The Only Way In

Azerbaijan lets you in by air and no other way just now, so the red Niva stays in its courtyard and I stand at a counter at Manas at two in the morning while a woman in a grey blazer feeds card stock into a printer older than my degree. There is a particular kind of politeness available only at that hour. We are both here against our better judgement and neither of us mentions it.

What comes out is not the tidy rectangle an airline app puts on a phone. It is a stiff little card with ruled boxes and a dot matrix head that hits the paper slightly crooked, and it carries a field marked SMOKE with the word NO printed under it. Nobody has needed that answer on an aircraft since the nineties. The form has simply never been redrawn, because the form works, and somewhere a supply of it is still being delivered to Bishkek three times a week.

The gate box is blank. At Manas they call it rather than print it, which means for the next hour the pass tells me everything except where to stand. Boarding at twenty five past three. Seat fourteen A, window, in a cabin two seats wide on either side of a very narrow aisle. I asked for the window on purpose. The route crosses the Caspian and I have spent years going around that water on roads and rails, describing it from its edges. Tonight I get to be above the middle of it in the dark, which is not the same as seeing it, but it counts.

I photographed the two documents together over the floor tiles because it is the only object this trip has produced so far, and objects are how I keep track. Later it will go into the back of a notebook and stay there, gone soft at the fold, useless and kept. That is the whole function of a boarding pass once it has been scanned. It stops being a permission and becomes a receipt for a night you would not otherwise be able to prove.