The man asked me in Russian if it was ok to stop here. I told him it was. The car dropped a wheel into the rutted shoulder like a kid testing the pool with his toes, bounced over a few dusty potholes and came to a stop. I helped my wife Gina up from the seat. She was slightly carsick after a morning of hitchhiking over the mountain pass. I got our bags from the trunk, thanked the driver and looked around. After seven years, Yeghegnadzor was the same. The same bus stop, the same leather jacket-clad men wearing black leather shoes, tufts of cigarette-singed black hair sprouting from their knuckles. One of them looked up. I greeted him. He returned the greeting in a casual, perfunctory way; I could’ve been his neighbor. No one else seemed to notice us and they continued talking with the grumbling, argumentative undercurrent only heard in old countries where the people have been talking throughout history, complaint and laughter mixing together to sound like the wind soughing in the trees.
The divided road that led up hill to town was crowned with a new building. Built of black tufa, smooth and gleaming, it looked like a modest replica of the Ka’aba. The tinted windows were coated with the soft mountain dust which had settled into the streets after being energetically swept from the sidewalks by shopkeepers. Another knot of men had tied itself here, possibly for the flattering new backdrop, but the building was too black; it’s obsidian sheen rendered their clothes into washed-out imitations. The men who stood here looked less like scions than petitioners, supplicants for the wealth of this new building. They stood smoking their cigarettes, looking around uneasily, like Kafka characters waiting for some nameless judgment.
The clothing store that had once been on the corner was gone. The display window was empty and filmed with dust, as were the windows of the small supermarket that had sold stale wafer cookies and sugary juices. A group of kids crouched in a doorway, whispering something. The elder girl of the group was holding a toddler by the hand who was straining and having a fit at not being set free. One of the three boys suddenly took off running and the other two immediately followed him. They all had the same haircut.
The shops of the main street had changed hands and sold the same things in different places. The shoe store had baby clothes, the vegetable shop sold women’s clothes, the long, dark outfits hanging from the metal shutters like effigies of Guy Fawkes, something to pin the crime on. A woman with peroxided hair in a red velour jogging suit sat in a patch of sun before these lithe outfits heating a long-handled copper kettle of coffee on a hotplate. She had striped socks and bath slippers on her feet which lazily pushed the dust at their toes in circles.
A rangy young man watched us walk by, his wrists protruding from his jacket sleeves by two or three inches, his eyes trained on mine. I greeted him because people in Yeghegnadzor have a particular way of going slack when greeted. The severe look drops from their faces; the burden of being anonymous is relieved and they return your greeting with enthusiasm, gold teeth winking, eyes shining. Instead of greeting me the young man says my name in a familiar way—not as a question but as a statement, then, without stopping, he asked me where my skateboard was. Seven years ago, struggling with inactivity and no outlet for my energy, I used to skate around this town, especially in this area. It was one of the only paved places. Little kids would congregate to watch. The older boys would feign disinterest until I started showing them how to ride it. A line would form and, one by one, the boys would come up to try it. It was the perfect personality test. The wild ones would always try to run and jump on as I’d done. The studious boys would test it with one foot, looking back at me. The younger ones, I’d hold by the armpits in case they fell. The skateboard was how I got to know the community. It was my ‘in’. The one interesting way I was different. And now, this young man, who was probably a boy back then, remembered. I went up to greet him properly, but there was nothing I recognized in his face and, not having much to say, I let him go on his way.
We were close to my old apartment. One of the blocky Khrushchev buildings, four stories tall; a wall of windows and salmon-colored tufa stones between two dirt roads. The kids who had lived there seven years ago had grown up, but their names were still written in chalk at the base of the building in Armenian and then, as they got older, in Russian, the Cyrillic characters still curved and ornamented with superfluous Armenian serifs. One boy named Artur, seemed to have spent an entire day writing his name over and over. It fairly covered the landing at the top of the stairs. A forgotten score written above this signature was recorded to hash marks. Three crossed sets of five and a few fluttering tics nearby: 13 to 9. The forecourt was quiet. In the warm, still afternoon, laundry hung sulkily, the bright shirts bragging to the sky. I pointed out the window of my old apartment for Gina, noticing that the rush of memory was wearing off as I neared its epicenter. I’d expected it to be empty, but it wasn’t. They put curtains in the kitchen window which looked out on the mountains to the south. It was the only window of the apartment that got any light and they’d put these frothy yellow curtains over it. I had to remind myself, for Armenians, looking at a mountain would be like a New Yorker looking at a skyscraper; a marvel, yes, but an ordinary marvel, a feature of the landscape and not worthy of extensive contemplation. Not being so acclimated, I used to watch the mineral light drip down those mountains in the morning and rise from them in the evening. In the summer, a shimmering umber light, cinnabar in the autumn, bluish platinum on winter evenings and like gold in the spring.
“Jon! Ay Jon!” David’s mother, Ruzanne called down to me from the balcony next to my old apartment. My old neighbor, even after seven years and from three floors up, recognized me. I waved to her. She brought out her son, whose baptism party I had attended. His arms and legs had grown and I couldn’t recognize his face. I shouted ‘hello’. He shouted it back. Ruzanne invited us up and as much as I wanted to walk up the steps of the building and smell its quiet mustiness and see the other neighbors, I had nothing to give them and, after all this time, I’d have to give them something. I thanked Ruzanne for the offer and we walked back down the dirt road. I tried to push down the sense of having already accomplished what I’d come back for.
Although I hadn’t forgotten everything, years of disuse had withered my Armenian language into the basics. When I’d first arrived, my speech had been choppy with the ebb and flow of memory: I spoke like I was reading a bullet-point list with no grace words to elide one concept to another. Standing in front of my old apartment, talking to Ruzanne, it felt like Armenian words, in particular verbs were pouring out of the past, like leaves on a fall day. One of the words that came to me, in all its euphony was ‘shtapel’ in English ‘to hurry.’ I used to say it a lot and now, here I was, saying it again. Maybe I had never really adapted. Maybe I’d spent two years frantically running around and I came back thinking it had been enough to be there at all, among people who weren’t in a hurry. Walking to Hayarpi’s, I tried to the word out, to test it for familiarity. I must’ve used it 1000s of times before; ‘Shtapel’ it even sounds like its been thoroughly chewed and lisped by years of overuse.
The apartment Hayarpi and her mother shared was only on the other side of the street from my old apartment. I knocked on the door and waited to hear the familiar squeak of the inside door which was always closed in the colder months to keep the heat in. The door opened and we had a clumsy greeting. I’d never hugged anyone in Yeghegnadzor before. I’d seen Armenians hugging each other, but I’d always been nervous about misunderstanding social cues and scooping up someone against their will or hugging a woman when it wouldn’t be appropriate. When the door opened, it was clear neither Hayarpi nor I had considered how to greet each other after seven years. I held out one hand and then moved it and the other to her back and leaned in, still trying to keep my distance. She and Gina, having just met, hugged each other like old friends.
The foyer was cold, like the apartment stairs, cement musty and bearing down with the leaden cold of concrete insulation. We took off our shoes against protestations and went inside. There were boxes of apples stacked around the perimeter of the room, a few boxes against the china cabinet, two under the window and stacks three or four high, about four feet tall, on either side of the bed. Hayarpi explained to me that they picked the apples from her aunt’s orchard in Yeghegis and then traded them for other things they needed. The clean smell of the apples made me shiver. The fruit hadn’t warmed in its great piles and it was like having ice stashed away in the corners of the room.
Hayarpi tidied up the room as she talked. She was smaller than I’d remembered. Her black hair was pulled back in a way that seemed to stretch her cheekbones out from her large dark eyes, which always gave the impression of looking up. She wore a pink sweater which read ‘I love you’ in English. I wondered if she’d put this sweater on knowing she’d have English speaking guests. Her mom, even shorter, not much more than four feet, came out of the kitchen where she was already making coffee for us. Like most middle-aged women in Armenia, she’d gained some weight and due in part to her height, gave the impression of being nearly round. The gap between her front teeth shone brightly in a smile after each thing she said in greeting. She was older so I figured I could get away with hugging her. It had been so long since I’d seen them or anyone here, I wanted to hug someone in recognition.
After she greeted us, Haypari’s mom returned to the kitchen to check on the coffee. When the kitchen door opened the smell of cold dried herbs and stove gas mixed with the apples and it was easy to imagine being in a burrow or a den, preparing for the winter. The windows were all fogged up from something boiling on the stove and I had the childish desire to nuzzle into a corner, wrap myself up in a blanket and nap until dinner, but the coffee came out on a tray in demitasse cups and I found myself very eager to gulp the steaming brew and warm myself. We lifted our cups and I began to thank our hosts as though proposing a toast. We had a few sips in silence then Hayarpi began to tell me about the car she’d bought, a little car, for her and her little mother. We finished our coffee and went outside and looked at it. Someone had put a new upholstery on the ceiling with thumbtacks and the result was something that looked like a lounge or a dark corner of a poolhall. I wondered where they’d gotten the money to pay for it. We went back in and looked at the bank papers. Even in Armenian, I saw how the interest would compound over time.
My main object in coming back to Yeghegnadzor was to take Hayarpi and her mom on vacation. When I’d lived here, I’d gone back and forth to Tbilisi many times, each time returning with some new detail. Hayarpi had been one of the few people I’d met in Armenia who seemed interested in the outside world. I had wanted her to see something of it, but now there was this damned car.
When we finished looking at the bank papers, they weren’t put away, but left out. This worried my conscience. I picked up the papers, studied them and asked myself how I could spend money taking these people on a trip when they were shortly to go into debt for this car. I wondered what would happen if they couldn’t make payments. Would the bank simply repossess the car? What if they took the apartment? I had no idea how these kinds of things worked in Armenia, but I was comforted by the fact that there was very little homelessness across the country. I imagined the banks probably didn’t have the teeth they did in America in a former Soviet country. I set the papers down and tried to return to our reunion. Hayarpi had been cracking walnuts. She put a handful on my plate and reached into a nearby box and found a big, bright apple for Gina.
“C’mon eat!” Hayarpi said, as if there was nothing to be concerned about. She was so casual, it was easy to forget about the car. I picked up a handful of nuts and began saying something about my Armenian wasn’t as good anymore. I apologized and said I hoped it would come back. I was being modest, I was actually surprised at how much had come back in the short period of time I’d been back. Even the unfamiliar topic of the bank loans had been comprehensible enough.
We talked a little about what had happened since I’d left, which, up until the day they’d bought the car, and this had only been a month or two ago, really hadn’t been much. The university had closed; a hotel had opened; the bus stop had—oh wait, you were here when that happened. That was eight years ago. Life had simply ticked along. What was there to tell? In the summers there were apricots. In the winters, it was potatoes and cabbage. Sometimes it rained or snowed. These were not things that needed telling and yet, I wanted to hear them. I pressed questions about holidays and certain dishes which were so inane they probably made me sound like a lonely person who only wanted to hear a voice respond to his own.
Hayparpi took the superfluity of our conversation in stride, probably chalking it up to another bizarre foreign tendency. I translated as much as I could for Gina and in a short time, she started to understand some, asking me if ‘yot tari arach’ meant ‘seven years ago’.I’ve always learned language by strategy, picking up nouns and verb conjugations like tool to be used at certain times. The result is when someone poses a predictable question, I have a predictable answer ready. By talking to Gina, I was able to learn what phrases I repeated. My Armenian tended to go around in a track, partially because I always tried to steer the conversation into familiar territory. Sitting there, cracking walnuts, with our coffee cups overturned, it was like I’d never left. All I wanted to talk about were the familiar things that defined my Armenia. Perhaps Hayarpi understood how I was trying to infantilize the country so that I’d be more capable of understanding it. She interrupted my nostalgic account of her mother’s cooking and asked me to loan them some money. There was nothing leading up to or away from this. Just a request. She seemed to be saying, ‘this isn’t the land of home-cooked meals and raw mountain air you want it to be. It’s a land of people with the same complex emotions as yours.’ For the first time since we’d arrived, Gina was looking at me with a questioning look and I wasn’t sure how to translate what had just been said.
What Hayarpi was saying was ‘If you’ve got money to take us on this trip, why don’t you just give us the money. We’ll stay here and use it on something we need it for.’ If I were to translate this into American English it would’ve sounded something like, ‘look, I don’t want to go on this trip, but I want the money.’ It sounded rude, but I knew this wasn’t how Hayarpi had meant it. For her, the offer of a trip—with no discernible practical purpose, was unprecedented. For most people in Armenia, If anyone goes anywhere, its because they’ve got some kind of business to take care of there. You go to Yerevan to get government papers you might need. You go into town to go to the market. You go to Moscow, Europe or the US to work—often without realizing you’ve just bought a one-way ticket because it’s very unlikely you’ll make enough to ever bring your family over. Offering a trip to Tbilisi, as much as I’d tried to explain it, still didn’t make any sense to Hayarpi and her mom. They didn’t want to go to a place just to see it. They didn’t want to experience the unfamiliar without compensation. They wanted to stay at home and have a car so they wouldn’t have to rely on others for transportation to the spring fields to pick greens or the autumn valleys to pick berries, food that could augment their diets and wouldn’t cost anything because it grew wild. It was also where they got all the herbs for tea. I understood, or tried to and gave them the money to cover their next car payment. I handed the money over smiling and said ‘You’re still going to Tbilisi.”
By this time, Hayarpi’s mom had come back from the kitchen; they were both so relieved to get the extra money to make their lives easier, they didn’t object to the Tbilisi plans, but I could tell they were both concerned about still having to go. But I knew I wasn’t making assumptions about their culture. Everyone is reluctant to travel in the beginning, especially those who have become acclimated to staying at home. I wasn’t forcing anything on Hayarpi and her mom I would force on my own grandmother. I was convinced there was something of value in travel that wasn’t only accessible to comfortable westerners. I knew this because when I tried to describe the excitement of travel, I didn’t have a translation ready and had to root around a little for the words. Which made things a little more difficult because I kept having to translate for Gina as well, but at least I wasn’t repeating myself anymore.
It took a while to extricate ourselves from the apartment with the apples piled in the corners. We were only allowed to leave after we agreed to come back first thing in the morning. I’d meant to try to see a few more people that day, but it was getting late and I remembered the long dark roads, the lack of streetlights and the occasional open manhole cover. We walked back to where we were staying in the frozen ruts of a dirt street which was churned into mud every time it rained. In the lack of light, the stars were bright and cold overhead. Fallen leaves rustled down the street, escaping from smoldering fires. The glowing embers at the center of each pile shone and dimmed, like quiet breathing. There were no other lights. Dogs barked and people passed by like apparitions, silent until they were right next to you and receding back into obscurity as they walked away. Most of the town was already asleep and, straining, I could hear their snores floating out from the thin panes of windows. There was something contagious in this sound and we yawned back to our own bed like someone who had been away for days.
In the morning, we went back to Hayarpi’s and had coffee. Now that the car had been taken care of, I returned to talk about the trip. I described Tbilisi, the Georgian bread, the lobiani or bean pastry which could be bought everywhere and was very good and filling. Hayarpi saw past these trivialities and protested that they didn’t know anyone in Tbilisi and had no business there. It was like she feared interrogation and was worried about her alibi. I tried to explain the concept of a vacation but she wasn’t having it; the idea was absurd. She’d spent her adult life in her apartment. She had talked about becoming a police officer once, but, like any other job in rural Armenia, you had to put a down payment on it, one her and her mother couldn’t afford, so she stayed in and took care of the apartment. The place was only one room and the kitchen. There was no working TV. When her mom went to work, Hayarpi probably had plenty of time to contemplate the world, she didn’t need to go anywhere else, but, I knew she cared. When I had told her in the past about the places I’d been, she listened intently, interested, but detached from the subject matter. I wanted to change that. I wanted her to see how easy it was to catch a bus, rent a bed in a guest room and see something different. If anyone would take advantage of it, I thought it would be Hayarpi. She was the only Armenian I’d met who talked about other countries more than her own, but when I mentioned visiting one of these countries, she just shook her head. To her, such things weren’t possible. I thought I could change that.
When I asked about their passports, we ran into a problem. I’d already checked with a friend who told me Armenians could travel to Georgia without a visa; many went back and forth all the time. What I didn’t know was that the passport had to be ‘activated’ with a stamp. Everyone had a passport, but very few of them had the stamp that made it anything more than an internal document. Hayarpi’s mother had the stamp from years before when she’d gone to Russia, but Hayarpi’s passport wasn’t activated. She told us, to remedy this we’d need money and we’d have to go down to the police station.
Ugh. The very belly of the beast. When I lived in Armenia, I was treated well by everyone I met with the marked exception of the police. Their heads seemed to have been crammed fuller than anyone else’s with Soviet xenophobia. At night when I ‘d gone out walking, they stood on the corner and insultingly waved me over with questions they didn’t wait to hear the answers to.
“Where are you from?”
“What are you doing here?”
“Where’d you say you work again?”
“Why are you out so late?”
One would ask the questions while the other would look me up and down. Sometimes, he’d even start to circle me, like a hungry dog. What bothered me more than anything, was that I knew it was all a show. Once, in Yerevan, on the Metro, I’d looked up to find a whole phalanx of cops all staring at me. Defiantly, I stared back, thinking eventually they’d lower their gaze, but they never did. We went five stations down the line before I had to elbow through them to get off and end our absurd staring contest. They were kids with uniforms and badges with no knowledge of the law. They were a remnant force of creaking Soviet denial. For the police, nothing was permitted. Even if they allowed something, they did so in a way that indicated they might change their mind and arrest you in a moment. The idea of intentionally marching into their HQ and asking for something wasn’t an idea I relished. On top of that, Hayarpi informed me, we’d probably have to wait a while and I knew by ‘a while’ she meant all day.
The autumn weather had deepened and on our way to the station, the clouds bunched together in an ominous way. Wind shook the tops of the plain trees and their powder-colored leaves spun like foil ornaments. Dust lifted from the paved streets in a grainy sheet, executed a parabola-turn and fled down a side street. The drain pipes were all rattling. The streets were empty.
The police station was at the bottom of the town, by the Tehran-Tbilisi highway which, in southern Armenia, slows to a trickle of road, two wobbly lanes pushed out of macadam as if by a rolling pin, occasionally passed over by a Lada, weaving between the potholes—making due at 35 miles per hour.
We climbed the stairs and opened the door to disappointment. The hallway was a crush of grainy, unshaven faces and tired, red-rimmed eyes. Hayarpi took her place among the petitioners. She didn’t ask anyone where we needed to wait or if we were in the right place. Seeing people waiting, she too waited to do anything else would be presumptuous. Even after living in Armenia and knowing the system, this made me impatient. We stood there for about ten minutes before a grandmother’s head appeared among the waists of the tired men to ask Hayarpi what she was doing there. She explained her errand and the grandmother nodded, receding back among the belt buckles, fake Armani labels and cigarette pack-bulging pockets. After a moment, as if she’d been thinking, grandma leaned back out and informed us that it was lunch time. There was no one actually in the office this whole hallway was seeking entry to. In moments like these, I wished my impatient American mind away. It’s constant demand for progress can be very annoying in different cultural contexts it must seem to casual observers, like a handicap or a rude proclivity. The impulse to always know where I am in line and how long I have left to wait has helped me to understand why the rest of the world often describes Americans as ‘childish.’ Constantly sighing, looking at our watches, demanding updates, we must seem very much like children on a long drive asking ‘are we there yet?’
I couldn’t handle the silence and body odor of the interminable hallway wait. I motioned to Gina and went to sit outside. I stopped at the top of the stairs and sat at the top of the wide tufa balustrade and watched the wind, the mountain dust and the Ladas pass down the street. I remarked on how long I thought we could be waiting, but I was glad we’d discovered the need to do this. Even if it took all day, it was better than getting to the border and being turned back after a five-hour trip for not having our papers in order.
After I explained my frustration, I focused on my memories. I hadn’t been here in seven years, looking out at the plane trees across the street, I considered who’d I’d been then. I remembered the first snow I’d seen here. I started to tell Gina about it but Hayarpi came out and said she was finished for the day. She’d been able to drop off her passport, but getting the stamp would take a while. We’d have to come back the next day to pick it up and pay. I was glad to not have to waste the entire day sitting on the steps of the police station. We went back to her house and had some tea before we said goodbye for the day and Gina and I were able to go scrambling over the hills as I had years before. I returned to the story I’d begun at the police station of the first snow and the image I had of going outside in my socked feet to watch it fall and leaving humid footprints on the concrete. As we walked, other fragmented memories returned to me and I pointed out the potsherds of memory I’d left all over the place that had kept so well in these remote hillsides, scrapped buildings and dry river beds. We were still out walking when the moon fought through the heaps of rock and rose clear, untrammeled, in the cloudless sky.
The next morning, we repeated what was by then becoming our ritual of coffee and breakfast at Hayarpi’s. There were still so many people I wanted to go see, but I felt obligated to drop by her place at least once a day; there was also the business of the passport. I gave her the money but avoided asking if she needed us to go with her to pick it up. In Armenia, this was incredibly rude. We’d gone down there yesterday together, it was only logical that we’d also return together. In small towns with high unemployment, this is the way things worked. People did things together and shared out the resulting problems and successes. I used to know this when I’d lived here and time was a fluid with one day passing so unobtrusively into the next, finding no rough calendar edges. Now, I was an American on vacation and I wanted nothing more than to rush all over the damn place and check off boxes. Every moment I sat on Hayarpi’s couch, I thought of another person I wanted to see, another memory of a little house and a friendship that began with a chance encounter. Did all these people remember me? I had to return to them all to know and they were scattered all over the hillsides. Hayarpi never asked me to go back to the police station with her, probably because she could tell how badly I didn’t want to go.
We left after spending the entire morning lingering over our coffee and snacks. We went back up into the hills to the south of town. I had a reunion with a man I’d last met when he was a boy and wearing one of those dense wool sweater vests little kids in the mountains have to wear, kicking a deflated soccer ball. Now he was nearly my height and using a cellphone like it was an extension of his body. I found myself giving him fatherly advice while we sat in the living room and ate fried potatoes and drank more viscid black coffee while his mother continually fussed over the table and refilled my glass of cherry juice against my wishes.
After making another stop, one which fortunately didn’t include food, we plodded west into the mountains where I’d made the long walk to a spring once or twice, a startling feature in the otherwise arid landscape where the water erupted in a bubbling pool and hissed effervescence into the still mountain air. Though I hadn’t been here many times before, this spring had come to symbolize Yeghegnadzor for me and I was intent on seeing it again.
The walk was peaceful but too long. We walked up the valley long enough to feel disconcerted with the mountains which seemed to bend over us, leering after a few hours. The little rocks found ways into our shoes and we were covered in fine dust, tasting it in our mouths. Just as we were about to turn back, I saw the turnoff where drivers pulled in to fill up jugs of water and picnic with skewered meat and strong, clear apricot brandy. I had been sure that my memory had embellished the size of the fountain that held the water, but it was as big as a crater and taller than a child. I took a few tentative sips while the sparkling water burped up and bubbles stretched and snapped and shot water into my nose. Wet enough, I decided to dunk my whole head in the fountain, half-expecting to come out looking a few years younger.
We filled up the bottle we’d brought, drank it off and filled it up again. All the around, it was quiet. The snaking mountain roads led to little villages and no one traveled them in the evening. It is a startling thing to spend so much time on a road and not see a single car. There was only the constant sound of the bubbling water like a witch’s cauldron boiling with no fire. We filled the bottle again and began the long walk back, the water dripped from my hair, soaking my collar. The wind picked up a little and glazed my wet earlobes with its mournful sounds. Blowing out of the west, out of the planes of Anatolia, it hurried us back to town.
The next morning was our last in town. I had to meet my friend Anna in Yerevan before we left the next morning for Tbilisi. Hayarpi and her mom were to meet us in Yerevan and we would take a taxi together to Tbilisi. After our customary breakfast, I reminded Hayarpi that she needed to remember their passports when they left the next morning. ‘Forget everything else,’ I cautioned. ‘But don’t forget your passports.’ I felt rude offering her such obvious reminders, but she’d only left the country once before and I knew such a small thing could be easy to forget in the rush to remember everything else. Even as we said goodbye, I couldn’t help quizzing her about what she needed to bring the next day, continually reminding her about the passports. Everything was planned out. I’d made all the preparations to fulfill this promise I’d been talking about for years. The expectation of this trip made it easier to leave town. I was so focused on preparations, I didn’t even notice as Yeghegnadzor, once again, slipped out from under my feet and I sped off to Yerevan and our busy American lives.
After we’d finished our errands, we sat in the park on Abovyan St. It was nearly dark and a few couples were giggling to each other, sharing benches, holding hands and staring messages into each other’s eyes. Gina and I sat down and I started cramming puffed corn snacks into my mouth. Since I’d quit smoking about a year before, I’d developed a habit of stress-eating. Things seemed to be going alright, but I knew I was lousy at planning trips for others. When I was alone, I had no problem forgetting to bring food, walking all the way across town or sleeping on a bench if I arrived too late. Over the years, I’d subjected Gina to all these inconveniences; I’d book the tickets, but she learned to make some advance preparation herself if she wanted to eat on the bus or have a bed when she got there. She’d been the one to suggest we buy some snacks at the supermarket. I thought I was prepared and here was one glaring omission: I hadn’t even remember to bring food for our five-hour trip. I sat on the bench, getting ‘nacho’ flavored dust all over myself, wondering what else I’d forgotten. Neither of us could think of anything, but I couldn’t suppress this nagging feeling that something else was missing.
We woke up early in the morning, but we were already late for my meeting with Anna. I decided to take a taxi—as much as I loathed them. But there were none to be found. Rather than wait around, we started jogging up the street. As I ran, I chastised myself ‘this is the guy who’s going to take two people who never leave their town, to a different country, a place where they’re going to feel disoriented and uncomfortable? I couldn’t even manage to make it half-way across town on time. I was no tour guide. Hayarpi’s mom couldn’t even walk that well; she certainly couldn’t run and, when I traveled, all I did was run. I tried to shut out the thoughts and run faster but I was continually reminded of my inability to accommodate others when I turned around and noticed Gina was still three blocks behind me, walking with an annoyed expression. We hadn’t even had any coffee yet.
After my meeting, I felt better. Seeing Anna reminded me of the debt I owed to this country and the people who had done so much for me. It might not be easy, but I had to try to return the favor. I was glad to think that this time, I hadn’t come only for my own purposes. Taking Hayarpi and her mom to Tbilisi on vacation was my way of introducing a new experience to the people who introduced so much to me.
I called the taxi driver after we left the cafe where we’d met Anna. The driver was short on the phone, like he had limited minutes. He hung up before I was finished talking and I had to call back to make sure we’d understood each other about where to meet. This seemed to annoy him. We walked back down Abovyan. The weather had warmed up and the smoky dampness of autumn had burned away. There was only a clear, sweet air to breathe, like something that had come down from the mountains. We got our bags from the hostel and, after a little searching, found our driver parked outside the supermarket, slumped over the open driver door texting with his phone in the universal taxi-driver posture, escaping, but at the same time, attached to his job.
We got in and immediately broke out the snacks. I offered a chocolate to the driver which seemed to warm him a little. We all began to talk, with me translating for Gina and as we drove across town to meet Hayarpi and her mom at the Metro station, I had a feeling I had pulled it off. We were in the taxi, about to leave Yerevan. The Air BnB apartment with two bedrooms in Tbilisi was booked. The taxi would drop us off at the door and pick Hayarpi and her mom up again in three days. Even if we couldn’t do much sightseeing, at least we’d get there and have a place to sleep and cook and all without running. I sat back and ate a few pretzels feeling like I was making a grand exit from this city I’d once arrived at so humbly, knowing nothing, in the middle of the night and now I was the one riding in sedan taxis, ferrying other people across borders. I joked easily with the driver and uncovered his Georgian identity. Knowing he wasn’t Armenian made me feel even more comfortable talking with him. It always puts me at ease, using a second language, knowing the person I’m talking to isn’t using their first language either.
We pulled up in front of the Yeritasardikan Metro. I’d been talking to Hayarpi on the phone since she’d arrived in Yerevan. I figured this would be the closest place to meet. Afraid I’d kept them waiting, I bounded out of the taxi after we came to a stop. I was excited now and tried to pace myself knowing there was still a long trip ahead, but in a country where strong coffee is so plentiful, I didn’t worry much about wasting energy.
Hayarpi and her mom had already arrived. They were sitting on a bench outside the station looking utterly lost while the sharply dressed students from the nearby universities poured in and out of the turnstiles, laughing, cheek-kissing and hand-clasping. Hayarpi and her mom sat rigid and wide-eyed on the bench, looking excessively rustic for the heavy coats they were wearing despite the warm weather and the large plastic market bag next to them on the seat which looked like it may hold all their worldly possessions. I saw them before they saw me and I was overwhelmed with a feeling of tenderness toward them and their uncertainty, as one feels when watching a child make their way down the corridor of a school for the first time. I ran up to them, making some joke as I went. I had put on this bright-colored shirt, in the few weeks I’d been there, I had gotten tired of the all-black attire favored by Armenians and, in visual protest, put this shirt on. It suited my mood to have this Hawaiian shirt on. I was light and happy. Everything was going to be fine.
I took my guests’ bags and felt the full weight of what I was doing. After years of their hospitality to me, I was going to be their host and I meant to provide them with all they could handle as they had done for me at their table, so often admonishing me to take more food and bringing new things to the table even when I’d eaten my fill. I walked backwards, facing them, so we could talk. I was so happy to see them and happier still to be doing something for them, taking them somewhere.. A place that had become like a mythical city to me. What wouldn’t we do there? What wouldn’t we see? I babbled about the river cutting right through the city, the churches and mosques climbing up the valley walls. The redbrick homes built almost on top of each other, the old town, the visible history, things that Yerevan in its angular modernity blatantly lacked. “Tbilisi,” I declared defiantly on the streets of Yerevan. “The capital of the Caucasus!”
I spun back around, leading the way, feeling like Willy Wonka marching his guests through his factory. If I’d had a baton, I would’ve been twirling it. Then, like a man suddenly unsure if he has his wallet whose hand shoots down to pat his pocket, I spun back around. “You have your passports, right?” I asked. Hayarpi and her mom exchanged glances, Hayarpi smiled and said, very calmly, “no,” as if this was a trifle. I knew she was joking. She had to be joking. After all we’d gone through, going back and forth to the police station, after I’d made her repeat back to me what she was going to be sure to bring above everything else. “Tell me, tell me you’re joking,” I pleaded. But she couldn’t because it was the truth. For reasons I don’t understand to this day, neither Hayarpi nor her mother had forgotten the passports, which when I’d left their house, had been right there, on the coffee table: unmissable.
When I realized she wasn’t joking, I went through a frantic denial. I asked them to please look in their bags, were they sure they didn’t have them. Maybe they’d packed them away and forgot? But, without even looking, Hayarpi confidently told me that they were still at home on the table. She knew they were. She distinctly remembered not taking them. They’d forgotten. 100%. I didn’t know what to make of her calm assurances. I knew that they’d been nervous about going, but when I’d offered to do something else rather than take the trip, Hayarpi had assured me that she’d really wanted to go. After all, this was the person who, out of everyone, had been the most interested in the places I’d gone. It was years of listening to her questions about places like Georgia that had given me the idea to take them in the first place. But here it was. The passports had been left at home and neither Hayarpi nor her mom seemed perturbed by this. Clearly, they didn’t want to go. I’d forced them into a corner and I hadn’t even noticed. Realizing my mistake, I began to feel incredibly self-conscious. I suddenly felt ridiculous in my festive shirt and hastened to take it off. Underneath, like everyone else, I was wearing black.
When I first arrived in Armenia, I had a difficulty understanding negative replies, not because I lacked the vocabulary—there were, after all, only a handful of ways to say no—but because I couldn’t read the visual cues. Instead of answering in the negative, shopkeepers, not wanting to be offensive, would often click their tongue in the place of a negative reply. Sometimes they combined this with looking away, but seldom did they actually say ‘no’ outright. At first, I thought they were being dismissive until I realized that they found saying ‘no’ just as rude as I found their inability to say it. Talking to Hayarpi and her mother that day, I couldn’t help but to think I was seeing the same thing. After years of living in this country and many more years using its language, with Armenian communities from California to Argentina, I thought I’d learned all the subtle cues and the cultural mores, but here was a cue I’d missed. My would-be guests didn’t want to go to Tbilisi. They weren’t interested in seeing the rumpled old town and the sagging brick work. They weren’t concerned with the nice restaurants and the soaring churches. They wanted to stay home where they were comfortable and they didn’t have this gangling foreigner leading them around. When I thought about it from their perspective, I couldn’t blame them. They didn’t want to dampen my enthusiasm; I hadn’t really given them a fair way to say ‘no’ without disappointing me.
We’d been standing behind the cab, parked in front of the SAS Supermarket, discussing what to do. Hayarpi had earnestly proposed that she go back on the marshutka to Yeghegnadzor and get the passports, a round trip that would take at least five hours, while her mother stayed with Gina, the driver and me. I asked the driver how much extra he’d charge to drive to Yeghegnadzor. The price he quoted was ridiculously high, nearly doubling the fare. After my realization, I dismissed the whole thing. I decided that we’d all go out to eat at the Syrian place nearby and then we’d take Hayarpi and her mom back to the marshutka stop to go home. No one seemed very excited about the plan, but I felt like I owed them some kind of cultural experience for having come to Yerevan and I thought it’d be a nice gesture to treat the driver to a meal since he’d waited so long for us to figure out what we were doing.
We all got into the car and instead of driving across the border, we drove around the block. The ride was short and awkward. I’d hoped Hayarpi and her mom would be relieved, but they still acted very uncomfortable, like even now, I was pulling the rug out from under their feet. For two years they’d fed me and I’d never been able to return the favor; just once, I wanted to treat them.
Restaurants in Armenia are for weddings. Most Armenians don’t casually go out to eat. They stop at little places and have coffee, piroshki, maybe a beer and zakuski, but the real restaurants with plates and napkins all have a brittle formal quality. The chairs are always high-backed, the floors faux-marble, the décor haphazard and radiating coldness. The tables are large to accommodate the many guests you’re supposed to be entertaining. There’s no such thing as a split check.
I figured the food would give us something to talk about. I knew Hayarpi and her mom had never had Levantine food. Maybe they wouldn’t like it, but I’d order enough appetizers for everyone to try, baba ganush, tabuleh, falafel and I knew they would know dolma and shawarma, which they called shashlik. I ordered mezze, imagining large fragrant plates, baskets of bread and observant waiters, but we waited in silence in the chilly, cigarette-scented atmosphere for small plates to arrive that no one seemed to want to despoil. I served myself a small portion and encouraged everyone else to do likewise, but the scene turned childish. My guests recoiled from the strange food and, after much cajoling, were finally induced to take little bites, whereupon they set their forks down and declared that this was not the food for them. I couldn’t blame them, they’d been eating the same homegrown food their entire lives, strange restaurant food was not the ideal meal to share and I figured everyone could order a main course they’d like and, I hoped, that would be enjoyed.
Gina and I ordered falafel; everyone else got a burger. When they arrived, Hayarpi took hers apart, squinting in distaste at the bun, like she was unable to understand what bread was doing in the meal and not off to the side. Her mom did the same and in a moment, a spare plate was covered with ketchup-sopped buns, like the extractions of a grisly accident and Hayarpi and her mom’s plates were reduced to a single patty of meat and a scattering of fries. When I considered the huge plates I’d been served at their house of fried potatoes and preserved tomatoes and peppers, I felt ashamed to have brought them to such an obviously sub-par place.
As we ate, I tried to keep the talk up, but everyone, even the driver who was probably anxious to be on his way, had sunken into low spirits. In the chilly room, forks knocked against the plates, comments hung in the air answered after a delay by monosyllables and coughs. I repeatedly had to ask for more bread, which only seemed to expose the inadequacy of the restaurant; in an Armenian household, no guest has ever, ever run out of bread.
It took forever to finish eating and I considered ordering a drink, but decided against prolonging things—also, I knew I’d have to force everyone else to order their own drink and I didn’t feel like I had the energy to be play the gracious, jolly host anymore. I paid the check and we left, still not really talking much.
The clear autumn day was already coming to an end outside. The sun was a coppery orange, down on the horizon, not glowing but oozing color as it does after a long day at the beach when you’ve been outside with it all day, not paying attention until it’s down on the horizon like a parent calling for an end to playtime. “That’s all for today; don’t worry. You can come back tomorrow.” But the fort is almost built, the trail is almost blazed, the plans are almost drawn up and you know, as does everyone else, that the fire for the activity won’t be there the next day. The dynamic won’t be the same. Tomorrow some kids will have to go home early, others won’t be in the same mood and the project won’t have the same seriousness. It won’t be the same. But, there’s this last golden moment for you to realize it. To take your mind out of the task, before you’re whisked back home and look at what you’ve done. Even if you never come back to it again. Look at what you’ve managed to do with this one summer afternoon. That’s the kind of sun that was in the sky, the sun that only seems to cast its rays backward, over what’s passed. The future is cut off by the horizon.
After seven years away, I went back to Armenia, knowing that I wasn’t going to find the same place I’d left, but hoping there’d be some approximation. In Yerevan, of course, there were a few changes, but across the country, things remained as they’d been, not only before I’d arrived, but for decades and centuries before then. History had moved over these mountains east of the Anatolian Plateau like glaciers churning up the ground, leaving lakes and piles of rubble but ultimately melting while the people continued living much as they’d always done, scarcely noting that the wall of ice had retreated leaving caravansaries, monasteries and Soviet factory husks behind in its wake. Features that dot the landscape like trees in other places and go unnoticed.
We drove Hayarpi and her mom down past the relics of history to the southern end of the city where the marshutkas leave for Yeghegnadzor; the kind of place you’d never visit if you didn’t live in the country. I helped with the bags, trying to hide the sorrow I was feeling knowing how long it would probably be before I’d be able to come back again. In the wake of so many glaciers, I hadn’t even scratched the surface of the land I’d paced over so relentlessly years before, but, upon leaving again, after heartily embracing Hayarpi and her mom, I found I’d been completely bowled over by the crushing pace of history. I’d been knocked over and out of the way and now all I could do was to look back from where I’d been thrown at where I’d been, point and search in vain for some remnant I’d left behind that would prove my presence.
But the landscape was utterly void of any distinguishing characteristics and, as we drove north, it became less familiar as we neared the Georgian border with its familiar green forests, golden rivers and European cities, while, to the south, Hayarpi and her mom, the real Armenia, immobile as ever, moved back down to the high desert of a country somehow older than its stones. They went back to where they’d started from, as I supposed it had to be and I, the foreigner, left, again, never having been able to do anything more than visit—but what a visit it had once been.
