by Dina Bennett
People crowd around a grizzled man. His floppy jowls are stubbled with a charcoal smudge, his black button eyes deeply embedded in bruised flesh. This is the agent for the one local empty truck, whose driver right now is slumped behind the steering wheel getting some much-needed sleep, or nursing a terrible hangover. I can see the truck bed is big enough to hold Roxanne, and I’m determined to get it for us. The agent stands, legs apart, in an ill-fitting gray serge suit, jacket straining its buttons, belly spilling over his belt, the frayed cuffs of his ill-fitting pants mopping the pavement. From his pocket he withdraws a packet of tobacco, and I stare in fascination as his sausage-like fingers, stained yellow with nicotine, roll a cigarette with the delicacy and precision of a surgeon doing a quadruple bypass. The cigarette is pinched in his surprisingly sensuous lips as he drags and exhales, drags once more. Spellbound, I focus on the coarse pores of his broad nose and start counting. At ten, two streams of smoke billow from his nostrils. His eyes disappear as he squints into the smoke and rubs his ham-like palms together in anticipation. He knows he’s standing in front of a gold mine.
The agent can’t conceal his delight at being surrounded by men owning valuable cars, willing and able to pay anything. I, however, have something they don’t: I’m a woman, and we are, after all, standing next to a brothel. Two hours pass during which I come and go, flirting, haggling, and finally flashing a wad of U.S. dollars. I win. The truck is ours for the day.
As I heave myself up into the cab I feel a flash of guilt at leaving so many needy drivers behind. If this is treason, then I’m a pleasantly relieved traitor. Plenty of others will manhandle their vehicles the next 270 miles. We won’t be one of them. We’ll be chauffeured and I won’t have to deal with a GPS or Tripmeter or route book to get us there. We can take this truck and ignore all the Rally controls, because we’re no longer competing for any medals. It feels fabulous.
Six hours later, when our driver is the one who gets us lost on the outskirts of Novosibirsk, I heave such a deep sigh of pleasure that this isn’t my fault, that Bernard thinks I’ve fainted. We’re searching for the Ford dealership, to which we have access thanks, again, to Matthieu. He’s offered us his place there, which I take as a sign of repentance for his shameful behavior back at the Kharkorin ger camp, when he could have invited me to join his party, but didn’t. It’s a mob scene to get into these dealerships, and only a few manage. We, however, have an actual invitation, since Matthieu & Co. have decided instead to use Novosibirsk’s Mercedes dealership for their repairs.
It’s getting on toward dusk. Our driver is muscling his truck through the confined alleys of a dilapidated Novosibirsk housing development in search of the dealership, when a shiny black SUV with deeply tinted windows cuts us off and motions us to the side. At first, I think it’s the secret police, and I spend a fretful sixty seconds before I see a trim man wearing tight black jeans and a fitted leather jacket hop up onto the truck steps and shove his head in the window. I look for a gun. If he has one, it’s not visible. “Beautiful car,” he says, grinning. “Very beautiful car.” It appears we’ve been pulled over by a minor oligarch.
“Thank you.” We’re studiedly gracious, not to risk offending anyone with possible connections. Especially if he might be able to cut short our search and direct us to Ford. He sticks his hand through the window, and we each shake it.
“Why are you here? In Novosibirsk?
“We’re on a rally. From Beijing to Paris. That’s why there’s a number on the car. And those special license plates,” Bernard says, motioning back toward Roxanne.
“I see. Very interesting. So. How much?”
Now it’s dawning on me he wants to buy Roxanne. No, that can’t be. He must be asking what we paid for her.
“Very expensive,” Bernard says, answering any number of possible questions.
“Yes, I’m sure. How much?”
I nudge Bernard and whisper, “Here’s our chance. Let’s sell Roxanne. She’ll have a good home here, be this man’s cosseted plaything. Plus . . . we’ll be able to leave without disgrace. It’ll make a great story. Come on!”
“We can’t,” Bernard hisses back. “There’s a carnet on her. Whatever car we entered the country with leaves with us, remember? It’s stamped on our passports! If she doesn’t leave Russia, neither do we.”Of course I remember. The Rally has posted a monetary bond for every car, insuring that every one of us will take the same car out of each country that we bring into it. That does not change my desire. It’s testimony to how frayed I am that even an illegal, black market deal appeals to me. That is, as long as it results in a good home for Roxanne. And no prison time for me.
“Not for sale,” Bernard says.
I wonder if, thwarted, the man will now pull the gun he’s surely hiding and say, “Not for sale? Well then, I’ll just take her!” He doesn’t. He smiles ruefully and says, “Ah, I understand. She’s very beautiful. Of course you want to keep her.” He gives the truck door a good wallop. “Well, good luck with her.” Just like that, the man in black goes back to his black car with the blackened windows and drives off. As if a curtain has lifted, we turn a corner and there is the dealership. In short order, we have off-loaded Roxanne and driven her into a sparkling clean repair shop where she will wait for us to return the following day.
In the hotel lobby next morning, I’m astonished to see Ralph and his son, who’ve been AWOL since midway through Mongolia. I figured they had retired, but now here they are, fatigued, deeply bronzed, and broadly pleased with themselves. I grab Ralph and gush about how happy I am to see him. “Well done, Ralph. And my god, you made it. What exactly happened? And how did you get here?” I could have chattered on in this vein, but it dawned on me I was holding him hostage with my questions. Probably it would be more supportive of me if I let him go take a shower. He hugs me back and gives me his big snaggletooth grin. “Quite an adventure,” he says. “Which I will tell you all about. But first I must get this leaf spring fixed.” He shows me the tiny suspension part that keeps his tiny car from scraping the ground, a piece of metal about the heft of a fork tine. A bubble of envy rises, that he can get his car part replaced in minutes in the hotel kitchen while ours requires deconstructing a tank. On the other hand, we’ve already slept two nights in a hotel, while his bed has been either his cramped car seat or the sand.
For our rest day in Novosibirsk, the route book gushes “With our twonight stay here, you will have the opportunity to explore the city.” I see nothing of Siberia’s capital, but I do get on intimate terms with the dealership staff. These particular Russians are kissy folks. Irina and Mikael, dealership employees who are put in charge of our satisfaction, greet us with six kisses, three per cheek. That’s just for me. Each time they wander into the service area, whether to bring us tea or inspect our progress, we get six more. When their friends arrive to see all the Rally cars, the time spent exchanging kisses grows extreme. I like being on a par, kiss-wise, with everyone else. It makes me feel like family.
Novosibirsk also is memorable for Siberian pizza, which we agree is far superior to that in Mongolia. As for the beauty of the dealership, Ford has spared no expense. The complex is stunningly modern, like a gleaming high-tech park in Silicon Valley, only brighter and cleaner. More important as far as we’re concerned, it runs a 24/7 repair operation. They are bursting with pride to host us in their facility and spare no effort to help us out. Even the cleaning women, who circulate hourly through the repair area to mop up crumbs and errant splats of oil, take a break to be photographed with the vintage cars and shabby-looking crews.
We spend several peaceful hours alongside other teams. Roxanne is lifted on a hydraulic hoist so Bernard can easily stand underneath her. A skilled mechanic is assigned to us for the day. He doesn’t speak English, but by now Bernard is fluent in drawing. The two of them pore over sketches on scraps of paper while other mechanics bring parts and spares. Together, Bernard and the mechanic change Roxanne’s oil, lube parts, begin we
lding new shock absorber mounts. Whenever Roxanne is lowered for work on the engine I have a chance to continue cleaning the interior, an endless task that never fails to reveal more areas in which Gobi dust still hides.
Suddenly, there’s a commotion at the garage entrance. Looking up, we see Matthieu, James, and their teams silhouetted in the open door. I can see them looking around at the service bays, each occupied by a Rally car in the middle of time-consuming repairs. What they see displeases them. James’s rage erupts like a volcano, and soon he’s spewing his dissatisfaction in a loud voice, publicly chastising the dealership manager. I don’t understand why they’re here. They were supposed to be working at their own private dealership. I overhear snatches of the monologue like, “ . . . paid for this months ago,” and “ . . . haven’t heard the last of this,” phrases I thought were only spoken in bad movies. James strides about the service area in a fury, and I’m scared to death. Any moment I expect him to come over to us and bellow, “Get your car out of there! This is MY spot.”
Bernard, though, walks over to James and quite calmly says the obvious, “Please, take our space. We can finish our car elsewhere.” My heart leaps into my mouth. “What are you doing?!” I want to scream. “Haven’t we had enough trouble as it is? We need this space as much as he does. No, we need it more. For god’s sake, the man’s driving with his own mechanic!” There’s no camaraderie in me whatsoever, and I am so different from Bernard at this moment I can hardly believe we’re married. I glance toward Matthieu, who shoots me a tight, placating smile and shakes his head.
James, who’s a strapping six feet, stops his tirade and looks down at Bernard. It’s like one of Tolkien’s orcs noticing a hobbit. I expect him to grab Bernard and fling him across the shining service area floor. Perhaps it’s Bernard’s politeness, perhaps his shorter stature, which combine to create the opposite effect. “Thank you, Bernard,” James says. “So kind of you.”That’s it. Bernard’s made a friend. I don’t think that friendship extends to me.
Siberian Cartoons
OMSK
Having nursed Roxanne over Chinese tarmac and the rutted despair of Mongolia’s Gobi Desert and Asian Steppes, we just may be undone by the Trans-Siberian Highway. Even worse, we can’t find our friends. When we were in China, everyone stayed in the same huge hotel each night. Once into Mongolia, the only hotel available to us was in Ulaanbaatar; other than that, we had all camped together outside small towns. One way or the other, we knew where everyone would be at nightfall. They were either working on their car or eating in the dining tent. There was no other place to be. In a bizarrely contradictory way, that was reassuring. Here in the belly of Russia’s vast interior we are again in hotels, except that none are big enough to house the entire Rally, so we’re split among three or four lodges every night. With people so scattered, sometimes we don’t see our friends for days.
Since we’re now driving mainly on the highway, and my navigation job requires me giving Bernard a direction about every thirty miles, I have ample time to gaze at the Siberian scene outside my window. We’ve left behind the bucolic greenery of Siberia’s southern borderlands and are entering the heart of Solzhenitsyn’s gulag archipelago. Gulag is an acronym for the agency that was officially created under the auspices of the secret police on April 25, 1930 and dissolved on January 13, 1960. It stands for Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies. According to official Soviet estimates, more than 14 million people passed through the gulag from 1929 to 1953. Some were political prisoners. Others were imprisoned in a gulag camp for crimes such as petty theft, unexcused absences from work, and antigovernment jokes. In 1940, the year Roxanne was built, there were 53 separate camps and 423 labor colonies in the USSR.
The scenery around me gives no clue to that history. Day in and day out there’s a continuous field of growing wheat, the green flatness relieved only now and then by a copse of green birch trees. In its monotone texture and color it feels much like Mongolia, though I’m still grateful to see green instead of brown. It’s early summer and the air is fresh, moistened each day with several hours of drizzle. It all seems benign and cultivated, but I can see how this flat landscape, when whipped by winds during Siberia’s subarctic winters, would be a more impenetrable barrier than anything man made. In areas such as this, more than a quarter of the gulag population died of cold and starvation during World War II. Today, in this massive monoculture landscape, there’s no animal life to see, no shaggy Mongolian goats chased by skittering motor bikes, no shedding Bactrian camels pacing toward greener pastures. The only life along the road is an occasional black and tan raven scavenging road-killed bunnies. For all the greenery, this landscape feels more empty than Mongolia.
Occasionally, we whiz by a tired Russian hamlet, just a huddle of low, bedraggled wood cottages with filigreed shutters whose blue or green paint is cracked and peeling. Overgrown weedy yards line each narrow dirt lane. No general store, no personable fuel station, no family run cafes, dilapidated or otherwise. Sometimes I glimpse a round babushka, tight black wool dress hugging her hunched back, black kerchief over her hair. As she shambles slowly up the lane, she reminds me of a tiny, earthbound dirigible. These are places that the twentieth century forgot. If they’re any indication of the might of Russia, we have nothing to fear.
Russia is huge, and we have correspondingly vast distances to cover each day if we’re to get out of the country in the allotted two weeks. There are no amusing distractions like time trials planned for Russia. The organizers guessed rightly that no one would be in the mood. The only times we stop are to register our existence at a passage control and to fuel up at one of the many brightly lit, modern Yukos gas stations that dot the Trans-Siberian Highway. Even with keeping our out-of-car time to a minimum, it’s all many of us can do to complete each day’s route in time for a late dinner. Still, I am pleased to be in Russia. In a sense, it’s my birth right to feel like I belong here. Even though Roxanne is continually in need of suspension repairs and I’m sagging with fatigue, I still want to smile, look that gas station attendant in the eye, and say, “Spaseba,” thank you, as much like a native as I can manage.
The Trans-Siberian stays well away from towns, but I sometimes see one on the horizon. From a distance, they look like a set from Dr. Zhivago, with whitewashed houses and the gold-clad onion domes of a Russian Orthodox church glittering in the sun. One day, though, our route takes us through the center of one such town, and I see something I’m not prepared for, not because I didn’t believe such a thing still existed, but because I never expected to see one myself. It’s a prison, whether a gulag relic or not I couldn’t say. I don’t implore Bernard to stop so I can ask. This is one place I want to get away from. Fast. The rot I see on the outside speaks of the conditions in which those who are inside live. Nothing about the structure tries to disguise its intent. I see guard towers jutting up from the inner courtyard and small blackened windows piercing the long building behind, like vacant, beseeching eyes. A skin of graying paint peels off concrete walls stained with black mold and topped with tangles of rusting razor wire. The concrete may be crumbling and the whole thing may speak of decay, but the armed guard at the gate makes it clear that once you go through those menacing doors, you’re not getting out without their say-so. He’s alert, at attention, and fierce in his gaze. Usually the sight of Roxanne makes people smile, but this guard’s mouth doesn’t even twitch.
We have three more weeks of intense driving to complete before we reach Paris. Roxanne’s formerly roomy quarters are starting to feel cramped, though I’m certain she has not changed physical dimensions. When we reach our hotel each night, Bernard and I become two dogs fighting over a bone. I want to look around whatever city we’re in, if only to stretch my legs and move about in a space wider than five feet, after which I want to flop on the bed in our room and not move. The main thing on Bernard’s mind is checking Roxanne, and then he wants to have a beer at the bar.
These days I carry wi
th me a wish that our car problems could be someone else’s, so I wouldn’t have to worry about them myself. Better yet, I wish to become a person who simply didn’t worry. Though I’m beginning to feel resigned that I’m the worrying sort, I’m also discovering the benefits of being an active, helpful worrier. Now, when Bernard makes trenchant pronouncements about the state of Roxanne’s underbelly, I say,“Guess I’ll start checking around for a truck to haul us tomorrow.” This simple statement makes me feel amazingly good, far out of proportion to what any twelve words should. It seems to lift Bernard’s spirits, too, because when I say it, he grabs my waist, gives me a little whirl and a kiss, and says, “Don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of things later. Let’s go check in.” His arm snugging me tight, we head for the lobby together, walking hip to hip like Siamese twins.
Early evening, after reaching Omsk, I sit next to a majestic white marble stairway in our hotel lobby, happily alone in the swirl of Rally check in, while Bernard gets the key to our room. Sybil walks by and gives me a high five. It delights us both to see that the other has made it in for the day. “Doing all right?” she asks.
“Fine. Just sitting still for a few minutes. You know. Not moving.”
“Sounds lovely. I’d join you, but my hair has been screaming ‘wash me’ for days. I better get to it.”
Perched on my marble step, doing a fair imitation of a gargoyle, I zone out, not daydreaming, but not paying attention to anything. I’m pleasantly sated with caffeine and sugar, courtesy of the wife of an auto parts shop owner.
We’d pulled up to their shop before dusk, in search of the usual. While the owner and Bernard discussed shock absorbers, she invited me into the back room to relax. Like many Russian women below the oligarch class, she was portly, her rotund body squeezed into beige polyester slacks, the short sleeves of a size-too-small apricot sweater pinching her arms and stretching across a chest made pointy by a 1950s-style push-up bra. Her broad face was full of friendship, and after setting the omnipresent kettle to boil, she motioned me to sit on a dark brown love seat pushed against the wall, its cushions stained and misshapen from too many heavy buttocks resting on it. A small color TV was on, with a talking head delivering what I assumed was the evening news. Handing me a cup of tea, she sat down, then jumped back up and began changing channels. Even in Russia, the news isn’t very entertaining. At each station, she turned to look at me. I shook my head. Finally something I recognized, something truly international made me nod. “Pinocchio,” I said, smiling broadly to show how much I love cartoons.