He would come in, sit down, and begin to sigh without respite. He was awkward, bespectacled, had a broad square face and body, big ears, bad teeth and a dark mark on his neck caused by his violin. He would adopt a very intense expression, not look at me, and not know what to do with his hands with their broad palms and stubby fingers with short, white, flat-ended nails. When I once asked what he had come for, he replied adenoidally, “I want to get to know you, Titch. You are so strange. I really can’t make out what kind of person you are.”
He called me Titch, but was embarrassed by it and tried to swallow the word. Despite that, he never called me by my proper name. He said he wanted to understand me, but after that spoke never a word. I did feel sorry for him and would have been pleased to have someone to talk to, but he didn’t respond when I spoke to him, and if he did would blurt out something beside the point, or start telling me something in a dull, incoherent manner before again falling silent.
I was still strange after the road, disorientated and totally unsure how I should live now. I wanted either solitude or understanding, and wordless Sergey could give me neither. Neither would he go away until it was time for Roma and me to retire for the night.
“Well, ask what you want to know and I’ll tell you.” He sighed loudly. I found him ridiculous but spoke kindly to him, in order not to laugh. “Sergey, smile. You look so glum.” For the first time he raised his face to look at me. “Dear Titch, you’ve changed so much this summer,” he said regretfully. “You’re completely different…” “I saw the world in a different light,” I replied flatly. “Someone probably showed it to you in a different light,” he suggested archly before looking away again. “It was just the road,” I said.
Roma Jah came in with the teapot and poured a glass for himself and one for me. He offered one to Sergey, sat down and started playing the guitar. Sergey said nothing, but I could see his curiosity had been piqued.
“So you really went hitchhiking?” he finally asked. “What of it?” “Well, it’s just it seems so… out of character for you. You’re so… vulnerable. Getting into other people’s cars, not having a home of your own, meeting strangers… People are all sorts, Titch. Were you really never scared?”
“You’re afraid of something you don’t know. When you don’t know, you make things up and frighten yourself.” “That’s why I really want to know you, but you don’t tell me anything.” “How can I tell you? Let’s go hitchhiking and you’ll find out for yourself.”
Roma struck a bum chord. Sergey had a hangdog expression but lacked the courage to refuse. We agreed to make an early start, and he immediately left the room. Roma Jah shook his head. “You need to think what you’re doing, Titch. That’s not for everyone, and he is a mole.” “He should have thought of that himself. For some reason he agreed.”
Roma shook his head again. With each additional road trip he became wiser and accordingly more and more placid, did Roma, the landlord of our commune. But the deed was done, and the pre-road trip butterflies in my stomach could not be stilled. A faraway smile lit up my face, my eyes began to shine, like Grand’s crazy eyes. It took me a long time to get to sleep that night. I lay and stared the length of the room through the window to see the stars and the gentle glow of the Moscow sky.
Oh, Stalker, Stalker, why is the Zone drawing you back again?
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 emerged only recently. We are still only starting out. 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.
What an ordeal our way back had been! A wearisome ordeal, as though the mountains and the Enchanted Lake did not want to let us go. If up to the Urals we were on a roll, after them our way was difficult but it was too late to do anything about it. Why that was, what caused it I have yet to understand, but at the very beginning of our progress Grand said, “The road is a continuous test for us. It is always waiting to see our reaction. We are always facing a choice, and what happens next depends on each step we take.”
“But what about luck?” “Luck on the road is not a matter of chance. It depends directly on you yourself, how open you are, how ‘beyond reproach’, how capable of transcending yourself, of accepting and loving everything around you. That will determine how easy and enjoyable your way will be. Ask yourself whether at this moment you’re loving what’s around you.”
I looked around and shrugged. We were walking in Omsk, the weather was great, the rucksack wasn’t feeling too heavy. I supposed I was loving it all, why not?
We went to the market. Grand decided to buy food. He left me looking after the rucksacks and disappeared. He had left me in a corner near empty stalls where nobody needed to come and with two rucksacks, each of which was up to my waist, yet within five minutes some lanky character showed up and started telling me how much he liked tourists.
“I was a tourist once myself. The Caucasus, the Khibin Mountains, the Sayans. I travelled all over the place, but now those years are gone. I am completely past it.” As he said all this, he assumed a suitably mournful expression, although his face, haircut and everything about his lithe figure indicated that here was a man who took very good care of himself. His hair was still impeccably black, with a single bleached strand flopping over his forehead. Above his silkily gleaming black shirt, flirtatiously open at the collar, lay a flat gold chain.
I had seen him in the distance, while he was still a couple of rows of stalls away. He was quite a height and towered over the stallholders. I noticed him because he was so unlike the kind of people you usually find shopping for groceries at the market.
“I’m past it and need to make money,” he went on. I tried to deduce his intention in approaching me from his expression. “Make money, feed the family. I used to have my own business but then we had the currency default, one thing and another. I work as a shipping agent for an Irish restaurant now.” To prove it he incongruously shook a goodly bunch of leeks.
“Ah, youth!” he sighed. “You must let me buy you a meal. There is a place over there, nothing special but clean. Everyone knows me there. It’s on me.” For some reason I was reluctant to go and eat with him. I played for time, hoping that when Grand came he would decline to share our company with this oversized ex-tourist.