‘worst ever guest’ treated her like his servant, asking her for tea, coffee, to buy his train ticket, ‘Can I have my breakfast now?’
‘He asked for many, many things like this, and he didn’t bring anything,’ she said, softly indignant.
Our problem was the opposite: British reserve and a keen concern for etiquette. Perhaps ten weeks of couchsurfing would knock it out of us. Still, at least first-time guests were still grateful. There was obviously some delicate balance to strike, somewhere in between excessive courtesy and taking liberties.
As for sexual harassment, she’d received messages, from mostly Turkish and northern African men, saying, ‘You look nice—let’s be friends.’ Impossible, given that Olga’s profile picture was of foliage. I’d noticed girls who seemed naked in their profiles, I said.
‘Yes, probably,’ she laughed timidly. ‘And they never look as good as their picture.’
The 1950s standard wasn’t so welcome in the bathroom: there was no lock (the door didn’t even shut), the single-ply toilet paper was the colour of Jiffy bag stuffing, and above the sink was an old-fashioned shaving brush, some wooden combs and antique mildew.
Back in the kitchen, the wine came out. ‘It’s only cheap and sweet,’ Olga apologised, adding, ‘It’s how I like it. Would you like some?’
‘Oh—only if you’re having some.’
‘No, no, please have if you like.’ She poured from an open bottle labelled ‘La Jeunesse’. Nibbling on past-it black and white grapes, Ollie and I smiled away our hunger. There was a couchsurfing house party that night, Olga said, the leaving party of an Irish couchsurfer called Donna. Result. We’d just inherited her social life—it felt liberating to have to go with it.
En route to the party, Olga pointed out one of the Kremlin’s potent red stars atop its spiky towers. A volt of joy fizzed through my body: we had a house party, a hand-holder and a local guide through Europe’s largest city. We passed a street kiosk and refuelled on public-transport-grade potato-filled pirojki pies, too flabby and tepid to be savoured.
Inside another anonymous Soviet apartment block, past a fourfoot—high mound of coats, twenty-five-odd twenty-somethings were mingling amongst the scatter cushions and up-lighters. The first four guests we encountered had been made redundant. ‘Actually, it freed me,’ said a Russian in a blazer. ‘There’s no point for career now. So I just go travelling.’
Donna turned out to be Donagh, a young male architect with warm freckles and black, curly hair, and also an open future—like us, he was heading east on the Trans-Siberian. We ricocheted around the party as the only itinerants; everyone else lived in Moscow. Wasn’t that strange?
‘We are networking,’ admitted a Siberian lawyer.
Tom, a British accountant, said it was an ex-pat thing.
‘Yes,’ added the Siberian, crisply, ‘Russian girls go to couchsurfing parties to meet foreign men.’
I nudged Ollie.
‘Let me tell you about Moscow women,’ said Tom. Ollie and I leant in. ‘There are more women than men, so while they’re better-looking than the men, they have to work a lot harder. It’s why you see feisty, dressy Russian women alone in bars—they’re competing for limited resources.’ But there wasn’t a novi Russki in sight: the demographic here was one of middleclass, bright young things, computer literate and emancipated. And English-speaking. Finding a Cossack while couchsurfing was going to be unlikely.
‘Oh, you’re in really capable hands with Olga,’ said Sarah, a bubbly Irish girl with bubbly, coiled hair. ‘She’s probably the most professional host here. She knows exactly how to be, without being obvious about it. If she doesn’t like you, she’ll diplomatically let you do your thing.’
With impeccable timing, Olga announced she was going home, adding, ‘Who is the most responsible person here?’
She elected Tom to get us home, drew us a map and gave us some keys. Tom took us to a snug indie club where we learned about the Russian mafia non-scene.
‘Oh, there is no more Mafia—they just became corrupt businessmen or politicians where there’s more power.’
And about the ‘blacks’: labour migrants from the ‘Stans—Tajikistan, Dagestan, Uzbekistan.
‘The Russians treat them worse than animals.’
But eventually the public displays of Russian passion around us became insufferable, so he sorted us a ‘gypsy cab’, a Tajik worker with his own Lada, and we returned to Pushkin Square to make an ill-advised friendship with a burger shack—toxic coiled sausageskis in white sliced bread that could have been moulded from foam. Still, slathered in mustard, ketchup and mayo, it became a meal. We’d be back.
12TH OCTOBER
8am. Ollie’s alarm was screaming—he’d forgotten to turn it off from the day before. He slept on, but after just four hours’ sleep, I couldn’t. Grey daylight seeped in and the rain bore down. I peered out of the window. Amongst all the cloned, beige-brick residential blocks, I saw in one corner ‘1956’ picked out in red bricks. In the apartment’s oppressive silence, I didn’t know what else to do but return to my couch. Only now, sober, did I realise it smelt faintly of unwashed bodies and that under the thin foam was a rigid wooden board—it was like sleeping on a door. In the heat I was too uncomfortable to sleep. I thought about tea and food, and sent texts to The Emperor. We’d become so twinned I was finding it hard to cut off.
Some hours later I finally tiptoed out and stop-started my way towards the kitchen, hesitating outside Olga’s bedroom for an argument with myself: say good morning; no, don’t bother her. Well, you can’t just march into her kitchen. I’m hungover, I’m not in the mood. Well, that’s not good manners…
In London, I either lived alone or with The Emperor—I wasn’t used to dealing with people not on my terms.
Knock, knock.
‘Good morning,’ I croaked.
Olga was communing with her laptop at a wooden desk, in a study half the size of our room with a sofa like mine and no other sleeping apparatus—the sofa was her bed.
‘Hello,’ she replied.
She got up and formally introduced me to the kitchen. A waft of cooked eggs lingered.
We chatted briefly, then she returned to her room. Too inhibited to whip up a full breakfast, I poured myself a water from the kettle. This, I realised, was the point of Pay it Forward. If I’d hosted first, I’d feel more right to hospitality.
After a time, she returned.
‘Have you had breakfast?’ she asked.
‘Actually, I’d love a cup of tea.’ What I really wanted was a cappuccino.
‘Bfff, of course!’ From a tiny pot crammed with loose black tea, she poured a strong, cold shot into a mug and topped it up with boiling water—chai, Russian style, no milk. ‘Try some kefir as well—it’s
