In Motion

Story by Artavazd Yeghiazaryan
Translated by Nazareth Seferian
Illustration by William Karapetyan
In cooperation with the European Union Delegation to Armenia

In Motion

The photojournalist with the sharpest eye was already on the scene. Given the deadlock in traffic and the complete chaos that had resulted, even he had had a lot of difficulty getting there. The driver had somehow managed to get him to Kochar Street, from where he had gone uphill and downhill through courtyards, camera in hand, running to make it to the area where there were a large number of vehicles, policemen and open-mouthed passers-by. For a second, he too stared wide-eyed at the scene — this wasn’t the kind of picture you would capture every day, even if you were an eagle-eyed photojournalist. This was more like something out of a Hollywood action movie. But there was no time for surprise. He began to take pictures from different angles, and his friends among the police allowed him to get closer to the scene than any other photographer would (although the rest were all stuck in traffic anyway). He heard snippets of bystanders’ conversation from time to time mentioning an incident, decades ago, when a bus had overturned on the newly-built Myaniskyan Avenue, and when a trolleybus had driven off Isakov Avenue into the lake. This new mishap, on Barekamutyun Square, would definitely find a spot in the historic list of unlikely accidents in Yerevan. When the first set of photographs had already been uploaded to the website and spread to screens across Armenia with lightning speed, and the daytime summer sun already unbearably burned everything and everyone in its path, the photojournalist lowered his lens and looked at the scene once again — trolleybus №9 was in the middle of it all, but instead of two rods sticking out to connect to the overhead electric line, a yellow Subaru had crashed through its ceiling in the middle. At the edge of the overpass on that part of the street, the railing had been destroyed and a black Brabus stood near the edge, its driver smoking.

Lilith

It was a calm morning at Gazebo, with only a few people there so far. The founding father of the coworking space, Arman, was sitting in his favourite corner, absorbed into whatever he was watching on his computer screen (based on the laughter he would be unable to contain from time to time — videos from the Monty Python Gold Collection), and Mrs. Arus the cook was unhurriedly making sandwiches, putting them in the refrigerator. Biayna the photographer had fused into her notebook as her bloodshot eyes stared into her screen, her nervous mouse clicking and keyboard tapping had already been going on for an hour, interrupted only by rare slurps of coffee from a huge mug placed next to her. Lilith, who had walked there from home a short while ago, explained Biayna’s behaviour by saying that she had worked the previous night on a huge group of photos she had taken, but had been unable to finish and had come here to concentrate. “And then I’ll go and sleeeeep..” Biayna had moaned to Lilith desperately half an hour earlier, seeking moral support from her friend who was also a photographer. After exchanging a few words with the sleepless Biayna, Lilith had sat down at her favourite table to have some tea and flip through the pages of the latest issue of the city magazine. After that, she was supposed to go underground to the metro station.

Lilith enjoyed traveling through the city underground. The metro allowed her to stay in motion. She could get to the godforsaken corner of Charbakh from the city centre quickly and in comfort. In the summer, it was also much cooler down there. On some occasions, at the peak of the summer heat, before starting her trip home from the centre, she would step into the Yeritasardakan metro station and sit on one of the benches on the platform and let a few trains go by while she read a book and cooled down from the weather outside. The half-rusted blue trains would creak as they transported their passengers, leaving murky water between the rails after they were gone. She also recalled that, years ago, her grandfather had told her how he had been a part of the metro network construction as a labourer in the 1970s. The Charbakh station had been built without him though and had opened a few years after independence.

And so Lilith, a free spirit when it came to mobility, soon found herself standing once again at the open-air platform of the Charbakh station. As she pondered whether she would be able to make her milonga dance class that evening and recall what she had learned when she’d gone to tango sessions for several months, her train arrived. This was no longer the blue piece of rust from her childhood. The wagons into which the people poured were a fresh and merry orange. She glanced at the time — would Armen already be there?

Armen

Armen was not there. Armen was running late. Armen was suffering. Armen was in a hurry, but he was unable to move an inch. Inside, he was speeding down from Nor Nork into the city centre to the spot where he was supposed to meet Lilith, but his body was stuck for the moment as a hostage within trolleybus №9. The trolleybus was a victim too — stuck in an endless traffic jam on Gay Avenue. The worst thing was his inability to do anything. The interior design of the trolleybus — including the artificial red roses that hung above the windows and from the ceiling — irritated him even more. “You only have yourself to blame, who asked you to take a trolley in this day and age?” Armen flung the accusation at himself, but then objected to his own words, “That’s the thing, though, isn’t it? Nobody travels on these trolleybuses anymore, so at least I’m sitting here with ample room. Otherwise I’d be much more cramped in a taxi or a minibus, stuck in the same traffic jam!”

Armen felt hot and listened in on the conversation that two elderly men were having behind him.

That pair of men constituted exactly half of the passengers in this particular piece of electric-powered public transportation.

“They wanted to cover the whole city though a metro system once,” the bald old man said, the look on his face suggesting sorrow over bygone days of glory, “We wouldn’t be boiling for hours in this stupid trolleybus if they’d done it.”

The conversation was punctuated by honking and swearing from the various vehicles around them and the people behind their wheels.

“Well, you never know, they might make it a reality someday…”

“Yeah, right,” the bald one muttered condescendingly. “We won’t see the day, that’s for sure.”

“Well, I mean, take my son. He just came from Vladivostok a few months ago,” continued the old man with the white hair, fanning himself with his coupon for free public transportation, “And he was about to go back there, when he found out that training sessions were being organised for new metro drivers. He went and completed the course, he’s going to start his new job soon.”

“That’s a lucky break, he won’t feel hot at work either!” the other old man remarked, wiping the sweat on his forehead.

As the conversation gradually moved to a discussion of the tensest moments and goal opportunities in the Ararat-73-Dynamo football rivalry, and the trolleybus had surprisingly already ended up in the Zeytun district, Armen realised that he had to sit somewhere else, or he would be driven to suicide. He didn’t even have a music player with him, so that he could distract his mind with some tunes. He got up from his seat and moved to the very end of the trolleybus, where the fourth and final passenger was sitting. The fourth passenger was a girl with black hair down to her shoulders (revealing a delicate marble-skinned neck underneath). As he walked past her, he saw that this creature with the exquisite face — probably a student — was staring at a book in her hands with a look that suggested sheer serenity, moving her head just barely from time to time in harmony with the music flowing through the wire of her earphones.

Zaven

Zaven, in contrast to Armen, was racing along the highway with nothing to slow him down. At the wheel of the car was his father, who had returned to Armenia from Europe. They had crossed the border with Georgia around an hour ago. Hovhannes Asatryan was on his way home again. But this time, it wasn’t from life as an emigrant. He had started a new business. And that business had grown to an international enterprise, as his partner was in Tbilisi. Zaven had promised to help his father with his new company. And because this business trip had been planned a long time ago, he had told Lilith and Armen that he would not be able to see them later that day, nor join them when they go from their gathering to another friend’s birthday. They were in Vanadzor now. They had stopped to have a cup of coffee and take a breather. Zaven looked at the time and said,

“Will you look at that! If I’d known we’d be here so early, I’d have told the guys that I’d join them. Why had I thought I would never make it?”

“I had no hope of making such good time either,” Hovhannes confessed, slurping his coffee. “But they’ve done such a good job modernising the Bagratashen border checkpoint, crossing it has become a matter of minutes. You can’t imagine how bad it used to be! It’s like the two sides of the border were decades apart.”

“I know, Dad, I’d gone with friends to Tbilisi several times back then.”

As he stared into his coffee cup, Hovhannes realised once again that he had not been by his son’s side for several years. That sense of guilt still suffocated him from time to time. Luckily, Zaven interrupted that moment of discomfort.

“Hey, what do you think of that business idea I had of starting a vinyl record shop? Should I go for it and register the company?” A few months earlier, when he had returned from Europe, Hovhannes had brought Zaven a vinyl record player, after which the young student had come up with the bright idea of opening the first record store in Yerevan since the start of the 21st century.

“You can register it any time — all you need to do is go to e-register.am, fill in a form, and your company will be registered in ten minutes,” his father stated, “It’s the rest that you need to think about. You need to consider whether it’s a worthwhile business; is there market demand? Let’s meet a few of my friends before you take the next step. There were some major vinyl collectors back in our day — Khanjyan, Disc Tiko…”

A few minutes later, the Asatryan father and son pair were speeding towards Yerevan in their old, but trusty yellow Subaru, which Zaven affectionately called the “Yellow Submarine”.

Lilith

Alighting at Marshal Baghramyan station was not just a practical thing to do; getting off the metro there was like making a statement, a demonstrative gesture of going against the flow of grey, identical people. Most of the passengers would pour out at the next station — Yeritasardakan — or perhaps at Republic Square, but here she was, a young and independent female photographer, making a contrarian decision and getting off at Marshal Baghramyan — a station that was always empty, and all the more pleasant for it. As she walked in the direction opposite to the departing train and approached the escalator, she glanced suddenly at the tunnel. In contrast to the image etched in her mind from her childhood, the floor of the tunnel was dry; not a trace of water anywhere. As she went up the escalator, she managed to Google it and discovered that this had been the result of a joint project by the European Union and the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development. The metro network that had been built by her grandfather (among others) had been modernised to a great extent thanks to support in the sum of millions of Euros. The train wagons had been renovated and made more comfortable, a new drainage system had been installed, preventing serious damage caused by moisture. “That’ll teach those of you who continue to waste time stuck in traffic in smelly minibuses,” Lilith flung out that last thought in an unspecified direction.

Armen

Another fifteen minutes went by. Armen was entertaining the thought of simply jumping out at the next stop and walking the rest of the way. But the buzzing that came through the earphones of the pretty female bookworm sitting in front of him interfered with these thoughts. It wasn’t the noise that bothered him, but rather the fact that it wasn’t loud enough for him to guess the song. Armen could no longer stand it. He cleared his throat and bent forward. He first tapped the passenger on the left shoulder and then extended his head above the armrests of the two seats in front of him.

“Excuse me, but this is a matter of life and death. Please say that you’ll help me,” he said in desperation, when the girl had taken her earphones out and looked at him in surprise.

“Um… okay,” the girl managed.

“I’m going crazy because I’m running really late, I’m dying of the heat, and — in addition to all that — I can’t figure out what song you’re listening to,” Armen indicated the white earphones the girl was holding in her delicate fingers.

“Oh, I see… Sorry to bother you,” the girl was slightly embarrassed.

“No, no, that’s not the problem. It’s just that this tiny bit of information can keep me from totally losing my mind right now. Would you please tell me what song that is?”

The girl thought for a few seconds, then smiled mischievously.

“Actually… I won’t. Take a guess.”

Armen strained his ears, twisted his face, and bent forward even further, trying to get closer to the earphones held between her fingers.

“I’ll give you a hint — I only listen to instrumental music when I’m reading, so that I’m not distracted,” the girl said.

That was it! The piano he had heard wasn’t part of a ballad, nor the intro to a long song, it was… Aha! The music started again with more energetic chords after a brief pause. He had no doubt left in his mind.

“Yann Tiersen?”

The girl’s faced revealed her surprise. She nodded.

“It’s the lovely soundtrack from Amelie, isn’t it?” Armen continued, “That is such a good album, that you can listen to it without watching the film — it has a life of its own. Doesn’t it?”

Armen looked at the girl through eyes filled with hope. In response, the girl held out one of the earphones to him. They heard the next piece together, each with one earphone. Armen moved his hands in the air, as if moving the bellows of an invisible accordion.

“I think this is the piece where Amelie and that guy speed through the streets of Paris on the moped at the end of the movie. They ride in freedom and happiness, while we’re stuck here in this weird vehicle, and everything is so motionless that it feels like even my heart would prefer to stop,” Armen exclaimed, as if delusional.

Perhaps it was the heat or the strange dreamlike romanticism of the situation, but Armen suddenly gathered so much courage that he took the girl’s hand and held it against his chest so that she could feel his heart beating. Although the girl was quite taken aback by this sudden turn of events during what should have been her usual commute, she did not seem to object. And she really felt his heartbeat. That unreal moment was interrupted by the sound of her briefly neglected book falling to the ground. Thump! Armen dropped the hand and managed to slip around the seat in front of them, rushing to pick up the book.

Zaven

The “Yellow Submarine” raced down the road to Yerevan. The Asatryan father and son pair knew, of course, that this ability to move freely and quickly would rapidly be curbed, soon after they entered the capital. And so it was — they spent the next twenty-five minutes in nightmarish traffic, but none of them unfastened their seatbelts for a second (and this would end up being of vital significance for both of them just a few minutes later). They had no choice but to tolerate the traffic — Hovhannes was heading to his office at the end of Baghramyan Avenue, and Zaven was planning to meet Lilith and Armen close by.

The section from Kasyan Street to Baghramyan was unexpectedly empty, so the Asatryans and their vehicle once again regained the sensation of unrestrained motion. Perhaps this was also something felt by the young man driving the Brabus that was speeding in the opposite direction — from Baghramyan to Kasyan. And it was that young man who suddenly, already on the overpass and driving at 88 km/h, felt the urgent need to grab a smoke, taking his eyes off the road as he picked up his pack of cigarettes. He dropped a cigarette from the pack and bent down after it without much thought, letting go of the steering wheel and consequently severing any physical or spiritual connection he had with his vehicle, which then swerved into the incoming lane. The Asatryans’ Subaru had no other choice at that moment — it had to keep as far to the right as possible, hoping that the smoking Schumacher would manage to straighten his car and get back into his lane. Alas, no such luck. The Brabus kept moving erratically (presumably, the much-desired cigarette had been found) and ended up hitting the Subaru. The “Yellow Submarine” was taken by surprise and leaped off the overpass. What happened next served as valuable clickbait for the internet that day!

Armen

La Valse des Monstres ended at the very moment when Armen, squatting between two seats in the trolley, quickly picked up the book that had dropped to the floor (Knut Hamsun’s “Hunger”) and lifted it up to the girl. She was still disoriented from the palpation of his heartbeat and muttered, “Merci” but he resisted the urge to respond “Mercy, mercy me!” and instead looked at the girl straight in the eye, suggesting, “Let’s go to Paris and waltz in the middle of Pont Neuf!”

The girl started to laugh. She wasn’t making fun of him — it was a joyous and good laugh, the kind that left no doubt in Armen’s mind that she was going to say yes. But instead of hearing “Sure, let’s go tomorrow!” what rang out around Armen was a loud crash, creaking, shattering class and people shouting. A few seconds later, when the dust settled and Armen was finally ready to open his eyes, he found that the girl listening to Yann Tiersen was in his arms, in a seat next to the window. The girl’s head was on his shoulder and there were pieces of glass in her hair. Armen wanted to say something to the girl, to ask, “Are you okay? Are you hurt?” but he lost his ability to speak when he saw that the middle of the trolleybus was now occupied by a familiar-looking upside-down yellow Subaru, standing at an angle such that its rear end was sticking out of the top — it was his friend’s beloved “Yellow Submarine”! He felt no less surprised when the front door of the twisted car opened and Zaven hobbled out, followed by his father. Zaven was looking around in shock.

“Zav, are you okay? Did you break anything?” Hovhannes Asatryan asked with concern.

“No, no, everything’s okay…” Zaven reassured him.

“Where did that idiot come from?” Hovhannes recalled the idiot who had caused the accident, then coughed, “See if we’ve hurt anyone…”

“Armen, is that you?” Zaven squinted towards the end of the trolleybus, where a girl had curled up into the arms of his friend, the one he was supposed to meet in fifteen minutes on Baghramyan Avenue.

“Weren’t you supposed to be in Tbilisi?” Armen was no less surprised to see him.

“Well, I would’ve stayed in Tbilisi if I’d know that things would end up this way…”

The voices of the other trolley passengers rang out from the opposite side of the car.

One of the retired men had put to use the whole vocabulary of swear words that he had accumulated over the past decades, insisting that “such a thing would never have happened in our day,” while the second said that “the best thing would be to build more metro stations.”

“What’s going on?” the girl’s voice was finally heard, “Are we alive?”

“Yes, it looks like we’re alive,” Armen said with slight uncertainty, embracing the girl with one arm while using the other to brush the shards of glass out of her hair. Say hello to my friend, Zaven. Zav, this girl is my saviour, we’re going to see the Collider together.”

“Pleased to meet you.”

“The pleasure is mine…”

They would probably have continued this friendly conversation in the middle of a damaged trolleybus, if not for a call on Armen’s phone. He pressed the speaker button by mistake and everyone could hear Lilith’s voice asking, “Armen, where are you?”

“Listen, things are a bit crazy here, but Zaven and I’ll get there soon, with another lovely person joining us.”

“Wasn’t Zaven supposed to be in Tbilisi?”

“No, he’s here. He’s standing right in front of me.”

“Okay, okay, I’m ordering a cup of coffee while I wait for you guys.”

Lilith

A few moments later, Lilith logged in to Facebook and, a few scrolls down, saw the shocking photographs from Barekamutyun, and she recognised her friends in some of the images. She dropped the cardboard take-away cup of coffee in surprise and rushed back to the underground station she had left earlier. A few minutes later, she was at Barekamutyun. The day was not yet through when Zaven, Armen and Ani — the girl reading Hamsun — reached Gazebo with Lilith and finally had the chance to give her the full story of what had happened. After hearing all the details, a thought flickered at the back of her mind — wasn’t it great that she could move about by metro, where no submarines could unexpectedly crash into its orange wagons?