In the afternoon I stopped at a village for a good feed. The evenings were my strong point and often, when Chris stopped for camp, I felt that I could keep going for another couple of hours. With ample energy, I pushed on. My legs felt strong and they were finally losing their skinny chicken look.
After about fifty kilometres, I began to look out for the flag that indicated where we would be camping for the night. I still felt strongly that rather than flagging the location, it would be prudent if the person in front waited; usually the second person wasn’t more than fifteen minutes behind. When I was in front it was my preferred method. It boiled down to this: what I called caution, Chris called pessimism.
After I had covered sixty kilometres, Chris was still nowhere to be seen. I must have taken my eyes off the road for a while, because when I looked up, there was a bearded man waving me down. I hadn’t even seen his car stop. I thought fleetingly about riding straight past him but he seemed harmless enough.
‘Hello, where are you coming from!’ he boomed, as two more men stepped from the car. His name was Sergei, too.
It wasn’t long before they invited me to their holiday house on a nearby lake. The words banya, vodka and ‘lots of fish’ were enough to raise my spirits to the point of near ecstasy. ‘Great! It’s just that I have to ask my friend Chris. He is riding somewhere ahead,’ I said.
They took off to look for him in a fluster of excitement. Not far down the road, I stopped at a police checkpoint to ask whether they had seen a traveller on a similar bike. The answer was no.
I doubled back and rode a good five kilometres but still there was no sign of Chris. He must have somehow gone further ahead. Eventually, Sergei and his mates came back. They too had seen nothing of Chris.
With simmering frustration I had to turn down the offer of a banya. The fury renewed my energy and I rode ahead blindly, venting my feelings.
‘It’s typical. Anything that remotely breaks up his routine or disturbs his train of thought is a distraction!’ That included having to wait for me on the roadside. It was the same in regards to filming. Whenever I wanted to do some filming, Chris would say, ‘Not now, let’s do it later.’
For me, filming enhanced the experience; for Chris it detracted.
Bloody hell, he probably considers offers of hospitality a distraction as well, I thought.
Fuming, I eventually pushed the bike into the forest and set up the loue shelter. As I lay down to the crackle of the fire it occurred to me that it was just as well Chris wasn’t there.
Into Siberia
Ekaterinburg – Omsk
Late Spring 2000
———
Chris
I woke to a glorious sense of space and freedom. The dawn sunlight filtered down through low branches and around gnarled trunks to dance orange on the cover of my sleeping bag. I gazed lazily from one side of the tent to the other. On a sudden impulse, I stretched my hands and feet to the corners of the tent.
I laughed like a kid – all this space for me! I sat up and looked out through the mosquito mesh of the window. Propped up against a tree stood my bike – alone – and nearby, a small fireplace with a few leftover bits of wood from the night before. No Tim! Not a sign of him. Not anywhere! I stuffed my sleeping bag into its nylon shell and climbed out of bed.
There were, for the moment, both good and bad points about his absence. Good: well, all this room for me; and a welcome break, probably for both of us, from the growing frustrations. Bad: we’d been planning to ride into Ekaterinburg today; and finding each other might now take up a good part of the morning. More than likely, he’d simply missed my flag by the roadside and ended up making camp further along.
Of course, it was always possible that something bad had happened to him: an accident, kidnapping, or maybe even the elusive Mafia that everyone kept warning us about. But then, these were dangers that we had to live with and as long as they didn’t happen, they didn’t bear worrying about.
I surveyed the space around me once again and felt the stirring of a temptation to prolong the time alone. On the other hand, we were in this together, for better or for worse, and it wouldn’t do to seriously lose each other.
Besides, I thought, as I pulled down the tent, I’m hungry and he has all the breakfast supplies.
Yesterday had been an all-day slog into a freezing wet wind. Tim had struggled, but late in the afternoon I’d had a burst of energy and had left him at a roadside café while I pedalled on to look for a spot to camp. As we often did, I left a signal by the roadside to mark the place where I turned off. Then I wheeled my bike into the forest and started collecting firewood, expecting Tim to join me within half an hour.
Now, as I pushed my bike back to the road and noticed that my fluorescent orange flag was still there, wedged into a section of aluminium crash barrier. It was hanging near the edge of the road at what would have been Tim’s head height.
I retrieved the flag and pushed off, expecting to find his camp a little way down the road. But twenty kilometres further, there was no sign of him. I waved down a few cars but no one had seen him. I got worried. There was no way he could have come this far last night. I turned back to scan the road more carefully around the potential turnoffs and camp sites.
I’d cycled halfway back to my original camp site when I finally spotted him riding towards me. He’d had warning from a driver that I was coming and we met up in good spirits, joking and catching up on the night’s adventures. The good feelings didn’t last long, however. He had decided that the mix-up was my fault.
‘You have to put your flag somewhere where I can’t miss it, Chris!’ he said, stonily. ‘This is the second time this has happened and it’s a bloody big pain in the arse!’
He was referring, of course, to the night when we’d lost each other outside of Babushkina the previous year. That, admittedly, had been my fault. But this time I felt things were a little different.
We both spent the morning simmering but, by the afternoon, tensions subsided below the surface. Later that day, we reached the very top of the Ural mountain range. A small marker by the roadside told us that geographically, if not politically, we were on the verge of crossing from Europe into the subcontinent of Asia. That, we decided, was something to feel proud of.
I sat on the divide and surveyed the scene before us. The lights of Ekaterinburg twinkled in the half dark and the forested plains stretched to the horizon beyond. We pushed off and sped down the long hill – out of the mountains and into Siberia.
———
I looked through the window in the guard tower and saw Tim gesticulating from the other side of a high, razor-wire security fence. With me were two guards. They have jobs for everything in Russia, and these two guys were the official guards of the local high-security carpark. They were at work – strictly no alcohol – so rather than the usual bottle of vodka, we were sharing a pot of tea – from shot glasses! We drained our cups, said goodbye and I hurried down the steps to find Tim waiting with Sergei. They’d met the night before, whereupon Sergei had invited us to stay with his family.
Sergei didn’t have a car, and had decided that the route to his flat, buried deep within a suburb of identical Soviet apartment blocks, was too difficult to explain. We walked to a busy intersection looking for a taxi and ended up flagging down an empty city bus for an on-the-spot charter ride.
Sergei was an enterprising engineer who, among other things, worked in the design department of a local munitions factory. We arrived late, but sat up for a long time, drinking, eating and making merry with his friends and family. We watched a long, wobbly and drawn-out home video shot the year before when Sergei had taken a barge 3000 kilometres up the Ob River. He’d been selling crates of alcohol, cigarettes and other such ‘vital provisions’ to the isolated villages along its banks and had made a huge profit. But by the time they’d sailed back home, all of the money had been completely swallowed up by the bribes and ‘protection’ payments that he’d been o
bliged to make to various armed representatives of the vodka and tobacco industries, as well as to regional mobsters. The moral, he explained, was not to get involved in anything big enough to attract the attention of the Mafia.
He spent a day escorting us around the city, showing us the sights. It was interesting but frustrating. My first priority on reaching a city had always been to find some place where I could log on to the Internet and sate my longing for contact with Nat. Today, however, we were guests, and our hosts were spending a lot of time and effort entertaining us. We wandered round the city eating ice-cream in the cold wind and straining to understand information boards in local museums. My need to get in touch with Nat had to wait until the next day, and somehow I managed to divert all of my pent-up frustration squarely onto Tim.
We spent several days in Ekaterinburg. Sergei and his family were wonderful hosts who made us feel at home in their flat. One of Sergei’s friends took us to see the local lake and nature reserve, still snowy and cold, then drove around the slushy suburban streets filming from the car window as we pedalled along.
On the third night of our stay, we had dinner with another young couple that we’d met on the road the previous week. They picked us up in a brand new car then took us shopping in an exclusive western-style supermarket that had a limited range of imported goods at double and triple western prices. They were small-time ‘New Russians’, a euphemism for crooked business people who were making their way in the world by exploiting the new democracy and quietly embezzling in some field related to computers. They were nice people, though, and interesting. They’d done a lot of cycling in their younger days and had once run a business importing Shimano bike components. When Sergei picked us up later, we heard him describing our new friends as gopniki. We quizzed him for a translation and he laughed. Apparently it was a new term meaning something like ‘Russians striving to become American’.
The day before our departure, I quickly ducked into the city to the Internet café. Walking fast on my way back through the metro station I was hauled aside by a policeman of the type that we regularly saw occupying little cubicles all over Russian cities.
This guy was big, broad, muscular and angry: typical military. His crewcut, square jaw, cauliflower ears and beady eyes all stared menacingly down at me and I realised, with a horrible, sickening, soiled-pants-type of feeling, that I’d forgotten my passport. We quickly established that I was both a foreigner and that I had no ID. He dragged me into his cubicle and sat me roughly on a wooden stool.
His teeth were brown and coated in phlegm. A smell like rotting carrion wafted from his mouth, threatening to overwhelm me. Quickly I glanced away, only to see a set of thick, calloused fingers lovingly caressing the handle of the big black nightstick. I dug my nails into my palms to stop my body from shaking. He lowered his crooked nose till it almost touched mine, took a deep, powerful breath and let out a roar. ‘WHY DON’T YOU HAVE A PASSPORT?’
My skull throbbed and resounded like a church bell. ‘Ah, ah, I left it at my, ah, friends’ …’
‘WHERE ARE YOUR FRIENDS?’
‘Ah, oni zhivyot, ah, ah …’ Shit! This monster was only just beginning to build up steam and already my Russian was leaving me! I tried again. ‘Ah, I don’t know the address but they live, um, not far from here.’
‘WHERE ARE YOU FROM?’ A look of murderous insanity had started to creep across his face and his cauliflower ears were turning beetroot red.
‘Um, … Avstraliya,’ I stammered, weakly.
‘Australia! HARGH!’ He threw back his head and let out a half-strangled snarling snort. He lowered his head towards mine. His bloodshot eyes held me transfixed.
‘You are a foreigner,’ he growled, laying the facts slowly and deliberately on the table. ‘You have no documents and you have a strong accent, a strong southern accent.’ I trembled as he paused, eyes gleaming, moving in for the kill. ‘YOU ARE A CHECHEN TERRORIST!’
He yelled this last at such close range that my face was plastered with flecks of spittle. He’s fucking crazy, I thought, desperately trying to think of something that would keep him from patriotically ripping my head off.
‘I’m just a boy,’ I began to beg, feebly, with my lower lip trembling. But just as I was about to break down completely, the door opened and another policeman stepped in through a ray of golden sunshine. I was saved.
This guy was just as big and burly as his partner, but he wore a kinder expression. He looked at me briefly, taking in the spag in my hair and the tears in my eyes, then wrinkled his nose thoughtfully – probably trying to sniff the air and see whether he’d come in time to save me from letting go in my pants. He looked at my executioner, standing now and puffed up like a strutting peacock, then back at me.
‘Boris?’ he asked slowly.
‘HE’S A TERRORIST!’ The reply was still thunderous but less certain. My saviour looked back at me, eyebrows raised. ‘Are you a terrorist?’ he asked. I shook my head, unable to speak. ‘Right,’ he decided. ‘Boris, I think you’d better go do your round of the station. I’ll handle this one from here.’
The new policeman had a much firmer grip on reality. He was aware that Stalin had been dead these past forty-five years, and was also aware that the KGB was an obsolete institution. He even believed that I was from Australia (by some amazing coincidence I happened to have a few Aussie coins in my pocket to add credibility). But let me know, nonetheless, that I was in pretty serious trouble.
I had not a scrap of ID and worse, didn’t know Sergei’s surname, his phone number or his address. I watched as the policeman filled out the necessary forms, made a phone call then placed me in a tiny lockup in the corner of the room while he catalogued my personal belongings. I’d just been to the bank and he sheafed through notes that were probably the equal of two months of his salary. He seemed more resigned than jealous, however, and we chatted amicably through the bars until a van came to take me away.
The duty sergeant at district HQ was a harassed and busy man. A few vagrants who’d rolled drunkenly out of the van before me were processed first, then I was prodded toward the counter and told to hold out my hands. The sergeant skimmed quickly over my arrest report as he removed my handcuffs.
‘You know how to get to where you’re staying?’ he barked. I nodded. ‘But you don’t know the address?’
‘No.’
‘Could you show an officer the way if he was to drive you there?’
I replied eagerly in the affirmative.
‘Right, we’ll do that then,’ he decided. ‘But you’ll have to wait a while.’
I was put in a large, communal lockup. It was 5 p.m. and I waited till midnight. I’d been due to meet Tim and Sergei for a party at eight. A few other prisoners came and went. They stayed an hour or two, pacing and swearing until their friends came to bail them out, but I sat by myself and avoided talking. Finally, I was collected and put in a van full of officers on their way home from work. They did a long lap of the city (just to disorientate me!), dropped the officers off first, then headed in the general direction of Sergei’s flat. Halfway there the radio crackled into life. ‘Have you got that Australian?’ The driver looked at me and I beamed. Good old Sergei. He’d managed to track me down.
When we arrived, the policeman took a cursory look at my passport and visa. He left and Sergei gave me a walloping angry whack on the backside. Then, at 3 a.m., after briefly explaining my story, I collapsed into bed.
We left the next morning. I was feeling tired, drained and subdued. Sergei and one of his friends drove ahead of us with their hazard lights flashing, leading us out through the suburbs and back onto the highway. We said goodbye and promised to keep in touch. Then we pushed off and pedalled, without looking back, away from Ekaterinburg.
———
I slept long into the next morning and awoke feeling uninspired. It was 300 kilometres to the next city of Tyumen, and we’d decided the night before that it would be a good idea to split up and ride mos
t of that distance alone.
We rode together for half a day until I spotted a nice camp site in the forest among a copse of old pines. We had lunch together then Tim packed up to leave.
We divided our equipment without saying much, then we shook hands and wished each other well. I’d be only half a day behind with the tool kit if he were to suffer any serious breakdown, and he assured me that he’d set up camp and wait twenty kilometres from Tyumen. We agreed on a contingency plan (we’d leave a telephone message with Sergei if anything went wrong), then he cycled off and I realised with mixed feelings that this would be the first time in four months – the first time since I’d been torn apart from Nat back in Sydney – that I would be completely on my own.
Stopping in cities always complicated things for me, and our break in Ekaterinburg had really affected my mood. After one or sometimes two weeks of settling into a simple life of cycling we’d reach another major city and dive into a hectic world of shops, crowds, parties and people. Our basic lifestyle of cycling and camping went straight out the window, and after a few days of living the ‘civilised life’ I always ended up feeling emotionally drained and exhausted.
We’d stayed in Ekaterinburg for four days and we’d had a great time. Physically, the break had done us good. Our bodies had had a chance to recover from the strains and stresses of riding heavy bikes day after day. I was feeling fresh and ready to go but mentally, when it came down to it, I was completely stuffed.
The near escape from horrible death at the hands of the maniac policeman had shaken me and the effort of being an interesting and agreeable guest in a foreign language had also taken its toll.
I climbed onto my bike the next morning and set off feeling tired and fuzzy headed. I pedalled constantly towards a distant horizon, paying barely any attention to the hills, forests and villages that I passed. My thoughts were dull and repetitive. What should I eat for dinner? How far do I have to go today? When can I be bothered to fix that niggling squeak in my hub? A flash of unexpected perception hit: I could suddenly understand what it must feel like to be a car. I pushed on, the spark of romance gone from cycling, just trying to cover the miles. Finally, I judged that I’d gone far enough for the day and made camp. In the morning, after another long night of dreamless sleep, I was feeling more alive and ready to go.
Off The Rails Page 10