The Seat Behind the Driver

The first coin landed in my palm before we had even left Didube. Then a second, then a crumpled five, passed forward over three shoulders like a note in class.

“Two from the back,” somebody said.

Eter had planned this. On the Mtskheta marshrutka the seat behind the driver is not a seat, it is a job. Whoever sits there takes the money, hands it to the driver and sends the change back. She put me there and took the window, with a bag of persimmons on her knee for her sister.

“You like numbers,” she said. “Here are some.”

The driver was called Jemal. He had a rosary hanging from the mirror and a ginger cat asleep on my seat, which he shooed off when we got on. “Up. You don’t pay.”

Two lari a head. It went quickly. A ten from the student with headphones: eight back, over the shoulders, into the same hand. A woman with a rooster in a basket paid for both of them, then asked whether the rooster got a discount. Jemal said a rooster was a full passenger if it crowed. It didn’t crow. I gave her a lari back.

Halfway there Jemal had stopped counting what I passed him. He just tipped it into the tin.

“Where did you work?” he asked in the mirror. “A bank?”

“Something like that.”

In Mtskheta, by the cathedral wall, he switched off the engine, emptied the tin onto his knee and counted. Then he turned round and counted us with one finger, the way a teacher counts children on a school trip.

“Fourteen passengers,” he said. “Thirteen paid.”

The marshrutka went quiet. Everyone looked at somebody else. The rooster looked at the student.

“There are thirteen of us,” I said.

Jemal pointed his chin at me.

I looked down at myself. The coat, the knees, the hand still warm with everybody else’s money. It had not crossed my mind.

“He’s always like this,” said Eter. “At my table too. I put a plate in front of him and he passes it on.”

I dropped two lari into the tin. The last two in it.

I had always thought I would cost more.

We came back after dark. The ginger cat was asleep on the seat behind the driver again, and this time Jemal let it stay. He gave me the seat by the door.

“Come again tomorrow,” he said. “Nobody counts better. Only start with yourself.”