Off the Beaten Track: Stories by Russian Hitchhikers

1

The same question must have tormented everyone who ever sat down with a blank piece of paper in front of them: where should I start? Logically, of course, it would make sense to start with a bit of history. But I’m no good with historical data and wouldn’t do a particularly good job of describing the city where I was born and used to live. To be honest, it’s probably just as well. You don’t need to know that this story happened specifically in Ufa, capital of Bashkiria. All you need to know is that it’s set in a moderately industrial city in the Urals, on the banks of the Volga, with a population of just over a million, five theatres and a state circus. How many museums? I can’t remember. See, I’d make a terrible historian.

How would a proper historian describe the city today? He (or she) would probably start by waxing lyrical on the subject of the rivers, and how they “carry their abundant waters past the white stone walls”. Well, I’m going to start at the city limits, where a sign saying UFA lets you know you’re entering a built-up area. Please refrain from sounding your horn, driver — you’re not on the highway now.

Incidentally, the sign is bilingual; Ufa in the Bashkir language is ‘Ephe’. Not the most attractive name for a city, I’m sure you’ll agree, but we’re used to it. And since we live in Ephe, are we modern-day Ephesians?

There’s nothing between the sign and the police checkpoint, and this is typical of Ufa. Anyone who’s ever visited one of the other regional capitals in the Urals — Chelyabinsk or Ekaterinburg — will know what I mean. In both these cities there is a cemetery running alongside the road at this point, like a kind of tribute to city life: rows of white headstones, apparently made of breeze blocks… There’s nothing remotely depressing about these cemeteries. They’re like miniature replicas of the suburbs. Everything about these sprawling metropolitan churchyards seems to say, “Greetings and welcome, dear visitors!” It’s always amusing when the city authorities hang a banner bearing words to this effect on the fence separating the cemetery from the road, and you’re never quite sure whether you’re being welcomed to the city or the afterlife.

At least the cemetery isn’t the first thing you see as you approach Ufa, and that has to be a good thing, right?

So, what else can I tell you? There are basically two sides to the city. The first is the centre, where everything’s very charming and picturesque: cobbles, boutiques, shop windows, bright lights, and plenty of people strolling about. The main street is named after You Know Who. Sometimes when you notice the street signs you can’t help remembering that Vladimir Lenin chose his pseudonym in honour of the river Lena in Siberia, where he served his exile. Imagine the alternatives: Amurin, Irtyshin, Enisenin… He had plenty of rivers to choose from!

To put it into context, the names of nearly all the streets in the centre of Ufa are connected in some way or other (most of them directly) to all that Marxist-Leninist nonsense. It’s the same in every ex-Soviet city. At least Ufa doesn’t have a street named after 1937, like they do in Saratov. The peak of the Great Purge. But seriously: Twentieth Anniversary of October Revolution Street, that’s what it’s called.

Anyway, as I was saying, there are worse places to hang out than our city centre. You can buy ice cream here on every street corner, and on a hot summer’s day there’s nothing like it. You take your cone and the ice-cream seller hands you your change, which is also kept in the freezer for some reason. A few frozen coins. It’s nothing, really, but it’s a nice feeling.

The rest of Ufa is industrial — home to the major Bashkir oil refineries (plus a dozen or so derivative petroleum factories) and whole districts of squalid, soot-covered Khrushchev-era apartment blocks, which are inhabited by blue-collar workers with bluish faces. It’s nothing to do with chemical poisoning — they just drink too much. That part of the city is where the famous rock singer Zemfira comes from, by the way. Zemfira: the leading exponent of Russian aggro-rock. When she launched her first album (like a missile), the cover was a photographic image of dilapidated factories and crooked chimneys in a haze of pearly-white chlorine cyanide smoke. Views just like this could be seen from anywhere in the centre of Ufa. The locals knew the best vantage points and were always happy to share them with visitors, who would never fail to be impressed by this evidence of our connection to the world-famous rock star.

This imposing industrial zone identifies our city as part of the Urals; you don’t get views like this in any of the other cities along the Volga. When I visited Samara I saw just one tall chimney on the city skyline. It really stood out. I found out later that it wasn’t actually a chimney at all but an enormous rocket-carrier, a monument to Sergei Korolev, a key figure in the Soviet space programme.

To give you a better feel for the city, let’s take a walk around and eavesdrop on a few of the locals.

An elderly spinster, looking up at a billboard…

“That’s Sandra Bullock! A famous actress!” she exclaims before adding, profoundly, “I used to look just like her…”

The local recreational park, early evening…

Two friends are larking about, smoking grass, wandering around one of the glades and urinating wherever they feel like it. Already stoned, they’re squealing with high-pitched laughter. A middle-aged man carrying two bottles of wine hears the laughter coming from behind the bushes.

“Would you like some company, ladies?” he calls out.

“There aren’t any ladies here, old man!”

A girl suffering from claustrophobia, her first time in a solarium… Before clambering into the sarcophagus she turns to the nurse and asks in a panic, “What’s your name? Just in case…”

“Why do you want to know? I’m not usually on first-name terms with the clients. Weird… Well, since you ask, it’s Larisa, and I finish at half past five!”

A conversation in a food shop…

A drunk rushes over to the counter of the wines and spirits section.

“Now for the most important purchase! I need a bottle of vodka. Just the one, but make it a good one, the kind you’d give to your son!”

“I’d clout my son over the head with any vodka bottle!”

The drunk is speechless…

The next customer is a young man of about twenty who looks like he doesn’t give a damn. Prominent cheekbones, dirty shoulder-length hair, scruffy old clothes… that pretty much sums him up. Yes, this is where you get to know one of our main characters. Officially his name is Mikhail, but everyone calls him Squire. Everyone, that is, except his university professors and a couple of other clueless old fogies. Like his parents, for example.

“A large can of Shikhan lager, please. Yeah, extra strength. Thanks…”

His parents are out of the picture. They still live in Sibai, a small Bashkir town in the middle of nowhere — a typical provincial backwater.

Squire arrived in Ufa four years ago to take up a place at the Aviation Institute. He started his course, and everything was fine, but he wasn’t really interested in studying… From the very first day he was blown away by the metropolis, charmed and smitten, once and for all. The city had it all! There were lots of places to hang out, like the ‘pipes’ — underground passages that had attained a kind of cult status. They were neglected and filthy, covered in Dutch tiles and full of soggy cardboard; he could spend hours in there, screwing up his eyes as he emerged into the unexpected sunlight. Nobody bothered him or interfered in his business. In fact, the only thing missing in Ufa was anyone who cared what he got up to, and that suited Squire down to the ground! A big city is never dominated by any one group — that’s the curse of provincial backwaters.

Mikhail’s new friends regarded him indulgently. His naïve enthusiasm amused them, and initially they even took to calling him ‘The Squire from Sibai’ for comic effect. Absurd juxtaposition.

Squire himself, meanwhile, grasped ‘city life’ with both hands — he couldn’t get enough of it! Buskers in the underground passages, taxis splashing through puddles inches from his stoned face…

Ufa is full of people like Squire. They come from the provinces to take up a cherished student place, pooling their money to rent squalid shared apartments, and their lives are identical from one year to the next: endless drinking bouts, an ever-growing arsenal of empty bottles in the communal kitchen, absenteeism and the ongoing (and exhilarating) threat of expulsion. It’s all so familiar and predictable that I’m sure I don’t need to go into any more detail.

To be fair, I should point out that Squire wasn’t one of those student layabouts who drink their futures away. Even students at prestigious universities can be lost from society and trust me, plenty of them are. No, Squire exercised moderation in everything. He was a notorious loner, someone who felt the lure of the road and the constant need for a change of scene. He spent several summers hitchhiking, travelling all over the country, and the apartment he sublet became one of Ufa’s legendary squats. These squats are basically informal doss-houses, where hitchhikers arriving in the city can spend a night or two for free. The addresses of these squats are circulated on scraps of paper and over the Internet, and visitors are always turning up unannounced. How many strangers have stopped at this apartment on their way through the city? Too many to count. A blur of casual acquaintances, faces, names, addresses scribbled hurriedly on the wallpaper…

Squire left the food shop with a bag containing his large can of beer and a packet of dubiously grey pasta, the cheapest you could buy. Standard weekend supplies. “I’m going to end up with a beer belly at this rate. But who cares?” he thought, as he headed home.

The sun was setting and the sky had already turned red, decorated with a panorama of clouds illuminated from below. Evening in Ufa: it was like the backdrop to a battle scene. The fact that it’s Ufa is irrelevant, really. It’s just another Russian metropolis. One of the few points on the map where two state highways intersect, in this case the M7 Volga and the M5 Ural.

2

“Hang on a minute, you said ‘we’… but who’s ‘we’?”

“Me and my friend Nikita. We’re travelling together. We left St Petersburg three days ago.”

“But there’s no one with you!”

“No, you don’t understand. We’re hitchhiking separately… I mean, who’s going to stop and pick up a couple of guys? There aren’t many drivers who’d be mad enough to do that… But we’re travelling together. He probably hasn’t got much further than Bavlov.”

“How do you know? Maybe he’s overtaken you. I’m not driving very fast…”

“No way. You don’t know Nikita. He always takes forever.”

“Hang on, how can he ‘always’ take forever? I don’t understand. You’re hitchhiking… Surely it’s down to luck?”

“Yeah, you’re right. It’s weird, though, I can’t explain it… He looks perfectly normal, and even if he wasn’t drivers can’t tell from a distance. But for some reason Nikita’s always slower than me — there’s always a breakdown or something, he has to take loads of different cars… I don’t know what it is. It’s just something about him.”

“He doesn’t wear glasses, does he? And carry a funny blue thing?”

“His sleeping bag. Yes, that’s him. See, you didn’t pick him up, did you?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Well, I don’t know…”

“You see?”

This last was declared in a particularly triumphant tone of voice, as if to say, “There you go, you’ve just proved me right!”

Even if the driver had wanted to he wouldn’t have managed to find room for a second passenger. It was a middle-of-the-road foreign car, a few years old but still reasonably presentable, and the boot was so full it was held shut by a piece of rope. The entire back seat was piled high with blankets, bags, a vacuum flask and so on. There was every indication that the car had a long road ahead of it. A long road behind it, too, judging by the state of the driver. The red eyes, the drooping eyelids… How many lives are lost on the road? I’m not talking about the little crosses and makeshift memorials you glimpse fleetingly at the side of the road, forgotten and covered with dust, banal in their familiarity. I mean the lives of the drivers who travel across entire time zones without stopping to sleep or rest. Thousands and thousands of kilometres… Every evening when the sun flits sideways behind the trees, making it hard to see the road, these drivers ask themselves the same question: shall I grab a couple of hours’ sleep or just keep driving? Unfortunately, it’s often the latter. I wonder how many strokes and accidents the road has on its conscience.

The driver was barefoot. Maybe it gave him a better feel for the car or something. The cold pedals were probably helping him stay awake. His feet were small and swollen. His destination was somewhere in the Far East. The hitchhiker in his passenger seat was heading for the Urals.

“So what’s the big deal about Ekaterinburg?”

“E-burg is great! We’ve got friends there. Well, some people we met over the Internet… They’ve invited us to stay. There’s a place there — a ‘dam’ they call it, like a kind of city square, where there’s going to be a huge get-together. We’re bound to meet some interesting people there. Have some fun.”

“Do you travel round the country a lot like this?”

“Yeah, I guess so. When I make it to E-burg I’ll have done nine thousand kilometres.”

“Wow. You know, I envy you, son! If only I had your youth…”

The hitchhiker’s name was Vadim. A lot of people think this isn’t a Russian name, that it’s a relatively recent foreign import, like Ruslan. I must admit I was quite surprised when I came across Vadim the Bold, one of the first Novgorodian princes and something of a hero back in the ninth century.

Our Vadim was from St Petersburg, birthplace of three revolutions and cultural capital of Russia to this day. A city that is proud of its ornate railings. Incidentally, one particularly frosty winter when he was a little boy Vadim got his tongue stuck to the legendary railings in the Summer Garden. Not every schoolboy can boast of such a thing!

Generally speaking, Vadim was a perfectly normal young man. Reasonably cheerful, reasonably nonchalant, reasonably unkempt… He’d failed one of his exams at St Petersburg University, but that didn’t stop him from setting off on his travels around the country. “It’ll all be sorted out in the autumn, anyway,” thought Vadim, pleasantly alarmed by his own composure. “Either I’ll retake it or they’ll kick me out, and that’s pretty unlikely over just one exam…” His parents didn’t need to know. They didn’t need to know about anything.

“My daughter’s about the same age as you,” said the driver, with a sideways glance. “Maybe a bit younger. If I thought for one minute…”

He gave a lopsided grin. Vadim knew what he meant.

“If you thought for one minute she was hitchhiking?”

“Yeah. I’d kill her.”

They fell silent. The car overtook a lorry. The driver concentrated on the road, manipulating the pedals with his bare feet. Then a dark blue sign swam past, telling them how far it was to various places. Vadim knew that the information given on road signs like this was unreliable at best, and sometimes completely arbitrary. This one said Ufa 72km, Chelyabinsk 489km.

“I live with my daughter. It’s just the two of us.”

This was followed by another silence. In situations like this, the hitchhiker doesn’t even have to respond. If they want to, they’ll tell you more. It’s a kind of unspoken rule that the driver is allowed to interrogate his passenger on the most personal subjects (and usually takes great pleasure in doing so), whereas the hitchhiker has no right whatsoever to poke his nose into the driver’s business. Does that sound a bit unfair? Well, they’re doing you a favour by giving you a lift, at the end of the day. It’s their prerogative.

“Her mother was a whore. We split up six years ago.”

Vadim immediately adopted his most understanding and sympathetic expression, whilst simultaneously thinking to himself, “Nice one! He’s a talker. At least he won’t hassle me.”

“We were classmates. I studied history at college. Gave it all up later, though… Anyway, they sent a group of students to work on a collective farm, and that’s where it all started. I bet they don’t send you to collective farms any more, do they?”

“Of course not! Some friends of mine at teacher training college had to go, though.”

“We went out together for about three months. Her parents were against it, and so were mine. Her mother was a real bitch. She had gold teeth and everything! She didn’t even come to the registry office, can you imagine that? But we had a party for everyone in our course… A real Komsomol wedding, it was. You know what I mean?”

“I can imagine. With vodka in the teapots?”

“Exactly! That sort of thing. Then we got a flat, had a baby… Then the arguments started, the bickering and the rows… Maybe it was that old cliché, just a ‘clash of personalities’… Probably. You know what annoyed her most of all, what used to really wind her up? This’ll make you laugh… Me not putting the lids back on.”

“What?”

“Seriously! I was always forgetting to put the lids on shampoo bottles and toothpaste tubes after I’d finished using them. Same with the shaving cream. It used to drive her absolutely insane!”

“That’s a bit…”

“Then she started going out with other men, drinking too. ‘You carry on, sweetheart,’ I said to her. ‘As long as you’re having a good time, eh?’ Eventually we split up. And do you know what sums it up? Marinka was only little, and when I asked her who she wanted to live with she chose me. Can you imagine that? What kind of… How bad does it have to be for your own daughter to…”

They were silent.

“While we’re on the subject, Vadim, let me give you a word of advice. Whatever you do, don’t rush into marriage. You’re a young lad, your hormones are all over the place… You’re bound to fall in love sooner or later. Fair enough. But whatever happens, don’t let her drag you to the registry office! It’ll only end in tears. Student relationships always do!”

“I wasn’t planning on getting married just yet.”

“And if you do get married, don’t get her pregnant. Otherwise it’ll be a disaster. Make sure you tell her right from the start that you want to live together for three years, without any children. And don’t give in, even if she cries or tries to persuade you!” The driver paused for a moment before saying, “You must have a girlfriend. Do you?”

“No!”

Vadim always answered this question, which came up quite a lot, with a look of casual indifference and a stupid half-smile. As if to say, “So what if I don’t? What’s the big deal anyway?”

The driver turned to look at him.

“Why not? What’s the matter with you? How old are you, anyway?”

“Here we go,” thought Vadim. He began to change his opinion of the driver. His face continued to bear an expression of calculated nonchalance, though it was now mixed with a kind of helplessness. No one likes to be thought of as past it. He couldn’t bear the thought of justifying himself or entering into a complicated explanation.

“Let’s just say that I just haven’t found the right person yet.”

This cliché and the pause that preceded it indicated that the subject was closed. The driver got the message and turned his attention back to the road. He threw a quick glance at Vadim.

“You’re taking the whole business very seriously, aren’t you?”

The way he pronounced it, ‘the whole business’ was loaded with innuendo.

You might be wondering whether Vadim had ever been in love… Oh, he had — head over heels! She was in his class, a languid girl with beautiful eyelashes and curly hair. And as for stupid romantic gestures… At 5.00 a.m. one morning when his chosen one, along with the rest of the city, was still asleep, he took a can of paint to the courtyard of her building and stood beneath her window with the intention of leaving her a message on the tarmac: “Good morning, my love!” — the eternal greeting of all would-be Romeos.

The outcome was so comic and humiliating that he preferred not to think about it any more. There was no happy ending to this particular love story. Vadim was caught in the act by the yardkeeper, and this is how it happened…

The sun was already up but the city was still empty, full of echoes. Vadim felt as though he were in some kind of parallel universe. It was a revelation, being out in the city this early in the morning, and subsequently he would make a point of getting up at first light, just to go for a walk. But on this particular day he was on a mission. He sneaked into the courtyard and marked his message out on the tarmac with chalk. Just as he started going over the enormous letters with paint, the yardkeeper turned up! No one could have predicted that he would start work so early. He was a big strong man with bad teeth, a hereditary alcoholic, and, more importantly, he didn’t have a romantic bone in his body. Vadim could still remember the sound of the yardkeeper’s voice as he yelled at him, and his own swift departure! He didn’t see the yardkeeper attacking his handiwork with a stiff broom. The letters “Good m…” hadn’t even had the chance to dry.

As he mooched about that morning the thwarted young Romeo decided to drown his sorrows, but even that mission was doomed to fail: at 6.00 a.m. the 24-hour bars and kiosks were decidedly shut. Fate was not smiling on him. He could remember how the streets had been illuminated by the slanting rays of the rising sun… God, how many years had passed since then!

The car approached the city. Interspersed among the heavily laden long-distance lorries were an increasing number of suburban Moskvich and Zhiguli cars, full to bursting with family members, with the occasional rusty old barrel strapped to the roof. Why on earth did anyone need a barrel like that in the city? Or in the suburbs, for that matter? Ufa’s industrial landscape was painted crimson by the setting sun and crowned with smoke from the factory chimneys.

“You’re a good lad,” said the driver, giving Vadim an appraising look. “Shall I just drive you straight to Chelyabinsk? It makes no difference to me where I spend the night. I can manage another five hours, and I can just set off a bit later tomorrow. What do you say, eh? Shall we just keep going?”

“Thanks, I really appreciate it, but you should get some rest. I’ll be fine here — I’ve got the address of a good squat. And anyway my friend Nikita will never catch me up if I carry on to Chelyabinsk! So, thanks but no thanks… Are you stopping at the police checkpoint? You can drop me there.”

3

The last lorry drove past, rumbling with the sound of disappointed hope. There’s something unpleasantly predictable about heavy-goods vehicles when you’re standing by the side of the road. They make such a noise when they rush past that even seasoned hitchhikers experience a moment of panic — will it squash me like a fly?

The last lorry drove past and then the road was empty, apart from a few cars in the distance. Nastya lowered her arm. It was a long time since she’d been stuck like this in the middle of nowhere! Bloody lorries. Mind you, the cars weren’t exactly falling over themselves to pick her up either.

Everything was quiet. You tend to be more acutely aware of silence out on the road, maybe because it occurs so rarely. “Oh, well!” smiled Nastya, resolving to take a philosophical approach to her misfortune. Walking away from the road, towards the grass, she squatted down near her rucksack and dug out a lighter and a packet of cheap cigarettes. She took a drag on her cigarette and looked around. The silence was serene and interminable.

A little further away from the road was the edge of a forest of gnarled pine trees, but there were probably other species mixed in with them too. The fringes of the forest had been littered with old tyres and empty canisters, poisoned by petrol fumes and polluted by the urine of countless travellers. Strange as it seems, these roadside forests are quite wild — hardly anyone ever goes further than two metres into them. There may even have been mushrooms growing in the impenetrable heart of this forest, unseen and undisturbed. Amongst the rubbish was another regular feature of the highway: a flattened corpse, kicked to the side of the road. The body of a dog.

Nastya was used to it by now, but the first time it was always an unpleasant discovery for a novice hitchhiker. She could remember being dropped off about 70km from her home town of Tyumen, about two years ago, and the first thing she’d seen was a squashed cat. Poor thing, it obviously hadn’t realised what had hit it. Quite literally. The cat hadn’t been merely knocked down but completely run over, and its flattened insides lay neatly to one side. It was horrific. It had taken Nastya half an hour to compose herself sufficiently to be able to hitch another lift. She still cried over things like that back then.

On the other side of the highway stood a couple of ramshackle wagons, crumpled and repainted to within an inch of their lives. A roadside café. There are plenty of these throughout the Urals, all more or less identical. Smoke curled above the metal trough that was being used as a makeshift grill for shashlik, and a couple of KamAZ trucks were parked to one side. Silence and serenity reigned here too.

Does it seem strange that nobody would stop to pick up a young girl? Sometimes that’s just the way it goes, albeit not very often… The thing is that female hitchhikers don’t tend to have an overtly feminine appearance. This is a deliberate tactic, employed for various reasons — for example, it helps to avoid attracting any unwelcome advances and is also a way of distinguishing oneself from the roadside prostitutes. Practical considerations also come into it: travelling clothes need to be comfortable and functional, and that’s all that matters. Nastya was wearing heavy boots, jeans and a lightweight yellow waterproof jacket. She wore her hair cropped short, so she didn’t need to bother tying it back. It was just easier that way. She wasn’t wearing any make-up, but that wasn’t just because she was on the road — Nastya never wore make-up in town either. She couldn’t care less what other people thought. As long as she was comfortable, that was the main thing.

She stood on the roadside verge, smoking and thinking. She looked up at the sky and thought… about what? She spat and threw her cigarette butt to the ground. A heavily laden car approached and Nastya raised her arm, but she’d already given up hope. She’d resigned herself to going back to the shashlik café — it obviously wasn’t her night.

It was nice out here in the woods, though. The air was fresh, and somewhere out there in the distance, beyond Ufa, beyond Dyurtyuli, were the steppes. The endless, open steppes…

In the quarter of an hour that she’d spent standing by the side of the highway, nothing had changed in the café. The same faces sat at the same tables. The girl behind the counter was obviously a local. She can’t have been more than about sixteen years old, but already her eyes betrayed a terminal boredom. The wheezing old speakers were playing the kind of song that was always popular on the road — ‘driving music’, they called it, but the lyrics were composed of prison slang! Why did they always sing in prison slang? These people at the tables, the long-distance drivers, had they all been inside or something? You can learn a lot about the Russian penitentiary system simply by travelling across the country.

The table furthest from the door was occupied by the owner of the establishment. He was middle aged but powerfully built and had an imposing presence, like all elderly natives of the Caucasus. He sat there leafing through some paperwork, effortlessly in charge.

“So you’re back, are you? I knew you would be!” he said, his accent faint but perceptible. “You’re not going anywhere tonight. Sit down! I’ll bring you something to eat.”

Nastya sat down, put her rucksack on the floor and stuck her elbows to the oilcloth table covering, which featured a pattern of cute little cartoon drawings. That was one of the distinguishing features of all these roadside cafés, the incongruous little traces of domesticity that managed to tug at your heartstrings when you were least expecting it.

What else? Walls made of plywood, indefatigable speakers positioned up near the ceiling… A few solemn and burly long-distance drivers at the little tables, eating their dinner. Refuelling on instant coffee.

The owner returned from the kitchen carrying a plate with steam rising from a double portion of shashlik. He placed it in front of Nastya. He was revelling in his Caucasian hospitality, she just knew it. Plying this hungry girl from the highway with hot food, watching her devour it ravenously — that was obviously how he got his kicks. Or maybe she was just in a bad mood because she was so tired.

“Thank you.”

“So come on, then. Where are you from?”

Conversations like this are the hitchhiker’s cross to bear.

“My name’s Nastya,” she began, with a little sigh. “I’m travelling from Tyumen to Moscow. I’ve been on the road for two days already, but it’s my own fault it’s taking me so long. I overslept yesterday, and what with one thing and another by the time I’d got my things together and got out onto the road… Basically I only made it as far as Ekaterinburg on the first day. So today I’ve been trying to make up for lost time. Tomorrow I’ll take the M7 out of Ufa. That’ll be the quickest way.”

“Why do you want to go to Moscow?”

“Why not?”

“Have you got friends there, or family?”

“No. I just felt like it. I haven’t been to Moscow since I was a kid. I’ll find some friends when I get there. I’ve got a few addresses written down…”

“So, basically it’s just some stupid idea you’ve got in your head.”

“You might think it’s a stupid idea. I don’t.”

Nastya spoke quite sharply, letting him know that the subject was closed. Just because she was eating his shashlik, that didn’t given him the right to start lecturing her!

“Aren’t you worried about travelling alone? It’s so dangerous out there. A young girl like you…”

“I know it’s dangerous, but that doesn’t bother me. I can’t explain it.”

“What about your parents?”

“What about them? We don’t talk much. They know that I travel all over the place. They say I’ve got ‘itchy feet’. There’s nothing they can do about it!”

“What does your boyfriend have to say about it?”

“I haven’t got a boyfriend. Not since May. I’m young, free and single!”

Nastya said this with such a desperate, angry smile that even the café owner knew to leave this subject alone.

He started bustling about, then went back behind the counter and flicked a switch. The café lights came on. He seemed to have complete dominion over this modest empire; he was in charge of everything, down to the humblest light-bulb.

“You’re not going anywhere tonight. It’s already dark.”

“But it’s not that late…”

“You are not going to spend the night on the road! I won’t allow it. I’ll get someone to make you up a bed in the box-room.”

“But I…”

“You’re spending the night here, and that’s the end of it.”

Nastya wiped the last traces of the shashlik from her mouth with the back of her hand and smirked. Wow! She hadn’t expected such steely insistence from the café owner. Of course, she could have predicted that things would take a similar turn…

“Thank you.”

The café owner got up from the table and went off into the kitchen, presumably to bark a few orders. Meanwhile one of the long-distance drivers stood up and walked towards the exit. Refreshed and refuelled, he was ready to continue his journey. Nastya stood up as well.

“Are you going to Ufa?”

The long-distance driver nodded. Excellent! She pushed her plate back, picked up her rucksack and followed him. Ciao, little roadside shack! Nice knowing you. Nastya left without a backwards glance, grateful that she’d managed to extricate herself from yet another predicament.

What next? The dark cabin of a KamAZ truck. For some reason it really seemed to feel the bumps in the road. At first the cabin would rock and sway, then the trailer would rumble behind them. The driver let her smoke and, tired and silent, they both took long drags on their cigarettes — two glowing red dots in the darkness. The blind headlights reached into the night, feeling for the tarmac and the uneven verge.

“I’ve driven across Siberia,” said the driver, breaking the silence. His voice sounded muffled. “One night it was really, really dark. Pitch black. Then suddenly I saw something…” He flashed his headlights for emphasis. “Something lying in the middle of the road. I thought it was a sack that had fallen off a lorry, so I slammed on the brakes and swerved… At least there was no one else on the road. I just missed it, thank God. It was a man’s body! Someone must have hit him, then just driven off and left him there. It can be pretty wild in that part of the world. So I just started the engine and drove off.”

This was followed by another silence. Nastya gave a bitter laugh. That was a pretty depressing story. A pretty depressing attitude, too. But hey, that’s life. Memento mori…

They continued their journey along the nocturnal highway of the Urals, breaking the silence only rarely to make the occasional remark, but always aware of one another’s presence in the dark cabin.

The kilometre markers — a constant reminder that they were on a federal highway — floated out of the darkness, reflecting the headlights. It was strange to see these flashes of glowing blue light emerge from the night, like a series of spectral apparitions. Each one seemed to approach slowly, then in a flash it was gone, taking its number with it. Four hundred and twenty-three… Four hundred and twenty-four…

4

The days are long in July, and the evening sky feels enormous. It’s all that exists. It’s easy to ignore the city sprawled out beneath it, strung with chains of barely perceptible street lamps. But the sky… It keeps changing. First it’s a curious peach colour, then it glows red and then… it goes out altogether, and the precise outlines of the buildings form a stark contrast against the background of the recently extinguished sky. Charcoal on metal.

People hurry home from work, calling in at the shops before storming the buses. Windows light up, some more invitingly than others.

Turning awkwardly, the trolleybus scatters sparks over the roof of a car. I wonder whether they’ll leave scorch marks.

Squire was sitting in the middle of his room on the broken and slightly singed sofa, mending his jeans. Actually he wasn’t mending them so much as ‘restoring’ them by going over the drawings and signatures that had been scrawled all over them a long time ago in red and black marker pens. A very long time ago, judging by their sorry state.

The apartment itself merits a detailed description, even if you’ve been in one like it before. It’s a studio apartment sublet from the legal tenant, and it hasn’t had any work done on it since… Well, it’s probably best not to think about that. The wallpaper is torn and faded and has witnessed a great deal over the years. There’s hardly any furniture, just a few items left there by the owners to be ‘run into the ground’ — an ancient chest of drawers, a couple of shelves (used more for CDs and cassettes than for books), the aforementioned sofa… No TV set. Such a luxury would be completely out of place here.

As is often the case in such apartments, the kitchen is not for the faint-hearted. Well, it’s hardly surprising when you’ve got a gas cylinder and a gas stove competing against one another in a confined space, year after year, and the resulting soot and greasy sediment and methane deposits are cleaned up only rarely and with great reluctance. Wheezing and panting, the decrepit old fridge adds to the atmosphere of filth and neglect.

It might sound like some kind of squalid dump unfit for human habitation, but it’s just a typical apartment and it suits Squire down to the ground. Not to mention his numerous friends, all the overnight guests, the passing hitchhikers from all over Russia… Actually, there’s one of them here right now.

Our friend Vadim from St Petersburg came out of the bathroom. He was naked from the waist up, and he was drying his long hair carefully with a towel. Long hair isn’t really compatible with hitchhiking. You can tie it back to stop it getting too dirty, but even so… You can’t wait to wash it whenever you get the opportunity.

“I’ve washed my socks and hung them in there on the line. Is that alright?”

“Yeah, no problem. They’ll be dry by tomorrow.”

“Are you redoing the colour?” Vadim nodded at the jeans that Squire was working on. “Have you just washed them?”

“Yeah, right — they’d fall apart if I washed them! I haven’t washed them for two years.”

“You’re kidding. How come?”

“Well, I don’t wear them much any more. When I do I try and look after them. So, like, I never wear them out when it’s raining, only when the weather’s good. And I wear underpants now. When I was younger, seventeen or so, I used to like going commando. But now, I’m an old man!”

They laughed. Vadim had never met Squire before (this was his first time in Ufa), and they had the whole evening ahead of them to fill with conversations and the mutual exchange of stories. It started predictably enough, with Vadim looking through Squire’s music collection. The ensuing exchange (“What have you got?”, “I haven’t heard this album before”, and so on) is unlikely to be of much interest to us, so let’s leave it there and resume the narrative at the moment the doorbell rang.

“Oh, that’s probably Nikita,” Vadim exclaimed happily.

“Is that the guy you’re travelling with?”

“Yeah. He’s always slower than me… I was worried he wouldn’t make it to Ufa tonight!”

“It could be anyone, you know…” Squire went to open the door. “It’s half nine, still early…”

From the stilted tone of Squire’s voice in the hallway, it sounded as though ‘anyone’ was an unexpected and unwelcome guest. Vadim was instantly on his guard. In theory, anything could happen here — normal rules didn’t apply, because a squat wasn’t like a home or even a real apartment. Everything has its price, including a free night’s accommodation. If you’re going to risk your life on the road, you might as well risk your life by dossing down in strange places. Vadim had spent the night with a bunch of drug addicts once. Well, they weren’t really drug addicts, just pot-heads, but they’d stayed up all night partying and he hadn’t been able to get to sleep. Vadim wasn’t really worried now, though. He knew he could stand up for himself.

A police officer entered the room. A regular police officer, and evidently a fairly junior one too. Unlike many others of his age and generation Vadim had no automatic antipathy for the forces of law and order, but he did take an instant dislike to this particular individual. He was short, with badly pockmarked skin, and his grubby, ill-fitting jacket gave him a slovenly look. But what Vadim found most offensive was the fact that the police officer hadn’t removed his shoes. Of course, they probably weren’t supposed to — after all, they had to be prepared for anything. But still, he and Squire had bare feet!

“Right then, Mikhail… yes? Renting the room from a Mrs Hassanova… yes? Living in Ufa temporarily as a student, originally from Kumertau…”

“From Sibai. Please, take a seat.”

Vadim decided that he must be a divisional inspector.

“So, Mikhail… I was here in April, wasn’t I? Did I not tell you then that the rent… the renting… the rental arrangements of this apartment are incorrectly formulated?”

“You did. But you need to talk to Mrs Hassanova about that.”

“Fine… But what about these complaints from the other tenants?”

“What complaints?”

“Same as last time! Noise, disturbances, non-stop partying… Dodgy types turning up at all hours of the night. I’ve had four complaints already this summer!”

The inspector stared at Vadim. “He probably thinks I’m going to panic and make a run for it, or try and climb out of the window or something,” thought Vadim. He tried to keep a straight face but couldn’t help smirking. The inspector took exception to his smirk.

“Can I see your documents, young man?”

“No problem.” Vadim bent over his rucksack then turned to Squire. “The traffic cops here are as bad as ours. I’ve already had my passport checked twice.”

“So you’re not from round here, then?”

“No.”

“St Petersburg!” declared the divisional inspector. “Are you staying for a while?”

“Just passing through.”

“Ah, I see. Another freeloader, sponging off other people… There’s something wrong with you lot. You’re all as bad as one another!”

Vadim shrugged. He wasn’t about to argue. The inspector carried on inspecting his passport. St Petersburg passports were quite a novelty! Eventually he put it down with a little sigh. He had no axe to grind with this visitor. The student, on the other hand…

With a triumphant air about him, the divisional inspector produced some forms from his zip-up document wallet. He straightened the crumpled corner of one of them.

“Alright, let’s draw up this report. I’ve had four complaints this summer. Gross infringement of the norms of communal living, committed by an individual living in violation…”

The inspector was having trouble finding the right words. He paused, then appeared to lose his train of thought.

“I’m living in violation?”

“You do not have the correct paperwork relating to your tenancy of this apartment. So we’re going to draw up a report in Mrs Hassanova’s name. We’re going to have to draw up a report in your name too, unless…”

The inspector paused, pen in hand. Squire chuckled, stood up and shuffled into the kitchen. It took Vadim a while to figure out what was going on. He didn’t get it even when his host returned carrying a large can of beer, dark and heavy.

The divisional inspector looked from the beer to the report form, to the beer and back to the report form. He wasn’t weighing up his social responsibilities, though. Oh, no! It was just that he’d already started filling out the form. Eventually he capitulated, declaring, “Damn, I wrote the wrong date!” He screwed the paper up into a ball and threw it into the corner, as though he lived there. Social responsibilities, indeed.

Before leaving (with the beer under his arm) he seemed to cheer up a bit. He even attempted a few friendly remarks, although they came across as rather patronising.

“So you’re from St Petersburg, are you?” he asked. Then he smiled, although neither of the others had said anything. He almost seemed to be talking to the passport, which was lying where he’d left it on the sofa. “So what’s going on up there?”

“Nothing special,” Vadim answered with a shrug. “Same as always.”

“Mmm, I went to St Petersburg once, on a school trip… Or Leningrad, as it was back then. Nice place! Yes, I remember it well… The Hermitage, the Aurora…” His face suddenly changed, becoming sad and pensive. After a pause he added, “You’re still young… You can travel… Ekh!”

At the door, he reverted to his stern official look.

“Sort the paperwork out properly with Mrs Hassanova!”

“I will.”

Vadim expected Squire to be angry. He can’t have been happy about giving away his beer like that! He felt a bit guilty, too. Although the situation with the inspector wasn’t directly his fault, it was because of others like him… So Vadim was quite surprised when Squire came back into the room and burst out laughing.

“What a leech! That’s the third time he’s been round here. Last time I got off with a bottle of vodka, and now… You saw what he was like, didn’t you? Looking around to see what he could get his grubby paws on. Typical Tatar!”

“I thought everyone here was Bashkir.”

“Yeah, right. As soon as drivers find out I’m from here they always ask, ‘So, are you a Bashkir?’ There aren’t many proper Bashkirs here, you know. It’s mostly Tatars. Anyway, who can tell the difference?”

Squire went into the kitchen. Should he put the kettle on? Where was it, anyway?

“Well, that bastard has left us without any booze! I’ll have to nip out to the kiosk. It’s only a couple of blocks away. Have you got any money?”

“Yeah, of course, but… Well, not much. And I hadn’t really planned on spending any of it in Ufa.”

“I don’t need much! I know the girl who works there. She sells me out-of-date beer for ten roubles a litre. Better than dying of thirst, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, of course! Great…”

“Excellent. I’ll be able to buy my student record book back too!”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s had it for six months. I left it with her as credit for something, I can’t remember what… Ha, what am I saying? It must have been beer!”

They both laughed.

“So what’s so important that you have to get to E-burg for?” Squire grumbled half-jokingly. “Stay here for a bit! We can go out, have a few drinks… It’ll be a laugh.”

“I can’t, sorry!” Vadim laughed. “We’ve got loads of online friends there, and they’ve lined up a whole programme of events for us. I might even meet a girl there…”

As he pulled his customised jeans on, Squire started complaining that he couldn’t wear them in the winter, because dirty jeans are no good in cold weather. Why was that? When they were both dressed and putting their trainers on, there was another ring at the door.

“That’ll be Nikita. About time!”

“Let’s see…” Vadim heard Squire turn the key, then he called from the hallway, “Wrong again! This time it’s a beautiful stranger!”

“Are you Squire? Hi, I’m Nastya from Tyumen. Remember? We exchanged emails earlier this week…”

“Oh, yeah. Come in.”

Once she was in the apartment Nastya dropped her heavy rucksack to the floor with a thud. Finally! She’d made it to Ufa before nightfall. That in itself was a minor victory, and everyone knows that they lead to major ones.

She had brought with her the smell of the road, or rather, the rank smell of the cabins inhabited by Russian lorry drivers.

5

Nikita Marchenko was twenty years old. When he was ten, half his lifetime ago, he wrote the following entry in his diary: “Today I went shopping with mum and dad. We bought wellies made in 1991.”

Yes, Nikita was a bit odd. He was also a straight-A student and came from a family of St Petersburg intellectuals with an illustrious scientific pedigree. Grandfather Marchenko, a physicist and member of the Academy of Sciences, was still mentioned in school textbooks. He had died in the late 1980s, and all that Nikita could vaguely remember was the prickly feel of his beard. His father was also a famous physicist — not as famous as his grandfather, but a professor and Head of the Department of Physics at St Petersburg University, as well as director of the university’s scientific projects. The mantle of academia had long since been exchanged for the respectable suit of a state functionary. And so what if it had? He had a good salary, status, an office with a secretary, and even a black Volga to take him to work in the mornings.

In July the Volga would overheat in the sun (being black, of course — it was physics at work!) A mini-hell on wheels! The sun would beat down mercilessly on the roof, the bonnet and the windows, reflecting off the surfaces like a scuffed and faded version of itself. Professor Marchenko would overheat too, in his official suit, but he could not dress otherwise.

Nikita’s mother worked at the same university, although she was only a senior lecturer in philology. She was renowned for her short temper and her long hair, which she wore in a plait. Nikita had never thought of his family as a happy one. It was a long story, but basically since childhood he had been accustomed to living in an atmosphere of… unpleasantness. This wasn’t helped by the fact that his father’s first wife lived in the same block as them. There was nothing they could do about it — the apartments were owned by the university, and they were all colleagues. He went back to her once and lived a few floors below them for about six weeks, about the same time that Nikita’s mother had to go into hospital. If only this first wife had never existed! Even if she hadn’t, things still wouldn’t have been right. Every morning the black Volga would drop them off at St Petersburg University and they hurried to their respective floors, desperate to escape from one another. It goes without saying that Nikita was a student at the very same institution.

This atmosphere of oppressive formality, the home library, the glances exchanged over dinner, was what Nikita Marchenko, at the age of twenty, was running away from at any available opportunity. He didn’t care where he went, he just had to get away. He ran to the highway and beyond, across the vast expanses of his native land.

He was currently jolting along in the cabin of a loaded MAZ truck, nearly two thousand kilometres from his home town of St Petersburg. They were already in Bashkiria, as he had realised when they passed the town of Tuimazy and the village of Serafimovsky. The landscape was increasingly rugged, and quite beautiful. They were driving alongside the enormous Lake Kandry-Kul — in some places overgrown with reeds, in others an impressive sight to behold — and the water seemed to be lapping the edge of the road. It was a warm, sunny evening and there were rows of cars lining the lake, while their passengers enjoyed a swim. How Nikita envied them! After all day on the road he was hot and sweaty and covered in dust… But he couldn’t risk losing this ride. If Vadim had been here, he wouldn’t have thought twice about it — it was just the sort of thing he would do. Nikita peered at the bathers. Was Vadim there? He couldn’t see him.

There were some wind turbines on one of the hills, obviously imported. They were brand new, gleaming white and graceful. Symbols of austerity and power. There was something surreal about the sight of the turbines slowly turning against the backdrop of the sky as evening fell…. It was like a modern version of all those old paintings of Dutch windmills. New Holland… Come to think of it, there was a district by that name in his home city.

The truck was struggling up the hill. Nikita suspected that it might be quicker, and less stressful, if he were to walk. The truck was fully loaded with various food products, stewed meat or something. The driver had told him, but he’d forgotten.

“You might be better off getting another lift,” said the driver, reading his mind. He slapped the wheel, as though apologising for his lack of speed.

“No, it’s fine. At least I’m guaranteed to make it to Ufa tonight.”

“With a bit of luck!”

Several icons had been strung across the windscreen right in front of their faces. They were there to provide protection, the automobile variety. Nikita looked at the faces of the saints and they seemed to be looking back at him, right into his very soul.

Religion had become one of the main issues that divided the Marchenko household. Their spiritual inclinations were as follows: Nikita… Did he believe in God? Maybe, but like most of his peers he didn’t really give the matter a great deal of thought. Nikita’s father, like any physicist (any Soviet physicist, at least), was a materialist and staunchly atheist. Not only that but he expounded his beliefs with the kind of zeal commonly exhibited by members of fanatical sects. Nikita’s mother, on the other hand, suddenly became conspicuously devout. She took to all the rites and rituals like a duck to water, and she was at home in the suffocating clouds of incense of the little local church.

Oh, the fights that took place in their house! The ‘crusades’ they mounted against one another! There was something almost sadomasochistic about his parents’ fights — they both seemed to thrive on the energy of discord. For his father it was a kind of ‘holy war’ in which he made it his mission to shatter his opponent’s ideals, to destroy her faith. Nikita wouldn’t have been surprised to see smoke coming from his nostrils. As for his mother, she revelled in the role of martyr, walking through fire for her faith. At the end of the day, it was essentially a kind of spiritual exercise for both of them — gymnastics for the soul, an exchange of passion that made them feel more alive. They would go to extremes to prove a point, too. During Lent Nikita’s father, who suffered from stomach ulcers, would eat salty and spicy food just to spite his mother. His mother would listlessly chew on her porridge, sick of trying to talk him round.

Nikita had a clear memory of his mother coming home for lunch one dazzling January day, wearing a scarf on her head and carrying a large chemical retort. Incidentally, the apartment was full of these retorts even though his father was a physicist, not a chemist. They used to store pickled vegetables in them.

“Look!” his mother announced triumphantly. “Holy water! It’s Epiphany today, and the priest blessed an ice-hole. I’d been waiting there since seven o’clock this morning!”

She proceeded to explain reverentially what was so special about the water and how it should be sprinkled in all four corners of the apartment, to banish evil spirits.

At first his father put up with it, but the assertion that holy water would keep forever finally pushed him over the edge.

“It’s just river water!” he exploded. “Have you completely lost your mind? You’re an educated woman. With a PhD!”

Basically, Epiphany ended with one of their usual arguments. Nikita didn’t fully understand his father’s fury. Neither did his mother. Displaying admirable self-denial, she refrained from sprinkling the water anywhere in the apartment. Maybe she had decided to keep it for a rainy day. Either way, she felt as though she’d done her duty and the retort was duly stored away in the darkness at the back of one of the kitchen cupboards, between the bottles of oil and vinegar, and everyone forgot all about it.

One fine day, a couple of years later, the apartment filled with Marchenko Senior’s joyous cries. God knows why he’d been rummaging in the depths of the kitchen cupboards… Maybe he was after the vodka? It didn’t matter anyway, because while he was groping around in there he’d discovered the retort, which he now dragged out and presented to them. There was something floating in it, a kind of gelatinous clot… basically, the holy water had gone mouldy. His moment of triumph had finally come! The inveterate atheist took great delight in celebrating such a resounding victory. The enemy was defeated, once and for all! Drunk on his discovery, the triumphant victor shouted at his wife for such a long time that she developed high blood pressure. And they all lived happily ever after… Yeah, right.

The truck came to a stop with a heavy groan, and Nikita woke up. He pressed the button to illuminate his watch. Shit, it was already late, especially considering that local time in Ufa was an hour ahead of Samara. “Vadim’s probably been asleep for ages,” he thought. “And I’ve still got to find the squat!” In the distance he could see a police checkpoint, flooded with orange lights. The gates to the city. He would have to walk a little further to get to the city itself.

“Thanks a lot!” Nikita finally came to his senses and started rummaging about in the darkness, getting his sleeping bag and his rucksack together. “I really appreciate it. Have a good trip!”

“You too. Good luck.”

“Hey!”

Nikita turned round. The driver leaned across the cabin to call out of the window, “You’ve dropped your cap!”

“Oh yeah, thanks!”

His cap lay on the ground next to the wheel. As he bent down to pick it up, Nikita suddenly felt the vibrations of the enormous, intimidating vehicle against his cheek, and it freaked him out. When he’d straightened up and moved away, the truck drove off. The noise of its engine grew fainter, and its red lights receded into the distance… And then they were gone. It was dark and quiet. Nikita was alone on the road and alone in the universe, or so it felt. He stood there for a minute, just listening, and he was overwhelmed with a sudden, primal fear. Brushing this feeling aside, Nikita hurried along the empty road towards the distant checkpoint. He looked rather peculiar, a solitary figure half-running through the darkness with his rucksack and his sleeping bag… If there was a God, he was probably watching him right now.

The policemen weren’t interested in Nikita’s sudden appearance, and he positioned himself at the roadside beyond the checkpoint, to be closer to people, to the lights. The floodlights at the checkpoint were so bright that the July night was virtually banished from the feeble roadside forest.

A pair of headlights approached. Nikita raised his arm apprehensively. He didn’t like hitching at night. All kinds of thoughts would enter his head, scenes from horror movies and the like. It really is quite scary when a car pulls up and you open the door… You never know what’s going to happen next.

The inside of the car was dark and smoky.

“City centre? Thirty roubles.”

Nikita sighed and took his rucksack off. It wasn’t worth spending the night on the road just because paying for a lift was technically against the rules of hitchhiking. It felt strange being so low down after the truck, and as he sat in the passenger seat watching the trees fly past he resolved not to speak to the driver. Well, it served him right! Once he’d made this decision he relaxed and started feeling better. At least he’d made it to Ufa. He was already in the Urals!

Actually, credit where credit’s due — the driver gave Nikita detailed instructions to help him find the squat where he was supposed to be spending the night, although it was the middle of the night already. It was 1.00 a.m. local time when he eventually made it to the Khrushchev-era apartment blocks and started searching for the right address. He didn’t like wandering about strange cities at night. In Penza, a few nights ago, he’d been approached by a group of local lads who looked like they were in the mood for a fight.

“Which block are you from?” they’d asked him.

Nikita would have been less surprised if they’d asked him which planet he was from.

“Oh, you’re not from round here, are you?”

Then they’d left him alone. It was a district of newly constructed apartment blocks and apparently these ‘blocks’ were their equivalent of courtyard gangs. So nothing had come of it that time, but the Ufa crowds might turn out to be less tolerant. Nikita noticed a group of three lads under a tree. They all seemed to have stopped talking and were looking at him. He increased his pace. The night wind was agitating the leaves on the trees and blowing rubbish about. Large moths flew at the street lamps, colliding audibly with the glass.

When Nikita finally found the right address, his happiness and relief knew no bounds. The stairwell stank, there was dirt everywhere and the cats he’d disturbed narrowed their eyes at him, but still — he was so pleased to be there! He found the right door and hesitated for a second before ringing the bell… What was his name again? Squire? Something like that…

6

A hitchhikers’ squat at night is a peculiar place… The people who spend the night here are just passing through, and they never stay for long. Their thoughts are already far away — memories of a hard day on the road, the blazing sun, a succession of stuffy cabins, and tomorrow more of the same, back into battle. You might expect them to take refuge immediately in their sleeping bag cocoons, to make the most of every available hour of sleep. But no, they have to sit and chat! Squats are meeting places for like-minded souls, people who share the same outlook on life, which means they don’t mind talking half the night away. At times like this even bitter out-of-date beer can taste like nectar!

They don’t drink too much beer, though, maybe just a couple of large cans shared between them, to keep the conversation flowing. It’s understandable, really — what with the early start, the long road ahead and the blazing sunshine, a hangover and dehydration are the last things they need. In any case, it’s rude to fill someone else’s car with stale beer fumes. That’s the driver’s privilege.

So here we are… It’s the middle of the night, the whole city’s asleep, and the only sign of life is in Squire’s appalling kitchen. The bare light-bulb burns too brightly. As a rule, apartments like this don’t tend to be overly well-endowed with lampshades. No curtains either — they’ve been burnt, soiled and long since discarded. That’s the level of comfort on offer in this apartment, where the nights are often full of acrid smoke and guitar music.

All four of our main characters are sitting at the kitchen table, passing round a can of beer. Squire knows exactly how to tilt it to avoid pouring out any foam. A skill honed by years of practice! What are they talking about? If we disregard the conversations about music (I don’t want to bore you), essentially what it comes down to is ‘travellers’ tales’.

Every hitchhiker takes a dozen or so stories from each journey. They’re mostly other people’s stories — many drivers love to make confessions and often launch into them as soon as their passenger is on board. Or their own stories, happy or unhappy as the case may be. Each tale circulates until it becomes a kind of folklore, and every retelling is interrupted with impatient comments such as, “Well, I…”, “Once I…” These ‘travellers’ tales’ are a kind of competition, with everyone keen to have their say. “Well, you won’t believe what happened to me”, “I’ve got an even funnier story”, “I’ve done that loads of times”… In other words, “I’m better than you”.

It’s Squire’s turn to talk. Squire is an experienced hitchhiker. Squire flicks his hair over his shoulders, to stop it falling in his beer.

“So there I was, stuck in Chebarkulb, of all places. Only 300 km from home and I had an exam the next day. I couldn’t even remember what subject… So I was thinking, ‘Shit!’ It was taking forever. I kept getting all these battered old trucks, which would take me five kilometres, fifteen at most. I was getting sick of it. So in Chebarkulb I wrote UFA on a bit of card in massive letters and stood by the side of the road. I stood there for half an hour, an hour… The long-distance drivers just shrugged, even the Bashkirs. ‘Shit, come on!’ I was thinking. ‘Somebody, just stop!’ Suddenly this amazing jeep pulled up. I’d never seen anything like it. Get this, the speedometer was kind of… it was, like, projecting onto the windscreen!”

“Cool!”

“So this bloke got out. He looked at me really carefully then told me to get in. Turned out he was driving it from the Far East for some client, and he’d been followed the whole way. They’d already tried to seize it twice. Basically he’d only picked me up so I could help out by watching the mirror and… well, I don’t know. Anyway… So, we set off. It was a right-hand drive so I was sitting on the left, and, get this, there was a loaded Makarov between us! The guy wouldn’t shut up about this super-jeep. He kept going on about how cool it was. Then — this is the funniest bit — just as we were coming to the top of the steepest hill this marvel of modern technology broke down! The indicators and screens on the dashboard started making a load of noise. Some kind of belt was broken, apparently. And — get this — it was impossible to fix it! Some bolts had stuck dead, and the keys wouldn’t fit. Useless piece of Japanese… Ahem, anyway, Slava — that was his name — decided the client could go to hell. He straightened the keys out with a hammer and almost wrecked the engine. We kept trying to flag someone down, but not one bastard stopped to help. You’ll never guess what happened next… A couple of hours later Slava picked up his Makarov and went and stood in the middle of the road with it!”

Everyone laughed, washing it down with beer. It was a very entertaining story. Next up? Nastya. She had a very different tale to tell.

“Mine’s not quite so dramatic, I’m afraid. When I was travelling from Tyumen to E-burg yesterday, I got picked up by a foreign car too. The old guy driving it seemed really nice. So I got in, we set off, and then he started coming out with all the usual bollocks — aren’t you scared to be travelling alone, don’t you get men coming on to you all the time, aren’t you just asking for it, all that stuff. Basically, he was trying to convince me that I wanted to sleep with him, and I was trying to convince him that I didn’t.”

“So who won?”

“I did. So he made me get out. And he was going as far as Sverdlovsk too, the bastard.”

It was the kind of story that makes you think, rather than laugh. There was a lull in the conversation.

“Seriously, though, doesn’t it bother you, travelling on your own?” Squire asked after a pause.

“Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t… I always travel alone.” Nastya shrugged then added, carefully choosing her words, “Let’s just say I haven’t found the right travelling companion yet.” She paused. “And I don’t know if I ever will.”

Why did Vadim decide to step in at this point? Who knows. Maybe it was the beer talking. A few drinks always lifted your spirits, reduced your inhibitions and made the impossible seem possible. Or maybe Vadim had realised that she was talking about finding not just a travelling companion but someone more significant? I don’t know. Probably a bit of both.

“But how can you be so sure that you haven’t met the right person yet? Maybe I’m the man for the job!”

Everyone laughed. This was just a bit of fun, wasn’t it?

“The thing is, you see… I don’t need just any guy. I need someone special. Someone with, how can I put it… with wings! Yes, that’s it.”

While she was speaking Nastya’s face took on a dreamy look… This was no longer a bit of fun as far as Vadim was concerned! So she was interested in the creative type, was she? Did that mean she thought he was some kind of philistine?

“Wings, eh? I write poetry, you know, and loads of people say it’s really good. There’s a rock group back home in St Petersburg, Anichkin Bridge they’re called, and I wrote two of their songs. Shall I sing them for you?”

“No, don’t!” Nikita interrupted his friend. He knew that later, when Vadim began to sober up, he would be excruciatingly embarrassed by anything he might have recited or — even worse — sung. He wasn’t exactly a natural performer.

“Take your T-shirt off,” Nastya suddenly requested.

Vadim was taken aback, naturally, but under the influence of alcohol one tends to act first and think later. So the T-shirt was removed and thrown aside.

At least he used deodorant. You know what it’s like, after a whole day on the road, the tarmac radiating heat like a furnace…

“Flex your biceps, please.”

Vadim had nothing to be ashamed of. He wasn’t built like a weight-lifter, of course, but wasn’t exactly a seven-stone weakling either. He was reasonably well developed for his age, for his generation.

The only problem was the deodorant. I’m sure you know how unattractive unshaven armpits can look with crusty residue hanging from them…

She ran her finger along his muscles. What the hell was going on?!

“Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you but I can’t find a single trace of any wings here. ‘Wings’ is what they call the muscles beneath the biceps on really well-developed men, just here. They stick out a little bit. If you want ‘wings’, sweetheart, you’re going to have to pump some serious iron!”

Nastya grinned. Was that a bit harsh? Well, he shouldn’t have started it!

Stripped to the waist, Vadim sat down, stunned. He’d been dismissed. At ease, soldier! Squire and Nikita were clearly feeling uncomfortable too. Squire muttered something along the lines of, “Well, we can’t all be bodybuilders…”

“What a bitch!” thought Vadim. “What was that all about? I was going to read her my poems, sing to her, even… And I almost did it too! Bloody hell…” It was the first time Vadim had been rejected so blatantly, and he was shocked. Shocked to the point of admiration, which is not uncommon. Grabbing the can of beer, he poured what was left into his and Nastya’s glasses.

“Well, cheers! You’ve certainly got a sense of humour…”

Seeing that the beer had run out, Squire sighed with relief. It was the middle of the night and they should have gone to bed hours ago. He couldn’t wait for the evening to be over, especially after that last little episode. They’d stayed up too late tonight.

“Right then, people, bedtime! What time are you planning on hitting the road tomorrow?”

“It takes about forty minutes to get to the highway from here, doesn’t it?” Nikita mused aloud. “In that case, around seven or eight. But you should probably ask Vadim, really…”

But Vadim had other things on his mind! He and Nastya were building bridges.

“So which are the best bands in Tyumen, then?”

It was no great surprise when Vadim tried to persuade Squire to stay up a bit longer.

“No way, man. You can stay up if you like, but I’m ready to hit the sack.”

“Me too,” interjected Nikita. “Vadim, we’ve got an early start tomorrow…”

“Yeah, OK,” said Vadim, ignoring him. “Squire, where can we get more beer round here?”

“Well, it’s your call. Personally, I wouldn’t go wandering round the streets at this time of night. It’s pretty rough out there, what with the gangs of kids, the local hard-nuts, and all that… But if you’re determined to go, there’s a little kiosk not far from here. Turn left when you get outside, then cross the road. Leave the door open on your way out.”

“Don’t be long,” added Nikita.

“We’ll be back in no time!” Vadim picked up his discarded T-shirt and went into the living room. A moment later came the cheerful request, “Squire, can I borrow some socks?”

7

Navigating the spit-covered communal hallway, where even the cats were asleep at this hour, they emerged into the fresh air and the freedom of the night.

It was pitch dark. There were no lights at any of the windows, unsurprisingly, but for some reason the street lamp was also out. Our young couple was swallowed up by the impenetrable darkness, so that only their voices were audible. The front door banged shut. The treetops were stirring anxiously in the wind.

“Oh, lilac!” said Nastya. She could see in the dark, like a cat.

This was followed by the rustling of branches. Obviously Vadim had taken her words like a call to action. You need to watch what you say to inebriated young men.

“Oh, how romantic!” Nastya’s voice was full of sarcasm. “A boy and a girl, a moonlit night… He trespasses on the grass to bring her a stolen bouquet…”

“Oh yeah, a moonlit night! Not a single bloody light-bulb… I nearly broke my leg just then. Here!”

“Well, thank you, kind sir… Charmed, I’m sure!” Nastya burst out laughing.

They continued walking. They weren’t sure which direction they were supposed to be going. In the middle of the courtyard they stumbled into a pile of tar, which was probably intended for roof repairs. At least there was something even blacker than the night!

“Hey, have you ever found a ‘lucky’ lilac blossom? You know, one with five petals?”

“Yeah, loads! Not in the middle of the night, though.”

Vadim grinned.

“I’ve never even found one, can you believe that? It used to really upset me when I was little. It was a constant source of entertainment — whenever anyone brought a big bunch in from the garden the others would look through it until they found one, then they would make a wish and eat it. And they kept finding them. They were always chewing, like cows. I never found a single one! My mum used to feel sorry for me, so she would collect ‘lucky’ flowers for me to eat… But it wasn’t the same.”

“Ah, poor little Vadim.”

“I’ve never seen a lucky omen. One night I was standing out on the balcony, just thinking about stuff, and suddenly out of the corner of my eye I saw a star fall from the sky! I started frantically trying to think of a wish to make… But then the star landed on the grass and disintegrated in a scatter of sparks. It was a cigarette butt! Someone had thrown it from one of the floors above.”

“You, young man, are quite the Lord Byron! However, I feel I should remind you that we haven’t come out for a stroll in the moonlight… We’re supposed to be finding a kiosk, to buy more booze.”

They both laughed. Vadim knew exactly how to react. He should just make light of it all, feign indifference to her barbed comments — that was a weapon against which there was no defence.

“I’ve seen loads of shooting stars since, though. Real ones. Out on the road.”

He really has. Russia’s not like Belgium, where they have floodlights on the motorways so it’s brighter at night than it is during the day. Over here, the highway can be a pretty bleak place at night, without another living soul for miles around. At least, no lights to indicate their existence. It’s just you and the stars — an infinite celestial backdrop, untouched by artificial illumination. This is eternity, in all its immutable desolation. If you tip your head back and look up at the sky when you’re out on the road on a clear night you sometimes feel as though you’re suffocating, choking on the stars. I say no more.

Night is completely different in the city, and not just because of the megawatts of electricity obscuring the sky. At night, when it’s fast asleep, the city is an extraordinary sight, almost absurd. It offers quite different images of eternity, desolation and solitude. After seeing the city alive during the day, swarming with a million inhabitants, it’s strange to see it so dead at night — a nocturnal wilderness of deserted avenues and empty courtyards, all bathed in the eerie glow of security lights and street lamps, each more unnatural and lifeless than the last.

Do you want to know why it’s absurd? Have you ever walked through a deserted city courtyard at 3.00 a.m.? It makes you want to run. Not because you’re worried about being attacked, though… When everything around you is so dead, even the sight of your own shadow and the sound of your own footsteps are enough to drive you mad. It’s even worse knowing that there are people nearby. There must be… Somewhere… But all the windows are dark. So you start to run, scurrying about frantically like a tiny insect. Is it paranoia? Maybe. But still…

“It’s my own stupid fault. I overslept and didn’t get out onto the road until lunchtime. I only made it as far as E-burg on the first day, so today — or was it yesterday? Whatever — I didn’t want to waste any time!” Nastya laughed. “I went straight through Chelyabinsk and made it to Ufa.”

“Cool. I hope we have a day like that tomorrow!”

“I want to get to Nizhny Novgorod tomorrow. That’s probably about as far as I can hope for… And I can always sleep in the woods if I have to. The wildlife’s pretty harmless round there.”

“You’d probably scare it all off anyway!”

Laughing, they stepped into the circle of light cast by a street lamp. Somehow they hadn’t noticed the gang who were now swaggering towards them.

There are certain situations you can read immediately. Humans do have a kind of ‘sixth sense’, a way of silently detecting a subtle change in atmosphere. This sixth sense is what tells you it’s no coincidence that these thugs decided to get up from their bench and stretch their legs just as you approached… In any case, our young couple realised it straight away.

They stumbled and hesitated, but they weren’t about to run away. Maybe it would all blow over. Maybe their ‘sixth sense’ was mistaken. Maybe…

“Stay on my left,” hissed Vadim, through his teeth.

Nastya didn’t move.

The gang of thugs moved into the light and stopped, evidently challenging them to follow suit. They certainly looked the part. One of them was even wearing a flat cap, the trademark of Russian street thugs. I’m sure you don’t need me to describe their shaven heads and fat, thuggish necks.

“Whoa mate, what’s the hurry? Where’re you from?”

“St Petersburg.”

The thugs had a problem processing this piece of information. They’d been expecting him to name one of the other districts in Ufa.

“What are you doing here?”

“Visiting a friend.”

“What’s his name?”

“You don’t know him.”

The thugs thought about this.

“Is she with you?”

“Yes.”

Now they would ask about his hair. Vadim knew this scenario off by heart. God, he was so sick of it… Did none of them have a brain? Or was it the herd mentality? Either way, the first thing any street gang would ask about was the long hair. Or the earring, if you happened to be wearing one.

“What’s with the long hair, mate? Are you some kind of hippy?”

With that, the ringleader put his hand up and touched Vadim’s hair. He even rubbed it between his fingers, as though he were selecting vegetables at the market! That was the final straw.

Now, Vadim was no superhero. He would not have been capable of the kind of intrepid exploits they showed in old Soviet films, like spitting in a Nazi face. His response was more of a spontaneous reflex. Vadim was very protective of his hair and didn’t allow anyone to touch it (except girls), so without even thinking about it he knocked the youth’s hand away. This was the trigger they’d been waiting for.

“You f-f-f…”

(I’m not using ellipses to replace a swear word here, by the way. Those street thugs actually talk like that. It’s a kind of reductive language, if you like. They use it in those ‘prison slang’ songs too.)

The exclamation was accompanied by a swift and effective punch in the face.

Sparks flew and the world began to spin. Vadim’s brain arrived at the logical conclusion that he was lying on the ground, although he couldn’t work out how he’d got there. He could just hear a ringing sound, and there was a high-speed train rushing straight towards him… He later realised that he’d just been looking up at the street lamp as Nastya tried to shake him back to life.

After Vadim fell to the ground, the gang would probably have had a field day with their latest victim if it hadn’t been for Nastya’s resourcefulness. It would have been a waste of time to call for help — they might as well have been in a ghost town, and psychologically it was better to assume that was the case. Better not to expect any help from the local residents. So Nastya’s response was to pick up a stone from the ground and throw it through one of the ground-floor windows. She knew exactly what to do! She knew that people these days are only willing to step forward when it comes to defending their property and saving their own fat, complacent skins.

It worked! The thugs dispersed. Retreating to their own courtyards to hide was not something they would normally consider, but seeing as the enraged owner of the window was going to come out any minute, seeing as the police were bound to turn up… They ran off, calling to one another, making plans for the rest of the night.

Now our young couple had to make their own getaway, because the enraged owner wouldn’t be interested in their version of events. Nastya helped Vadim up, and they ran off in the opposite direction. In the centre of the courtyard, the bunch of lilac blossoms lay abandoned in the circle of light from the street lamp. There were probably some ‘lucky’ flowers among them.

Everything was still and quiet once again. No enraged owner came rushing out. Maybe he was scared, poor bloke. Or maybe he was out. Or maybe… It sounds crazy, but maybe there was no one else in the whole city?

The indifference of the empty avenues, buildings and alleys… The wind chasing a newspaper along the tarmac… This madness… There wasn’t a single soul anywhere, just endlessly unfolding panoramas, like something out of Tarkovsky’s Stalker.

8

Finally, there were the bottles of beer, the reason they’d come out in the first place. The shelves were full of them, all different shades of brown. The all-night kiosk smelled of smoke and the ice melting in the fridge.

Nastya went up to the counter. The girl working there might have been younger than her, but her eyes had already lost their spark.

“Excuse me, could you tell us where the nearest emergency clinic is, please?”

They’d already forgotten about the beer.

The girl looked Nastya up and down in search of obvious injuries.

“Keep walking along the main road until you get to the second bus stop. Then cross the tram ring and follow the fence.”

“Thanks a lot!”

“Look at the state of her!” the girl thought about Nastya, amused rather than annoyed as she usually was. “Dressed like a tramp, and not a scrap of make-up on! Who goes out without make-up on these days? There must be something wrong with her…”

She herself was done up as though she were going into battle. Effectively, she was.

Coming out onto the kiosk steps, Nastya panicked, thinking he’d gone… But no, a shadow peeled away from the wall. Vadim was holding a paper napkin to his broken nose.

“There’s no point!” He was still weakly protesting against the idea of the emergency clinic. “It’s just a broken nose! Feel it yourself if you like, it’s not even dislocated.”

“Don’t be stupid. What if you’ve got concussion or something? You’re going to be out on the road tomorrow. You might die out there… in Systert or some other godforsaken hole.”

“Oh, what delights await me!”

He grinned, and Nastya grabbed his hand and started pulling him along behind her. Meanwhile Vadim kept up his protests.

“OK, look, I’m not registered as an Ufa resident, am I? And I left my passport at home… I mean, at Squire’s place. My blood’s full of alcohol. And anyway, it was a fight! They’ll have to report it to the police!’

“Oh, just be quiet!”

There was a pause, then he laughed and said, “You’re dragging me along like a little boy!”

“What choice do I have, if little Vadim doesn’t want to go and see the nice doctor? Oh, he can be a stubborn little chap when he wants to be. Look at him, digging his heels in and everything!” Nastya started laughing and Vadim played along, pouting and pulling a face like a toddler having a tantrum. Now they were both laughing, and the tension of the situation was diffused. Vadim didn’t put up any more resistance. It was just a shame, the way things had turned out in this damn city! He should have spent the night on the road.

The napkin was wet through and he had blood all over his fingers. The blood had started clotting inside his nose, so he had to do a lot of sniffing and spitting to get rid of it.

“Shit! That was bad luck, wasn’t it? Where did those bastards come from anyway?”

“Just a street gang!” Nastya shrugged. “We should’ve stuck to the main road. You know what city courtyards are like at night… Never a good idea.” She paused. “I was attacked, you know, a few months ago, back home in Tyumen. They broke my nose too.”

“Really? They attacked a girl?”

“What’s the difference? Anyway, they weren’t after me, it was my bag they wanted. They came out of nowhere, punched me in the face and ran off. It was one of those drawstring ones, and I’d customised it… You should have seen it! It looked like a general’s uniform.”

“What do you mean?”

“It was covered with badges and medals. It started when I found a few vintage badges — you know, with revolutionary slogans on, stuff like that — and pinned them on. People noticed, and someone gave me a medal commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of Victory Day. It wasn’t actually that special, but I pinned it on anyway. And that’s how it started. It’s amazing how much of that old stuff people have lying around at home. They just kept bringing me more and more! My best friend Luda’s grandfather died. He was a really good bloke, you know… Anyway, she gave me some of his medals and even promised to give me his Soviet order, but… well, there’s no point now.”

“Hey, I’m sorry you lost it… Maybe I’ll have a go at making one like that myself. But why on earth were you wandering about the courtyards on your own at night?”

“I wasn’t on my own. That’s the whole point. That was the worst of it.”

Nastya’s mood suddenly changed and she retreated into herself. They continued walking in silence along the empty avenue, which was flooded with toxic orange light from the street lamps. The only sound was Vadim forcefully clearing the blood from his nose. Finally they came to the tram ring, which was empty at 4.00 am, of course… The trams were all at the depot, sleeping companionably side-by-side, just like their passengers. There was a white fence on the other side of the ring. Excellent! They were nearly there. Intending to share this with Nastya, Vadim glanced at her then decided against it. “We might not appear to have anything in common,” he thought, “but we’re in this together. A boy from St Petersburg and a girl from Siberia.”

Tyumen! He’d never been there. Maybe he’d go there one day, maybe he’d make it that far… He tried to imagine the city — grey snow piled up along the sides of the roads in winter, minibus taxis, smoke from the factory chimneys a blurred trail in the frozen air. Rows of identical nine-floor apartment blocks, home to Nastya and her best friend Luda. And Luda’s grandfather, once a merry soldier.

There had been hundreds, thousands of men like Luda’s grandfather — full of vigour, optimistic, ‘thoroughly decent chaps’. Who remembers now the military operations in which Luda’s grandfather was wounded and displayed his valour? He and his kind were immortalised affectionately in Soviet literature. Then he became a grandfather, proud and wise, with medals on his jacket and grandchildren on his lap. The same merry soldier. He even had a smile on his face as he lay in his coffin. It was an eerie and pitiful sight.

Then his medals were pinned onto Nastya’s bag. She was even more of a hippy then than she was now… For example, like a lot of young people in Tyumen at the time she used to wear a swastika in her left ear. And the first badges to adorn the famous bag were also in the form of Nazi helmets, though over time they were hidden by the Soviet medals.

You don’t think I’m criticising her, do you? It’s certainly not my place to say, “O tempora! O mores!” It’s more a case of Turgenev’s “eternal reconciliation and life without end”.

Suddenly the emergency clinic swam out of the night — a squat breeze-block building, with its very own moon. Seriously! A flat, round lamp hung over the entrance, flickering weakly and casting as much despondency as the real moon. It was a lonely beacon in the night, attracting only big grey moths and other unpleasant nocturnal insects.

“Looks like there’s a light on in those two windows,” said Vadim after a pause. They’d been looking at the building for a long time. “Huh! I thought there was no one there at first.”

“I thought it looked like a morgue.”

“You’re right, you know. That’s exactly what it looks like.”

They approached the building. The surrounding area looked serene.

“Ufa must be a fairly calm place!” said Vadim, with a dry laugh. “I thought they’d be queuing round the block…”

“Hey, don’t speak too soon! Maybe they’re all inside.”

Vadim cleared the blood from his throat.

But it was just as quiet and empty inside. The only sign of life was a nurse in a dirty robe sitting behind a desk at the end of the corridor. She glanced up as they came in and continued speaking in a bored monotone into the telephone receiver that was clamped to her ear.

“Just stop it, Gleb. You’re crazy. Gleb, you’re behaving like a child. I’ve told you over and over again, and you never listen, do you? Gleb!”

Because she was frequently ill as a child, or maybe because she had overprotective parents, Nastya had spent a lot of time inside Soviet medical institutions. As a result, she had come to hate them with a passion. And here she was again! The cheap linoleum floor stained with various bodily fluids, bloodstains on the deathly pale fabric of the bench… But the main thing was the smell, that sickly smell of disinfectant. It was unbearable.

“I’ll wait for you outside, OK?”

The nurse looked pointedly over at the door of the doctor on duty, indicating that Vadim should go straight in. Honestly! She couldn’t be expected to drop everything to attend to every long-haired hippy that came wandering in with a black eye… Not when she was in the middle of an emotional crisis.

Nastya came out onto the steps and spotted a bench. On closer inspection it was spattered with blood, as though it had come from a torture chamber. She had to sit on the back of it and hunch over, with her feet on the seat. So, what was going on? It had been a particularly bad night, and now there was no chance of getting a decent sleep because she’d have to get up early if she wanted to make it to Nizhny before the following night.

It was that dead hour just before dawn, when you can walk the streets without meeting another living soul and roam the darkest courtyards at your leisure, safe in the knowledge that all the local thugs are tucked up in bed, dribbling onto their pillows and dreaming their innocent dreams.

There was an apartment block behind the emergency clinic, one of those enormous breeze-block monsters built in the late Soviet period. There wasn’t a single light at any of its numerous windows. Surely someone somewhere was awake… No. The entire building was devoid of life.

What was she doing here, alone in this strange, hostile city? She was always alone, always running, running away from herself.

Nastya sat on the bench and cried bitter tears. She felt utterly alone in the universe.

9 Vadim’s Story

I started listening to ‘alternative’ music when I was fourteen. I started with the easier stuff — Mumiy Troll, Spleen, Zhanna Aguzarova’s later stuff, Zemfira’s early stuff. I can remember my mum listening to a couple of songs and saying, “It’s awful! You can’t make head or tail of it. What a load of nonsense!”

I was deeply offended, even though I didn’t understand the words any better than she did. But I didn’t need to understand them! I just knew that those meaningless words expressed a certain view of life. You didn’t really need words at all. Why not just sing a rhythmic collection of sounds? Or sing in Latin, or something… Why not? I couldn’t believe that nobody else had thought of it. I was a musical genius!

When I was fourteen, or rather, the day before my fourteenth birthday, we went out to the country. It was a beautiful sunny evening. You could hear the sound of an electric saw humming. I picked a daisy and started pulling the petals off one by one, trying to work out whether or not I would fall in love at fourteen. I remember picking another daisy and doing it again, because I really wanted the answer to be yes. Why? I wish I knew. My head was so full of nonsense back then.

I think it’s a cultural thing. I mean, just look at the kind of popular culture kids are exposed to these days: 70% of books and 90% of films are about love. Every single pop song is about love, as are most rock songs, and I somehow knew that all the ‘nonsense’ I was listening to was about love too.

I had such a romantic idea of love when I was fourteen! Now I’m twenty, and I’m standing under a street lamp in a strange city kissing an amazing girl called Nastya. We’re kissing cautiously, because we’ve just been to the emrgency clinic about my nose. It’s not broken or anything, but it’s still pretty sore. We even had to go to a kiosk and buy an ice cream in a plastic wrapper for me to hold against it. So now we’re taking our time, kissing carefully, and our tongues are made for each other.

I didn’t have a clue about kissing when I was sixteen or so. My first kiss wasn’t a particularly pleasant experience. I was acutely aware of my sudden proximity to a gaping void, an alien vacuum… then my teeth caught against hers. It was a girl from my class, a straight-A student. She had curly hair and there was something vaguely ethereal about her, and I was head over heels in love with her.

I used to wait for her after school. I kept calling her and telling her how I felt about her. I wrote “Good morning, my love” outside her apartment — or rather, I tried to. Now, of course, I understand why we could never be together. I was a gawky teenager suffering from acne, and I had a stammer too — basically, not much of a catch. Anyway, I managed to gather a few crumbs of happiness from the experience, so I can’t really complain.

One good thing to come out of it was that I suddenly understood all that ‘nonsense’ I’d been listening to! Whereas before I had just liked the sound of Zemfira’s voice, now the lyrics, apparently the same nonsense, made perfect sense. It was quite a shock to realise that every single word was about me, that every word perfectly articulated the way I was feeling. It wasn’t like Latin at all.

When I look at Nastya — I can’t believe I’m actually kissing her! — my head is full of song lyrics, the kind of nonsense that now makes sense. But the real paradox is that when you’re in love you’re the one who doesn’t make any sense. Your thoughts are all mixed up. Only someone else who feels the way you do can understand the rubbish you’re coming out with, and that’s basically the point of all that ‘nonsense’, the way it all works. Simple, really!

I understand it, and she seems to understand too. At least she’s thinking along similar lines… She seems to be talking about her ex-boyfriend now, why they split up, all that stuff, but I’m not even listening. It’s a good thing I’m not jealous of the past. After all, she didn’t know she was going to meet me! But still, I’m curious to know how many boyfriends she’s had. Not many, by the sound of it.

I’ve been with a couple of women — girls, technically, I suppose — but it didn’t mean anything. It was just sex. When we were students it was something you went along with, something you did because everyone else was doing it. Someone’s nicely furnished apartment, expensive vodka poured into a set of matching shot glasses… all very contrived. There might not have been enough snacks to chase the vodka with, but there were always plenty of candles casting shadows that flickered on the walls and made me feel uncomfortable.

When everyone started to pair off and head towards the beds and sofas, not having sex would have been like an insult to the others. I remember one time… It would have been rude to move away afterwards, so I had to go to sleep with my arm around her and my face pressed against her back. It was July and the nights were unbearably hot and humid, and I spent the whole night covered in sweat.

No fun at all, but it was a long time ago. And more than two thousand kilometres away.

Nastya’s walking along beside me in the semi-darkness. The street lamp we’re walking past isn’t working, so I can see her features clearly outlined in silhouette, like a classical sculpture. Her slightly aquiline nose… Her forehead… Her cropped hair…

She lights a cigarette. I admire her profile with the tiny glowing ember.

“D’you want one?”

I don’t really smoke but I have the odd cigarette now and then, if I’m drinking. Or if I’m in a really bad mood. Right now I feel capable of rising up above the tarmac and soaring through the sky. At least I’m experienced enough to take a drag without properly inhaling, so that I don’t start coughing.

We walk and smoke in silence. The city is completely silent. I’m starting to feel a bit rough from the beer, but it’s no big deal — I’m just a bit dehydrated. My mouth feels sticky and I can taste my own teeth. The cigarette is adding an aftertaste of prunes… Sorry! That’s more than you need to know about the state of my oral cavity.

I kiss her again. She presses herself into me. She runs the fingers of her free hand through my hair, and it feels amazing.

“So what’s the distance between St Petersburg and Tyumen, exactly?”

Of course the atlas is in my rucksack, and my rucksack is back at Squire’s squat; I roll my eyes, trying to work it out. I call to mind an image of the Russian Federation.

“About three thousand kilometres. Maybe a bit less.”

“That’s a long way,” she sighs.

“Tell me about it!”

“And think of all the people in between — millions of them! It’s amazing when you think about it, we might never have met.”

Instead of answering I just hold her more tightly.

“You know,” says Nastya, suddenly pulling away from me. “One of my friends married a German guy two years ago. Seriously! She moved to Germany. I can’t remember which city. She writes to me quite often. She misses it here… The German guy came to Tyumen specially to meet her!”

“Bit weird, was he?”

“Why do you say that?” Nastya is offended. “There was nothing wrong with him. He was about eight years older than her, but basically just a normal bloke. He was a bit bald, though… Actually, I’ve noticed on TV too, German men always lose their hair early. Why is that? Is it because of the radiation, or something?”

“Maybe it’s their hormones.”

“German hormones? Don’t make me laugh! Anyway, when this guy showed up he was beside himself with excitement. ‘Siberia! Siberia!’ he kept saying. I’m surprised he didn’t bring a fur coat with him! It was summer, and due to the hole in the ozone layer over Siberia it was about thirty-five degrees. Probably not quite what he was expecting…”

I suddenly become aware that I’m smiling indulgently and quickly straighten my face before Nastya notices. Tyumen was pretty remote, and it must have been the first foreigner they’d ever seen. An understandable reaction!

The ice cream that I’m holding to my face has almost melted and is sloshing around inside its wrapper. Tracing an arc, it falls to the tarmac and lands wetly, like a frog. It occurs to me belatedly (as usual) to offer it to Nastya.

“Don’t worry about it. I don’t eat sweet stuff.”

Just like me. We’re very similar. I keep thinking that. Both inside and out. You can’t really see it right now in the pale light of the street lamps, but the right-hand side of her face is tanned from standing on the side of the road. The unmistakable hallmark of a hitchhiker.

Nastya lights another cigarette. She smokes too much.

A car drives past us on the avenue. It might be the first one we’ve seen the whole time we’ve been walking. The wide avenue is generously illuminated by the street lamps and completely empty. It would be a good place to come rollerblading in the middle of the night, or early in the morning. This vast expanse of smooth tarmac, completely deserted, the wind whistling in your ears and not a care in the world.

“Wait… Let’s just stand here for a bit.”

“Why?”

“Just because.”

I stopped obediently, although at first I didn’t understand why. Then I realised. It was so that this magical night would last as long as possible.

We put our arms around one another and kissed. Nastya buried herself into my embrace, her whole body shivering, and I warmed her up. With her face muffled in my arms, she still managed to cover me with frenzied kisses — my neck, my chest (through my T-shirt), my shoulders. When her lips touched my arm above the elbow, I remembered the conversation over the table at Squire’s place (just a few hours ago, but it seemed like a hundred years!) and tensed my bicep slightly. She kissed it.

“I thought I wasn’t your type! I don’t have ‘wings’…”

She burst out laughing and bit my arm.

“That’s not true. I was just being stupid. You do have wings… The best kind.”

The city sky above us was as full of stars as a city sky can be. My head was full of song lyrics, all jumbled and chaotic… I was happy. I’d found my happiness here, in this strange and distant city. So my journey hadn’t been in vain, after all. After all that travelling, I’d finally found it.

10

Just before sunrise everything in the city faded to grey and seemed to swell up and fill with shadows. Even Squire’s apartment was full of transparent silhouettes and unreliable outlines. Everything seemed exactly as they’d left it a few hours ago. They tiptoed straight into the kitchen, so as not to wake the others.

Nastya poured herself a glass of cool water from the kettle. She was dying of thirst. It was the dregs from the very bottom, and lime-scale deposits swirled thickly in the glass. She would have been able to see them if it hadn’t been so dark.

Vadim went over to the window.

The street lamps were waning against the sky, which had started to grow pale. There were no lights on in any of the windows. It was just after 5.00 a.m.: the deadest hour. When it grew a little lighter, the birds would all start singing simultaneously and then it would seem strange that anyone could sleep through such a racket. But this moment was yet to come. For now, silence reigned and the only movement was the swaying of the trees in the grey half-light before dawn.

“It’s so strange…” began Vadim, clearly unable to get over the way fate had brought them together. “Meeting you here, in this random city… In the Urals, in Asia…”

“Actually, we’re not in Asia,” laughed Nastya. “Ufa’s still in Europe, but tomorrow — today, I mean! — on the way to Chelyabinsk, about two hundred and fifty kilometres from here, you’ll pass a funny monument. It’s like a massive slab of stone, saying Europe on one side and Asia on the other. It’s so weird! Wait till you see it. It’s really off the beaten track. The Ural Mountains… The road twists and turns like a snake — it’s all rocks and ravines, and you won’t come across another living soul. The enormous electricity pylons are the only sign of civilisation. And then all of a sudden, out of the blue, you’re at the border between two continents! It’s like something out of a sci-fi film.”

Vadim stood at the window, crushed and helpless. He was barely listening to her inspired speech. It wasn’t her description of the Urals that had this effect on him…. “You’ll go past,” she’d said. “You,” not “we”.

“So you’re saying that tomorrow — today! — we’re going to go our separate ways?”

This was followed by an awkward silence, during which Vadim couldn’t bring himself to turn away from the window and Nastya couldn’t work out what to say.

“Well… you’re travelling from St Petersburg to E-burg, right? And I’m travelling from Tyumen to Moscow. Neither of us is going to change our plans. We’re each going to stick to our own path. It’ll be better that way. Trust me.”

“But why?” He turned to her, distraught. “Why does it have to be like that? I’ll change my plans for you, if you want me to! I’d be happy to turn around and go to Moscow with you. I don’t care where I go…”

“But what about your friend?”

“What about him? He can go to E-burg by himself.”

They fell silent. Desperate to find a solution, Vadim found himself clutching at straws.

“Or we could stay in Ufa together! Why not? It’ll be like, I don’t know, a kind of impromptu honeymoon! When we got here yesterday evening, we didn’t know any of this was going to happen… Then we found each other.”

“And you got your nose broken.”

“Well, at least you’re wrong about that!”

A forced smile. They can still bring themselves to joke about it! The human spirit is truly remarkable.

“The thing is…” Nastya’s voice suddenly sounded extremely tired and hoarse, from all the cigarettes. “I split up with someone recently, you know. Someone who meant a lot to me. I thought I meant something to him too, but he turned out to be a total bastard. It’s… I don’t really know how to explain it, but it’s like everything inside me is scorched and barren. I felt as though I had nothing to live for! I tried to slit my wrists and cried for months. I can’t go through that again. Getting involved in another complicated relationship right now would be like throwing myself back into the fire! I simply don’t have the strength to fall in love again. Can you understand that?”

Vadim didn’t know whether he understood or not. He didn’t really have a clue what was going on. Since yesterday evening nothing had made any sense.

“See, you say that you’ll go with me to Moscow…” Nastya suddenly became animated, her words tumbling out erratically, emotionally. Her cheeks may well have been flushed; it was impossible to tell, because it was still quite dark. “I don’t care about Moscow! I just want to go somewhere, anywhere! It doesn’t matter, as long as it’s away from home, as far as possible from everyone I know! I need new places, and I need to keep moving… The main thing is not to get attached to anyone. I know I’ll meet people along the way, and that’s fine — I just don’t want them to stick around! I need to be alone. It’s my way of healing my broken heart. And I can only be truly alone when I’m out on the road. Drivers don’t count — they pick you up, they drop you off, and you never see one another again. But I don’t want anyone else trying to get to know me, asking me who I am or where I’m going. Freedom and solitude — yes, that’s what I need right now. Nothing else.”

Vadim didn’t respond. He rested his head on his arms, and to anyone else it might have looked as though he were sleeping. Nastya had nothing more to say either, so the dawn broke that day in complete silence.

Finally there were movements in the living room and Nikita shuffled into the kitchen. Still half asleep, he stood and stared at them in the weak morning light.

“What the hell are you two doing? Are you out of your minds?” He scanned the kitchen for a clock, but there wasn’t one. There never had been. “I can’t believe you’re still boozing. We have to be on the road in a couple of hours!”

His disapproval was obvious from the way he pronounced “boozing”. He was right, none of them should have been drinking in the first place. They were all dehydrated. Nikita turned the tap on and bent his head down to it. The pipe made a loud noise and started shuddering as though it were about to explode. He had to turn it off quickly so as not to wake up the entire block.

“Yeah, you’re right,” declared Nastya. “We probably ought to get some sleep, Vadim. Even a little is better than none. You know you’re going to feel like shit later on.”

Of course he knew it! Lack of sleep is always an issue when you’re out on the road, whether you’re huddled by a roadside verge or spending the night in a rowdy squat. But the real challenge starts when you get into a warm car with soft seats, and the road is nice and smooth… Then you have to fight to stay awake! It’s generally a losing battle, to be honest, but you have to give it your best shot, particularly if your equally sleep-starved long-distance driver is in the mood for a chat. It’s the worst kind of torture. Vadim had on two occasions managed to hold conversations with drivers in his sleep, whilst dreaming that he was talking to someone else entirely… so of course he had no idea what he might have said. He didn’t even want to think about it.

He’d been there enough times to know exactly how he would feel! But he couldn’t help it…

Now the matter was taken out of his hands. After washing her face and rinsing her mouth out (setting the tap off again in the process), Nastya went into the living room to sleep. Nikita had already gone back to bed. So what choice did he have? He wasn’t going to sit there alone listening to the birds. It felt as though both his body and his mind had been wrapped in cotton wool. Vadim followed them into the living room and automatically unrolled his worn-out old sleeping bag. He looked around for somewhere to lie and chose a spot under the table. Now he just needed to find his jumper and fold it up like a pillow… That was the only reason he carried a jumper in July. Where was it? Oh, sod it. He’d have to try and sleep without it.

The sun’s first rays were unbearably yellow. They climbed in through the windows, gradually taking over the whole building. It wasn’t time for alarm clocks yet, and the city was still and quiet. The empty tramlines ran off into the distance, shining like polished gold.

The state highways never slept, although there weren’t many cars out here either at this time of the morning. The sun reflected off the clean, smooth tarmac, turning the roads into mirrors and making it difficult to focus on the road. Most long-distance drivers were still resting, and their KamAZ trucks stood in idle herds at every police checkpoint and roadside café.

It was early in the morning, and things were looking good.

Right now the highway was deserted, and it was hard to imagine a better place than this to put on your rollerblades and skate to your heart’s content, the wind whistling in your ears.

The first ray of sun looked in through the window of Squire’s living room. They were all fast asleep… Or were they? If someone was still awake and crying, it was nobody’s business but their own.

11

I heard once that we only dream in colour when we’re young. Is that true? I don’t know. Maybe it’s just that when you’re older — when your life is taken over by nappies… OK, maybe not nappies but the school reports of your growing offspring, when you’re stuck in a rut at work and there are arguments every evening at home, when you crawl into bed knowing that you have to get up again in just a few hours, cursing your alarm clock — maybe then you’re not capable of dreaming at all. Biologically speaking you are, but not in any real sense.

Once people get past that stage and start heading for senility, when they forget the medical term for the condition they’re suffering and reality contracts and recedes like skin, very often all that’s left is the dreams of their youth. The kind of dreams in which they soared through the sky and saw the world from above… Doctors believe that these dreams are a sign that we’re growing.

I had a dream like that recently. I was climbing a ladder up the side of an enormous factory chimney in the city centre. It was shaky and very high up, with red clearance lights fixed to the sides. And I was up there! I’ve always had a pathological fear of heights, but in the dream I just kept on climbing and climbing. My hands were freezing, because it was winter, and the city lay beneath me enshrouded in frozen, pearl-coloured exhaust fumes. Because of the frost, the smoke from the chimney wasn’t dissipating and stretched into the sky for tens of kilometres. It was thick and soft, like cotton wool, and not all toxic. I know this because I dived into it. Yes, right into the middle of it.

Can you dream the future? Is it possible? Nobody knows for sure, but in his dreams Squire saw the coming winter. There was nothing special about it, incidentally — just another cold, grey winter in Ufa. Cities are pretty much all the same at that time of year. There are the same two types of snow — one is pure white and falls silently, and when you’re far enough away from the factories you can catch it on your tongue; the other is the kind you have to wade through, and its colour is indeterminate. The same trolleybuses, the rank stench of exhaust fumes, the occasional blue-tit and hoarfrost on the trees in the morning. A typical city winter.

That winter Squire was finally kicked out of university. I say “finally” not because I think it’s something you’ve been waiting to hear but because his spectacularly inadequate academic performance had to be addressed sooner or later. On the one hand, it was most unfortunate, but on the other hand by that point he was thoroughly disillusioned by his chosen profession… so it wasn’t worth getting upset about it. At least, that’s what he told himself. He tried his best to reassure his friends too, affecting nonchalance and laughing it off.

What happened next was all too predictable. The cunning zeal of the university’s military department; the uncommon efficiency of the military enlistment office, willing to accept him ahead of the following spring’s conscription round-up; the cold, degrading medical check-up… And basically, that was it. Conscript Squire was told what time and where he had to report for duty and given two weeks to say goodbye to his family and friends.

Squire did actually go back to Sibai, but his parents didn’t shed any tears. It made no difference to them where their good-for-nothing son was — at least this would make a man of him. Once he returned to Ufa the winter days felt long and grey. He managed to fill some of the time retrieving his documents from the university, washing his underwear and buying essentials such as a new razor and a flask. He’d already stocked up on toilet paper.

In a state of mental and physical exhaustion, Squire spent these days on auto-pilot. He spoke in a monotone. He couldn’t believe it — was this it? Was there no way to get out of this stupid situation? He didn’t care about his studies, but really, was this all his life amounted to?

His friends were full of sympathy. Their appalled faces betrayed their horror. Each of them was thinking, “It could have been me!” They spent the last few days before Squire’s conscription wandering aimlessly about the city. They took random trolleybuses to the end of the line, where they would drink beer or vodka before turning around and coming back again. Sometimes they spent the night together. It was a kind of ritual, a farewell send-off.

There’s no point introducing you to Squire’s friends. You wouldn’t remember them anyway, because they’re virtually indistinguishable amongst the thousands just like them — hippies from good families, experimenting with ‘alternative’ lifestyles. Some of them were students who were also about to be kicked out of their academic institutions; one of them, like Squire, already had been. They all looked the same, too: leather biker jackets, heavy boots, shoelaces woven into their hair… They used to congregate at Squire’s place, and now he’d been conscripted they would have time on their hands and plenty to think about during the long winter evenings. Or maybe they’d just find somewhere else to hang out.

In fact, Squire’s friends did have something to occupy them right now, besides wandering aimlessly around the town. They had come up with a plan to sell Squire’s hair. Now, I should probably explain… As we all know, Squire would have his head shaved as part of the army enlistment procedure. In other words, this precious asset that he had been cultivating for over three years would be destroyed by an electric razor in a matter of seconds. They couldn’t allow it! So they decided to cut his hair themselves and sell it to the highest bidder, so that it wouldn’t “fall into enemy hands”. They had to salvage something from the situation.

There were plenty of buyers in the city. Squire’s friends dragged him round, gathering contacts and haggling.

They stopped by a lamp-post to investigate yet another flyer proclaiming ‘We Buy Hair!’ This was followed by the dubious but even more familiar assertion: ‘Best Prices Paid!’ The wind had picked up, causing the edges of the advert to flutter. Squire seemed to be the only one not showing an interest in any of it. His attitude was one of complete indifference, while his friends crowded around the advert, arguing, calculating, showing off their business skills — how their teachers would love to see them now!

“Shit! Is that how much they’re paying these days?”

“Read what it says next… They’ll only pay that if the hair’s thirty centimetres or longer.”

“Damn! His isn’t that long yet.”

And it never would be.

The situation was complicated by the fact that hair shorter than thirty centimetres was accepted by weight, and weighing this particular asset while it was still attached to Squire’s head was clearly going to be a challenge. There were a number of other issues to contend with, as well — for example, almost a third of Squire’s hair would have to be combed out because it was of inferior quality. The whole business was enough to make your (unshorn) head spin, and the owner of the relevant ‘commodity’ was the only one who simply didn’t care enough to try and understand it. He just listened to his friends when they specified the days he ought to wash his hair, because a certain amount of grease would make it heavier.

This ridiculous aspect of his enlistment was probably what Squire found most alarming. The longer they spent hanging about by the advert, the more he began to wish that they would hurry up and cut his hair off so that everyone could finally stop going on about it. This thought was enough to induce a wave of panic — he’d been growing it for so long! Oh, but what did it matter now? He himself had been growing for even longer, and look how he was ending up.

Meanwhile it was decided unanimously that they would call the number on the flyer. The number was duly copied down onto the palm of someone’s cold, dry hand, and they set off in search of a phone booth. None of them had a phone card, so they decided to try and borrow one from someone once they’d found a phone.

In the event, they didn’t have to try too hard. They approached a booth they’d spotted, which was making a soft, metallic noise in the wind and the snow. Just at that moment a pretty girl stepped away from it, wrapped up against the cold, and she kindly lent them her card. This group of strapping lads in leather biker jackets must have made quite an impression on her. They reacted with a great show of enthusiasm — with the possible exception of Squire, who suddenly felt like a ‘non-person’. Why was this happening to him? Why?

Was there any point trying to understand it? Was there any point tormenting himself by thinking about his future and what it would be like? No. There was no point to any of it. He’d messed things up, and now it was all over.

The flat that he’d been subletting had already been returned to its legal owner, Mrs Hassanova, a corpulent, taciturn old woman whose clothes were always covered in the husks of sunflower seeds. On Sunday, his last night of freedom, Squire collected his old posters, his cassettes, the material trappings of his former life, and took them out to the rubbish tip. New tenants would be moving in and redecorating soon — they wouldn’t want his old junk lying around. Squire thought of the confused stares that would greet countless young hitchhikers from all over Russia, who would mutter their apologies before crossing this address from their notebooks.

Towards evening the temperature dropped, and the chill in the air officially became a frost. The park was partially illuminated by the few street lamps that remained intact. Although the paths were empty there was every chance that they might run into one of the street gangs, so perhaps they should have chosen a different route… Never mind! Squire and his friends walked through the park, chatting quietly, the hair had been cut off and sold. Are you wondering what Squire looks like without his hair? Well, I can’t tell you, because he’s wearing a woolly hat. And he’s walking in silence.

His friends continued their half-hearted conversation — discussing how much money they’d made, how much they could have made, how much had been combed out, how much it weighed, and so on. But none of it mattered any more — the deed had been done, and the bottles were clinking in their bag.

They sat down on a bench under a street lamp. This place was just as good as any other.

Squire produced the first bottle of vodka. It was a good one, too — none of that lethal fake rubbish from the workers’ districts.

Their disposable plastic glasses crunched like the snow.

“So, what are we drinking to?” His friends were determined to remain optimistic. “Let’s drink to things working out OK for you!”

They didn’t clink their glasses, but this was purely out of practical considerations — when the air is so cold sometimes all it takes is an awkward touch, a tremble of the fingers, for the plastic to shatter in your hand.

If you have to drink vodka outside in subzero temperatures you might as well not bother, because it doesn’t have the slightest effect. It doesn’t get you drunk. You can’t even feel it! But they had to drink, and that was what they were doing day after day in the run-up to Squire’s departure — an inevitable and compulsory ritual.

Squire heard the jackdaws squawking aggressively and looked out at the darkened park, at the illuminated façade of the House of Culture… The street lamps lining the main road disappeared into the distance, and the factory chimney was adorned with red clearance lights.

Squire cried in his sleep.

12

The alarm went off at 7.00 a.m. and Squire hit it with a groan. At 7.10 a.m. the plumbing system broke into a cheerful grumble as Nikita began his morning ablutions.

Maintaining your oral hygiene can be quite a challenge when you’re on the road. Most hitchhikers tend to solve the problem with chewing gum: minty fresh breath in seconds! But that wasn’t our Nikita’s style… Even if he woke up in a forest somewhere, chilled to the bone, after a good stretch he would ceremoniously extract his toothbrush and squat down by a ditch. As for rinsing his mouth out, well, why do you think he carried a bottle of mineral water? It had the added benefit of preventing terminal dehydration on a hot day on the road.

While we’re on the subject, Nikita’s washing accoutrements really were something to behold. Particularly in contrast to Squire’s filthy bathroom, with its grimy surfaces, stray hairs everywhere, and the cracked toilet seat. Nikita Marchenko always carried a plastic wash bag containing his shaving equipment, his deodorant, a travel toothbrush in its own little protective case, a bar of soap and a barely dented tube of toothpaste. He even had a pair of nail scissors. Good for him! A snagged nail is enough to ruin a holiday.

Nikita belonged to the glorious generation of hitchhikers from good families, with smart clothes and plenty of pocket money. Their life’s path was already determined, and there were no potholes to navigate — just a nice, easy ride.

These boys took to the road, to the anguish and dismay of their doting parents — when they knew about it, of course. You should read Nekrasov’s Russian Women, about Princess Trubetskaya who followed her husband into the depths of the Siberian wilderness — it’s exactly the same impulse.

At 7.15 a.m. Nikita was still brushing his teeth. He knew that he was going to be successful, to get on in life. He knew that it was worth preserving a perfect, white smile, because it could be a valuable asset in years to come.

At 7.20 a.m. all four of them finally sat down at the table for a breakfast of boiled pasta without salt or butter, or any particular enthusiasm on their part. They couldn’t tell whether it was tasteless because Squire had overcooked it or because it was cheap pasta. Either way, they had to eat it. They needed the energy.

“I don’t suppose you’ve got any ketchup, have you?” asked Vadim, who was having trouble swallowing.

“I’m not sure… Have a look in the fridge. Maybe someone left some.”

They continued their breakfast in complete silence, lost in their own thoughts. They all felt apprehensive about heading out to the highway. In their minds they were already out there, on the road, so they didn’t feel much like talking. Or eating, for that matter.

At 7.30 a.m. they began making their final preparations, rummaging around in their rucksacks and tightening the straps on their sleeping bags. Then just one tradition remained. Nikita went up to Squire.

“Have you got a bit of paper? We’ll leave you our addresses in St Petersburg.”

“Just write them on the wallpaper over there in the corner — see?”

Nikita went over to the corner and saw pictures of naked girls mixed up with scrawled addresses, names of cities and so on. He carefully wrote out his address. He always carried a pen with him.

“Vadim, shall I write down your address?”

Vadim nodded and Nikita wrote it on the wall. Then he looked at Nastya and raised his eyebrows questioningly, but Nastya shook her head. He shrugged. Fair enough.

Meanwhile the city was bathed in bright yellow sunlight, and a new day had begun. The buses were full of people. Drivers squinted, giving themselves extra wrinkles, as the low sun shone right into their eyes. They searched for their sunglasses and put them on. A man drove briskly past on a tractor. An old man set out for a walk, carrying a stool. Scenes from an ordinary morning in a big city.

A stout gentleman comes out of a building. Before getting into his posh car, he looks around furtively and leaves a bag full of rubbish by the front door. At that moment a window bangs open and an old woman sticks her head out. This is precisely what she’d been waiting for! She’s not going to stand for it.

“Young man! Who’s going to tidy that up?”

“You are,” he replies, as he walks towards his car.

“The bins are over there!”

“Thanks for letting me know,” he retorts, and then he gets into his car and drives off.

These days, squabbles on public transport are a thing of the past. Oh, how sparks used to fly! There was always such a crush, people pushing and shoving… that was communism for you! They have been replaced by a new phenomenon — GAZelles.

GAZelles essentially operate as shared minibus taxis, following set routes, but they’re so much more than that! They’re a kind of subculture, and they follow their own rules — crossing abruptly from the third lane straight into the first, sudden starts, ‘emergency’ stops and so on. Their drivers’ psychology is different too — they need the money! You must have witnessed it. For example, when a GAZelle minibus approaches a bus stop it watches for the slightest movement to indicate that anyone wants to get on. So the potential passengers sit there waiting, trembling nervously and watching one another’s reactions. All it takes is the twitch of an eye and the GAZelle screeches to a halt. Another example… A lilac GAZelle approaches a stop, and a boy who wants a good seat runs alongside it, grabs the door handle and leads the minibus to a complete stop, like the boy holding the reins in Petrov-Vodkin’s Bathing of a Red Horse.

No, you can say what you like, but in the city GAZelles are a way of life.

Another peculiarity of GAZelles is that they all have three or four rear-facing seats at the front, just behind the driver’s seat. If you end up sitting in one of these seats you have to put up with everyone else staring at you, and there’s nothing you can do about it! You look pointedly out of the window, deliberately ignoring the boy over there who’s devouring you with his eyes. That’s if you’re a girl, of course…

That’s where Nastya was sitting, right in the firing line. The minibus was virtually empty, so it wasn’t too bad, but the other passengers were staring straight at her. They were probably trying to work her out… What does she look like? Why isn’t she wearing any make-up? She’s dressed like a tramp… And why’s she got that huge rucksack with her?

Nastya couldn’t have cared less! Let them look. She was used to it. People were always staring at her as if they were in a zoo. She concentrated on looking out of the window, though the minibus was going so fast she could barely make out the view. It was heading to the Zaton district. Squire had written directions on a piece of paper for the police checkpoint in Zaton, which was the starting point for the M7, the Volga highway.

Nastya had already checked their progress with the driver a couple of times. Unusually for a hitchhiker, Nastya had absolutely no sense of direction. She found it impossible to get her bearings in the city. But they weren’t in the city any more! They were driving past trees and forests.

The GAZelle took a turning and pulled up at the side of the road, raising a cloud of dust.

“The checkpoint’s that way,” said the driver, indicating with his hand. “Keep walking for about three hundred metres and you can’t miss it.”

“Thanks!” Nastya held out her fare. The coins had warmed up in her hand.

“Don’t worry about it,” winked the driver. “Hitchhikers travel for free!”

Nastya thanked him sincerely. She jumped down from the step and set off, without a backwards glance at the other passengers, who were all watching her through the windows… Their curiosity had tripled.

It was nothing, really. Literally six roubles. But still, it was a nice feeling.

She walked along the roadside verge feeling cheerful, energetic and almost happy.

Meanwhile the boys were heading out onto the Ural highway, and their mood was very different. Squire had helpfully written down all the minibus taxi routes for them too, and as they travelled across the city Nikita tried to lift his friend’s spirits. Gazing out of the window at the city outskirts, he sighed and said, “We didn’t get to see much of Ufa, did we?”

Vadim nodded limply, but his thoughts were elsewhere.

So it was in silence, wearily and reluctantly, that they came out onto the highway, to the same spot where they’d been dropped off the previous day. They ambled across the wide intersection, two tiny figures laden with rucksacks.

The highway was virtually deserted. Just as they reached the verge, a lorry rumbled past at high speed, its canvas covering flapping enthusiastically on both sides.

“It’s from Chelyabinsk, that one.” Nikita nodded at the disappearing truck and added good-naturedly, “Bastard… He could have stopped!”

“Seventy-four… is that Chelyabinsk?” asked Vadim, perking up a little. “I ought to remember that… What’s Sverdlovsk?”

“Sixty-six.”

They walked a little further until they reached a reasonably straight stretch of road, then they stopped. It was time to split up.

This is probably the hardest thing about travelling as a group, when one says, “OK, I’ll stay here,” and the others say, “See you later.” Gradually the group gets smaller and smaller, until each of them is standing alone by the side of the road. I seem to remember a fairy tale like that, where all the characters say goodbye and disappear, one by one. Can’t remember what it’s called, though.

One of them had to go first. Nikita wanted to make sure it was fair.

“Go on, you go. It’s your turn.”

“I couldn’t possibly! Not with your track record… If I get a head start as well, you’ll never catch up with me! It’s best if you go first. Go on!”

“Let’s hope we both make it to E-burg tonight!”

They shook hands and Vadim walked away — to be honest, with a sigh of relief. Nikita was a great guy and didn’t ask too many questions, but right now he needed to be alone.

Vadim stopped about two hundred metres further along the road and looked back. He could still see Nikita, and the city in the distance. He could see them clearly because he was standing with his back to the sunrise — they were travelling east. There weren’t many cars.

Half an hour later Nikita finally got a lift — a young couple in a Moskvich, as far as he could tell. Nikita managed to wave apologetically through the window as they drove past. And then Vadim was alone.

I’m going to let you into a little secret. Vadim never turned down the chance to go last, and not simply out of comradeship. He had come to look forward to the overwhelming sense of melancholy that envelops you when the door slams, your friend drives off and you suddenly realise that you’re alone on the bleak and endless highway. The realisation is always sudden and strong enough to take your breath away. The sense of solitude is striking, almost palpable, and infinitely more intense than the loneliness you feel in the city.

Maybe this is what it all came down to. Maybe this feeling — this vivid, exhilarating feeling — was the reason Vadim liked hitchhiking so much.

Many words and expressions used by Russian hitchhikers have been borrowed from English, but the roads, the solitude and the melancholy are quintessentially Russian.

Translated by Amanda Love Darragh