On The Couch

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! (#ulink_d391a126-f55b-5e8e-8728-42db8708f995)

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.’