…and She Waits

2026-03-02 - 11:55

Visiting one post-Soviet state, you can then recognize it in all others – the similar patterns of urban planning and the identical buildings, structures, roads, pipes, wires, tiles, etc. However, an outsider delving inside under the extreme familiarity of the material environment finds an extreme “strangeness” of social interactions and practices. The “Outside In” series is about emplaced paradoxes and nuances. It spotlights the mundane in Armenia’s peripheral locations, where the seemingly unspectacular encounters with people and things allowing us to capture the unique features of the territory. Listen to the AI generated audio article. Your browser does not support the audio element. Outside In Essay 26 It was a foggy spring morning in a small Armenian town. Silva* was kneading dough. Her phone lay face-down on the windowsill when a message came. Silva did not reach for it immediately, not until she had carefully wiped her hands on the edge of her apron. She adjusted her glasses and read silently. Then said: “It arrived.” Her mother-in-law, seated at the kitchen table cleaning parsley leaf by leaf, did not look up. Did not ask how much: “Good. We will pay the gas first.” Silva’s husband had left for Moscow six weeks earlier. That was the first money transfer since his departure. She opened the second drawer beneath the stove and took out a small notebook with worn-out edges and foxed paper. Inside, I could see columns of numbers filling several pages. Electricity. Gas. Flour. School fees. Medicine for her mother-in-law. Repayment to a cousin who had lent money during winter. The transfer had been anticipated. It was already divided before it arrived. That scene is quite unremarkable by the standards of that town where following the collapse of socialism, lack of statecraft and deindustrialization had hollowed out the possibility of a life built in one place. Factories had closed. Infrastructure was in various stages of decay. Men had left to build cities for other people in Russia, and women had stayed behind. What I stumbled upon was not (at least not only) poverty or absence, but a life in waiting – patient, practiced, almost entirely invisible but carried along with endurance and dignity. On the other side of town, Gayane leaned on her balcony railing with a cup. Her husband was in Moscow. “Until winter,” he had said. Every evening Gayane called him and narrated the day. She tilted the phone so he could see the courtyard. “Look, Ashot,” she joked, “nothing has changed.” After the call ended, she stayed on the balcony a while longer, observing. The children ran in circles. The old men settled into the gazebo. Somewhere a gate clicked shut. Movement belongs to men, Maria jan. Stability is organized by women. This is how life goes on, round and round. Gayane did not say this bitterly. She said it the way you state something that has always been true. Anahit had moved to town from a nearby village two years earlier after marrying Hrachya. Several weeks after the wedding, he had left for Rostov-on-Don: We hardly had time to talk, you know, how it should be. I did not even learn the house properly before he went. On the refrigerator in that house hung a calendar. Certain dates were circled in red pen – the days when the remittance was due. He says I should ask him before making big decisions. But what is a big decision? This was a deceptively small question. In it lived an entire universe of social relations – the nominal authority of the absent husband, the daily management of the woman who remained, and the gap between the two. This gap would widen with each silent day – every unreturned call, every message left on read, every month red circles remained empty, and every decision Anahit made and then attributed to someone else. The small town I am writing about is by no means exceptional. Across