CAR KAPUT
INSTEAD OF HEADING to the idyllic lake we set off in the other direction, to Chemal in the north. Friends of Nadya have booked a two-day horse riding tour there and invited us along. We bump along a dusty dirt road through the steppes with round rolls of hay and indifferent cows. People here joke that if you drive along the roads here with a bag of milk in the trunk, after half an hour you’ll have cream, and I now know what they mean.
“Will you visit me in prison, if I happen to get caught without a permit?” I ask as we pass a sign reading Border Control.
“Every day,” says Nadya.
We’re in luck: the post is deserted; it’s already dark. After a good three hours on the mogul-road we rejoin the highway. Baby-bum-smooth asphalt from now on; we glide instead of driving. It’s a car commercial come to life. And, of course, Nadya really steps on the gas.
We both see the sharp-edged, fist-sized stone too late. Polya jolts right over it. There’s swearing in Russian, German, and English, jamming of brakes, and we stop on the gravel shoulder.
We take stock: It’s just before 11:00 PM. The right front tire looks bad—it’s pretty flat. The back tire sounds bad—it’s leaking air. Fifteen minutes later, it’s breathed its last breath. The ratio of available spare tires to the number of flat ones is 1:2.
In such situations, it’s extremely unwelcome to read “No Network” on your cell phone display. We look on Nadya’s navi for the nearest roadside assistance services. It answers that help is at hand sixteen hundred miles away, in Ulyanovsk, on the Volga; the trip will take forty-two hours. I’ve lost confidence in the thing after it tried to send us to our doom in the mountains, so I suggest a little walk in the hope of gaining access to the internet from a higher point.
Next to the road somewhere, we hear the splashing of water; because of the lack of light pollution, the night sky is so grandiose that it’s almost an affront. “We’ve got enough gas to leave the car running all night for the heater,” says Nadya.
“We’ve got half a roll of salami to eat,” I add. Today we are a man/woman skit: she wants warmth, he wants food.
Five hundred yards further on I actually have one bar of reception. Et voilà: according to Maps.me it is only eighty-odd miles to the nearest towing services, in Gorno-Altaysk. That sounds better. Nadya calls to order a tow truck. We climb back into the car, put on warm clothes, eat salami, and listen to Queen at nightclub volume. Every five minutes the headlights of cars and trucks breeze by.
And sometime an eternity later, a pair of headlights slow down and a UAZ Ranger recovery vehicle pulls up next to us. Two men in dark track pants and light-colored sneakers get out and introduce themselves as Danil and Ararat. “From Germany? You’re not used to such roads, eh?” Danil says, and laughs. He looks to be in his mid-forties and his assistant seems about half his age. From their erratic movements as they apply the crowbar to the wheel rims, I realize that Nadya’s call must have reached them in the middle of a pleasant bout of drinking.
“Are you man and wife? Aren’t Russian men good enough?” Danil asks Nadya. There’s a distinctive smell of alcohol on his breath.
Soon a massive crane slowly hoists up our poor Polya. It sways back and forth so violently that we have to grab the bumpers to stop it from colliding with the truck’s windows. Then we sit four in a row in the driver’s cabin, although there’s only space for three. Danil calls his wife. “Sorry, I’m going to be late. Please don’t lock the door. We’ve got a German with a kaput car.” He says it as if it’s the craziest thing in the world.
The crane’s hook swings around in front of the windshield; Arabic belly-dancing music blares out of Ararat’s cell phone. Suddenly the road surface is strewn with millions of moths, which continues for several miles; it’s like a scene from a horror movie. They make absolutely no effort to escape from oncoming traffic. “Because of them we had two springs this year,” says Danil. “They completely wiped out the first leaves, then everything had to grow again.”
He stops at a gas station and forgets to pull the hand brake. As he opens the gas cap, the vehicle begins to roll slowly, directly toward a kiosk. With a scream, he runs to the door, jumps in—banging his head in the process—and grabs the brake. Raucous laughter. “That wouldn’t happen in Germany, eh?” he says.
After about a hundred-mile drive we pull up at a small roadside workshop. On the sign outside: Shinomontazh—tire “montage,” or mounting. Words borrowed from French have a special scharm in Russia: before a massazh you can dab on some Letual odekolon (L’étoile eau de cologne) that you packed in your bagazh.
Less charming is what Danil is now doing to our car. He is hammering away at one of the wheel rims, as if he had to first kill it before reusing it. A bit of odekolon would do the garage no harm, as it stinks of glue and paint. We are seated on two threadbare armchairs right next to the place where freshly sprayed cars are brought to dry. Danil brings us two pinecones as our evening meal. A genuine gourmet snack can be found beneath the scales: the pine nuts of the Siberian pine.
Eventually it turns out to be a good night. Danil manages to whip the wheels into shape, Ararat gazes off into space, and Nadya and I nibble away at the nuts. Shortly after 3:00 AM, Polya is up and running again and we can move on. However, with the spare tires, we have a speed cap of maximum fifty miles per hour.
An hour later Danil calls up to ask if all is well. Good guy. Or does he know something about the repairs that we don’t? It doesn’t matter; those two guys burned the midnight oil for us instead of putting us off until the next day, and you have to appreciate that. Shortly before sunrise we reach Chemal.
Truth No. 13:
Russia’s service sector is better than its reputation.
When 105 horsepower causes so many problems, maybe you should downsize to one. The next morning, after visiting the local Shinomontazh (one of the tires was flat again), we drive the forty miles to Edigan, a village with two hundred inhabitants. There was a slight misunderstanding at the planning stage, which is why we’re half an hour late. “Be on the lookout for a white Range Rover and a couple of very angry people sitting on horses,” Nadya instructs me as we near the meeting point.
I soon spot the Range Rover, but not the angry people. Alexander and Galina enthusiastically greet Nadya; they haven’t seen each other for years. The rest of the group consists of Juliya, nine, Galina’s daughter; Yevgeni and Natalya, a couple both over fifty; and Alexey, a twenty-six-year-old IT expert and keen hunter. Our guide is Nikita, who is eighteen. The top half of him, with his baseball cap, sunglasses, and hoodie, looks like Eminem; the bottom half, thanks to his thigh-high waders, like a fly-fisherman. We lash waterproof bags to the saddles and set off.
In general, handling horses is not that complex. Brrr means “whoa,” noo means “get going,” digging your heels into the flanks means “giddyap,” and you use the reins to steer. At least that’s what Nikita shows the beginners. Pros can control the direction by shifting their weight.
In the run-up to the trip I imagined us like Genghis Khan and the Golden Horde galloping across the steppes. But initially it’s more like Cowboy Eminem and the Six Sacks of Flour. Beneath us, seven pointedly indifferent horses trot along a forest path in single file.