Читать книгу On The Couch - Fleur Britten - Страница 22

A colossal, cabbagey babushka was cradling a potato sack like a baby. The potato sack shook to reveal the wiry, grey head of a small mutt. A defeated and dusty old man—in pitch-perfect Chekhovian tragedy—held his troubled brow in bloodied, swollen hands. A grubby street urchin shamelessly prodded the shoulders of every man, woman and child in his way, holding out his artful hands. I was at Novosibirsk station, waiting for my forty-hour train to Ulan-Ude. Without Ollie, I was en garde. Without Ollie, I realised, I was engaged—Russia had come alive. What I found reminded me to count my blessings.

In my cramped cabin, two Russian workers had already claimed the emotional space. Wrung out, I meekly clambered on to the top bunk and attempted to hibernate. My tears seemed to have given me a cold: I sneezed. ‘Bud zdorova [bless you],’ said one of the workers, gruffly. I looked down. He was wearing an unconvincing black nylon wig; the other had a heavy Scouser ’tache and kind eyes. ‘Chai?’ offered the ’tache. And so began a most unlikely friendship, conducted through my increasingly clammy dictionary and sign language. They were truck drivers from Dikson, deep within the Russian Arctic Circle. Was my mother not worried? Did I have a Kazakh dictionary? Have these wafers! No thanks. Have these wafers! Okay! Where was I staying? ‘I’m staying with a friend,’ I said. I repeated those words in my head: I had a friend—of sorts—waiting for me in a new city. That was a powerful feeling.

Clutching an in-case-of-emergency address in Dikson, I turned in at 3.30am, perplexed as to why my berth buddies were happy to share their night and supplies with me. We weren’t used to such hospitality in London’s individualistic, post-Thatcher society. As I looked at my rations-for-one, I wondered if it were me, unable to think beyond the self, that was uncivilised.