Chapter 4

We had a transit flight, as there were no direct ones from Yerevan to any U.S. airport. We had to wait a full 3 hours and 45 minutes at Charles de Gaulle Airport to catch our connection flight. Anush was already uneasy - it was her first time on a plane. I had flown twice before, and Anush kept catching my curious glances at her. At the Paris airport, I tried my best to calm her down (no exaggeration - she was actually swaying back and forth like a newborn trying to shake off an imaginary fear). Three hours later, we were finally in the air again, and thirteen hours after that, we set foot in America. Yesayi met us at the airport, and we hugged him like he was a best friend we hadn’t seen in years.

It was a blessing that we had mastered English through AUA, as it helped us a lot with the language barrier in America. None of us had any trouble communicating with the locals. Although we landed in California, where more than a million Armenians lived, our rental place was actually in the town of Larkwood, far from the nearest Armenian community. Larkwood was a small town with low-story houses, perfectly level streets, and lush greenery along the soft shoulders. It had only a few thousand inhabitants, if that. Yesayi found the house with the help of his friend from San Francisco.

Renting a house in the United States costs a fortune, especially in a bigger city. Despite the fact that the road from San Francisco to Berkeley was much shorter than the one from our new town, the price was too high a priority to ignore.

It was past midnight when we finally arrived in Larkwood from the airport. By then, darkness had already spread its nocturnal wings over the small town. Neon lights glimmered in the dark, resembling markers for amusement parks. They seemed to serve more to accentuate the surrounding darkness than to illuminate the streets. We didn’t have much time to explore the town that night; instead, we decided to spend the rest of the night unpacking in our new home.

The house wasn’t very spacious: just a living room, a small bedroom, a kitchen, and a hallway. A tight basement downstairs. As we stepped inside, we were greeted by the smell of tarnished, time-worn furniture and the heavy, choking dust hanging in the air. It wasn’t that you’d expect every landlord to be a neat freak. If your wallet’s feeling the pinch, be ready to spend a day or two just cleaning the place.

A narrow hallway, three or four meters long, led to the living room entrance. Pressed against the right wall was a small bookshelf, its shelves crammed with fiction books. The living room had no door connecting directly to the hallway. In the middle of the room lay a brown couch, tattered in places, which let out a squawk as it unfolded into an uncomfortable king bed. A counter, the same height as the couch, stood behind it, separating the living room from the kitchen. It was like a bar counter, but with coffee cups and a fruit platter - both of which someone must have tripped over at some point, judging by the lined cracks around the edges.

There was a window in the living room, and another in the kitchen, where a broken pane had been replaced with a mismatched one of a different color. The floor creaked underfoot. If you pushed too hard, you might have collapsed straight into the basement.

When I went to get some water and jerked the faucet, the shrill noise made me shudder. Worn-out pipes, probably.

“I thought we were back in Armenia, listening to the subway roar beneath our feet,” Yesayi said. “Pass me a glass, too.”

“Guess you can run the tap water whenever you start missing home,” I replied, pouring two more glasses and handing them to Yesayi and Anush, stepping carefully over the screeching floorboards.

“Lots of work to do here,” Anush said after taking a big sip. “Let’s tackle it all tomorrow morning.”

Too tired to argue, we didn’t even bother unpacking. We crammed our suitcases together in the hallway and went straight to bed.

I took the pull out couch in the living room, Yesayi lay on a creaking metal bed - the landlord had been kind enough to drag it out of the shed - and Anush settled into the bedroom with a twin bed all to herself.

“You good there, Yesayi?” I asked, staring into the floating darkness above me. We’d been lying still for a while.

Yesayi was sleeping.