On The Couch

‘So does Siberia want independence?’

‘Moscow won’t let it. There is a place in Siberia, Yakutia—it’s bigger than Kazakhstan—and it pays fifteen per cent ofMoscow’s taxes from gold, diamonds and brilliants.’

‘But does Siberia want independence?’

‘The people are too busy to think about it. If you have time, you think, ‘I want a car, I want a girl, I want financial independence.’’

‘So, umm, does everyone get the “clause” treatment?’ I said, referring to certain stipulations in his emails.

‘Of course,’ Ravil said, flatly.

He’d once had five Polish people staying, who’d come back with seven bottles of wine.

‘I said to them, did you not read that wine was forbidden?’ They had a pretty big dose. I don’t want unexpected troubles—it’s important to be safe in your house.’

I very quickly determined not to get on the wrong side of Ravil. The pressure to please this hard-to-please man who had such particular ideas was suffocating.

Ravil was no eager tour guide. We passed by an immense, icily sterile Lenin Square, home to Russia’s largest opera house (‘I hate opera’) and some dwarfingly large constructivist statues of Soviet workers, soldiers and, of course, Lenin. But it wasn’t until we returned home that I read in my book we’d crossed the very geographical centre of Russia, honoured by the golden domed Chapel of St Nicholas. Nor that the Arctic-bound Ob River, on the north bank of which we found a deserted skate park, was the world’s fourth longest. But I sensed that Ravil wasn’t a couchsurfer out of city pride, but for political reasons—he abhorred money. Perhaps he’d always choose to sleep on doors.

At the prescribed hour, 9pm, we went to A&E—not because Ravil assessed it as an emergency, but because this was the most efficient route. Ravil took Ollie behind closed doors, leaving me in a Soviet-era mint-green waiting room and a tableau vivant of rather un-vivant Russians. A jaundiced miner in leather boots and dungarees covered in a thin film of coal dust was holding a urine sample; another rocked drunkenly, hassling any medic that passed. An hour passed and the jaundiced miner was wheeled past in the recovery position. Ollie wasn’t waiting, he was being seen to, so what was taking so long? From beyond, I heard the sound of grown men screaming. What if one of the screams was Ollie?

Standing only in his pants, his hiking boots (covered with blue plastic bootees) and a seeping bandage where the lump had been, Ollie was back, his face waxy and drawn. Ravil was standing at his side, looking solemn. My heart started thudding.

‘We have to go home, Fleur. They found puss on my leg and it could spread to the bone. They collected thirteen millilitres of puss. That’s a lot.’

Suddenly it was an emergency. I bit back the tears. Ollie’s leg was in serious trouble, so was it wrong to feel sorry for myself? Instantly I was furious with Ollie’s London consultant; he should never have been declared fit. And ‘go home’? Did I really have to go home after eleven days? There was nothing wrong with me. Or was it because Ollie didn’t think it wise for me to travel solo through Russia and China? The marbles had been released on to my path, yet this was Ollie’s emergency—we had to sort him out. I was electrified with panic.

In fits and starts, we picked our way back to Ravil’s, whose pace, incredibly—or revealingly—still didn’t slow for Ollie. We stopped at an all-night pharmacy (it was now midnight) for antibiotics and water.

‘Why are you buying water?’ Ravil roared.

Ollie and I both cowered.

‘You can drink tap water. It’s just marketing myth that you can’t drink it.’

We found excuses to defend our purchases and hit a wall of silence for the rest of the walk home—no, Ollie couldn’t get a taxi. Ravil really had become Siberian, with his intolerance for spoilt, Western softness.

What to do? We were about to book flights home, so I had make a decision, fast. I hated travelling alone. I subscribed to the Noah’s Ark school of travel—it should be done in pairs. But I, supposedly, was the lucky one—quitting wasn’t permitted. I’d waited too long for this adventure. I rearranged my face into one of survival: ‘Ollie, I can’t come home with you.’

He understood: ‘I just thought you’d want to.’

In a way, I did.

At home, Ravil sat down at his computer, slipped on some enormous headphones, and said, ‘I’m off to crash cars.’

Ollie’s flight home was urgently arranged—there was one to Moscow at 7am. At 4.30am, Ollie and I left for Novosibirsk Airport: I was going to cling on to him for as long as I could. The boys exchanged a brotherly hug and I stuffed a packet of biscuits into my bag—Ollie and I were ravenous, and biscuits were easier than asking Ravil for food. But I still hadn’t adjusted to the news. I bolted from our farewell at the airport—an emotional downpour felt imminent.

In total silence, blinking like a pit pony, Ravil let me back in at 6.30am. Well now we were in a Pinter-esque tension, an unbearable ache of awkwardness in his too-close-for-comfort bedsit. The camp bed had been put away so, trying to be no trouble, I took to the floor—it couldn’t be any less comfortable.

I lay awake, rigid on my mat—even the most microscopic movement would create an abominable rustle. With the feeling that Ollie and I had taken way more than we could give, I resolved to get up early, whether I’d slept or not, and get out. I wanted out. My train to Ulan-Ude was the next night at 1am; I would deal with the day alone. I had to nurse my crumbling emotional landscape in private. Bereft, lonely, empty, I pined for The Emperor. Ollie’s friendship had so persuasively concealed the void within, but now they were both far away, I so craved what I couldn’t have. Wanting what was out of reach—it was so predictable.

22ND OCTOBER

A text from Ollie: ‘The air stewardess just had to rip a hidden can of beer out of the hands of the man on the plane seat in front of me because he’s drinking before take-off. He looks like Rumpelstiltskin and she looks like Sharon off Eastenders. Quite a tug of war. Niet. Da. Niet. Da…’

I sat up in bed, stiff like the floorboards responsible for my aches. Behind me, I could hear that Ravil was awake, scrolling through his mobile—it felt strange that he hadn’t acknowledged the new day and said good morning. I offered my salutations, and packed up in paranoid silence for a hasty exit. I now felt completely naked.

‘Are you hungry? I suppose you are,’ Ravil said kindly.

I supposed I was. Breakfast was Mama’s cold beef stew and boiled potato. Halfway through, Ravil put his in the microwave without inviting me to follow suit, so I went along with the cold version, as if it were just how I liked it. I found a hair in amongst the potatoes, covered it with another potato and announced myself full. Instead of eating, I mined him for travel tips on Kazakhstan.

‘Kazakhstan is extreme,’ he said, with finality.

I tried to look unfazed, like a real traveller.

‘It’s extremely hospitable but extremely poor. I only travel with what I need.’

I felt vulnerable.

My sister once locked our new puppy in a room with the old cat, so that they could get to know each other. Couchsurfing’s forced friendships reminded me of her experiment. Like cats and dogs, Ravil and I were similarly opposed. As he accompanied me to the station’s left luggage hall, he seemed happy in contemplation (or social retirement). I, however, needed to feign some kind of social order, so I babbled away about London life: politics, the underground, Russian oligarchs—wasn’t this couchsurfing’s cultural exchange? His standard response was an impregnable ‘mm-mm’. Sometimes I’d repeat myself, thinking he was saying ‘pardon’, only to get another ‘mm-mm’. But I blundered on, because wasn’t it worse to be both needy and mute?

Left luggage passed without incident, and he sent me off in the right direction for a day of organisation in Ravil’s preferred Wi-Fi zone, KFC.

‘I feel a bit stressed,’ I confessed, my voice cracking.

‘At least you are stressed,’ he replied, wisely.

I forcibly hugged him, squeezing out all of the human contact I could, and turned away quickly. It was time to leave, yet I wasn’t ready to be alone. While Ollie was returning to London to look after his limb, I felt like I’d lost one. Like an unfledged chick flung out of the nest, I suddenly felt all alone.

I had the number for Nick, another local couchsurfing host who was, according to his references, ‘the coolest dude in Novosibirsk’ (Ollie and I had requested his couch, but he wasn’t sure if he’d be in town for the ‘third decade of October’). I invited him to KFC for a junk-food hit. Meanwhile, I spent the day online, trying to feel connected. I broadcast the news of Ollie’s departure to all, and begged for reinstatement of communications with The Emperor. I felt too feeble to try and move on—I needed that lifeline. He wrote straight back, offering to come out, as a friend, as ‘whatever’. But couchsurfing wasn’t for everyone, and it wasn’t for him. He was way too uncompromising and dominant; he was, after all, The Emperor. Right in the middle of KFC, I wept great streams of longing. I wanted to go home, but defeat was inadmissible. It wasn’t as if I were the world’s first solo explorer. Perhaps couchsurfing would look after me, as I bounced across Asia on lily pads of hospitality, falling into the arms of kind hosts. At least that was the hypothesis.

Ollie, meanwhile, was sending live feeds from London. He’d gone directly to his consultant, who said things weren’t as bad as they’d seemed: the abscess would have eventually burst outwards, into the air, rather than inwards, poisoning his blood. Not so bad? That wouldn’t have been our response in the Mongolian wilderness. He’d have to have the titanium removed at a later stage, and, for the time being, have consultations every other day. His doctor had found seaweed stuffed into the holes the Russians had made in his leg, a pub gem best known after the event when all is well. Under strict instructions to rest up, Ollie was going to be surfing his own sofa for a while. We were both miserable.

Well, what do you know? Donagh, the Irish architect we’d met in Moscow, walked into KFC as the couchsurfing guest of Nick, a Shrinky-Dinked Russian graphic designer with long blond dreads, a goatee and earrings.

‘Ach, you’re no more vulnerable here than in real life,’ reassured Donagh, once I’d poured my story all over them in one breathless torrent.

I secretly leant on Donagh and Nick, vampirically milking their positivity and wisdom. Donagh had been surfing since Moscow: ‘So that people can take me to bars,’ he explained, cradling a pint of KFC beer. ‘I don’t want to stay in alone reading my book—Russia isn’t very friendly to outsiders but couchsurfers are leftist enough to open the door.’

Nick was one such specimen. ‘I’ve had thirty or forty people at my place since June,’ he said. ‘And I’d host someone for long time if they’re in a special situation, like trying to get a job.’

There were people who surfed for a whole year, they told me, and there was ‘over-couchsurfing’. Donagh recounted how one Russian girl in Moscow extended a two-week stay to a year because she didn’t want to pay the capital’s high rents. But her host—Russia’s legendary Country Ambassador—turned it to his advantage, essentially using her as his PA. This was the alternative economy.

For the first time I felt part of something bigger: the couchsurfing community. We were strangers, yet we had an instant bond: we all shared similar experiences and principles. What’s more, Donagh had met Yvonne in Yekaterinburg, and would be in Beijing at the same time as me. I was on a couchsurfing trail! That might devalue the concept for some, but for me, the discovery was a happy one—this was a mobile community. And I saw couchsurfing through other, more experienced, eyes: I realised that Ollie and I had been muddling along in the dark. Nick and Donagh gave me a frame of reference.

For two hours, my loneliness had been suspended. At 11.30pm, Nick and Donagh saw me off to the station. Blessed by serendipity and topped up with kindness, I felt emotionally nourished. My hypothesis was looking promising.

CHAPTER 5 ULAN-UDE: TO HEALTH! TO LOVE! TO VODKA!

A colossal, cabbagey babushka was cradling a potato sack like a baby. The potato sack shook to reveal the wiry, grey head of a small mutt. A defeated and dusty old man—in pitch-perfect Chekhovian tragedy—held his troubled brow in bloodied, swollen hands. A grubby street urchin shamelessly prodded the shoulders of every man, woman and child in his way, holding out his artful hands. I was at Novosibirsk station, waiting for my forty-hour train to Ulan-Ude. Without Ollie, I was en garde. Without Ollie, I realised, I was engaged—Russia had come alive. What I found reminded me to count my blessings.

In my cramped cabin, two Russian workers had already claimed the emotional space. Wrung out, I meekly clambered on to the top bunk and attempted to hibernate. My tears seemed to have given me a cold: I sneezed. ‘Bud zdorova [bless you],’ said one of the workers, gruffly. I looked down. He was wearing an unconvincing black nylon wig; the other had a heavy Scouser ’tache and kind eyes. ‘Chai?’ offered the ’tache. And so began a most unlikely friendship, conducted through my increasingly clammy dictionary and sign language. They were truck drivers from Dikson, deep within the Russian Arctic Circle. Was my mother not worried? Did I have a Kazakh dictionary? Have these wafers! No thanks. Have these wafers! Okay! Where was I staying? ‘I’m staying with a friend,’ I said. I repeated those words in my head: I had a friend—of sorts—waiting for me in a new city. That was a powerful feeling.

Clutching an in-case-of-emergency address in Dikson, I turned in at 3.30am, perplexed as to why my berth buddies were happy to share their night and supplies with me. We weren’t used to such hospitality in London’s individualistic, post-Thatcher society. As I looked at my rations-for-one, I wondered if it were me, unable to think beyond the self, that was uncivilised.

24TH OCTOBER

After a day of hyper-sleep, I was starting to come round from the shock. The Russians had left to drive trucks, and I was alone again. I thought of Ravil—he had given his time, his food, his place and his philosophy. Surely the insight into Russian life would long outlive memories of silly social anxiety.

I found it difficult to look out of the window; the Great Empty Steppe mirrored my sense of isolation. However, out there, edged by lonely firs covered in plump blankets of snow was the oceanic Lake Baikal, the ‘blue eye of Siberia’. As the deepest lake on earth, the largest freshwater lake by volume, and—thanks to its self-purifying properties—holder of one-fifth of the world’s drinking water, Lake Baikal was, to the Buryatian people, the Sacred Sea. The Buryatians—a traditionalist Mongol people numbering just a million, who practised both Buddhism and Shamanism (despite Soviet efforts)—respected nature like a religion.

I was very pleased with my couchsurfing find in Ulan-Ude, a 25-year-old eastern Buryatian girl called Zhenya. While western Buryats had been ‘Russified’, dumping nomadism for agriculture, eastern Buryats were more traditional and closer to the Mongols. But I didn’t know much about Zhenya—her profile was scant and new—except that her family had, at some stage, swapped nomadism for the suburbs. I was eager for an ersatz Ollie and some shanti love, that beneficent Buddhist practice of forbearance and forgiveness. But having forgotten to get a gift in the ‘excitement’, and about to arrive with a lot of needs (laundry, tickets to Mongolia and Vladivostok, internet access), it all felt a bit take, take, take. Again.

I was floundering on the platform, lost in a sea of strangers, when Zhenya pulled me to safety. I looked up at her. Tall and beautiful, with long, glossy sable hair, and narrow, Mongol eyes smouldering with kohl, she smiled graciously like a Buryatian goddess. She even had a retinue of three young European males.

‘Bernat, Albert, David,’ she introduced, in a honeyed Russian accent.

‘A-ha!’ I exclaimed. ‘You must be the Spanish firemen.’ News of their journey had preceded them—we were due to share the same Vladivostok host. I was right back on the trail.

We piled into Zhenya’s silver Toyota Camry Lumiere. I eyed the Buddhist charm hanging from the rear-view mirror as we tore home, skidding on black ice and dodging pot-holes by veering on to the wrong side of the road. Conversation fell to the three musketeers and me. Actually—as they were quick to point out—they were Catalan, not Spanish, from Barcelona.

‘I never wanted a Russian flag,’ said Bernat, the selfappointed spokesperson, owing to his superior English. ‘But I would like a Buryatian one. We have sympathy for Buryatia under Moscow’s centralised control.’

We were so immersed in conversation that both the view and Zhenya’s silence were overlooked. Chastened, I tried to chat with her, but after repeating myself and even trying out some Russian (to which she pulled a face of mortal horror), she finally confessed, ‘I find your accent difficult.’ Zhenya spoke American-English. English-English was niche, it seemed. She dropped her head: ‘I need to practise.’

‘We can help with that,’ I grinned.

‘That’s why you’re here!’ she said.

‘The suburbs’ were the Beverly Hills of Ulan-Ude (well, relatively speaking), at the end of an unprepossessing, three-mile dirt track. We pulled up at a large, detached house. This was my first couch not in a Soviet block. The senses were slapped hard. With the distinct aroma of pickled cabbage and charcoal smoke under my nose, I was introduced to her father, a small man of a sensei’s build with a beatific smile, and her younger brother, Sasha, who was going mountaineering with his university friends that weekend. In amongst the rush of the family running around, grabbing at ropes and high-tech outdoor equipment, Zhenya showed me my room—my own room! We’d all be going out again in twenty minutes, she told us (it was Friday night), and left to grab at ropes.

My Own Room was large and bare, with a single bed, a computer and, on the walls, two posters of models in bikinis pressed against shiny red Mercedes—the fascinating habitat of a Russian youth. As a matter of emergency, I washed my hair and changed my top (there was no washing or changing on the Trans-Siberian), and chatted to the Catalans who were sleeping in Zhenya’s vacated room next door. Worn out, they were all lying on their mattresses. This, too, was their first couchsurfing trip, and we traded tales. Some of their hosts had even met them with name placards, and one of their hosts’ boyfriends split for three days because he didn’t like couchsurfers. I instantly liked them—but then, I needed them.

We didn’t get very far on our drive into town because we were stopped by the police.

‘One of you hide!’ Zhenya urged dramatically. ‘Four in the back is illegal.’ We all simultaneously ducked. Wearing a cute leather bomber, an asymmetric black miniskirt and foxy kneehighs, she stepped out of the vehicle.

‘She never passed her driving test,’ one of the musketeers whispered. ‘Apparently Sasha knows the right people.’

Sliding back behind the wheel unscathed, Zhenya purred, ‘Sometimes, it’s good to be a woman.’ The police had been looking for drink-drivers. But the action didn’t stop there. After dropping Sasha off, there was then a near miss with a tram, which she avoided by reversing into oncoming traffic. And when trying to parallel park (a group effort), she ripped her tyre on a metal spike.

How many Spanish firefighters does it take to change a wheel? More than three evidently. ‘Don’t worry!’ they rallied. ‘We can fix this!’ They were quickly pushed aside by a local and we celebrated with a meal in a nearby Chinese café, where Zhenya’s Buryatian friends—a cousin, an ad exec, and a well-known opera singer—were waiting. There were no Russians inside—Ulan-Ude was quite the ethnic departure. Its population of 360,000 included Mongolians, Chinese labour migrants (Buryatia was close to the Chinese border), and twenty-one per cent Buryatians.

While waiting for our food, I decided to tell a perfectly relevant joke:

Me: Did you hear about the three Spanish firefighters?

Them: No.

Me: They were called Hose A, Hose B and Hose C.

Them: Oh.

Me: You know—like José! No?

Lost in translation. I distracted the table by switching focus on to Zhenya. The name ‘Zhenya’ was—like her peers’—a Russian name because they’d been born into the Soviet Union. Despite her strong Buryatian identity, Zhenya couldn’t speak Buryatian; her mother, also Buryatian, was a Russian literature and language teacher. But Zhenya knew enough to give me my Buryatian name, cecek—‘flower’. I felt like I almost belonged. Zhenya had recently returned to Ulan-Ude to look after her ill father, having been working in Moscow for three years at a Russian high-street fashion chain. ‘I miss Moscow,’ she said, her perfectly groomed brows knotting. Finding work in Ulan-Ude in the current climate was proving tough, and Ulan-Ude was not cosmopolitan, but, it seemed, the Buryatian sense of family duty took priority. I exhaled—I felt safe, and also excited. I could suspend my guard. That, as I would realise later, would prove dangerous.

‘NO!’ gasped Zhenya to the musketeers. ‘It’s not good luck to stick your fork in the bread.’

Sharing-plates of glass noodles, deep-fried pork and chubby knots of steamed bread had arrived. With food to negotiate, conversation fell to the path of least resistance: the Europeans with the Europeans, the Buryatians with the Buryatians. It felt wrong, like I preferred to talk to the firefighters. This was the ex-pat conflict. I wanted to explore new frontiers, but it was hard work. I’d instinctively slipped back into my comfort zone.

Over tea so milky it looked like just milk, the musketeers grumbled about not being able to find a decent coffee. But that was one of couchsurfing’s blessings, wasn’t it? That it broke the spell of bad habits. I was off the double-shot cappuccinos with caramel drizzle because it just wasn’t an option. I was probably kicking all sorts of habits, emotional and physical. That, unfortunately, included sleeping and washing—sometimes they weren’t available either.

‘Fasten your seatbelts!’ the firefighters insisted. We’d ditched Zhenya’s car and were in her ad-exec friend Rinchin’s gleaming Nissan Presage for a spot of ego-tourism, as he sped, tail-gated and devoured Ulan-Ude’s urban sprawl as if driving a tank. The firefighters and I volleyed fearful expletives, but they only seemed to provide the encouragement that Rinchin craved. And the emergency? We needed milk vodka, a Buryatian speciality, to toast new arrivals. Despite losing an hour, plus days off my life, to this perilous and ultimately fruitless quest, it was for the best—we were spared a night on fermented, curdled mare’s milk. Couchsurfers couldn’t say no—after all, wasn’t that why we were here, for the access to traditional delicacies?

Reprieve was short-lived. Russian vodka and balsam (a herbal vodka) would have to do. Rinchin stormed Skin Mountain, a hill studded with Buddhist prayer stones overlooking the city, for the welcome we’d been dreading: the SUV’s leather seats were then swivelled around into a cosy circle. ‘No, no, I can’t drink tonight,’ groaned Bernat. Why not? Because exactly the same thing had happened the night before. I could only wait to find out what.

‘The first toast is for respect,’ said Zhenya, pouring out six shots. Respect—that made it impossible to say no. Despite our full bellies, we were instructed to chase with huge buuzies (doughnut-sized, Buryatian dumplings). The boys gritted their teeth and ate their words. Rinchin didn’t seem remotely bothered by the drink-driving crackdown. ‘What’s the penalty?’, I asked, in undisguised disapproval. ‘A two-year ban, and if you have an accident, nine months in prison,’ he said, unmoved. I buttoned my judgment—it felt disrespectful. The toasts kept coming. To health! To love! To friends! To…The fog of forgetfulness soon descended. Suitably tanked up, Rinchin dropped us off at Metro, apparently Ulan-Ude’s best club.