Scenes from the Life of a Student

Story by Artavazd Yeghiazaryan
Translated by Nazareth Seferian
Illustration by William Karapetyan
In cooperation with the European Union Delegation to Armenia

Dear admissions reviewer, who is required to read dozens of boring motivation letters, each one just like the other,

As I’m tired of using the same template simply changing a few words and the name of the university, I’m going to regale you with the story of my life. I know that you’re sitting there with the third (or fourth?) cup of coffee on your table and sighing at this development, but don’t jump to conclusions. First, I can assure you that my life story is not that long and, second, it is directly related to my application because all the key decisions in my life have focused on education, and this letter features yet another resolution in that vein. So here we go.

Pre-school

I don’t know whether or not you’ve heard in those citadels of Western civilisation of yours, but here in Armenia, the issue of education becomes a pathologically important feature for a child — me, in this case — starting from an age of roughly four and a half years old. I had barely begun to feel like an intellectual being when I suddenly found out that “Oh, no! This child can’t read or count!” Add to that the comparisons with the neighbour’s daughter, Hasmik, who was born the same day as I, half an hour later, but could already “read, write, recite poems, and do basic arithmetic,” and the conclusion was that I was falling behind. Somehow, after tears, whining, and feeling upset with the world, I managed to understand three apples and four pears as an arithmetic problem, and to draw figures resembling the alphabet using my colour pencils (and here I should say that I really did enjoy writing the letters). I somehow came to terms with that torture of homework because it was balanced with the play and fun we had at kindergarten. But my inner serenity was shattered one day.

School

“We’re going to school in a week!” my mother announced unexpectedly.

“Why wasn’t I consulted about this?” I thought as I rebelled inside, but I had no choice — I had to go. And so it was — September 1, Charbakh, school. A hot day. Hundreds of confused, befuddled children who did not understand what they were expected to do, why they had been dragged to this place, why those heavy bags hung on their shoulders. Happy and emotional parents. Excited teachers. “What poem can you recite?” Among all kinds of “If you’re happy and you know it…clap your hands” I am singled out and decide to start Tumanyan’s “The End of Evil.” I manage to get through it, stumbling in various parts (it was just nerves, given that my rehearsal at home had been flawless the previous day) before finishing the story of that stupid cuckoo, and thus ended my first admissions interview, after which I was enrolled in Mrs. Chokekchyan’s class. That child prodigy Hasmik (who had recited Tumanyan’s “The Dog and the Cat” from end to end and word for word during that same interview, and had announced that she’d been dreaming of attending school for a year already) was also in the same class. Moreover, we were placed next to each other, on the first bench in the middle row.

Hyperactive Lilith Asatryan and not-so-active Ernest Movsisyan sat behind us.

Let’s fast forward to grade four. I had gradually come to an understand, by this point, that the only thing that interested me was literature. I only enjoyed tests when they involved writing essays. Mrs. Davtyan had chosen to ignore the spellingon which I would score 3 and gave me a full score of 5 out of 5 for an essay, which she even read out to the whole class the following day. I noticed how Hasmik, the perfect student, looked at me with a combination of anger and respect — on the one hand, she was jealous that her immaculate work had not received the same admiration, while on the other hand, she was thinking, “Hmm, looks like Arthur isn’t completely useless after all.”

***

In the meantime, Ernest had understood that nothing in school interested him at all. A week after my triumph with the essay, Ernest caught me at the moment when my mother had dropped me off near the school entrance and rushed off to work.

“Hey there, Art. Have you done the homework we were assigned?” It was obvious that there was an ulterior motive to this question he was asking.

“Yeah, I stayed in yesterday instead of playing in the yard and finished…”

“Not me,” Ernest said, as if he had asked the question simply to speak about himself. “Let’s skip school.”

“And go where?”

“I don’t know. We could go to the Aeratsia neighbourhood and walk around there. I don’t feel like going to class.”

“But, but…”

“Come on, don’t overthink this. You’re not scared, are you? Let’s go!”

I wasn’t scared but, even though I’d really done my homework, I missed what life had been like without school. We ran off to Aeratsia. That was the story of the first time I skipped class, the first of several hundred occasions.

***

By that time, I had already established my position as an average child. My parents seemed to have given up on their dream of raising a child prodigyand resigned themselves to this reality. But, in order to keep me on my toes, I was required to do my homework with Hasmik at least once a week, either at her place or ours. In the fifth grade, I fell in love with Hasmik.

Ernest, who had completely stopped studying at this point, noticed the lovestruck glances I threw to the person with whom I had constantly been sharing the same bench over the years, and he released an unyielding torrent of all kinds of stupid teasing and humor. On the one hand, Ernest had never taken a liking to “that boring geek” Hasmik, but on the other hand he couldn’t understand how one could fall in love, and he was a bit jealous, thinking that my first experience with love posed a threat to our status as best friends. And, anyway, “what’s with this love thing, anyway? Let’s go and spend our time better by starting a fight with the kids in grade 5B.”

I’d fight, then go to study with Hasmik.

And then, one day, I decided that I had to confess my love to her. Admittedly, I had no idea how and why I had to do this, or what would happen afterwards. This was the plan — at the end of our maths homework session at Hasmik’s house, I would invite her to the cinema (I’d managed to save some of my lunch money) and there, during that first date of mine, I would tell her everything.

Hasmik acted differently that whole day. She wasn’t herself. It was as if her thoughts were elsewhere. Eventually, before we’d finished our maths homework, she said in a quivering voice,

“I’m not coming to school anymore.”

I raised my head from my notebook in shock and couldn’t say anything. My only thought was, “Damn it! Is she changing schools? Are they moving out? What if they go to Davitashen or something? How would we see each other then?”

“Dad’s been offered a job in Germany. Our flight is in four days.”

No love was confessed that day, no gift was presented, all hope was crushed and any motivation to study had dropped to zero — Ernest had won.

My only consolation was the creation of an alternative reality. All young people (and sometimes, even adults) in such situations lie down to sleep at night and dream of a brighter reality, where they do everything correctly and at the right time. I went a step further than such people, I began to create that dreamworld on paper, with the awkward handwriting of a fifth grader. And thus, through the pains of unrequited love, my first story was born. I was the protagonist. He (I) had fallen in love with the smartest girl in the class. And that girl didn’t move abroad, she went to the cinema with the boy. (Naturally, this first innocent little piece of work was concealed forever and nobody ever got to see it).

Pre-College

“Come on, man, why would I think about college?” Ernest said, lighting a cigarette, “All that diploma crap, professional specialisation, all that is stuff left behind from Soviet times — it’s just useless formality. I’m not going to need a diploma for another hundred years.”

We were approaching the end of the ninth grade and that heralded the season of questions like “Which university should I apply to?”, “Where could I pass a test without paying a bribe?”, “Who could tutor me to pass the entrance exams?” and so on.

“But wouldn’t that mean you’d get conscripted to the army?” I asked.

“Yeah, so what? I’ll go and serve, then I’ll come back and do something.”

“Do what? How are you going to get a job? You’ll have to study something, won’t you?”

In reality, the argument I was having with Ernest was a verbalisation of the struggle I was having with myself. I, too, needed a good reason to continue my education.

“I’m not going to look for a job. I don’t plan to work a day for anyone. I’ll have my own business,” my friend said with the utmost confidence.

And suddenly I was bitten by the same bug. Perhaps Ernest was right. Perhaps nobody really needed a university education. By that time my average score was stable at 3, although I got extra respect from Mrs. Davtyan (“You really have a talent for writing, Arthur,” she would say after each essay) because one of the stories I had written had won a prize in a competition organised by dasaran.am. That first story I had written, by the way, had still never been read by anyone.

But, in any case, I continued to have no vision for my future. I wasn’t going to turn into a person with stories about my own alternative reality, was I? And when, at home that evening, I mentioned the topic of not studying at university, things ended up with my mother having a panic attack and drinking a mild sedative before lying down, and my father smoking his first cigarette after a four-year break (to be fair, he’d probably been waiting for the right opportunity all that time). Because I didn’t want to heighten tensions further, I said, “Fine, fine, I’ll go to college.” Without delay, another important education-related decision was made that evening. “You’ll go into programming. The whole world’s getting into it now,” my parents decided, even though my dream had been to write. “Fiiiiine,” I relented, thinking that I would somehow learn to write on my own. The following week, my first appointment with a maths tutor had already been set up so that I could prepare for the entrance exams.

(I can imagine your anxiety here, dear reader, and I even assume that you read the previous sentence twice. No, you were not mistaken; here in Armenia, in order to get into a university and gain your place as a Homo diplomicus, one often has to repeat the whole school curriculum, sometimes from scratch, during the course of one’s final year in high school. And here’s another shocker — usually, these private tuition sessions are run by the same teachers who should have taught all this in school. And because you’re sub-human at best in Armenia if you don’t have a university education, this is the path taken by everyone. EVERYONE.)

***

In order to make life even more difficult for me, I was sent to a tutor who lived in Aygedzor. The small bus rumbled along for forty five minutes and I was stuffed into it with my body bent over like a knight on a chessboard, and then I had to walk for ten minutes from Baghramyan Avenue to the five-storey buildings constructed in the Khruschev era, find the right one, guess the correct entrance (no renovation in thirty years, dark and smelly — yes, the perfect atmosphere for learning), go up the stairs, knock on the door, enter and join a group of miserable future students like me, “Good afternoon, hello.” And then I noticed one of the girls in the group looking at me and smiling, and I thought, “Why does she seem to be so interested in me?” before it suddenly struck me. It was Hasmik. Before I could manage to put a confused sentence together, Mr. Gandilyan burst into the room unexpectedly like the Spanish Inquisition and ordered everyone to open their notebooks and focus their attention.

Two hours later, after that particular session of the Inquisition had ended, we left. We said goodbye to the other three members of the group and the two of us walked together. I told her that I had missed her. Hasmik assured me that she’d missed me as well and that she was happy to be back in Yerevan. She said that she felt better here, she could study with no tension. We recalled, naturally, the endless homework sessions we had together. In the bus, as the vehicle tumbled to our stop in Charbakh, it crossed my mind to tell her how I had felt that last time we had seen each other, to mention my first story, but… What was the point? We were kids then, we were almost college freshmen now. No, there was no point. So all I said was, “We were so funny when we were kids.”

We smiled at each other, and never mentioned it after that. We went to our tuition sessions and behaved like friends. Sometimes, the four of us — Hasmik, Lilith, Ernest and I — would go to the “Ponchikanots” (we were poor schoolkids, after all, we didn’t have the money to go to a better place). I noticed that Ernest looked differently at Hasmik. One day, after school, just as I was getting ready to go to Gandilyan’s mathematic hell, Ernest slipped something into the conversation.

“Art, listen man, you don’t have any plans when it comes to Hasmik, do you? That little crush you had on her when you were a kid is in the past, right?”

My jaw must have dropped to the floor. But I gathered my wits, replaced my jaw, and thought to myself that I really didn’t have any plans, and all that belonged in my childhood. We were good friends now, but…

“No, no.No plans.”

“Whew, that’s good. I really like her. I want to ask her out, but didn’t want you to get upset.”

A few months later, at the school graduation party, I ended up sitting at a table in a bad mood, while everyone danced to the stupidest pop song of the year. Ernest and Hasmik — a special guest at the event, as a former classmate — were ones dancing the hardest. I tried to feel happy for two of the closest people to me, but couldn’t do it. Lilith walked up to me, “Hey, how come you’re sitting here alone? Come on!” I couldn’t refuse, so I danced with Lilith. I noticed with horror that Hasmik and Ernest were holding hands when they left the dance floor together. Lilith, completely unaware of my thoughts, remarked, “Looks like Hasmik’s in love.”

University

Lilith, Hasmik and I ended up gaining admission to different programs at the same University (I won’t mention its name here, you’ll see it on my CV). Ernest decided to serve in the army, come back and conquer the world. He had already said goodbye to his attitude-laden adolesence, but still did not have a serious outlook when it came to life. (And I continued to have no idea how he and Hasmik were still together). On the final evening before his military service started, he made me promise that I would keep an eye out for Hasmik. “Definitely,” I promised. I spent my first three years at university the same way I did at school — doing just enough to make sure I didn’t drop out of the programme, but nothing more. My classmates had already started to organise their careers. Everyone around me seemed to be setting up a new startup. They were building the future, in a word. But I went through the motions as if in a trance.

Ernest had come back from the army the previous year and had begun his search for the meaning of life. All of us kept trying to convince him to get into a college and get a degree.

“You’re going after needless formalities again,” he declared, when the four of us were sitting in one of the cafés on the Cascade (we could finally afford to spend some time in another place besides the “Ponchikanots”). “I don’t need those diplomas you’re after.”

Nevertheless, Hasmik, who had spent the whole period of Ernest’s absence focusing on her studies, managed through some miracle to get him to agree to undergo vocational training.

“Didn’t all those vocational education schools close when the Soviet Union collapsed?” I asked in surprise when I heard the good news. “Or have you discovered a time machine that we didn’t know about?”

“Ha, ha, ha, very funny. You get a score of 5 for humour,” Ernest said (Hasmik and Lilith were really laughing, and I caught myself admiring the smile on Hasmik’s face). “Hasmik pestered me so much that I finally decided to learn some engineering. It turns out that the European Union has funded several dozen vocational training schools and helped them restart operations…”

“They’re called vocational education and training institutions now,” Hasmik corrected him tenderly, to which Ernest responded with a kiss that was just as tender.

Another College

Dear admissions committee member, faithful reader, I realise that you must be tired by now, and that you want to understand why I am seeking that wonderful scholarship you are offering and the reason I would like to participate in that programme everyone loves and respects, named after Erasmus of Rotterdam. I will now present the final scene, which will provide the answer to that question, where I make an education-related decision (this time — all by myself).

Two years had already gone by since I graduated from university. Because the Armenian Army had declined my services as a consequence of the poor eyesight I had gained in my final years at school, I was now working without enthusiasm as a programmer in a Yerevan-based tech startup. My parents had been right — finding a job in the IT sector had proven to be quite easy. Ernest had finished his vocational school (sorry — vocational education and training institution), and then started his own production unit. He did indeed plan to conquer the world, that lazy Earnest of old was gone. Hasmik, who seemed to be in a happy and harmonious relationship with him, had started working at a company as their office manager. Lilith kept trying things all the time, studying and putting new ideas into practice, living a high-energy life.

And, one evening, the four of us decided to go out for tea. When I got there, none of the others had arrived. I got a strange text from Lilith ten minutes later — “Sorry, I can’t make it. I’m in an argument with Dad about plans to renovate our house.” Then Hasmik showed up, alone. All alone. Sad and upset. I said, “Hey, where’s Ernest?” And I heard, “We broke up ten minutes ago.” My jaw crashed down to the floor. Or we could use another word here — I was dumbfounded.

The rest of the story came to me as if through a fog. “He was differently lately, always getting upset because his business wasn’t doing well. And then one day he said that we shouldn’t be together…” The idea suddenly came to my mind that I should use this opportunity, I should do what I hadn’t done years ago, I should give Hasmik a big hug — not just as a friend — and I should kiss her, and start over again with her. But when I saw the tears in her eyes and her confusion, I stopped myself in time and realised that itwould have been a big mistake. I embraced her like a close friend would, and told her that she simply needed to talk things out with Ernest. It was a tough time or him, that was all. There was no reason to lose hope and, in any case, they needed to “sit down and talk about it.” After calming down a bit, for some reason I did not comprehend, Hasmik suddenly said, “Do you remember the wonderful essays you used to write? I thought you’d become a big writer. That you’d write something about us… but here you are, a programmer.” And at that moment, I did recall how much I loved writing. I laughed, “Me? A writer?” But something had clicked inside my head.

I walked Hasmik to her place and promised her that everything would be all right. I wrote Ernest a text, “You idiot! Get your act together and call Hasmik.” I came home and started doing some research — I wanted to go to Europe and become a writer. I finally wanted to study something that was my own choice. How wonderful it was that Hasmik had sparked something in my head! I took a deep breath, sat at my computer, and found the best option. Yes, dear anonymous reader, drinking what is already your fourth (or fifth?) cup of coffee. This is where I get to my main request. After all these years, I finally feel a real desire to gain an education. A thirst for a new city, different surroundings, and fresh knowledge. And when I get back, I will write about us for sure, and this time I’ll show Hasmik what I have written.

Thanks for your time!