Vadim nodded and Nikita wrote it on the wall. Then he looked at Nastya and raised his eyebrows questioningly, but Nastya shook her head. He shrugged. Fair enough.
Meanwhile the city was bathed in bright yellow sunlight, and a new day had begun. The buses were full of people. Drivers squinted, giving themselves extra wrinkles, as the low sun shone right into their eyes. They searched for their sunglasses and put them on. A man drove briskly past on a tractor. An old man set out for a walk, carrying a stool. Scenes from an ordinary morning in a big city.
A stout gentleman comes out of a building. Before getting into his posh car, he looks around furtively and leaves a bag full of rubbish by the front door. At that moment a window bangs open and an old woman sticks her head out. This is precisely what she’d been waiting for! She’s not going to stand for it.
“Young man! Who’s going to tidy that up?”
“You are,” he replies, as he walks towards his car.
“The bins are over there!”
“Thanks for letting me know,” he retorts, and then he gets into his car and drives off.
These days, squabbles on public transport are a thing of the past. Oh, how sparks used to fly! There was always such a crush, people pushing and shoving… that was communism for you! They have been replaced by a new phenomenon – GAZelles.
GAZelles essentially operate as shared minibus taxis, following set routes, but they’re so much more than that! They’re a kind of subculture, and they follow their own rules – crossing abruptly from the third lane straight into the first, sudden starts, ‘emergency’ stops and so on. Their drivers’ psychology is different too – they need the money! You must have witnessed it. For example, when a GAZelle minibus approaches a bus stop it watches for the slightest movement to indicate that anyone wants to get on. So the potential passengers sit there waiting, trembling nervously and watching one another’s reactions. All it takes is the twitch of an eye and the GAZelle screeches to a halt. Another example… A lilac GAZelle approaches a stop, and a boy who wants a good seat runs alongside it, grabs the door handle and leads the minibus to a complete stop, like the boy holding the reins in Petrov-Vodkin’s Bathing of a Red Horse.
No, you can say what you like, but in the city GAZelles are a way of life.
Another peculiarity of GAZelles is that they all have three or four rear-facing seats at the front, just behind the driver’s seat. If you end up sitting in one of these seats you have to put up with everyone else staring at you, and there’s nothing you can do about it! You look pointedly out of the window, deliberately ignoring the boy over there who’s devouring you with his eyes. That’s if you’re a girl, of course…
That’s where Nastya was sitting, right in the firing line. The minibus was virtually empty, so it wasn’t too bad, but the other passengers were staring straight at her. They were probably trying to work her out… What does she look like? Why isn’t she wearing any make-up? She’s dressed like a tramp… And why’s she got that huge rucksack with her?
Nastya couldn’t have cared less! Let them look. She was used to it. People were always staring at her as if they were in a zoo. She concentrated on looking out of the window, though the minibus was going so fast she could barely make out the view. It was heading to the Zaton district. Squire had written directions on a piece of paper for the police checkpoint in Zaton, which was the starting point for the M7, the Volga highway.
Nastya had already checked their progress with the driver a couple of times. Unusually for a hitchhiker, Nastya had absolutely no sense of direction. She found it impossible to get her bearings in the city. But they weren’t in the city any more! They were driving past trees and forests.
The GAZelle took a turning and pulled up at the side of the road, raising a cloud of dust.
“The checkpoint’s that way,” said the driver, indicating with his hand. “Keep walking for about three hundred metres and you can’t miss it.”
“Thanks!” Nastya held out her fare. The coins had warmed up in her hand.
“Don’t worry about it,” winked the driver. “Hitchhikers travel for free!”
Nastya thanked him sincerely. She jumped down from the step and set off, without a backwards glance at the other passengers, who were all watching her through the windows… Their curiosity had tripled.
It was nothing, really. Literally six roubles. But still, it was a nice feeling.
She walked along the roadside verge feeling cheerful, energetic and almost happy.
Meanwhile the boys were heading out onto the Ural highway, and their mood was very different. Squire had helpfully written down all the minibus taxi routes for them too, and as they travelled across the city Nikita tried to lift his friend’s spirits. Gazing out of the window at the city outskirts, he sighed and said, “We didn’t get to see much of Ufa, did we?”
Vadim nodded limply, but his thoughts were elsewhere.
So it was in silence, wearily and reluctantly, that they came out onto the highway, to the same spot where they’d been dropped off the previous day. They ambled across the wide intersection, two tiny figures laden with rucksacks.
The highway was virtually deserted. Just as they reached the verge, a lorry rumbled past at high speed, its canvas covering flapping enthusiastically on both sides.
“It’s from Chelyabinsk, that one.” Nikita nodded at the disappearing truck and added good-naturedly, “Bastard… He could have stopped!”
“Seventy-four… is that Chelyabinsk?” asked Vadim, perking up a little. “I ought to remember that… What’s Sverdlovsk?”
“Sixty-six.”
They walked a little further until they reached a reasonably straight stretch of road, then they stopped. It was time to split up.
This is probably the hardest thing about travelling as a group, when one says, “OK, I’ll stay here,” and the others say, “See you later.” Gradually the group gets smaller and smaller, until each of them is standing alone by the side of the road. I seem to remember a fairy tale like that, where all the characters say goodbye and disappear, one by one. Can’t remember what it’s called, though.
One of them had to go first. Nikita wanted to make sure it was fair.
“Go on, you go. It’s your turn.”
“I couldn’t possibly! Not with your track record… If I get a head start as well, you’ll never catch up with me! It’s best if you go first. Go on!”
“Let’s hope we both make it to E-burg tonight!”
They shook hands and Vadim walked away – to be honest, with a sigh of relief. Nikita was a great guy and didn’t ask too many questions, but right now he needed to be alone.
Vadim stopped about two hundred metres further along the road and looked back. He could still see Nikita, and the city in the distance. He could see them clearly because he was standing with his back to the sunrise – they were travelling east. There weren’t many cars.
Half an hour later Nikita finally got a lift – a young couple in a Moskvich, as far as he could tell. Nikita managed to wave apologetically through the window as they drove past. And then Vadim was alone.
I’m going to let you into a little secret. Vadim never turned down the chance to go last, and not simply out of comradeship. He had come to look forward to the overwhelming sense of melancholy that envelops you when the door slams, your friend drives off and you suddenly realise that you’re alone on the bleak and endless highway. The realisation is always sudden and strong enough to take your breath away. The sense of solitude is striking, almost palpable, and infinitely more intense than the loneliness you feel in the city.
Maybe this is what it all came down to. Maybe this feeling – this vivid, exhilarating feeling – was the reason Vadim liked hitchhiking so much.
Many words and expressions used by Russian hitchhikers have been borrowed from English, but the roads, the solitude and the melancholy are quintessentially Russian.
Translated by Amanda Love Darragh
Irina Bogatyreva
> OFF THE BEATEN TRACK
We are footloose and fancy-free wayfarers on roads without end, friends of long-distance truckers and drivers, their amulets, talismans, their guardian angels. Even the cops leave us alone. They know us for who we are and where we are going. We may not know that ourselves, may laugh and gesture into the sun, but the cops know. They swear, shrug, hand back our ID, and send us on our way. There is no stopping us, but why that should be they don’t know.
We are legion, dots scattered along the road, romantic followers of our guru Jack Kerouac, members of the same mendicant order, and the motto on our crest could read, In via veritas or, more simply, “The Road Is Always Right”. Our destinations differ and the routes we take, but we are as one in our sense that only here, on the road, are we truly free.
We are twenty years old, give or take, do not yet have a past, do not look to the future, and in the present have only the road ahead, the asphalt, and the jubilant knowledge that everybody else has lost track of us.
We set out only recently. Soon we’ll be everywhere. We are on a high and embrace our road, anticipating its gifts, not knowing where it will lead us.
And you, capricious road, now smiling, now incensed, how are we to detect the moment when your mood changes? You are life, and destiny, the unique instance of all possible combinations. Right here, right now, with this person, and we know no alternative.
Africa / (Rastafari)
We get out and set off along the soft verge of the Moscow outer ring road at pedestrian speed. The nearest turning for the city is three kilometres away, and it would be good to know the area, friend, the area we are in now. It is good to know where you are, and especially like now at night, in the rain, walking along the verge of the ring road, the verge of the whole of Moscow.
The rain sheets down and we feel underwater, walking on the seabed. The ring road hurtles past, headlights probing the darkness, teeth clenched against the speed, and all it can see is night and rain and red lights. Water shatters against blunt windscreens, foams beneath wheels leaving white silhouettes on the asphalt. A car passes and the silhouette holds for a moment before white foam drains to the verge and us.
“Tolya, the speed limit here is a hundred kilometres an hour. Do you hear? They simply can’t see you!” I have turned to look back and shout into the darkness. The silhouette of Tolya, pissed as a newt, is shimmering back there behind the wall of rain, his arm outstretched to thumb a lift. “Forget it! Come on!” I urge again.
We are tree stumps, milestones on this godforsaken highway, our speed is nothing compared to theirs. They can’t see us, friend, can’t see these three wet stumps with rucksacks. We have nothing even to reflect their light, and still have so far to go before we will be home.
“What’s the hurry, you bastards?” Tolya’s drunken larynx shreds the night air. “Stop, you maniacs!” Night is shredded into shriek. I glance at Roma. He is cool, plodding along with just the hint of a smile, his lips repeating his song. “Titch, just mind he doesn’t fall over,” he counsels.
Titch is me. It’s what they call me, not on account of my height or size but just because I’m younger than the rest of them. I turn to look at Tolya. He seems to be walking okay, lurching, of course, staring at the ground, his rucksack not straight, but at least he’s walking, laughing about something, even apparently talking to someone.
The night rushes by, the ring road rushes by, with us as its milestones. Something clicks in me, as sometimes happens, and suddenly I am seeing everything at once, not from inside myself but from above, as if from a bridge or a cloud: three figures walking: Titch (me), Roma Jah, and Tolya, artist and poet, but right now just a straggling drunken pal. The ring road is a Ferris wheel illuminated by coloured lights. The cold is making a thousand and one bunches of hair stand on end on Titch’s (my) head. Leftover brown greasepaint is streaking Tolya’s shaven head making him look like specialforces out on a jungle mission. Roma, our ginger-dreadlocked Roma Jah, is now so wet and thin, so cool and pitiable, that he looks like Jesus Christ. A Rastaman Jesus with scrawny dreads sticking to his face, he bears his rucksack full of tom-toms, and the smell of ganja hangs in the wet air behind him. Roma always smells of ganja. That’s why he is called Roma Jah.
“Are you coming?” I turn round to yell at Tolya, but collide with him and his smell, a smell of cadged rum and expensive brandy recently downed. You are truly bladdered, friend, and now not even the cold May rain can clear your brain.
“No need to shout,” Tolya says quietly. Even in the midst of all that noise and water you can speak quietly and be heard if you are nose to nose. “Move on!”
He takes a step in my direction and I jump back and move along. I hear him shouting, “Roma! Hey, Roma! Did that song even have an ending? You know, the one we were thumping out for the last hour back there?” Roma smiles and plods on. “Come on, Roma, say something, will you? How did it go? ‘Rastafari…’? Roma!” Tolya tries to remember the words and gets them wrong, bawling away behind our rucksacks.
“Will they get wet?” I ask Roma, nodding at our packs. All the African drums we have are in there: a djembe, tom-toms, a large kpanlogo. They have thick mahogany bodies and white leather drumheads and look like casks, wooden stools or the tables of an outdoor café. They smell of Africa and ganja. Actually, no. It’s Roma smells of ganja and the drums just belong to him.
I wonder whether they have downpours like this in Africa for drums to get exposed to. Roma smiles, says nothing, mouthes his endless Rastaman song, his endless Rastaman mantra. Jah will give us everything, eh, Roma?
I love his songs and his drums. Roma is always very, very cool. Even when he’s stoned he is cool and a bit pensive, with no giggling or antics. He’s a real, meditative Rastaman whose constant ganja meditation has taught him the truth of the greatest insight of Rasta: Jah will give us everything. I like him for that.
The drums appeared at the beginning of winter. Our commune is a vast, Stalin-era apartment on Yakimanka near the centre of Moscow, with endless corridors and ceilings, which anyone can rent. How many people live there only Roma knows, because he is the landlord. He sublets it and lives in it, in our room; more precisely, of course, in his room, but besides him there are four other people there, including me. I sleep in the gallery. In that kind of apartment the gallery is like an intermediate floor and I like it there.
All through the winter our room was learning to pound out African rhythms on the drums. Tolya and I were the ablest pupils, learning to beat out the basic rhythms, which Roma ornamented with beautiful, non-repeating, unexpected rhythmical patterns. All winter long we treated our neighbours to this and, when the snow melted, migrated our little piece of Africa to the pavement of Kuznetsky Most to make some money.
We were discovered within a fortnight. A plummy woman came along, put a hundred roubles in Roma’s ginger-coloured hat, beckoned him over and said, “Are you a permanent group or have you just now got together?” “A permanent group,” Roma Jah confirmed swiftly. “Give me your phone number. We organise corporate parties and our theme next week is ‘Natives’. We’ll invite you and your group to play.” Roma nodded and gave her our Yakimanka number.
Madame didn’t call the next week, but two weeks later she did. It was a Saturday and our entire commune was at home. Tolya was having a creative crisis over his pictures and moaning that he needed to get smashed but hadn’t any money, and I was reading Kerouac up in my gallery. It was no problem for Roma to get us together and take us on the metro out to Shchelkovskaya. What a corporate party involved none of us had any idea. In the metro the drums clunked against each other in our rucksacks. Tolya asked Roma Jah whether there would be drink.
Next to the metro station, near the Matrix Cinema, a black Volkswagen was waiting and drove us far out beyond the outer ring. I sat in the back with despondent Tolya, while Roma tried to make conversation with the driver. Talking to drivers was a hitchhiking habit of his. The latter remained impassive, however, not even resp
onding to direct questions. “Actually, he was a shaved gorilla,” Tolya opined afterwards.
We drove up to an impenetrable white wall, one section of which tipped over and admitted the car to a clean, empty courtyard. The white walls of a not spectacularly large house were surrounded by a hedge, which was still bare and unwelcoming. Glass doors in the porch slid back at our approach to reveal two bronze borzois, restless and lean, light and life-sized. Everything in the interior of the house was white and understated, but with a particular, gilded kind of understatement.
We were taken through to a large room almost entirely occupied by what looked like a triple-sized table-tennis table on which sat slender, beautiful girls. They were tanned to the point of swarthiness and had had so much ointment rubbed into them that their skin reflected the bright lights. One was a genuine mulatto. They were lightly dressed. More precisely, they were scantily clad in scraps of cloth suggestive of the attire of African natives. A dozen very professional-looking men and women were doing their hair, applying make-up, manicuring them, pedicuring them. The girls were putting on costumes, laughing, and talking loudly. As we entered we were dazzled by this riot of gleaming, sophisticated, fragrant, chocolatey beauty.
“Bloody hell!” Tolya exclaimed. Someone asked, “Who are these?” “Musicians,” someone else answered on our behalf. “To make-up!” we were instructed, and proceeded to a corner of the table.
“You are negroes,” the woman who had discovered us on Kuznetsky Most announced. She was plump and a product of the most chocolatey of solariums. Golden rings and bangles jangled on her neck, arms and legs. She was large, loud and ready to party, like a fertility goddess in a drought-stricken rainforest.
“Will there be food?” Tolya enquired, looking around tentatively, like a proletarian under arrest on the eve of the Great October Revolution.
“Later.” The woman checked him out cursorily. “Two hundred dollars, shall we say?” she informed rather than asked Roma Jah. “Those are very good,” she said with a nod towards Roma’s dreadlocks. “Pity about that one.” This in respect of Tolya. “I shaved them off yesterday,” he bumbled.
Off the Beaten Tracks Page 8