Off the Beaten Tracks Read online

  Igor Savelyev was born in 1983 in Ufa (Bashkiria) where he still lives and works as a crime reporter for the local news agency. He has a degree in Philology from Ufa University. His short novel Pale City, based on his own hitchhiking experiences, was shortlisted for the Debut and Belkin prizes in 2004 and published in France. Critics have noted his “masterful, finely chiseled style based on brilliant counterpoints like a virtuoso music piece.” “Here realism is bordering on phantasmagoria, a striking sample of new-generation psychological prose.”

  Irina Bogatyreva, born in 1982, grew up on the Volga. She has seven novels to her name and has won several important literary prizes, including the prestigious Debut Prize for her novel Auto-Stop (Off the Beaten Track) which came out from a major publishing house in Russia. Bogatyreva spotlights the most topical issues of Russian life and enjoys both readers’ and critics’ acclaim.

  Tatiana Mazepina is the latest winner of the Debut Prize for a travelogue about her Eastern travels. She is a member of the Society of Free Travelers and works as a journalist writing on religious matters.

  “An unusually gifted generation is entering Russian literature. Literature has not seen such an influx of energy in a long time. This new generation – both the individual writers and the phenomenon as a whole – deserves great attention.” – Olga Slavnikova

  GLAS NEW RUSSIAN WRITING

  contemporary Russian literature

  in English translation

  Volume 52

  This is the third volume in the Glas subseries presenting young Russian authors, winners and finalists of the Debut Prize founded by the Pokolenie Foundation for humanitarian projects in 2000. Glas acknowledges its generous support in publishing this book.

  OFF THE BEATEN TRACK

  Stories by Russian Hitchhikers

  Igor Savelyev

  Irina Bogatyreva

  Tatiana Mazepina

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  Front cover photograph by Anastasia Perova

  Camera-ready copy: Tatiana Shaposhnikova

  ebook ISBN 978-5-7172-00104-9

  © Debut Prize 2012

  © Glas New Russian Writing 2012

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any

  manner without the written permission of the publisher.

  CONTENTS

  Igor Savelyev

  The Pale City

  Translated by Amanda Love Darragh

  Irina Bogatyreva

  Off the Beaten Track

  Translated by Arch Tait

  Tatiana Mazepina

  Traveling to Paradise

  Translated by Ainsley Morse & Mihaela Pacurar

  STORIES ABOUT HITCHHIKING

  Igor Savelyev

  THE PALE CITY

  1

  The same question must have tormented everyone who ever sat down with a blank piece of paper in front of them: where should I start? Logically, of course, it would make sense to start with a bit of history. But I’m no good with historical data and wouldn’t do a particularly good job of describing the city where I was born and used to live. To be honest, it’s probably just as well. You don’t need to know that this story happened specifically in Ufa, capital of Bashkiria. All you need to know is that it’s set in a moderately industrial city in the Urals, on the banks of the Volga, with a population of just over a million, five theatres and a state circus. How many museums? I can’t remember. See, I’d make a terrible historian.

  How would a proper historian describe the city today? He (or she) would probably start by waxing lyrical on the subject of the rivers, and how they “carry their abundant waters past the white stone walls”. Well, I’m going to start at the city limits, where a sign saying UFA lets you know you’re entering a built-up area. Please refrain from sounding your horn, driver – you’re not on the highway now.

  Incidentally, the sign is bilingual; Ufa in the Bashkir language is ‘Ephe’. Not the most attractive name for a city, I’m sure you’ll agree, but we’re used to it. And since we live in Ephe, are we modern-day Ephesians?

  There’s nothing between the sign and the police checkpoint, and this is typical of Ufa. Anyone who’s ever visited one of the other regional capitals in the Urals – Chelyabinsk or Ekaterinburg – will know what I mean. In both these cities there is a cemetery running alongside the road at this point, like a kind of tribute to city life: rows of white headstones, apparently made of breeze blocks… There’s nothing remotely depressing about these cemeteries. They’re like miniature replicas of the suburbs. Everything about these sprawling metropolitan churchyards seems to say, “Greetings and welcome, dear visitors!” It’s always amusing when the city authorities hang a banner bearing words to this effect on the fence separating the cemetery from the road, and you’re never quite sure whether you’re being welcomed to the city or the afterlife.

  At least the cemetery isn’t the first thing you see as you approach Ufa, and that has to be a good thing, right?

  So, what else can I tell you? There are basically two sides to the city. The first is the centre, where everything’s very charming and picturesque: cobbles, boutiques, shop windows, bright lights, and plenty of people strolling about. The main street is named after You Know Who. Sometimes when you notice the street signs you can’t help remembering that Vladimir Lenin chose his pseudonym in honour of the river Lena in Siberia, where he served his exile. Imagine the alternatives: Amurin, Irtyshin, Enisenin… He had plenty of rivers to choose from!

  To put it into context, the names of nearly all the streets in the centre of Ufa are connected in some way or other (most of them directly) to all that Marxist-Leninist nonsense. It’s the same in every ex-Soviet city. At least Ufa doesn’t have a street named after 1937, like they do in Saratov. The peak of the Great Purge. But seriously: Twentieth Anniversary of October Revolution Street, that’s what it’s called.

  Anyway, as I was saying, there are worse places to hang out than our city centre. You can buy ice cream here on every street corner, and on a hot summer’s day there’s nothing like it. You take your cone and the ice-cream seller hands you your change, which is also kept in the freezer for some reason. A few frozen coins. It’s nothing, really, but it’s a nice feeling.

  The rest of Ufa is industrial – home to the major Bashkir oil refineries (plus a dozen or so derivative petroleum factories) and whole districts of squalid, soot-covered Khrushchev-era apartment blocks, which are inhabited by blue-collar workers with bluish faces. It’s nothing to do with chemical poisoning – they just drink too much. That part of the city is where the famous rock singer Zemfira comes from, by the way. Zemfira: the leading exponent of Russian aggro-rock. When she launched her first album (like a missile), the cover was a photographic image of dilapidated factories and crooked chimneys in a haze of pearly-white chlorine cyanide smoke. Views just like this could be seen from anywhere in the centre of Ufa. The locals knew the best vantage points and were always happy to share them wi
th visitors, who would never fail to be impressed by this evidence of our connection to the world-famous rock star.

  This imposing industrial zone identifies our city as part of the Urals; you don’t get views like this in any of the other cities along the Volga. When I visited Samara I saw just one tall chimney on the city skyline. It really stood out. I found out later that it wasn’t actually a chimney at all but an enormous rocket-carrier, a monument to Sergei Korolev, a key figure in the Soviet space programme.

  To give you a better feel for the city, let’s take a walk around and eavesdrop on a few of the locals.

  An elderly spinster, looking up at a billboard…

  “That’s Sandra Bullock! A famous actress!” she exclaims before adding, profoundly, “I used to look just like her…”

  The local recreational park, early evening…

  Two friends are larking about, smoking grass, wandering around one of the glades and urinating wherever they feel like it. Already stoned, they’re squealing with high-pitched laughter. A middle-aged man carrying two bottles of wine hears the laughter coming from behind the bushes.

  “Would you like some company, ladies?” he calls out.

  “There aren’t any ladies here, old man!”

  A girl suffering from claustrophobia, her first time in a solarium… Before clambering into the sarcophagus she turns to the nurse and asks in a panic, “What’s your name? Just in case…”

  “Why do you want to know? I’m not usually on first-name terms with the clients. Weird… Well, since you ask, it’s Larisa, and I finish at half past five!”

  A conversation in a food shop…

  A drunk rushes over to the counter of the wines and spirits section.

  “Now for the most important purchase! I need a bottle of vodka. Just the one, but make it a good one, the kind you’d give to your son!”

  “I’d clout my son over the head with any vodka bottle!”

  The drunk is speechless…

  The next customer is a young man of about twenty who looks like he doesn’t give a damn. Prominent cheekbones, dirty shoulder-length hair, scruffy old clothes… that pretty much sums him up. Yes, this is where you get to know one of our main characters. Officially his name is Mikhail, but everyone calls him Squire. Everyone, that is, except his university professors and a couple of other clueless old fogies. Like his parents, for example.

  “A large can of Shikhan lager, please. Yeah, extra strength. Thanks…”

  His parents are out of the picture. They still live in Sibai, a small Bashkir town in the middle of nowhere – a typical provincial backwater.

  Squire arrived in Ufa four years ago to take up a place at the Aviation Institute. He started his course, and everything was fine, but he wasn’t really interested in studying… From the very first day he was blown away by the metropolis, charmed and smitten, once and for all. The city had it all! There were lots of places to hang out, like the ‘pipes’ – underground passages that had attained a kind of cult status. They were neglected and filthy, covered in Dutch tiles and full of soggy cardboard; he could spend hours in there, screwing up his eyes as he emerged into the unexpected sunlight. Nobody bothered him or interfered in his business. In fact, the only thing missing in Ufa was anyone who cared what he got up to, and that suited Squire down to the ground! A big city is never dominated by any one group – that’s the curse of provincial backwaters.

  Mikhail’s new friends regarded him indulgently. His naïve enthusiasm amused them, and initially they even took to calling him ‘The Squire from Sibai’ for comic effect. Absurd juxtaposition.

  Squire himself, meanwhile, grasped ‘city life’ with both hands – he couldn’t get enough of it! Buskers in the underground passages, taxis splashing through puddles inches from his stoned face…

  Ufa is full of people like Squire. They come from the provinces to take up a cherished student place, pooling their money to rent squalid shared apartments, and their lives are identical from one year to the next: endless drinking bouts, an ever-growing arsenal of empty bottles in the communal kitchen, absenteeism and the ongoing (and exhilarating) threat of expulsion. It’s all so familiar and predictable that I’m sure I don’t need to go into any more detail.

  To be fair, I should point out that Squire wasn’t one of those student layabouts who drink their futures away. Even students at prestigious universities can be lost from society and trust me, plenty of them are. No, Squire exercised moderation in everything. He was a notorious loner, someone who felt the lure of the road and the constant need for a change of scene. He spent several summers hitchhiking, travelling all over the country, and the apartment he sublet became one of Ufa’s legendary squats. These squats are basically informal doss-houses, where hitchhikers arriving in the city can spend a night or two for free. The addresses of these squats are circulated on scraps of paper and over the Internet, and visitors are always turning up unannounced. How many strangers have stopped at this apartment on their way through the city? Too many to count. A blur of casual acquaintances, faces, names, addresses scribbled hurriedly on the wallpaper…

  Squire left the food shop with a bag containing his large can of beer and a packet of dubiously grey pasta, the cheapest you could buy. Standard weekend supplies. “I’m going to end up with a beer belly at this rate. But who cares?” he thought, as he headed home.

  The sun was setting and the sky had already turned red, decorated with a panorama of clouds illuminated from below. Evening in Ufa: it was like the backdrop to a battle scene. The fact that it’s Ufa is irrelevant, really. It’s just another Russian metropolis. One of the few points on the map where two state highways intersect, in this case the M7 Volga and the M5 Ural.

  2

  “Hang on a minute, you said ‘we’… but who’s ‘we’?”

  “Me and my friend Nikita. We’re travelling together. We left St Petersburg three days ago.”

  “But there’s no one with you!”

  “No, you don’t understand. We’re hitchhiking separately… I mean, who’s going to stop and pick up a couple of guys? There aren’t many drivers who’d be mad enough to do that… But we’re travelling together. He probably hasn’t got much further than Bavlov.”

  “How do you know? Maybe he’s overtaken you. I’m not driving very fast…”

  “No way. You don’t know Nikita. He always takes forever.”

  “Hang on, how can he ‘always’ take forever? I don’t understand. You’re hitchhiking… Surely it’s down to luck?”

  “Yeah, you’re right. It’s weird, though, I can’t explain it… He looks perfectly normal, and even if he wasn’t drivers can’t tell from a distance. But for some reason Nikita’s always slower than me – there’s always a breakdown or something, he has to take loads of different cars… I don’t know what it is. It’s just something about him.”

  “He doesn’t wear glasses, does he? And carry a funny blue thing?”

  “His sleeping bag. Yes, that’s him. See, you didn’t pick him up, did you?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, I don’t know…”

  “You see?”

  This last was declared in a particularly triumphant tone of voice, as if to say, “There you go, you’ve just proved me right!”

  Even if the driver had wanted to he wouldn’t have managed to find room for a second passenger. It was a middle-of-the-road foreign car, a few years old but still reasonably presentable, and the boot was so full it was held shut by a piece of rope. The entire back seat was piled high with blankets, bags, a vacuum flask and so on. There was every indication that the car had a long road ahead of it. A long road behind it, too, judging by the state of the driver. The red eyes, the drooping eyelids… How many lives are lost on the road? I’m not talking about the little crosses and makeshift memorials you glimpse fleetingly at the side of the road, forgotten and covered with dust, banal in their familiarity. I mean the lives of the drivers who travel acros
s entire time zones without stopping to sleep or rest. Thousands and thousands of kilometres… Every evening when the sun flits sideways behind the trees, making it hard to see the road, these drivers ask themselves the same question: shall I grab a couple of hours’ sleep or just keep driving? Unfortunately, it’s often the latter. I wonder how many strokes and accidents the road has on its conscience.

  The driver was barefoot. Maybe it gave him a better feel for the car or something. The cold pedals were probably helping him stay awake. His feet were small and swollen. His destination was somewhere in the Far East. The hitchhiker in his passenger seat was heading for the Urals.

  “So what’s the big deal about Ekaterinburg?”

  “E-burg is great! We’ve got friends there. Well, some people we met over the Internet… They’ve invited us to stay. There’s a place there – a ‘dam’ they call it, like a kind of city square, where there’s going to be a huge get-together. We’re bound to meet some interesting people there. Have some fun.”

  “Do you travel round the country a lot like this?”

  “Yeah, I guess so. When I make it to E-burg I’ll have done nine thousand kilometres.”

  “Wow. You know, I envy you, son! If only I had your youth…”

  The hitchhiker’s name was Vadim. A lot of people think this isn’t a Russian name, that it’s a relatively recent foreign import, like Ruslan. I must admit I was quite surprised when I came across Vadim the Bold, one of the first Novgorodian princes and something of a hero back in the ninth century.

  Our Vadim was from St Petersburg, birthplace of three revolutions and cultural capital of Russia to this day. A city that is proud of its ornate railings. Incidentally, one particularly frosty winter when he was a little boy Vadim got his tongue stuck to the legendary railings in the Summer Garden. Not every schoolboy can boast of such a thing!

  Generally speaking, Vadim was a perfectly normal young man. Reasonably cheerful, reasonably nonchalant, reasonably unkempt… He’d failed one of his exams at St Petersburg University, but that didn’t stop him from setting off on his travels around the country. “It’ll all be sorted out in the autumn, anyway,” thought Vadim, pleasantly alarmed by his own composure. “Either I’ll retake it or they’ll kick me out, and that’s pretty unlikely over just one exam…” His parents didn’t need to know. They didn’t need to know about anything.