Off the Beaten Tracks

by Irina Bogatyreva

  We went back to the commune, but our room was still sound asleep. Only Roma Jah was missing. The window was wide open, my somnolent roommates huddling in their blankets as warmly as they could.

  I sat on the windowsill and looked down at asphalt still wet from the street-spraying truck, at the playground and the grass where dogs were already out walking their owners. Lenka came and sat beside me and dangled her feet over the edge too. She yawned, her eyes still only half open, her blond hair matted, and oh, how fresh and joyous it was to sit there with Lenka as she was now!

  “Well, we don’t need this any more,” she said, tearing off the ‘Emergency Exit’ sign and skimming it like a boomerang. It rotated a few times before falling inelegantly into the courtyard. I smiled, remembering that at 10.00 Sasha and I had a meeting with Grand, and before that I needed to pack my bag. I felt as if I could have spread my wings, launched myself from the windowsill, and left behind forever the open window of Yakimanka, the communal paradise which let us all grow up.

  To the Lake

  “Life is about moving on,” Grand said, and my summer exploded and raced so fast there was in any case no question of stopping.

  There had been Yakimanka, and it had been left behind in the smog of Moscow. There had been Sasha Sorokin, and he was left behind the moment I told him I wanted to go with strange, mysterious Grand, away from here, onward to the East. I had never experienced hitchhiking like that, so easy, spontaneous, impetuous, so passionately impelling us towards a destination known only to Grand, shimmering in infinity.

  “Always look them in the eye and say ‘Stop!’ to yourself,” he instructed me, peering towards the horizon. Grand the Wayfarer, who looks like a pirate with his black bandana and shaggy beard. His skin loves the sun, his eyes love distant horizons, and who knows what is in his mind?

  “Does that really work?” Grand could teach the birds in the trees, the sunbeams, the waters of a river. Perhaps that’s why he is on the road: the road loves those who know what they are bringing with them. And what do you bring with you, friend, other than your willingly borne eternal solitude? “What do you mean, ‘Does it work?’ You are giving them an order. They hear, ‘Stop!’”

  I am going to learn from this man, taking in his every word and gesture. Before a day has passed I am walking the way he walks, and within three I have adopted his way of smiling his silent approval, where back on Yakimanka we would have exclaimed, “Cool!” or “Really gone, man!”, our voices ringing with delight. What he is going to teach me only God and his messengers know, but Grand radiates a power which attracted me the moment we met, and if anyone thinks he might suddenly just stop and decide to put down roots, I would be the first to lose interest in him.

  “Can you see their eyes at that speed and distance?” “It makes no difference.”

  If we stop near a roadside café, Grand sends me in with a pot in which dry buckwheat is rattling and I come back with porridge, tea and two buns, leaving behind no more than a good mood. I had no idea I could do that.

  “No, I do understand, only it doesn’t seem likely to work every time.” “Don’t look at appearances, look at what things mean. Everything that happens to us is a sign. If that car didn’t stop for us, it means something.” “It means there will be another one along which will stop.” “That too. But who will be in the car? Look at those people and learn. These too are signs, lessons. Why has the road sent you these people and not others? What is it inside you that person is responding to? Learn to see it.”

  I learned and saw. I was pleased the road had sent me this particular kind of man, and I cooked the food when we stopped. I asked questions and Grand always answered them in detail.

  There was only one question Grand did not answer, and that was where we were going and why. For some reason that caused a feeling to grow and ripen in me that there was more to my journey than met the eye, and that Grand had had everything planned long ago.

  You raise your thumb, half-close your eyes, and how desperately I wish I knew what you are seeing at that moment, my friend, when you look at the road, trying to spot reflections from a windscreen.

  Sometimes we got a lift, sometimes we just stood at the roadside. At first it was mostly standing. Moscow had us in her grip and didn’t want to let go. We yawned, facing the traffic, looking towards the capital we were leaving and with our backs to our journey, which seemed in no hurry to receive us. We were like stones in a tight catapult someone couldn’t pull back far enough to fire us at the East.

  We didn’t yet know each other. We looked and tried to work out what we could expect and how much we meant to each other, but also how much of that talent for communing with the road each of us had.

  In the evening we passed through Shatsk. The last people to stop for us were Greeks in an old black Audi with a foreign number plate. With great difficulty they explained they needed Russian money and offered to sell us a gold ring. With great difficulty we told them we had no money and didn’t need a ring. Disappointed, the Greeks drove off, leaving us puzzling over whether it wasn’t obvious why we were standing at the roadside.

  “Well, not too bad for the first day,” Grand said, already surveying our surroundings and wondering where we should spend the night. “Moscow is a big magnet. It’s not easy to escape a pull like that.”

  All day a quiet frustration had been building in me. Grand was not the culprit because I still had faith that my destiny had brought us together, but getting almost no lifts, being ineptly unable to get on our way, was making me tetchy.

  “What matters most is our intention,” Grand said. He pronounced the word as if it came from another language. He kept repeating that all day, looking at me, only too obviously sizing me up, while I did everything in my power to look as if I was no stranger to the road and knew all about hitchhiking.

  I held up my thumb and leaned towards every car, but only succeeded in looking like a scarecrow planted by the roadside. It got to a point where Grand enquired how I would feel about our splitting up if need be. “Extremely negatively,” I muttered, fondly remembering Sasha with whom I had already split up. He would never have made that suggestion, but then again, it was I who split up with him. Grand just shrugged.

  I desperately wanted to do something, and in my irritation the most unexpected thing I could think of was to go over to the black and white striped kerb separating the roadway from a steep-sided ditch and wobble along it, waving my arms about and balancing fairly incompetently. Grand looked on indulgently. I thought he even nodded. I jumped down and turned to face the roadway. It was empty. The fiery sunset was so tranquil and classically crimson you wanted only to think about eternity and forget all about lifts and roads.

  “A Gazelle!” We raised our thumbs in unison and a minute later were in the van. “Where do you guys want to go?” The usual question. “As far as possible.” The usual answer. “Fine! I’m going to Togliatti, but I need to push it to get there before they close the dam at 6.00 am, otherwise I’ll be cooling my heels on this side till Tuesday.” The catapult had been fired and we were on our way.

  We flew all through the night with a driver who played his one and only cassette on auto-reverse. Music on the road is a topic in its own right. You immediately know what kind of person is giving you the lift. You usually end up listening to a lot of underworld songs and pop, but this driver was young and serious, very focused. His music was electronic hard rock. Wisps of white mist rushed to escape the headlights.

  After midnight, the driver passed us a couple of pillows and Grand there and then gratefully fell asleep. I stared in horror. Had he not read Anton Krotov’s Questions and Answers, the hitch-hiker’s bible, which clearly states:

  “Sleeping during a lift is STRICTLY PROHIBITED”?

  I decided to be stoical. The driver glanced sideways at me and asked why I wasn’t sleeping. I stared glassily into the darkness, nodded and smiled, as if to say everything’s just fine. I could see he hadn’t read Krotov either.
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br />   As dawn broke and all around was damp and misty, the massive bulk of the Lenin Hydroelectric Dam in Kuibyshev loomed up around us, a statement comparable to the pyramids, ziggurats or other monuments of long forgotten civilisations. Paying proper respect to a bygone age, the driver dropped his speed, crossed the Volga, then put his foot down and we were off again. He soon stopped at a junction, we jumped out, and our kindly Gazelle drove off into the city.

  It was damp and misty and the long-distance truck drivers who had parked for the night at the roadside café were waking up and setting off in their mammoth vehicles. A flock of gleaming black rooks were circling the road, landing on the asphalt and not flying away. One rook was prostrate near the parking lot and the others were strutting over and trying to get him to fly with the rest of them. He struggled but couldn’t take off. Vehicles were driving by very close, so close their gigantic wheels could have snagged his beak but there was not so much as a glint of fear now in the stunned bird’s eyes. We stood watching, I in horror, not daring to approach, and Grand grimly.

  The long-distance truckers departed, neither taking us with them nor touching the bird, until Grand said, “This is clearly a sign, only what does it mean?” He took a sheet of plywood and moved the rook back to the kerb. It opened its beak, moved its feet, tried to prop itself up on its wings, but couldn’t fly. Its black relatives circled, cawing, and in each of them I seemed to see the spectre of my Cara. When we moved away the birds again flew to the injured bird, trying to get him to fly. “A curious sign,” Grand repeated.

  A sleepy family in a Lada-6 gave us a lift as far as Samara. We bought yogurt and went down to the beach, to the Volga. The sun had already dispersed the mist, but there was nobody there. I went into the water, and the river remembered and welcomed me. “Hello, sister…”

  Afterwards I lay on the sand and fell asleep. The sun rose higher, became hotter, but I carried on sleeping, listening to the lapping of the Volga, to the sounds from the town above, to the motorboats, and Grand snorting like a horse after his swim. He came out and lay down beside me and he too fell asleep.

  Grand is footloose and fancy-free. Fancy-free and weird. I know nothing about him. Tell me, sister, what kind of man has the road given me as my companion?

  “Grand, tell me where we’re going.” “To where the sun rises.”

  Having once picked us up, the road carried us on steadily and swiftly. In Samara I woke up on the sunlit beach horrified, thinking we were late, but Grand said you can never be late for your next lift, the one and only lift destined for you. The simplicity of that wisdom impressed me. I believed him and before long we met up with a Gazelle loaded with cherries.

  The driver was an Armenian heading to Oktyabrsk, near Ufa in Bashkiria The whole way Grand chatted to him about the price of fruit and vegetables, the best way to buy them and sell them before they went off. Loud music was being played and I could hardly hear them. I ate cherries and threw the stones out the window.

  He dropped us off and before we had time to see the roadside a Lada Samara hatchback stopped and took us on to Ufa. The driver was a young guy who laughed at the jokes on the radio and talked to Grand about the price of petrol. Bashkiria, green, bright green and expansive, clean and friendly rushed by the window. On the distant hills we could see the silhouettes of idyllic grazing horses and miniature oil pumps like shadoofs at a village well. I felt I was almost in fairyland.

  We bypassed Ufa, by which time it was almost evening. It was almost evening, and we remembered that in the last 24 hours we had skipped two hours ahead. We put our watches forward, checking them with a timer on the recorder in a police car, which cheerfully gave us a lift to the next junction on the bypass.

  I wanted to take a breather. It had been a long drive and I was feeling dizzy. Grand’s eyes were shining wonderfully bright. We had a glass of tea in a café, washed our hands, surveyed the sky, pigeon-grey from the sunset, and got a lift in a Lada off-roader driven by an Orthodox priest.

  He was in a hurry and knew the way well. He smoked, blowing the smoke out of the side window only for the smoke to blow back in on me. He told us he was on his way to the funeral of the abbot of a monastery near Ekaterinburg. A sullen sceptic, it was a puzzle how he had come to be ordained. Grand talked about church services, fasts, pilgrimages and the monastic life. He said he had worked in a monastery and intended to become a novice himself but changed his mind. It was the first time I had heard Grand say anything about himself.

  “We went to Sarov a month ago,” our buddy the priest told us, gradually thawing out. “We walked there from Kazan. That’s a holy place, where Saint Seraphim lived and worked, and it is good to go there. It is good to go there and you too, when you feel the call in your soul, should go to Sarov, to pray in the holy places. There are springs there, and water… It is good to go there.”

  He was so carried away he didn’t bother to stop when a cop raised his baton. He lowered the sun visor, which had ‘Monastery’ inscribed on the reverse, and drove on muttering, “Scoundrels, the lot of them”.

  In the darkness we could make out a gloomy forest along the road. I could feel the breath of night coming through the air vent and was preparing myself for another sleepless passage on the road when our benefactor said, “I’m not driving through Sim. You need to know the road there in the dark. You hear the devil’s fife playing in the dead cedar trees.”

  Grand nodded. We pulled up at a log-built coaching inn, there was no other way to describe it, with a high porch and fretwork architraves. This roadside refuge in the forest gave off a sense of great antiquity, with the Ural Mountains all around and a solitary yellow lantern swaying above the car park. The priest invited us in, meticulously washed his hands at a washstand, and then ordered beer and soup for himself, and tea and fried eggs for us.

  He hunched over the table, looking down into his plate, eating and drinking in silence. He had a bushy beard the shape of a shovel, an unsmiling face and the broad back of an old-fashioned carter. The inner room was brightly lit and empty and the light made Grand and me look pale and haggard.

  “Well, don’t give in to sin, children,” our priest adjured us, sending us on our way. “You are young and temptation is always near at hand.” I had already picked up my bag when Grand went over to be blessed and bowed deeply before him. After that we went out to the dark road and were picked up by a taciturn insomniac KamAZ truck driver who took us over the Urals in six hours. I found out then all about Sim, a steady ascent by hairpin bends where the stars become ever more numerous both above and beneath us.

  From near Tyumen we hitched a ride with Muslims: two fast-driving Azerbaijanis with two new Ladas in which green discs with a tassel and a gold monogram reading ‘Allahu akbar’ swung behind the windscreen. As soon as Grand got in and saw this talisman he greeted them with the same words and from then on the conversation never deviated from a discussion of festivals, traditions and the Qur’an. The driver in our car was called Roma and told us that when Arabs had come to Tyumen, commissioning a factory of some description, the first thing they asked when entering a new building was which way was east. Roma thought they were brilliant. He thought Grand was brilliant too, and was constantly phoning and talking about us to his wife at home or to his partner in the other car. After this the other car drove up parallel to ours and its driver shouted something cheerful and hospitable through the open window. They sometimes exchanged cigarettes, a lighter, food and water bottles through the window in just the same way without stopping.

  They were reluctant to say goodbye, gave us their telephone numbers and insistently invited us to drop in on them for kebabs on the way back. Grand agreed, and I could tell from his expression that he really would visit them any time he was returning along that road.

  From Omsk to near Novosibirsk we were driven in a passenger Gazelle from Krasnoyarsk with a Moscow number plate. Two drivers were taking it in turns to drive. The one who had the day off sat in the back with a bottle of vodka. I
was in there with him and our rucksacks, and Grand was in the front. Judging by his by now very thick beard, the strange look in his eyes, and some singular Siberian propensity of their own, the guys decided Grand was an Old Believer and asked which community we were heading for. The whole way they were preoccupied with the Church Schism and wanted Grand to tell them why it happened and why some had refused to accept the new faith 400 years ago. At first Grand just smiled, but then he started talking about the oneness of God, freedom of choice and predestination. He didn’t deny being an Old Believer.

  We drove for a long time before making a stop. The men produced something along the lines of a Primus stove but couldn’t get it to light. They splashed petrol over it and ignited it. The stove burst into flames. We were shocked, but the guys said that when the petrol had burned off their stove would work well, and in next to no time they had cooked up Siberian pelmeni dumplings on their contraption.

  During the second part of our journey with them, my companion finished the vodka and lost interest in philosophy. He kept beckoning me over, pressing his vodka wetted-lips to my ear, and asking over and over again, “You sure you know where you’re going? How long’ve you known this character? Come on, you can tell me, aren’t you afraid? Oh, what a pretty state of affairs. Young people have their eyes shut. Can’t you see he’s making off with you? Abducting you!”

  I forced a smile and moved away. The geezer dozed off, opening his eyes now and again to give me a knowing wink, then drew me over and whispered, “Where do you come from yourself? Go back home, lassie. Come on, I’ll give you the money for the ticket. Want that? Ohh… no-o… Come on, I’ll give you the money. You’ve no idea where you’re going, no idea. You’re sectarians, I can tell.”