Trafika Europe 4 - Armenian Rhapsody

La-le-lu, nur der Mann im Mond schaut zu, wenn die kleinen Babies schlafen, drum schlaf auch du.

Lo-lee-lu, only the man in the moon’s watching when the little babies sleep, so you shall sleep, too.

(German lullaby by Hans Gaze)

y mother, who has freckles and lives under the Milky Way: this is Aza. At night I whispered her name without being able to call her mother, or mum, or mummy, and the more I repeated it, the more I believed I understood its meaning. Aza, she who has wings. Aza, who must have thought I was a bird, and perhaps hoped that one day I’d fly to that place to which she’d been drawn. Aza, who was wrong but somehow proved right in the end. I missed her even before I was separated from the umbilical cord, before I could have imagined what awaited me just four hours after I was born, in a single room of the Red Cross clinic in Taxistrasse, West Munich. Aza rose from the bed with a painful groan, slid her toes into her flip-flops and lifted me out of the bassinet. It was the first time she touched me. It was the first time she looked at me. She hadn’t wanted to see me before that. She hadn’t wanted to see anyone, closing her eyes as soon as she heard footsteps approaching. She lay still when someone put a hand on her arm or when something moved behind her, even if it was only the harmless curtains fluttering in the scent of a storm. When Nurse Marianne M

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