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

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!”