Trafika Europe 4 - Armenian Rhapsody

live on the fifth floor of one of those buildings from Khruschev’s time. I go to work like regular people, come back in the evening, have dinner, rarely breakfast, and have a cat. My mother and sisters sometimes come to clean my house, so that I can write. If there is a mess around me, I don’t tidy it up, but I don’t write either. The messy house stops me from writing, but laziness stops me from tidying up. I have a cat because it washes and cleans itself. It’s a pretty cat, with gray fur and even grayer eyes. It lies on the window sill, under the sun. It is even prettier under the sun. I photograph it and it closes its eyes and curls up with the click of the camera. My mother has come and removed the curtains, so that she can get them washed. She says, “Writers are lazy people, they’ll sit around doing nothing all day if you let them, just thinking, thinking… What do they think about so much? Two plus two is four, after all.” I’m standing in front of the mirror and have spotted some white hairs on my head, so I’m plucking them out. I’m plucking and at the same time saying, “Mom, what are your thoughts on sparrows, then?” and she says, “A sparrow is just a bird, nothing more,” and starts to clean the windows even more fervently. The glass is so clean, that I hit my head against the window as I try to look out into the yard. I go out onto the balcony. There is a woman sitting on the balcony of the building opposite mine, also on the fifth floor. She has white hair. She is smoking. Our buildings are so close that I can see her smoke, but I can’t tell whether it is a regular cigarette or a slim, and whether there is smoke, or not. I

3