone of his words, feeling wretched in this judgment when the pain was so evident and transmuted through the gestures in his hands.
"She was crying in the night, on her knees in the dirt," he began again. "My father came. Did he? Yes, from the States to take us out of there. She hadn't followed him years before, you know, when he took my sister and emigrated with my uncle to New York. And with the war, even with the war - she said she was mother to this land, even as to her kids, and wouldn't abandon it."
"Quel saccage du jardin de la beauté," Sara murmured. "What havoc in the garden of beauty."
He nodded, "I remember the stubborn lines on my brother's face too - as stricken as she was and holding her shoulders against my father's arguments. All of their voices hissing in the night. I guess I was the only one small enough to pick up, because my father carried me away from there finally."
He looked up into her face, the grinding stones calmed, but his eyes were wet and flashing. "That's it, I just remembered why. Why the garden means so much to me."
Oh dear, she thought. "Do you think? I mean, I see you get so much... happiness out of it. How does the memory of the war and," she hesitated, "losing your family bring you that?"
"No. No, I mean that it reminds me of it. And I couldn't figure out until now why the garden makes me sad - at the same time that I love it so much."
Sara knew that this garden was one of a few things that helped him feel complete. It was a deeply personal space that he entered each morning and afternoon - watering, planting, pulling weeds and moving compost about with utter meditation. There were evenings when she would look out from the house and see him stopped from work, silent among the vines or holding palmfuls of earth up to his tears. Mostly though, it brought him joy. Smiles and sweat and armfuls of green dinners. To see him so always turned her on, and she was filled with a deep and abiding security in her love with him. She experienced a state of almost perfect, religious intensity when seeing him walk to the back door in the setting, red light; smudged with the scent of musted earth, sky, his body, and the coolness of plants. It was their ritual then, to draw together, her brown fingers long and framing his face. Their footsteps turning steps before the kiss. Tall bunches of kale and green topped onions her bouquet, caught up wet against her chest. The spice of ground cardamom her scent.
"Javen," she spoke, reaching her hands out to enfold his, "after the war, in Armenia..."
"There's always war in Armenia," he choked.
"Well, do you think your family would've tried to go back to their land?"
"If they could. Our home was built on it. My uncle said that the grandparents were buried there."
Sara looked at him quizzically, "Not on church land?"
He shook his head amusedly, "No, my mother's family was ostensibly pagan. You know: born on that piece of land, married to it, buried there; dancing and fucking in the fields."
"Like us," she smiled.
"Like us," he nodded and touched her face, "in our own Karabagh, our own Black Garden."
"What do you want to do Javen? Do you want to try to find them?"
He looked to the sky, caught briefly in the startling clarity of its lapis. "Checked. There's no-one with the Karayanes' name in Tatev anymore."
"But they could be elsewhere!"
"They could be anywhere. If they... if. Look, my mother took up handfuls of dirt and held on. Do you think they actually drove her out of there?"
Sara drew a breath and sighed, wiping her palms on her jeans. The sun had set, and she felt the ground growing cold beneath her. "I don't know. But if you want to look, I'm there with you."
He caught her hand, "Thanks. Maybe. Maybe I need to build on this garden," he gestured with a shrugging sweep of his arm. Sara gazed into the dark tendrils of shadow that were already gathering dew around them. She breathed the essence of its flinty, green perfume, wondering as to the future.
"Can I help you in the garden tomorrow?" she asked of him, as they stood up, linked in arms.
Javen hesitated. "Are you sure?" For she had fairly much conceded the workings of the garden as his private hours and space. He felt touched, and suddenly wanted very much to share the garden tasks and satisfactions with her. "I mean, yeah, of course!"
She assured, as they threaded their way back to the house: "I'd like to learn."
---
Sara rose early in the day, pulled a long, floral print dress over her brown shoulders and kissed Javen awake. He took a fingerling of her wet hair from where it fell across his cheek and savored its clean scent.
"Mmmh. My goddess," he murmured.
"Ah, hush," Sara blushed. "I have an errand to run. I'll be back by noon to help in the garden, okay?"
"All right. See you later."
She kissed him light, "Love."
"Love."
---
In the warm noon hour Sara ate up the curvaceous hilltop road with her old blue Malibu. Racing home, serious in her intent. When she arrived she walked around the house and made her way down the slight bowl of a valley to the garden plot. Javen was there, and for a while she watched him - turning the earth, driven and grinning. She watched his shoulders and the very interesting path of sweat and dust down his back. Watched the shovel turn the ground over - the deep brown and nearly steaming soil. Watched his grin and anticipation and love of this ground, the work and the thought of lively green stuff thrusting up. Good to eat. Life.
Sara kicked off her shoes and in a moment when his work was still, she curved her hands around his denim waist and kissed his neck. "Hi there, sexy."
Blinking, he turned into her eyes and laughed. They stumbled back together to the deep ground. Javen lifted the massed tendrils of Sara's hair from her shoulders onto the grass, where they spread out from her face as a black and fluid delta.
She kissed below his ears, closing her eyes and catching the scent of the back of his neck. He smelled of pine needles, warmth and stone. It thrilled her, and she was moved to lightly, firmly bite him there. He felt her smile.
Sara felt the earth, like a hand, awaken at the small of her back, pressing close and lifting away as she moved to meet Javen. The rippling strength of the earth passed through her and she called out in a wordless, throaty growl. She was rich land, calling to him. She was a shining complexity of water. When he kissed her, her eyes echoed the clouds and she was the scent of lotus.
It became a way of knowing, a time of losing the effects of distinctions between things. He, her, the earth massed together. There came a sensation of falling away from the self; a shock, then the joy of entering into a flowing, surging river. He gasped, felt Sara/the earth move in a wave again. Her fingernails made claims to his skin, and her lioness roar surged and pulsed. Following the wave, he crested, foam spattered. Saw his own body with eyes wild and skin flushed, radiant with heat - tremble and change. Buds of leaves sprung from his fingertips, the groove of his tongue and along his spine. Tendrils sprouted from the crown of his head, spread out, snapping like snakes, luxuriant and green.
He felt Sara's mouth reaching to him, her lips silk-smooth and plumlike. His tongue flicked across the crystalline and wicked ivory of her teeth, tasting blood and salt and crushed wild berries. Drawing back he tried to focus on the wonder of her face but found himself unable to make distinctions between her sage green eyes and the garden around them. The lines and contours of her face rippled and fell out of focus. He reached for her, felt a thrill move through him and then found himself staring into a pool of stones, smooth and watery. He woke with a cry on his hands and knees, deep in a creekbed.
Soaked cold and surprised, Javen stood up to glance around him. Sara was nowhere to be seen, and he was locationally unsure of himself. "Well, it's not the garden. It's not San Francisco," he mused to himself. He clambered out of the creek, feeling a cold, dry wind cut across his wet arms and legs. "Oh, damn!" he managed, shivering and pulling up his jeans. "What a way to travel."
Mountains rose dry and sharp from a valley profuse with poppies. Silence lingered across the pale sky, save only for a faint hush-hushing of grass. A brief scent of smoke caught his attention. This was a place he knew after all: the countryside near Tatev. "Teletransporting again without a passport," he thought. "Hah."
Upon this realization, Javen bent to pick up a stone. He gripped it fiercely in his palm, feeling its solidity. He opened his hand to gaze at the small, round chunk of Armenia held there - letting sudden hot tears fall on his home. A distant crunch of rock against mild footsteps brought his attention up to the grassy crest of hill before him.
Sara strode into view, her long hair and print dress sliding across her willowy frame in the wind. She paused at the crest, shielding her eyes from the strong sunlight with a hand. Then she brightened and waved; she called out to him: "There you are. I thought we could have a look around?"
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