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

The tall dark-green grass ripples by the roadside, playing with the warm southern breeze. Where will I spend the night? The cars don’t notice me in the darkness and if they do see me they are just surprised. Aswan is a tourist city and the drivers probably think that I need an expensive comfortable tour bus.

All the same, an old car slows down. There’s a whole family inside: mama, papa, a fourteen-year-old daughter and nine-year-old little boy. The women don’t have headscarves, so they must be Christians. I wonder which kind they are this time. The girl speaks English, putting together the words memorized for dictation with difficulty.

“You’re Christians?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“Orthodox or Catholic?”

They have a hard time answering, searching for the right words.

“Protestants?” I guess.

“Yes,” answers the girl.

So now I have met with representatives of all three main Christian confessions. I give my usual answer to the question of where I will spend the night: “In my tent.” The father falls into obviously perplexed thought. Finally, they decide to take me to their village church, where the elder will most likely allow me to spend the night.

“You see,” the head of the family explains, “we’re forbidden to invite foreigners into our homes.”

“Of course, of course,” I reassure him.

It’s clear that his perplexity continues. From the back seat, where I’m sitting next to the boy and girl, I can see the mother’s concentrated profile fixed on the father. He probably feels this profile too even if he can’t see it. The mother says something gently to the father and he turns towards me.

“But we’d still like to invite you to our house if you don’t mind, of course.”

“I’d be delighted!”

No perplexity remains, the tense atmosphere disappears. The mother, son and daughter all start talking at once, laughing. The father happily speeds up.

“What do you usually eat for supper?” At the house, the girl translates her father’s question.

“Whatever there is.”

In the middle of the living room, at a big table covered with a white tablecloth is a large platter of hamburgers (god knows where they came from!) We fold our hands and pray. The father thanks the Lord for having brought me to their home and asks that He show them the important message they are meant to convey to me.

The next morning, when I’m already leaving, the father hands me a slightly worn book with a colorful cover.

“This is the New Testament in English,” the girl explains.

“I’ve been dreaming of having a copy.”

I’d given away my own copy a few days ago to that Orthodox woman in Luxor, the one who took me in and treated me to sweet sugarcane at the campfire.

The road from southern Egypt to Cairo seems to run alongside one long endless village. For this reason every time I get out of a car I find myself in the thick of Egyptian life.

“Hello! How are you?” Little boys yell to me from their village cart hitched to a donkey.

“Where you go?” A group of young men walk up to me in business-like fashion.

Often someone invites me over for a cup of tea, worries that I’m hungry. They exchange e-mail addresses with me and promise to write.

The police keep refusing to let me on my way, consult with each other for a long time before finally cranking up their dark-blue clunker: it has two seats up front for the driver and one more person, then a little truck-bed behind with no doors and wooden benches. Despite their insistence, I throw my backpack in the back. My attendants sit down next to me. I pick up a stick of sugarcane from the floor and start awkwardly peeling it with my teeth. One of the policemen takes it from me and in a few seconds hands back a white piece all prepared. I gulp down the sweet juice looking back at the palms bordering the grey road behind us. Or the road ahead?

Conclusion

It’s ten minutes walk from my friends’ place in Tahrir to the airport-bound bus. What a shame it’s so short. I get the crazy idea of shaking the hand of every Egyptian in the city. But you can’t shake hands with all eighteen million.

They’re about to announce the flight. I understand that it’s almost impossible to leave. Can you really leave paradise so easily? Can you say: “Thanks for everything but it’s time for me to go… I have stuff to do at home.”

Of course I have stuff to do. Important and necessary stuff. But how can you leave paradise? A place where you are surrounded with tender care twenty-four hours a day. Where it’s impossible to feel lonely for even a second. Where people give you gift after gift with selfless and sincere warmth and goodness. Where the sky does not abandon you in daytime, shining with clear blueness, or night, showering you with sparkling gems whose weight you can sense even if you can’t touch them.

Where does this all come from? What did I do to deserve this?

When I left home exactly one month ago, and set off into the world, I left more than just my familiar comfortable home, my warm bed and regular meals, I also left the ubiquitous striving to plan, calculate and organize everything in my life the way I think it should be, the way I think would be best. But nothing at home had ever worked out the way it had during this month on the road. Why?

Here on the road, I stood in the dark on a path made through the snow in the outskirts of Erzurum, or near the rustling reeds of Aswan, bearing eloquent evidence of the roadside swamp, and I didn’t know where I would spend the night, whether there would be any supper after a whole day of active movement; whether I would be safe. I didn’t and could not know. I couldn’t organize or plan anything. As a last resort, I would turn round to ask. And He Whom I asked would delightedly extend hands filled with gifts to me — hands He Himself was tired of holding back. These hands are always extended, and I turn to them so rarely. And no wonder because I’m not used to being in paradise.

I’d travelled so much before. I’d accepted these gifts so many times before. But never before had they been so generous. Why?

Well, because they aren’t going to just fall on your head from the sky. They need hands into which He places them. Here, in these countries I’d gone through, I could see for myself how open palms were raised five times a day in order to accept and fulfill His will. You know this will when you give yourself entirely into His hands.

But it’s time for me to finish my story.

March — November 2009

Translated by Ainsley Morse & Mihaela Pacurar

All the three authors are winners of the prestigious Debut Prize for young writers.

Igor Savelyevwas 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.