Yerevan remembered fondly

Right after the Crimean war we used to hang out in Salvo’s bar in Yerevan, me, Nana Mouskouri and Marco Polo. Nana was old enough to be my mother back then; now she’s old enough to be my grandmother. The bar was on the second floor of the Hotel Philosophe and we always took a table over by the window where Russian soldiers couldn’t overhear us: they were everywhere back in those days, and they were none too subtle in their eavesdropping. Hemingway usually had a table in the back where he could smoke and nobody noticed him, or so he liked to think. He was the only one of us who carried a gun. Most afternoons we talked poetry, with good Georgian wine to get us started, while April thunder clouds gathered around Ararat just over the border in Turkey then drifted down the snowy slopes to drop the coldest rain onto Republic Square. None of us had jobs or even the right (or inclination) to work, but we had a book running every weekend taking bets on who would arrive at the opera house on Saturday night on the arm of the French ambassador’s wife, and who would go home with her husband who always left right before the curtain fell with some beauty or other.