‘Is it strong?’ I asked.
‘Is it strong? Of course it is. I guarantee that you will be able to ride another ten thousand kilometres at the very least. You can even jump up and down on the frame and it won’t break!’
One of the drunks took the challenge literally. He stood on the frame and began to jump up and down. I pushed and sent him toppling to the floor. The welder laughed.
I felt indebted to this tall stranger, yet when I offered him thanks and some money he refused. ‘No, it’s I who thank you for giving me the chance to meet such a traveller. There is one condition – that is, you must come to have a glass of vodka with me.’
With the bike fixed, being merry was tolerable again! Back in his cottage, we toasted the meeting. I never knew his name, but he was of Polish descent. He and his father had been sent to Siberia during Stalin’s reign. Briefly, he spoke of relatives he had never met in Poland. Unlike most men who swore at the mere sight of my bike, he congratulated me for having the will to do the trip.
‘I was also a sportsman once,’ he remarked, with nostalgia.
As abruptly as he had opened up, he slid the bottle back into its niche in the wall and shook my hand. Our brief crossing of paths was over.
Back in the kindergarten, the workmen were warming up for a heavy night. They sat around a table dishing out a mix of stale bread, tomato paste, salt and cold, stodgy macaroni.
‘Sit down! Come and sit down!’ The master engineer beckoned. My presence heralded the opening of a four-litre jar of samagonka, which is homemade vodka, but usually with a higher alcohol content.
The men raised their glasses in excitement. It was difficult to guess their age. With greasy stubble and leathery complexions, they wore their dank clothing like a second skin. Apart from the boss, most appeared slim and square-shouldered.
A plate of tomato paste and macaroni and a glass of samagonka were shoved before me as the feast got under way. While the others starting slurping, one man was struggling to focus through a pair of crooked, cracked glasses. You could tell that he was mulling over a question.
‘There in Australia, the capital is Sydney, right? And you have a lot of deserts and in some parts some mountains?’ he asked solemnly, as if wanting to confirm that his education was correct.
Before I could answer, the others butted in with a volley of questions.
‘Do you have potatoes in Australia?’
‘Don’t be stupid; potatoes are Russian!’
‘What do you drink in Australia? Have you tried vodka?’
‘What do you think about Russian girls? Are they the best in the world?’
‘Have you tried samagonka?’
‘What kind of money do you have there?’
The best I could do was nod and shake my head as everyone demanded an answer at once. This went on until the master engineer slammed his fist down on the table. ‘You know my workmen. You are my comrades, my simple workmen. We today have here an Australian. Do you know, men, that in the forty-five years of my life, including my high education in Moscow, I have never met or talked with a real foreigner. Comrades, this is a great event. You know we must give him pork fat, potatoes and milk to go on his way.’
The men were silent, awed. Then: ‘Eat, eat, as if you were at home!’ They demanded, breaking the silence. They felt proud to be sharing their wealth, and I could see that beyond the slops in front of me there was a heartfelt generosity.
As the drinking continued I blended into the group, asking my own questions. Misha, who had stayed by me from the start, was a short man with a long wispy moustache. When he smiled, lines forged deep channels from his eyes like the splayed rays of the sun.
‘Misha, how long have you been working on the bridge?’ I asked.
‘Oh, about three months, but I will probably work here for another four or five,’ he replied.
‘And have you been paid for it?’ I probed.
He looked as if I had asked a stupid question. ‘No, I haven’t been paid anything, but the boss says we might get paid soon.’
Misha had two children and a wife in a village a couple of hundred kilometres to the south. I had the feeling that he was too proud to go home without payment, and yet disillusioned with the work. Typically, like the other men, he had turned to vodka.
‘Well, you know, I get angry sometimes because I should be back home cutting the hay, working the potatoes. I mean, how is my family supposed to survive?’ he exclaimed, departing from his quiet tone. He pointed around the room. ‘Yes, him over there, he has three children, and that one over there too.’
It felt as if I was seeing a desecration of life. Here were grown men drinking themselves to death in what was once the playhouse of children; children that they themselves had at home.
I knew that the men would drink all night and eventually pass out. At around midday there would probably be some rousing of heads. After some more samagonka to lessen the hangover, they would stumble to the bridge and achieve almost nothing. It was true that they were still working unpaid, but there was no honour in that. In fact the work they were doing, largely in a drunken, apathetic daze, was so unproductive that it didn’t warrant payment. They were achieving absolutely nothing; not successfully repairing the bridge, not earning money, not helping their families. If this scenario was typical of life in the thousands upon thousands of villages in Russia, it shed some light on the extent of the country’s economic and social woes. Alcohol obviously had a crippling effect. The typical Russian man drinks a pint of pure alcohol every two days, compared with less than two pints a month for the average American. Approximately 40 000 Russians a year die of alcohol poisoning, not to mention the huge number of alcohol-related deaths. Outside of Africa, the male mortality rate in Russia in 1999 was worse than any country, except Haiti. This could be attributed mainly to alcohol and tobacco abuse, little exercise and a poor diet. The mortality rate has been increasing ever since 1965, but particularly since perestroika when the old Soviet systems and institutions were thrown into disarray.
l stared contemplatively into my glass, and then decided to down it.
Sasha eventually arrived to announce that the banya and dinner were ready. I slipped out without the men noticing. It was still raining as we made for his home.
‘What is your occupation here?’ I asked.
‘Well, at the moment I weld and drive a tractor in the fields,’ he replied.
‘And how much do you earn?’
‘One hundred roubles a month.’ Three dollars fifty, US.
‘But how can that be possible? People in the north get one thousand roubles a month on the pension!’ I cried.
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well, I am not on the pension yet,’ he finally replied.
His home was a tiny wooden cottage that stood on a small plot of land. Its foundations were giving way, leaving a bent and twisted structure. The small square windows were contorted so that there were gaps between the glass and the windowsill. Above the windows, intricate woodcarvings added life and character.
‘So come in. Welcome to our home,’ he said, opening the door. ‘I’m afraid that I don’t have tea, but I have some leftover cocoa if you would like.’
Inside, the soft patter of rain on the wooden roof made the three-room house feel cosy. It was quiet compared to the endless chattering in the kindergarten. A cat lay stretched out on a bed, purring. On the walls hung some stained carpets. One depicted paradise – a white castle rising above a forest where beautiful people rode horses.
‘Here, have some soap, and get changed while I fetch some water,’ he said.
I sat looking around the main room. Like everything else, the electrical wiring was self-made. The stove was a coiled wire set into a brick. When Sasha hooked it up by twisting wires over the power terminal, it turned a glowing red. Other than a chipped cabinet and a small Chinese-made radio, his possessions were negligible. As in most Russian homes, his glassware consisted of a couple of old jars.
&nb
sp; Sasha was like many friends of my own age in Australia: he had just moved out of home and was trying to build an independent life. His girlfriend had fallen pregnant, but complications forced her to have an abortion. She was yet to arrive home from hospital.
But it wasn’t just independence that had brought Sasha here. In the city he had been unable to survive. At least here there was enough milk, meat and crops to live on, even if the wages were pitiful and irregular.
Sasha returned and I headed for the banya. One of the reasons I enjoy banya so much is that it is a chance to get close to the surroundings. There is nothing like sitting in the yard naked, watching horses and carts go by and observing the houses while steam pours from your body.
While I stood outside, cooling off, Sasha was in the vegetable garden collecting ingredients for the borsch soup. Nothing around me hinted at modern life as we know it in the western world. Probably thousands of villages like this one lay neglected and out of sight from the main roads.
I imagined leaving the village behind and riding to Novosibirsk. In the city, this place would be just a memory. For some reason I felt guilty that I could just arrive, experience the place and leave again. And yet, although I sympathised with the workmen, I was partly baffled. Why in their kindness and maturity did they drink so much? Did the hardship that contributed to their generosity and joviality also drive them into depression and death?
After my experience of the past day, it was no wonder that life expectancy for Russian males is just fifty-nine years. This is shorter than men in three quarters of the world’s countries, many of which are much poorer. In fact, against the trend of most countries, the life expectancy for men in Russia has been declining since 1965 when it peaked at sixty-seven.
After a while I returned to the banya. I placed a large scoop of water on the stones and the small room filled with heavy steam. Sweat quickly built up on my body and I washed away the dead skin, grime and dirt that had built up over seven days on the bike. It was a deeply cleansing feeling and induced a sense of calm. I took in deep breaths and let the urgency and adrenaline of the past week dispel.
For the first time since separating from Chris, everything was in one piece. The broken bike was now irrelevant; it had led me to a far greater insight than success on the tarmac could ever have given me. As I peered out the small square banya window, I saw Sasha return with a bundle of carrots and onions; he was soaked to the skin. My problems were nothing.
Most of the men were still passed out when I gathered my bike in the morning. Misha came out to wave goodbye as I rode out of the village. I stopped only once to take note of its name: Filipimovo.
Later that day I rolled down a grassy hill into a patch of birch trees. It was still light and I could see across to the plains. Here and there, clumps of trees formed a scattered archipelago. It wouldn’t be long before the sun began to dip and the mosquitoes came out.
I pushed the bike slowly, bottling in triumphant laughter. I felt no urge to rush and the threat of disaster didn’t worry me.
Almost there.
I knew that Bruce was gone, and although I would never know why, I could only learn from it. The smiles of children and Sasha’s struggle to construct a life was enough to spark my reaffirmation of life. And what better way to live than by an armchair on wheels across Russia?
As for Chris, well hadn’t I been overly introspective in the past week, craving the freedom to ride uninterrupted? What if, just what if, that was the way he’d been feeling the whole time?
As Chris’s tent came into sight, I wasn’t overcome with relief. I felt proud of the way I had managed the week alone.
Off the Rails
Novosibirsk – Bratsk
Mid-Summer 2000
———
Chris
I sat in the bum-shaped curve of a fallen tree at the bottom of a grassy slope and chewed at the end of a pen. On my knees, I held a notebook full of Russian words that I was trying to learn, and resting on the log beside me was a long letter to Nat that I’d been trying to finish. I was only twenty kilometres from Novosibirsk, and as long as Tim arrived sometime that afternoon, I’d be talking to Nat on the phone in the morning. Somehow, I couldn’t put my energy and my thoughts into a letter that wouldn’t reach her for another month.
I gave up and looked around for something else to do. The headset that connected my handlebars to the bike frame had come a little loose over the previous week and it needed adjusting, but I didn’t feel like hauling out my tool kit and getting all greasy. I went for a stroll along the grassy bank and eyed off a few prospective pieces of firewood instead, but the pile by the tent was already more than big enough to last the evening. In the end, I turned back towards camp and did what I’d wanted to do all afternoon. I grabbed a water bottle and set off up the hill to find a stakeout spot where I could watch for Tim.
No sooner had I reached the top, than I saw a familiar, smudgy white and brown blob on the horizon. I did a double take and looked again. The blob wobbled its way into focus and became Tim on the bike. I raced back down the hill feeling ridiculous and settled on my log just in time to see Tim ride over the top of the hill. He came hurtling down with a huge grin and braked to a squealing halt beside me.
‘Long time no see, mate. How’d you go?’ I asked, smiling.
‘Yeah, not too bad,’ he replied, casually. ‘Had a few problems with the bike, but other than that …’
‘Oh, yeah. What happened?’
‘Well, just let me think.’ He scratched his head and glanced at me with a twinkle in his eye. ‘That’s right, the gear changer snapped off a few days ago, then yesterday I had a little problem when the entire bike snapped in half, but nothing too serious. How about you?’
‘Wow!’ I said, impressed. ‘I had a couple of flats and my handlebars came a bit loose a few days ago, but …’ I paused for a moment. Tim was struggling to keep from laughing, but it was useless. A grin erupted from somewhere beneath his beard and a moment later we both cracked up laughing.
After a week apart, it really was great to see Tim again. I’d missed his company more than I thought I would. I’d enjoyed the freedom to ride in uninterrupted contemplation, to think and ponder the world for hours on end. And I’d also needed to get away from everything about him that annoyed me, but I’d missed his company all the same. I’d missed sitting under the stars by the campfire and chatting about the world and our respective futures. I’d missed hearing his unique comments and ideas, some of which irritated me to distraction, but most of which intrigued me as a very different way of seeing the world.
I got the fire going and put some water on the boil. Then Tim showed me the jagged, brutal-looking weld line across the frame of his bike and the way that he’d rigged up his broken gear changer. I was impressed at how well he’d managed to pull through in the face of such disasters; and I could see that as casual as he was being about it all, he was proud of himself.
We sat by the campfire well into the evening, catching up and laughing at the confusion we’d caused in the villages as we passed through a day apart. One group of kids I’d met in the village of Kotchki had got it into their heads that I was involved in a long-distance bicycle race from Moscow to China. When they saw Tim roll in the next day they had urged him to pedal faster: ‘C’mon, hurry up! The first guy’s only a day ahead of you!’
———
The next day we rolled into Novosibirsk to meet Nina Koptyug, the lady who was to be our host for the week. Nina and her husband Ivan were academics. She was a professor of English and Ivan a physicist. They lived with their daughters in the suburb of Akademgorodok, or ‘Academy Township’, which in its heyday had been a driving force behind Soviet science and technology. At its peak, the township housed up to 65 000 of the USSR’s top scientists and their families; Nina and Ivan were children of the very cream of this intellectual stock. Nina’s father had been the director of one of the institutions and had moved on to become a member of an elite thin
k-tank advising Mikhail Gorbachev. Ivan’s father had been chair of the board of academic directors of the entire academy. Although Nina and Ivan had established their own lives independent of their families, and while much had changed in Akademgorodok since the fall of the Soviet Union, the week we spent there gave us a glimpse into the astonishing world of power and privilege that had been the domain of the Soviet elite.
We had come into contact with Nina through the Internet; she was one of the handful of people who had responded to the thousands of e-mails Tim had sent to Russian schools from Finland. Dismayed at the quality of primary and secondary language education in Novosibirsk, she had thrown in her university post to teach English at her daughters’ school and had become a well-known local activist and advocate for education reform. She’d invited us to stay at her flat and had arranged for us to speak to as many English students as she could schedule into a week. We were, of course, more than happy to do so.
We had arrived late. Due to Bruce’s funeral and the delay in Omsk, we had reached Novosibirsk after the end of school term. Despite her best efforts, Nina had only managed to arrange for a few groups of students to meet with us. We visited several schools in different corners of the city and spent a fascinating morning talking to bright-eyed kids in a public orphanage, but apart from that, the rest of the week was our own.
Every day we’d take the bus thirty kilometres through the suburbs then ride the subway into the bustling heart of the city. The days were hot and sunny and people were out in force. I spent many hours on the Net, catching up with Nat, while Tim searched the city’s many sports shops, in vain, for a replacement gear changer.
With nearly two million people, Novosibirsk is the biggest city in Siberia. Tim saw thousands of imported western bikes, but did not manage to find anyone who stocked spare parts. In the end, we resorted to removing the three-speed gear-changer from Ivan’s old racing bike and bolting it onto Tim’s. It wasn’t much, but with mountainous terrain ahead, at least he had a few gears.
Off The Rails Page 16