It's Only a Movie

by Mark Kermode

  Mr Nyet sat in the driver’s seat, saying nothing, gripping the steering wheel, staring unflinchingly ahead. No one said anything. There really wasn’t much point. Still, I thought, why break the habit of a lifetime?

  ‘Have we broken down?’

  ‘Nyet.’

  ‘Oh, that’s good. So, are we stopping for a rest?’

  ‘Nyet.’

  ‘Right. But we have stopped, haven’t we?’

  Silence. This was new. No negative response, so clearly the fucker did understand me.

  ‘Has something happened to the car?’ More silence.

  ‘Did we burst a tyre?’

  Even more silence. On a conversational level, this was a sensational breakthrough.

  ‘Shall we have a look?’

  ‘Nyet.’

  Back to normal then.

  ‘Right, well I need to get out anyway, so I’m going to take a look. OK?’

  Silence. Another glimmer of hope!

  Nige and I got out of the car together, and after a brief bout of torturous stretching we wandered round to observe the rear driver’s side tyre which was, indeed, flat. Obviously. Under other circumstances we might have been mildly mythered about the time we’d lose changing the wheel, but by now we’d been travelling for so long that further delays couldn’t make things any worse. The sky was already starting to darken and by the time we got going again it would be early evening. But at least a flat tyre was fixable – it wasn’t like we’d broken down and were in need of a mechanic. Any idiot could change a tyre, couldn’t they?

  Worryingly, we appeared to be the only idiots showing any signs of actually getting out of the car. Mr Nyet just sat there in the driver’s seat, staring straight ahead, apparently waiting impatiently for these slow-poke Brits to get on with whatever they were doing and get back into the car so we could all get going again. Maybe he hadn’t realised what had happened. Was that possible?

  I limped round to the driver’s window and waited for Mr Nyet to roll it down. He didn’t. I waited some more. He didn’t some more. Finally, feeling like some comedy policeman from a naff sixties movie, I tapped on the window and made the hand-rolling gesture that is the international symbol of ‘please roll down your window so that I may take down your particulars’. Mr Nyet sighed gruffly, mouthed some indecipherable obscenity, and then made the international symbol which means ‘I’m sorry officer, I’d love to co-operate with your request but sadly the window-winding mechanism on this fine vehicle is currently out of order.’ Either that or ‘I fart in your general direction, you English poof’ – it was hard to tell.

  I looked at Nige, exasperated. He looked back, similarly unimpressed. Clearly Mr Nyet wasn’t going to help. Presumably he blamed us for bursting his tyre. After all, we were in the back, weren’t we? And it was the overburdened back tyre which had gone bang, was it not, rather than the correctly weighted front tyre?

  With a sense of terrible inevitability we both trudged back round to other side of the vehicle, opened the back door, and got in.

  ‘Hi Yolena. Could you possibly tell our driver that the rear driver’s side tyre is burst and we need to change it?’

  Yolena did just that. Mr Nyet failed to respond. She tried again. Again, nothing.

  ‘What’s his problem?’ I asked with a sense of mounting annoyance.’Are we going to change the bloody tyre or not?’

  Yolena asked him something else in Russian, and this time got the standard response.

  ‘Nyet.’

  ‘Nyet?!’ I burst out.’Nyet what? “Nyet” we haven’t got a busted tyre? Or “Nyet” I’m not going to change it? In which case, we’ll change it.’

  I got out of the car again and stomped round to the boot which should have been locked but (surprise surprise) was merely held shut with a piece of string. I started scrabbling at the fastening, wondering whether the engine in a Lada wasn’t actually buried in the boot like a Hillman Imp, which would make me look pretty stupid and presumably give Mr Nyet a big laugh ha ha ha. But not to worry – the boot opened up and engine was there none.

  Nor was there a spare tyre.

  ‘Where’s the spare wheel?’ I shouted round the side of the car, although even as the question left my lips I already knew the answer.

  ‘Nyet!’

  And Mr Nyet was right. There was indeed nyet spare tyre. Nada.

  Nil. Nothing.

  Nederland nul points.

  Nige came round and looked into the open, empty boot.

  ‘There’s no spare tyre, is there?’

  ‘Nope.’

  We both stared into the boot, as if hoping that doing so would make a spanking new tyre materialise out of thin air. I got down on the ground to see if there was a spare wheel sneakily strapped to the undercarriage of the car as is the case with some models. But not this one. No sir. No matter which way we looked at it, the answer was the same. We had no tyre. We’d have to call the breakdown service. What was Russian for AA? Presumably ‘a?? a??’.

  Yolena joined us, and performed the same strange looking and scowling routine that we had just perfected.

  ‘There is no spare tyre,’ she said, correctly.

  ‘No, there isn’t. And I imagine our driver already knows this, which is why he is not getting out of the car. So what do we do? Call for a breakdown truck?’

  Yolena looked fore and aft along the chaotic road on which we were now stranded, trying to get her bearings, troubled but – as always – uncomplaining. The look on her face suggested that this was not a brilliant place to break down and also strongly implied that professional help would be hard to come by in such a remote area (she had a very expressive face). The road was major, but the region was minor in the extreme. Worse, the sun was threatening to set soon and none of us fancied being stuck here after nightfall. But in this pre-mobile age, with neither a phone box nor a village in sight, there was simply no way of calling for assistance other than flagging down a passing car. As we stood there on the side of road, sucking our teeth, a couple of cars cruised past, one of them stuffed with thick-necked young men who seemed worryingly interested in our plight. Being of paranoid disposition I wasn’t certain whether these burly brutes wanted to help us or rob and kill us. Probably the latter. Yolena walked back to the driver’s door where Mr Nyet was still resolutely refusing to leave his seat. She exchanged a few words with him through the closed window, then came back and explained the situation to us.

  ‘He says we must get back in the car and drive on.’

  ‘With a flat tyre?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘But it will ruin the wheel …’

  ‘He says no.’

  ‘… and it will probably ruin us too.’

  Yolena shrugged. Clearly she had expected nothing else, and she wasn’t about to get agitated about circumstances she couldn’t change. Unlike me.

  Then, in a flash of inspiration, it occurred to me that there was a simple solution to our problem. We needed a spare wheel which would fit on to a Lada, and every single car that was passing us on the road was indeed a Lada. I could just flag one down and buy their spare wheel. Secreted in my shoe I had one hundred American dollars, an invaluable insurance policy against just such an inevitable disaster. Back in England, the only advice anyone who’d been to Russia would give me was ‘take hard currency – and hang on to it’. A friend who had travelled from Ukraine into Russia by coach remembered that packets of Western cigarettes were pretty useful for bribing corrupt border guards (the only kind, apparently) but dollars were like kryptonite. If you had dollars, you could do anything.

  Emboldened by my ingenuity, I whipped a twenty-dollar bill out of my left sock and waved it at the first Lada coming down the road. The result was impressive – the approaching vehicle performed such a note-perfect emergency stop that the car behind nearly piled into its rear end. American Express? That’ll do nicely sir.

  The driver of the car got out, all smiles, and despite the language barrier seemed
to comprehend almost immediately that I wanted to buy his spare tyre in return for this twenty-dollar bill with which he could quite probably buy a new car. He was happy, I was happy, everyone was happy with this transaction. Everyone except Mr Nyet. For just as handshakes were exchanged and our new knight in shining Lada hoiked open the boot of his car, Mr Nyet came storming round the side of the vehicle, gesturing wildly, muttering strange imprecations, and generally giving the impression that he wasn’t happy with any of this at all. I had no idea what he said, but the next thing I knew our potential spare-wheel supplier was back in his car and off down the road and we were all back where we started.

  ‘What the hell was all that about?’ I asked Yolena in dismay.

  ‘I think that maybe he feels insulted,’ she said, with infinite sympathy and patience.

  ‘Insulted?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘He has a lot of pride.’

  ‘But he has no spare tyre.’

  ‘No, that is true …’

  We stood dejectedly by the roadside, listening to the inevitable decline of capitalism.

  ‘Come on,’ said Yolena eventually, in that reliably reassuring manner of hers.’We should go.’

  And so we did. The three of us shambled back into the rear seat of the car and no sooner were we suitably squished than Mr Nyet hit the gas and the Lada lurched forward and back out into the oncoming traffic.

  The next few miles are something of a blur. I remember the bumping, the groaning, the grinding of metal on tarmac as our trusty Lada discovered life in the pre-pneumatic age. I remember the previously creeping bud of pain and discomfort which had taken root just above my pelvis blossoming into a blood-red rose of raging, burning misery and anguish, making me think that my insides were actually on fire. I remember Nige and Yolena stoically saying nothing while the woman in the front passenger seat yelped and gargled in jostled distress as the car smashed around the concrete assault course that passed for a road in this godforsaken region. And I remember the particularly violent jolt which finally pushed me over the edge – a savage thrust from the underside of the car which seemed to have been kicked by some dormant giant awakened from its slumbers by the screams of Mr Nyet’s Lada. At which point, I felt something move in my back – something which, by all rights, needed to remain stationary, firmly wedged in place. The spasm which gripped me in the aftermath of this jolt was almost religious in its intensity – I felt as though every atom of my body was on the brink of sneezing, and if I relaxed my whole body would disintegrate and be exploded out through my own nose, voiding into the darkening Ukrainian night. It was very unusual – and not in a good way.

  I squealed like a freshly stuck pig (or like Ned Beatty in Deliverance), shrieking with such vigour that the normally unresponsive Mr Nyet promptly slammed his foot on the brakes, throwing my head forward so that it snapped sharply off the back of his girlfriend’s headrest, making a satisfying cracking sound in the process. The car slopped to a halt and I yanked open the door, stepping out into the centre of the road with little care for the passing traffic. I put my hand out to steady myself on the side of the car, bending at the waist as if genuflecting toward the gods of lost travellers and lost causes. Thusly folded, I walked gingerly round to the back of the car, still apparently studying the road with the intensity of a pervy asphalt fancier.

  Here was my problem: I could not stand up. I was stuck.

  And that was when I lost it.

  Suddenly, and with little or no dignity, I started screaming and swearing and shouting and raging, calling for hellfire to rage down upon this pestilential piss-hole and flatten everything and everybody from here to Minsk. I was rude, abusive, aggressive, unreasonable, and my tone could quite possibly have been seen as threatening were it not for the fact that I was bent double and therefore all my insults were directed straight down into the ground. If you’d driven by and seen me you would have thought that I was having a heated row with the road, which in a way I was. At some point in this avalanche of anger, Nigel came out of the car, stood beside me, and attempted to put his arm round me in a comforting brotherly fashion. It was a sweet gesture, spoiled only by the fact that my absurdly twisted position meant that the best he could do was to rest his hand on my back, making me look like a human coffee table.

  And that was how we stayed for quite some time.

  I could go on (and on, and on, and on). I could tell you how I was gingerly jackknifed back into the car, and how that three-legged warhorse smashed on another few miles before arriving at a village where some very friendly, helpful locals came out of their houses with spare wheels that sadly wouldn’t fit Mr Nyet’s Lada. I could tell you how we did eventually flag down another passing vehicle and buy their spare wheel for twenty dollars, our driver (who was by then as defeated as the rest of us) helpfully putting aside his pride, and how we proceeded on to our ultimate destination, getting further lost on the way.

  Suffice to say that we finally staggered into Feodosiya at some ungodly hour, and considering how hard it had been to get there, it was all a bit of a let-down frankly. To my eyes, it looked like a dump – although the sight of the most beautiful city on earth would probably have failed to lift my all but broken spirits by then. If I go to the internet now and call up images of the Feodosiya ‘resort’ it looks perfectly nice – pretty buildings, lovely sunshine, picturesque beach blah blah blah. Shame about the unsightly shipping and mechanical plant just next to the main bathing spot but, hey, you can’t have everything, and if we’d been there for any length of time I’m sure it would have started to seem quite relaxing. Certainly there were plenty of holidaymakers apparently having a good time in Feodosiya, and the Dark Waters production members we spoke to were in good spirits about their surroundings. As for the actual ‘location reports’ which Nige and I were meant to file from there … well, they’ll have to wait for the moment. Because it had taken us so long to get to Feodosiya that almost as soon as we’d arrived it was time to turn round and start heading back again.

  And so we did.

  Having refused point-blank to get back into a Lada (any Lada) or travel cross-country on that stinking toilet of a train, it was agreed that the Dark Waters production team would arrange to fly us from Kiev to Moscow. Hooray. We could have flown more directly from Kiev to Heathrow, but for reasons which none of us understood we had return tickets from Moscow and there was nothing anyone could do about that. So, rather than suffer the indignities of land travel on the former USSR’s terminally depressed road and rail networks, we would take to the skies.

  A few words about flying in the former Soviet Union. Back in the dark days of the early nineties there were many hair-raising tales of air-related ‘incidents’ which gave the impression that these were not the safest skies in the world. Most notoriously, on 23 March 1994 (a year after our Dark Waters adventure) Flight 593 flew out of Moscow and promptly crashed near Mezhdurechensk after the pilot allowed his fifteen-year-old son to ‘have a go’ sitting at the controls, accidentally overriding the autopilot and killing all seventy-five people on board. Such was the notoriety of Flight 593’s demise that the popular Canadian TV series Mayday (better known as Air Crash Investigation here in the UK) dedicated an episode to it self-explanatorily dubbed ‘Kid in the Cockpit’. Catchy title, huh?

  Along with the apparent element of danger, there was the equally pressing issue of customer care. In 2003, BBC News reported that the Russian airline Aeroflot had employed a British public-relations team to improve their standing as one of the least inviting airlines in the world and help them shed their ‘long-time reputation for service with a scowl’.’Their stewardesses used to be very austere and authoritarian,’ admitted Tom Austin, deputy chairman of Identica, ‘and they certainly weren’t very friendly. ’ Which, as understatements go, is on a par with saying that the heroine of Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS wasn’t exactly the sort of girl you’d want to take home to meet your mother. But what was most
disturbing about the BBC’s report was that it contained confirmation of something which I had been wondering whether I had actually imagined for almost a decade: the fact that as recently as the early nineties flight operators within the former Soviet Union ‘regularly took on extra passengers for cash, resulting in dangerously overcrowded planes’.

  It is oddly reassuring to see the phrase ‘dangerously overcrowded’ used by a news agency as solidly reliable as the BBC because it means that what I’m about to tell you is very probably true, despite the fact that it sounds like I’m making it up. Here’s my experience of flying from Kiev to Moscow in the days before modernisation made the phrase ‘I’m Olga, Fly Me’ something other than a very bad joke.

  First up, we tried to book the tickets by phone, with a credit card, only to discover that neither phone nor credit-card bookings were acceptable. This was to be a cash-only transaction, and it had to be done in person at the airport in Kiev. So, less than forty-eight hours after arriving at Feodosiya, Nige and I found ourselves standing at a sales-kiosk window attempting to effect safe passage out of the place in the following Kafkaesque manner.

  Firstly, I proceeded to the sales window, where a list of flight times and prices was prominently displayed. Having checked which flight we wanted, and counted out exactly the right amount of Russian currency, I attempted to purchase a ticket for myself.

  ‘Hello,’ I said brightly to the sour-faced wonk behind the window.’Do you speak English?’

  ‘Da.’

  ‘Great. Then I’d like to buy a ticket for the next plane to Moscow, please.’