Bye

It’s been over two months since Arman and I landed in New York City. We’ve moved to Woodside, Queens, a neighborhood of immigrants: rare is a hipster. They had invaded my Greenpoint neighborhood in the year I was away, filling the run-down C-Town with five dollar boxes of organic crackers while avoiding the Polish butcher shops and bakeries. More bars and restaurants and cafes, a new “luxury condo” building on every block, plate glass windowed lofts overlooking the ragtag row houses covered in aluminum siding, some with “For Sale By Owner” signs in front. Arman and I would respond to an ad on Craig’s list and before we even arrived the apartment had been taken. One bedroom apartments for a minimum of $1600. Where was the affordable housing? (And how was this any different from Yerevan and Northern Avenue?)

We resorted to asking people walking down the street if they knew of anything for rent. Arman would ask most innocently, just about anyone: old Polish ladies who couldn't speak English, little kids. The Latino couples, moms and dads, aunts and uncles, socializing on the corner over checkers, would have various reactions: were we yuppie invaders? Many times they were friendly and helpful, informing us of places they had heard were opening up, or lamenting with us the rising rents. Invariably, the hipsters thought it was the strangest thing, to be asked such a question while walking down the street. They didn’t seem to know anything about the neighborhood or their neighbors. My temperature would rise at seeing them sipping $8 beers in the outdoor cafes, on sidewalks normally traversed by working class moms on their way to do the laundry. Go back to Manhattan! I wanted to scream.

It’s popular now to diss the hipsters. I think I once was one, but we didn’t call ourselves hipsters back then, in the nineties. We were artists, activists, slackers, queers and generally disenfranchised Gen X-ers. We shopped at thrift shops because they were cheap, and we lived in low-rent neighborhoods because we had to. These NY hipster kids seem like capitalists by default; they don’t really like the system, they want the world to be more green and expressive, but they don’t know how to change things. So they spend premium prices to dress like previous generations who had less apathy and more attitude, and they move into neighborhoods that seem more real than the suburbs that they have come from, rendered just as comfortable with fancy new buildings. They haven’t had any reason nor the means to truly question the way things are now, nor to get upset about them: much of our culture now reinforces numbness and acceptance, of war, of tv, of boredom, and they have an easy life with their parents’ money or corporate jobs that give them a disposable income to shop at Whole Foods.

But this is all speculation, really; just observations from what I have overheard of the youth while riding the bus or subway home.

Vartan and Viken just moved to New York from Armenia to have a better life, a more creative, expressive life, where they can truly be themselves. But they are realizing the impossible New York equation for artists. It’s too hard to survive and have time to make your art. They have noticed that people coming home from work to the working class neighborhoods look exceptionally tired and weary. No where in Europe do the working masses look like this, Vartan claims. He wants to mount a camera by the subway exit just to show the commuters' collective low energy as they stream out of the ground. Viken has noticed that the people who show up at the war protest rallies and marches are tatiks and babiks, because they are the only adults who actually have time on their hands. The exception was an Armenian-American protest against the Anti-defamation Leage for denying the Armenian genocide. There, he saw college kids and young and middle aged professionals.

Arman has noticed a strong police presence on the streets here, and he cannot understand why it’s necessary for clubs to check your ID before you walk in the door; he sees less freedom than he expected. Only one event inspired him (and me): Low Life, a celebration of Luc Sante’s book on New York through the 19th century, by burlesque dancers and drag queens, staged in Tompkins Square Park as part of the Howl Festival. One drag queen named Tigger, dressed as a Bowery whore, stripped down to nothing and bounced his entire naked body, butt to the audience, against the stage floor. Such meaningless vulgarity seems especially important right now, as we are living with so much repression, not even identifiable at times. It was the most liberating event I had seen in a long time, though I was aware that the women were rendered sexual objects in their ironic embrace of burlesque, and yet the men dressed as women in order to speak. The audience was older than me, longtime East Village residents, it seemed, and very few young people, though there were performers in their twenties. A host(ess) observed that the audience was bigger than the one at the first Wigstock, and the coordinator shouted at the end that the East Village would never die, as she was surrounded by a banner with corporate sponsor logos including East Village Realty companies. Arman has noted a certain creative freedom in the East Village that he can’t find in our neighborhood, though he questions the prices on the clothes and food and apartments and wonders how poor artists can live there.

He and I spend most of our free time in Woodside exploring the Dominican bakery, the Irish deli, the Mexican tamale cart, the Greek diner, the best Bangladeshi restaurant in the city, the Chinese-Tibetan buffet, the Korean market, the pan-Asian supermarket. It takes ten minutes to walk to Jackson Heights, where the streets are decorated with lights to celebrate Eid and the windows filled with sparkly Indian outfits. Though language separates me from many of my neighbors -- I have botched up more than a few orders at Spanish speaking restaurants; Arman had to act out a little vignette for the Indian family upstairs to ask them to be quiet after midnight – I am comfortable here, more so than the neighborhood we moved out of, more than the rest of New York. I told a friend recently that I didn’t know why, but the immigrants seem more real to me; I trust them more. It’s not quite clear why, as many of them come from traditional cultures like the one that I have just lived with and challenged. But perhaps it is because so many of them live with struggle, just to survive, and because in their hearts and minds they live in another place. There is another place in my mind too.

And now this place has been on the news. Well, at least, the US congressional acknowledgment of the Armenian genocide has been on the news, as well as the Turkish response – the Armenians are practically left out of the story. It’s not surprising to me that the U.S. media has reacted this way, since Americans generally seem to have more of an obsession on dominant cultures than minorities.

Armenian-Americans have been trying for decades to get a resolution passed in Congress. It’s an effort that makes sense; a democratic government should acknowledge the human rights infractions that have been waged against some of its people. They should take a stand in getting another government to apologize for such crimes. It was mainly the democratic leadership and representatives of Armenian American constituencies of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs that adopted it, but I can’t help wondering if it’s an undermining effort against the war. If Turkey stops funneling arms, etc., into Iraq as a favor to the U.S., then the war kind of stops, without having to be voted upon. Or, the democrats don’t really give a fuck if Bush and Condi call them asking them not to piss off Turkey, because they don’t care about the war anymore. In any case, I have very confused and mixed feelings: what value does this political resolution have coming from a country that is waging an un-just war? Or, is this a really hopeful event, a sign that there is truth and justice in the U.S.? Will the U.S. now admit the genocide against the Native Americans? Is it a step towards Turkey admitting the truth? Well, Turkey pulled their ambassador out of Washington DC, they made the threats to back out of the U.S. war effort in Iraq, and they claimed they would attack Iraqi Kurds over the border. They condemn Arat Dink and Serkis Seropyan of Agos with insulting Turkishness for printing one of Hrant Dink's interviews, an interview that many other Turkish newspapers also ran. They respond this way, seemingly without thinking, for they know that the world is watching their actions regarding human rights issues.

When my mind goes fearful, I imagine Turkey totally giving up on their effort to get into the European Union, and just deciding with Azerbaijan to wipe out Armenia, the troublemakers, once and for all. Will the U.S. do anything, now that certain representatives have adopted the resolution, or will they just let it happen, like the genocide in Darfur?

If you take the “everything happens because of money” tack, Turkey’s obstinacy relates to their fear of having to pay reparations, which also explains the U.S. failure to erect a monument to lost slaves or apologize formally to Native Americans. Instead, they offer blacks and Native Americans “freedom” and “opportunity” to succeed in the American way of life, if they can get around the racism of U.S. institutions.

Who would want to buy into such a system? Who would feel good about a country that took advantage of you or your ancestors and never apologized?

Well, the immigrants in my neighborhood, for one. Many of them come from places where the U.S. has meddled, infiltrated, or otherwise fucked over – the Phillippines, Iran, Vietnam, El Salvador, etc.
So why do I trust them so much? Maybe it is because after all they have been through -- political oppression, economic hardship, religious persecution -- they find a way to survive and hold onto their homes. They buy cheap phone cards to hear the voices of those who raised them, they eat food and worship gods that enrich their blood and spirit. They don’t give up on the impossible equation of who they are. I think, maybe, the rest of us do.

There are some things I miss about Armenia, that I want to hold onto: the offense at saying thank you or sorry, the availability of people to be present, to be there for you and with you, with food and love, instead of slaving themselves to a career and work. And though I often felt bad about myself, as a diasporan Armenian, for forgetting my language and not being able to learn it, of my need for “boundaries” and clarity around money, I can’t help now to be proud of the way we can act and fight for something we believe in. I am not sure where this spirit comes from, as it is dying in America and suffocating in Armenia. In Yerevan, I saw the desire for change, over and over again, but it seemed a critical mass needed to break through against feelings of being squashed under Soviet times and the current corrupt policing system. Something is building, though, as evidenced by the increasing number of protests in Yerevan, like the one today against the destructive mining practices in Garni gorge for building materials, including those of well-connected government officials. Some energy has been long passed down to us through the stories of survival. This fight for justice is something to constantly cultivate, and to apply to just causes, whatever ones you feel are most important.

Thank you so much for reading this. I will miss you. I already do.

Love, Nancy

Destruction question

There are some things that I do not think I will ever find the answers to. Like why pear flavored soda is called limonad; why one word, vodk, is used for both foot and leg, as if they were indistinguishable parts of the body; and how drag shows came to be called travesty parties. For the latter, you can understand the mistake: travesty sounds like transvestite. But I am just wondering how it stuck, how everyone using that word unanimously decided not to correct it.

A drunk intellectual sabotaged the women’s workshop reading during the question and answer session. He was with his cronies, in the corner; I am not sure who invited them or why they came but they talked during the whole thing, and snickered and laughed at the women’s writing. The problem partially had to do with the setup; we decided to sit the way that we sit in the workshop, in a circle, with the audience sitting around us. It made sense in the planning, but during the reading it set up some kind of dynamic that left people out of our group, and then, that we were under siege.
The first question the drunk intellectual asked was: when two men get together they talk about sex. So what does a group of 12 women do when they get together? Orgies, Lara said. For some reason I decided to take his question seriously, and told him that men were often competitive in groups, women supportive, but both energies were positive because they led to improvement. This started a series of questions on competition, from another intellectual, this one younger and sober and more sincere. The drunk intellectual asked one woman why she wrote about her mother’s curly hair, and if this was a sign of feminine writing. The younger intellectual asked if we would read Marc Nichanian’s essay on Zabel Yessayan, a man writing about a woman. After each of these questions, the women in the circle would look at each other and talk about them before we replied. I sensed that some women felt that they were being accused of being feminist, and they were defensive, as with that term, in Armenia, often comes the notion that women want to take over the world and castrate men. A couple women told me that the drunk intellectual was mocking us.
When it seemed as if the questioning was subsiding, I commented that many people had asked me why it was a workshop for women only. My reply was that I wasn’t so sure women’s voices or stories were being heard. And when I had been to other events like these, during the q and a, it was often men who dominated. The dynamic in the room at that very moment illustrated that fact. I said it was interesting to think about the forces in society that made men feel so entitled to ask questions, and why women didn’t. The men in the corner replied, without a moment’s thought, that asking questions was inherently male. Then the drunk intellectual asked, how did the women from the capitalist, imperialist countries get along with the local aboriginal women? It actually wouldn’t have been a bad question, if he had phrased it differently, and I considered answering it for a moment, but it seemed I was being insulted. So I turned around and told him that we could answer him in conversation afterwards, and that he had asked enough questions, thank you.
Later, I was telling Vartan this story, who said that the drunk intellectual thought of himself as a member of the proletariat, and that he could only see me, a woman from New York, as an imperialist. It’s true that CEC artslink is funded in part by the US State Dept, something I wasn’t so aware of before I started the project. But I designed the project, with help from “aboriginal” women for Utopiana, the co-sponsor. The workshop was meant solely to provide community for women writers. No one made money from the project; the book will be given away for free. The workshop will continue, in Armenia, and with participation from diasporan women writers online, in Armenian. So I have trouble understanding how what I did was imperialistic, except for the fact that feminism is often seen as a foreign force, not inherent to Armenia. I can understand this idea, for the modern feminist movement originated with white upper class women in Europe and America. But it often feels like this concept is used to rationalize women’s oppression in Armenia today. And can’t we also argue that communism was imported or imposed (or imperialistic) as well? Aren’t some ideas just international in basis?
Someone asked me afterwards if it was a feminist workshop, and I replied that a woman did not have to be a feminist to be in the workshop; she just had to want to write in community with other women writers. In that sense, and because it was meant to bring out women’s stories, it was feminist. We read female writers from all over the world. East and West, Armenian and other, to inform our discussions. I wasn’t using the workshop as a tool to import ideas; just for people to talk to each other about our families and our bodies and our experiences.
To answer the question, though. We had to use a translator to connect mono-lingual English speakers (basically me) to the non-English speakers. It slowed down our conversations, but it made us more aware of language. Many people knew English, but they chose to speak in Armenian; I wasn’t sure who knew English until like, the 6th week. We did not all bond at first. It took time, the time of the workshop, actually, to feel comfortable with each other. Much of the time I was nervous, but this had more to do with the fact that we were all Armenian women, and much of my childhood was spent with unpredictable, moody, intolerant Armenian women; I kept thinking the workshop members were going to become my aunts and grandmother. But they didn’t, of course. They weren’t ghosts. They all wanted to write, and they all had different ideas on writing, and this was mainly what the workshop was about: our meeting of minds, our sharing and understanding of one another's craft and process.
The only time we divided was when we spoke about the genocide. The diasporan women were interested in acknowledging the impact of the event, because they felt it had been silenced, whereas the local women had heard enough about it, where it is taught in schools and commemorated widely every April 24th.
The local response seems mostly due to nationalized mourning as a form of propaganda. The locals’ wariness makes sense to me, as nationalism was what led people to kill in the first place. But then, such a response does not acknowledge the individual’s right to mourn: either you conform with the nation’s response to genocide, or you reject it. There is no way to understand genocide for yourself, through world history, through family. Since genocide is still taking place today, it’s not as if it’s an irrelevant issue.
But now I am imposing my imperialistic, capitalistic emphasis on the individual over the ideas of the rest of the group, who cannot speak for themselves here on this blog. Unless they happen to be reading and leave a comment.
Viken told me that it was the drunk intellectual’s style to ask questions in such a way that you didn’t understand if he were serious or joking. But that no one should come to an event drunk and do such a thing. I wasn't expecting such a reaction, never thought of the workshop as a controversial enterprise, and I am not sure what would have been a successful q and a. But the upshot was that some of the women don't want to read their work in public any time soon.
The question is why the drunk intellectual did such a thing. I mean, who is this workshop really harming? The drunk intellectual was condescending, and his message seemed to be that such a project was completely worthless. There was no acknowledgment nor understanding of community-based collaboration. But perhaps some day, when the drunk intellectual sobers up, he'll be able to understand the worthiness of individual expression.
I thought he just wanted to be destructive in order to prove how intellectual he was. I thought that if I were in his position, I would probably have the destructive feelings, but I wouldn’t have acted on them. Then again, I am not in my mid- fifties, possibly alcoholic, financially struggling, and living in a world vastly different from the one that formed me.
I remember back in the 90s when Pina Bausch was paid an outrageous sum of money to present her dance company in L.A., by the Cultural Affairs Department, as part of an L.A. arts festival. There was protest, as that money could have been used to support hundreds of local L.A. artists. Many questioned why a European woman was given such status while L.A. artists were ignored, a grant program for individual artists recently cut.
Similarly, and more egregiously, American and European artists find ample opportunities to work in Armenia, while Armenian artists struggle to survive. It’s true that local Armenian artists are also finding opportunities in Europe. But who is funding the local artists, within Armenia? Both NPAK and Utopiana support local artists, but they are both run by diasporans and are somewhat seen as suspect. The common assumption is that you have to get in with the diasporan leaders, or you are ignored. It’s interesting to note that these two groups are presently at odds with each other. I know little about the problem, but I am reminded of two goldfish that my family left on vacation once when I was a child. Since no one was around to feed them, one of them ate the other.
My point is that the whole conflict seems to be about entitlement.

My last day in Yerevan, the women’s resource center and the women’s workshop had a little party for me. The women made a scrap book of images and messages so that I would remember our time together. As they said goodbye to me, a few of them told me how much it meant for them to meet me. I was quite surprised, as I didn’t think I had much contact with them; but then I remembered that I had spoken about coming out as bisexual to their sexuality group, and that they had come to see one of my performances. I led, for a short time, an English conversation group, and I went to Shushi with them. I learned a little bit about their lives, about their relationships with their family and friends (which can be alienating for their different outlooks), about their relationships with each other (they seem incredibly close) and about what they want for themselves, personally and professionally (an equal partner, a family, a fulfilling career of the mind).
As I was saying goodbye to Lara, I told her how much the center had helped me to feel a part of Yerevan, and I reflected on how it was a place of “yes”. You don’t have the sense that there are limits there, that you can’t be yourself or that your project won’t work. The rule seems to be openness and accommodation. This is a place that both diasporan and local women made in collaboration. And it strikes me, that this is Armenian feminism, created by us: we connect as women, through our experiences, and not as members of separate nations.
Unbeknownst to me, at the exact same time, my landlady, her mother and son, were at my apartment with Arman and his family, putting on a show that the apartment was a horrible mess, and that it was sparkling clean when we had moved in. As has been documented in “Compare/Contrast Gone Awry”, this is simply not true. The landlady railed against me, in my absence, claiming I had broken a dish, and asking that we pay for tiles that fell from the bathroom on their own, which we had informed her about months before. She said she would never rent to an American again. She demanded 45,000 dram.
We moved into the apartment six days late, and paid for those days, because she was not ready to move out. She told us that if we paid three months rent before we moved in, she would install a new oven for the apartment, which we did, but she brought over a used Soviet oven with the wrong size burner covers and a broken dial, a month late. In December, she asked us to pay part of our rent ahead of time to help her buy Christmas presents, which we did. She left bodily secretions of unknown origin on the bathroom floor for us to clean up the first night we were there. And yet, I was unworthy to rent from her, I was the destructive force.
Lara set aside a box for me to use to pack, and then she took off with the instructions that I close up shop. My Armenian teacher called me just I was leaving, so I was distracted; we shut the door behind us and it locked, with the box left behind. Shit I said, when I got onto the street. Shit shit shit, I lamented. It was the perfect size, and I didn’t have another box, and we would be leaving the country in about five hours.
Everyone seemed pretty surprised that I would be so upset about a box. Here I was, leaving a life behind, and the most emotional response I had was for an inanimate object.
We can find you another box like that anywhere, Meri responded.
Nushik said, My boyfriend and I can get you one in twenty minutes.
Okay, I responded. I really needed a box!
Oh Nancy, Anna said, making fun of me, We’ll find you a box! A box, a box!
If she hadn’t said it, I wouldn’t have realized what an entitled princess I was being.
Nushik and her boyfriend stopped by the apartment twenty minutes later with two boxes. Arman told me, “That’s not right. You’re taking advantage of them.”
And, it turned out, he had already found us a box.

Earlier that day, I was going to PrintInfo with Davit to make the final financial arrangements for printing the workshop’s anthology. He was waiting for me at Santa Fe, the bad café near the Opera marschrutka stop. After he sat down, he waited ten minutes before anyone looked at him, and the place was empty. Finally he waved down a waiter, who explained he wasn’t his waiter. Another guy came over and said, no, he wasn’t his waiter, the first guy was and had made a mistake. Davit finally ordered coffee, but it wouldn’t be ready for 20 minutes, so we took off.
He said that many places in Yerevan were like this; no sense of service. He said there were some, like the Marriott and the Club, where you could feel safe. These are establishments owned by diasporans, and expensive, places for the privileged.
On the long bus ride back from PrintInfo, he pointed out buildings to me that he liked. He said that the Stalin era buildings were actually and ironically quite humanistic, with large rooms and thick walls. By contrast, during Brezhnev’s time, an architect was killed for figuring out the square meters of space necessary for people to live comfortably. Stalin killed millions for their minds, but the ones that “behaved”, that conformed to the Communist state, he treated well, gave them room for their bodies to breathe.


The day after the reading, I went to go see Arman’s brother be sworn into the army, up in Lori.
Many families were there, for the ceremony, while three platoons marched around with guns and each one of them swore their service and their lives to their superiors and in front of their peers. Families got up close and took pictures of their sons. These are people who don't have connections and can’t pay to get their kids out of the military: regular, hardworking people. On the grounds, there were strange, outsider-artish paintings of soldiers, and monuments to Armenian military heroes through the ages, like Dro and Monte.
I didn’t really feel like I was there until a platoon marched very close by, and I could see how incredibly young and vulnerable the soldiers were. They wear cheaply made boots; they eat bad food, they are treated like prisoners. And yet, here they were smiling shyly and proudly, transformed into soldiers from sons.
Arman’s brother chose to go to the army; he was in his first year of college and could have put it off till he graduated. But he wanted to get it out of the way, and he said he was unafraid. Arman’s parents keep in touch with their son every day, thank God, to keep him from harm. After the ceremony, we had a day long picnic for him; three kinds of barbecued meat and tons of fruit and vegetables, cakes and coffee. When he had to return, he did not want to go back; he cried.
There is some truth here, about Armenia and the incredible pain of defense.

I started this post about unanswered questions, and yet, the whole time I was here, I sought to answer questions, about Armenia, about myself. Why? I don’t know. I guess because there is some drive to define oneself, as a way to understand the world. If I can figure out what parts of me are Armenian, and what parts of me are American, then maybe I can understand the polarized world, the war and the empires, the haves and the have nots. But I have trouble just understanding what it means to be each of my national identities.
I think Armenians seek to answer questions because they have too many of them in their lives; questions cause us to think, to grow, but too many uncertainties, like who we are in the world, and if we will continue to exist, are too uncomfortable. Some choose to ignore the questions, some are haunted by them, and everyone becomes rigid and defensive, even those who think they have an open mind.

Matnashoonch

Lusine came up with the title, Matnashoonch. We were all being kind of literal, with stuff like, darber nmanner (different samenesses) and then she threw this one out of nowhere. The girls explained it to me. Mat means finger, shoonch comes from breath, na, the connector, means he or she. Finger she breath. All together it describes an infection of the fingernail involving pus, apparently a common enough ailment in Armenia to warrant its own name. Nushik also explained that it could mean, “with flow”. Obviously it is one of those words that has so many different meanings and connotations that it works well as a book title, especially for the collection of nonfiction we wrote, some of which involved the body. We spoke about writing as a physical act, the connotation of just writing the pain out of you, needing to itch.

The bites are so disturbing. They last for weeks it seems. Tiny little flies bite me, on my forearms and shins, the sides of my hips, once or twice on my face, at nighttime. I am constantly tending them with Dr. Snapz Individual Insect Bite Relief Applicators and Boro cream, the latter which has an awesome antiseptic smell which is probably more therapeutic than the herbal medicines inside. For some reason the insect bites itch more at night, even if they are days old. I try to make myself adjust to the stinging sensation all over my body. It’s just on the surface, I tell myself. It is no big deal, just a minor irritation. Someone is dying somewhere, from a botched organ transplant or something, in extreme pain. I fall off to sleep and inevitably wake up three or four hours later, even more itchy from even more bites. The natural insect repellant is rendered moot after two hours; I must apply the stuff with DEET, so strong that if it gets onto its own bottle it will take the paint off. It takes a special kind of modern denial to overlook the toxicicity and spray the stuff all over me.

Arman goes away for five days to Shushi and I am left alone with the bugs. It’s just me and my bites. I scrub them in the shower, then don’t moisturize because I am lazy, then I itch them subconsciously. On an ordinary day, when I don’t get bit, I am already an itcher; whenever I feel self-conscious I am somehow aware of my skin. So the choice not to itch goes beyond my faculties.
One night, I am working on the Matnashoonch book with the workshop and I look down at my leg and I see it is red where there is a constellation of three bites of various age. For some reason, the redness gives me a source of pleasure. It tells me that I am truly suffering, that these bites aren’t so insignificant.
The next day, the area is redder still, less blotchy, more of a blob. It doesn’t hurt, and is not so itchy, and I have no other symptoms, so I don’t worry about it. It’s probably just a different type of bite.
The day after that, Arman comes home, and I expect him to find the red blotch on his own, point at it, gasp, and say What is that? as he is wont to do about the smallest contusions on my person. But this time, for some reason, he is not so impressed.
The day after that, I have become disturbed by the red blotch, more of a blob now. We go to Arman’s aunts’ place and Elena asks me why I’m sad. I point down and ask if she has anything to help me; I’ve given up on Dr. Snapz and the Boro. I’m immediately treated with chamomile flavored cognac dipped in gauze. The coolness feels really good against my leg. I go home and leave the alcohol on the spot all night, and it seems to be getting better.
But the next day, still no significant progress. It’s time to see a doctor.
Arman runs into a friend coming out of the sliding glass doors of the Nairi hospital, just as we go in. They are smiling and laughing like it is a big social occasion when I am going through some kind of life or death or at least amputation-threatening matter. Arman has complained a couple times already that I look miserable, and on the marshrutka he told me to shut up because I thought we were at the hospital when we weren’t. I’m forgiving him for his poor caretaker attitude since he is under pressures so enormous – with his US immigration pending -- that he doesn’t even seem to realize half of them. So when we come across this social opportunity, I try to be jovial. I don’t want to be some self-centered American, culturally obsessed with health, prolonging the inevitablity of death as a boost to capitalism. Arman tells the friend to come along with us and we can all go back to the center of Yerevan together, as if we are just going pick up a DVD rental.
When we head up the stairs, the woman at reception looks at my leg, raises her eyebrows, and says it is a matter for the surgeon.
According to my internet research, I have a case of cellulitis; some staph or strep has infected my bite, and I just need some strong antibiotics to clear it up. No surgery needed.
Everyone sees the shock on my face and laughs. They won’t cut into you, they all promise. Suddenly, everyone is a medical expert. I insist on a general practitioner. Arman translates for the receptionist as if I am a hopeless idiot, and it is at this point I decide to go to the bathroom and cry. I cry and I cry and I cry. It is unbelievably pleasurable.
I pull myself together. I return to the party and Arman escorts me to the doctor, but we’re actually and suddenly in some ancient wing next door to the shiny new hospital. The floors are dusty and creaky and there are two mammoth electric typewriters nearby. Arman escorts me out and we are back where we started and Arman mumbles under his breath, Can you smile? He doesn’t want his friend nor the receptionist to see that I’m upset.
Luckily, his friend apologizes that he can’t stay, he has some meeting to get to. I understand, I tell him, as if I’m sorry he won’t witness all the helpless emotions I go through whenever I enter the walls of a hospital. Who knows how long this will take? I tell him.
Who knows indeed. We wait in line for the doctor for about fifteen minures, during which time Arman again asks me to change my face. I don’t know, I guess I can look pretty bad when I’m upset about something. But don’t most people look bad when they don’t feel good?
Yes, but I have to look at you, Arman says.
You know, I tell him, when you were sick in Jermuk I never told you that you looked bad.
This one actually gets him to shut up.

I have nothing against having a positive attitude. But can people at least acknowledge something bad is happening first, and not try to act like it isn’t, so that you don’t feel like you’re crazy?
You have to scratch the itch in order to identify the bite.

Finally we see the surgeon and who knew that surgeons here don’t actually cut people open. He pushes on my redness, so that it hurt, applies some cream to my bite, wraps it in gauze, then tells me to take some Cipro. I ask him a bunch of questions, via Arman, as he did not know English. He is a large man with a short haircut and a serious face. I get the sense that Arman was siding with him. I can’t remember what I was challenging him on, but as we left, I asked Arman, why aren’t you on my side, and he joked, because he is a man.
By the next day, I have taken the cipro, I have kept my leg elevated. And the red blotch is redder and larger. The doctor looks at it and proclaims it has gotten better. When he leaves, I tell Arman that it hasn’t.
How do you know? He asks.
We took a picture of it! I tell him. And I know it wasn’t this big. I had to take the gauze bandage off because the whole thing had swelled up and was hurting me.
I think it’s better, he says. I roll my eyes at him, refusing to get angry. I know that he knows that I am right, but he just can’t admit it.
I ask the doctor of the possibility of taking another medication, since the cipro doesn’t seem to be helping. Cephalexin, both my doctor and a doctor friend recommended it. He says there is no difference between them, with a shrug, and that I can do whatever I want. But I know the score; I have done my internet research. Cipro is mainly used for respiratory infections, not so much for skin things. There are huge web sites devoted to delineating the differences.
The doctor escorts us into his office and tells me not to worry, that everything will be fine, that it takes a few days for an infection to clear up, that it won’t happen immediately. Arman translates all of this gleefully. I look at both of them placidly; I am more calm today, less nervous, for some reason. It’s not just that I’ve been upset about the big red welt; this morning, we’ve resolved some immigrations issues that were deeply upsetting us, causing arguments. I was insisting that we know for sure that our decision would be right, that it wouldn’t cause problems in the future, that we should perhaps talk to a lawyer. At one point, Arman yells at me, Why do you have to make such a big deal out of everything, looking things up, asking two doctors. Why can’t you just go to this doctor and listen to him? Why do you have to get so nervous and make everything so complicated and make yourself worry if you’re doing the right thing?
He’s talking about the red welt, but also about the immigration issues. He claims that I’m making him feel nervous too.
But you’re linked to me, and I don’t want any harm to come of you, I tell him.
But I decide to cut him some slack. He doesn’t seem able to handle my kind of all-consuming research and decision-making process. He would rather watch a movie or download more music, to just have a nice time of life. I can’t force him to be a neurotic. I let the immigration stuff go; it’s in his hands now, and we’ll just assume that everything will be okay.
But I know that when a doctor tells me that everything will be okay, repeatedly, and that I shouldn’t think so much, I should actually worry and think. Doctors who know what they’re doing don’t tell you this shit. Doctors are scientists, and they are to tell you what the science is behind your ailment and treatment. This guy doesn’t seem to even have the powers of observation necessary for the job, nor been kept up to date on the most basic antibiotics.
The next morning my friend Annette calls from Boston. She asks if she’s called too early, but I inform her that I got up early to take my antibiotic. She’s taking antibiotics too, she tells me, because she scratched a bug bite that went bad.
I did too, I tell her. Do you have cellulitis?
Yes! She says. It’s quite a coincidence.
Her husband who is a doctor has prescribed her, guess what, cephalexin. The infection started to get better after a day.
Meanwhile, my blotch is now even larger, even brighter. I ask Arman again. He admits the color has changed.
That doctor doesn’t know what he’s doing. Why did you agree with him yesterday when he said my leg was better?
Because I wanted it to be better! Arman finally admits.

So is this a post Soviet reality? Don’t worry, be happy? Don’t acknowledge the problem, just say it doesn’t exist? Perhaps it’s been hard to learn the value of gaining knowledge and acting positively; it hasn’t been demonstrated nearly enough, in all realms of soceity.
To play devil’s advocate: I have been realizing that I get so emotionally unhinged by hospitals and doctors because of accumulated awful/hellish experiences. When you’re young, you have not had so many crappy things happen to you, and you are not so haunted. Part of my nervousness had partially to do with the situation itself, and partially from the past.
Additionally: it’s true that I was kind to Arman when he was sick in Jermuk; I wasn’t giving him the hard time he was giving me for feeling bad nor worried. But it’s also true Arman wasn’t nearly as nervous as me. I insisted we figure out alternative routes home in case he was still pooping by the bus’s departure; he just wanted to take a walk and see the waterfall. He wanted to make the best of a bad situation.
He tells me sometimes, when I get so worried, that I am like the ravens cawing. Apparently it is an Armenian expression on naysaying. I have to admit that worrying can be destructive. It has probably done more damage to my health than anything else, especially when I can't express it. In many cases, it seems clear that it’s a far better choice to have faith and a positive attitude. There is some value to forgetting yourself, forgetting the bad stuff. In a place where many bad things have happened, it is probably a necessity of survival.
But unfortuately, forgetting is the cousin of denial, mother of ignorance.
When I go to the pharmacy to ask for Cephalexin, the pharmacist gives me Cipro. No, Cephalexin, I say again.
They’re the same thing, the pharmacist says.

Book chamber

I decide to give Meline Reading Lolita in Tehran. When I visited her home at Christmas time, I had spotted Henry James in her book case. And she is such a dynamic, caring teacher, that I thought she would relate to Nafisi’s dedication to her students.

But I don’t have anything for Anahid. I am not really friends with her. I am not even really sure what she teaches. Her hair is an impossible color of red, more like magenta, and often, when I saw her during the semester, she was sick or tired or sad and I just didn’t know how to enter her reality. Often, Meline was also sick or tired or sad, but she always told me so. She would tell me the story of her bad dentist or that her child had the grippe and she would look at me with big round eyes and call me Nancy dear, her voice quite blustery, staccato. (I noticed the rhythm of her language was softer when she spoke English, more percussive when speaking Armenian.) Anahid is more Meline’s friend, brought along to make the occasion more fun, I guess. I decide to bring along some bookmarks, imprinted with Audubon’s birds, so at least I have something. My mother picked them up from some museum gift shop or perhaps from Buck-A-Book off route 128 in Needham. She’s given them to me twice as gifts.

We go to Doka pizza. Meline wanted to take me to Caucasus, but I had been there the night before, and it is too far away from the book chamber. I feel awfully guilty. But I’m in the midst of publishing a book with Lara and Shushan, and Shushan has called suddenly this morning, telling me that I must come to the book chamber, which is only open for two hours in the middle of the day, because the authorities need all three of our signatures. Meline had mentioned that she would switch around her private students so she could have some time to spend with me, and now I have to leave early.

For some reason Meline needs to sit inside, though it is a beautiful summer day. The inside of Doka pizza is a bit perilous as there are 1984-ish video screens all over the place that you can’t help look at and they usually present music videos that resemble porn. There’s also a new-age, speed-up-the-nature video set to ambient music and thank god this is the video playing during this meeting with my two professor colleagues.

Meline orders a bunch of pancakes. Some are wrapped around curds and others mushrooms. I present my gifts, telling Anahid that if I had known her interest in books better, I would give her some. She tells me she’s into plays.

And then, for some unknown reason, and in a way that seems very much unlike her, she launches into a speech.

You know Nancy, there are no great Armenian writers right now, at the moment. It’s because the way our society is, we are not free. The mind needs freedom to write, for the mind to connect to the hand. But you have a free mind. You need to be our writer.

Okay, I tell her bashfully. But I don’t write in Armenian.

That’s okay, you can be translated. Saroyan didn’t write in Armenian either, but he is considered an Armenian writer.

But Meline begs to differ. He is an American writer, she responds. Of Armenian origin.

They don’t quite resolve this matter, but Anahid continues. She insists that I should write my observations about Armenia, that Armenians need to see themselves represented, that they need to think critically about their predicament, and that I am the one who needs to prompt them.

I really have no idea where this is all coming from but it freaks me out big time. I have categorized my world in order to operate in it. I know that I have written some things that are pretty forthcoming, about sexuality, about my family. I know some people can’t handle it, and I do not blame them for it. I want them to be in my life. But I’m also afraid of them. So I keep them in a special category, in which I appear to be some semblance of myself, but I don’t tell them everything. Anahid is telling me she wants me to be free, but I don’t think she realizes what she’s saying. I suspect I’m a little bit too free for her taste, that the freedom I have just presented on the page, with Lara and Shushan, goes beyond what she has in mind.

Our book is called (An)taratsutian Mej, in the unspace. The idea is that each of us, individually, can’t really exist, in our totality, so we must create a space to be ourselves. This space exists, but it exists for the part of us that can’t exist, that people don’t want to exist. It’s significant that Armenian women have come up with such a concept, considering that Armenians have been victims of an urge for them not to exist. And now Armenians are apologetic for existing, because our existence causes way too much confusion and explanation. In the unspace though, the three of us do not apologize. We have written in three languages and we embrace the idea that we cannot be understood so easily.

In the book, I have written a lot about the university, presenting the young women who are the students of our department, who are valued more for their appearance than their abilities; about Armenian notions of love and sexuality and life choices for women; about my desire to not be married and have children; about my history of being diagnosed with herpes here in Armenia, and lots of other things that I would never talk about directly with Anahid and Meline.

A few months before, I had given Meline a chapter from my memoir about staying with my grandmother and aunts when I was a child, learning about the genocide from my grandmother, and my aunt jumping naked into the shower with me. The piece had a lot do with themes of sexuality and shame and the body and their inheritance. The students had so much to talk about when they read it, and some of them could even talk about the bodily stuff. Meline’s response was visual: she wanted to draw a picture of my grandmother, based on my description of her face.

Now I ask her about her drawing. In the middle of the semester she suddenly took up pencil portraiture, which she found odd, as she has never been trained as an artist. But she looks like one. She wears beautiful chunky silver jewelry, and her hair is straight and long and flowing. She loves to wear bright colors, scarves and hoods. She looks like any free-spirited, sophisticated literature professor anywhere. The rest of her colleagues are either modern day working women types with straight skirts and heels, or Soviet era matrons. Meline, answering my question, laments that she hasn’t been drawing, she doesn’t have the time or space, the freedom, she stresses to reiterate Anahid’s point.

Anahid’s insistence that I write begs for me to tell her about our book, the reason I must leave them so early. But I can’t bring myself to do it. I tell myself that I can always call them if I want them to come to our reading at the end of the week. I can decide to take a risk, to give them a chance, to break them into a new category. Meline, after all, has chosen very consciously to befriend me. When I don’t speak to her for a while, she tells me she has been thinking of me.

Suddenly I stand up and tell them I must go. Meline has ordered coffee and ice cream though she knows I am in a hurry. She insists I have some, so I gobble down, the vanilla sweet and white, and slurp a bit, the coffee black and sour, and she says, “well, if you must…” as I turn and run out the door.

**

The book chamber is in an office building I have walked by a million times but have never given much thought, behind a theater. Shushan finds me outside and we walk through a hallway that has the size and sound of a high school corridor. The offices are tiny and ancient, and I am reminded of the city hall in Abaran where Arman and I got married. There’s an element of permanent despair and electric heaters in every room to heat up miniature pots of coffee.

First we meet with the director of the book chamber, where we sign our names. He sends us to another office, a tiny one, holding three women who are eating ice cream. They offer us some, which we refuse, and they ask us what we have written and where we are from. The lady filling out the register by hand, just like the lady who filled out Arman and my marriage certificate, says that Shushan looks like she is from New York; I look like I’m the one from Armenia. It’s because she has short hair and a nose piercing and big cuffs on her jeans, and I have long hair and am wearing wedgy shoes, my pseudo-professor feminine look. She doesn’t say anything about Lara, in black, with her long blond hair, also nose-pierced, perhaps because she doesn’t have a firm idea of what Armenians from Canada by way of Lebanon look like. Shushan says she feels like we’re a three headed dragon.

Off we go to another office till we land at the card catalogue, classification of literature section. Two women are sitting at desks across from each other, and there are piles of unfiled newspapers and publications on all sides. They are eating ice cream in here too. The woman who deals with us is quite confused. We are wreaking havoc because our book is in three languages. She says that our book can’t be classified as Armenian if it’s not entirely in Armenian. Then her kid calls on her cell phone, telling her that she is sick and wants her to come home. The woman is slurping up ice cream from a stick, balancing the chocolate coating, trying to negotiate.

She calls around to a few of her colleagues while we wait for a determination. I look over at the other woman, who doesn’t seem to have much to do. I imagine that she makes very little money, in this government job. A few moments later, she starts complaining about her salary. Lara wants to volunteer to work here a week, see what their world is like. I admire her desire to shape shift, to understand people through living their experiences.

Shushan is doing a lot of the negotiating, even getting on the woman’s cell phone to explain to a faceless voice, while Lara tells me what’s going on. There’s some issue with what category we should be listed under. We want to be listed under Armenian feminist literature but there is no such category in the big Soviet book they are consulting, so more troops are called in, more women emerge from the depths of the book chamber. A woman with chunky glasses suggests women’s issues, or women’s movement, or general essays. She is familiar with women’s studies/gender studies as a scientific discipline, but the idea of feminist literature, books by and about women, is unfamiliar to her. She wants to read the book, to get a sense of what it’s about, but there’s no time for it.

Finally, they decide to list it under Armenian literature and Women’s Literature.

As we walk back down the hall, a couple of hours after we stepped inside, Shushan says we just had a Post Soviet experience. It’s hard for me to imagine that we’re the first people to suggest feminist literature as a category. The world is changing, has been changing for fifteen years, but the library of Armenia cannot break their dependency on the big Soviet book to tell them what to do, how to contruct the world, how to put writers and people and ideas in their proper places.

**

Postscript: At our reading, at the end of the week, I read a passage about my university students. I think Meline and Anahid would find it interesting, but to hear their department’s students publicly lambasted might upset them, so I don’t invite them.

Somehow, we decide that Lara, Shushan and I will sit at a table in the middle of the room, amongst the tables of audience. I am completely unnverved by this, as I always think of readings as happening behind an invisible wall, a place where I can stand alone and do anything, and the audience can’t harm me, the way that people can in the real world, asking me questions, passing judgment.

But I love that the barrier between writer and reader has now been broken down, that we are opening up our unspace to others. My mind is one step more free, in a way it hadn’t been before, and it could have only happened, I think, in Armenia.

Jermuk

Lena Sarkissian told me to go to Jermuk. We were in the basement of the Nowhere bar, on 14^th street, between First and Second Aves, a few days before I was about to come to Armenia. She told me people brought tea bags and held them beneath the hot spring water, and then she did the gesture, she held out an imaginary tea bag in the pink glow of the Nowhere bar’s lights, and we both laughed.

Jermuk is the name of a town and the source of a lot of spring water. There are two companies that bottle Jermuk’s water, and both are called Jermuk. Their labels are different but now I am unable to distinguish the Jermuk companies from each other, because one of them changed their label very suddenly. This is the company that imported Jermuk mineral water to America. The FDA finally got around to testing the water and found the levels of arsenic in it were far higher than recommended. (It actually says “Arsenian” on the bottle.) Since then I have stopped drinking Jermuk, but the night before my trip there, I went out with the girls and had two glasses of red wine and two bottles of Kilikia beer, and I just needed some water. The bar didn’t have any Bjni, so the waitress went out on the street and got me a bottle of Jermuk by mistake. I drank a third of it and promptly felt sick. Lusine joked it was the Jermuk, but I don’t think she was too far off.

Jermuk is three or four hours from Yerevan. Arman and I went to the Kilikia Avtogayan on Saturday morning, hoping to escape the heat. We had some time to kill before the bus left, Arman lef me over to the bus restaurant at the back of the station. It looked scary; I slowed down my step. There was hardly any light. Everything seemed to be the color of grease. On the counter, there was a plate of peroshgis, and a plate of cucumbers and tomatoes as if someone had just been to the market and this was all the restaurant could offer, lean times. We each ate two peroshgis, 50 dram each. They are fried oblong pieces of dough with spicy potatoes inside, and these actually tasted pretty good. Arman got a draft beer; the man seemed to be tapping only foam. I was sure we’d pick up some salmanella, just sitting there. Arman said it was his favorite restaurant in all of Yerevan. He said it was punk.

It was time to leave and the bus driver told us to get our tickets. We chose a couple of seats in the middle of the bus only to discover seats had been assigned, and ours were in the back. Arman somehow made a deal with a kid sitting by a window to switch with me.

There were a lot of farms along the way. Regular people work on the farms. Not farmhands it seems, because half the time you see middle aged women or grandmothers bent over picking stuff up in the fields. The children have left the family farms, perhaps to make money in Yerevan or Russia. Everything is green, plants tied to posts, leaves intertwining and sprouting and making outrageous lush shapes from the land.

After Areni, the wine producing region, we make a turn somewhere, through towns clustered along a river and then up the side of a gorge. Arman keeps track of the towns on the map until we get to Jermuk.

The driver lets us off at the Ararat Sanatorium. Jermuk was a resort town from the time of the Soviet Union; people came here to be healed of illnesses, and I wonder, if it was just more politically correct to call a hotel a sanatorium during Communism. Workers could relax if they were sick, but hotels were for the bourgeois.

As we approach the mammoth building, one of those blocky, mid-1950s dorm like structures, Arman tells me not to talk. If I blow my American cover we will get charged up the wazoo. The place doesn’t appear to have been renovated; people are lounging about in chairs, a pair of people are playing ping pong on the balcony. The light is dim, not enough fixtures for so large a space. The lady at the counter is wearing a white coat, her hair is blond and black and her teeth are gold. Another woman strolls by, a worker wearing a white stove-pipe hat, actually more of a giant piece of paper that’s been somehow fastened together and fitted to the top of her head. She’s the chef, apparently. This is the Soviet Union, I tell myself, as close to it as I can get.

People mention the impact it made on them, the way privacy was a life and death matter, no one could be trusted, the lack of individuality, but I find it so elusive. No one will just spontaneously tell you a story about it. I keep retreating to my memories of the dumb movie White Nights with Mikael Baryshnikov as a ballet dancer who defects. There were many entertainment vehicles in the 80s depicting Russians (always Russians, never anyone from any of the other republics) who wanted to defect. That word, said with the emphasis on the second syllable, so as not to sound as if there was anything wrong with it. But there was something so emotional about the process; Westerners were obsessed with defection, really, probably because for us too there was no way to step out of your own life without major disguises, without death. Defection was like experiencing death on earth.

But very few comrades defected. The masses stayed, the Communist era not so clear to me now in their faces and bodies, but far more evident in the structures, a few of them left now, like the Ararat Sanatorium.

A man in beige, with tinted glasses that start out dark at the top of the lenses and gradually get lighter, comes around to tell us the prices. Arman asks about the spa, the sauna treatments. We’re informed that it’s quitting time, and nothing will be open tomorrow because it is Sunday.
Even Arman, who has not been raised in a capitalistic society, is appalled. Isn’t Sunday the day when people come from Yerevan for a little rest and relaxation?
Yes, but no one works on Sunday is the reply.
We go check out the Olympia, the Armenia and a third one whose name I cannot remember but which had a very cool tiled mural of a brown man in a diaper frolicking in the jermuks on the side of their buidling. All of them tell us that there are no spa treatments on Sunday.
It is at this point that I curse Lena Sarkissian, back in New York, who made it sound like Jermuk was little more than a quirky good time in the nature.
We go back to the Ararat Sanatorium. It’s the one I feel most comfortable with; the others were renovated with way too much fancy marble and they were also more expensive. The man with the glasses takes us to his office. Arman tells him my name is Nvart, my baptism name, a passe name. We get a room on the fifth floor; there are two twin beds and light is streaming in. Out the window: a bridge and a gorge.

After dinner at a nearby restaurant, we take a walk through the town. There is an elaborate system of footpaths among the evergreens, which the tour books had mentioned. One claimed that Jermuk would be a nice place if the hotels weren’t so shabby and the architecture so Gloomy Soviet. But I like the place. The trees are grand and there is a giant chrome statue of a deer on top of a wall of rock and you can walk to a colonnade and find four or five urns with spigots churning out really hot jermuk water. I don’t spy anyone with a tea bag, but it seems like a possibility. There are a couple of tatiks, grandmas, at the far end, the hottest at 53 degrees celsius. Arman wants me to get my photo taken with them, but the tatiks, who are no nonsense, scatter as soon as the lense is pointed their way. They probably just want to heal themselves.

The ironic thing is that Arman gets violently sick the next day with diarrhea. We have eaten all the same things in the last twenty four hours except he had a bunch of raw hazelnuts and ate drank way more of the mineral water. Perhaps Jermuk was a Soviet plot against people who thought they would improve their health from the healing waters, only to get poisoned by arsenic.

The next morning we go down to the commissary. The lady with the tall stove pipe hat tells us to sit at a table that needs to be cleaned up, while there is a perfectly nice table nerby with curds and yogurt awaiting. Someone just ate here; you can see their breadcrumbs and that they dipped a spoon into the bowl of apricot jam. The bread is in a Tupperware type container circa 1975. The same bread containers are on all the tables. When a party leaves, the lid is put back on, and when another party is seated, the lid is lifted. At the end of the breakfast hour, I watch ladies in frilly white hats put all the apricot jam from the little bowls on the tables into one giant bowl. A similar procedure is applied to the butter. For a sanatorium, it seems pretty unsanitary. An example of Soviet thriftiness is what it is. One might find the lack of consumer waste refreshing, but honestly, who touched that piece of bread before me?

I take a look around at the other guests. No one looks sick. What are they doing here, on a Sunday, with no spa treatments to be had? An old man cranes his neck over his porridge, like he is staring into churning waters, hoping to find an answer.

Profile of houry

This post is part of an effort to write one short thing a day until I leave, ten days from now...They're meant to give some sense of Armenia.

Houry looks like she has on more eye makeup than usual but then I discover that she just has dark circles under her eyes. She’s wearing the dress with the black and white pattern, mod style. Her hair is clipped back, half a bee-hive. Often she wears perfume too, sometimes an overwhelming amount. She giggles a lot. This is our last meeting. It’s my idea that I take her out for dinner.

The restaurant is called Khinkali and that is what we order, cheese and meat. She makes them at home with her mother. Her mother is an excellent cake maker, but Houry isn’t. She is good at sewing though; she saw a skirt she liked in a store but they didn’t have her size, so she studied its construction, bought some fabric, and made one just like it. It was the fist time she had sewn something on a sewing machine.

She lives in Massiv with her friend Lilit, who is a reporter on an Armenian channel.

A tall woman walks into Khinkali with long curly blonde hair. She is quite striking. Houry tells me she likes this woman, for the way she looks. She lives in Massiv too, and Houry always sees her; she often goes into the same building of the souvenir shop where Houry works, and rides the same marschrutka. And now here she is.
Does she recognize you? I asked. Oh yeah, Houry said. Of course. But they have never spoken to one another.

We talk about what Houry can do with her life. She wants to teach, or work in an office, or do translations. She doesn’t think she can teach in a school, because most of those teachers have to pay to get their positions.

She gives me a gift. It’s a little representation of an open bible, Jesus on one page, the Lord’s Prayer in Armenian on the other. We rarely talk about Jesus or god or religion, not that I can remember except I’ve told Houry all the ancient church sites I have visited.

Houry says my writing in Armenian is good, but we both know I’m lousy with speaking. I can’t string a sentence together, but people tell me I have a good accent. I’ve noticed there’s a certain age group, like 29 – 32, for whom Russian was their first language, and they have a Russian accent to varying degrees, and they are usually the ones to tell me my Armenian accent is good. They had to learn Armenian when they went to the university. My friend Shushan tells me theirs is a lost generation, born in the Soviet Union, 15 years old or so when independence came, wedged between two realities.

Houry is 23, so she was eight years old at indedpendence. She graduated from university, one that I have never heard of, last year. Since then she’s worked in an internet club and in an office. She is so tired of working in the souvenir shop, for the others who work there only talk about clothes and men. At first she liked it, because she would encounter many tourists. Someone from Kazakhstan gave her a bunch of Kazakhi coins. Another man tracked her down to do translations, but then she discovered he wanted more than translations. She can’t quit the job, the way she might if she lived with her parents, like other young people in Yerevan. Her parents live in a small industrial city to the north, but the industry has left.

On the back of the bible, Houry has written in Armenian that she was honored to have met a man like me.

I tell her to please contact me if I can be of any help. I tell her that the more she teaches, the more opportunities it will bring. I tell her that maybe that woman from Massiv at the next table who she always sees on the marshrutka will be the one to give her a new job, and she laughs. I’m serious, but it sounds pretty stupid, in this context, a khinkali restaurant with heavy oak furniture, modernized with lots of mirrors, in the basement.

She gives me her address. I realize then, I do not know her last name. As she writes it, I see that it’s a name that connotes a princely descendence.
You’re royalty, I tell her.
It’s tragic, isn’t it, she says. What’s become of us, and she laughs. She’s not usually so cynical.

I try to pay her for two lessons, for today and for one that I cancelled the week before, but she wouldn’t have it. I told her I would feel bad if she didn’t take the money, and she told me that she would feel bad too, very bad, if she did.
I also remembered the time that I forgot to pay her, and as we were departing -- she was standing in front of the fabric store where she bought the material for her skirt – she asked me, Are you going to pay me next week?
My mind was a question mark. Why would I do that? And then I realized; I apologized and told her I had simply forgotten.
No, I am sorry, she had said. I am so sorry I brought it up.

Houry and I walk up Abovian to her marshrutka station; she tells me that she is usually too tired after working eight hours in the souvenir shop to do anything at night, but on days when she has private students she stays in the center and visits with friends. I try to imagine the whole of her life; the shop, her sewing, her family in the small industrial city, all collaged together. It’s an unseasonably cold day, and Houry says, it’s the breeze of November, and we laugh. She really likes to laugh.

She tells me a story: last year, at Vartavar, the pagan holdiay that allows kids to throw water on grownups, she went to the grocery store at 8 am to avoid the children with buckets. But a gang caught her in the parking lot afterwards and ordered that she put aside her shopping bags, immediately, so that they wouldn’t get wet. She just stood there. And your cell phone too, they insisted. What could she do? They doused her completely. She went home and stood over Lilit’s bed, where she was still sleeping.

“You must see this,” she said.

Shadow matriarchy

Two people responded to the idea of Armenia being a shadow matriarchy, in the post, "Same Old Thing". Sarah wanted more of an explanation, and Alan gave an example (you can see their thoughts posted in the comments section). I told my friend Lara about it, and she said it would be hard for me to explain, that you have to be here to understand it. I told her that everyone cares what their mairig (mother) thinks; the mother has more power in a family than a father, at least by the time a child becomes an adult. You see people answering their cell phones in Yerevan at all hours of the night, reporting to their mothers. Lara identified it as a post-menopause phenomenon, that once women aren't childbearing, they take on a different role; but it's also traditional, as the wife of the leading male (the dahn degeen) ran the household and everyone else in it.
In some cases women are the main wage earners in the family, too. During the tough years, 91-94, I heard reports from visiting diasporans that men were hanging out in the square playing backgammon, and women were seen gardening the parks, mowing the lawns. It's not fit for a man to do certain work, such as a waiter...but a woman will take any job, a woman will see to the survival of her family. Women were keeping the country afloat while the men were at war; they were Armenia's shoulders.
I think of some professors I know at the university. They must take on private students in order to survive. Then they must take care of their families, be sure their children are doing well in school, that there is a proper route to their education, since there aren't so many possibilities here for jobs. I visited one friend in her home, and it wasn't clear to me what her husband did; he was an artist of some sort. But it was obvious she was the one in charge of the household and all its decisions, showing me the coat she had bought for her daughter, going over the homework for her son; at the same time she was also the one who made the outrageously beautiful meal. There is some parallel to the myth of the superwoman in American culture. The women are doing it all, but are they enjoying themselves?
Recently, there was a commercial on tv for cocoa and it featured four characters: a mother, sister, brother and father. The mother and sister used the cocoa in the kitchen to bake, and the father and brother were in the living room eating cocoa covered ice cream. Women working, men enjoying.
So there is a certain amount of respect for mothers by the time the sons become men, and you get the sense the men are running the country for their mothers, that their concept of Armenia and Armenian culture includes the maintenance of a sacrificing, hard-working mother.
The mothers, in turn, ask their daughters-in-law to do everything to please their sons. The mothers-in-law say, don't breastfeed for too many months. The mothers-in-law decide if the couple's beds should be pushed together or not.
So it seems sexism, or at least, the oppression of young childbearing women, is upheld by mothers too. The mothers want their sons to be in charge. And the men deem the only valuable role for a woman is a mother. A woman working is fine, as long as it is to support the family, not for her own self-satisfaction or personal gain or enrichment of the mind.
So perhaps the real work that needs to be done is changing Mothers' minds, empowering mothers. If mothers can imagine that their daughters would want something else than being a mother, if they can imagine pleasure could be found as a self-determining young woman, rather than waiting till after menopause to have any real power, there will be change. If they can imagine the same things they want for their sons as for their daughters...why can't they do this? Can they do this? Are they doing this?
Lara was right, you have to be here to get it...