On The Couch

‘Shall we make our beds?’ I offered helpfully. Knowing where I’d be sleeping would be one comfort. Olga directed us straight ahead with an outstretched arm: ‘I have bedding if you need.’ Ollie and I entered the living room (though any evidence of life here had long since departed) and Olga discreetly left us to it. Yet we continued to behave as if she were still in the room; no conspiratorial whispering—we were still being ‘good’.

There, in the darkest corner of a long, low-lit room (most bulbs had blown) was my couch—an actual couch. Apparently from the 1980s (though it looked 1970s—maybe that was the Russian delay), it was a coffin-sized rectangle of foam upholstered in a brown and beige, zigzag-patterned, coach-seat fabric. Ollie said he’d prefer the retro, canvas camp bed, which didn’t look comfortable but, he insisted gallantly, its wonky elevation would be good for his leg. The fact that Ollie and I would be sharing a room—a first in our long history—was vaguely unsettling, but it was the least of our new experiences. What was more overwhelming was suddenly finding myself in the slipstream of someone else’s life. I was wearing Olga’s slippers, breathing her air and shadowing her life. It all felt extraordinarily random.

We regrouped with Olga in the hallway, and handed over our gift. In response to our invitation, she’d politely suggested a book of our choice, and we’d picked a photographic compilation, London Through a Lens. She unwrapped it, peered at it, flicked through it, but it was impossible to decipher her half-nod, halfsmile and restless hands. Maybe we’d embarrassed her.

‘Would you like a drink?’ Olga offered.

We repaired to her modest kitchen, which looked unchanged since the 1950s—rose-print kitchen units, an electric oven and a quaint, rounded, ceramic sink—and sat at a humble breakfast table.

‘I’d love a drink of water,’ I supplicated.

‘Oh. That could be a bit difficult.’ She looked mildly ashamed. ‘You can’t drink the tap water here.’

She poured the tepid remains of water from the kettle into a teacup for me. Ollie and I were starving.

‘Do you do much cooking?’ Ollie asked.

‘I don’t cook for couchsurfers,’ she said with surprising frankness. ‘I just cook for myself. It’s not so tasty; it’s very basic things. But you can help yourself.’

She opened a monastic-looking fridge to reveal eggs, bread and cheese. A sticker on the door read WHERE ON EARTH IS PERTH?

‘From a couchsurfer,’ she said.

Now that our first living-and-breathing couchsurfer was firmly in our clutches, we cross-examined her with our entry-level questions. Forget Putin and polonium—what we really wanted to know was: how was it with other couchsurfers? Was it strange the first time she hosted?

‘It was something unusual,’ she said, smiling quietly, ‘so I didn’t know what to do.’

That was at least reassuring. Telling us how she’d hosted a male English teacher for six days, I wondered how this shy sparrow had coped, and then I thought, maybe it was our gaucheness polluting the atmosphere. I was looking forward to when this all felt more normal.

‘Did you ever give any bad references?’ I asked, trying to feel for the edges of this experiment.

‘Most people don’t leave negative references unless it’s really bad,’ Olga replied. ‘I had a couple of fairly bad guests, though they never broke or stole anything. ‘I did hear that one host found their guest shooting up.’

Olga’s ‘worst ever guest’ treated her like his servant, asking her for tea, coffee, to buy his train ticket, ‘Can I have my breakfast now?’

‘He asked for many, many things like this, and he didn’t bring anything,’ she said, softly indignant.

Our problem was the opposite: British reserve and a keen concern for etiquette. Perhaps ten weeks of couchsurfing would knock it out of us. Still, at least first-time guests were still grateful. There was obviously some delicate balance to strike, somewhere in between excessive courtesy and taking liberties.

As for sexual harassment, she’d received messages, from mostly Turkish and northern African men, saying, ‘You look nice—let’s be friends.’ Impossible, given that Olga’s profile picture was of foliage. I’d noticed girls who seemed naked in their profiles, I said.

‘Yes, probably,’ she laughed timidly. ‘And they never look as good as their picture.’

The 1950s standard wasn’t so welcome in the bathroom: there was no lock (the door didn’t even shut), the single-ply toilet paper was the colour of Jiffy bag stuffing, and above the sink was an old-fashioned shaving brush, some wooden combs and antique mildew.

Back in the kitchen, the wine came out. ‘It’s only cheap and sweet,’ Olga apologised, adding, ‘It’s how I like it. Would you like some?’

‘Oh—only if you’re having some.’

‘No, no, please have if you like.’ She poured from an open bottle labelled ‘La Jeunesse’. Nibbling on past-it black and white grapes, Ollie and I smiled away our hunger. There was a couchsurfing house party that night, Olga said, the leaving party of an Irish couchsurfer called Donna. Result. We’d just inherited her social life—it felt liberating to have to go with it.

En route to the party, Olga pointed out one of the Kremlin’s potent red stars atop its spiky towers. A volt of joy fizzed through my body: we had a house party, a hand-holder and a local guide through Europe’s largest city. We passed a street kiosk and refuelled on public-transport-grade potato-filled pirojki pies, too flabby and tepid to be savoured.

Inside another anonymous Soviet apartment block, past a fourfoot—high mound of coats, twenty-five-odd twenty-somethings were mingling amongst the scatter cushions and up-lighters. The first four guests we encountered had been made redundant. ‘Actually, it freed me,’ said a Russian in a blazer. ‘There’s no point for career now. So I just go travelling.’

Donna turned out to be Donagh, a young male architect with warm freckles and black, curly hair, and also an open future—like us, he was heading east on the Trans-Siberian. We ricocheted around the party as the only itinerants; everyone else lived in Moscow. Wasn’t that strange?

‘We are networking,’ admitted a Siberian lawyer.

Tom, a British accountant, said it was an ex-pat thing.

‘Yes,’ added the Siberian, crisply, ‘Russian girls go to couchsurfing parties to meet foreign men.’

I nudged Ollie.

‘Let me tell you about Moscow women,’ said Tom. Ollie and I leant in. ‘There are more women than men, so while they’re better-looking than the men, they have to work a lot harder. It’s why you see feisty, dressy Russian women alone in bars—they’re competing for limited resources.’ But there wasn’t a novi Russki in sight: the demographic here was one of middleclass, bright young things, computer literate and emancipated. And English-speaking. Finding a Cossack while couchsurfing was going to be unlikely.

‘Oh, you’re in really capable hands with Olga,’ said Sarah, a bubbly Irish girl with bubbly, coiled hair. ‘She’s probably the most professional host here. She knows exactly how to be, without being obvious about it. If she doesn’t like you, she’ll diplomatically let you do your thing.’

With impeccable timing, Olga announced she was going home, adding, ‘Who is the most responsible person here?’

She elected Tom to get us home, drew us a map and gave us some keys. Tom took us to a snug indie club where we learned about the Russian mafia non-scene.

‘Oh, there is no more Mafia—they just became corrupt businessmen or politicians where there’s more power.’

And about the ‘blacks’: labour migrants from the ‘Stans—Tajikistan, Dagestan, Uzbekistan.

‘The Russians treat them worse than animals.’

But eventually the public displays of Russian passion around us became insufferable, so he sorted us a ‘gypsy cab’, a Tajik worker with his own Lada, and we returned to Pushkin Square to make an ill-advised friendship with a burger shack—toxic coiled sausageskis in white sliced bread that could have been moulded from foam. Still, slathered in mustard, ketchup and mayo, it became a meal. We’d be back.

12TH OCTOBER

8am. Ollie’s alarm was screaming—he’d forgotten to turn it off from the day before. He slept on, but after just four hours’ sleep, I couldn’t. Grey daylight seeped in and the rain bore down. I peered out of the window. Amongst all the cloned, beige-brick residential blocks, I saw in one corner ‘1956’ picked out in red bricks. In the apartment’s oppressive silence, I didn’t know what else to do but return to my couch. Only now, sober, did I realise it smelt faintly of unwashed bodies and that under the thin foam was a rigid wooden board—it was like sleeping on a door. In the heat I was too uncomfortable to sleep. I thought about tea and food, and sent texts to The Emperor. We’d become so twinned I was finding it hard to cut off.

Some hours later I finally tiptoed out and stop-started my way towards the kitchen, hesitating outside Olga’s bedroom for an argument with myself: say good morning; no, don’t bother her. Well, you can’t just march into her kitchen. I’m hungover, I’m not in the mood. Well, that’s not good manners…

In London, I either lived alone or with The Emperor—I wasn’t used to dealing with people not on my terms.

Knock, knock.

‘Good morning,’ I croaked.

Olga was communing with her laptop at a wooden desk, in a study half the size of our room with a sofa like mine and no other sleeping apparatus—the sofa was her bed.

‘Hello,’ she replied.

She got up and formally introduced me to the kitchen. A waft of cooked eggs lingered.

We chatted briefly, then she returned to her room. Too inhibited to whip up a full breakfast, I poured myself a water from the kettle. This, I realised, was the point of Pay it Forward. If I’d hosted first, I’d feel more right to hospitality.

After a time, she returned.

‘Have you had breakfast?’ she asked.

‘Actually, I’d love a cup of tea.’ What I really wanted was a cappuccino.

‘Bfff, of course!’ From a tiny pot crammed with loose black tea, she poured a strong, cold shot into a mug and topped it up with boiling water—chai, Russian style, no milk. ‘Try some kefir as well—it’s good for hangovers.’

‘Sure!’ I pursed my lips to test the buttermilk. It was sour and unfriendly. ‘Maybe it needs sugar,’ I said, trying to sound optimistic.

The digital age might have brought instant connections, but that didn’t mean instant friendship. A force-field of unfamiliarity separated us. Olga hung around, so I had to sing for my breakfast. I didn’t feel like small talk, but I was couchsurfing: I had no choice. Eventually, Olga left to see her parents, and in her place, Ollie arose, boldly putting his foot up on the sideboard in the kitchen. He pulled up his trouser-leg to reveal a swelling the size of a computer mouse.

‘It’s not as bad as it looks,’ he said.

It looked hot and angry. I wasn’t convinced.

‘Chai?’ I offered. ‘Black, one sugar, coming up.’ I ferreted through her cupboards, looking for sugar. It felt strange to sense some kind of ownership over someone else’s apartment.

‘Arghhhh!’ Ollie had found a problem with the tea.

‘Did you burn yourself?’

‘No—you put salt in my tea. If Olga had made it, I probably would have politely drank it: ‘Hmm, this curious Russian speciality!’’

We made it into Moscow as the sun was setting. We ran dull errands, refuelled, and then met Olga at the beautiful 1930s Komsomolskaya metro station under the mosaics honouring its workforce, the Komsomol (or Communist Youth League). Olga was going to help us buy our Trans-Siberian rail tickets. ‘Always remember that the host is doing the surfer a favour,’ the website had chided. I couldn’t forget. She assumed the mothering role and we became the children: we’d left our passports and cash behind, turning a fifteen-minute task into one and a half hours.

‘I must have taken seven or eight of my guests to get their train tickets,’ Olga said.

I was confused: I felt guilty, and yet, it seemed, this was standard. The kindness of strangers—it really existed.

We felt an urge to take Olga to dinner. She chose an art-café-cum-bookshop, Bilingua, and, as we chatted, she told us how she had a ‘very special criterion’ when couchsearching. She’d search for ‘Godard’ or ‘Truffaut’ to locate fellow French cinema fans. She told us about Russia’s Country Ambassador, something of a celebrity in Moscow: a Philippino diplomat who often had four or five surfers staying at one time; he’d had over a hundred guests this year.

‘I don’t like it when homes are like hostels,’ Olga frowned.

There was even a couchsurfing monastery, she said, just outside Moscow: one shared room for couchsurfers, a curfew, and a task, such as painting the walls. Like opening a matrioshka, those sets of Russian nesting dolls, Olga’s twitchy, nervous shell had fallen away, and she seemed at last relaxed. Finally, the act of welcoming us into her home didn’t appear so masochistic.

We headed back and, unbidden, Olga looked up our train times and wrote out a role-playing station script for next time. And as we ate into her bedtime, my couchsurfing guilt reappeared. Christ, was this going to be like catholic guilt? I went to the kitchen to make tea, and found myself washing up, thinking about the selfish rewards of altruism: had Olga, too, gone to bed feeling good? Outside I heard the ghostly clatter of horses’ hooves—Olga had told us earlier that they belonged to gypsy girls who used them to beg. It was my reward.

13TH OCTOBER

Moscow Sights Seen So Far:

 The metro system;

 The railway station;

 A Russki hair salon (I had amused myself with a Moscow makeover, hairspray finish and everything).

Not exactly Top Ten. Couchsurfing, with all its social and organisational demands, was eating into our tourists’ needs, but then,we’d seen a very different kind of tourism—intimate tourism.

But we were just getting to know our host and our little party was over: we had to leave Olga’s at 7am the next day to meet Max, our second Moscow host (‘Please arrive at 8am—I have a very hard day.’). Couchsurfing Rule Numero Uno: guests defer to hosts. Olga assured us she’d get up early to say goodbye. She really was the sweetest thing, I said to myself, mentally composing my very first positive reference.

14TH OCTOBER

‘When you come out of the metro, you’ll see a supermarket, then we are house 36.’ A riddle wrapped in a Soviet apartment block.

Metro—check. Supermarket—check. Time check: 8.10—a little late. But house 36? House even? Encircled by row upon row of dirty white, high-rise blocks, we were stumped. We sent out a Mayday to Max, but by 8.50 (a lot late), there was still no word. We called him (wasn’t that the sound of a man freshly woken?), and received our instructions for the final stage.

The smell came first—the fetid smell of fermenting men. At the foot of the twenty-storey Block 36, four red-faced, leering drunks swayed in the wind; a fifth was retching over clutched knees. We picked our way past the broken bottles, suspect puddles and a dark-skinned, obese woman slumped in the janitor’s cabin, and into a lift. One hour late, we got our hands on the prize.

Max, rangy in jeans and a Cambodia T-shirt and with the flat, fringed haircut of a young geography teacher going on fifty, bounced out to greet us with a laughing, long-armed hug. Sleep creases marked his smooth Pinocchio cheekbones. ‘Lock the door behind you!’ he said merrily, as we followed him through two solid steel doors and straight into a glittering coral-pink hall resembling a camp Santa’s grotto. We were equipped with slippers (leather for the boys, flowery pink towelling for the girls), and led off the hall into a small room containing a brown velour ‘super deluxe’ sofa.

‘Yesterday,’ clucked Max in a singsong voice, ‘ve vent to ze couchsurfing film night, on ze Irish independence!’

‘Oh yes?’

‘Ve vatched ze Bloody Sunday, khuh khuh!’

We courtiously laughed back, and Max took to his computer. I slumped dysfunctionally on my new bed; I’d had on average four hours’ sleep a night at Olga’s.

‘Zere’s anozzer couchsurfer vere you sleep. Yvonne from London!’

I was confused, but too strung-out to pursue. Max fiddled with his computer, putting disks in, taking disks out, taking work calls (aged thirty-five, he worked in logistics, he told us), then, with a grin the size of his face, he presented us with a commemorative Moscow photo disk.

‘So, Max, have your other couchsurfers struggled to find your place?’ I bleated. ‘All the blocks look the same!’

‘Khuh khuh! Ve khave a film zat is set around New Year’s Ev, ze main kholiday in Russia. So, it’s usual to go to ze banya to clean your body and mind at zis time. When you go to ze banya, you take wodka. So, in zis film, four men khad drunk so much…’

To shear back a long and tangled shaggy-dog story, Max was recounting a much-loved Russian film by the director Eldar Ryazanov, which was shown on Russian TV every New Year.

‘It’s called The Joke of Your Life,’ he explained.

The plot followed a drunk Muscovite who mistook a Soviet apartment in St Petersburg for his own, as the addresses coincided, the appearances coincided, the interiors coincided; even the key worked.

‘It’s based on Soviet style of life,’ explained Max. ‘For foreign person, it’s difficult to understand.’

We understood.

Yvonne, a wan, thin girl with straggly, long hair, emerged from the kitchen. So that’s where we’d be sleeping; I hadn’t done that since drunken student days.

Max hooted, ‘Breakfast Included!’

The opposite of Olga, extroverted, jokey and unselfconscious, he made me feel instantly cosy. In the kitchen, against a pumpkin-coloured backdrop, rested a pumpkin-coloured sofa bed. Claustrophobically small, it was in fact rather like being inside an actual pumpkin. What space remained was serried with panpipes, fridge magnets and ethnic masks—Max’s apartment was a shrine to travel. If travel was Max’s religion, couchsurfers were its disciples—for Russians, visas were difficult to obtain, Max told us, and air travel was expensive: in times of need, couchsurfers brought the world to him.

’s phone rang again, so we acquainted ourselves with our compatriot. Couchsurfing was an obvious starting point (and current obsession).

‘It would be quite lonely without couchsurfin’,’ Yvonne explained in her London accent. ‘I’m twenny-one, I’ve got £1,000 to travel indefinitely. I’m going to Mongolia, China, India, Tibet, Nepal, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam…I can teach but I’d rarver not.’

Yvonne’s conversational coffers seemed infinite—and so she went on. She’d been staying at Max’s for a week, but she’d evidently earned her moral right because she’d hosted a lot in London. She recounted how two guests had paid for her National Express ticket so she could show them Stonehenge, and how one girl had asked for the vacuum cleaner (‘My house isn’t completely spotless, right’) and left after an hour.

Max returned and busied himself with breakfast: tea in glasses and a large bowl of chocolates and wafers.

‘Zere’s not so much sugar so I khave some khow-do-you-say…blackberry.’

I gamely put some jam in my tea and took a chocolate for breakfast, but the wrapper wouldn’t budge so I aborted. Max spooned soupy chocolate spread straight from a bowl into his mouth. I went to refill the kettle from the tap, but Max leapt up, saying ‘No, no!’ and ladled a cup of water from a large pan. The point of couchsurfing was being played out—we were experiencing a new ‘normality’. A random bloke sloped in, helped himself to tea, offered legal-minimum pleasantries, and sloped out.

‘Khe’s out-of-verk computer programme,’ explained Max. ‘Khe’s my permanent couchsurfer. Khuh khuh.’

’s was evidently a hospitality that didn’t say no.

With a stomach-turning collection of corpse-long and broken fingernails, Yvonne clawed a number into her mobile.

‘So can I crash your language class today?’ she drawled into the mouthpiece. ‘Cuz you said the ovva day I could sit in on your Russian class?’ Yvonne was looking for a pen.

‘Ruchka!’ enthused Max. ‘Tsat’s ‘pen’ in Russian. ‘Arm’ in Russian is ruka, so pen is little arm!’

Yvonne scratched down the new word in her exercise book. It seemed they had a good tutor-student relationship going on.

Max had to drive out of Moscow, so we gathered ourselves to leave with him; there were no spare keys and we’d have to stay out all day.

‘Zere’s a couchsurfing party tonight. Someone is presentation khis trip to China.’

He furnished us with the address, and the three Londoners disentangled themselves from this force of positive energy and returned to the real world.

Passing thunder-faced, potato-bodied babushkas selling kittens in cardboard boxes, we advanced in the drizzle to Red Square. In my sleep-deficient state, Yvonne’s motormouth was bringing out my misanthropy. Gone was my rictus smile—compulsory companionship had gone unquestioned when there was a motive but now I dropped back while Ollie and Yvonne swapped India stories. Yvonne expressed an interest in going to the State History Museum so I expressed an interest in the Kremlin. Bye-bye Yvonne: she’d be moving to a different host later.

Rocking up at a Russian house party felt a little peculiar without Max, and with no introduction other than the fact that We Too Were Couchsurfers. But, we reminded ourselves, couchsurfing was an open community, plus we’d come well stocked with ingratiating party provisions. Inside, we couldn’t get past the human log-jam in the hall; the bilingual slideshow on China was taking place in an impenetrable bedroom. Conversation was unavoidable. Finding myself in front of two Californian sisters tucking into bowls of borscht, we got talking. They didn’t know anyone either, and were staying at a hostel. Not wanting to be with all the tourists, they had checked out Moscow’s couchsurfing group, and this party was posted on it.

A Kazakh girl invited me into a ‘secret’; she’d met her boyfriend when couchsurfing with him in Paris.

‘We were reading my English-Russian manual together,’ she whispered. ‘I was very tired so I leant my head on his shoulder…’ Why the whispering?

‘To stop others thinking that they’ll find love on the couchsurfing site and messaging random girls.’

I told her we were on our way to Kazakhstan.

‘I sympathise,’ she quipped. ‘In Moscow, nobody ever looks at you in the street. In Kazakhstan, they do. They’re checking your nose hasn’t turned white with frostbite—it can be—40°C in the winter.’

Beyond the capacity of my imagination, it just sounded exciting. Naivety was remarkably motivating.

‘Everyone leave now!’ shouted the flushed Russian host. ‘We’re all going to a café down the road!’

Nobody budged. Nobody could.

Eventually, the host got his way, so we returned to Max’s and convened in the kitchen. As we snacked on bread and bananas from our own supplies, Max quizzed us on all matters travel.

‘Show me rucksack! Vot about sleeping bag? Khow much you pay?’

We presented him with our gift, a Lonely Planet guide on Thailand (he’d dropped a hint in an email while we were in London) and he yelped with joy.

‘Natalie!’

His tiny, mouse-like girlfriend scurried in wearing mintgreen loungewear with SWEET GLAMOUR twinkling in green crystals.

‘Try ze rucksack!’ said Max, excitedly.

My rucksack practically toppled her, but she beamed. Their delight infected us all. Natalie didn’t speak English so Max seamlessly ran two conversations without ever revealing the strain.