On August 24, Spartak went into the storage room of his home in
Gyumri, hung the rope from a ceiling, tied a part of it to his neck and
tried to put an end to his miserable life. His mother and aunt had made
it in time to take him down from the gallows, gave him artificial
breathing to make his heart function and hurried to the hospital where
doctors saved his life. Spartak returned home after staying one week in
the hospital. The marks left on the neck will fade away quicker than
the family’s problems.
What had caused the ten year-old boy to hang himself? Maybe it was the
longing for his father who had gone to Russia to work. “Boris had never
been outside of the country in his whole life,” says the child’s mother
Nazik Markaryan, “But we could not live like this anymore. He used to
repair a laundry machine and the money kept on getting delayed. They
kept on saying ‘Boris, we will give the money when we get the
subsidiary’. There was not enough money for bread. One day, he said
that it was enough living like this.” His friend suggested that they go
to Russia and work. Nazik continues: “He said Nazik, other wives wait
3-4 years for their husbands to return, I will go for the first time in
my life. I will earn some money and come back. Three months is nothing.
I will be here for New Years. He could not stay in the winter, his feet
hurt.” However, one month has not even passed and Spartak already
misses his dad. “He used to say that he could not wait three months for
his dad and cried all day”. The family says that Spartak is very close
with his father, he likes to wear his clothes and says that when he
grows up he will be an artisan just like him. That day he fought with
his sister when she took out a blue insulating tape from his father’s
toolbox. “My son did not let her. He said ‘do not touch my father’s
tools’,” says Nazik, “they had a dispute,he cried and said ‘none of you
love me, only my father loves me, I am going to get run over by a car’
and ran to the door. I said to him ‘how dare you throw yourself under a
car’ and locked the door.” Spartak still intends on committing suicide.
In order to keep his mother away, he lies and says that he is covering
the cracks in the wall with the whitewash. “He said, ‘if you don’t let
me go, then I will do the same work my dad does.” If the family had not
sat down for breakfast at that hour and the mother had not gone out to
look for her son, they would not know that Spartak is hung in the
storage room. Adrine goes to find her brother. “I called him to come
for dinner. There was no sound. I looked from the window, no sign of
him. Then I opened up the storage room door and saw Spartak. I yelled
to my mother”. The girl thought that her brother was asleep in an
awkward position and came running and screaming to her mother. “I came,
I still had not looked up,” tells the mother, “I said Spartak come and
eat dinner. Then I looked up and saw the rope. I thought Jesus Christ,
he has hung himself and grabbed his feet. But I could not resist myself
and fell to the ground. Something pulled me off the ground so I could
save my son.” The mother grabbed her child with one hand and lifted him
up, stretched her hand out to her husband’s toolbox to get the
scissors, cut the rope but her hand didn’t reach.
Adrine goes out calling for help and at the entrance she sees Aunt
Nvart coming. The aunt gets the scissor and cuts the rope. Spartak was
not breathing. “I had learned how to give artificial breathing by
watching television and I started to press the heart,” says Nvart. “And
then all of a sudden the heart started to function….”. During the whole
time in the ambulance, Nvart keeps pressing and releasing the lungs and
giving artifical breathing, until they reach the Gyumri hospital where
the doctors save Spartak’s life. “When they brought the child to the
hospital, he was in a state of unconsciousness,” says general doctor of
the hospital Ashot Kurghinyan. “He lacked all reflexes, he could not
breathe on his own, only the heart was functioning. He was given
artificial breathing and cured in the recuperation department. That’s
how his consciousness got restored, he came back to life and his
reflexes were back to normal. The doctor says that the child is back to
normal, he has no deflection, however, it would be good for him to get
psychological help. Nobody talks about the incident at home. That is a
closed subject. If there is any talk about the hospital, they say that
Spartak had a stomach ache.
On the same day of the incident, the wife of Boris’s friend called her
husband in Sverdlovsk, Russia and told him that Spartak had a stomach
ache, he was seriously ill and if his father did not come his
temperature would not go down. Boris leaves work and comes back. “I had
left Armenia by getting a loan. I had to work to pay it off. I had only
worked for ten days and I barely had money to get back. They gave me
nothing. My friend found some money. He said here take the money and
don’t worry about it. If I can’t pay back the debt, then I will do some
begging and get it back”. There were no flights that day. He waited
impatiently for two days. He was certain that his son has died.
Everything crossed his mind-maybe Spartak got run over by a car, or
went on top of the garage and accidently fell down, or maybe he had
gotten a stomach ache from eating something poisonous and died. “When I
reached the entrance to our home, I saw that there was no casket and I
got happy. I said to myself that I had not lost my child.” As soon as
Spartak saw his dad entering the hospital, he gave the Snickers candy
bar to his dad and said eat it, you look hungry, but his dad only said
‘you eat it my son, eat it for me’.
“I love my dad the most because he is the one who takes care of the
family,” Spartak says already at home. Forty two year-old Boris
Tamazyan has also been close with his dad, who died on December 7 last
year on Earthquake Day. “From that day on, I just feel bad,” says Boris
with tears in his eyes. Boris has worked with his dad for 10 years in
the grinding machine factory. He lost his home and job after the
earthquake in Gyumri. He started to work as an artisan, however, orders
are few in Gyumri. There are months when he works 1000 dram the most or
10-12,000 dram. Nazik is in the same situation. She lost her home and
job. After the earthquake they both got married and started living in a
cottage where Spartak and Adrine were born. Life was hard in the
cottage. Boris got diagnosed with rheumatism and the money he worked
was spent on medicine.
Nazik also has health problems. She has complexities from a heavy flu,
but she has not gone to a doctor because she didn’t have money at the
time. She has also lost hearing for one ear. In 2000 they have received
a certificate for buying an apartment and got one through the American
Urban Institute project. Boris’s sickness has somewhat gotten better,
but when it starts raining or snowing he gets sick again and can not go
to work. “My feet get weak and I can’t carry anything heavy.” However,
the new apartment has created some problems that they are not used to.
The family was not able to pay for heating. They used to collect wood
and make a fire in the winter. The wood was collected from the
neighboring village. “But how can I bring wood to the building?”, asks
Nazik. The Tamazyans live on the 9,500 dram subsidiary. They buy the
bread and necessary food by credit until they get money to pay for it.
But when they have no hope of getting money, they just starve. “When my
daughter wants something to eat, my son tells her to be happy that you
have that piece of bread”, says Nazik. In the winter, they make a
choice: either buying food or wood. On cold days Spartak brings a
branch with him from school. I ask him why he brings it, he says
mother, put this in the fireplace so you won’t get cold.” When they
were living in the cottage, Nazik used to go the neighboring Azatan
village with her children to “pletch” something and bring buckets of
potatoes home (when the villagers finish harvesting the crop, they
leave the remainder for the poor). Now she does not go because the
apartment building is far away from the village and she can not go
there by foot.
One time, Nazik went to the village in despair and came back
empty-handed. The villagers said that the hail destroyed the harvest. A
year ago, Spartak had seen a multicolor building under construction and
thought that that could be a place for his mom to work. “He came and
told me that behind our apartment building they are constructing a toy
factory and that I can go work there. I went to see what it was and saw
that they were building a gas station. My son had thought that it was a
toy factory”. School has started, but neither Spartak nor his sister
has shoes to go to school. Spartak has sewn the cracks in his shoes
with his own hands. Adrine is ashamed to go to school with her old
shoes. Other girls in school dress nicely and she dresses in ragged
clothes. Nazik had a fear that people would blame Spartak for what he
had done. “I was praying to God in front of Jesus’s picture (Jesus’s
picture is hung from the wall in our house). Jesus Christ, save
Spartak’s soul, so that my reputation does not go down, so they won’t
say that I have not raised him well and that is why he did what he
did,” said Nazik. The children don’t even have books for school. The
family’s hope was that Boris could send some money from Russia for the
school year to buy books, shoes and clothes. Nazik has asked the school
principal to let the children have the books for free, but the
principal has rejected her. “He claimed that ‘the whole district does
not have money. Who can I satisfy? I don’t know. Maybe I can do
something for Spartak’.” Until going to the principal, Spartak had
asked his mother not to give money for books, but his mother has lied
to him by saying that the books are free. “I have always done something
about the money for books, but I don’t know what I can do this year,”
says Boris.
Boris does not want to go to Russia yet, even though his friend has
told him that he can find the money for him if he wants. But Boris does
not want to be separated from his child. “I think to myself-where can I
go? I have only one boy. For whom will I work if I lose my child? It is
better to be hungry and be with my child. Spartak is in the center of
attention. Aunt Nvart has bought a toy train for him with her subsidy.
“My subsidy is 3,300 dram. I don’t even have money for food, but when I
found out that Spartak was going to come home from the hospital, I
bought a toy train for him for 3,000 dram knowing that he would like
it.”Adrine feels really bad because she thinks that the reason for
Spartak committing suicide was the dispute between her and Spartak. One
of the visitors of the hospital gave 100 dram to Adrine and she bought
a small lantern for Spartak. Of course, the light does not turn on,
there was no money left for batteries. But it’s not a problem. The
light will be turned on soon. Adrine has already collected 30 dram. She
will collect 30 more and will buy a battery for 60 drams.