The Understanding

Petrosyan's is at number 8 and Aslanyan's is at number 22 and the war has been running since 1984.

The origin is disputed. Petrosyan's version involves a stolen recipe. Aslanyan's version involves an insult delivered at a christening. A third version, held by almost everyone else on the street, is that both families arrived in the same year, opened the same business forty metres apart, and needed a reason.

The war is conducted properly.

Neither will use the other's name. Petrosyan's says "down the road." Aslanyan's says "the other place." This has held for four decades and has been transmitted to a second generation and, alarmingly, a third — Aslanyan's granddaughter is nine and refers to a rival bakery she has never entered as "the enemy," and is corrected by her father in a tone that does not carry conviction.

There have been incidents. In 1996 there was a leaflet. In 2004 there was an issue with a wedding order that required the involvement of a priest.

The observable facts

Petrosyan's opens at six. Aslanyan's opens at six.

Petrosyan's closes at two on Wednesdays. Aslanyan's closes at two on Saturdays.

Petrosyan's does not make gata. This is remarkable, because gata is the single most requested item in an Armenian bakery, and Petrosyan's grandmother made, by universal agreement including Aslanyan's, the best gata in the city.

They stopped in 1987 and have never resumed and will not discuss it.

Aslanyan's does not make nazook. Same year. Same silence.

Aslanyan's makes the gata. Petrosyan's makes the nazook.

If you go into Petrosyan's and ask for gata, they will tell you they do not make it. If you press — and you have to press — they will say, with enormous distaste, "try the other place."

They will say it every time. They have said it, by a rough estimate, forty thousand times.

What Mrs Dilanyan saw

Mrs Dilanyan has lived above the laundrette since 1979 and does not sleep well.

At about ten past four on most mornings, one of the Petrosyans walks to number 22 and puts a tray on the step, and one of the Aslanyans opens the door and takes it and puts a different tray out.

Neither speaks. It takes about four seconds.

She has watched this happen for, she estimates, thirty-five years.

She has mentioned it to nobody, because Mrs Dilanyan is ninety-one and has understood since roughly 1990 that she is in possession of the only genuinely important fact on the street and that mentioning it would end something.

What the trays are for

Flour.

Not always. Sometimes butter, sometimes eggs, once — in the bad winter of 2010 — an entire delivery split down the middle when the roads were shut and only one of them got through.

They have covered each other's shortfalls for thirty-five years, in silence, at four in the morning, and gone on refusing to say each other's names at eight.

The current position

Old Mr Petrosyan died in 2021. Old Mrs Aslanyan died last year.

The funerals were attended, in both cases, by a member of the other family, who arrived late, stood at the back, and left before the end.

Both were seen. Neither has been mentioned.

The war continues. It is now run by two men in their fifties who went to school together and who have not spoken in public since 1991.

The trays go out at ten past four.

Mrs Dilanyan watches from the window, because she is ninety-one and does not sleep well, and because after thirty-five years she wants to see how it comes out.