On The Couch

The spices languished by the front door for the duration of our stay.

‘You want Russian soup? It’s Mama’s gift.’

Ravil led us into his phonebox-sized kitchen, lined with smetana and yoghurt pots hatching herbs, lettuces and other edibles. With only room for two, Ollie wedged an armchair into the doorway. Ravil passed him a plank to use as a tray, and we broke plump, disc-shaped Uzbek bread together, dunking it in his mother’s wholesome chicken soup. I forgot to concentrate on taste, however, as my senses were distracted by the view: strong, hero’s cheekbones, fine olive skin, kitten-tail eyebrows. His hairline was maturely undulated for a 23-year-old, but it added extra gravitas to an already serious soul. The grey patches under his eyes reminded me of that sleepless night that might be waiting for us. I offered to make tea—this ritual at least was a small claiming of kitchen territory—and Ollie went for a smoke on the balcony.

‘Don’t hurt my bike!’ Ravil yelled, jokingly, but not.

I was caught up in my own jarring, one-way sexual tension. This one-room imprisonment, every nuance under scrutiny, didn’t help. But it was the diktat on Ravil’s profile that wouldn’t leave me: he only wanted travellers—not tourists (’even hardcore ones’). Could we stretch to being travellers? We’d needed a couch, so of course we’d say what he wanted to hear. But if comparing stories with travellers was Ravil’s motive for couchsurfing, we were going to disappoint. Couchsurfing was a host’s market—they could afford to stipulate conditions. Us guests had to be much more accepting.

It was time for the slideshow. Ravil opened up a photo on his computer of himself lying in the middle of an empty road—the classic hitchhiker pose—and began to conduct a sermon on Russian hitchhiking.

‘When you hitchhike, everyone is happy to see you,’ he said wistfully. ‘You don’t need money, you don’t need a bag. If you think you need something, it’s your problem.’

He took his Axe deodorant and sprayed a squirt on to a lit match, creating a jet of fire close to our ears. It would have been laughable were it not for Ravil’s silent command over us.

Russia had a hitchhiking guru, Ravil told us, Anton Krotov—a 32-year-old modern-day Kerouac (who looked like the last person you would give a ride to, owing to his abundant Jesus beard). Ravil had read many of his books and followed his website, The Russian Academy of Free Travel—hitchhiking, it seemed, was cool in Russia. It transpired that hitchhikers and couchsurfers existed happily in the same Venn diagram, for both financial and philosophical reasons: both ideologies enabled a life—for free—outside the material world.

At 3am, I decided to take cover in the bathroom, multi-tasking with time out, a shower and the chance to change my clothes with modesty. It was a man’s bathroom: contents included ten cheap soaps worn down to wafers, and tools for shaving, tooth-brushing and clothes-washing. Waiting minutes for the Siberian water to heat up, I went to brush my teeth—but there was no sink in the bathroom. The apartment’s only sink was in the kitchen with a violently wobbly tap. And Russians didn’t seem to believe in bathmats, or cleaning, so I was left not knowing where to put my clean feet.

At 4.20am came the surprise announcement, ‘Let’s sleep’. I silently rejoiced. I’d been dreading staying up all night on the back of ten days’ junk sleep, but Ollie and I had both settled into our submissive role in the couchsurfing dynamic. Lack of sleep was the worst thing about couchsurfing. I was supplied with a stained, tobacco-coloured, canvas camp bed (‘It’s called a raskladushka—‘little folding thing’’). Ollie took the sleeping mat for his leg, and Ravil—in the grey marl T-shirt he’d been wearing that day and a tiny pair of briefs—took to his two half-doors. Somehow, I hadn’t thought what sharing a one-bedroom apartment meant: enforced intimacy. Hiding my bare, white turkey drumsticks from view behind an armchair, I tried to persuade myself it was no different to being on the beach together. I then made a dive for my bed, which was so close to Ravil’s that we were practically spooning. Sleep would evade me that night.

A voice came from the darkness: ‘I have no problem being nude.’

‘Are you preparing us for breakfast in the buff?’ I joked.

A pause.

‘I try to swim nude when I can. My girlfriend and I like to swim nude in the lake.’ His words hung in the air as we fell silent. Finally, the darkness afforded us some privacy. So he had a girlfriend—in this cloying proximity, that was a massive relief. Ravil sent late-night texts while I developed an intense hatred for my bed. The head was too high so I slipped down like water, forming a pool of patheticness in the middle, while the metal frame boxed me in like a caged animal. Growl.

21ST OCTOBER

Breakfast was sweet bread and soup supplied by Ravil, and black Earl Grey supplied by us, slurped unselfconsciously noisily by him. We booked in to go to the hospital that evening for Ollie’s leg. Ollie rolled up his jeans and we all inspected the lump. Ravil took his history, assumed a grave face and said something about infection. I wasn’t worried—I just assumed they’d give him some drugs and he would get better.

By day, Ravil’s block was the colour of a Chernobyl sunset. It was built in the 1940s, apparently, quite possibly the last decade it had looked clean. The foot-wide drainpipes that ran straight on to the pavements now spilled shards of ice. We wanted the cold; seeking extremes, this pleased us. We took a tram to check out the city, through those motorway-wide streets, past the city’s oppressive Stalinist architecture and numerous industrial cranes. Novosibirsk was a functional, industrial Soviet city, with a population of 1.4 million, a plutonium plant, a civil aviation factory and lots of mining. Novosibirsk—or Rio De Novo, as Ravil so ironically called it—was twinned with Doncaster, no less. But couchsurfing opened up a new prism on unattractive towns: it gave them soul.

On board the tram were passengers of Mongol extraction. We were edging nearer to Russia’s autonomous Buryat Republic and, of course, Mongolia. And, yes, both places had couches for us. The Buryatian capital, Ulan-Ude, was our next stop—some 2,300 kilometres east of Novosibirsk. We’d eventually managed to persuade a young Buryatian girl that it didn’t matter that her English was bad and that she lived in the suburbs—we had a couch at least.

Back in Novosibirsk, a pattern was establishing itself in our communications:

Me: ‘So is…Russia/Siberia/Novosibirsk/couchsurfing…?’

Ravil: [an appropriate answer].

Silence.

Silence.

Silence.

Me: ‘So is…Russia/Siberia/Novosibirsk/couchsurfing…?’

Otherwise it was: ‘Let’s stop and wait for Ollie.’

I spent half my time looking backwards at Ollie, as he lagged behind, beaten by Ravil’s turbo pace. Sleep-deprived, I would have preferred not to make conversation, but that was a privilege reserved for better friends. Plus, efforts seemed so unequal—like Polly, Ravil showed little curiosity for us.

‘So is there a Siberian flavour to Novosibirsk?’

‘All of Russia is the same—no one cares about architecture or art. They just want somewhere to live.’

‘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.’