I’m going to let you into a little secret. Vadim never turned down the chance to go last, and not simply out of comradeship. He had come to look forward to the overwhelming sense of melancholy that envelops you when the door slams, your friend drives off and you suddenly realise that you’re alone on the bleak and endless highway. The realisation is always sudden and strong enough to take your breath away. The sense of solitude is striking, almost palpable, and infinitely more intense than the loneliness you feel in the city.
Maybe this is what it all came down to. Maybe this feeling — this vivid, exhilarating feeling — was the reason Vadim liked hitchhiking so much.
Many words and expressions used by Russian hitchhikers have been borrowed from English, but the roads, the solitude and the melancholy are quintessentially Russian.
Translated by Amanda Love Darragh
Irina Bogatyreva
OFF THE BEATEN TRACK
We are footloose and fancy-free wayfarers on roads without end, friends of long-distance truckers and drivers, their amulets, talismans, their guardian angels. Even the cops leave us alone. They know us for who we are and where we are going. We may not know that ourselves, may laugh and gesture into the sun, but the cops know. They swear, shrug, hand back our ID, and send us on our way. There is no stopping us, but why that should be they don’t know.
We are legion, dots scattered along the road, romantic followers of our guru Jack Kerouac, members of the same mendicant order, and the motto on our crest could read, In via veritas or, more simply, “The Road Is Always Right”. Our destinations differ and the routes we take, but we are as one in our sense that only here, on the road, are we truly free.
We are twenty years old, give or take, do not yet have a past, do not look to the future, and in the present have only the road ahead, the asphalt, and the jubilant knowledge that everybody else has lost track of us.
We set out only recently. Soon we’ll be everywhere. We are on a high and embrace our road, anticipating its gifts, not knowing where it will lead us.
And you, capricious road, now smiling, now incensed, how are we to detect the moment when your mood changes? You are life, and destiny, the unique instance of all possible combinations. Right here, right now, with this person, and we know no alternative.
Africa / (Rastafari)
We get out and set off along the soft verge of the Moscow outer ring road at pedestrian speed. The nearest turning for the city is three kilometres away, and it would be good to know the area, friend, the area we are in now. It is good to know where you are, and especially like now at night, in the rain, walking along the verge of the ring road, the verge of the whole of Moscow.
The rain sheets down and we feel underwater, walking on the seabed. The ring road hurtles past, headlights probing the darkness, teeth clenched against the speed, and all it can see is night and rain and red lights. Water shatters against blunt windscreens, foams beneath wheels leaving white silhouettes on the asphalt. A car passes and the silhouette holds for a moment before white foam drains to the verge and us.
“Tolya, the speed limit here is a hundred kilometres an hour. Do you hear? They simply can’t see you!” I have turned to look back and shout into the darkness. The silhouette of Tolya, pissed as a newt, is shimmering back there behind the wall of rain, his arm outstretched to thumb a lift. “Forget it! Come on!” I urge again.
We are tree stumps, milestones on this godforsaken highway, our speed is nothing compared to theirs. They can’t see us, friend, can’t see these three wet stumps with rucksacks. We have nothing even to reflect their light, and still have so far to go before we will be home.
“What’s the hurry, you bastards?” Tolya’s drunken larynx shreds the night air. “Stop, you maniacs!” Night is shredded into shriek. I glance at Roma. He is cool, plodding along with just the hint of a smile, his lips repeating his song. “Titch, just mind he doesn’t fall over,” he counsels.
Titch is me. It’s what they call me, not on account of my height or size but just because I’m younger than the rest of them. I turn to look at Tolya. He seems to be walking okay, lurching, of course, staring at the ground, his rucksack not straight, but at least he’s walking, laughing about something, even apparently talking to someone.
The night rushes by, the ring road rushes by, with us as its milestones. Something clicks in me, as sometimes happens, and suddenly I am seeing everything at once, not from inside myself but from above, as if from a bridge or a cloud: three figures walking: Titch (me), Roma Jah, and Tolya, artist and poet, but right now just a straggling drunken pal. The ring road is a Ferris wheel illuminated by coloured lights. The cold is making a thousand and one bunches of hair stand on end on Titch’s (my) head. Leftover brown greasepaint is streaking Tolya’s shaven head making him look like specialforces out on a jungle mission. Roma, our ginger-dreadlocked Roma Jah, is now so wet and thin, so cool and pitiable, that he looks like Jesus Christ. A Rastaman Jesus with scrawny dreads sticking to his face, he bears his rucksack full of tom-toms, and the smell of ganja hangs in the wet air behind him. Roma always smells of ganja. That’s why he is called Roma Jah.
“Are you coming?” I turn round to yell at Tolya, but collide with him and his smell, a smell of cadged rum and expensive brandy recently downed. You are truly bladdered, friend, and now not even the cold May rain can clear your brain.
“No need to shout,” Tolya says quietly. Even in the midst of all that noise and water you can speak quietly and be heard if you are nose to nose. “Move on!”
He takes a step in my direction and I jump back and move along. I hear him shouting, “Roma! Hey, Roma! Did that song even have an ending? You know, the one we were thumping out for the last hour back there?” Roma smiles and plods on. “Come on, Roma, say something, will you? How did it go? ‘Rastafari…’? Roma!” Tolya tries to remember the words and gets them wrong, bawling away behind our rucksacks.
“Will they get wet?” I ask Roma, nodding at our packs. All the African drums we have are in there: a djembe, tom-toms, a large kpanlogo. They have thick mahogany bodies and white leather drumheads and look like casks, wooden stools or the tables of an outdoor café. They smell of Africa and ganja. Actually, no. It’s Roma smells of ganja and the drums just belong to him.
I wonder whether they have downpours like this in Africa for drums to get exposed to. Roma smiles, says nothing, mouthes his endless Rastaman song, his endless Rastaman mantra. Jah will give us everything, eh, Roma?
I love his songs and his drums. Roma is always very, very cool. Even when he’s stoned he is cool and a bit pensive, with no giggling or antics. He’s a real, meditative Rastaman whose constant ganja meditation has taught him the truth of the greatest insight of Rasta: Jah will give us everything. I like him for that.
The drums appeared at the beginning of winter. Our commune is a vast, Stalin-era apartment on Yakimanka near the centre of Moscow, with endless corridors and ceilings, which anyone can rent. How many people live there only Roma knows, because he is the landlord. He sublets it and lives in it, in our room; more precisely, of course, in his room, but besides him there are four other people there, including me. I sleep in the gallery. In that kind of apartment the gallery is like an intermediate floor and I like it there.