THE TIME OF THE FLIES BY NARINE KROYAN
Sona and her husband Adam have been living in Stepanakert, Nagorno Karabakh for a year and a half to be close to their son Arman’s place of military service. Nothing predicted the impending danger, but the morning of September 27, 2020 started with the sound of bombings. The enemy attacked both from the air and from the ground. Adam rushed to the battlefield to find his son, leaving Sona alone. However, Sona could not stay in Stepanakert even for a minute longer. Gathering a backpack full of essentials, she set off.
Encountering various disasters, indescribably cruel scenes, witnessing inhumane deaths and murders, Sona remained faithful to her mission to find Arman. On the battlefield, she told his son’s friend Davit, who later died in Sona’s arms, to always keep his sniper rifle by herself. She promised Gevorg, an Armenian soldier beheaded by an Azerbaijani officer, that as soon as she arrived in Yerevan, she would take revenge on the official who gave him boots much bigger in size, saying that anyway all the soldiers would become cannon fodder for Bayraktar UAVs. Finding out that his son had been transported to “Erebuni” medical center in Yerevan, she rushed there. A shell had exploded next to Arman and he had to start learning to walk and talk once again.
While showing emergency assistance to Sona in the hospital, it turned out that she was pregnant. She was going to have twin boys and had decided to name them Davit and Gevorg. Having no news from her husband, she was convinced that he had been captured by Azeris. Sona decided to make a plan to bring back her husband by exchanging him with the maps and documents seized from the backpack of the murdered Azerbaijani officer.
Waking up on November 9 and going out into the street, she was unable to process and accept what had happened. Sona decided to give birth to her children in Artsakh as if realizing her mission in life.
