style of life,’ explained Max. ‘For foreign person, it’s difficult to understand.’
We understood.
Yvonne, a wan, thin girl with straggly, long hair, emerged from the kitchen. So that’s where we’d be sleeping; I hadn’t done that since drunken student days.
Max hooted, ‘Breakfast Included!’
The opposite of Olga, extroverted, jokey and unselfconscious, he made me feel instantly cosy. In the kitchen, against a pumpkin-coloured backdrop, rested a pumpkin-coloured sofa bed. Claustrophobically small, it was in fact rather like being inside an actual pumpkin. What space remained was serried with panpipes, fridge magnets and ethnic masks—Max’s apartment was a shrine to travel. If travel was Max’s religion, couchsurfers were its disciples—for Russians, visas were difficult to obtain, Max told us, and air travel was expensive: in times of need, couchsurfers brought the world to him.
’s phone rang again, so we acquainted ourselves with our compatriot. Couchsurfing was an obvious starting point (and current obsession).
‘It would be quite lonely without couchsurfin’,’ Yvonne explained in her London accent. ‘I’m twenny-one, I’ve got £1,000 to travel indefinitely. I’m going to Mongolia, China, India, Tibet, Nepal, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam…I can teach but I’d rarver not.’
Yvonne’s conversational coffers seemed infinite—and so she went on. She’d been staying at Max’s for a week, but she’d evidently earned her moral right because she’d hosted a lot in London. She recounted how two guests had paid for her National Express ticket so she could show them Stonehenge, and how one girl had asked for the vacuum cleaner (‘My house isn’t completely spotless, right’) and left after an hour.
Max returned and busied himself with breakfast: tea in glasses and a large bowl of chocolates and wafers.
‘Zere’s not so much sugar so I khave some khow-do-you-say…blackberry.’
I gamely put some jam in my tea and took a chocolate for breakfast, but the wrapper wouldn’t budge so I aborted. Max spooned soupy chocolate spread straight from a bowl into his mouth. I went to refill the kettle from the tap, but Max leapt up, saying ‘No, no!’ and ladled a cup of water from a large pan. The point of couchsurfing was being played out—we were experiencing a new ‘normality’. A random bloke sloped in, helped himself to tea, offered legal-minimum pleasantries, and sloped out.
‘Khe’s out-of-verk computer programme,’ explained Max. ‘Khe’s my permanent couchsurfer. Khuh khuh.’
’s was evidently a hospitality that didn’t say no.
With a stomach-turning collection of corpse-long and broken fingernails, Yvonne clawed a number into her mobile.
‘So can I crash your language class today?’ she drawled into the mouthpiece. ‘Cuz you said the ovva day I could sit in on your Russian class?’ Yvonne was looking for a pen.
‘Ruchka!’ enthused Max. ‘Tsat’s ‘pen’ in Russian. ‘Arm’ in Russian is ruka, so pen is little arm!’
Yvonne scratched down the new word in her exercise book. It seemed they had a good tutor-student relationship going on.
Max had to drive out of Moscow, so we gathered ourselves to leave with him; there were no spare keys and we’d have to stay out all day.
‘Zere’s a couchsurfing party tonight. Someone is presentation khis trip to China.’
He furnished us with the address, and the three Londoners disentangled themselves from this force of positive energy and returned to the real world.
Passing thunder-faced, potato-bodied babushkas selling kittens in cardboard boxes, we advanced in the drizzle to Red Square. In my sleep-deficient state, Yvonne’s motormouth was bringing out my misanthropy. Gone was my rictus smile—compulsory companionship had gone unquestioned when there was a motive but now I dropped back while Ollie and Yvonne swapped India stories. Yvonne expressed an interest in going to the State History Museum so I expressed an interest in the Kremlin. Bye-bye Yvonne: she’d be moving to a different host later.
Rocking up at a Russian house party felt a little peculiar without Max, and with no introduction other than the fact that We Too Were Couchsurfers. But, we reminded ourselves, couchsurfing was an open community, plus we’d come well stocked with ingratiating party provisions. Inside, we couldn’t get past the human log-jam in the hall; the bilingual slideshow on China was taking place in an impenetrable bedroom. Conversation was unavoidable. Finding myself in front of two Californian sisters tucking into bowls of borscht, we got talking. They didn’t know anyone either, and were staying at a hostel. Not wanting to be with all the tourists, they had checked out Moscow’s couchsurfing group, and this party was posted on it.
A Kazakh girl invited me into a ‘secret’; she’d met her boyfriend when couchsurfing with him in Paris.
‘We were reading my English-Russian manual together,’ she whispered. ‘I was very tired so I leant my head on his shoulder…’ Why the whispering?
‘To stop others thinking that they’ll find love on the couchsurfing site and messaging random girls.’
I told her we were on our way to Kazakhstan.
‘I sympathise,’ she quipped. ‘In Moscow, nobody ever looks at you in the street. In Kazakhstan, they do. They’re checking your nose hasn’t turned white with frostbite—it can be—40°C in the winter.’
Beyond the capacity of my imagination, it just sounded exciting. Naivety was remarkably motivating.
‘Everyone leave now!’ shouted the flushed Russian host. ‘We’re all going to a café down the road!’
Nobody budged. Nobody could.
Eventually, the host got his way, so we returned to Max’s and convened in the kitchen. As we snacked on bread and bananas from our own supplies, Max quizzed us on all matters travel.
‘Show me rucksack! Vot about sleeping bag? Khow much you pay?’
We presented him with our gift, a Lonely Planet guide on Thailand (he’d dropped a hint in an email while we were in London) and he yelped with joy.
‘Natalie!’
His tiny, mouse-like girlfriend scurried in wearing mintgreen loungewear with SWEET GLAMOUR twinkling in green crystals.
‘Try ze rucksack!’ said Max, excitedly.
My rucksack practically toppled her, but she beamed. Their delight infected us all. Natalie didn’t speak English so Max seamlessly ran two conversations without ever revealing the strain.
By 1am, we could delay the inevitability of kitchen camping no more. We pushed the kitchen table right to the wall and unfolded the sofa-bed—the kitchen disappeared. I filled my empty water bottle from the just-boiled kettle—the only drinking water I could find—and the plastic warped. I wasn’t used to having to think about where I’d get my water. I sandwiched myself between Ollie and the wall and we killed the lights, but the glow from the appliances’ LEDs held their steely gaze on us. I couldn’t sleep: the fridge was whirring, I was boiling, I had a dead arm from the wooden
