“When the August morning dawns upon you…” – C.P. Cavafy
Summer in Armenia. Hot as a sauna.
The scent of velvety-soft apricots lifts from cardboard boxes, buckets and washing up bowls on street corners. Tomatoes are sun scalded, peppers blistered. The mournful sound of Jivan Gasparyan playing the duduk, a wind instrument carved from superior apricot wood, is occasionally carried woozily through an open window.
There is an impulse to enter supermarkets for the frigid blast of air conditioning and the chance to buy bottles of ice-cold kompot in flavours of blackcurrant, pear, cornelian cherry, strawberry, raspberry and feijoa. Gulping the sweetness down, fast as possible, the temptation is to then roll the cool condensation from the glass bottle onto hot wrists.
A longing to be at higher altitude. A desire to sit by the freshwater expanse of Lake Sevan and an urge to sleep with the windows open at the crumbling Writers’ House where ghosts of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir live on.