Off the Beaten Tracks

by Irina Bogatyreva

  “You aren’t really intending to go there, are you? “I asked when we moved on. “Yes. I want a wash. We’ve already turned down two gifts from the road. It wouldn’t be right to pass on a third.”

  We found ourselves in a remarkable apartment. Exactly how many people were staying there was probably a mystery to everyone, including the landlords. I identified them solely on the basis of their opening the door more frequently than other people. The landlady was a girl even shorter than me, blonde, with hair as matted as felt. Her husband was tall with large, sunken eyes which didn’t smile, even though he told a lot of jokes. He wore a beige panama hat and looked like a very tall, brooding gnome. Their child was weaving its way in among everyone, a small, independent being with curly blond hair. I confidently classified it as a girl, before discovering he was a boy. He treated everyone as equals, completely unfazed by age difference.

  Every square metre of the apartment was occupied. People were getting washed in the bathroom. Both rooms were living a life of their own. People went out onto the balcony to smoke. Even in the hallway there was a small group of people, but the real crush was in the kitchen. There some were cooking while others were eating. Music was being played through speakers built into a broken-down guitar hanging on the wall.

  What all these people were doing here, why they had come, whether they knew what they were doing or why they came was beyond my comprehension. It was plain they were not all renting these few square metres of accommodation as we did on Yakimanka. They evidently came as visitors and stayed for several days. We were welcomed in just the same way as everybody else, that is, completely naturally and without curiosity, as if we were regulars.

  Grand got into conversation with the owners and was very soon promoted to the status of philosopher. A circle of listeners formed round him, asking questions which Grand answered in detail. I found myself redundant and sat some distance away with world weariness in my eyes. Every now and then Grand would turn to me, his eyes asking, “Do you love what is around you?”

  With each hour that passed, however, I found the apartment more depressing. The slaphappy indolence drove me to despair until I felt I was ready to reply to his question with a resounding, “No!” This slovenly partying, the indiscriminate friendliness and lack of curiosity, the aimless, lazy lifestyle with its pretensions to be seeking a meaning for itself seemed as tacky as a spider’s web and I just wanted to get back on the road, to freedom. It was only in moving on that I could now see any sense.

  “Why are you leaving?” the landlord asked Grand. “Gosha here came in from the road and thought he’d just stay overnight. When was that? Well, he must have been living with us for the best part of a month now.”

  “My life is about moving on. I can turn aside, see something new, but I can’t see sense in stopping.” “What does make sense? There is no sense,” Gosha boomed from somewhere up near the ceiling. He was an athletic-looking giant with a happy baby sitting on his bare back. “There is no sense,” Grand replied quietly and with a smile, “but there is a goal.”

  I had had enough and started pestering him to leave. “You’re separating yourself off from them when you should be loving them, and then you’d understand them,” Grand told me when, catching him for a moment in the hallway, I voiced my opinion in an irate whisper.

  “It’s usually the other way round! Usually you understand first and love afterwards.” “Well, the opposite is the right way,” he said and walked off.

  Towards midnight our hosts took us for a tour of the city. Some hangers-on followed but gradually fell away. Cool, nighttime Ekaterinburg was quiet, transparent, and as unreal as a film set. We trudged through backyards, sometimes clambering through holes in fences, and suddenly emerged into a square flooded with street light, ran across it and again disappeared into the darkness. At the end of each excursion we might see a unique flowerbed shaped like a baby hippopotamus or a totally unique crevice in a wall. I very soon lost my bearings and could barely move my feet from exhaustion. The whole thing felt like a dream which had been going on too long. The child on the landlord’s shoulders had fallen asleep with his head resting on the panama.

  When we got back, everyone who was still able to stay awake assembled in a room to read aloud from the Strugatskys The Snail on The Slope. Communal reading was evidently a local custom. It was already morning. I went off, curled up in my sleeping bag, and to a rhythmical communal murmuring on the other side of the wall started looking at the stars. They glowed with a phosphorescent light and were painted on the ceiling.

  How sluggishly our hitchhiking went after that! We trekked through a small town called Kamensk Uralsky on foot without getting a lift at all. Just outside the town the traffic cops gave us a lift after we had stood a full hour by the roadside. We came to a halt in the Urals, spent a night in the mountains, then went on foot in search of a good position. A good position needs to be neither on a downhill nor an uphill stretch and where are you going to find that in the Ural Mountains? We finally got a lift in another Jeep with people from Perm but, as we didn’t want to go to Perm, that lift didn’t take us far.

  We were driven through Bashkiria by a geezer with whiskers and his wife. We had been worn out by Ural mountain passes and fell asleep. Through my sleep I heard a conversation: “The Great Spirit of Ways and Roads protects you, but you do not notice it,” the wife said to her husband, and I thought I must already be dreaming.

  We bypassed Ufa, but would doubtless have had to walk straight through the middle, only the beneficent Spirit of Ways and Roads smiled on us and we got a lift in two MAZ trucks transporting bottles. You can’t fit three people in the cab of a MAZ. Grand and I were separated and cheerfully went our separate ways, talking between trucks over the walky-talky to the accompaniment of the musical tinkling of the empty bottles in the back.

  They dropped us off in Tatarstan, and we realised we had won a two-hour time shift off the road. That was enough to get us to Naberezhnye Chelny with a morose, taciturn driver. He dropped us off at the turning to the city, ten metres from a police station. Our rucksacks and general bewilderment attracted the cops’ attention. An officer sternly inspected our passports and residence permits, checked our faces against our photos, and chewed his moustache. Just to be on the safe side, he ran our names through the national wanted persons database.

  That was when I discovered Grand’s surname: Grandovsky. It had never occurred to me just to ask him. Now it’s practically the only thing I know about him.

  By the time we got away from the cops it was already dark. There was no chance we would be going anywhere that night. We moved away from the road but didn’t find any good sites so pitched the tent in a field on neglected, uneven ground. We were concealed from the road by a huge power station pipe and a stone plinth with the name of the ancient town of Yar Chaly. As we were pitching the tent I looked around at the dismal industrial landscape and wondered what there was here to love.

  One day we encountered a thirteen-year-old boy who had no luggage, shabby clothes, and furtive eyes. He jumped down from a KamAZ truck near where we were standing and walked away backwards, thumbing. He disappeared round a bend. Someone gave us a lift soon after but, when they dropped us off, we saw the same kid dancing along fifty metres in front of us. We stopped and I turned to face him. He soon got a lift.

  We kept bumping into each other all day, sometimes overtaking, sometimes being overtaken. Grand paid no attention to him but I started watching him closely. I started seeing him as a competitor and my determination to get a lift first came close to a race. I knew instinctively he had his eye on me too. After another lift I saw his face in an approaching truck. He was eating an apple and gave me a wave. I felt my gall rising.

  It was already evening when we jumped down from a truck and went into a café full of truckers. We sat in a corner with our rucksacks propped up against the wall. We were tired and hungry. Grand bought some food and ate it with a smile on his lips but I felt like a corne
red animal. I just wanted to disappear. Everybody around us knew what our game was and I felt they were weighing us up and deciding not to take us with them.

  Another trucker came in together with the kid. They were talking loudly. The driver ordered a meal for himself and the boy, then joined a group of his friends and began talking to one. I had my back to them and could hear everything. “Maybe you can take this waif. He needs to get to Yaroslavl and I’m only going as far as Nizhny Novgorod.”

  After a time they pushed back their chairs and made for the door. The boy was now with a different driver. I stared at his back, and even in the way he walked I saw something smug. At the door the boy turned and it seemed to me stuck out his tongue. I could have thrown something at him.

  “Smile,” I heard Grand’s voice at just that moment. “Smile!” His face began to emerge for me out of a fog of hatred. “Tell me, do you love all that is around you at this moment?”

  Explain to me, road, why I am here right now with this person who looks like a scarecrow, and what I should do? How can you love someone it is impossible to love, be tolerant towards someone you just want to punch?

  “Sergey, it’s three hundred kilometres to Moscow, we have nowhere to sleep and we don’t have a tent. Do you want to get home tonight?” “Yes.” “Well it’s not very evident! You’re scared of cars! Look how you’re standing. Where is your wish to get a lift and provide someone with agreeable companionship? What sort of expression have you got? Who’s going to want to give you a lift looking like that?”

  Soon we’ll have been stuck here for three hours and no one has even slowed down. Maybe it’s just the place we’re standing. You do get hopeless places on the road, I’ve been told. Sergey makes me feel like I have a huge rucksack on my shoulders, much heavier than anything I’ve ever had to carry before and which makes it impossible for me to get a lift. I have pins and needles in the arm outstretched towards the road, my feet are tired and I don’t know what to do.

  “You’re an actor, Sergey. Do something to make your audience respond to you!” “I’m a musician.” “Don’t musicians have to know how to hold their audience’s attention?”

  He is silent. He is snivelling. Waves of fury break over me and it takes an effort to restrain myself. I sense his weakness. I want to hit him or scream something at him. I move towards him. He raises his face and looks hounded and pathetic. I close my eyes.

  When I was in kindergarten there was this boy. I don’t remember any of the other children, but him I remember perfectly. I rarely played with anyone there. I was a quiet and totally unremarkable little girl. My only naughtiness was that I really enjoyed pinching this boy. When we were on a walk I would go up to him, take the striped straw hat off my head, shove it in front of him and say, “How many stripes?” He would say nothing. I knew he couldn’t count. “How many stripes, how many?” I would ask again, jabbing my finger at the hat. The boy would say nothing, look down at the ground and begin to sob. That was when I pinched him. I did it every day. It became an addiction for me, and for him a nightmare.

  I remember the wave of pleasure that rose in me every time. I could feel my power and hold over him, and his weakness and incompetence. No exhortations or shouting from the carers, no summoning of my parents, no punishments could deter me. Made to stand in the corner, I picked plaster off the walls, looking round to catch his eye among the other children, and noticing that he was looking warily in my direction. I knew I left dark bruises on his skin, but I also knew he was scared of me, and my exultation over that was stronger than all other feelings.

  He was rescued by our teacher. The wisdom of her decision would have done credit to King Solomon. She made sure I was always and everywhere paired with this boy. Henceforth our cots in the rest hour were placed together, we had our meals together, and held hands when taken for walks. What really mattered for her was to ensure that we sat at the same table in class when we were being taught to count. The boy found this very difficult, while for me it was easy-peasy. I saw him struggling, sighing with the effort of trying to identify the changing number of sticks in the piles. It annoyed and disgusted me, and to my own surprise I started teaching him.

  I had lost my trump card. Without thinking, I had given it away and by the time I realised what had happened it was too late. I was ashamed of helping him, ashamed of sitting next to him, and started avoiding him. No friendship blossomed between us, but a sense of responsibility took root in me. I had been burdened with this boy, and whatever I might think about it, I had no option but to carry him.

  I could swear it is that selfsame boy looking at me now through Sergey’s eyes. I have the exact same feeling: here is my burden and I have no choice but to bear it. I would like to turn away and leave him to it, let him trudge all the way back and get himself a taxi home, but, dammit, we are sitting at the same table now, friend, and together we are going to sort out those sticks!

  “Sergey, look! There are people in those cars,” I say quietly. “They are all kind people. They need you to like them. It’s up to them now whether we get home this evening or not.” “But I don’t know them, Titch.” “What of it! Just love all of them anyway!”

  Oh, road, help me to do that too: to love someone I find it impossible to love, to forgive someone I just want to punch.

  I thought our journey would never end. It was a cliff, a sheer rockface we had to scale, pulling ourselves up a metre at a time by our hair. No long-distance vehicles came along. We got lifts from people going in our direction ten kilometres at a time. We crept forward from one spot to the next, intersection by intersection, milestone by milestone. The weather was nothing to write home about either. In the vicinity of Kazan, having already crossed the Volga, we found ourselves in such a hurricane we couldn’t stand upright. We had to get out of the wind. It was blowing in our backs and we almost ran down the hill to a place where there was less wind but no cars.

  I was silent and sullen. When Grand said, “Smile!” I couldn’t manage even a grimace. Rage was building up in me at our haplessness and helplessness. Despondency smouldered.

  “Why are you so uptight?” Grand asked. “Weather not suiting you?” “I grew up near here,” I told him for some reason. “We passed the turning to my town not long ago, and my brother often drives along this road to Moscow, to pick up goods. He has a Gazelle van.”

  “Do you want to avoid meeting him?” “N-no.” I reflected for a moment. “It’s not that I want to avoid him, I just know he wouldn’t stop. My brother isn’t the kind of person to give lifts.” “You know, our road will come to an end soon,” Grand said after a pause. “If the road is not smiling on two people, it’s probably best for each to carry their own destiny. How do you feel now about us splitting up?”

  I said nothing and looked away.

  In the rain no one wanted to pick up two wet hitch-hikers. A sturdy truck finally stopped for us. Only two were allowed to be in the cab, so I was stowed away on the shelf and told to lie low if any cops appeared.

  The truck was being driven by a Lithuanian who spoke Russian with an accent but very much liked doing so. He told us how great it was to go on assignments in Russia. It paid much better than Europe so, like him, a lot of truckers were keen to drive here. He set Grand off on his childhood memories, and he talked about how he used to travel to Lithuania when he was little and how much he had enjoyed being there. Their conversation became very man-to-man and I wanted to contribute something from my shelf. I remembered my parents too had lived there for a while, but then also remembered that was because my father was a serving officer who instructed soldiers in the art of firing missiles. I decided to keep quiet.

  It was warm in the cab and I could see the road from above. It moved towards me like a ribbon and seemed to pass right through me, every kilometre carrying away a bit more of me. I started to feel dog tired. Moving on, moving on and never stopping, the succession of faces and places, and there were so many of them, both places and faces, and what’s the poin
t, what’s the goal? Today I’m going somewhere, tomorrow I’m leaving, but where is the place I am eventually going to arrive at?

  In one diner some truckers joined us and asked the usual questions. They asked why we did it. What was the pleasure, what did we get out of it? We gave them the same answers: it was interesting to see new places and people, and Grand added that we just liked moving on.

  “Well, why don’t you come and work as a trucker if you like being on the road so much,” they said. They were hulking young guys who had arrived on the autobahn, and what every hitch-hiker knows about autobahn drivers is that they never stop to give lifts. “No, it’s something quite different,” Grand said quietly, and I agreed. “You’re strange people,” they replied. “We at least get paid. Like hell we would go on the road if we weren’t getting paid.”

  “It’s no surprise they don’t understand us,” Grand said afterwards. “They and we are at opposite ends of the spectrum, but for all that, we and they are travelling the same road. We and they together are the road. Do you see now why we have to love everybody?”

  His smile just got bigger and bigger and he looked happy. Something had obviously occurred to him, but right then there was nobody feeling more disconsolate than me. That hateful question: ‘Why?’ which was so capable of devaluing everything, hovered over the world for me and I found it very unclear how one should live a good life. I tried to imagine how and what people live by, and could not. All the values that seemed self-evident in cities, after just two months on the road ceased to be meaningful. Looking back, I could see how they could all be arranged like links in a chain, explaining one thing by another. I tried to trace it back. Perhaps somewhere you could see what really makes life worth living, but I couldn’t find the ends. Education led to a job, a job to money, money to prosperity, prosperity to a family, a family to children, children to… Where was the ultimate goal? After all, I knew now that you can live without money, without a home, without supplies. What really matters is to radiate joy and be good people. But turning to the world, I saw that everything in it was arranged differently, and I wanted to stand and face it, close my eyes and shout very loudly indeed: “Stop!” To make them all stop, and then ask just one big question: “What’s this all for?”