Trafika Europe 4 - Armenian Rhapsody

managed to sell his car that very same day and buy from some wheeler-dealers a used unlicensed chronomatizer. He didn’t have enough money to buy a charge of time – for his paltry actor’s wages he could only buy at most just a few years from black marketeers. That’s why Torne became a temporal donor for his wife. He gave her a quarter century, so their bodies would feel like they were the same age. In reality they had lived to the age of 29, but now both of them were over 55. The fact that he gave Marta his biological time made them much closer, although it was a closeness with a certain heartbreaking aftertaste. They, however, were bored with this life of retirement, with the daily unpleasant discoveries regarding their body’s degradation. The metabolism in their abruptly aged bodies slowed down, and because of that, it seemed that the days were skating past the window with a quickness of a sprinter. Torne couldn’t reconcile himself with this kind of existence and constantly reproached himself for his inability to change anything. He became even more successful in his dramatic roles in the theater. Just now he didn’t play Hamlet, but instead his bodiless father. In general the dilemma of life resembled for him something repulsively literary. At times he was ready to steal from an unexpected passer-by what was stolen from his Marta. But that would mean continuing the chain of injustice with his

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