Off the Beaten Tracks

by Irina Bogatyreva

  I said nothing and moved as far away as I could. The road seemed endless. Grand carried on talking about the Schism, freedom of choice and the spiritual path. I had never asked him about his faith, and he had never before volunteered any information about it.

  Grand said, “Women are infinitely more gifted than men. A woman needs only to be given impetus and direction for her then to guide her teacher forward.” I longed to be a woman like that. I longed for a teacher to give me direction and then everything else could go to hell. For some reason, though, nothing I did ever impressed Grand. He took it as only to be expected. In the tales he told, girls who were remarkable were either witches or wise women, or at the very least ‘gifted’. I never advanced beyond ‘Titch’.

  Then suddenly on my road the witch appeared, hung like the sword of Damocles over my head, and my days were full of anxious, dispiriting anticipation. She appeared when, for the first time, Grand gave more than a vague answer to my repeated question of where we were going. “East”, he said, and then added, “We are going to a Lake. Someone will meet us there. I think it will be right for them to come with us.”

  My heart sank. In that genderless ‘someone’, as Grand always referred to everyone, I suddenly saw unambiguously that this would be a girl, and not just any girl but one I (and Grand) had come the length of Russia to meet. I wanted and at the same time was reluctant to ask about her. I wanted and was reluctant to set eyes on her. She had become our goal and my question of ‘where’ had now changed to ‘who’. Every time Grand answered, I tried pathologically to detect something that would tell me more about her and about what kind of woman Grand was in such a hurry to get back to.

  I pictured her as wise, calm, someone who knew life’s reality, someone with a warm, open smile, a gentle light in dark eyes, imposing, engaging and attractive. In other words, I pictured her as much the same as Grand, only even better. She was, after all, Woman, the embodiment of everything in the world that is beautiful. When I thought of her like that my very soul couldn’t wait to get the road behind us, the sooner to exult in this meeting.

  Alas, I then immediately imagined Grand and me meeting Her, and wondered where I would fit in when she was finally there. I, after all, am me, Titch, the eternal teenager, a puppy with big eyes, the spirit haunting the gallery on Yakimanka. What was there in me of real Woman. How could I possibly stand alongside Her? In any case, what need would there be for me next to Grand when she was there? Thinking along those lines, I stood at the roadside like a weary donkey and not a single vehicle saw fit to pay us any attention.

  One of those nights I had a dream: a very tall, bespectacled girl, plump and chubby, approached, towered over me, held out her hand and wanted to introduce herself. In my dream I was horrified. I woke up totally perplexed, recalling that within a day, or at most two, I would be meeting her in the flesh. If we didn’t wait for Sasha where we had agreed, it could be even less. She was already expecting us. I knew that because Grand had had a text message the day before which put a smile on his face like none I had seen before. He started replying, a dozen times erasing and re-typing every word. I bristled like a hedgehog and retreated to the tent.

  I decided to take definitive action to resolve everything once and for all. It might kill two birds with one stone by demonstrating to Grand how remarkable I am, and at the same time at last reveal to me something about Her. I resorted to subterfuge. I was so scared that Grand with his shrewdness would immediately see through me and felt I was throwing myself in desperation into a whirlpool, but my curiosity got the better of me.

  “Last night I dreamed we had arrived,” I said and paused, watching Grand out of the corner of my eye. We were having breakfast in the tent because it was overcast outside. He said nothing, knowing I would continue, which I did.

  “We met a girl,” I said, keeping my eyes on him. Grand munched. “She came over to shake hands,” I ended pointedly. Grand finished what he was eating and asked, “What did she look like?”

  I didn’t want to tell him the truth: the lanky creature in my dream could not possibly be Her, I was sure. I started making it up, watching his expression. “Well, she was tall… Maybe not as tall as you, I’m not sure, but taller than me for sure. And she wasn’t skinny but neither was she fat. Average. She had long hair – dark or brown – I don’t remember. And glasses.” I broke off. Never mind if some of the fine detail didn’t fit, I would be able to see that straight away and get a better picture of her. It wouldn’t bother me at all if he laughed and said, “No, she does not wear specs, and her eyes are blue, she has blond hair, and in any case… Come on, get ready. This is all just drivel.”

  Something really did light up in Grand’s eyes, though, but it was hard to tell quite what. He said, “What else do you remember?” “Oh, nothing.” “Perhaps she said something? Introduced herself?” “Hmm,” I prevaricated mysteriously. “I think she did. Yes, I remember now. She did tell me her name.” “And?”

  I was certain he had seen through me and that by now I was playing by his rules. I felt like putting a stop to it, but I also felt, what the hell. “Nastya,” I blurted out, and Grand’s face flickered and changed in a barely perceptible way, like when a stripe runs down the TV screen: the picture stays the same, but something has changed nevertheless. I could see I wasn’t going to get anywhere.

  “Mmm, yes, that I do remember. She came over, held out her hand and said, ‘Hello, my name is Nastya’.”

  Grand put down his mug and left the tent. I could have cried with frustration. Two days later, though, I discovered he had simply had nothing to add. She was called Nastya.

  She was called Nastya, and she was tall, neither thin nor fat, and had small steel-rimmed spectacles which made her look like a laboratory assistant in a Natural Science department. Her hair was long and of a colour so common in Russia it doesn’t have a name. Just dark. A person with thin, almost honed, features, cheekbones, eyebrows, the slant of her eyes, nose, lips; they lay symmetrically in ribbon-like lines and stretched when she smiled, not changing their shape. In those first days I was amazed that her body language seemed barely to reflect her emotions. I found her face inscrutable, as inscrutable as Asian faces are said to be to Europeans.

  Hurtling along above the speed limit, viewing the world as an endlessly repeated gift, we burst into the city, and found it unwelcoming and grim. “A witch lives in this town,” Grand said. “She is gifted but I think you will be able to help her in a number of ways.” “It would have been good if you had told me beforehand. What will I need to do?” “Nothing. Just be the way you are.”

  The way I am. Me, Titch, with a rucksack on my back and tattered sneakers on my feet. I am walking through a new town, glancing into the faces of passersby, wearing my inconstant, crazy hitchhiking smile, so what am I going to be able to reveal to your witch, friend, other than how to brew tea over a campfire till it’s just the way you like it?

  We stood across from Moskovsky train station under the awning of a large hotel with dark walls which reflected us. It was hot and the busy street, full of traffic, flowed past us like lava. We stood in the shade but nobody walked in this cool, inviting space. They steered clear of these two odd, dusty strangers.

  We burst into this city and our hearts were pounding as fast as our progress, almost four thousand kilometres in four days. We burst into the city, bringing with us all the same gifts we had given in each car: love of life, freedom from care and an enormous smile – but had suddenly to stop as we realised we had to wait. We waited, we took it easy, and my excitement, which had reached the level of hysterical palpitations, deflated and was expelled like air when you exhale deeply and are left empty and ready to take in a new breath. Those were Grand’s words when he was teaching me to understand the art of breathing, and now I understood them.

  I was empty, turned round, and saw Her. Grand had not spotted her yet and was staring vacantly ahead although she had already come round the corner. She was coming towards us but sti
ll he didn’t see, or didn’t recognise her. I knew that was Her and got up from our bags. She approached in a stiff, almost business-like manner and my self-confidence grew steadier and firmer with every step she took. There was nothing about her to justify all my anguish these last days. There was nothing about her I needed to fear.

  An instant before she approached, holding out her hand, I knew what she was going to say. “Hello, my name is Nastya.” Then she’d turn to Grand as if I were no longer there.

  How hard the climbing was at first! It was hard for me because I wasn’t used to it and I lagged behind. Nastya was up in front, with Grand following her. Sasha was miles back down the path. Nastya viewed the two of us with a sense of superiority. I could feel every blister on my feet and didn’t give a damn about anything else.

  Then suddenly everything changed. The open hills, the sloping meadows turned gradually into dense taiga forest. Bizarrely shaped boulders began to peep from beneath the moss. It was a forest of dark pines and larch trees. Now Nastya started falling behind while Sasha and I ran on ahead. We put our best foot forward and the trail seemed no more than a Sunday stroll.

  On the third day it became obvious we were lost. Nobody said as much, but we all knew it. We hiked on, but our mood was less buoyant. Grand said nothing either, but started cutting back on the rations. “We can always scrounge food off somebody else,” Sasha said nonchalantly, but nobody replied. We hadn’t seen a soul during our trek.

  Sasha was looking like a wood-goblin. A faraway smile appeared on his face as he dug about in the grass, smacking his lips with satisfaction. In behind his glasses his eyes were spotting things the rest of us overlooked: wild strawberries and allium, cranberries hidden deep in the shade; honeysuckle on bushes, and occasionally gooseberries and a variety of mushrooms. He would pop up to one side of us, in front of us, be catching us up from the rear, festooned with leaves and twigs, bearing the fruits of the forest before him in a plastic bag. When we stopped he would brew herbal teas and braise mushrooms in their own juice in the pot lid. I clambered through the bushes with him.

  We gnawed the fibrous white alliums. They were sweet, but with salt and dried bread they were delicious. Sasha could conjure food out of the ground. “Sasha, how come we were so hungry at the lakes?” “Because it was spring, of course, Titch. May.”

  Sasha and I went far ahead of the others, gathering things to eat. Nastya looked on as if to say, “This is just what I expected. It’s all you are capable of. Now let’s see you get us out of this mess.” She didn’t eat our mushrooms and grumbled that, if we were going to stop at every bush, we would never get anywhere. Grand was more and more unsmiling and had ever less to say. He began taking a serious interest in the extent to which these gifts were a real alternative and supplement to our rations. He trusted our instinct in respect of unfamiliar mushrooms, but did cut some open himself. If they didn’t darken he would know they were poisonous. Sasha and I hadn’t a care in the world. We gathered honeysuckle. It was delicious if you added it to porridge made with dried milk.

  “What do you think, Sasha, are we going to get anywhere?” “Who cares, Titch. Look what a great time we’re having.”

  Forest-covered mountains, boulders combining different colours nestling among moss-covered tree trunks. There were unexpected expanses: we might emerge to find ourselves on the edge of a precipice and hold our breath at the height and the noise of a river raging down below in the gorge, or come across fields covered with strawberries. More forests, streams with the hoof-prints of unshod horses on their banks. Every time I gazed ahead I expected to see our lake shining mirror-like in the distance.

  “Grand, where are we going?” “The only direction worth travelling is towards infinity.”

  Grand is an experimenter. He plays games as if compiling chess problems. He puts the pieces on the board and watches to see how they behave. He changes the disposition and looks again. He adds new pieces and looks again, evaluating, as if seeking the optimal progression – or is it just that he likes experimenting?

  Right now, however, he is in a muddle. Something in his chess game is not working out. He doesn’t know what, but it is already too late to change the configuration and looks as if someone other than he is moving the pieces. This someone else seems always to get the calculations right, even though they don’t agree with Grand’s.

  He is at a loss. He doesn’t know what to do next and doesn’t notice that he is himself on the chessboard now, along with us, his chess pieces.

  You took me on a walk through Chelyabinsk one night and taught me only to look at the shadows. The shadows of trees, of branches in leaf. Thin, knotted, light, obedient to the breeze, they came alive and spoke of the town, the warm night and the dusty air. Shadows of fences, benches and posts were patterns on the asphalt, the monumental memory of the town. Shadows of the infrequent passersby blurred and disappeared. They possessed sound, colour and mood. Shadows revealed the world to me.

  “Everything around us is signs which you can learn to read,” he said, and the world opened like a huge book. The world became alive and immense, it began to throb, breathe, be heard – and all that was external to me, independent of me, here and now, right beside me.

  You taught me to trust the Earth, to walk backwards without looking round. You taught me to listen and hear, to look and see. You taught me that the world is greater than we know or can know.

  How then is it possible, friend, that you were unable to see something as simple as the ordinary love of a woman?

  They suddenly turned into incredibly adult and boring people. They turned into a ball and chain on each other’s legs, trudging wearily with eyes unfocused.

  We had already been waiting three days in the city for Sasha who had got stuck somewhere on the road, and meanwhile we were living with Nastya in an apartment piled high with old furniture and smelling of decay. Its owner was an ancient deaf woman who moved from one room to the next like a spider, slowly and silently. She didn’t shuffle and seemed long ago to have become one with the walls, to have dissolved in the shadows, to be part of the dust on the furniture, of the mildew on the ceiling, of the dim lamps, of the books with faded bindings, the paintings, the figurines, the crumbling decor and fittings which retained their value only in the eyes of their mistress.

  The old lady is probably no longer in this world, but even then she seemed to be not wholly there. All of us who were temporarily living in her apartment tried not to notice her and treated her like all the other objects in it, with care because they were decrepit, but trying not to come into contact with them more than necessary because they made us squirm. We ignored them because they were irrelevant, because their time had passed. They came from a world to which we did not, and never had, belonged. They were like the glimpse into the past afforded by a faded, yellowed photograph. When I recollect her now the old woman is more alive for me than she ever was when I lived alongside her.

  A hearing aid shrieks in her ears. It shrieks incessantly, at very high frequencies, and the louder it shrieks the more quietly we speak or even stop talking altogether. We suspect she turns the sound up the better to eavesdrop on us, the young, the living. We grudge her that. We don’t want to share our strength with this creature which is already crumbling into dust. She sneaks up to closed doors almost inaudibly; she tries to hear the sounds we make, even our breathing.

  “Nastya, why is it so quiet in here? Why aren’t your friends talking? Really, Nastya, you know I can’t bear silence,” she says finally, coming in to us. My eardrums cannot bear the squealing of her earpieces.

  It is impossible to stay in the apartment so we go out for a walk, but as if fulfilling an obligation or doing a chore. We walk, describing circles through the town until our legs can carry us no longer. Grand and Nastya talk, walking side by side, staring down at the asphalt. I feel like a child next to them. I can’t walk that slow, and run on ahead, play on the swings, chase dogs, make the pigeons fly up in the air. Nastya adopts
a pained expression when I come close, so I try to spare her feelings by giving her a wide berth.

  “Step on the side and Lenin’s just died,” I murmur a children’s rhyme as I try not to step on the joins in the paving slabs. “Step on a crack and Hitler comes back,” I recite, making the task more difficult, and have to slow down and be even more careful about where I put my feet. Nobody in our kindergarten wanted Hitler to come back. No matter how slowly I try to walk, I still catch up with them.

  “So what do you do for a living, when you’re not travelling?” I hear Nastya enquire. “The road is my life.” Grand’s favourite answer. I stop and look around, wondering what to do next. “Walking, walking down the street, thinking where we put our feet,” I recite as I proceed along a kerb, my arms outstretched like a tightrope walker.

  “How you’ve changed!” “That’s only natural. You’ve changed too.” “No, somehow you have changed completely.” “My quest hasn’t changed.” “Oh, you and your quests. That’s all so insufferably abstract!” I don’t want to listen to them.

  “Zooom, plane coming in to land, request permission to land, charter flight Moscow-Beijing…” I roar past, darting between the passersby and hear from behind me, “Oh, this is impossible. It’s like a kindergarten!”

  For Chrissakes, does she think I don’t know what she’s up to? God and all the envoys of light know I know perfectly well, but my role here is to be myself, to be Titch. That is the purpose for which Grand dragged me from one side of Russia to the other. The only question is: how was he able to see that dawn morning on the boulevard that I, sluggish, half-asleep Titch, was the person whose mere appearance would jolt Nastya out of her indifference to him?

  She clings to him, doesn’t take her eyes off him. She has measured, weighed, probed him with her eyes, studied him from top to toe to ascertain the differences between the Grand she knew and the Grand who has turned up now with silly, infantile me in tow. She looks at him and tries to figure out what we have in common, how I come to be here with him. She would never just ask him that straight out, so I will carry on playing my role to the end, and then who cares what happens?