out of the kitchen window, I noticed a glossy black Range Rover with blacked-out windows. It seemed to match this luxurious, modern apartment. My eyes locked on to it. Sure enough, out popped an impish, tanned girl with a confident crop and over-sized, tomato red spectacles. She looked up to her apartment and saw me. I waved at her. She waved back.
‘She’s here!’ I hissed.
The girls collapsed into a hysterical fit, started up Voyage by Milky Lasers on the laptop, and assumed the ‘surprise!’ position.
And so two hysterical girls became three, screaming, jumping, hugging. Ollie and I hesitantly joined in. Tomboyish in twisted jeans and a white T-shirt, the 20-year-old Polly burnt bright, flashing her strong, milky teeth and warm, nutty eyes. She babbled spiritedly and quickly launched into a gift ceremony. For Albina: ‘The best coffee in Turkey!’ For Sasha: Turkish Delight. She turned to us: ‘Guys, you both eat meat?’ Oh yes, we said, as if being offered the keys to paradise. Wow—a Turkish spice gift set. We in turn gave her a bottle of Agent Provocateur perfume, the last of our gift stash from London.
The rat was duly positioned on Polly’s shoulder. DouDou, Polly told us, was named after Madame DouDou from the cartoon Max & Co.
‘You haven’t seen Max & Co? Really?’ she said, haughtily.
She fed the rat some Turkish Delight direct from her own mouth, and the Polly Show began. Like small children introduced to TV for the very first time, Ollie and I were mesmerised. Polly was like a Studio Ghibli character—a super-cute, quirky heroine and an army of one.
‘I’m not a racist, but Turkey is such a stupid country,’ she said, unpacking her suitcase. ‘Turkish people are so lazy and stubborn. You only get progress in cold countries, where you have to work and think. They don’t have to think because food grows all around them.’
‘What about the Greek and Roman philosophers?’ I gently challenged her.’
‘They were the last ones to do anything intelligent,’ she sniffed.
Couchsurfing warfare was surely internecine so we laughed it off, but it soon became obvious that it didn’t matter what we said, it was still going to come. English was clearly the lingua franca here, so eventually Albina and Sasha drifted off, leaving Polly to continue uninterrupted.
Eclipsed by her energy, Ollie and I grew increasingly passive, sitting at her new dark-wood breakfast table while she danced around us, regaling us with her riotous political incorrectness. She was outrageous and opinionated; this was entertainment. We were her first couchsurfers, she explained, and she was ‘crazy’ about speaking English.
Had she received any other couchsurfing requests?
‘One Turkish guy, but I didn’t respond because Turkish men think Russian girls are prostitutes. Saying yes would be saying yes to sex.’
We howled with laughter.
‘I hate Italian men because they stare at Russian women like we’re prostitutes. And they are so impulsive; their feelings are too much.’ She pulled a comedy face. ‘I think I’m talking too much.’
But it didn’t stop—the dynamic had been set. After jumping from topic to topic, Polly sat us down in front of her laptop for a comprehensive presentation on her Lomo photography, and then suggested sushi: ‘I’m crazy about sushi.’ Sure, we said, by now adjusted to going with the flow—it was 10pm. We grabbed a taxi into town.
‘If you had a car,’ I asked, ‘would you give strangers a ride?’
‘Only foreigners,’ she said briskly. ‘It’s dangerous to pick up locals, even when it’s a couple—there could be sex violence.’
Declaring herself fat-, junk-, alcohol—and meat-averse (although she really missed cow’s tongue, she said), Polly liked sushi because it was about the only fun thing left. As we took our seats at Wasabi, Ollie pointed out that this would be only our third meal of the trip. Industrial foodstuffs, sweets and sufferance had been our staples. ‘It’s very bad for your bodies to live like this,’ Polly lectured crossly. She made some bossy suggestions, but quickly returned to her favourite subject: herself. It was such a problem, she told us, because so many guys wanted to be with her and she didn’t want to be with them. Admiration for our host soon distorted into a sense of asphyxiation. I sank into my wine—at least just listening, and not having to talk, offered some kind of respite.
Wakey, wakey: party time. We were off to Apartment, a nightclub at the top of a cinema complex, which Polly’s olderman lover owned. Arriving at Face Kontrol, she dialled her lover’s number and pushed her phone at the door police. They spoke to the phone and waved us through. To the tune of European hip-hop and old-skool funk, Ollie and I threw back vodka shots with her art student friends in amongst the garconchic guys and vintage-clad ladies. Polly threw some expert shapes for a while and then became entwined in a lover’s knot. Ollie and I made do with her friends—we had an instant gang.
‘I am an architecture,’ said a blonde, goateed Russian with yellow-lensed spectacles. ‘But the Russians who have money have no taste, so we are not being asked to build nice buildings.’
Crutches made good dance floor props—Ollie danced unrestrainedly for what looked like way too long. Should I have said something? Nothing he didn’t already know.
At 4am, we walked home to a soliloquy on how Polly had spent two years playing the Long Game to win over her lover. Unfortunately, she had to put up with me as a bedfellow that night for some top-to-tail action. My breather from Polly was sleeping with Polly.
19TH OCTOBER
‘So guys, how do you feel after all that alcohol?’
‘Fine!’ we replied, in grinning defiance.
I bounded out of bed to put the kettle on.
‘Actually, we don’t drink from the tap.’
‘But it’s okay boiled, no?’
‘The government says yes but I say no.’
Faced with this planet-sized ego, my British diplomacy could hold its banks no more. I started experiencing inappropriate compulsions to take her on; the self-doubt that had bothered me in Moscow had summarily been pushed aside.
Breakfast was porridge and politics. What did Polly think of Medvedev? Did Russia regard him as Putin’s puppet?
‘I met a DJ from Munich who said the same thing, but the election was shown as democratic—maybe it was the truth that lots of people voted for him.’
‘Yes’, we said, ‘but there are ways of pushing the electorate.’
‘My generation is tired of politics,’ she said with a brush of the hand. ‘We don’t have a newspaper culture here. The most common news in Russia is rumour. It goes back to Soviet times when the only information was rumour. People would meet in the kitchen, where you’d be sure that no one would go to the government. It still exists now: people don’t want their brain to be—what’s the word—pressed?’
Did she feel Asian? Apparently not, despite Yekaterinburg sitting within Russia’s Asian border. It seemed all Russians wanted to be seen as European. She explained that in Yekaterinburg there were many Tajiks, Dagestanis and Chechens, selling vegetables in the market.
‘I’mnot a racist,’ she said, arching an eyebrow, ‘but I don’t like them. They’re Muslims—they have absolutely different minds. They are used to war so they can’t think any other way. They don’t trust people.And I don’t like theway they treatRussianwomen.We are nothing to them. They make a lot of sex violence in the night.’
She flicked on the TV to check the outside temperature: 8°C. Polly was going to take us on a guided tour. She’d done a couple of days’ training as a guide—that definitely boosted her couchsurfing worth.
‘Polly,