Circle. Was my mother not worried? Did I have a Kazakh dictionary? Have these wafers! No thanks. Have these wafers! Okay! Where was I staying? ‘I’m staying with a friend,’ I said. I repeated those words in my head: I had a friend—of sorts—waiting for me in a new city. That was a powerful feeling.
Clutching an in-case-of-emergency address in Dikson, I turned in at 3.30am, perplexed as to why my berth buddies were happy to share their night and supplies with me. We weren’t used to such hospitality in London’s individualistic, post-Thatcher society. As I looked at my rations-for-one, I wondered if it were me, unable to think beyond the self, that was uncivilised.
24TH OCTOBER
After a day of hyper-sleep, I was starting to come round from the shock. The Russians had left to drive trucks, and I was alone again. I thought of Ravil—he had given his time, his food, his place and his philosophy. Surely the insight into Russian life would long outlive memories of silly social anxiety.
I found it difficult to look out of the window; the Great Empty Steppe mirrored my sense of isolation. However, out there, edged by lonely firs covered in plump blankets of snow was the oceanic Lake Baikal, the ‘blue eye of Siberia’. As the deepest lake on earth, the largest freshwater lake by volume, and—thanks to its self-purifying properties—holder of one-fifth of the world’s drinking water, Lake Baikal was, to the Buryatian people, the Sacred Sea. The Buryatians—a traditionalist Mongol people numbering just a million, who practised both Buddhism and Shamanism (despite Soviet efforts)—respected nature like a religion.
I was very pleased with my couchsurfing find in Ulan-Ude, a 25-year-old eastern Buryatian girl called Zhenya. While western Buryats had been ‘Russified’, dumping nomadism for agriculture, eastern Buryats were more traditional and closer to the Mongols. But I didn’t know much about Zhenya—her profile was scant and new—except that her family had, at some stage, swapped nomadism for the suburbs. I was eager for an ersatz Ollie and some shanti love, that beneficent Buddhist practice of forbearance and forgiveness. But having forgotten to get a gift in the ‘excitement’, and about to arrive with a lot of needs (laundry, tickets to Mongolia and Vladivostok, internet access), it all felt a bit take, take, take. Again.
I was floundering on the platform, lost in a sea of strangers, when Zhenya pulled me to safety. I looked up at her. Tall and beautiful, with long, glossy sable hair, and narrow, Mongol eyes smouldering with kohl, she smiled graciously like a Buryatian goddess. She even had a retinue of three young European males.
‘Bernat, Albert, David,’ she introduced, in a honeyed Russian accent.
‘A-ha!’ I exclaimed. ‘You must be the Spanish firemen.’ News of their journey had preceded them—we were due to share the same Vladivostok host. I was right back on the trail.
We piled into Zhenya’s silver Toyota Camry Lumiere. I eyed the Buddhist charm hanging from the rear-view mirror as we tore home, skidding on black ice and dodging pot-holes by veering on to the wrong side of the road. Conversation fell to the three musketeers and me. Actually—as they were quick to point out—they were Catalan, not Spanish, from Barcelona.
‘I never wanted a Russian flag,’ said Bernat, the selfappointed spokesperson, owing to his superior English. ‘But I would like a Buryatian one. We have sympathy for Buryatia under Moscow’s centralised control.’
We were so immersed in conversation that both the view and Zhenya’s silence were overlooked. Chastened, I tried to chat with her, but after repeating myself and even trying out some Russian (to which she pulled a face of mortal horror), she finally confessed, ‘I find your accent difficult.’ Zhenya spoke American-English. English-English was niche, it seemed. She dropped her head: ‘I need to practise.’
‘We can help with that,’ I grinned.
‘That’s why you’re here!’ she said.
‘The suburbs’ were the Beverly Hills of Ulan-Ude (well, relatively speaking), at the end of an unprepossessing, three-mile dirt track. We pulled up at a large, detached house. This was my first couch not in a Soviet block. The senses were slapped hard. With the distinct aroma of pickled cabbage and charcoal smoke under my nose, I was introduced to her father, a small man of a sensei’s build with a beatific smile, and her younger brother, Sasha, who was going mountaineering with his university friends that weekend. In amongst the rush of the family running around, grabbing at ropes and high-tech outdoor equipment, Zhenya showed me my room—my own room! We’d all be going out again in twenty minutes, she told us (it was Friday night), and left to grab at ropes.
My Own Room was large and bare, with a single bed, a computer and, on the walls, two posters of models in bikinis pressed against shiny red Mercedes—the fascinating habitat of a Russian youth. As a matter of emergency, I washed my hair and changed my top (there was no washing or changing on the Trans-Siberian), and chatted to the Catalans who were sleeping in Zhenya’s vacated room next door. Worn out, they were all lying on their mattresses. This, too, was their first couchsurfing trip, and we traded tales. Some of their hosts had even met them with name placards, and one of their hosts’ boyfriends split for three days because he didn’t like couchsurfers. I instantly liked them—but then, I needed them.
We didn’t get very far on our drive into town because we were stopped by the police.
‘One of you hide!’ Zhenya urged dramatically. ‘Four in the back is illegal.’ We all simultaneously ducked. Wearing a cute leather bomber, an asymmetric black miniskirt and foxy kneehighs, she stepped out of the vehicle.
‘She never passed her driving test,’ one of the musketeers whispered. ‘Apparently Sasha knows the right people.’
Sliding back behind the wheel unscathed, Zhenya purred, ‘Sometimes, it’s good to be a woman.’ The police had been looking for drink-drivers. But the action didn’t stop there. After dropping Sasha off, there was then a near miss with a tram, which she avoided by reversing into oncoming traffic. And when trying to parallel park (a group effort), she ripped her tyre on a metal spike.
How many Spanish firefighters does it take to change a wheel? More than three evidently. ‘Don’t worry!’ they rallied. ‘We can fix this!’ They were quickly pushed aside by a local and we celebrated with a meal in a nearby Chinese café, where Zhenya’s Buryatian friends—a cousin, an ad exec, and a well-known opera singer—were waiting. There were no Russians inside—Ulan-Ude was quite the ethnic departure. Its population of 360,000 included Mongolians, Chinese labour migrants (Buryatia was close to the Chinese border), and twenty-one per cent Buryatians.
While waiting for our food, I decided to tell a perfectly relevant joke:
Me: Did you hear about the three Spanish firefighters?
Them: No.
Me: They were called Hose A, Hose B and Hose C.
Them: Oh.
Me: You know—like José! No?
Lost in translation. I distracted the table by switching focus on to Zhenya. The name ‘Zhenya’ was—like her peers’—a Russian name because they’d been born into the Soviet Union. Despite her strong Buryatian identity, Zhenya couldn’t speak Buryatian; her mother, also Buryatian, was a Russian literature and language teacher. But Zhenya knew enough to give me my Buryatian name, cecek—‘flower’. I felt like I almost belonged. Zhenya had recently returned to Ulan-Ude to look after her ill father, having been working in Moscow for three years at a Russian high-street fashion chain. ‘I miss Moscow,’ she said, her perfectly groomed brows knotting. Finding work in Ulan-Ude in the current climate was proving tough, and Ulan-Ude was not cosmopolitan, but, it seemed, the Buryatian sense of family duty took priority. I exhaled—I felt safe, and also excited. I could suspend my guard. That, as I would realise later, would prove dangerous.
‘NO!’ gasped Zhenya to the musketeers. ‘It’s not good luck to stick your fork in the bread.’
Sharing-plates of glass noodles, deep-fried pork and chubby knots of