'Whatever happened to Icarus buses?' - a short story by Ashy Macbean

Whatever happened to Icarus buses?

In Soviet times, many of the major cities within Soviet territory had big jointed-in-the-middle buses called 'Icarus' - pronounced 'IkARoos' - and when I started exploring those regions, such buses were still around, though most of them were old wrecks. I was sitting having tea in the kitchen with my wife and daughter the other day when the subject of Icarus buses came up. Only then did we realise that none of us had sighted one in our city for a couple of years. We can only assume that they have all gone to the scrap yard.

After this we all started talking about them with fond memories, which is strange because every body hated them when they were around. Even my short experience of them consisted of a string of mostly negative encounters. Whenever one tried to turn a corner there was always a traffic jam. They took so long to get round, the lights changed when they were half way and impatient drivers would try to squeeze past them and get stuck. Then the lights would change again and cars from the other direction would try the same and they would get stuck too. An Icarus ran over a woman's foot on the corner near the school I worked at for a while.

When I first started going out with Sveta, I would occasionally go to her house in the suburbs to visit her and sometimes she would come into town to visit me. The buses to her place were fairly infrequent, but included a trolley-bus which I always took if it came along. I still prefer trolley-buses to any other form of public transport but in those days I thought they were brilliant. As they run on electricity, they have to follow the overhead cables and are therefore fairly limited in the routes they can take, since only the main streets have trolley-bus cables. If you knew the number of the buses which corresponded to the different routes, you could be fairly sure you would get where you wanted to go. That suited me fine, as my Russian at that time was limited to memorised phrases which I anticipated having to use and which I used to go over just before I went out in public. Needless to say, if anything out of the ordinary happened, I was stuffed. The trolley-buses, from this point of view, were the best gamble.

They didn't always work out however and on more than one occasion I was indeed stuffed. Sometimes the electricity would go off and all the trolleys would grind to a halt. Once, I took a trolley-bus number nine when I had been advised to take a bus number nine - big mistake. It went in a completely different direction, and just because a number nine takes you there doesn't necessarily mean it will take you back again. The most embarrassing thing which happened, however, and I know I'm digressing here but I want to tell you about this so I'll digress just a little bit more, was when I got on a trolley bus with 'to the park' written on it. I hadn't been in the city long, I had a day off and the weather was lovely. I was out exploring and feeling adventurous. I should have mentioned that the fare was a flat fifteen tenge at the time (although the ticket said one rouble) which made things even easier. I hopped on the trolley-bus and paid my fare, thinking, 'The park? That will do nicely.' As the bus went along, the conductress kept shouting 'to the park' as the doors opened at each stop but this didn't strike me as odd, though in retrospect perhaps it should have, considering, as I've already explained, how easy it was for people to master the trolley-bus system.

So there I was, sitting on the trolley-bus anticipating an afternoon stroll in a nice, shady park where I might even pluck up the courage to negotiate the purchase of an ice-cream or a few beers, when I noticed that as well as shouting 'to the park', the conductress would occasionally add, 'Oezova!' which I was sure was the Russian word for 'lake'. 'Great', I thought, 'a park with a lake in it. This is going to be good - I bet there are trees all around it and there'll probably be boats you can hire.' Imagine my surprise then when, half an hour later, the trolley-bus, containing me, the conductress and the driver, rolled into the trolley-bus park on Oezova Street.

Where were we? Waiting for the trolley-bus to Sveta's house, but it never came. The Icarus always came instead. Boy, did it stink. Not because it was old. It stank of rubber, and probably had done since it was new and I can only assume all the others smelt the same. My daughter says they did. No matter what time of day it was, the bus was always horribly crowded and the only place to stand was over the join. Now, the Icarus was made to bend on the horizontal plane when it went round corners and that was scary enough, since the accordioned rubber which was supposed to keep the passengers dry and inside the bus and provided the illusion of continuity between the two halves, had long ago perished. That meant that, on average, once out of every twice the bus turned, sometimes more depending on the route it was taking and the side you were standing on, you saw the road between your legs and wing-mirrors of lorries just inches from your face - all at high speed. This bus however, as well as bending the way it was supposed to, also - and this is because it was old - this one also bent on the vertical plane. And not just going round corners. It did it all the time. Like a giant inch-worm on acid.

The only time I managed to get a place - not a seat, just a place - away from the join, I managed to get on by the rear doors and stay there even though the bus was, as always, really crowded. The doors opened to let me on, but they didn't open to let me off. Only the front doors opened at my stop and I didn't know how to draw attention to this fact. I got off at the next stop in the dark and in the rain and walked back.

While we were talking, my daughter told me something really bizarre. Down in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, where they are short on petrol but not on Icaruses, they have converted the Icaruses into trolley-buses. They run on power from the overhead cables. Can you imagine one of them trying to turn a corner?

In Glasgow, books about the 'days of the trams' started to become popular in the mid-nineties. The trams disappeared in the nineteen-fifties and the writers of such books describe things like the larger-than-life personalities of the clippies who took the fares and the sense of camaraderie which existed between the regulars on particular routes. They recount memorable, usually humorous stories involving trams and generally lament their passing. Shite. People hated trams. I know because my mum lived with them and my granny and granda lived with them. Trams were always crowded. People were occasionally sick on them. They wouldn't go up hills on frosty days. They were silent and had a tendency to run over drunk people and kids on foggy winter evenings.

That was forty years ago and I bet in forty years time people will be saying the same kind of things about Icaruses. I mean, we were sitting round the table giving it, 'Those were the days,' and they only disappeared two years ago. Nostalgia is a very strange thing.