the early 19th-century Ascension Church that survived the communists; a lemon-yellow stucco merchant’s mansion handed over to the Young Pioneers; and across to the Church of the Blood. Built in 2003, on the site where the last Tsar and his family were murdered, there were plenty of hip young Russians inside, praying solemnly in rather unhip headscarves and skirts. Religion was very fashionable here, Polly explained.
‘I think it’s stupid so much money was put into this building. This is a place that makes you look to God, not talk to him.’
At the Metenkov Photography Museum we found an exhibition from a recent local competition.
‘Did you enter?’ I asked, one eye on a photo of an overweight, topless construction worker.
‘Yes, but I didn’t like the judges—they were so conservative. They didn’t even say anything about my entry.’
I rolled my eyes rebelliously. We took a tram to Lenin Prospekt, location of the City Hall where her mother worked. Just outside, a beat-up old car drove into the back of another. Both drivers laughed and sped off. Polly pointed out her mother’s office—as the city’s culture minister, she had her own driver, she told us, and a new black Volga.
‘The beautiful thing about couchsurfing,’ I said, ‘is that you form emotional attachments with cities.’
‘But you didn’t hear about the secret Russian soul?’ she said, as if I hadn’t heard of Russia. ’You really didn’t hear that we have so great literature, that we are so open-hearted?’
‘No,’ I retaliated—that wasn’t the point. My point was that our memories wouldn’t be of architecture and facts, but of personalities and homes. Couchsurfing gave a place the human touch—that could happen anywhere, and it certainly didn’t take a legacy of literature to enable it. Polly’s phone rang.
‘Christ,’ I muttered darkly to Ollie, ‘I can’t handle any more arrogance, nationalism or bigotry. Oh the irony of the Russians thinking they’re the best.’
My British pride was boiling. Ollie defused me with the appropriate pacifiers, while I consoled myself with the fact that at least when hosts could be tolerated no more, it would soon enough be time to leave.
I determined to behave and suspend my ego for our last supper—Polly took us to a traditional Urals canteen to carb-load before our 25-hour train journey that night to Novosibirsk. She explained all the strange, muddy offerings, helping us to choose rich, oily Uzbek plov (lamb pilau with carrots, cumin and paprika), pelmeni (meat dumplings), shredded pork in aspic, and sweet pancake filled with horridly sour, granulated milk. Good behaviour was productive—I was sweet to her, she was sweet back; it gained its own momentum. I nearly lost the plov when she asked, ‘So Fleur, what do you do for a living?’ After all this time.
One classic Polly one-liner came as an unexpected afterdinner treat when we popped into the supermarket: to my offer to carry her five-litre vat of water, she replied, ‘I’m not a feminist—men should carry heavy things for women. It’s not good for women before they are pregnant.’
Priceless. Polly was a raging feminist.
CHAPTER 4 NOVOSIBIRSK: LOSING A LIMB
‘Hello Ravil! Just to say that we’re on board our train to Novosibirsk and are looking forward to meeting you tomorrow at midnight…could you just confirm that you’ve received this?’
This was the third unanswered text message that we’d sent our prospective couch. We were hoping Ravil would be our fourth host, but we’d had precisely no replies. The probability of something going wrong—given that the premise of couchsurfing was suspended on the very delicate bridge of altruism between strangers; and that Ravil was holding a Kalashnikov in his profile picture—was soaring. As novices, this seemed like an impending catastrophe. But first we had to exorcise the electrifying effects of Polly. Now at a safe distance, she amused me—surely better provocative and caffeinated than thumb-twiddlingly bland. The problem was that couchsurfing’s doses were either overdoses or none at all. Besides, she’d put us up, and in luxury—as our host, she was the sacred cow.
Ollie elevated his leg in a tea-towel sling—the compulsory walking tour hadn’t helped; it was obvious that he was hiding the pain.
‘You should seriously get your leg checked out, Ollie,’ I said. ‘You might be doing it permanent damage. Maybe we can ask Ravil to help.’ After all, Ravil was a 23-year-old medical student who worked nights at an ‘emergency station’ in a town renowned for science. Akademgorodok, meaning ’academy town’, was Novosibirsk’s ‘utopian science city’, purpose-built in 1957 and considered to be Siberia’s educational and scientific centre. Ravil lived, sometimes with his mother, in a one-room apartment. It was staggering that people were happy to share such a small space. It was also an indication of Novosibirsk’s limited couchsurfing choices.
20TH OCTOBER
We awoke in Siberia. Were the rest of Russia to disappear, it would still be, at thirteen-million kilometres squared, the largest country on earth. There was a text from Ravil: ‘ok’. Just okay? It was both a relief and a jolt—no catastrophe, but not exactly much love. All his communication had sounded alluringly bastard-like: our gun man was handsome, intelligent and dangerous. The tension mounted.
We hurtled over Stalin’s mass graves, the iron ore and the permafrost, and spent the day staring out at the monotony of miles and miles of nothing: barren, prehistoric steppe and great tracts of spruce and birch taiga, occasionally interrupted by hopeless, broken railside settlements and the odd, sky-choking industrial plant. I zoned out into the waiting abyss in preparation for the next onslaught. Because we’d be arriving at midnight, Ravil had promised (or threatened) ‘a bit sleepless night’.
‘Fleur! Ollie!’
Standing statuesquely outside our carriage on the stroke of midnight was Ravil, tall and lean in jeans and a beige puffa jacket. Black flashing eyes looked out from beneath a moose-grey beanie. He smiled briefly. I inexplicably squeezed his arm, while the boys shook hands. Ravil led us through Novosibirsk’s imposing Stalinist station and out into an empty car park encrusted with a sparkling frost. Russia’s answer to the Fiat Panda—an ocean-blue and very muddy Oka—awaited.
‘It’s the last Soviet car,’ explained Ravil in a soft, Americanised accent. ‘I bought it for $1,250—hardly any works and there’s probably twenty kilograms of dirt on it.’
‘Fuck.’ Ravil’s engine stalled in front of a police patrol car, right in the middle of a monster junction resembling the confluence of four motorways. After a brief Kubrick moment (specifically, Wendy trying to flee Overlook Hotel in The Shining), the car started…and stalled…and started, as it did for the rest of the journey. Similarly, with much prompting, Ravil gave us his potted history. I focused on him furtively in the rear-view mirror while he told us he was a Tatar, a Turkic people originally from the Gobi Desert. It sounded awfully romantic. He was born and raised in south Kazakhstan, and came to Novosibirsk, Russia’s third largest city, to study, ignoring his family’s wish for him to study in Kazakhstan. It was a child’s right to ignore his parents, he said powerfully. Besides, he was ‘very clever’ and won prizes for biology. His father had passed away a few years ago, and after his death, Ravil’s mother, a seamstress, joined him in Novosibirsk.
So
