Every square metre of the apartment was occupied. People were getting washed in the bathroom. Both rooms were living a life of their own. People went out onto the balcony to smoke. Even in the hallway there was a small group of people, but the real crush was in the kitchen. There some were cooking while others were eating. Music was being played through speakers built into a broken-down guitar hanging on the wall.
What all these people were doing here, why they had come, whether they knew what they were doing or why they came was beyond my comprehension. It was plain they were not all renting these few square metres of accommodation as we did on Yakimanka. They evidently came as visitors and stayed for several days. We were welcomed in just the same way as everybody else, that is, completely naturally and without curiosity, as if we were regulars.
Grand got into conversation with the owners and was very soon promoted to the status of philosopher. A circle of listeners formed round him, asking questions which Grand answered in detail. I found myself redundant and sat some distance away with world weariness in my eyes. Every now and then Grand would turn to me, his eyes asking, “Do you love what is around you?”
With each hour that passed, however, I found the apartment more depressing. The slaphappy indolence drove me to despair until I felt I was ready to reply to his question with a resounding, “No!” This slovenly partying, the indiscriminate friendliness and lack of curiosity, the aimless, lazy lifestyle with its pretensions to be seeking a meaning for itself seemed as tacky as a spider’s web and I just wanted to get back on the road, to freedom. It was only in moving on that I could now see any sense.
“Why are you leaving?” the landlord asked Grand. “Gosha here came in from the road and thought he’d just stay overnight. When was that? Well, he must have been living with us for the best part of a month now.”
“My life is about moving on. I can turn aside, see something new, but I can’t see sense in stopping.” “What does make sense? There is no sense,” Gosha boomed from somewhere up near the ceiling. He was an athletic-looking giant with a happy baby sitting on his bare back. “There is no sense,” Grand replied quietly and with a smile, “but there is a goal.”
I had had enough and started pestering him to leave. “You’re separating yourself off from them when you should be loving them, and then you’d understand them,” Grand told me when, catching him for a moment in the hallway, I voiced my opinion in an irate whisper.
“It’s usually the other way round! Usually you understand first and love afterwards.” “Well, the opposite is the right way,” he said and walked off.
Towards midnight our hosts took us for a tour of the city. Some hangers-on followed but gradually fell away. Cool, nighttime Ekaterinburg was quiet, transparent, and as unreal as a film set. We trudged through backyards, sometimes clambering through holes in fences, and suddenly emerged into a square flooded with street light, ran across it and again disappeared into the darkness. At the end of each excursion we might see a unique flowerbed shaped like a baby hippopotamus or a totally unique crevice in a wall. I very soon lost my bearings and could barely move my feet from exhaustion. The whole thing felt like a dream which had been going on too long. The child on the landlord’s shoulders had fallen asleep with his head resting on the panama.
When we got back, everyone who was still able to stay awake assembled in a room to read aloud from the Strugatskys The Snail on The Slope. Communal reading was evidently a local custom. It was already morning. I went off, curled up in my sleeping bag, and to a rhythmical communal murmuring on the other side of the wall started looking at the stars. They glowed with a phosphorescent light and were painted on the ceiling.
How sluggishly our hitchhiking went after that! We trekked through a small town called Kamensk Uralsky on foot without getting a lift at all. Just outside the town the traffic cops gave us a lift after we had stood a full hour by the roadside. We came to a halt in the Urals, spent a night in the mountains, then went on foot in search of a good position. A good position needs to be neither on a downhill nor an uphill stretch and where are you going to find that in the Ural Mountains? We finally got a lift in another Jeep with people from Perm but, as we didn’t want to go to Perm, that lift didn’t take us far.
We were driven through Bashkiria by a geezer with whiskers and his wife. We had been worn out by Ural mountain passes and fell asleep. Through my sleep I heard a conversation: “The Great Spirit of Ways and Roads protects you, but you do not notice it,” the wife said to her husband, and I thought I must already be dreaming.
We bypassed Ufa, but would doubtless have had to walk straight through the middle, only the beneficent Spirit of Ways and Roads smiled on us and we got a lift in two MAZ trucks transporting bottles. You can’t fit three people in the cab of a MAZ. Grand and I were separated and cheerfully went our separate ways, talking between trucks over the walky-talky to the accompaniment of the musical tinkling of the empty bottles in the back.
They dropped us off in Tatarstan, and we realised we had won a two-hour time shift off the road. That was enough to get us to Naberezhnye Chelny with a morose, taciturn driver. He dropped us off at the turning to the city, ten metres from a police station. Our rucksacks and general bewilderment attracted the cops’ attention. An officer sternly inspected our passports and residence permits, checked our faces against our photos, and chewed his moustache. Just to be on the safe side, he ran our names through the national wanted persons database.
That was when I discovered Grand’s surname: Grandovsky. It had never occurred to me just to ask him. Now it’s practically the only thing I know about him.
By the time we got away from the cops it was already dark. There was no chance we would be going anywhere that night. We moved away from the road but didn’t find any good sites so pitched the tent in a field on neglected, uneven ground. We were concealed from the road by a huge power station pipe and a stone plinth with the name of the ancient town of Yar Chaly. As we were pitching the tent I looked around at the dismal industrial landscape and wondered what there was here to love.
One day we encountered a thirteen-year-old boy who had no luggage, shabby clothes, and furtive eyes. He jumped down from a KamAZ truck near where we were standing and walked away backwards, thumbing. He disappeared round a bend. Someone gave us a lift soon after but, when they dropped us off, we saw the same kid dancing along fifty metres in front of us. We stopped and I turned to face him. He soon got a lift.
We kept bumping into each other all day, sometimes overtaking, sometimes being overtaken. Grand paid no attention to him but I started watching him closely. I started seeing him as a competitor and my determination to get a lift first came close to a race. I knew instinctively he had his eye on me too. After another lift I saw his face in an approaching truck. He was eating an apple and gave me a wave. I felt my gall rising.
It was already evening when we jumped down from a truck and went into a café full of truckers. We sat in a corner with our rucksacks propped up against the wall. We were tired and hungry. Grand bought some food and ate it with a smile on his lips but I felt like a cornered animal. I just wanted to disappear. Everybody around us knew what our game was and I felt they were weighing us up and deciding not to take us with them.
Another trucker came in together with the kid. They were talking loudly. The driver ordered a meal for himself and the boy, then joined a group of his friends and began talking to one. I had my back to them and could hear everything. “Maybe you can take this waif. He needs to get to Yaroslavl and I’m only going as far as Nizhny Novgorod.”