He handed the driver his fare, fifteen hryvnia, and lumbered to take one of the vacant seats in the rear of the vehicle. This was not hard to do. All of the seats were vacant and would remain so for much of the trip. He was going against the current. At the other end, in Simferopol, a crowd was boarding a trolleybus to come to the sea, but in Yalta he was among a dismal handful who, for their own insular reasons, were going in the wrong direction. And of these, only he appeared every Saturday, summer or winter, rain or shine, year after year, now for ten years. Occasionally, over this time, some misfortune had led one or another person to undertake this journey for a period of weeks or months—a man who required a course of chemotherapy at a specialized clinic; a woman who succored her ailing mother and then her ailing aunt. Their appearance on the trolleybus was temporal, tragically temporal, as his appearance was tragically permanent. But this wasn’t something he disclosed to his co-sufferers.
