Suddenly, we both relaxed. “I can speak,” I said. “Me too,” he said. As it turned out, amid all that confusion, that linguistic labyrinth that had been going on for minutes, our common language had been Turkish all along. For years in Yerevan, because I didn’t know Russian, I had always felt somehow incomplete, pushed outside that linguistic geography. That night, for the first time, I laughed out loud at this deficiency of mine. I knew Armenian, he knew Russian; English, declared as the common denominator of the global world, was of no use whatsoever in our communication and brought us together on the threshold of a third language we had never expected.