“What does your boyfriend have to say about it?”
“I haven’t got a boyfriend. Not since May. I’m young, free and single!”
Nastya said this with such a desperate, angry smile that even the café owner knew to leave this subject alone.
He started bustling about, then went back behind the counter and flicked a switch. The café lights came on. He seemed to have complete dominion over this modest empire; he was in charge of everything, down to the humblest light-bulb.
“You’re not going anywhere tonight. It’s already dark.”
“But it’s not that late…”
“You are not going to spend the night on the road! I won’t allow it. I’ll get someone to make you up a bed in the box-room.”
“But I…”
“You’re spending the night here, and that’s the end of it.”
Nastya wiped the last traces of the shashlik from her mouth with the back of her hand and smirked. Wow! She hadn’t expected such steely insistence from the café owner. Of course, she could have predicted that things would take a similar turn…
“Thank you.”
The café owner got up from the table and went off into the kitchen, presumably to bark a few orders. Meanwhile one of the long-distance drivers stood up and walked towards the exit. Refreshed and refuelled, he was ready to continue his journey. Nastya stood up as well.
“Are you going to Ufa?”
The long-distance driver nodded. Excellent! She pushed her plate back, picked up her rucksack and followed him. Ciao, little roadside shack! Nice knowing you. Nastya left without a backwards glance, grateful that she’d managed to extricate herself from yet another predicament.
What next? The dark cabin of a KamAZ truck. For some reason it really seemed to feel the bumps in the road. At first the cabin would rock and sway, then the trailer would rumble behind them. The driver let her smoke and, tired and silent, they both took long drags on their cigarettes — two glowing red dots in the darkness. The blind headlights reached into the night, feeling for the tarmac and the uneven verge.
“I’ve driven across Siberia,” said the driver, breaking the silence. His voice sounded muffled. “One night it was really, really dark. Pitch black. Then suddenly I saw something…” He flashed his headlights for emphasis. “Something lying in the middle of the road. I thought it was a sack that had fallen off a lorry, so I slammed on the brakes and swerved… At least there was no one else on the road. I just missed it, thank God. It was a man’s body! Someone must have hit him, then just driven off and left him there. It can be pretty wild in that part of the world. So I just started the engine and drove off.”
This was followed by another silence. Nastya gave a bitter laugh. That was a pretty depressing story. A pretty depressing attitude, too. But hey, that’s life. Memento mori…
They continued their journey along the nocturnal highway of the Urals, breaking the silence only rarely to make the occasional remark, but always aware of one another’s presence in the dark cabin.
The kilometre markers — a constant reminder that they were on a federal highway — floated out of the darkness, reflecting the headlights. It was strange to see these flashes of glowing blue light emerge from the night, like a series of spectral apparitions. Each one seemed to approach slowly, then in a flash it was gone, taking its number with it. Four hundred and twenty-three… Four hundred and twenty-four…
4
The days are long in July, and the evening sky feels enormous. It’s all that exists. It’s easy to ignore the city sprawled out beneath it, strung with chains of barely perceptible street lamps. But the sky… It keeps changing. First it’s a curious peach colour, then it glows red and then… it goes out altogether, and the precise outlines of the buildings form a stark contrast against the background of the recently extinguished sky. Charcoal on metal.
People hurry home from work, calling in at the shops before storming the buses. Windows light up, some more invitingly than others.
Turning awkwardly, the trolleybus scatters sparks over the roof of a car. I wonder whether they’ll leave scorch marks.
Squire was sitting in the middle of his room on the broken and slightly singed sofa, mending his jeans. Actually he wasn’t mending them so much as ‘restoring’ them by going over the drawings and signatures that had been scrawled all over them a long time ago in red and black marker pens. A very long time ago, judging by their sorry state.
The apartment itself merits a detailed description, even if you’ve been in one like it before. It’s a studio apartment sublet from the legal tenant, and it hasn’t had any work done on it since… Well, it’s probably best not to think about that. The wallpaper is torn and faded and has witnessed a great deal over the years. There’s hardly any furniture, just a few items left there by the owners to be ‘run into the ground’ — an ancient chest of drawers, a couple of shelves (used more for CDs and cassettes than for books), the aforementioned sofa… No TV set. Such a luxury would be completely out of place here.
As is often the case in such apartments, the kitchen is not for the faint-hearted. Well, it’s hardly surprising when you’ve got a gas cylinder and a gas stove competing against one another in a confined space, year after year, and the resulting soot and greasy sediment and methane deposits are cleaned up only rarely and with great reluctance. Wheezing and panting, the decrepit old fridge adds to the atmosphere of filth and neglect.
It might sound like some kind of squalid dump unfit for human habitation, but it’s just a typical apartment and it suits Squire down to the ground. Not to mention his numerous friends, all the overnight guests, the passing hitchhikers from all over Russia… Actually, there’s one of them here right now.
Our friend Vadim from St Petersburg came out of the bathroom. He was naked from the waist up, and he was drying his long hair carefully with a towel. Long hair isn’t really compatible with hitchhiking. You can tie it back to stop it getting too dirty, but even so… You can’t wait to wash it whenever you get the opportunity.
“I’ve washed my socks and hung them in there on the line. Is that alright?”
“Yeah, no problem. They’ll be dry by tomorrow.”
“Are you redoing the colour?” Vadim nodded at the jeans that Squire was working on. “Have you just washed them?”
“Yeah, right — they’d fall apart if I washed them! I haven’t washed them for two years.”
“You’re kidding. How come?”
“Well, I don’t wear them much any more. When I do I try and look after them. So, like, I never wear them out when it’s raining, only when the weather’s good. And I wear underpants now. When I was younger, seventeen or so, I used to like going commando. But now, I’m an old man!”
They laughed. Vadim had never met Squire before (this was his first time in Ufa), and they had the whole evening ahead of them to fill with conversations and the mutual exchange of stories. It started predictably enough, with Vadim looking through Squire’s music collection. The ensuing exchange (“What have you got?”, “I haven’t heard this album before”, and so on) is unlikely to be of much interest to us, so let’s leave it there and resume the narrative at the moment the doorbell rang.
“Oh, that’s probably Nikita,” Vadim exclaimed happily.
“Is that the guy you’re travelling with?”
“Yeah. He’s always slower than me… I was worried he wouldn’t make it to Ufa tonight!”
“It could be anyone, you know…” Squire went to open the door. “It’s half nine, still early…”
From the stilted tone of Squire’s voice in the hallway, it sounded as though ‘anyone’ was an unexpected and unwelcome guest. Vadim was instantly on his guard. In theory, anything could happen here — normal rules didn’t apply, because a squat wasn’t like a home or even a real apartment. Everything has its price, including a free night’s accommodation. If you’re going to risk your life on the road, you might as well risk your life by dossing down in strange places. Vadim had spent the night with a bunch of drug addicts once. Well, they weren’t really drug addicts, just pot-heads, but they’d stayed up all night partying and he hadn’t been able to get to sleep. Vadim wasn’t really worried now, though. He knew he could stand up for himself.