Trafika Europe 4 - Armenian Rhapsody

stronger than the crazy desire which had possessed him during the first weeks with Aza.

This was something else. This was love.

Looking up from the Orffstrasse, Paul could see from afar the upper floors of the hospital where he sought the window at the end of the hallway on the fifth floor. There was a burning sensation in his chest, which, for the first time, didn’t feel oppressive but inspiring. Life with Aza hadn’t been easy in the past few months but now, he thought, everything would be fine and maybe they’d even want to get married one day, although Paul wasn’t so sure about that. Anyway, he wouldn’t tell Max. That he’d ever wasted a thought on marriage would constitute a betrayal of their shared principles discussed at least once a week and late into the night at the kitchen table over a pot of chilli con carne (marriage as a bourgeois institution, an instrument of oppression, restriction of freedom, a symbol of moral subjugation, et cetera, et cetera). Yet my father was basically a romantic, and exchanging rings or even a solemn signature was just as much part of that as his dream of a Tropical Institute, which he and Aza would run one day, carrying out research in the Amazon while my future siblings and I would play with children from some nearby naked Indian tribe, bristling with health under banana trees.

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