One day back there in the good old days when I was nine and the was full of every imaginable kind of magnificence, and life was till a delightful and mysterious dream, my cousin mourad, who was considered crazy by everybody who knew him axcept me, came to my house at four in the morning and woke me up tapping on the window of my room.
Aram, he said.
I jumped out of bed and looked out of the window.
I could not believe what I saw.
It was not morning yet, but it was summer and with daybreak not many minutes around the corner of the world it was light enough for me to know I was not dreaming.
My cousin mourad was sitting on a beautiful white horse.
Is stuck my head out of the window and rubbed my eyes.
Yes, he said in Armenian. It's a horse. You are not dreaming. Make it quick if you want to ride.
I knew my cousin mourad enjoyed being alive more than anybody else who had ever fallen into the world by mistake, but this was more than even I could believe.
In the first place, my earliest memories had been memories of horse and my first longings had been longings to ride.
This was the wonderful part.
In the second place, we were poor.
This was the part that would not permit me to believe what I saw.
We were poor. We had no money. Our whole tribe was poverty - stricken. Every branch of the Garoghlanian¹ family was living in the most amazing and comical poverty in the world. Nobody could understand where we ever got money enough to keep us with food in our billies, not even the old men of the family. Most important of all, though , we were famous for our honesty. We had been famous for our honesty for something like 11 centuries, even when we had been the wealthiest family in what we liked two think was the world. We were proud first , honest next, and after that we believed in right and wrong. None of us would take advantage of anybody in the world, let unlone steal.