Chapter 32
“Oh, guess what,” Danny says, about an hour after they’ve left the marina. They’re halfway to Glendale, which is apparently another city near Los Angeles (or maybe it’s in Los Angeles? Sasha’s a little fuzzy on the geography) and also the home of Carmen’s, the taco shack Danny wants to try.
Sasha has a feeling Carmen’s tacos are going to taste exactly the same as all the other tacos they’ve had this week, but he’s keeping that thought to himself.
“What,” he replies, because sometimes Danny likes him to ask, even though they both know Danny’s going to tell him either way.
“I was looking up the address for this place, and I saw there’s an Armenian bakery, like, right down the street. It has really good reviews.”
“Okay?”
“Well, I was thinking maybe we could check it out? I’ve never had Armenian food before.”
Sasha makes a noncommittal noise, looking out the window at the other cars on the freeway.
He doesn’t have a reason to say no, but he can’t help suspecting Danny’s sudden interest in Armenian food has to do with him.
He hopes he’s wrong, because he doesn’t want to have this conversation again.
He’s already told Danny he’s not Armenian, and once should have been enough.
“My mom was telling me that Glendale actually has, like, a pretty big Armenian population,” Danny continues, his voice a little louder, like he’s glancing over at Sasha. “I feel like maybe I knew that, but like, I forgot. Did you know that?”
As if Sasha’s supposed to just know where every Armenian on the planet lives. “No.”
“Are there a lot of Armenians in Russia?” Danny asks, sounding curious.
Sasha shrugs, even though the answer’s yes, at least in Moscow. There’s a big Armenian church complex not too far from his apartment; he’s walked by it a couple of times with Alina, but they’ve never gone inside.
“We can skip the bakery, if you don’t want to go,” Danny says after a moment. “We can just get tacos.”
Sasha wonders if he’s overreacting. He knows Danny’s almost as food-motivated as Buddy—case in point, today’s entire road trip—so maybe that’s all this is. It’s not like Danny was googling Armenian places.
“Okay,” he finally says, looking back at Danny. “We can go.”
*
Carmen’s tacos are pretty good, Sasha has to admit.
He still doesn’t think they were worth the trip, but Danny clearly does, posting an Instagram story of himself mid-bite and captioning it with best tacos ever!
!! plus a drooling emoji. Watching his facial expressions as he eats, and listening to him moan as he licks the last bit of hot sauce from his fingers, Sasha decides that maybe they were worth it after all.
He’s hoping Danny might have forgotten about the bakery by the time they’re done, but no such luck.
Instead, Danny leads them down the street to a bright yellow building with a red-tiled roof, blue-framed windows, and a hand-painted sign above the door that says “Naneh’s Bakery” in English.
There’s some Armenian script underneath, which Sasha can’t read; he assumes it means the same thing.
Inside, the walls are covered in old photographs, newspaper articles, and various “best bakery of the year” certificates.
There’s no one behind the glass counter, which spans the entire width of the store, but voices drift through an open door at the back, a few notes of a pop song wafting over the folk music on the speakers.
“Holy shit.” Danny stares in awe at the rows of pastries, crouching down to examine the desserts at the bottom of the counter. “These look amazing.”
Seconds later, a man emerges from the back room, rolling up his sleeves—Tigran, according to the nametag on his chest. He’s maybe in his thirties, with dark hair and light grey eyes that sweep over Sasha, lingering first on his outfit and then on his curls.
Sasha knows his hair’s a mess from the ocean—not to mention what Danny did to it on the boat—but Jesus, it’s not that bad, is it? Before he can sneak a glance at the mirror behind the counter, however, Tigran says something Sasha doesn’t understand at all.
It takes him another second to realize that Tigran’s speaking in Armenian.
Danny looks around, confused, then stands up, causing Tigran to notice him for the first time. “Welcome,” he says, switching instantly to English. “How can I help you guys?”
“Hi!” Danny peers at Tigran’s nametag. “Tie-gran?”
Sasha cringes, but Tigran’s expression doesn’t change as he corrects Danny. “Tee-grahn.”
“Oh, sorry! Tigran. Hi. I’m Danny, this is Sasha.”
Tigran smiles at Sasha, but Sasha doesn’t smile back. He’s still thinking about how Tigran addressed him in Armenian, assuming Sasha would know what he was saying, after just one look at him. What the fuck?
“So, what can I get for you guys?” Tigran inquires after a pause.
“No idea,” Danny says, eyes round and helpless. “Everything looks so good. I feel like we should take a box home?” he asks Sasha, who doesn’t bother replying, since it’s obviously a rhetorical question. “What are those? Oh, is that baklava? Wait, what do you recommend?”
Tigran starts explaining the different pastries to Danny.
Sasha pretends to listen, but he doesn’t know most of the words in English, and he doesn’t want to be here anymore, either, his skin crawling with annoyance whenever Danny tries to include him in the conversation by asking if he’d like to try this or that pastry.
He answers in nods or shrugs, leaving the latter up to Danny’s interpretation, until they’ve finally made enough choices.
“So, how long have you guys been in business?” Danny asks while Tigran’s boxing up the pastries.
“Since 1980.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah.” Tigran grins. “My grandmother started it. And of course she named it after herself.”
Danny’s laugh echoes through the bakery. “Go Grandma. That’s awesome. How’d she get into baking?”
“Her grandmother. Her family had a bakery in the village—before the genocide—and then when they came over here, they didn’t have the money for it. But she taught my grandmother how to bake, and my grandmother promised her she’d have the business again one day.”
“Oh.” For a second, Danny seems confused, but then he recovers. “Wow. Good for her.”
Tigran nods. “How about you guys? Where are your families from?”
He’s asking Danny, but he’s looking at Sasha.
“I’m from here. Well, Newport Beach. But my mom’s side of the family is from Latvia, like way back, and my dad’s side of the family’s from Germany.” Danny glances at Sasha, waiting for him to jump in, but Sasha pretends to be fascinated by the nearest pastry. “Uh, and Sasha’s from Russia, but—”
“I am from Moscow,” Sasha says, loud enough that Danny stops talking. “I will pay for this later, okay?”
It should have been his turn—Danny already covered lunch—but he doesn’t want Tigran to see the last name on his debit card. He just wants to get out of here, the sooner the better.
“Don’t worry about it,” Danny replies after a pause. “Thanks, Tigran. Can’t wait to try all these.”
Sasha walks out while Danny’s still paying, under the pretense of grabbing one of the tables off to the side of the bakery, and Danny joins him a moment later, sliding over the box of pastries and the napkins Sasha forgot.
“You okay?”
Sasha’s in the kind of mood where that question only pisses him off even more, but he swallows back a retort. He knows he doesn’t have a real reason to be upset with Danny. “Yes. Okay. Tired. What do we eat first?”
Danny doesn’t look very convinced, but he goes along with the subject change and starts reviewing their pastry options.
Whatever he picks—some sort of roll with a buttery walnut filling—is almost good enough to distract Sasha from the prickling under his skin.
But just when he’s started to think they’ve moved on, Danny clears his throat.
“Hey, Sash? What was that genocide Tigran was talking about?”
Again, Sasha wonders what’s going on in American schools. Wonders, too, if the US is one of the countries that pretends the genocide didn’t happen. “You don’t know Armenian genocide?”
“No. Sorry.” Danny flushes. “I’m not good at history.”
Sasha tries to explain it in as few words as possible. “It was during First World War. In Ottoman Imper—Empire, now you call Turkey. They took Armenians from their homes and they killed them, or they send them to desert without food or water. Million Armenians died.”
When Sasha had learned about this in school, he was ten years old and smaller than almost everyone in the class, which meant getting picked on by the bullies just for existing.
“Maybe we should send you to the desert, Sasha,” Grisha Morozov had whispered loudly, and Sasha remembers sitting there, burning with embarrassment, as several of the students around him snickered.
He doesn’t mention this to Danny.
“Whoa.” Danny’s eyes are wide, uncomfortably focused on Sasha. “I had no idea. Did that happen to your dad’s family?”
“No,” Sasha lies.
Alina had told him, once, that his father’s maternal grandparents were among the few survivors from their village, and that they never, ever spoke of it, not even to their own children.
But if Sasha brings this up now, Danny’s going to make a big deal of it, just like he had when he’d found out about Sasha’s old practices at Round Lake.
And Sasha knows it’s a big deal. He’d paid attention to those lessons in school.
He’s read the Wikipedia pages and wished he hadn’t.
But he doesn’t want Danny pitying him over relatives who died eighty years before he was born, relatives whose names he’ll probably never know because his grandparents are long gone and his father can’t tell him anymore. Those aren’t his condolences to accept.
Danny’s quiet for a moment, fiddling with his napkin and getting flaky pastry crumbs everywhere. Then he glances up at Sasha. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Yes?”
“How come you don’t, like, identify as Armenian?”
Sasha barely manages not to roll his eyes. Americans are so obsessed with what they “identify as,” as if it fucking matters, as if other people won’t look at you and decide what they think you are instead. “Because I am not Armenian. I am Russian.”
“Yeah, but, like…” Danny’s eyebrows knit together. “You were born in Armenia. And your dad was from there.”
“So? Do you ‘identify as’ Germany?” Sasha shoots back, remembering what Danny had said about Andy’s family.
“Well, no.”
Then there’s your answer, Sasha wants to reply, but he can’t think of the translation fast enough. He settles for an aggressive shrug.
“But…” Danny, apparently, isn’t going to drop it.
“I mean, my dad’s not from Germany, it was his grandfather.
And… I don’t know, if I was born in Germany, and my dad was from Germany, then yeah, I’d probably call myself German American.
So… I guess I’m just trying to understand why you don’t identify as, like, Armenian Russian. ”
“Because I am not Armenian.” Sasha’s getting so fucking sick of saying this to people. “I don’t live there, I don’t speak language, I don’t read it, I don’t even know this food.”
He pushes the pastry box away, harder than he’d meant to, and Danny has to catch it before it falls into his lap. “Sash—”
“My father is dead, I have no family in Armenia, no grandparents, no aunts or uncles, nothing, so how do I ‘identify as’ Armenian?”
Sasha’s voice keeps rising, and Danny’s shoulders are hunching over, like he’s weathering a storm. “Yeah, no, you’re right,” he says quietly. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t, like, trying to tell you what to do or anything.”
Sasha forces himself to breathe in, out, and in again before he says something he regrets.
He shouldn’t have lost his temper with Danny, when it was Tigran who’d pissed him off—or not Tigran, really, but a lifetime of other people looking at him like he’s different.
Like he doesn’t belong in his own goddamn country.
And none of that is Danny’s fault.
“It’s okay.” Sasha swallows his anger, feels it burn all the way down. “I am sorry for yelling.”
“No, it’s fine. But… thanks.”
Sasha decides to change the subject. “Pastries are good,” he says, and Danny’s eyes light up in agreement—and relief.
“Right? This nazook stuff is the shit. I might not even save any for my mom.”