Strung with Lights

I was driving to Lake Sevan and there was a passenger jet parked above the water.

The road out of Yerevan climbs the whole way, and by the time it gets past Hrazdan you are at seventeen hundred metres and the valley has opened onto a reservoir — pale turquoise, bare hills coming down to it, a village of red roofs on the far bank. On a bluff over the water, nose pointed out across it, sits a Tupolev Tu-134A. Not crashed, not dumped. Parked. As though somebody had given it the best view in the valley and told it to wait there.

It was the second Soviet airliner I had stood under in two days. The afternoon before I had been on the wing of a Yak-40 above the Kasagh gorge, and I had assumed that was the strange one.

This one is white all over and going chalky with it, sun-bleached to the point where every rivet line and every seam shows through the paint like veins under skin. Both engines are still on the tail, the intakes open to the sky. And then there is the nose, which is the whole character of the aircraft: the Tu-134 carries a glazed navigator’s station out in front of the cockpit, a faceted bubble of framed glass where a modern airliner keeps its radar. It gives the thing a face, and the face belongs to a bomber, because that is where the design came from.

The wires

It took me a minute to work out what I was looking at. There are cables running the full length of the fuselage, out along both wings to the tips, off the ends of the tailplane, and down to pegs in the dirt — the airframe rigged like a marquee. At two in the afternoon they read as damage. You see lines trailing off an aircraft and your eye calls it wreckage, something come loose, rigging from a crash.

Then you understand that they are strings of bulbs, and the plane changes meaning completely. Somebody dragged a Soviet jet onto a headland above a reservoir, wired it up, and turned it into somewhere to have a party. The ground says the same thing — a concrete pad, a wide dirt turning circle worn down to dust, tracks going out to the road, a yellow sign bolted under the belly.

Covered in lights. Like a place for parties.

In the daylight there was nobody at all. Dry grass, wind off the water, wildflowers going over on the slope below, and this enormous white object standing there with its lights up, waiting for the evening to start.

I didn’t stay — Sevan was still an hour up the road and I had an unfinished hotel to get to before the sun went. But it has stuck with me more than most: the one dead aeroplane I have found that isn’t dead at all. It just works nights now.