Editor’s note: Is the fountain of youth real, and has it been hiding in a monastery in Armenia all along? This piece came to us unsigned, from a woman who asked that we not print her name, or, she said, any of the names she has used. She tells us she drank from the spring at Geghard in the summer of 1974, and that she has been going back ever since. We were not able to verify any of it. We’ve decided to run it as she sent it.
The tour leaves Yerevan at nine. I have taken it before, not this exact van, not this exact guide, but this tour, this loop through the countryside, more times than I will tell you. The others on board are strangers to each other and will stay that way: a German couple, two Polish students, a family from somewhere warm, and a young woman traveling alone who boards last and takes the single seat across from mine. She is maybe twenty. She has the specific restlessness of someone who left somewhere in the middle of a sentence. I know it when I see it. I had it once, on this same road, more than fifty years ago.
I was twenty then too. It was 1974, and I came east with a boy named Theo and forty dollars and the unshakable certainty that nothing out here would ever have to be paid for. A woman near Garni pressed warm apricots into my hands and refused my money. I was drunk on plum brandy and altitude and the flat conviction that I would live a very long time and it would all be like this.
That last part came true. It did not come true the way I meant it.
Garni
The first stop is the temple. Greek columns on an Armenian cliff, a temple to a sun god nobody has worshipped in seventeen centuries, and still standing, rebuilt, the guide says, after an earthquake shook it down in 1679 and left it in pieces for three hundred years before anyone put it back.
The young woman climbs the steps ahead of me and turns at the top to photograph the valley, and the wind takes her hair and she doesn’t bother to fix it, and I have to look away.
I have learned that the trouble with never dying is not the dying of everyone else, though that is bad enough. It is that you cannot stay. You can never be the woman who was there for all of it, who is in the photographs, who signs the papers and appears in the records and adds up, year over year, into a person with a life. The moment a life begins to add up, it begins to notice that I don’t age, and then I have to set it down and walk away and become someone new.
The first time, there was an actual dock. A ferry went down one night in the islands, more people aboard than the boat should have carried, and I came out of that water after a night and a morning without a mark on me, not a cut, not a cough, while others did not come out at all. I understood, sitting on the rescue boat in someone’s dry shirt, that sooner or later a person in a uniform would want to know how a woman survives a thing like that untouched, and that I had no answer I could give that did not open a door I could never shut. So I got off at a small pier before the lists and the questions, and I left that woman there on the boards, and I have never gone back for her. I have done it maybe a dozen times since, on no dock at all. I remember how each of them took her coffee.
The temple has outlasted its god and its earthquake and everyone who ever prayed in it. I used to find that comforting. Standing here now, I find it is simply company.
The Gorge
Below the temple the road drops into the gorge, where the cliff is made of basalt columns packed together like the pipes of an organ, which is why they call it the Symphony of the Stones. The rock cooled into these shapes millions of years before anyone arrived to name them. We walk the path at the base of it, the whole group strung out along the river, small under a wall that does not know we are here.
The young woman walks near me for a while. She asks, in careful English, whether I have been to Armenia before. I tell her once, a long time ago. She asks if it has changed. I tell her the rock hasn’t.
She laughs, and I think: you will laugh at that differently in forty years, if you are lucky, if you are ordinary, if you get to be forty and then sixty and then an old woman who creaks when she stands. I nearly say something. I have learned not to. There is nothing to say that does not sound like either madness or a threat, and anyway she would not believe me, and anyway I could no more spare her from her own life than I was spared from mine.
I was going to grow old once. It was going to happen to me the ordinary way, and I never got the chance to grow out of the girl who drank.
Geghard
The monastery is cut into the mountain itself. Geghard, the word means spear, older than most of the countries the people on this van come from, cold inside even now, in the last warm week of autumn. We file in out of the sun. The guide gathers us in the dim of the carved hall and begins to talk, his hands moving, about the khachkars, the cross-stones, the inscriptions worn into the black walls by people who have been dead so long that even their prayers are nearly gone.
Then he leads us to the spring.
It is in the deep part of the monastery, in the rock, where the light from the door does not reach. A basin worn into the stone, water the color of old tea, cold, tasting, I know, I know exactly, of stone. The guide says the word in the flat cheerful voice you would use for the height of a bell tower. The holy spring. The waters that grant long life. A phone goes up. Someone asks if you can drink it. He says people do.
In 1974 there was no rope and no placard and no group of us filing past. There was only the water, and Theo laughing somewhere behind me, and me thirsty in the bottomless way you are thirsty at twenty when your whole body is still an argument for being alive. I cupped it in both hands. I did not think about it for one second. That is the whole trouble. The water did exactly what the guide is promising these people it will do. It gave me a long life, it is still giving me one, and it shows no sign of stopping. I have had more than fifty years to think about it since, and I would give all of them to have that one thoughtless mouthful back.
The young woman is standing at the basin. She reads the placard. She looks at the dark water, and she smiles, charmed, the way you are charmed by a thing you do not believe, and I watch her decide, the way you decide something that costs nothing, to lean down.
I do not stop her. I tell myself I can’t, that don’t is not a sentence that reaches a person at twenty, that it is only the sound the old make. But I have her face; I am not old to look at, and that excuse has never quite held. The truer thing, the thing I stopped pretending about somewhere across the years, is that I no longer try. I warned one of them once, a long time ago, said more than I should have. She drank anyway, and looked at me with real pity, and after that it got easier not to.
She touches the water with two fingers. She does not drink. She wipes her hand on her jeans and moves on, already looking at her phone, and I let a breath out that I did not know I was holding, and I understand that it changes nothing. It was not her today. It will be someone, someday, on some tour like this one, thirsty, and twenty, and sure. The water does not need me to help it. It only needs the world to keep bringing it the young.
Sevan
The last stop is the lake.
After the cave it is almost violent, how much sky there is. Sevan opens out blue and enormous under a hard autumn sun, the little monastery black on its hill above the water, and the wind comes off the lake with nothing to stop it. The group scatters to take the photograph everyone takes. The young woman climbs toward the church. A man rides a dark horse along the shore below, unhurried, and I watch him the way I watch everything now, you too, and that horse, and this whole bright afternoon.
The lake was here before the monastery and will be here after. It does not know about the spring an hour’s drive away, or the woman who drank from it, or the dozen lives she has set down and walked away from. It is just a great deal of water under a great deal of sky, and in five hundred years it will be exactly this, and I, God help me, will be somewhere, still, to see it.
The van will take us back to Yerevan. The young woman will fly home in a day or two and begin, without noticing, to age, a gift so ordinary that no one who has it can feel its weight. I will stay the night in a hotel under a name that is not the one I was born with, and in the morning I will go, the way I always go.
But I will come back. I always come back. Not for the water, which has never once answered me. For the lake, maybe, and the rock that doesn’t know I’m here, and the person I was before I asked a spring for anything. And because I have stopped warning them, I cannot make myself do it, I have tried, but I have not stopped hoping I will know what to say to the next one afterward. When she surfaces, whoever she turns out to be, on some bright and windy day, finally understanding what she asked for without knowing she was asking, I want to be the one who is sitting there when she comes up for air. To tell her the only true thing I have. That it does not answer. That it never answers. And that the asking is the only part of us it never lets die.
Fictional disclosure: Fake Travel News publishes fictional travel stories inspired by real places. I have fun inventing impossible events, but I also love travel and the very real magic it grants to the human experience. For real-world travel details, see Geghard and Garni day trip from Yerevan - Museum of Wander.
