They say every single family in the city of Gyumri lost at least one person in the earthquake. Every single family.
Young mothers were running like it was an Olympic race to the schools because there were rumors that the schools had crumpled like aluminum foil. They had. And here is saddest part. If the earthquake had come even five minutes later, lots of those children would still be alive, because the school bells would have rung by then and dismissed the kids for recess and lunch. They would have been outside playing or walking home, instead of trapped inside as the buildings collapsed.
My father dug through the mountain of bricks and timber and glass where his parents had lived, even though he was half blind. The wiring was all like Medusa head. Everyone on the street dug like crazy people. Everyone in the city dug into the night. People dug until their fingers were broken and the skin on both sides of their hands was gone. But humans couldn’t lift the rubble from five-and six-story buildings. There were too few backhoes and bulldozers for so much damage, and it was nearly impossible for vehicles to drive down the roads because great chunks of the pavement had been thrown into the air like playing cards, and buildings had melted into the streets.
My father had awful choice when the darkness came. Did he stay with his mother and father, who were beneath the rubble, unsure if they were dead or alive, or did he leave them and go search for his wife? He said it was agony. He told himself he would dig for half hour more and then go find her. He would see what was left of their apartment. (It would still be standing, but most of the windows would be broken and there would be no heat or electricity or water for months. And this was in December. My parents took in lots of their neighbors, and they all huddled together for warmth. Some of the old people compared it to Leningrad in 1942. For many years other survivors would live in tin houses called domiks. The government built them that winter. They were only supposed to be in them maybe one year. When I was twelve I went to Gyumri with my mother, and there were still whole neighborhoods of domiks. It was so depressing my mother just wept.)
Finally my father gave up. There were some people buried alive beneath the rubble, but not my grandparents. They were just buried. But you could hear other victims begging for help. Pleading. Sometimes, he said, you just heard moaning. Seven hours of digging and my father had helped drag eleven corpses from the rubble, but he had found no one who was still breathing. They would need backhoes to pull the rest of the dead from that pile.
He struggled back to the Lada through the flashlights and bonfires and the headlights from the ambulances and fire trucks at the end of block. The Lada was fine, but he couldn’t drive it anywhere. The streets were cratered like the moon. The road was choked with the bricks from collapsed buildings. So, my father did the only logical thing: he took those two big boxes of wristwatches, balancing them like circus clown, and walked home through the disaster area that hours ago had been a city. His plan was to sell the watches for food on black market, which was going to be gigantic after the earthquake. This is what I mean about my father being operator. He was very resourceful. A dependable provider. A good husband.
All around my father that night walked zombies. Heroes, too. But mostly zombies. He saw two teenage boys carrying an old woman who had lost a leg. One of the boys was shirtless because he had turned it into a tourniquet and wrapped it around the woman’s thigh. The shirt was now the color of pomegranate wine. He saw a green and white bus on its side, the dead passengers half in and half out of the broken windows. He saw whole rows of cadavers, some mangled. People were calling out names, sobbing, wailing. It was biblical. It was like end-of-world time.
My mother was not home when he got to the apartment. She was out looking for him. Kooky comedy of errors, right? Wrong. It was all just horrible, all just errors. There was no comedy. So he left the boxes in the living room and went back outside to find her. All night long he walked. All night long, my mother walked, too. It wasn’t just the wreckage that made it so awful. Everywhere there were bodies. Bodies on ruined curbs, bodies on trucks, bodies in big holes in the ground. Arms in trees. Legs, somehow barefoot, in store windows, the broken glass shards like Christmas icicle displays. They both saw heads with no torsos or arms or legs, the eyes open and the lips seeming to mouth the word “How?” They both saw the worst thing in the world you can see: bodies of children.