Painting Lady Part Deux

Today I walked into the kitchen, more confidently, having grown accustomed to the staff, and they having grown accustomed to me. The painting lady was at the table and saw me uncover the box of chocolate covered dried apricots, figs and plums that I bought at the famous Grand Candy shop in Yerevan. Everyone started enjoying it with their afternoon coffee.

An hour later we had another celebration, a colleague had bought two fancy cakes and put them on the table. I was one of the first to enter the kitchen for the afternoon treat and she was standing by the sink. For some reason I have failed to learn hello in Armenian, only thank you, because it is the same in Iran, mersi. SO I just say “hello” with an honest smile on my face. She returns my greeting with her own sweet smile and then asks me a question. I can tell the way her face says “why” that she is asking how I fit in this world, being from the US. She wants to know where I am from, I guess and I say “Iran.”

Then a colleague comes into the kitchen and she starts translating. “where did you grow up is your family Iranian?”
“ the US, my parents are Iranian.”
“She says that no matter where someone is born, their culture, can grow inside of them and show. She says she loves Iranian culture, and history.”

Having an opportunity to look at her closely during the conversation, I see how young she is despite her gray hair and small body. Her face is very expressive. My mother once told me that the way people act in their old age reflects how happy they were in their life. The painting lady smiles as if she was always very happy.

Last night my colleague told me that she paints because her church is teaching her to paint the saints. She was a computer technician during the Soviet times.

Ecclesiastic Tyranny

Of all plagues with which mankind is cursed, ecclesiastic tyranny's the worst. -Daniel Defoe, novelist and journalist (1659?-1731)

Use your mind to move bravely in the direction of your soul.

Painting Lady

I walked into the office kitchen and the cleaning woman sat at the long dining table as she usually does, ready to clean the used tea cups and glasses of the day. As I turn on the hot water kettle; I look over to her again. I want to talk to her but I don’t speak any language she understands. She is wearing a skirt, a sweater, a smock and eye glasses with her silver hair pulled back in a small ponytail. She is very little although she walks with good posture.

As I gaze over in her direction, I am surprised by what I see. I look down to open my tea bag and look over again. She is painting. Her little fingers are dipping the brush into the red and green paints and gliding the brush over a small canvas laid flat on the kitchen table. Everything is confused. Something about her activity is quite young, while her choice to paint seemed quite mature, independent. It was as if she was not the employee but the leisurely owner. Or perhaps she fits neither of those discrete categories. Perhaps she is the image of dignity at work.

The Perfect Day

It was the perfect day. I woke at 1 PM, something I have been largely incapable of most of my life. During my sleep, I dreamt the whole time. I dreamt of my cousins. It was so nice to let myself sleep, to wake up and see the morning light shining through my room and simply ignore it. Letting the day go by without me.
And then I awoke. In some natural way. I spent the night awake, watching television, writing, reading, thinking, listening to music. My hotel room was a playground for my mind. I finally decide that 5 AM is a good time to go to sleep, and so I do.

I dress and dance to the music of fashion television. I know where I am going. I have known since before I arrived. To the market, to the market. To buy art. Vernisaj. I pass by a pomegranate juice maker man. I watch a woman wait for him to squeeze her juice. Her little girl, about 2 years old, walks around curiously, meandering, like the curls on her head. She is edible. I wonder how much the juice costs, and she gives me my answer as she puts two coins on the table.
I ask for one after she is done. I put my coins on the table. The man makes my juice, 2 and a half small pomegranates worth, and looks at me as he takes the coins. He is surprised or wondering why I do not speak to him in Armenian, like others.
I walk around lost trying to find the market. I enter in an alleyway and the smell and the plastic ceilings begin to make me feel nauseous. I feel my face go white. It feels like that night, after the fancy dinner, when I awoke at 3 AM, my face in a cold sweat my stomach like a dinosaur was trying to run through the tunnels of my intestines, not sure which way to come out, causing immense distress to me in his indecision.
Meanwhile the tiny alley way of the market is not ending, not opening into an open air place as I expected. I must turn around, I cannot handle this, I am getting claustrophobic, something I didn’t know I was capable of.
I come out of the market, grateful, thankful, for my freedom. I breathe, my stomach wants to vomit. I walk, wondering what it is I need to do. Food. No not food. It’s the juice. It was too natural.
I find the market, after asking two women and two men. I start to feel better, its open air, nobody is here, I have some peace. The air is clean today and the sun shines gently. I began to enjoy. Things I have never seen before, people’s creations. I bargain with young men, we laugh. I get a free souvenir for smiling. I buy beautiful art.

I stand with an artist in front of his art for 15 minutes. For 6 minutes we talk. He speaks french, armenian and russian, and sells in english so our conversation is not profound. He has modern still life paintings, hung by close pins on thin ropes and I like the colors and the way he gives the oil texture on the paper, because he does not paint on canvas. He uses limes, pool, and browns and it appeals to me and my love of water.

I am trying to decide if I want one and which one. I bargain him to 18 dollars but I don't know which I want. He stands next to me while I ask for silence as I stare at his paintings. There are over 40 hung before me, but I focus on four. As I picture them in my room on my wall, I realize they are a bit sad, and lonely. The choice of colors though nice, are a bit simple. I enjoyed that short relationship with his art, but I decide that I don't want to see this art everyday. I feel an obligation to buy and then quickly realize that he and I have had a nice time together, talking and enjoying his art. And so I tell him with my hands that I am not ready to buy, that I want to walk around. He is fine with it, doesn't seem annoyed one bit, and we say good bye.

Hours later, having walked through the whole market, having bought a pomegranate ring, a backgammon table, and things for my sister, I decide this perfect walk must come to an end. I go to pick up the art I bought and the guy offers his help to me "if you need anything" its hospitality. I have so many phone numbers of colleagues that offer their help should I get bored or lonely. But I am one of those people that indulges in solitude. So I turn down his offer and go my way.

I enter the hotel, the three young women receptionists always over-smile when they see me. Perhaps it is refreshing to see someone like themselves as a guest, on her own.

In the room I take out my art. I love it. I call Gayane. Make plans for tea later that night. I leave.

Artbridge café and bookstore holds me for two hours. I read, eat, write. Yerevan magazine is in English and its actually a good read. I write down nice quotes from an article about a famous Armenian writer during the Soviet times. I read about an Armenian artist who lived in Paris in the twenties and thirties, friend of Picasso who eventually returned to the Soviet Union only to be separated from his wife forever. George Micheal plays on the restaurant speakers. I feel at home. My perfect illy cappuccino makes me smile. My brain and my heart is fed.

Finally I am ready to go. The weather is dreamy. Some sort of autumn, warm enough so that I leave my coat in the hotel, cool enough so the trees are a thousand colors of yellow and green. I can’t find where I am going. It’s an art restaurant bookstore. Under the ZARA shop I see something. It is in French. I go down. It looks too restaurant. I come back up. I go back down. I open, I walk somewhere away from the tables and the people.

A boy is standing there, with others, but I don’t notice him first. I ask about the bookshop. He responds in an over-confident, French sort of way “yea, there are hundreds of bookshops.” I say, “well is there not one here?” “He says yea, it is through here.” He can see that I am still disoriented and decides to give me a tour. He has dark eyes, one perfect brow, he wears a black denim jacket, and black denim jeans, a black tie. His hair is fohawk. He starts to give me a tour, it’s a hip place, couches, dim lights and cave sort of feeling.

We end up in the bookstore and I ask for the bathroom. He introduces me to two doors: the proper entrance to the shop and the entrance to the bathroom. I say I am going to the bathroom and head towards the exit of the shop. In front of it, I stop, turn around and he says “you say you are going to the bathroom but you go to leave.” I laugh and walk to the bathroom.

I come back and we walk through the store together. He is studying pharmacology. He speaks English better than anyone I have met. He helps me pick out things for my brother in law.“ I used to work here two years ago, now I just hang out here because there is nothing else to do on a Saturday (looking at his watch) at 7PM, what am I going to do?”

At this point, I learn that my visa card is not working on the store credit card machine. He walks me outside. I ask him for the nearest HSBC. He says HSBC doesn’t work with visa cards, I say “it doesn’t work with your Armenian visa card, it will work with mine.” I don’t know how to say it in a way that isn’t patronizing but the bank is meant for foreigners. He gets it, and I don’t have to explain. We go and it works I get cash. I come outside, jump and say boisterously, “it worked.” He says “I know, I saw” with a smile on his face, in reaction to my exaggerated jubilation.
We walk back, make the purchase and I ask him if he wants to walk me to the hotel.

I like his conversation, he is clever, relaxed, and spicy. He is curious and absorbs quickly so he is able to mold into the world of foreigners. He tells me he has friends working for NGOs and development orgs and that’s why he can speak English so well. He tells me there is nothing to do in Yerevan because all the discotheques are full of men because women get a bad name if they are out. So everyone gets married.

He is from Syria, came back to Armenia to get away from the “horrible middle east.” “I have a lot of Iranian friends here. Armenian men and women are like villagers, very backwards they just got exposure to life ten years ago…” He asks me if I am going to meet some people right now. My friends are going to take me out to get tea at eight. And I want to call my boyfriend. He nods.
“Okay this my hotel.”

He looks at me, it’s a pregnant pause. I have been here before. A young eastern guy intrigued by an east meets west kind of woman. It is fun for me, because I like to push open their minds by my independent behavior. I like his company, I would like for him to walk me around town more and say abrupt things in a blunt manner, the way that he does. But it always goes in the wrong direction. But maybe this guy can stay cool, this isn’t Afghanistan after all. I tell him to come by the hotel at 7 PM on Monday night. We can go for walk, I say to myself in my head. I can buy time to see if I still want his company in two days. If I don’t, I will not show up.

We say goodbye.

History is sad

Yerevan Day Two
History is sad. Today, a colleague of mine, an Armenian with a phd in Turkish linguistics and two masters in other things philosophical, said “it’s the cost of history” as he walked me past the National Academy of Sciences back to our offices. It was one of those clusters of buildings that had been completely ignored since the fall of the Soviet Union, as opposed to the shops and empty business complexes down the street, the national academy of sciences lost more than it gained with the collapse. Who is going to invest in the humanities, social sciences and oriental studies departments of a country of 3 million?
On the inside the building looked like a war torn abandoned building. We walked in and found the going up elevator. It was a 4 feet by 4 feet long. The smell of body odor overtook my normally adaptable nose. The hallway and offices were too familiar, old and dilapidated, suitable only for abandon, but strangely inhabited and used, as if these venerable academics were proudly holding on to the last tangible asset they were given.
We went to see the head of the Oriental Studies department and though he had a large office with a secretary, compared to the store fronts of corruption down the street, he was no longer valuable in capitalism. I tried to imagine his previous world, where academics are paid for the sake of thinking and studying only, where they neither apply for grants nor take on management positions to boost their salaries, where they publish solely because they have a new concept or piece of research and not because their tenure or good name requires it. A world where people are allowed to think and publish freely, not trying to fit a political agenda, or a cause, except the improvement of humanity through knowledge. That’s where I go too far. Though these halls were adequately funded during Soviet times, they were perhaps never truly free of political bias.
I could imagine these buildings, these departments, these hallways twenty, twenty five years before. Bustling with theories, fancy suits, and big conferences of experts from all across the Soviet Union. It was an investment in knowledge for knowledge’s sake, an investment in understanding problems. Nobody cares about that in this new Armenia.
As my colleague and I walked away from the building, I ask my favorite question- how is it different pre-and post Soviet Union? He states clearly “look freedom is number one” let me say what I want, travel as I want, eat what I want, go for the job I want and I am happy. Poverty is horrible, hunger is horrible, but the lack of freedom is unbearable. The poverty, illness and death that resulted from the crash of the Soviet union, was the cost of history.
As we sit for lunch later that day, I start to like this guy. He has been through it all, it seems, and yet he has a clear head, a rational mind, and a sincere heart. He tells me about taking up cigarettes in the early nineties because it was more affordable than eating. “A cigarette and a coffee, that’s all you needed.” I ask him about what Moscow was like in the eighties while he was getting his phd. I wonder if he had any indication of what was to come. He said one day he turned on the television and he saw a man actually talking in an unrehearsed, natural way for the first time in his life and he thought “this country is going down.” That man was Gorbachev.
He explains that though his family was treated poorly by the soviets, he never wanted it to completely evaporate, because of the benefits it gave to his country. He thought a unified body of independent states would have been the best solution, but “a bunch of crooks and rogues wanted to pilfer off the goods of the country and so they separated.
Walking back, the cost of history burns in my mind. I realize I am not sad that the academics are under funded, because other academic institutions are doing quite well in Yerevan. I am sad because a whole world, a whole culture of thinking, is disappearing. It is like an endangered species, maybe we don’t care about it anymore, but it has some value independent of what humans find trendy today. This academy of sciences might one day disappear or take on a completely different culture, but today it still has the feel of soviet life and that’s hard to let go.
I suppose it is like letting go of the Iran of thirty years ago. I still look at the pictures of my parent’s Iran with nostalgia. How do you recreate a time when people had gardens in the courtyards, and time for family and money for feasts?
A time when information and money were not as important. A time when cities weren’t overcrowded, the environment was still clean, and food was cooked at every meal. A time when people used their minds instead of the media to make decisions. A time when wisdom had a chance.
Walking home
That evening a colleague offers to take me out to dinner with her husband. She astutely takes advantage of the cool autumn air and walks me through large parts of the city. As she talks to me about marrying at age 20, I notice the light. The light is different in Europe, and even further east, than it is in America. It is closer, the sky is less far away. It is sunset as we walk, but since it was a cloudy day, the light gets grayer and grayer but bright, the way rain light can be. She walks me through the parks and a pathway of outdoor cafes. It is a lovely city.
We passed a set of four ping pong table, men battling it out with tiny paddles and balls. We walk on narrow pathways that weeds and flowers have cracked. The dirt and sediment in the streets and the untrimmed hedges, trees, and grass around the streets makes walking a bit more adventurous. I miss this organic way.

Yerevan

The Soviets built long one or two lane roads from the airport to the city. On either side there is nothing except maybe street lamps. As the Russian speaking driver that usually picks me up speeds fast at the strange hours of night that I usually arrive in many of these countries, I feel like this is the closest depiction of the road to the afterlife, if there was one. A calm dark straight drive under lamp posts into nothing but more darkness, just silent driving. It is calming because there is nothing to achieve, nothing to do but sit. It is also depressingly un-optimistic, there are no blue skies, green pastures, bright sunlight like in the plains of the US, or on the long drives in Nashville.
I feel strangely secure in that car, in all of those cars, with all of those drivers that have a sign up with my organization’s name on it when I exit the airport. I don’t know them, they don’t know me, but my organization has vetted them, and they have that sort of paternalistic feeling that the men in those countries have, that sense that has largely disappeared in the West, the sense of responsibility a man has for a woman. So I feel safe with those strangers, in their cars, Ladas, bmws, Mercedes, whatever they are, as we drive at 12 AM, 3AM, 7 AM through the long street to the hotel.
I lose my sense of responsibility and drift into the scenery, into the lamps that race past us as we drive. I melt into this world, this dark world, that, despite its recent consumerism, its recent Armani and Prada store fronts, is still marked by functional soviet architecture, grays, browns, and copper, so dark it can’t be cleaned anymore, so sturdy, it can’t be destroyed. I am only supposed to arrive here, for now, I am only a passenger, my illiteracy, my inability to speak, makes me impotent, excuses me from conversation, from engaging in the world, I only have to observe. I am a bystander. And so I stand by, or sit rather, and appreciate my driver’s complicity in this.
Of course the next day is different. I must lead, I must collaborate, discuss, idealize, criticize, create. At the overpriced breakfast in the hotel, I realize how comfortable I am in the western world. The hotel restaurant is occupied by 11 people, including myself. Ten of them are men.
The night I left LA, two days before, I spent the night at a business hotel near the airport. That morning I saw salespeople riding the elevator. It was also dominated by men, but there were, peppered among them, women. Aggressive saleswomen, with blackberries, blue tooth, carry-on luggage, laptop all in tow.

I felt, two days later, in the restaurant of the hotel, that I was in an old boys club, a culture of role playing and nepotism. Though they were innocent of all my claims against them, I still didn’t like them, collectively. I remembered a time when I enjoyed molding into a group like that, the challenge of charming and then intellectually conquering a group of chauvinists. Most of the time, though, in retrospect I don’t think they were ever really conquered as much as they were charmed and amused. I won a few over, taught a few that women were as smart and capable as men, but most were simply amused, I am sure.

But now, I had no patience to either charm or conquer. I just wanted to move beyond them, I knew they existed, everywhere they existed, in the US there were millions of them, traditional men that want traditional roles for women. They are everywhere, but I had found my bubble, my niche, my market, my world and they didn’t exist there. In my world I went as far as I could based on my merit. So I thought.

Later in the bathroom

Unlike the men, I missed the bathrooms. I went to the bathroom in the office after lunch. I sat there looking at the shower, the sink, the low ceiling. I missed the culture of the bathroom. The toilets are not as big as in the US, nor as sturdy, somehow you felt you were really shitting into the ground. The sinks were smaller, the showers, smaller. It reminded me of that year in Afghanistan.

The bathroom in this world, as clichéd and as trite as it is, seemed more authentic, more realistic. A bathroom should be a very small room with a simple toilet and sink, right? It was more Marxist in a way, sure there were fancy bathrooms and less fancy bathrooms, but generally there was much less differentiation than in the US. My Marxist side comes out.

But strangely, I am less compelled towards this world than I once was. I am less curious, less drawn. Its age I suppose. And comfort feels good now. Capitalism has a new place in my heart now. Luxury feels good. And I feel isolated here, far from innovation and progress. Far from strong social programs, liberal policies, from new technologies for heating and cooling homes, from new curriculum for teaching youth and children, far from strange new foods, new ideas that make millions, far from opportunity and experimentation.

Summit

She is
An almost thirty year old woman
Traveling alone
Leading alone
Following alone
She is a woman
Walking slowly tonight
in
Republic square

She moved past her twenties
Now stands at the top
Proud

She knows
that the ascent
to the next peak
will begin soon

But for now
she enjoys the solitude,
the silence,
of the summit

A Dream

this is a flower
not an act
not something to be done
there is no end to reach
nothing to maintain
no place for initiative
nothing to plan

it grows on its own
towards the sun
and around the other things
nature nourishes it
it adapts

this is a sunset
it is to feel
the light on our skin
while our eyes are taken
by the slivers of
pink red yellow saphire violet
and turqoise

we have no other role
but to sense

this is a meal
made with thought
as an art
we can only be brave enough
to go slow enough
to put each morsel
on our tongue
to smile at every change in
flavor
to remember each bite

this is a dream
we can only allow it
to be

Sunshine

sun comes
out
the vine dries up
and cracks
falls
crippled
and small
in pieces
on to the ground

Vines

sadness and boredom
creep over me for two days
like a thin vine
working its way from my ribs
around my spine
out from my mouth
winding down to my feet
around each toe
and twirling back up my ankle
stretching across my face
until it can grow no more

Its Queen

emotions
can make
us feel
like the world
is small
and we are its
queen
sitting on top
moving it,
pushing it
in so many directions

that the responsibility
is all ours
is both oppressive
and exciting

when really
we are just but tiny
ants
walking on an
earth that revolves
around its own laws
around the sun
in a galaxy
among many

Shukrollah in Tennessee Stick

Strangers give me laughter
today

Pile

the past
is a library
full of books
falling on my
shoulders

Good Shit

we laugh
and our innocence
and wisdom
mashes into
each other

We are grown
so we like
this moment more
this is good
shit

Fall came
and pushed my face
into the smells
of the cycles
of the past
it was familiar
to be back in the same coat
same scarf
same cold
but now courage
was sitting inside
waiting to come out
and I knew it would
I just waited for when

A DAY

One should count each day a separate life. -Lucius Annaeus Seneca, philosopher (BCE 3-65 C