Washing Off Armenia

The last ritual of any trip is the wash bay, and for a borrowed car it is not optional: two weeks of Armenia came off the green Niva in sheets, pass mud, gorge dust, the fine powder of gravel roads that gets into the door seals and, I assume, my biography. Sleeves rolled, I fed the machine its coins and worked the lance like a deck hand, glasses flecked, sleeves soaked, deeply satisfied.

There is method in it beyond manners. Under the dirt you find things: a new scrape to confess, a loosened trim strip, the small honest ledger of what the roads charged. The Niva emerged green again, factory green, and looked ready to deny everything we had done together.

Tomorrow I hand back the keys in Yerevan with a full tank and a jar of pass honey for the archivist, which is the correct exchange rate for a lent Niva. Then a flight home, and a few weeks at the desk before the next thing, which turns out to be medieval in its own way: my own red Niva pointed east, Kazakhstan like a second country of petrol and tea, then the long climb to the Mongolian border with a different stack of papers. Chinggis had horses; I have a timetable and a spine that already complains. The eastbound dust can wait its turn.