Igor Savelyev: Off the Beaten Tracks: Stories by Russian Hitchhikers

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.

“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 across 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.

“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.