Trafika Europe 4 - Armenian Rhapsody

drops that fell like dew on my outstretched palms. Grandpa would have continued as a postal worker in his one-man branch and come home for lunch. He would have given me a new stamp with a butterfly on it every day. In exchange, I’d have run down to the kiosk with two coins to buy him a cigar (plus one or two sticks of liquorice for me and some herbal sweets for Grandma). I would have been no trouble, occasioned no expense, and I would have added new meaning to their lives, a new goal, which they, now in their mid-forties, might well have needed. My father could have finished his studies in Aachen and come to us at weekends to help me practise cycling and walking on stilts every Saturday afternoon. But Paul had made his decision and only on my seventh birthday did I understand why. Until then, I yearned for each visit to Mathildesberg, bursting into tears at the farewells from Grandma and Grandpa who spoiled me rotten, much more than Max and Irene and all the others who came and went ever would have done. Not that I was unhappy in the Munich flat, quite the opposite. I was Luisa, Lulu, Lu, a silent, smiling baby, and after long discussions with my grandparents and a quick democratic vote by our flatmates I was brought home to live with Paul, Max and Irene, two weeks after my birth, in a bright red stroller chosen by Grandma and paid for by Grandpa.

We lived in a spacious flat in the Nibelungenstrasse. The

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