On The Couch. Fleur Britten
are too many couchsurfers who say how crazy they are. Psychologists will tell you that they’re compensating for being pale.’
Right-o, we said, with pointed blandness. And, err, where was the gun now?
‘It’s from a little training I did in Russian army. I only had to do it for three weeks because I’m doctor. I don’t know how to use it—I’m pacifist.’
Somehow though, the presence of the gun never quite left him.
We arrived at his ‘open-air garage’ at the hospital where he worked. ‘I parked so right by the wall,’ he chuckled, ‘because my fuel lid is broke.’ Three belligerent guard dogs ran for us but Ravil said something to them and they loped off. Ollie asked if we could take a taxi to his, but Ravil said no, firmly: ‘By the time we find the taxi, we’ll be at home.’ He set off into the darkness, walking fast and with purpose, like a lone knight. Ollie was instantly left behind, but it was in my interests to make Ravil wait for Ollie—it was much easier to chat with back-up.
Walking down a dark, potholed dirt track, we passed rows of battered tin-can garages.
‘Any Homer Simpson activity down here?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ Ravil replied airily, like I shouldn’t need to ask. ‘It’s well-known fact that Russians drink in their garages to escape their wives.’
He then told us about his $500-a-month job (the best paid at his level, apparently) screening A&E patients: ‘I must decide what do the people need—maybe they’re too drunk, too drugged, maybe they just need go home.’
Novosibirsk’s health sounded pretty wretched, but, he reassured us, ‘because we have such large country, disease doesn’t spread like it does in Britain.’
Perhaps that went for social disease too.
I swooned when he told us he was building a house in a village seventy kilometres away. Was that usual? To build your own house in Siberia?
‘My father was engineer,’ Ravil said, proudly. ‘I built one house with my father in Kazakhstan. I don’t see any difference between making a computer, a car or a house.’
Ravil had borrowed his friend’s couchsurfers to dig there at the weekend: ‘There will always be space for surfers there.’ Factoring couchsurfing into his house’s blueprint—was it naivety or vision? Ravil was nothing if not resourceful.
‘Is that a door you’re sleeping on?’ I asked, when we arrived at his bedsit in an unloved Soviet tenement building on a seemingly infinite estate.
‘Two half-doors,’ he said, with relish. ‘It’s hard—I like it.’
The doors rested on two mismatched chairs at each end of his ‘bed’. In fact, all the furniture was similar to what you might find in a skip. Either Ollie or I would be sleeping on the floor, though these kinds of facts were made explicit on the couchsurfing site. I stuck my head round the oversized wardrobe in the middle of the room to find, hidden in the darkness, an old red sofa.
‘It’s Mama’s bunker,’ he smiled.
Even his mother slept on a sofa. Ravil’s entire apartment seemed to be a bunker.
Having totally overlooked buying anything in Yekaterinburg, Ollie and I had privately agreed to re-gift Polly’s spices—after all, we couldn’t travel round Asia with a spice set.
‘Thank you,’ Ravil said, scrutinising them before adding imperiously, ‘We have all these spices here.’
The spices languished by the front door for the duration of our stay.
‘You want Russian soup? It’s Mama’s gift.’
Ravil led us into his phonebox-sized kitchen, lined with smetana and yoghurt pots hatching herbs, lettuces and other edibles. With only room for two, Ollie wedged an armchair into the doorway. Ravil passed him a plank to use as a tray, and we broke plump, disc-shaped Uzbek bread together, dunking it in his mother’s wholesome chicken soup. I forgot to concentrate on taste, however, as my senses were distracted by the view: strong, hero’s cheekbones, fine olive skin, kitten-tail eyebrows. His hairline was maturely undulated for a 23-year-old, but it added extra gravitas to an already serious soul. The grey patches under his eyes reminded me of that sleepless night that might be waiting for us. I offered to make tea—this ritual at least was a small claiming of kitchen territory—and Ollie went for a smoke on the balcony.
‘Don’t hurt my bike!’ Ravil yelled, jokingly, but not.
I was caught up in my own jarring, one-way sexual tension. This one-room imprisonment, every nuance under scrutiny, didn’t help. But it was the diktat on Ravil’s profile that wouldn’t leave me: he only wanted travellers—not tourists (’even hardcore ones’). Could we stretch to being travellers? We’d needed a couch, so of course we’d say what he wanted to hear. But if comparing stories with travellers was Ravil’s motive for couchsurfing, we were going to disappoint. Couchsurfing was a host’s market—they could afford to stipulate conditions. Us guests had to be much more accepting.
It was time for the slideshow. Ravil opened up a photo on his computer of himself lying in the middle of an empty road—the classic hitchhiker pose—and began to conduct a sermon on Russian hitchhiking.
‘When you hitchhike, everyone is happy to see you,’ he said wistfully. ‘You don’t need money, you don’t need a bag. If you think you need something, it’s your problem.’
He took his Axe deodorant and sprayed a squirt on to a lit match, creating a jet of fire close to our ears. It would have been laughable were it not for Ravil’s silent command over us.
Russia had a hitchhiking guru, Ravil told us, Anton Krotov—a 32-year-old modern-day Kerouac (who looked like the last person you would give a ride to, owing to his abundant Jesus beard). Ravil had read many of his books and followed his website, The Russian Academy of Free Travel—hitchhiking, it seemed, was cool in Russia. It transpired that hitchhikers and couchsurfers existed happily in the same Venn diagram, for both financial and philosophical reasons: both ideologies enabled a life—for free—outside the material world.
At 3am, I decided to take cover in the bathroom, multi-tasking with time out, a shower and the chance to change my clothes with modesty. It was a man’s bathroom: contents included ten cheap soaps worn down to wafers, and tools for shaving, tooth-brushing and clothes-washing. Waiting minutes for the Siberian water to heat up, I went to brush my teeth—but there was no sink in the bathroom. The apartment’s only sink was in the kitchen with a violently wobbly tap. And Russians didn’t seem to believe in bathmats, or cleaning, so I was left not knowing where to put my clean feet.
At 4.20am came the surprise announcement, ‘Let’s sleep’. I silently rejoiced. I’d been dreading staying up all night on the back of ten days’ junk sleep, but Ollie and I had both settled into our submissive role in the couchsurfing dynamic. Lack of sleep was the worst thing about couchsurfing. I was supplied with a stained, tobacco-coloured, canvas camp bed (‘It’s called a raskladushka—‘little folding thing’’). Ollie took the sleeping mat for his leg, and Ravil—in the grey marl T-shirt he’d been wearing that day and a tiny pair of briefs—took to his two half-doors. Somehow, I hadn’t thought what sharing a one-bedroom apartment meant: enforced intimacy. Hiding my bare, white turkey drumsticks from view behind an armchair, I tried to persuade myself it was no different to being on the beach together. I then made a dive for my bed, which was so close to Ravil’s that we were practically spooning. Sleep would evade me that night.
A voice came from the darkness: ‘I have no problem being nude.’
‘Are you preparing us for breakfast in the buff?’ I joked.
A pause.
‘I try to swim nude when I can. My girlfriend and I like to swim nude in the lake.’ His words hung in the air as we fell silent. Finally, the darkness afforded us some privacy. So he had a girlfriend—in this