Documentary : Where Grapes--and Trust--Die on Vine : * Neglected vineyards symbolize the bitter mood in Nagorno-Karabakh, ruled by ancient enmities.

It was the vines that troubled the peasant heart of Ishan Bagdasaryan.

The 55-year-old man, balancing a homemade shotgun on his arm, gazed upon them from the rudimentary earthworks he and other Armenians had gouged into the crest of a hill.

Off in the distance, the roofs of the city of Agdam showed chalky white. There was an Azerbaijani gun emplacement out there somewhere, Bagdasaryan’s colleagues cautioned, so you really should keep your head down. On the rolling fields to the rear, black smudges on sere earth showed where enemy artillery rounds had landed.

But it was the fate of the grapes that bothered Bagdasaryan, and strangely enough, that was a cheering note of humanity and decency in the hate-filled strife over ownership of Nagorno-Karabakh, a mostly Armenian-populated island here in the middle of Azerbaijan.

It certainly wasn’t as if Bagdasaryan had no personal stake in the conflict. In early 1988, the little man in the blue coat recalled, “I had to flee from my home in Sumgait with not so much as a spoon.”

But today, it was not his former home near the Caspian seacoast 150 miles east that was on his mind, but rather the vineyards and their neat rows of gnarled, dark brown plants that marched across the no-man’s-land between the Armenians’ straw-strewn trench and the Azerbaijani town in the distance. In happier times, those plants would soon be yielding the fat grapes that local winemakers by some miracle would transform into Nagorno-Karabakh’s dark and heady red or into sweet vermouth.

“It’s time to clean and cut back the plants,” Bagdasaryan said softly, almost to himself. “We should be taking care of them. But what can we do? We can’t go out there; we’d be cut down by machine-gun fire.”

Did he think after more than 1,000 deaths and such a crescendo of animosity that Armenians and Azerbaijanis could ever sit down again at the same table and drink some of the wine grown on this tan-colored tableland?

Yes, he said after reflecting, he did. But many of his compatriots do not.

Beasts. Perverts. Soviet Turks. Such are the labels used by many Armenians to describe the enemy. When I asked an official of the Artsakh Society, an association of Nagorno-Karabakh natives who live in Armenia proper, why he thinks the Azerbaijanis are fighting to hold on to the territory, he replied:

“We Armenians have just one goal: to defend our hearths and homes. But they are motivated by three desires: to earn money or booty, to commit sodomy and, of course, by their Muslim fanaticism.” His was an extreme view, but it illustrated how the fighting has dehumanized relations between peoples who have lived alongside one another for centuries--albeit sometimes not very peacefully.

On a weeklong visit to Nagorno-Karabakh, it was not possible for me or the Russian photographer who accompanied me to cross over into Azerbaijani-controlled territory because we might have been shot before we could identify ourselves. But beyond the vines, under those white roofs in Agdam, the hatred, by most accounts, is the same. Such emotions have many wondering what will happen when the struggle for the region ends, as all wars must.

Armen Seiranyan, a construction engineer of Armenian origin from Stepanakert, Nagorno-Karabakh’s capital, is one of the pensive ones. He virtually learned his trade from an Azerbaijani instructor at a local building institute. At least 10 times, he recalled fondly, he was invited to his mentor’s home. “He received me just like a member of his own family,” Seiranyan recalled.

But those dinners of mutton and endless glasses of hot, heavily sugared tea were before the two ethnic groups went at each other’s throats after a 1988 request by Nagorno-Karabakh’s legislature for the territory to be removed from Azerbaijani jurisdiction and made part of Armenia. A few weeks ago, Seiranyan, this time carrying a gun, was back in his former instructor’s town, Malybeili, a predominantly Azerbaijani settlement outside Stepanakert.

Armenian fighters had just stormed the place, since the Azerbaijanis were using it to fire artillery and rockets onto the capital. And in the fighting, the house of Seiranyan’s friend, who had since moved to Baku, the Azerbaijani capital, had been set ablaze.

“I watched it burn,” Seiranyan remembered. “And as it blazed and finally burned down, I asked myself: Will that man and I ever be able to sit down again together, as we used to, and have a frank talk? What will we say to one another?”

If you come into Nagorno-Karabakh from Armenia, as we did, you fly on a helicopter over the magnificent mountains of the Caucasus, all craggy and blindingly bright with pristine snow. Although the enclave lies only a few miles from the Armenian-Azerbaijani border, all land routes have been cut by an Azerbaijani blockade.

At last word, getting in from the Azerbaijani side was even harder. Two Azerbaijani helicopters have been shot down with great loss of life recently. The Azerbaijanis say the Armenians did it, and they are loath to take more chances.

My photographer, Felix Titov of St. Petersburg, and I landed at Kolatag with a group of fighters from Armenia who called themselves the Nikol Dumyan Brigade--named, they said, in honor of an Armenian who had played a heroic role in resisting the Turks.

As the sun set, we lurched on a truck along a muddy road leading to the hillside village of Kichan, about 15 miles away, that had been under Azerbaijani siege for weeks. To enter it, we had to charge along a footpath that dipped, then rose again to meet the wooden houses of the village. It was dark when we arrived, but the Azerbaijanis saw us through night scopes and opened fire with machine guns and Kalashnikovs.

The air seemed to be filled with bright red streaks and the angry buzz of bullets as we bolted down the snowy path. I was carrying a portable computer plus a voluminous file and books on the history of Nagorno-Karabakh. The whole case must have weighed 40 pounds, but it suddenly seemed very light.

We slept in the brigade’s bunkhouse and shared the fighters’ coarse, delicious bread and tea. They wanted to know if the “Karabakh question” would affect the presidential race in the United States; I told them that, frankly, the performance of the American economy was probably what was worrying most voters.

To imagine the way Nagorno-Karabakh is laid out, people here said, think of a chessboard. The Armenian villages are the black squares, the Azerbaijani the white. Because of the hostilities, sweeping detours are often needed to skirt villages held by the other side.

The van trip between Stepanakert, the enclave’s capital, and nearby Armenian positions at Askeran one afternoon took two hours over a freshly cut mountain road that bypassed hostile Azerbaijani settlements. “If we could have taken the main road, we would only have needed 10 minutes,” Seiranyan said. Objective to a fault, he added that local Azerbaijanis had to put up with the same hardships.

At an 18th-Century stone fortress on the banks of the Karkar River outside Askeran--a site commanding a wide valley near the spot where nagorno , or “mountainous,” Karabakh runs into the flatlands below--I heard of the special place that this region occupies in the Armenian consciousness.

When Armenians elsewhere were subjugated by the Turks or the Persians, “Karabakh was the last redoubt of our nation,” said Valery Sayan, who is now a fighter in the local Self-Defense Forces. “We have always been free here, even under the Mongolian yoke,” he added, referring easily to events that occurred centuries ago.

The fortress, converted into what was, no doubt, Askeran’s best restaurant, now bristles with weaponry once more. The diners are gone and young men with assault rifles and a jury-rigged, spring-powered grenade launcher have taken over the place.

“This fortress is the key to Nagorno-Karabakh--how many times it has saved our army,” said one member of the present-day garrison, Khachik Avitisyan, who had just turned 32, and whose black beret was stitched with a Christian cross.

The public position of Armenia’s foreign minister, Raffi Hovannisian, a native of Fresno who grew up in Los Angeles, is that the conflict is purely an internal affair of the “Nagorno-Karabakh Republic.” Never mind that signs to the contrary are outrageously evident in Yerevan, Armenia’s capital.

On Yerevan’s Moscow Street, next to Red Cross headquarters, sits a building belonging to the innocuously named State Committee for the Implementation of Special Economic Programs. It is a key coordinating center, perhaps the center, for funneling aid to Nagorno-Karabakh.

As for the region’s claim that it now constitutes the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, it seems little more than a political feint to deprive the Azerbaijanis of any grounds for accusing Armenia of annexationist aims.

Arthur Mkrtchyan, the chairman of Nagorno-Karabakh’s legislature, admitted as much in an interview. “Maybe I should answer that question as a politician, but as a historian I’d say that yes, unity (with Armenia) is sooner or later ineluctable, just as it was for the two Germanys, for the two Vietnams,” Mkrtchyan said.

The struggle over Nagorno-Karabakh, many here told me, is the worst thing that has happened in their lives. In the icy-cold basement of Stepanakert’s City Hall, where the Self-Defense Forces set up their command post, a tiny woman in her 60s, wrapped in woolen scarves, roamed the halls, muttering. When she saw a non-Armenian face, she switched to Russian.

“Even in the war, there wasn’t any fighting here,” she said, meaning World War II. “Now we are dying of hunger. We have nothing left to eat.

“I used to watch television and be horrified at the war going on in Cambodia and the rest of Indochina--the machine guns blazing and naked children running around in fear. And now we have all that here,” added Karen Zakharyan, 27, who should have been working at a marble-finishing plant in Stepanakert.

But the war has closed the plant, and Zakharyan was at last word off fighting somewhere in central Karabakh.