Live from the Republic of Earthly Pleasure

From a late night in Yerevan.

It always seems to rain at night during Yerevan summers.

During the day, the heat and ultraviolet radiation cling to my skin in the form of sweat and burns, and even though drinking fountains are mercifully plentiful, seemingly littered on every pavement on every block, the dry heat and stale air make the distance between these oases seem insurmountable. The Hrazdan is an irrelevant trickle, far removed from the city, tucked away in its deep gulch like a hermit. The lake is a pittance. The Arax is too far. No respite.

But then the sun sets and the tides turn. Volte-face. Gusts sweep over the city’s gorges and escarpments as if Barsamin himself was lifting the city into the skies with arms of wind. Rain falls, always a drizzle at first, then sometimes a deluge, complete with brilliant bolts of lightning illuminating the slopes covered in Soviet concrete blocks and new condos. Water, sweet water. Most people aren’t awake to see this display of raw power for themselves, but they inevitably wake up to the scene of the crime, with their balconies moist and the reek of urban petrichor hanging in the air. The dust and dirt that lingers everywhere becomes clumped together, and the cool air that blew in earlier that night remains until breakfast is finished.

I daren’t open the windows, except late at night, when I let the cool breeze that lingers after the gale creep onto my skin. The streetlights are far from my window, so at night, I am hit with a wall of darkness. Darkness, punctuated only by my lighter or my phone. Silence, punctuated only by crickets. All in the heart of a city of more than a million people. All mine.

Though perhaps not all mine. If you walk the streets here, more and more stores are open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There’s more and more of everything, everywhere. Electric scooter flashmobs, ads for plastic surgery on the Metro. Advertisements so intrusive the government actually dared to impose a regulation. Coffee machines littering pavements from Kentron to Kond. And oh, Kond. Half bulldozed for a glass and stone monstrosity with gilded gates that looks straight out of a Neopagan’s wet dream. Stone and corrugated metal saved only by the tenacity of its residents and perhaps by the splashes of white and black and red that have turned it into an open-air museum of a different kind. Who knows if it’ll remain. Who knows if it will all remain. In Baku, they talk wistfully of the Erivan Khanate. They used to murmur about ‘Western Azerbaijan,’ and now they shout.

I once saw a woman walking her dog at 3 in the morning. At around the same time, I also saw my neighbour light a cigarette, take a couple drags, and then walk back inside. He has a larger balcony than I do. I wonder where he’s from. He doesn’t look Armenian, he’s too lanky and hairless for that. I’d know because I see the way his tank top sits on his body like a bin bag every time he goes out for a smoke, and I see the way the sun reflects off his skin. It’s most likely that he’s Russian: after all, I’m in a neighbourhood popular with Russian émigrés. Maybe he works in IT. Maybe he’s one of those tattooed ones at those photogenic spots downtown. Most likely not: I’ve seen him with a woman. Maybe he has kids. Maybe they had to leave Moscow or Saint Petersburg. I wonder how his children are faring in school. Do they speak Russian to their classmates, or Armenian? Are they even making an effort to learn Armenian? Do they consider their classmates backward Caucasian barbarians, and their mother tongue crude highland speech? Do they say barev dzez or zdrastye when they walk into the bakery? Are they grateful?

Am I grateful?

Am I grateful that this land makes any attempt to tolerate me at all? My ancestors aren’t from here, they’re from the West. Past Ararat and deep in Anatolia. I feel like an aberration here, eating food that is familiar, but not because it courses through my veins with an ancestral yearning. I had to learn this food. When my family moved from America to Yerevan, we had to learn this language, learn these sights, learn the little nuances that make our Armenia different from this Armenia. Am I grateful, therefore, that the taxi drivers say ‘but you have Armenian blood?’ And that I can say yes and therefore still feel less alien, even though to a certain extent I shouldn’t? I probably should be.

There is no magic, there is no spell. Diasporans in America talk about it in hushed tones. But there is no trance that befalls you when you land at Zvartnots. If there is one, it’s extracted from your brain and repeatedly stabbed to death in front of your eyes when you’re driving from the airport towards downtown. Gentleman’s clubs and furniture stores line both sides of the road. It reminds you of Amman or Baltimore or whatever. Instead of a spell or a trance, there’s something simpler. Not lust, but love. Leaves dangling on the sides of suburban streets. Older women revelling in the increasingly less frequent sight of children. Sensory overload. The same blush-coloured stone everywhere you go. The feeling a parent must have when realising their teenager is suddenly too big for their childhood clothes when looking at the city fanned out before them, new steel, new concrete, new glass, new opportunities, new liabilities. And so you fall in love, and that becomes the trance. The delirium.

Lightning just flashed. The sky turned violet. I don’t hear the pitter-patter of rain, so I go to light a cigarette. Should I bring some back with me? American sin taxes are a bitch. What should I bring back to my friends and family? I don’t know if they want the Greater Armenia shirt I saw at Yerevan City yesterday, but it would be a fun gag gift. Maybe to a Turkish friend. Because yeah, I have those, even though I got funny looks from practically everyone I’ve told here. Funny looks, like the funny looks they give Indian delivery drivers and students. Funny looks, like the funny looks you get when you talk about gay people. Funny looks that betray a darkness that should not exist.

The sun is rising. The sky has turned from black to cobalt blue to grey. I want to sleep, but how can I? I’m not done with this city yet. Yerevan is speeding tits out no seatbelt down Saralanji in Lusine’s Volga with Kino on the radio and Masis poking through the haze. Yerevan is Europe and Asia and neither and both. Yerevan is Hakob and Armen walking hand in hand, but drawing the blinds when you kiss Oleg so the neighbours don’t see. Yerevan is crimson cherries reposing in plastic crates just as they dangle invitingly like diadems on trees lining Mamikonyants, begging you to bite down and stain your teeth and fingertips a lurid magenta. Yerevan is Russians glued to MacBooks in well-lit cafés and Armenians with ears pressed to Huaweis in bustling taverns and Americans bedecked in Apple Watches shuttling to and from penthouses with backup generators. Yerevan is Range Rovers and Teslas prowling Pushkin and rubbing shoulders with mid-2000s Camrys and older Ladas with cataclysmic dents on Sayat-Nova. Yerevan is unforgiving sun, a dry heat settling over the valley and wrapping everyone in a pashmina of sweat by mid-afternoon, and dust blown into your eyes from the construction sites on every block which anoint the city with a tiara of a thousand cranes. Yerevan is a patchwork quilt of pink and black and orange tuff. Yerevan is mothers and sons hauling 5 litre bottles of Byuregh up the stairs when the water main breaks, grandmothers clad in black and white polka dot dresses walking in pairs past murals of Artsakh War martyrs splashed over khrushchevkas and ducking into greengrocers and butchers, fathers in groups of seven smoking Parliaments on the sidewalk and coating it in ash, and daughters playing on the rusty and overgrown playground equipment out front and splashing playmates with the teeth-shatteringly cold water from the public fountains. Yerevan is constantly grasping at the cross that doesn’t dangle around your neck and feeling the burning of new ink on your skin. Yerevan sounds familiar, but not too familiar. Yerevan tastes familiar, but not too familiar. Yerevan is apricot scraps strewn across the asphalt because the auntie at the kassa never double bags. Yerevan is LED signs and billboards and exposed wires looming over potholes and crumbling stone. Yerevan is dirt and grit and glistening brows and stained shirts and holes in your shoes. Yerevan is sweeping vistas across gulches and plateaus dotted with skyscrapers that didn’t exist the last time you were here. Yerevan is the smell of fresh bread in the air at seven o’clock sharp every morning. Yerevan is shops that open one day and close the next without any warning. Yerevan might not be here next week or next year or next decade.

Yerevan is delirium.