Trafika Europe 4 - Armenian Rhapsody

allowed to take one out of the freezer in the basement (if I dared to go down there alone). The fact that they had bright green woodruff-flavoured ice cream in the freezer even before I knew this was my favourite flavour was proof that some answers exist before their questions. It was the same thing with Fergus and my father. After Paul and Fergus met on the day of my birth, there was an unspoken closeness between them, yes, almost intimacy, nourished by Fergus’ instinct to help more than was actually humanly possible and by Paul’s impulse to consider him, from the first pat on the shoulder, as a natural part of his, of our lives. Fergus had been there in the right place at the right time, as they say, and we couldn’t help but hold him in our hearts, in Paul’s which, so empty, so hollow, was suddenly beating, and in mine which, although no bigger than a butterfly, had space for a whole world. Apart from the Turkish kiosk owner who constantly forced chocolate on them, hoping to dispel the bitterness of what happened, and who constantly threw his hands heavenwards, thanking God for his help, Fergus was the only person who’d witnessed Paul at the point of disintegration. My father, shaken by all the possible consequences, kept imagining me plummeting down five floors. What if Fergus hadn’t been there … and how could Aza … why, just why? On that fresh, rain-scented summer evening Paul sat shattered and in tears on a soft-drinks crate under the flickering neon of the hospital kiosk, riding

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