my BlackBerry was rather more straightforward—it was lost. Of course, there was the possibility that something more sinister than good times had taken it, but the idea was unthinkable. Hosts had far more to lose.
The day’s next excitement was the hypermarket, for the boys to stock up for their three-day train journey. In the car my gaze was conveniently averted outside, to catch, in amongst a constructivist majority, Ulan-Ude’s bronze monuments to heroic, mounted Buryatian warriors, and Buddhist buildings with flying eaves. At the supermarket, Zhenya picked up a couple of value tins of horsemeat.
‘You need meat,’ she said maternally.
‘Why?’ responded Bernat, with some disdain.
‘For the train.’
‘No.’
It was useful to see how others—non-Brits—were with their hosts. Bernat wasn’t rude, he just didn’t want tinned horsemeat. His candour was inspiring.
We hugged the boys goodbye at the station. With them safely out of earshot, I could finally ask Zhenya for the missing details.
‘You were in the back of my car wearing his chapka,’ she said, her voice tripping into a laugh. ‘And David asked, “Can I kiss you?” You said yes. And then he asked, “Can you kiss me?” and you just started singing.’
(Was it ‘Can I kick it?/Yes you can,’ I wondered). But did I kiss him?
‘Then we got home and you went to bed. When I asked where David was, I found him in your room but you were asleep, and I shouted, “David, go back to bed!” The boys were laughing for thirty minutes.’
As did we. Too bad alcohol took as much as it gave.
My next stop, in two days’ time, would be just outside Mongolia’s capital Ulan Bator, where I’d be staying in a ger—a traditional felted tent. My host, a German woman married to a local, had three negative references—quite a count for couchsurfing. She’d been ‘moody’, and had pushed her guests into doing her ‘maximum price’ tours. She responded negatively to one reference, saying the guest had set fire to her house and stolen her phone. It sounded like a cartoon. But she also had plenty of positive references. I was intrigued; it sounded authentic. Maybe Marco from Italy summed it up: ‘At Sabina’s I had the craziest couchsurfing adventures, she is unique, in both really good and really bad ways, but once you understand Mongolia, you understand Sabina, or vice versa.’ It promised some safe danger. I was excited.
‘I have to visit my aunt with a broken rib,’ Zhenya announced after helping me buy my tickets to Mongolia. ‘I’ll be back at 10pm [it was now 5pm]—maybe you can go for a walk.’
The apron strings were suddenly severed. I was going to have to be independent again. Placing all emotional needs on my host was an ask too much, I realised, and foolish. So I decided to go and place them on the internet instead.
News from Ollie: he was ‘lying very still’, under self-imposed house arrest, ‘maybe for a whole month’, but now that the knife had been at his leg, it was ‘nice and flat’. Ollie was such a stoic. I was going to miss his calm crisis management.
10pm suddenly became 7pm—Zhenya was going to come back early. She was waiting outside in her car, with her mother and another cousin, Nastia (short for Anastasia). They screamed when I tried to get in. This was, of course, because I’d got into the wrong car of Buryatian girls. I guess Zhenya saw all of this because I then heard a car horn, presumably to aid my sonar location. But once reunited, no one mentioned it—least of all me in my deep shame. I missed having someone to laugh with.
We dropped Zhenya’s divorced mother at home, taking the silent and shy 20-year-old Nastia, a ‘customs’ student, back with us. Was I hungry? ‘A little bit peckish,’ I said warily, thinking about sheep entrails. Plus, I’d just eaten half a packet of strawberry sandwich biscuits. Too bad—pancakes, tomato chutney, smetana and Siberian apple jam were promptly laid out on the kitchen table. Nastia and Zhenya folded their pancakes into neat little parcels, so I did too, filling mine with round after round of the most delicious apple jam—crunchy and fresh cherry-sized apples in a tart but sweet sunset-pink apple soup. Zhenya had made it herself; her grandmother did the blackcurrant jam, which they’d mix with cold water for a drink. But that was nothing, her father had built the whole house.
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