Off the Beaten Tracks Read online

  “My daughter’s about the same age as you,” said the driver, with a sideways glance. “Maybe a bit younger. If I thought for one minute…”

  He gave a lopsided grin. Vadim knew what he meant.

  “If you thought for one minute she was hitchhiking?”

  “Yeah. I’d kill her.”

  They fell silent. The car overtook a lorry. The driver concentrated on the road, manipulating the pedals with his bare feet. Then a dark blue sign swam past, telling them how far it was to various places. Vadim knew that the information given on road signs like this was unreliable at best, and sometimes completely arbitrary. This one said Ufa 72km, Chelyabinsk 489km.

  “I live with my daughter. It’s just the two of us.”

  This was followed by another silence. In situations like this, the hitchhiker doesn’t even have to respond. If they want to, they’ll tell you more. It’s a kind of unspoken rule that the driver is allowed to interrogate his passenger on the most personal subjects (and usually takes great pleasure in doing so), whereas the hitchhiker has no right whatsoever to poke his nose into the driver’s business. Does that sound a bit unfair? Well, they’re doing you a favour by giving you a lift, at the end of the day. It’s their prerogative.

  “Her mother was a whore. We split up six years ago.”

  Vadim immediately adopted his most understanding and sympathetic expression, whilst simultaneously thinking to himself, “Nice one! He’s a talker. At least he won’t hassle me.”

  “We were classmates. I studied history at college. Gave it all up later, though… Anyway, they sent a group of students to work on a collective farm, and that’s where it all started. I bet they don’t send you to collective farms any more, do they?”

  “Of course not! Some friends of mine at teacher training college had to go, though.”

  “We went out together for about three months. Her parents were against it, and so were mine. Her mother was a real bitch. She had gold teeth and everything! She didn’t even come to the registry office, can you imagine that? But we had a party for everyone in our course… A real Komsomol wedding, it was. You know what I mean?”

  “I can imagine. With vodka in the teapots?”

  “Exactly! That sort of thing. Then we got a flat, had a baby… Then the arguments started, the bickering and the rows… Maybe it was that old cliché, just a ‘clash of personalities’… Probably. You know what annoyed her most of all, what used to really wind her up? This’ll make you laugh… Me not putting the lids back on.”

  “What?”

  “Seriously! I was always forgetting to put the lids on shampoo bottles and toothpaste tubes after I’d finished using them. Same with the shaving cream. It used to drive her absolutely insane!”

  “That’s a bit…”

  “Then she started going out with other men, drinking too. ‘You carry on, sweetheart,’ I said to her. ‘As long as you’re having a good time, eh?’ Eventually we split up. And do you know what sums it up? Marinka was only little, and when I asked her who she wanted to live with she chose me. Can you imagine that? What kind of… How bad does it have to be for your own daughter to…”

  They were silent.

  “While we’re on the subject, Vadim, let me give you a word of advice. Whatever you do, don’t rush into marriage. You’re a young lad, your hormones are all over the place… You’re bound to fall in love sooner or later. Fair enough. But whatever happens, don’t let her drag you to the registry office! It’ll only end in tears. Student relationships always do!”

  “I wasn’t planning on getting married just yet.”

  “And if you do get married, don’t get her pregnant. Otherwise it’ll be a disaster. Make sure you tell her right from the start that you want to live together for three years, without any children. And don’t give in, even if she cries or tries to persuade you!” The driver paused for a moment before saying, “You must have a girlfriend. Do you?”

  “No!”

  Vadim always answered this question, which came up quite a lot, with a look of casual indifference and a stupid half-smile. As if to say, “So what if I don’t? What’s the big deal anyway?”

  The driver turned to look at him.

  “Why not? What’s the matter with you? How old are you, anyway?”

  “Here we go,” thought Vadim. He began to change his opinion of the driver. His face continued to bear an expression of calculated nonchalance, though it was now mixed with a kind of helplessness. No one likes to be thought of as past it. He couldn’t bear the thought of justifying himself or entering into a complicated explanation.

  “Let’s just say that I just haven’t found the right person yet.”

  This cliché and the pause that preceded it indicated that the subject was closed. The driver got the message and turned his attention back to the road. He threw a quick glance at Vadim.

  “You’re taking the whole business very seriously, aren’t you?”

  The way he pronounced it, ‘the whole business’ was loaded with innuendo.

  You might be wondering whether Vadim had ever been in love… Oh, he had – head over heels! She was in his class, a languid girl with beautiful eyelashes and curly hair. And as for stupid romantic gestures… At 5.00 a.m. one morning when his chosen one, along with the rest of the city, was still asleep, he took a can of paint to the courtyard of her building and stood beneath her window with the intention of leaving her a message on the tarmac: “Good morning, my love!” – the eternal greeting of all would-be Romeos.

  The outcome was so comic and humiliating that he preferred not to think about it any more. There was no happy ending to this particular love story. Vadim was caught in the act by the yardkeeper, and this is how it happened…

  The sun was already up but the city was still empty, full of echoes. Vadim felt as though he were in some kind of parallel universe. It was a revelation, being out in the city this early in the morning, and subsequently he would make a point of getting up at first light, just to go for a walk. But on this particular day he was on a mission. He sneaked into the courtyard and marked his message out on the tarmac with chalk. Just as he started going over the enormous letters with paint, the yardkeeper turned up! No one could have predicted that he would start work so early. He was a big strong man with bad teeth, a hereditary alcoholic, and, more importantly, he didn’t have a romantic bone in his body. Vadim could still remember the sound of the yardkeeper’s voice as he yelled at him, and his own swift departure! He didn’t see the yardkeeper attacking his handiwork with a stiff broom. The letters “Good m…” hadn’t even had the chance to dry.

  As he mooched about that morning the thwarted young Romeo decided to drown his sorrows, but even that mission was doomed to fail: at 6.00 a.m. the 24-hour bars and kiosks were decidedly shut. Fate was not smiling on him. He could remember how the streets had been illuminated by the slanting rays of the rising sun… God, how many years had passed since then!

  The car approached the city. Interspersed among the heavily laden long-distance lorries were an increasing number of suburban Moskvich and Zhiguli cars, full to bursting with family members, with the occasional rusty old barrel strapped to the roof. Why on earth did anyone need a barrel like that in the city? Or in the suburbs, for that matter? Ufa’s industrial landscape was painted crimson by the setting sun and crowned with smoke from the factory chimneys.

  “You’re a good lad,” said the driver, giving Vadim an appraising look. “Shall I just drive you straight to Chelyabinsk? It makes no difference to me where I spend the night. I can manage another five hours, and I can just set off a bit later tomorrow. What do you say, eh? Shall we just keep going?”

  “Thanks, I really appreciate it, but you should get some rest. I’ll be fine here – I’ve got the address of a good squat. And anyway my friend Nikita will never catch me up if I carry on to Chelyabinsk! So, thanks but no thanks… Are you stopping at the police checkpoint? You can drop me there.”

  3

  The
last lorry drove past, rumbling with the sound of disappointed hope. There’s something unpleasantly predictable about heavy-goods vehicles when you’re standing by the side of the road. They make such a noise when they rush past that even seasoned hitchhikers experience a moment of panic – will it squash me like a fly?

  The last lorry drove past and then the road was empty, apart from a few cars in the distance. Nastya lowered her arm. It was a long time since she’d been stuck like this in the middle of nowhere! Bloody lorries. Mind you, the cars weren’t exactly falling over themselves to pick her up either.

  Everything was quiet. You tend to be more acutely aware of silence out on the road, maybe because it occurs so rarely. “Oh, well!” smiled Nastya, resolving to take a philosophical approach to her misfortune. Walking away from the road, towards the grass, she squatted down near her rucksack and dug out a lighter and a packet of cheap cigarettes. She took a drag on her cigarette and looked around. The silence was serene and interminable.

  A little further away from the road was the edge of a forest of gnarled pine trees, but there were probably other species mixed in with them too. The fringes of the forest had been littered with old tyres and empty canisters, poisoned by petrol fumes and polluted by the urine of countless travellers. Strange as it seems, these roadside forests are quite wild – hardly anyone ever goes further than two metres into them. There may even have been mushrooms growing in the impenetrable heart of this forest, unseen and undisturbed. Amongst the rubbish was another regular feature of the highway: a flattened corpse, kicked to the side of the road. The body of a dog.

  Nastya was used to it by now, but the first time it was always an unpleasant discovery for a novice hitchhiker. She could remember being dropped off about 70km from her home town of Tyumen, about two years ago, and the first thing she’d seen was a squashed cat. Poor thing, it obviously hadn’t realised what had hit it. Quite literally. The cat hadn’t been merely knocked down but completely run over, and its flattened insides lay neatly to one side. It was horrific. It had taken Nastya half an hour to compose herself sufficiently to be able to hitch another lift. She still cried over things like that back then.

  On the other side of the highway stood a couple of ramshackle wagons, crumpled and repainted to within an inch of their lives. A roadside café. There are plenty of these throughout the Urals, all more or less identical. Smoke curled above the metal trough that was being used as a makeshift grill for shashlik, and a couple of KamAZ trucks were parked to one side. Silence and serenity reigned here too.

  Does it seem strange that nobody would stop to pick up a young girl? Sometimes that’s just the way it goes, albeit not very often… The thing is that female hitchhikers don’t tend to have an overtly feminine appearance. This is a deliberate tactic, employed for various reasons – for example, it helps to avoid attracting any unwelcome advances and is also a way of distinguishing oneself from the roadside prostitutes. Practical considerations also come into it: travelling clothes need to be comfortable and functional, and that’s all that matters. Nastya was wearing heavy boots, jeans and a lightweight yellow waterproof jacket. She wore her hair cropped short, so she didn’t need to bother tying it back. It was just easier that way. She wasn’t wearing any make-up, but that wasn’t just because she was on the road – Nastya never wore make-up in town either. She couldn’t care less what other people thought. As long as she was comfortable, that was the main thing.

  She stood on the roadside verge, smoking and thinking. She looked up at the sky and thought… about what? She spat and threw her cigarette butt to the ground. A heavily laden car approached and Nastya raised her arm, but she’d already given up hope. She’d resigned herself to going back to the shashlik café – it obviously wasn’t her night.

  It was nice out here in the woods, though. The air was fresh, and somewhere out there in the distance, beyond Ufa, beyond Dyurtyuli, were the steppes. The endless, open steppes…

  In the quarter of an hour that she’d spent standing by the side of the highway, nothing had changed in the café. The same faces sat at the same tables. The girl behind the counter was obviously a local. She can’t have been more than about sixteen years old, but already her eyes betrayed a terminal boredom. The wheezing old speakers were playing the kind of song that was always popular on the road – ‘driving music’, they called it, but the lyrics were composed of prison slang! Why did they always sing in prison slang? These people at the tables, the long-distance drivers, had they all been inside or something? You can learn a lot about the Russian penitentiary system simply by travelling across the country.

  The table furthest from the door was occupied by the owner of the establishment. He was middle aged but powerfully built and had an imposing presence, like all elderly natives of the Caucasus. He sat there leafing through some paperwork, effortlessly in charge.

  “So you’re back, are you? I knew you would be!” he said, his accent faint but perceptible. “You’re not going anywhere tonight. Sit down! I’ll bring you something to eat.”

  Nastya sat down, put her rucksack on the floor and stuck her elbows to the oilcloth table covering, which featured a pattern of cute little cartoon drawings. That was one of the distinguishing features of all these roadside cafés, the incongruous little traces of domesticity that managed to tug at your heartstrings when you were least expecting it.

  What else? Walls made of plywood, indefatigable speakers positioned up near the ceiling… A few solemn and burly long-distance drivers at the little tables, eating their dinner. Refuelling on instant coffee.

  The owner returned from the kitchen carrying a plate with steam rising from a double portion of shashlik. He placed it in front of Nastya. He was revelling in his Caucasian hospitality, she just knew it. Plying this hungry girl from the highway with hot food, watching her devour it ravenously – that was obviously how he got his kicks. Or maybe she was just in a bad mood because she was so tired.

  “Thank you.”

  “So come on, then. Where are you from?”

  Conversations like this are the hitchhiker’s cross to bear.

  “My name’s Nastya,” she began, with a little sigh. “I’m travelling from Tyumen to Moscow. I’ve been on the road for two days already, but it’s my own fault it’s taking me so long. I overslept yesterday, and what with one thing and another by the time I’d got my things together and got out onto the road… Basically I only made it as far as Ekaterinburg on the first day. So today I’ve been trying to make up for lost time. Tomorrow I’ll take the M7 out of Ufa. That’ll be the quickest way.”

  “Why do you want to go to Moscow?”

  “Why not?”

  “Have you got friends there, or family?”

  “No. I just felt like it. I haven’t been to Moscow since I was a kid. I’ll find some friends when I get there. I’ve got a few addresses written down…”

  “So, basically it’s just some stupid idea you’ve got in your head.”

  “You might think it’s a stupid idea. I don’t.”

  Nastya spoke quite sharply, letting him know that the subject was closed. Just because she was eating his shashlik, that didn’t given him the right to start lecturing her!

  “Aren’t you worried about travelling alone? It’s so dangerous out there. A young girl like you…”

  “I know it’s dangerous, but that doesn’t bother me. I can’t explain it.”

  “What about your parents?”

  “What about them? We don’t talk much. They know that I travel all over the place. They say I’ve got ‘itchy feet’. There’s nothing they can do about it!”

  “What does your boyfriend have to say about it?”

  “I haven’t got a boyfriend. Not since May. I’m young, free and single!”

  Nastya said this with such a desperate, angry smile that even the café owner knew to leave this subject alone.

  He started bustling about, then went back behind the counter and flicked a switch. The café lights came on. H
e seemed to have complete dominion over this modest empire; he was in charge of everything, down to the humblest light-bulb.

  “You’re not going anywhere tonight. It’s already dark.”

  “But it’s not that late…”

  “You are not going to spend the night on the road! I won’t allow it. I’ll get someone to make you up a bed in the box-room.”

  “But I…”

  “You’re spending the night here, and that’s the end of it.”

  Nastya wiped the last traces of the shashlik from her mouth with the back of her hand and smirked. Wow! She hadn’t expected such steely insistence from the café owner. Of course, she could have predicted that things would take a similar turn…

  “Thank you.”

  The café owner got up from the table and went off into the kitchen, presumably to bark a few orders. Meanwhile one of the long-distance drivers stood up and walked towards the exit. Refreshed and refuelled, he was ready to continue his journey. Nastya stood up as well.

  “Are you going to Ufa?”

  The long-distance driver nodded. Excellent! She pushed her plate back, picked up her rucksack and followed him. Ciao, little roadside shack! Nice knowing you. Nastya left without a backwards glance, grateful that she’d managed to extricate herself from yet another predicament.

  What next? The dark cabin of a KamAZ truck. For some reason it really seemed to feel the bumps in the road. At first the cabin would rock and sway, then the trailer would rumble behind them. The driver let her smoke and, tired and silent, they both took long drags on their cigarettes – two glowing red dots in the darkness. The blind headlights reached into the night, feeling for the tarmac and the uneven verge.