“Sleeping during a lift is STRICTLY PROHIBITED”?
I decided to be stoical. The driver glanced sideways at me and asked why I wasn’t sleeping. I stared glassily into the darkness, nodded and smiled, as if to say everything’s just fine. I could see he hadn’t read Krotov either.
As dawn broke and all around was damp and misty, the massive bulk of the Lenin Hydroelectric Dam in Kuibyshev loomed up around us, a statement comparable to the pyramids, ziggurats or other monuments of long forgotten civilisations. Paying proper respect to a bygone age, the driver dropped his speed, crossed the Volga, then put his foot down and we were off again. He soon stopped at a junction, we jumped out, and our kindly Gazelle drove off into the city.
It was damp and misty and the long-distance truck drivers who had parked for the night at the roadside café were waking up and setting off in their mammoth vehicles. A flock of gleaming black rooks were circling the road, landing on the asphalt and not flying away. One rook was prostrate near the parking lot and the others were strutting over and trying to get him to fly with the rest of them. He struggled but couldn’t take off. Vehicles were driving by very close, so close their gigantic wheels could have snagged his beak but there was not so much as a glint of fear now in the stunned bird’s eyes. We stood watching, I in horror, not daring to approach, and Grand grimly.
The long-distance truckers departed, neither taking us with them nor touching the bird, until Grand said, “This is clearly a sign, only what does it mean?” He took a sheet of plywood and moved the rook back to the kerb. It opened its beak, moved its feet, tried to prop itself up on its wings, but couldn’t fly. Its black relatives circled, cawing, and in each of them I seemed to see the spectre of my Cara. When we moved away the birds again flew to the injured bird, trying to get him to fly. “A curious sign,” Grand repeated.
A sleepy family in a Lada-6 gave us a lift as far as Samara. We bought yogurt and went down to the beach, to the Volga. The sun had already dispersed the mist, but there was nobody there. I went into the water, and the river remembered and welcomed me. “Hello, sister…”
Afterwards I lay on the sand and fell asleep. The sun rose higher, became hotter, but I carried on sleeping, listening to the lapping of the Volga, to the sounds from the town above, to the motorboats, and Grand snorting like a horse after his swim. He came out and lay down beside me and he too fell asleep.
Grand is footloose and fancy-free. Fancy-free and weird. I know nothing about him. Tell me, sister, what kind of man has the road given me as my companion?
“Grand, tell me where we’re going.” “To where the sun rises.”
Having once picked us up, the road carried us on steadily and swiftly. In Samara I woke up on the sunlit beach horrified, thinking we were late, but Grand said you can never be late for your next lift, the one and only lift destined for you. The simplicity of that wisdom impressed me. I believed him and before long we met up with a Gazelle loaded with cherries.
The driver was an Armenian heading to Oktyabrsk, near Ufa in Bashkiria The whole way Grand chatted to him about the price of fruit and vegetables, the best way to buy them and sell them before they went off. Loud music was being played and I could hardly hear them. I ate cherries and threw the stones out the window.
He dropped us off and before we had time to see the roadside a Lada Samara hatchback stopped and took us on to Ufa. The driver was a young guy who laughed at the jokes on the radio and talked to Grand about the price of petrol. Bashkiria, green, bright green and expansive, clean and friendly rushed by the window. On the distant hills we could see the silhouettes of idyllic grazing horses and miniature oil pumps like shadoofs at a village well. I felt I was almost in fairyland.
We bypassed Ufa, by which time it was almost evening. It was almost evening, and we remembered that in the last 24 hours we had skipped two hours ahead. We put our watches forward, checking them with a timer on the recorder in a police car, which cheerfully gave us a lift to the next junction on the bypass.
I wanted to take a breather. It had been a long drive and I was feeling dizzy. Grand’s eyes were shining wonderfully bright. We had a glass of tea in a café, washed our hands, surveyed the sky, pigeon-grey from the sunset, and got a lift in a Lada off-roader driven by an Orthodox priest.
He was in a hurry and knew the way well. He smoked, blowing the smoke out of the side window only for the smoke to blow back in on me. He told us he was on his way to the funeral of the abbot of a monastery near Ekaterinburg. A sullen sceptic, it was a puzzle how he had come to be ordained. Grand talked about church services, fasts, pilgrimages and the monastic life. He said he had worked in a monastery and intended to become a novice himself but changed his mind. It was the first time I had heard Grand say anything about himself.
“We went to Sarov a month ago,” our buddy the priest told us, gradually thawing out. “We walked there from Kazan. That’s a holy place, where Saint Seraphim lived and worked, and it is good to go there. It is good to go there and you too, when you feel the call in your soul, should go to Sarov, to pray in the holy places. There are springs there, and water… It is good to go there.”
He was so carried away he didn’t bother to stop when a cop raised his baton. He lowered the sun visor, which had ‘Monastery’ inscribed on the reverse, and drove on muttering, “Scoundrels, the lot of them”.
In the darkness we could make out a gloomy forest along the road. I could feel the breath of night coming through the air vent and was preparing myself for another sleepless passage on the road when our benefactor said, “I’m not driving through Sim. You need to know the road there in the dark. You hear the devil’s fife playing in the dead cedar trees.”
Grand nodded. We pulled up at a log-built coaching inn, there was no other way to describe it, with a high porch and fretwork architraves. This roadside refuge in the forest gave off a sense of great antiquity, with the Ural Mountains all around and a solitary yellow lantern swaying above the car park. The priest invited us in, meticulously washed his hands at a washstand, and then ordered beer and soup for himself, and tea and fried eggs for us.
He hunched over the table, looking down into his plate, eating and drinking in silence. He had a bushy beard the shape of a shovel, an unsmiling face and the broad back of an old-fashioned carter. The inner room was brightly lit and empty and the light made Grand and me look pale and haggard.
“Well, don’t give in to sin, children,” our priest adjured us, sending us on our way. “You are young and temptation is always near at hand.” I had already picked up my bag when Grand went over to be blessed and bowed deeply before him. After that we went out to the dark road and were picked up by a taciturn insomniac KamAZ truck driver who took us over the Urals in six hours. I found out then all about Sim, a steady ascent by hairpin bends where the stars become ever more numerous both above and beneath us.
From near Tyumen we hitched a ride with Muslims: two fast-driving Azerbaijanis with two new Ladas in which green discs with a tassel and a gold monogram reading ‘Allahu akbar’ swung behind the windscreen. As soon as Grand got in and saw this talisman he greeted them with the same words and from then on the conversation never deviated from a discussion of festivals, traditions and the Qur’an. The driver in our car was called Roma and told us that when Arabs had come to Tyumen, commissioning a factory of some description, the first thing they asked when entering a new building was which way was east. Roma thought they were brilliant. He thought Grand was brilliant too, and was constantly phoning and talking about us to his wife at home or to his partner in the other car. After this the other car drove up parallel to ours and its driver shouted something cheerful and hospitable through the open window. They sometimes exchanged cigarettes, a lighter, food and water bottles through the window in just the same way without stopping.