The Yellow Bus of Alaverdi

I came by air for once, which regular readers will note with suspicion, but the arithmetic won. The overland fantasy from Bishkek is a Chinggis-khan of petrol: Caspian ferries or the long northern loop through Russia and Georgia, borders that close for moods, and more days than my visa math would forgive. So the red Niva stayed home, and in Yerevan an archivist I know through my father handed me the keys to her uncle's Lada Niva, olive green the way the factory intended, Armenian-plated, older than me and completely unimpressed by the fact. Armenia begins, for me, in the Debed gorge, where the road drops between cliffs and the towns hang on the slopes like shelves. I stopped in Alaverdi because my shoulders demanded it. Then I saw the bus.

A PAZ-672, butter yellow, rust blooming at every seam, parked below a staircase as if it had been waiting for a photographer with low standards and high affection. I grew up in the back rows of buses like this. The upholstery pattern is stored somewhere behind my sternum, along with the exact sound the doors make, a cough and a sigh in one mechanism. I stood there longer than any schedule could excuse, shielding my eyes, reading the old plate like a line of verse.

Nobody came to ask what I wanted. In towns like this a woman photographing a dead bus is apparently within the normal range of weather. I find that hospitable. Tomorrow the monasteries; today the vehicle that carried everyone to them for fifty years.