On The Couch

By 1am, we could delay the inevitability of kitchen camping no more. We pushed the kitchen table right to the wall and unfolded the sofa-bed—the kitchen disappeared. I filled my empty water bottle from the just-boiled kettle—the only drinking water I could find—and the plastic warped. I wasn’t used to having to think about where I’d get my water. I sandwiched myself between Ollie and the wall and we killed the lights, but the glow from the appliances’ LEDs held their steely gaze on us. I couldn’t sleep: the fridge was whirring, I was boiling, I had a dead arm from the wooden ‘mattress’, and there was a foreign body in my bed snoring. Meanwhile, my mind was imploding from the day’s events. Was it really only this morning that we were lost in transit? It felt like we’d lived a week in one day.

15TH OCTOBER

‘I vont to khave breakfast!’ Max, in football shorts and his Cambodia T-shirt, entered the kitchen—it was rather like joining us in bed. All evidence of the night was efficiently tidied away, and Max set about producing a Heidi-style brunch: watery cabbage soup in need of salt, with trace elements of onion and carrots; smetana; chewy, sour black bread; and spineless ‘Russian standard’ cheese. Random Bloke joined in, and he and Max chatted in Russian. I was grateful not to have to join in, since I couldn’t think of anything to say. I just wanted coffee. Which wasn’t included.

Mystified by the ease with which Max played host, I asked, was the concept of couchsurfing intrinsic to the Russian psyche?

‘Yes!’ he said, practically bursting. ‘I met man in Kiev at ze station and khe invited me to stay khis khouse. Russians are wery khospy-table.’

I, too, could accommodate people on my kitchen floor, but it would take a Blitz for that to happen.

‘Okay, you do the voshing-up!’ Max left the kitchen and it struck me that the couchsurfing dynamic was all about sub/dom. Max was instinctively dominant and we happily submitted. Maybe it could also work as a dom/dom dynamic, and even dom/sub, with a guest dominating a submissive host. But when both were submissive, as it had been with Olga, it left the relationship needing a kick.

‘Perhaps that’s what I should do,’ Ollie piped up. ‘I’ll get couchsurfers into my house, and say to them, ‘You can stay in my house, but you do the washing-up.’

Max returned with his Moscow guide book: ‘You could go here, you could go here…’

Actually, we said, we were interested in the All-Russia Exhibition Centre (a Monaco-sized tribute to Soviet glory). Max seemed unconvinced, but went to print out notes. Now a troika, Max, Ollie and I left the apartment. Feeling shattered, I wished we were a deux. We passed the obese woman in the janitor’s cabin and Max explained that yes, she did live in that one tiny room.

‘Rent is wery expensive in Russia. She’s probably from Uzbekistan. Zey take zose jobs.’

Ollie couldn’t have told me that, I thought to myself.

Outside, Max hucked and spat on the roadside. I sneezed. Ollie blessed me. ‘Yes,’ said Max, ‘Cheers!’

First we visited Moscow’s space park, where a one-hundred metre tall, titanium totem to The Conquerors of Space pointed vertiginously skywards. As we walked down the Avenue of Cosmonauts, Ollie struggled to keep up with Max’s long strides; despite our polite requests, the pace never slowed. Ollie wisely sat out the Monaco-sized glory park. Max guided me indefatigably round the eighty-two Stalinist pavilions, Gagarin’s Vostok rocket and an Aeroflot Yak-42 (smirking not permitted). Without Ollie to share in deciphering Max’s accent, I struggled to understand him, and when I could, I felt too socially retarded to converse, relying simply on a repertoire of, ‘Oh yes, wow, how interesting, I see, umm, gosh’. It became increasingly apparent that Max had taken the day off to hang out with us, despite not really rating our choice. The consummate host never let on.

Max peered into a souvenir stand with hungry eyes: ‘Now I know vare to send my couchsurfers,’ he clucked.

‘Do couchsurfers usually bring presents for you?’ I asked.

‘Sometimes zey offer to buy food, but mostly I say no, pliz. Many zink of it as a place for staying so zere is no obligation to leave presents. But it is a custom of Russia to bring a gift because you don’t pay the bill.’

I resolved to keep on giving.

We scooped up a smiley Ollie, and took the scenic monorail (which Max had researched for us earlier) to Moo-Moo, a chain restaurant decked out like a Friesian cow, serving up Russian classics: borscht, cabbage-stuffed bread, kvas (fermented rye bread water), and, of course, vodka. Two men on the neighbouring table asked to join us. ‘Sure!’ said Max. For the rest of our meal, Max tirelessly translated the glassy-eyed Igor and Sergey’s rants on the war in Georgia (and the Western media’s blindness to Saakashvili’s evil), eulogies to Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (‘most important Russian book!’) and pushy vodka toasts to ‘united nations’. But Max remained the jolly messenger, never getting political. I’d tried to discuss politics with him earlier, but he’d laughed it off; it didn’t seem relevant to him. Natalie appeared halfway through, to nibble on an eggcup-sized portion of vegetarian gratin and saucer of salad, after which our hosts skipped off to their Latino dance class.

Couchsurfing was a hungry beast, so Ollie and I busied ourselves in an internet café. There was a constant need to plan ahead, arrange back-up and confirm arrivals. Each acceptance felt like a minor victory. Perversely, however, we found ourselves, like naive kittens, seeking just a little more danger. Our next stop was Yekaterinburg (some 1,814 kilometres east of Moscow), where our host, a journalism student called Polly, would be on holiday in a ’rather fashionable’ hotel in Turkey when we arrived, leaving us in the curious company of her pet rat. Danger indeed.

16TH OCTOBER

Max was expecting a Spanish couple—our replacements—to arrive at 8am from St Petersburg. Ollie had suggested we wake at 7am to prepare for them, but given our own delayed arrival, I overruled it. At 8.30, the doorbell rang.

‘Hola! Buenos dias!’ they trilled.

Max, the expert logistician, deftly organised us like human elements in a sliding-tile game, and then began the breakfast ritual. The girl immediately offered to do the washing-up. I was so slow on this sharing and helping thing.

‘Do you always like to have surfers, Max?’ I asked, when the amantes weren’t listening. I was shocked by his turnover.

‘I need a rest,’ he replied. ‘Sometimes Natalie don’t like zem.’

‘Are there ever surfers that you don’t like?’

‘No, no!’ he heehawed like a donkey, before adding, ‘Zere vos a Sviss couple cycling viz all zare kit.’

That was as rude as he could bring himself to be about them.

It was checkout time for us—we had a train to catch aboard the world’s longest railway. While packing up, it occurred to me thatMax must now have something of a collection of objets oubliés.

‘Ah yes!’ he said, convulsing with laughter. ‘It’s like a muzeum khere. I khave towels, I khave trousers, I khave tooz-brushes…’

‘Actually,’ I added, ‘I can’t find my top.’

‘Too late! It’s in the muzeum, khuh khuh khuh!’

CHAPTER 3 YEKATERTNBURG: THERE’S A RAT IN THE KITCHEN

‘Well, that was odd.’

Ollie and I were rumbling towards Asia on board the Trans-Siberian Express, and I was grappling with why Max could possibly choose to live in that chaos. We had thirty hours to work it out before it all began again in Yekaterinburg.

‘Max is having the time of his life,’ Ollie mused, as he stretched out on his sailor-sized bunk. ‘He’s meeting experienced travellers from all over the world, showing them his city, dodging his shitty job and working from his phone. He’s got it all worked out.’

Still, he must have possessed a spare brain lobe to accommodate the madness. Perhaps it was a reaction against Russia’s isolationist stance. Whatever, it would be hard to look at a Soviet block and still think ‘prison with windows’—we knew now that within their walls could be warm and colourful homes.

Ollie, meanwhile, was getting familiar with my dinner of Russian biscuits.

‘I couldn’t be my normal cheeky self,’ he said, his mouth full.

We were both caught up in manners: this was a shame—cheekiness had its role in social lubrication.

‘And you can’t be selfish as a couchsurfer,’ he added. ‘I was really having to push my leg because I felt rude telling Max to keep slowing down.’

He inspected the growth on his knee. It was bulging hard and taut. Ollie strapped a chilled bottle of water to the lump (he’d left his gel pack at Max’s) and added, ‘It would be really churlish to call a host boring—but Olga wasn’t so exciting.’

He was right. That was blasphemy.

As we pulled away from the relatively westernised Moscow, we pressed our noses against the window. Nothing to see but nothing: the Siberian birch, it seemed, had a monopoly over Russia’s hinterland. Staring out of the window began to feel like sticking one’s head into grey cloud: ready-made emptiness, waiting for our minds’ overspill.

But at least, I realised, one part of my mind was filled with peace: The Emperor Department. Usually so fraught with the minutiae of our last five arguments, now it was quiet. There was surely something out there for both of us that was more stable, that was better for us. We should be using this time to heal. I’d been sending trip updates to The Emperor, but now I sent this emotional update, and I felt it strongly. Maybe thousands of miles and all these weeks was the only way to save ourselves from ourselves.

17TH OCTOBER

Our need to get our heads around couchsurfing had left us without much grasp of Moscow: we’d spent much of it in a Petri dish of domesticity. Couchsurfing was meant to be the vehicle, but in Moscow, it had done the driving. I was looking forward to being in Polly’s apartment without Polly for a day. She’d despatched her friend Sasha to meet us off the train. All we knew was that her English wasn’t very good, and she wasn’t a couchsurfer.

As the train slowed down into Yekaterinburg—founded in 1721 by Catherine the Great and where, in 1918, the last Tsar and his family were murdered by the Bolsheviks—my heart sped up. Like looking at a jack-in-the-box, I was expecting the shock, but I knew I’d still jump.

Scanning the busy Friday evening platform for a young Russian woman was like watching an identity parade without witnessing the crime. But this was a redundant task—immediately outside our carriage were three coloured balloons attached to the hands of a smiling sylph with long ballerina hair and a peaches-and-cream, babydoll face.

Sasha’s uncontainable excitement proved a handy tool for cutting through any social tensions. We fell into a spontaneous group hug, giggling in idiotic communion, holding our respective balloons. After a physical tussle between us over her insistence on helping with our bags, we headed to the tram stop, engaging in much sign language, and confused yet eager communication: ‘I very dream talk of London!’

We managed to gather that she was twenty and, like Polly, halfway through a six-year journalism course. Plus, she explained, by putting an imaginary microphone up to her mouth and adding a few key words, she presented for a local news channel—we were in the company of young ambition. She had a brother and a sister, which was a lot of siblings by Russian standards: ‘My father is hero!’ she joked. She loved British and American music, but not Russian—hip-hop, lounge, Alicia Keys, Bon Jovi.

‘Cool,’ we smiled.

We feigned cheery obliviousness to the freezing, thirtyminute wait at the tram stop. Yekaterinburg had a Siberian sense of space. Large, low-rise Soviet blocks inhabited the wide, quiet streets, which were veiled in an icy, dusty mist that whispered hostility. Its cars were thick with the spit of slushy streets. But Yekaterinburg seemed less desperate than Moscow. There were fewer drunks and street folk scratching around for bread money, and a little more laughter and conversation. A small child overheard us talking, and said to us, ‘How are you? How are you?’ We were more of a novelty here, not least to Sasha.

As night drew its inky curtain across the overcast day, Sasha gave up on the tram, and held out an elegant gloved hand to hail a taxi. Three private cars pulled up in quick succession, and then drove off.

‘This is how is be Russian woman,’ she sighed. ‘They say, ‘Oh, you beautiful woman and then…’’ She finished her sentence by motioning a brush-off.

Eventually, we were delivered, via a muddy, rutted track, to an uninvitingly dark and vast residential estate in Central Yekaterinburg, filled with sad, skeletal trees—the perfect horrormovie set.

That is, until we passed through the grim, dingy stairwell. Inside, it was as if we’d booked into a boutique hotel: all darkwood, floor-to-ceiling wardrobes, blonde-wood floorboards and plum organza curtains. It exuded the distinctive smell of newness.

‘It’s all Ikea,’ Sasha said, proudly.

The bed was pleasingly huge, a king-size surrounded by a dinky white wooden fence and cornflower-blue flocked wallpaper, straight out of Elle Deco. Or Ikea.

Returning my stare, and motionless on its hind legs was a rat, dull brown and threadbare, right in the middle of the floor. Behind bars, thankfully. We approached with caution, eyeing it suspiciously. Sasha, meanwhile, skipped into the kitchen and grabbed a thick red dictionary (or ‘diary’, as she called it). ‘Please make what home!’ she grinned, reading from its pages. Then she skipped to the cage and fished out the rat. ‘Hello DouDou!’ She thrust it towards me. ‘Hello Fleur!’ I reluctantly fingered its coarse, matt coat, but soon stopped. Then she walked over to the bed, and lowered DouDou on to it. It scampered to the edge. I traced its path without blinking, yet it disappeared. I stared hard at the bedcovers. Eventually, they rippled: it had burrowed underneath.

Pinned to the fridge on squared paper was a note from Polly:

Hi guys! You are Welcome! Well, now you’ve reached the destination and I hope you’ll feel yourself like home.

I don’t know in what my flat is because I’m still in Turkey. I hope Sasha keeped it well. There are two most things you need now!

the bed I hope you see it :-)

and the supermarket (about 3 minutes by on foot…)

[she’d drawn a map.]

So, I will arrive in the morning of 19th and I won’t explain you anything else because I hope to see you soon.

Enjoy your first night in Yekaterinburg.

Polly

Sasha hopped into hostess action. Taking leaves from a chic, artisan-looking brown paper bag, she brewed a fragrant floral tea, then interleaved some slices of tomato and bland Russian cheese on top of slices of black rye bread. She neatly sliced an orange, an apple, a pear and a banana and fanned them out on a white Ikea plate (our first taste of fruit this trip).

‘Heat, heat!’ she urged, adding, ‘I can’t heat’

‘Why not?’

‘I used to be model but too fat,’ she cried.

I checked her out there and then. Her skinny-cut Hilfiger jeans—no more than a size ten—were cutely crammed, but fat? No. Who had she been modelling for? Amongst others, the Yekaterinburg Journal. She could afford an apple slice.

Sasha certainly had a lot of energy stored somewhere. She broke into song (it sounded neither British nor American) and danced as if stirring a giant saucepan with both hands. Ollie and I were rather more sedate (or shy), watching the show. We needed a Wi-Fi zone, so she suggested we went to Rosy Jane, an ‘English’ pub where she used to work on ‘Face Kontrol’. Face Kontrol was Russia’s ‘survival of the fittest’ entry-selection process in its clubs and bars, where ‘fit’ could be measured in cosmetics consumption. Sasha rose to the occasion with a thick mask of make-up over her perfect complexion and pulled on Polly’s black patent-leather knee-high boots. From what we’d seen in Moscow, you weren’t a real Russian girl without them.

The door-bitch deemed Ollie and me too sportif but Sasha managed to sway her.

Inside the wood-panelled, pub-themed bar, she lit up a Parliament Light.

‘Polly no drink no drugs. I am smoking and drinking,’ she said gleefully.

She told us about a local music festival: ‘Three boys very ill,’ she said, pointing skywards. ‘Cocaine. Girls eat drugs but they control situation.’

We ordered drinks, chatted for a polite length of time, and then tried to log on, but our own private cabaret refused to stop performing.

‘Are your friends coming down?’ I asked, thinking that perhaps they could entertain her.

‘Russians work, work, work maximum—they don’t control time,’ she frowned, adding, ‘Is a Russian tradition to work when drinking.’

Or drink when working. Behind us, two office girls were dancing shamelessly on an empty dance floor.

Our Wi-Fi needs were eventually abandoned, while Sasha bounded on: ‘I will shocked that Polly hosting. Russian tradition to have Russians, but tourist never. We think you’re going to steal it.’

Ollie and I laughed in shock. But it was certainly either very amazing or very naive of Polly to agree to us being there without her when we had no references (not that she did, either).

‘My parents were worried too,’ Ollie said, understandingly, and told us how he’d had to show them our hosts’ profiles.

‘My mother looked at my father with eyes on stalks,’ he explained, ‘But my dad said, ‘These look like nice people, Jeni. Remember when we were eighteen. Hitchhiking is the same.’’

Except that couchsurfing, with its reference system and verification, was way safer.

The English pub succeeded in recreating the essence of an English Friday Night, complete with binge-drinking, elbows at the bar and insufferable disco beats, so we retreated homeward. Sasha threatened to stay the night—not, I think, to check up on us, but because she just wanted more. To my relief, she ordered a taxi and went home.

Now unobserved, Ollie and I made ourselves at home, making tea, casing the fridge (empty but for Clipper organic ground coffee) and cold-reading her white, fitted bookshelves: five Lomo cameras protectively stored in their boxes, a Super 8 and a few books (Kafka, 1984 and some Russian chick-lit). Being able to adjust to an alien environment without the added pressure of having to get along famously with our host, was a welcome reprieve. Ollie and I were now having fun.

Ollie swore that he really would rather sleep on the floor to elevate his alarmingly large leg. Meanwhile, the rat seemed to sense the presence of danger, gnawing away at the bars of his cage.

‘It’s a controversial pet,’ Ollie pointed out, ‘considering all the rat infestations in the Gulags.’

Controversial—there was a clue about our host.

Spread like a starfish across Polly’s bed and now finally alone, I read again the response from The Emperor. ‘We both know,’ he’d written. ‘I’ve been thinking the same. It makes me so sad…My soul is aching.’

This was supposedly the right response, yet it broke my heart. I indulged in that silent land of tears. By day, as couchsurfers, we were forced to live publicly and so I was forced into coping. That was actually quite useful.

18TH OCTOBER

During a spot of couchsurfing in an internet café, the person sitting next to us happened to be a fellow couchsurfer. A middleaged Australian kidult who talked too much, he was off to Krakow for a big party. He was ‘surfing’ with his Russian girlfriend after a messy divorce. It suddenly felt like we’d joined a secret society. But we had work to do, leaving gushing references for Olga and Max. Displaying true amateurishness, we closed with a kiss.

Sasha had asked us to be part of Polly’s surprise welcome home committee for six o’clock. Except that we lost half an hour to trying to locate Polly’s block from the scores of other identical beige-brick blocks, all unmarked save for their information boards by the door—all carrying identical flyers. A Ryazanov moment (as we’d had trying to locate Max’s apartment) was only spared by comparing an earlier photograph to all the doors until, finally, we had a match.

At Polly’s, Sasha and her friend Albina were creating a Post-It collage on the breakfast table in the shape of a giant, umm…

‘Da!’ shrieked Sasha, holding my hand in kittenish enthusiasm. My hand went Britishly limp. ‘It’s a ‘pennis’!’

‘Err, why?’

‘It’s our fantasy!’ she giggled.

I saw right through Ollie’s smile into his fear.

Around the apartment were orange balloons and oranges sliced into quarters (orange was Polly’s favourite colour). Who got such a homecoming after just a two-week holiday, I wondered. Was this normal in Russia, or was Polly abnormally lovely?

Eventually, out of the kitchen window, I noticed a glossy black Range Rover with blacked-out windows. It seemed to match this luxurious, modern apartment. My eyes locked on to it. Sure enough, out popped an impish, tanned girl with a confident crop and over-sized, tomato red spectacles. She looked up to her apartment and saw me. I waved at her. She waved back.

‘She’s here!’ I hissed.

The girls collapsed into a hysterical fit, started up Voyage by Milky Lasers on the laptop, and assumed the ‘surprise!’ position.

And so two hysterical girls became three, screaming, jumping, hugging. Ollie and I hesitantly joined in. Tomboyish in twisted jeans and a white T-shirt, the 20-year-old Polly burnt bright, flashing her strong, milky teeth and warm, nutty eyes. She babbled spiritedly and quickly launched into a gift ceremony. For Albina: ‘The best coffee in Turkey!’ For Sasha: Turkish Delight. She turned to us: ‘Guys, you both eat meat?’ Oh yes, we said, as if being offered the keys to paradise. Wow—a Turkish spice gift set. We in turn gave her a bottle of Agent Provocateur perfume, the last of our gift stash from London.

The rat was duly positioned on Polly’s shoulder. DouDou, Polly told us, was named after Madame DouDou from the cartoon Max & Co.

‘You haven’t seen Max & Co? Really?’ she said, haughtily.

She fed the rat some Turkish Delight direct from her own mouth, and the Polly Show began. Like small children introduced to TV for the very first time, Ollie and I were mesmerised. Polly was like a Studio Ghibli character—a super-cute, quirky heroine and an army of one.

‘I’m not a racist, but Turkey is such a stupid country,’ she said, unpacking her suitcase. ‘Turkish people are so lazy and stubborn. You only get progress in cold countries, where you have to work and think. They don’t have to think because food grows all around them.’

‘What about the Greek and Roman philosophers?’ I gently challenged her.’

‘They were the last ones to do anything intelligent,’ she sniffed.

Couchsurfing warfare was surely internecine so we laughed it off, but it soon became obvious that it didn’t matter what we said, it was still going to come. English was clearly the lingua franca here, so eventually Albina and Sasha drifted off, leaving Polly to continue uninterrupted.

Eclipsed by her energy, Ollie and I grew increasingly passive, sitting at her new dark-wood breakfast table while she danced around us, regaling us with her riotous political incorrectness. She was outrageous and opinionated; this was entertainment. We were her first couchsurfers, she explained, and she was ‘crazy’ about speaking English.