On The Couch

I hadn’t anticipated a club because I wasn’t quite at one with the couchsurfers’ motto: Be Prepared for Anything. Despite Face Kontrol not adoring my walking boots, our association to Zhenya—a girl about town with her Moscow credentials—saw us swiftly ushered into the velvet banquettes of the VIP area. Much more vodka was bought, and we were introduced to Zhenya’s friends. They’d heard some girls outside trying to remember some Spanish words. News that three macho Spanish guys were in town was out.

It was at about this point that amnesia drew its black curtain. I remembered saying thank you to Zhenya a lot, and clinging to my new ally, David (okay, I was flirting with the unattached one; I didn’t want him, I was just feeding my emotional hunger). There were strippers, there were bottle-blonde Buryatian women, there was shameless dancing, there were good times. Apparently.

25TH OCTOBER

Still dressed, still drunk and my mouth desert-dry, I woke up in Sasha’s bed, numb from a night on its wooden base—all Russians seemed to like it hard, evidently. But how did I get here? Where was my BlackBerry? Whose was that chapka—the Russian fur hat? That camera? And—oh God—did I kiss David or was it a dream? I scrambled to check the photographic evidence: tight embraces, topless boys, boys kissing boys, power punches…worrying. Then I thought about Ollie, and The Emperor, and I realised I hadn’t worried about anything since I’d arrived. Getting out of my head had, quite literally, helped me get out of my head.

I could hear that the boys had just woken up and were laughing about the night. I froze, realising that to get out of my room, I had to go through theirs. I drew a deep breath.

‘So, boys, I seem to have lost my phone and my memory and gained a camera and a hat…’

I searched David’s eyes, but I couldn’t find the answer there. I quickly scurried out—I was going to have to ask Zhenya.

‘Hungry?’ chirped Zhenya, orchestrating the domestics in the kitchen.

‘Starving!’

‘Sheep soup,’ she explained, handing me a large bowl.

Would it be insulting not to eat the solid cubes of fat, the layers of alimentary canal and the tendons swimming like eels? I was the only one eating, so I had no one to copy. Plus, as a couchsurfer, I was learning that you ate what and when you could—the fridge wasn’t mine to raid.

‘So what do you grow in your kitchen garden?’

With tomatoes, onions, cabbages, cucumbers, apples and potatoes, it was the picture of Siberian self-sufficiency.

Having pointed her attention outside the window, I threw the unspeakables away. And that possible indiscretion? Cowardice struck—I could hear the boys coming. I’d wait to ask Zhenya after they left for Vladistock later that day. Losing one’s memory had its hazards, but it was also a face-saver.

Losing my BlackBerry was rather more straightforward—it was lost. Of course, there was the possibility that something more sinister than good times had taken it, but the idea was unthinkable. Hosts had far more to lose.

The day’s next excitement was the hypermarket, for the boys to stock up for their three-day train journey. In the car my gaze was conveniently averted outside, to catch, in amongst a constructivist majority, Ulan-Ude’s bronze monuments to heroic, mounted Buryatian warriors, and Buddhist buildings with flying eaves. At the supermarket, Zhenya picked up a couple of value tins of horsemeat.

‘You need meat,’ she said maternally.

‘Why?’ responded Bernat, with some disdain.

‘For the train.’

‘No.’

It was useful to see how others—non-Brits—were with their hosts. Bernat wasn’t rude, he just didn’t want tinned horsemeat. His candour was inspiring.

We hugged the boys goodbye at the station. With them safely out of earshot, I could finally ask Zhenya for the missing details.

‘You were in the back of my car wearing his chapka,’ she said, her voice tripping into a laugh. ‘And David asked, “Can I kiss you?” You said yes. And then he asked, “Can you kiss me?” and you just started singing.’

(Was it ‘Can I kick it?/Yes you can,’ I wondered). But did I kiss him?

‘Then we got home and you went to bed. When I asked where David was, I found him in your room but you were asleep, and I shouted, “David, go back to bed!” The boys were laughing for thirty minutes.’

As did we. Too bad alcohol took as much as it gave.

My next stop, in two days’ time, would be just outside Mongolia’s capital Ulan Bator, where I’d be staying in a ger—a traditional felted tent. My host, a German woman married to a local, had three negative references—quite a count for couchsurfing. She’d been ‘moody’, and had pushed her guests into doing her ‘maximum price’ tours. She responded negatively to one reference, saying the guest had set fire to her house and stolen her phone. It sounded like a cartoon. But she also had plenty of positive references. I was intrigued; it sounded authentic. Maybe Marco from Italy summed it up: ‘At Sabina’s I had the craziest couchsurfing adventures, she is unique, in both really good and really bad ways, but once you understand Mongolia, you understand Sabina, or vice versa.’ It promised some safe danger. I was excited.

‘I have to visit my aunt with a broken rib,’ Zhenya announced after helping me buy my tickets to Mongolia. ‘I’ll be back at 10pm [it was now 5pm]—maybe you can go for a walk.’

The apron strings were suddenly severed. I was going to have to be independent again. Placing all emotional needs on my host was an ask too much, I realised, and foolish. So I decided to go and place them on the internet instead.

News from Ollie: he was ‘lying very still’, under self-imposed house arrest, ‘maybe for a whole month’, but now that the knife had been at his leg, it was ‘nice and flat’. Ollie was such a stoic. I was going to miss his calm crisis management.

10pm suddenly became 7pm—Zhenya was going to come back early. She was waiting outside in her car, with her mother and another cousin, Nastia (short for Anastasia). They screamed when I tried to get in. This was, of course, because I’d got into the wrong car of Buryatian girls. I guess Zhenya saw all of this because I then heard a car horn, presumably to aid my sonar location. But once reunited, no one mentioned it—least of all me in my deep shame. I missed having someone to laugh with.

We dropped Zhenya’s divorced mother at home, taking the silent and shy 20-year-old Nastia, a ‘customs’ student, back with us. Was I hungry? ‘A little bit peckish,’ I said warily, thinking about sheep entrails. Plus, I’d just eaten half a packet of strawberry sandwich biscuits. Too bad—pancakes, tomato chutney, smetana and Siberian apple jam were promptly laid out on the kitchen table. Nastia and Zhenya folded their pancakes into neat little parcels, so I did too, filling mine with round after round of the most delicious apple jam—crunchy and fresh cherry-sized apples in a tart but sweet sunset-pink apple soup. Zhenya had made it herself; her grandmother did the blackcurrant jam, which they’d mix with cold water for a drink. But that was nothing, her father had built the whole house.

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