I said, trying to sound optimistic.
The digital age might have brought instant connections, but that didn’t mean instant friendship. A force-field of unfamiliarity separated us. Olga hung around, so I had to sing for my breakfast. I didn’t feel like small talk, but I was couchsurfing: I had no choice. Eventually, Olga left to see her parents, and in her place, Ollie arose, boldly putting his foot up on the sideboard in the kitchen. He pulled up his trouser-leg to reveal a swelling the size of a computer mouse.
‘It’s not as bad as it looks,’ he said.
It looked hot and angry. I wasn’t convinced.
‘Chai?’ I offered. ‘Black, one sugar, coming up.’ I ferreted through her cupboards, looking for sugar. It felt strange to sense some kind of ownership over someone else’s apartment.
‘Arghhhh!’ Ollie had found a problem with the tea.
‘Did you burn yourself?’
‘No—you put salt in my tea. If Olga had made it, I probably would have politely drank it: ‘Hmm, this curious Russian speciality!’’
We made it into Moscow as the sun was setting. We ran dull errands, refuelled, and then met Olga at the beautiful 1930s Komsomolskaya metro station under the mosaics honouring its workforce, the Komsomol (or Communist Youth League). Olga was going to help us buy our Trans-Siberian rail tickets. ‘Always remember that the host is doing the surfer a favour,’ the website had chided. I couldn’t forget. She assumed the mothering role and we became the children: we’d left our passports and cash behind, turning a fifteen-minute task into one and a half hours.
‘I must have taken seven or eight of my guests to get their train tickets,’ Olga said.
I was confused: I felt guilty, and yet, it seemed, this was standard. The kindness of strangers—it really existed.
We felt an urge to take Olga to dinner. She chose an art-café-cum-bookshop, Bilingua, and, as we chatted, she told us how she had a ‘very special criterion’ when couchsearching. She’d search for ‘Godard’ or ‘Truffaut’ to locate fellow French cinema fans. She told us about Russia’s Country Ambassador, something of a celebrity in Moscow: a Philippino diplomat who often had four or five surfers staying at one time; he’d had over a hundred guests this year.
‘I don’t like it when homes are like hostels,’ Olga frowned.
There was even a couchsurfing monastery, she said, just outside Moscow: one shared room for couchsurfers, a curfew, and a task, such as painting the walls. Like opening a matrioshka, those sets of Russian nesting dolls, Olga’s twitchy, nervous shell had fallen away, and she seemed at last relaxed. Finally, the act of welcoming us into her home didn’t appear so masochistic.
We headed back and, unbidden, Olga looked up our train times and wrote out a role-playing station script for next time. And as we ate into her bedtime, my couchsurfing guilt reappeared. Christ, was this going to be like catholic guilt? I went to the kitchen to make tea, and found myself washing up, thinking about the selfish rewards of altruism: had Olga, too, gone to bed feeling good? Outside I heard the ghostly clatter of horses’ hooves—Olga had told us earlier that they belonged to gypsy girls who used them to beg. It was my reward.
13TH OCTOBER
Moscow Sights Seen So Far:
The metro system;
The railway station;
A Russki hair salon (I had amused myself with a Moscow makeover, hairspray finish and everything).
Not exactly Top Ten. Couchsurfing, with all its social and organisational demands, was eating into our tourists’ needs, but then,we’d seen a very different kind of tourism—intimate tourism.
But we were just getting to know our host and our little party was over: we had to leave Olga’s at 7am the next day to meet Max, our second Moscow host (‘Please arrive at 8am—I have a very hard day.’). Couchsurfing Rule Numero Uno: guests defer to hosts. Olga assured us she’d get up early to say goodbye. She really was the sweetest thing, I said to myself, mentally composing my very first positive reference.
14TH OCTOBER
‘When you come out of the metro, you’ll see a supermarket, then we are house 36.’ A riddle wrapped in a Soviet apartment block.
Metro—check. Supermarket—check. Time check: 8.10—a little late. But house 36? House even? Encircled by row upon row of dirty white, high-rise blocks, we were stumped. We sent out a Mayday to Max, but by 8.50 (a lot late), there was still no word. We called him (wasn’t that the sound of a man freshly woken?), and received our instructions for the final stage.
The smell came first—the fetid smell of fermenting men. At the foot of the twenty-storey Block 36, four red-faced, leering drunks swayed in the wind; a fifth was retching over clutched knees. We picked our way past the broken bottles, suspect puddles and a dark-skinned, obese woman slumped in the janitor’s cabin, and into a lift. One hour late, we got our hands on the prize.
Max, rangy in jeans and a Cambodia T-shirt and with the flat, fringed haircut of a young geography teacher going on fifty, bounced out to greet us with a laughing, long-armed hug. Sleep creases marked his smooth Pinocchio cheekbones. ‘Lock the door behind you!’ he said merrily, as we followed him through two solid steel doors and straight into a glittering coral-pink hall resembling a camp Santa’s grotto. We were equipped with slippers (leather for the boys, flowery pink towelling for the girls), and led off the hall into a small room containing a brown velour ‘super deluxe’ sofa.
‘Yesterday,’ clucked Max in a singsong voice, ‘ve vent to ze couchsurfing film night, on ze Irish independence!’
‘Oh yes?’
‘Ve vatched ze Bloody Sunday, khuh khuh!’
We courtiously laughed back, and Max took to his computer. I slumped dysfunctionally on my new bed; I’d had on average four hours’ sleep a night at Olga’s.
‘Zere’s anozzer couchsurfer vere you sleep. Yvonne from London!’
I was confused, but too strung-out to pursue. Max fiddled with his computer, putting disks in, taking disks out, taking work calls (aged thirty-five, he worked in logistics, he told us), then, with a grin the size of his face, he presented us with a commemorative Moscow photo disk.
‘So, Max, have your other couchsurfers struggled to find your place?’ I bleated. ‘All the blocks look the same!’
‘Khuh khuh! Ve khave a film zat is set around New Year’s Ev, ze main kholiday in Russia. So, it’s usual to go to ze banya to clean your body and mind at zis time. When you go to ze banya, you take wodka. So, in zis film, four men khad drunk so much…’
To shear back a long and tangled shaggy-dog story, Max was recounting a much-loved Russian film by the director Eldar Ryazanov, which was shown on Russian TV every New Year.
‘It’s called The Joke of Your Life,’ he explained.
The plot followed a drunk Muscovite who mistook a Soviet apartment
