This young man doesn’t have a “daddy” who has a lot of money and drives a Jeep. All he has is a stinky and humid room that he has rented in a hostel for 4,000 AMD (10 dollars), a cat and dog that he found on the street and his mother, who he considers the most valuable and who suffers from seeing her unfortunate son.
Thirty-four year old Karen Kocharyan says that he is part of the tired youth of today. It’s kind of hard for him to admit that he is tired of everything. Perhaps it’s a shame for a guy his age to feel this way, but it’s even more of a shame that he is still waiting for a better day. To this day, he has lived with the hope that he will find a job, earn a living, buy a house, get married, but…now, he doesn’t believe in that and walks around his hostel room the whole day thinking about that just killing time.
We met Karen in the hallway. He was a little shy at first, but later invited us to his “house”.
In 1976, he and his mother Knarik left everything behind in Baku and moved to Armenia. They used to live in the one bedroom house belonging to Knarik’s brother, who had inherited the house to his son before his death. So, they were left homeless. The owner of the hostel in the Kanaker community has agreed to provide them with shelter in a humid room with no air of spring for 4,000 AMD a month. The atmosphere inside the home reminds them of the cold and dark years of Armenia, but as soon as you get outside, you look at all the beautiful things around you and feel that life is beautiful.
Knarik sells sunflower seeds in car stores over the weekends just to occupy herself. She manages to earn 500 AMD (1 dollar) for bread during those two days. Sometimes her neighbors buy sunflowers, but her “business” runs a high risk factor because her clients complain about her service.
“The room is too humid. When I cook the sunflower seeds, they get humid after a while. I don’t know what to do. My customers complain and say that the sunflowers are wet,” she says.
Knarik and her son say that they work a little on Saturdays and Sundays, set food on the table those days, and then…
They pay off the rent and electricity bill with Knarik’s 7,700 AMD pension. She can’t work as a custodian because she is ill, she has high pressure. As for Karen, he is an electrician/technician by profession. He hangs his head low and says:
“I follow up on all job announcements, but I just don’t have any luck. Nothing works out. I don’t have any friends or relatives to help me find a job. They are all dead. The employers don’t even care about my diploma.”
Karen has worked at a construction site and has then laid in bed for three days due to an ulcer. They love Armenia a lot, but miss Baku often.
“During the Soviet era, Baku was an international city. Jews, Russians, Armenians and Turks all used to live there. There were a lot of smart people. Now you have the villagers there, but there is no culture,” says Karen who shifts from the social topic to other topics so that he can show how much he knows.
Mrs. Knarik lost a lot of her relatives after the war and says that her son is all she has. She feels terrible that her son doesn’t have the opportunity to get married. Mother and son sleep on the two couches in the 3-4 square meter room. The room is both a kitchen and a bedroom, and the bathroom is for everyone living in the hostel. Karen and his mother say that they are so used to the winter cold that they don’t even turn on a heater. Karen asks:
“Put yourself in the bride’s shoes. Would you come and live somewhere like this?”
Then he adds that even if he was married, he wouldn’t bring his wife to this room because he would feel pity for the girl. Sixty-seven year old Knarik searches for the right moment when Karen isn’t listening and tells me that she no longer has hope that she will see her son married before her death. Karen doesn’t hear his mother and says:
“Nothing seems to work out, nothing…I get disappointed and tired. True, a man shouldn’t say these kinds of things, but honesty is a good thing. You say to yourself: to hell with it, it’s life. Whatever happens, happens.”
Karen gets more frustrated and says that Armenia is not the country where you can actually wait for a better day. All he cares about is finding a job.
“I hear about how life is in Russia and hope there is some way I can go there. They give hypothec loans to families that are just starting out, fix suitable interest rates and take out 25% for families with one child. The Russian government does all it can to increase the population, to see a new generation, but it seems as though Armenia doesn’t care about the new generation.”
He says that the government closes all the doors of opportunities for young people like himself while his son may just increase the population by one. Karen considers himself part of the youth that is obligated to be patriot because he can’t find a ticket to leave for abroad; otherwise they would escape. According to Karen, he doesn’t picture leaving for abroad in order to live a better life, but rather because he feels that nobody wants him here and that people will need him abroad.
“Neither the government nor the people need me. If I die tomorrow, who is going to know that I’m dead? We are living like animals, it’s like survival of the fittest. The state says one thing-go and work as a custodian. The thing is that I feel that is not for me, I am an intellectual. I will simply ruin myself, I will disrespect myself and won’t be able to feel at ease when I buy bread with the money I get.”
He says that he is not like Lenin to gather the working class and lead them by saying “Let’s go teach them a lesson”. Karen realizes that he has lost the battle and doesn’t feel like continuing the struggle because his past shows that he will feel disappointment.
“I can’t achieve anything in a world full of mafia oligarchs that go at each others’ throats like a pack of wild bores. I am not a bore,” he says.
Karen used to feel good about himself when he was working in the basalt factory in Jrvezh as a locksmith. After he lost his job, he simply lives with inertia. Now his job is to find a job.