Trafika Europe 4 - Armenian Rhapsody

That was fine as long as they helped with the rent, which was still fairly affordable. With me, my father, Fergus, Irene, Max, the guest and the guest’s friend, there were sometimes up to seven of us sitting in the kitchen for a late Saturday breakfast, pooling whatever everyone had brought, things like honey, fresh bread or stuffed grape leaves from the market, so that all sorts of ill-matched, sweet and savoury goodies were placed on the table. Each of us had his or her own taste: a bit Bavarian with white sausage and sweet mustard, a bit English with scrambled eggs and bacon, a bit homey with someone’s mother’s jam, a bit of solidarity with the supposedly multicultural society, which was no more than a vague idea in the form of feta cheese, Turkish bread, hummus and mozzarella and, occasionally, some kind of exotic fruit that no one quite knew how to peel. I remember well our richly endowed kitchen table, cigarette butts pressed into empty eggshells, the mixed smells of coffee and wheat beer, the array of chipped mugs and always blunt knives that were pushed out of reach whenever I made a grab at them. I remember sitting on Paul’s lap as he fed me applesauce while Irene let him have a puff of one of the cigarettes she rolled, which she gently pushed between his lips. After a while, Paul passed me on and so I did the rounds, sitting on warm laps letting everyone play with me as if I were a doll: arms up and down, feet up and down, I was tickled and sniffed, or lifted into the air by Fergus, until they’d had enough of me and got bored. Then they deposited me in the playpen, which was either in Paul’s room or in the hallway. No

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