As I tumble down the slick rock face with hail stinging my face, I think that this really must be it. The end. Not how I expected things to end, but okay… There is still a lot left undone – bummer. But also there is a lot I got to do – just this morning I was writing how blessed my life really was. My body tries to fight off gravity and find something to hang onto while sliding inevitably down, down, down. It’s both in slow motion and happening in fractions of seconds. And another thought pops into my head – when exactly did I start hating heights?
I am 12: my knees are skinned and scabbed over and skinned again. I pick the scabs, and blood runs down my dirty shins, and my knees never heal. My hair is dirty and stringy – with no running water washing it is a production and absolutely not a priority. It’s school vacation, and the first thing I do when I wake up every morning is run 13 stories down and into the street and figure out what to occupy myself with today.
Summer comes early to Yerevan. The streets are full of voices of children playing, older men seeking refuge in the shade of apricot trees, counting out their backgammon games, street vendors advertising their wares (brooms, ice cream, knife and scissor sharpening), and fine dust that gets stirred up into the air by the wind that descends off the mountains every evening. The dust gets into everything, seeps into every crack, and leaves a fine coating on every piece of furniture, even with the windows firmly shut. Sparrows circle the old gray Soviet-construction cement block buildings and chatter excitedly, catching bugs mid-flight. My street is illuminated by the iridescent orange glow of the sun tumbling into the Hrazdan river gorge. All nice summer evenings are supervised by the BBC network of the neighborhood ladies in their housecoats, hanging out of their windows or off their balconies, eating sunflower seeds, and minding everyone’s business. This is how I’ll get busted dating for the first time at 14. But at the moment, I’m 12, with scabbed knees, stringy hair, a mean badminton high serve, and the best friends a girl could wish for.
All of us lived in cement block buildings except for Regina. Hers was a pre-WWII single storey house with cement roof shingles, an outhouse, and a backyard full of fruit trees. Their small home was getting encroached on by cookie-cutter high rises spawned by communist urban planning. But within the confines of their yard, demarcated by rocks pieced together with crumbling plaster, it was an Eden full of mulberry, apricot, peach, and walnut trees.
Our girl gang had made it a habit to hang out in Regina’s backyard. We played neverending games of Monopoly that we sometimes had to revisit the following day because it would get dark, and the adults would refuse to waste perfectly good candles to figure out who would finally get 4 houses on Park Place and fleece everyone for rent (we may or may not have formed clandestine agreements off the books, speedily arranged during trips to the outhouse). We dug up June bugs out of the compost pile, tied a string to one of their legs, and launched them into the sky like living shiny emerald green little kites (yes, I do realize how ridiculously inhumane this was). But most of all, we would climb the trees and compete who could get to the highest branch.
The apricot tree was where we hung out: the sitting room of Regina’s backyard. The trunk split into thick low branches close to the ground, making it easy to climb, and even pull the 7-year-old Iza up with us. The actual apricots stood no chance against us – we would decimate the unripe fruit before it could ripen. We lounged on the branches and talked about our hopes and dreams (which often looked like getting a house and living together when we were older – why didn’t we ever do that?), about boys, who were the common enemy at that point, and who was already starting to grow boobs (ever the late bloomer, I didn’t love this particular subject). The apricot tree was privy to many closely-held secrets.
And then there was the mulberry tree: tall and tough to climb, it provided bragging rights and perilously close calls to many of us. Its tiny fruit served as frequent lunch and dinner when going home to eat was potentially fraught with not being let back out. The mulberry tree was my favorite – it was a challenge and an opportunity to climb a little higher each time; it was both terrifying and exhilarating to see Regina’s roof from up above; it was all about sweaty palms and bragging rights since no one else would climb as high as me.
There were a number of rites of passage in an Armenian summer: the mulberry harvest; the washing of rugs in the street; the letting out, washing, drying, and fluffing of the wool from the winter blankets; the water festival Vardavar when everyone runs around the city dumping buckets of water on one another; the preparation of dried fruit on every balcony and windowsill; and cooking of jams and preserves that would cause the price of sugar to spike for a month. I think I must have been 4 when I first saw a mulberry harvest. The daycare teachers had stitched several bedsheets together – each of us took an edge of the sheet and stretched it as far as it would go under the mulberry tree. Mrs. Zoya’s son, the one who played the accordion and the harmonica, and the one who would eventually not return from the first Artsakh war, climbed high into the tree and gave some of the branches a shake. Tiny fruit rained into the bedsheets. Another shake, another hailstorm of sweet-smelling fruit. We held onto the sheet with one hand and reached for the berries falling around us with the other. The tree seemed to have an unending resource to give us, and we were only too happy to walk under the tree with our giant bedsheet, trying to catch all of the berries raining down on us. But really, it was Mrs. Zoya’s son who was the real star – high in the tree, fearless, making our mulberry dreams come true. I was riveted – someday I wanted to be the one shaking the berries off the tree. Later, we gorged ourselves on mulberries and managed to give ourselves stomachaches – that too would become a rite of passage every year.
So here I was, many years later, in Regina’s mulberry tree, the branch creaking and swaying disconcertingly under my feet, palms sweating, but stick in hand, shaking the sweet little berries into the outspread bedsheet that the girl gang was holding under the tree. I was absolutely terrified of heights, even at that moment – all I knew was that this was a rite of passage I had been looking forward to for a very long time – getting to be the person in charge of the mulberry harvest. I came down the tree when the bedsheet was heaping over with berries. I was entirely too amped eat, my knees still wobbly from fear and exhilaration. I would need to work on my stomachache later. But here I had been, absolutely terrified of heights but shaking the mulberries down anyway.
As I tumble down a rock face, feeling pretty sure that this really is it, I remember Regina’s backyard and the mulberry tree of our childhood. They tell you that in moments like this life flashes before your eyes. But I run out of time going through the mental snapshots of the summers of my childhood: the unripe apricots we stole, the June bugs we tormented, the treasure of now-worthless Soviet money we buried in the neighborhood. And that one mulberry harvest I had been in charge of, despite being terrified of heights.
Packing List for Immigration 