Robert Eksuzyan

How very sad that dear Robert has died [Obituary: Robert Eksuzyan]. Like Bob Evans I was in the Moscow bureau when he joined us as our third translator. He proved to be worth his weight in gold.

He and I were alone in the office at Sad Sam one quiet morning in about 1971, probably a Sunday. The telephone rang. Robert picked up the receiver, listened for a moment, then became more incandescent than ever I saw him before or since. It was his sister on the line from Gagra alerting him to his daughter’s elopement with a young Russian on the overnight train to Moscow. The language that ensued flew in the face of everything we had ever learned about the friendship of peoples.

All was not lost, for life itself teaches us that trains take their time to reach Moscow from the Caucasus. Robert was at the station to meet it.

No more was heard until a few months later he invited Patricia and me to his daughter’s wedding in Gagra. Apart from being a great honour, it was also a rare opportunity to see part of life in the USSR that was usually hidden from us. The appropriate authorities were somehow squared; there were no Kafkaesque foreign ministry shenanigans. On the appointed day we took the plane to Adler.

Armenian weddings, we were told, last for three days, though we were not expected to stay the whole course. We visited Robert’s widowed mother in a fine traditional house that stood before a grove of orange trees. We stayed with his sister, who worked for the Interior Ministry (not sure whether Soviet, Georgian or Abkhaz) and lived in a fairly substantial block of flats. In her second floor apartment cold water was stored in the bath to ensure continuous supply.

The wedding, at an outdoor restaurant, was a lavish affair attended by every kind of nationality to be found in a place like Gagra, Russians, Ukrainians, Georgians, Abkhazes, Jews and of course Armenians.

The groom was Armenian.

The tamada had to last the course for three days, and to boost his staying power he interspersed his toasts with tumbler-sized chasers of the brine in which you conserve gherkins. There was plenty of vigorous dancing, and it was much to Robert’s embarrassment when his boss from Moscow accepted an invitation to join in.

While we were there Robert took us on a trip to Pitsunda on the regular local bus. He forewarned us that it might get held up at some point because the Abkhazes had a great tendency to fall out with one another and start a fight. As he so often was at work in Moscow, Robert was spot on. Fortunately the fight was at a bus stop, not on the vehicle.

After the fall of communism he paid one or two visits to London, where he was shocked at the variety of foodstuffs available in the shops for pet animals.

When Jacquie and I spent a week in Moscow in 2000, on our way eastwards to Kamchatka and the US, Robert entertained us in his home and took us to the Great Patriotic War Memorial which had appeared out along Kutuzovsky since my days as a Moscow correspondent. It was a great opportunity to learn more of his life history. We had known that his father was the Aeroflot representative in Gagra, but Robert told me his grandfather had been the priest at an Armenian parish somewhere in the hills behind Gagra. When the church was reconsecrated in the 1990s, Robert said he was invited to attend and was feted by the Armenian parishioners. He only went to church once a year himself and showed us the Russian Orthodox Church near his flat where he went each Easter. He was visibly shocked when I told him that one of his former Reuters bosses was an atheist.

As a teenager he recalled that he and a couple of mates found an unexploded artillery shell on the Black Sea shore and were pelting it with stones, or hammering at it with some other implement. Fortunately they were apprehended in time, or none of us would ever have had the benefit of his wisdom and humour. After this incident his father had him sent away to a boarding school. Robert said this was the making of him.

With treasured memories of a well-loved colleague. ■