Andranik

Riga, the city of lights: It was the middle of January, but no matter where we went in the darkness, we were always wrapped in the friendly sparkle of Christmas - the festive, colorful decorations of the holidays brighten Latvian winters even through the beginning of the deep cold. I couldn't help but rejoice in their light as I danced along the street through the newly fallen snow.

It was in the last week of my time in Riga that my favorite Armenian bartender had decided I needed a phone. Incidentally, I had met him at some time in my trip that might be described as the beginning of the end, but my lack of telecommunication was something he'd decided to rectify the first day he met me.

"I know what it is like to be alone in a strange country," he had told me, concern shining in his sincere blue eyes as he offered me his phone.

"Are you sure?" I asked, wide-eyed with surprise.

He was sure. If there's one thing I've learned about Andranik, it's that everything he puts his mind to he does with purpose.

But he hadn't had the charger with him, so in the afternoon of the next day I wandered up the escalator of the giant golden mall on Dzirnavu iela and found him on a second-floor balcony overlooking the stores below. He greeted me with chocolate, surprising me as we walked out the door by tucking two Serenāde chocolates into my hand - dark and rich, with fruit jelly in the middle.

"Oh, no, I'm in trouble," I laughed. "I love chocolate."

"Really?" His cheeks split into a wide, boyish grin, happy and open and completely unguarded. "These are my favorite. Other people have their favorite chocolate from other countries, other regions, but I think these right here are the best in the world." From then on, I found that I could rely on him to supply me with chocolate at every opportunity.

The World According to Mallards - The Freedom Monument at night.

Several hours later saw us strolling through the park by the Freedom Monument, Riga's Statue of Liberty. The three stars that crowned it shone like soft fire against the night, floating in the palms of a woman named Milde as though they had always belonged there. Earlier, I had mixed her up with another woman on the shiny new Latvian euro.

"This woman, Milde, right? She's supposed to be the perfect Latvian woman," I had said. I nudged the coin with the tip of my finger as my friend poured my tea, the lamplight glinting on the engraved wreath of flowers in her braided hair. We were in a Double Coffee, the Starbucks of Riga, and I was getting an introduction to Armenian hospitality - in which, as a lady and a guest, I was not allowed to pay for anything. I initially dared to protest and ended up getting an education on the excellent art of giving up and giving in, although I still tried to object occasionally on principle.

Milde of the Freedom Monument

The new shiny coin sat between us on the small round table as my new friend shook his head. "Milde, no - that is Milde," he said, pointing towards the Freedom Monument in the east. Milde, I knew, had been the girlfriend of the sculptor who had made the woman on the Monument. "Whenever you see the three stars, that is Milde." I nodded in understanding as I absently started to put sugar into my tea. "Here, let me do it," he said, and proceeded to vigorously spoon sugar into my teacup.

"Stop, stop!" I laughed, my eyes flying open wide - the good bartender was serving me tea with my sugar! Milde forgotten, we began bickering good-naturedly over his taste for the extremely sweet and the ludicrously spicy.

Now I remembered her as I gazed through my camera lens and found her again, framing a wide shot before carefully immortalizing it with the click! of the shutter. I looked over at my bartender friend, silhouetted against the shifting rainbow light of a nearby bridge, and considered the flaxen hair before me, softly glowing in the dusk.

"You are Armenian, but you are so blond!" I had told him. I had always thought of Armenians as a dark-haired, swarthy folk, and it was strange to me to see such yellow hair and vivid blue eyes over the structure of this man's face.

"Actually, the original Armenians - real Armenians - are blond," he replied. I was sitting in his restaurant and munching on mushrooms, and he had stopped by to see how his chiquita was doing (we had been working on his Spanish). I had wandered in alone that night, tired and hungry and looking for my dinner, and he had looked up in surprise when he saw me.

"How many?" he asked.

"Just me," I sighed, and managed a smile. I had been looking for the restaurant in about the same spot for fifteen or twenty minutes on foot; it was around the block and down a cellar from where it was supposed to be. Soon I found myself seated at a table for four, under the wing of a curious and concerned gentleman who was the son of an Armenian father and a Latvian mother.

A view from inside St. Peter's Church. Also, a certain Armenian.

"When I was little, the children would make fun of me," he said, "because I was blond and so pale." I listened as he spoke of how the children would tease him for his white skin and for his hair, and of how he went crying to his father about it. His father comforted him, and told him not to worry: true Armenians had blond hair and blue eyes. "There was genocide," he said, watching me as I settled my chin in hand, "around World War I, and then many remaining Armenians married the Turks, and they are darker, you know; so now many Armenians have dark hair and dark eyes instead of light hair and light eyes. But the true Armenians are blond."

"What color was your father's hair?" I asked.

"Blond. With blue eyes," he smiled.

My camera drifted with my memories, towards the gleam of his hair in the dark, but he spotted me trying to take the shot and it evaded me. "Hey," he spluttered, and I scowled as I realized I had been thwarted in my scheme. He was on the phone, so I left him in peace and turned my attention to the mallard ducks braving the icy waters of the small river below.

To get here, we had to pass by the opera house, and I had laughingly pointed out the dancing pine trees on display out front. "Dancing pine trees?" my friend asked, peering at them closely. The white plastic ballerina pines each balanced precariously at all angles on a single long rod, three other rods mimicking arms and the second leg. "Oh!" he exclaimed. "I never noticed that before!" We had just come from eating, and I was busily pulling my hat over my head as he spoke. It was a bomber hat, a gift from my dad to ward off the Latvian winter, and it was impossible to not notice. "Where did that hat come from?" he asked me.

Photocred to the most excellent
James Levin, our Master Photographer

"From America!" I said, fumbling to close the clasp under my chin.

Surprise crossed his face. "America!" he exclaimed. "That's a Russian hat! I looked at it when I first saw you tonight, and I thought, 'What kind of hat is that, that is such a tourist hat!'" He raised his eyes to the heavens. "What a disaster."

I doubled over in laughter, the clasp flying open as it was forgotten in my mirth. Every other thing, be it mildly irritating or terrible and horrendous, was a "disaster" to Andranik, and every time the word left his mouth I struggled to control my laughter. I dipped down, still chuckling, and managed to pack a snowball as I reached into the snow. It smashed into his shoulder as I let fly, and he gasped, his hand going to the soggy spot on his coat. Warm laughter rumbled out from his chest as he reached out and playfully grabbed for my hood. His elbow clipped my ear as I ducked under his arm, and I dove after my hat as it hurtled into a pile of snow. He beat me to it, yanking the cold, snowy hat over my ears as I let out a hollered, "Hey!"

We were still chortling and dusting the snow from our ears as we crossed into the park and over the lock bridge, where couples would snap a padlock on the guardrails in token of their love. I poked around the ponds and statues while my friend stood off and watched, and we meandered down the twists and turns of a downhill path as my favorite bartender told me about his little daughter in Germany, his love for her nearly singing through his voice. The path took us across another bridge and eventually drifted us over to this spot where Milde and her stars stood outlined against the twilight, the spot where I found a large Armenian scowling down at me in amused mutiny against my photography. I looked up at the big man, and for a moment saw what he must have looked like as a child.

"When I was small, we moved to Armenia, and it was a happy time for my father, because he was going back to his fatherland. Not so happy for my mother," he had said, back in the restaurant. "In those days it was Soviet Union, not like today; my father could cross the border without documents, no problem. We lived on a border town with Azerbaijan, and you know, there was war. My mother cried every day, every day...when I was little, maybe five, six, I already knew how to use a machine gun. The men would show us, and it was fun for us, you know; we didn't know any better. But then, years later, I look at the news and I see these children with their machine guns and I thought, This is crazy, what are they doing? They are just kids!"

"I didn't think, but then I realized that I, I was one of those children."

Too emotional indeed. I often think of Andranik in these
colors; their warmth suits him.

I watched the play of the lights on the gentle eddies of the small river below me as I considered the complexity of this man who had so quickly become my friend.

"So you're, what, Latvian, then?" I had asked him, trying to puzzle out his identity.

His expression twisted in exaggerated, wry distaste. "No, Armenian, Armenian - Latvians are so cold," he groaned, his rolled-up cuffs tightening around his muscled forearms as he gestured expansively in my direction. "I am Armenian, I am too emotional to be Latvian!"

"Armenians are supposed to be really emotional?" I asked, delighted at his childlike freedom of expression.

"Oh yes, we are all over the place!" He grinned at me, and I couldn't help but grin right back. "I am like a caveman sometimes, you know."

A tug on my elbow brought me back to the present, and I looked up to find that he'd finished his phone call. "Ready?" he asked. "Let's go." He plucked me up off the ground and we started off towards a pale triangular glow in the west, leaving the mallards behind.

While we had picked our way down the steep winding path towards the sound of their gentle quacking,  he had asked me, out of the blue, what was happening with gay rights in America. Surprised, I filled him in on some of the legal proceedings, and for the first time I saw a shadow fall over his face.

"I do not think it is right, you know," he said. "These people...they should be free to do what they wish in their own homes, but you cannot force your own opinion on the people, you know. It is not right." I watched his shoes, pacing along beside me, and listened intently as a strange kind of dread deepened his voice.

"In Germany, it is normal, for people to do that openly there." I snuck a sideways glance at him and saw him shaking his lowered head. "She is little, now, but I know that one day my daughter will ask me what that is, and I will have to tell her."

I had slipped my fingers into the palm of his hand, mute as I recognized the concern of this father for his child, for this daughter whose name was a song on his lips, for the girl who was so far away. How painful must it be to be parted from flesh of his flesh, bone of his bone?

He was towing me along by my gloved hand, towards the white glow of what appeared to be pyramids rising out of the ground. As we got closer, I realized that they were hollow. "Your hands are so cold!" I scolded him, tapping his bare fingers as I freed my own. "And look at your ears, they're so red. You should wear a hat."

"No, no, I'm fine," he said, rubbing one of the offending ears ruefully. He smiled at me. "Whenever I wear a hat, I always have to change all of my clothes for it, so I don't wear them."

I rolled my eyes: "all my clothes" constituted a yellow T-shirt under a lined leather jacket, a pair of jeans, and those dark shoes he had on. I, on the other hand, had at least three layers on. "I'm going to buy you a Russian hat, I swear," I threatened.

The snow in this particular park hadn't been disturbed overmuch, and so I started dancing around a little in the snowdrifts. "The other day in the Christmas market, there was Latino music playing!" I called across to him. "And it was so weird - Latino music in Latvia at Christmas! But I started dancing salsa a little right there in a the square because I could, and another lady was doing the same thing ten meters away, and we ended up spotting each other." I turned and shot him a cheeky grin, aware that he was laughing at me. "It was great!"

It was amazing, too - the Latvian woman and I were linguistically not on the same page, but the music had moved our feet to speak, one to the other and back again. Our brief moment of connection, a shared secret smile, had spanned beyond the understanding of any spoken tongue.

"I like to dance," Andranik confessed. In Armenian it's An-dra-NIK, not An-DRA-nik, he had told me, and I still found the right pronunciation a little odd on my tongue. He pulled out his phone and started scrolling through it. "When I am working out, I like to dance to salsa, bachata, reggaeton..."

I laughed and clapped my hands together. "Reggaeton can be so much fun! But you have to find the right kind of reggaeton. Here, do you have the music?"

"Trying to find it..." he murmured.

"Put it on!" I skipped around in front of him, walking backwards as I spoke. "We can have a dance party right here!"

He looked up at me, his big blue eyes wide with consternation. "Oh, no," he exclaimed. "I only dance in my home, while I'm working out. Bachata, and reggaeton, it's very scandalous, you know!"

I stared at him for a moment before putting my face in my hands, laughing helplessly for a moment, before I mustered my dignity enough to place a solemn hand on his arm. "Do you know how many people I think I've scandalized in your poor city, just by running through it?" I inquired, my voice cracking as mirth broke through. I looked about the deserted park and decided that someone must have decided to reserve it just for us. "There's no one here, just put it on!"

His fingers found the playlist he was looking for, and suddenly the deep bass notes of reggaeton poured forth into the Latvian air. We listened for a moment under the while skeletons of the pyramids, the snow whirling about in small tornadoes, our only audience.

"Are you ready?" I shot my favorite Armenian bartender a mischievous smirk and let the music guide my footsteps through the virgin snow. I danced a few circles around him, grooving to the music, letting my hips and shoulders flow with the beat, and discovered on my third rotation that I had somehow convinced him to follow suit.

We gleefully jazzed out to reggaeton as the minutes passed us by, feet churning the snow, the pyramids our audience, the park our stage. The bright white light shining around us threw the shadows oddly, and so it took me a moment to realized we actually weren't alone. A soberly dressed couple, robed in black, their coats quite supple, viewed us with dismay from a footpath steps away, and judged us with indignation in their eyes.

"Look!" I elbowed Andranik, and he whipped around and saw them as they started to move on. The music was still vibrating through the air, but we completely disregarded it as we leaned against each other and laughed heartily, basking in the atmosphere of light and joy and gladness. We were like giddy drunken fools, besotted with the ambrosia of life. I found myself grateful that, despite my short time here, our show would go on - for all of the world was our stage.