Birthday in Vienna

“.. And in the morning you smell like you drank apple cider vinegar,” he said, scratching his day-old, salt and pepper beard. “Apple cider with the vinegar’s mother, to boot!”

It was a cold winter morning and we were at the airport in Prague. He had a hangover from the night spend with the Green Fairy in the Catacombs. I was taking a short fly to Vienna as he preferred not to drive.

“Prague has changed much since your first visit, yes? When was it, really?”

“2002. It was a city introducing itself to those who wanted to discover. And its inhabitants were silently unhappy that it had taken so long.”

“I recall your amazement that the trolley cars were remodeled Russian train cars. But it all made for good B&W photos you took with your Russian camera.”

“You do indeed smell like apple cider,” I finally realized, “are you sure what you drank was green?”

“I was among the happy ones last night--Vincent van Gogh, Oscar Wilde, Monet, and Hemingway.  Did you know that "For Whom the Bell Tolls" was written under the influence of "The Green Fairy"? You should try it sometimes, I am sure your photos will come out different.”

“I am too old for such experimentation,” I proposed.

“I forgot! You will celebrate your 50^th in Vienna tomorrow night! You have very special friends who would do such a thing.”

Indeed. It was a semi-surprise celebration as I knew we would celebrate but did not know when and how.

...The day was full of academic presentations and discussions. My “special” friends at the Ministry of Health had promised that if I accept to come to Vienna on February 14, they will have a celebration here so that this birthday will not be forgotten.

“We will pick you up at 1900 hr and will walk to the Church.”

“Church?  Don’t tell me I am going to be baptized again!”

“No, you are now too big to fit into the bassinet and they do not have enough Holy Water to cover all your sins.”

It was a strange and unique time in my life. An Armenian having his birthday in Vienna by going to a church with Slovenian and Austrian friends who knew about Armenian history as much as I did.

As we walked into the crisp evening sprinkled by light snow, I learned about the church and its members.

“It is more like a social club where the newly immigrated Armenians of Vienna come together to celebrate. The premises are also shared with other immigrant communities such as Greeks.”

...The church was a large hall where Armenian carpets, statuettes, and pictures were displayed. When I was a boy in Beirut, all our rooms at school somehow looked like this hall. They were only smaller and there was a date tree somehow outside each window. Here, it was dark, cold and snowy.

“This is our birthday boy, all the way from Maryland.”

I was totally taken back: there were a couple dozen attendees to my party! And I knew only one in that crowd, as she was an assistant to the Section Director within the Ministry. Who were all these kind people coming to my birthday party?

“Most of us are from Armenia, some from Iran, a few from Syria” made the introductions a middle-aged woman with a vast smile and “Soviet Red” hair. “We are so pleased to meet an Armenian from America—do you speak Armenian?”

The “Soviet Red” was a typical shade of rusty red used by emigrants from Armenia or Central Europe. Sometimes it can be amazingly alluring, like the red head I saw during a conference at Balaton Lake in Hungary. I still remember her—she had ample curly red hair and looked like an Celtic goddess whose carrot hair had turned red from anger. Or passion.  But often the “Soviet Red” is rusty-brown, sitting atop brown or gray hair roots.

“And I am Arminé; I am Silva; I am Shoghig; I am Aline; and I am Vahig….”

I could remember a few names and associate to faces. What I immediately saw was the traditional joy of getting together to have a good time. As I was shaking hands and getting hugs, the delightful aroma of stuffed grapes, stuffed eggplant, yogurt, lamb meat, acidic sauces, and fried dough filled my insides like a familiar song. Some of these ladies had made Armenian food for someone they did not know!

“So, we were told by your dear friends that this is your 50^th birthday and that you should not spend it alone in a cold hotel room.  Come, would you like to have Austrian red wine? It is very good.”

We sat at a long table made of foldable tables tastefully aligned and covered with colourful covers. And as I was enjoying the musicality of Armenian dialects spoken in Tehran or Yerevan, a box was opened with a chocolate torte in it. And, the calligraphed wishes atop were written by frosting and in Armenian…

“Well, the Chef de Patisserie is Austrian so we wrote the saying in big letters and he “wrote” them as an image. Not bad, eh?”

Not bad—it was amazing. While I grew up in the Armenian Diaspora, I could not recall any other time when I had a cake upon which a long saying was written in Armenian. I suppose one has to survive a civil war, multiple immigrations, and live for 50 years to deserve an Austrian chocolate torte adorned by Armenian alphabet.

“Tell us about you in that delicate Diaspora Armenian spoken in Lebanon,” I was asked, “you know, for us your dialect sounds like Italian!”

Indeed, the Armenian dialect spoken in Lebanon was a little bit like Lebanon itself—a country dominated by France, capriciously spoken with a smooth pronunciation to make things flow without accentuating the harsher letter from its 36 letters alphabet. In Tehran, Armenians spoke the mother tongue with the heavier cadence of Farsi; in Armenia it is spoken as Western Armenian, the true and historic way of celebrating this ancient language.

“My my, you do speak Armenian very well. All these years in America have not made you forget. But do you also eat our traditional foods? Or you eat ice cream and hamburgers?”

...Dinner was grand but did not last for long. Someone slipped an Armenian CD into a portable player and turned the volume to its highest.

“Time to dance! Arminé, show us how graceful you are!”

And the floor got suddenly crowded by women who tied a scarf around their hips and started a dance which soon became a synthesis of traditional moves, belly dancing, and smooth aerobics! It did not matter, it was fun, and the Austrian red wine had helped smoothen the edges.             

“The birthday boy has to dance!”  

And, drawn to the center of the floor by a woman from Yerevan, I danced as a 50 year old man dances when he had forgotten about age. I could hear the group appreciating my effort and making a few jokes, now that they felt that they knew me well enough.   

Past midnight, we decided to go home.

“You have to speak at the conference tomorrow,” I was told, “dancing with women you do not know may make you forget your speech!”

All that dancing had made us sweaty and warm. It was snowing outside and we bundled up after cleaning the dishes and the tables to have the “church” in good shape for the next group planning a celebration.

As I was thanking everyone and exchanging email addresses, the lady with the “Soviet Red” hair gave me a package.

“Your gift,” she said. “I did not know if you spoke Armenian well enough, so I got you primary school books. I used to be a school teacher, and I brought some books with me from Armenia. I see that you don’t need them, except that these are good books to have.”

...Upon return to my hotel room, I placed on my bed the two slices of the torte and the package from the school teacher. I needed to sleep, but wanted to see the books. As I opened the envelope, the familiar smell of soviet paper hit me. I think that if I were blind, out of all the books printed in the world, I could smell the ones from the Soviet Union. The paper, the ink, the chemicals. It is the same reaction I used to get when handling a soviet camera—the leather case had the unique tanning smell, and the camera had its own from the lubricants and perhaps the steel.

Once I got over the smell of the books, I realized these were “propaganda” books printed in the 1960s. One was about boy scouts or “Bionere” in Russian-Armenian, and the other about “Sovkhoz” farmers.

It was almost 2 o’clock in the morning and I had a speech to give next day at 10.

“Plenty of time,” I convinced myself, “let me read these books and have another slice of torte.”

Then I decided to write an email to my Czech friend asking if the Green Fairy had Soviet Red hair….

January 28, 2013

© Vahé Kazandjian, 2014