lived a week in one day.
15TH OCTOBER
‘I vont to khave breakfast!’ Max, in football shorts and his Cambodia T-shirt, entered the kitchen—it was rather like joining us in bed. All evidence of the night was efficiently tidied away, and Max set about producing a Heidi-style brunch: watery cabbage soup in need of salt, with trace elements of onion and carrots; smetana; chewy, sour black bread; and spineless ‘Russian standard’ cheese. Random Bloke joined in, and he and Max chatted in Russian. I was grateful not to have to join in, since I couldn’t think of anything to say. I just wanted coffee. Which wasn’t included.
Mystified by the ease with which Max played host, I asked, was the concept of couchsurfing intrinsic to the Russian psyche?
‘Yes!’ he said, practically bursting. ‘I met man in Kiev at ze station and khe invited me to stay khis khouse. Russians are wery khospy-table.’
I, too, could accommodate people on my kitchen floor, but it would take a Blitz for that to happen.
‘Okay, you do the voshing-up!’ Max left the kitchen and it struck me that the couchsurfing dynamic was all about sub/dom. Max was instinctively dominant and we happily submitted. Maybe it could also work as a dom/dom dynamic, and even dom/sub, with a guest dominating a submissive host. But when both were submissive, as it had been with Olga, it left the relationship needing a kick.
‘Perhaps that’s what I should do,’ Ollie piped up. ‘I’ll get couchsurfers into my house, and say to them, ‘You can stay in my house, but you do the washing-up.’
Max returned with his Moscow guide book: ‘You could go here, you could go here…’
Actually, we said, we were interested in the All-Russia Exhibition Centre (a Monaco-sized tribute to Soviet glory). Max seemed unconvinced, but went to print out notes. Now a troika, Max, Ollie and I left the apartment. Feeling shattered, I wished we were a deux. We passed the obese woman in the janitor’s cabin and Max explained that yes, she did live in that one tiny room.
‘Rent is wery expensive in Russia. She’s probably from Uzbekistan. Zey take zose jobs.’
Ollie couldn’t have told me that, I thought to myself.
Outside, Max hucked and spat on the roadside. I sneezed. Ollie blessed me. ‘Yes,’ said Max, ‘Cheers!’
First we visited Moscow’s space park, where a one-hundred metre tall, titanium totem to The Conquerors of Space pointed vertiginously skywards. As we walked down the Avenue of Cosmonauts, Ollie struggled to keep up with Max’s long strides; despite our polite requests, the pace never slowed. Ollie wisely sat out the Monaco-sized glory park. Max guided me indefatigably round the eighty-two Stalinist pavilions, Gagarin’s Vostok rocket and an Aeroflot Yak-42 (smirking not permitted). Without Ollie to share in deciphering Max’s accent, I struggled to understand him, and when I could, I felt too socially retarded to converse, relying simply on a repertoire of, ‘Oh yes, wow, how interesting, I see, umm, gosh’. It became increasingly apparent that Max had taken the day off to hang out with us, despite not really rating our choice. The consummate host never let on.
Max peered into a souvenir stand with hungry eyes: ‘Now I know vare to send my couchsurfers,’ he clucked.
‘Do couchsurfers usually bring presents for you?’ I asked.
‘Sometimes zey offer to buy food, but mostly I say no, pliz. Many zink of it as a place for staying so zere is no obligation to leave presents. But it is a custom of Russia to bring a gift because you don’t pay the bill.’
I resolved to keep on giving.
We scooped up a smiley Ollie, and took the scenic monorail (which Max had researched for us earlier) to Moo-Moo, a chain restaurant decked out like a Friesian cow, serving up Russian classics: borscht, cabbage-stuffed bread, kvas (fermented rye bread water), and, of course, vodka. Two men on the neighbouring table asked to join us. ‘Sure!’ said Max. For the rest of our meal, Max tirelessly translated the glassy-eyed Igor and Sergey’s rants on the war in Georgia (and the Western media’s blindness to Saakashvili’s evil), eulogies to Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (‘most important Russian book!’) and pushy vodka toasts to ‘united nations’. But Max remained the jolly messenger, never getting political. I’d tried to discuss politics with him earlier, but he’d laughed it off; it didn’t seem relevant to him. Natalie appeared halfway through, to nibble on an eggcup-sized portion of vegetarian gratin and saucer of salad, after which our hosts skipped off to their Latino dance class.
Couchsurfing was a hungry beast, so Ollie and I busied ourselves in an internet café. There was a constant need to plan ahead, arrange back-up and confirm arrivals. Each acceptance felt like a minor victory. Perversely, however, we found ourselves, like naive kittens, seeking just a little more danger. Our next stop was Yekaterinburg (some 1,814 kilometres east of Moscow), where our host, a journalism student called Polly, would be on holiday in a ’rather fashionable’ hotel in Turkey when we arrived, leaving us in the curious company of her pet rat. Danger indeed.
16TH OCTOBER
Max was expecting a Spanish couple—our replacements—to arrive at 8am from St Petersburg. Ollie had suggested we wake at 7am to prepare for them, but given our own delayed arrival, I overruled it. At 8.30, the doorbell rang.
‘Hola! Buenos dias!’ they trilled.
Max, the expert logistician, deftly organised us like human elements in a sliding-tile game, and then began the breakfast ritual. The girl immediately offered to do the washing-up. I was so slow on this sharing and helping thing.
‘Do you always like to have surfers, Max?’ I asked, when the amantes weren’t listening. I was shocked by his turnover.
‘I need a rest,’ he replied. ‘Sometimes Natalie don’t like zem.’
‘Are there ever surfers that you don’t like?’
‘No, no!’ he heehawed like a donkey, before adding, ‘Zere vos a Sviss couple cycling viz all zare kit.’
That was as rude as he could bring himself to be about them.
It was checkout time for us—we had a train to catch aboard the world’s longest railway. While packing up, it occurred to me thatMax must now have something of a collection of objets oubliés.
‘Ah yes!’ he said, convulsing with laughter. ‘It’s like a muzeum khere. I khave towels, I khave trousers, I khave tooz-brushes…’
‘Actually,’ I added, ‘I can’t find my top.’
‘Too late! It’s in the muzeum, khuh khuh khuh!’
CHAPTER 3 YEKATERTNBURG: THERE’S A RAT IN THE KITCHEN
‘Well, that was odd.’
Ollie and I were rumbling towards Asia on board the Trans-Siberian Express, and I was grappling with why Max could possibly choose to live in that chaos. We had thirty hours to work it out before
