At this workshop they’ve found an innovative solution to the eternal problem of tools being stolen. They simply haven’t got any at their work stations. Each mechanic starts the day by exchanging his ID badge for a box of spanners, despite which after an hour’s work Zhenya, who is working on my car, makes a fuss saying someone has pinched the number fourteen and the eighteen from his set. A big search ensues. It turns out he left both spanners in the pit himself.
After removing the gearbox we can see that the synchronizer has split into tiny chips of metal which have scraped off the ratchets. In the process Zhenya discovers there’s oil leaking out of the engine and both axles, and the clutch disk is very thin, worn out. I’m furious, because this is now the fifth workshop where I’ve had my Lazhik repaired, and not long ago in Kurgan they fixed the clutch bearing. They only had to say and I’d have taken the opportunity to get the disk changed too.
That’s what upsets me most about the Russians – their reluctance to do anything in advance, except what’s absolutely necessary, their languid way of waiting for disaster to happen before getting on with anything. That was how in the 1980s they lost ‘Komsomolets’, the most expensive, best ever submarine in the world. The little device for measuring oxygen content broke – costing fifty roubles – but no-one could be bothered to check the gas level by hand, so a fire broke out in which almost the entire crew was killed.
Zhenya fixes the gearbox and seals the axles. He takes 5000 roubles for the repairs. He and his assistant have been working on it all day. Including the replaced part, the entire repair cost me 10,000 roubles. That’s 1000 zlotys (£200). Nowhere in Poland could I have had a gearbox replaced so cheaply and so quickly.
Ahead of me is the hardest stretch of my route. More than 2000 kilometres to Khabarovsk.
IGOR
All my passengers, the men, the women and even the children I picked up on the road, brought into the car the bitter Siberian cold, which after a few minutes in the warm lost the freshness and briskness of the taiga, the unusual charm of the continental climate, as it changed into a very commonplace, sweet-and-sour, stifling odour of poverty. The stench of unwashed armpits, pissed-in pants, gastric juices, revolting food and hands wiped on coats. A stench of being abandoned, forgotten, rejected by all – quite simply the smell of misfortune, and for many the first symptom of homelessness. It’s exactly the same everywhere, in Barcelona, Warsaw, Moscow, Beijing . . .You do your best not to touch them and to take as shallow breaths as possible, like in a really disgusting toilet, so your alveoli will take in as little as possible of the air they have used.
In Igor’s case I only have myself to blame. As soon as he got in, I was surprised how lightly he was dressed, so he undid his sheepskin coat to show me that underneath he had nothing but a singlet and a track suit. And to think he had acquired that smell in barely a week.
A week ago he buried his mother. His name is Igor Smirnov. He’s twenty-two. His face is red, almost livid and puffy with cold, his eyes are bloodshot from sun and wind, and his lips are parched.
Straight after the funeral his stepfather, at whose flat he had been living along with his mother and eighteen-year-old brother Alexei, slammed the door in the boys’ faces, so they couldn’t even get a change of clothes. Just as they were, they set off on the road. To their father, and thus away from Chita, where they buried their mother, a distance of more than 1500 kilometres east, across the cruellest, ice-cold, wild taiga.
I feel uneasy about driving this way by car, but these guys set off on foot, with no food or money, because they spent all their savings – 6000 roubles (£30) – on the funeral. Two days ago they managed to stop a lorry that’s going to take Alexei to their father’s place. There was only room for one.
I picked Igor up fifty kilometres before Skovorodino, when he still had more than a thousand kilometres to go. He eats whatever the drivers who pick him up give him, or at roadside bars, where he can get a bowl of soup for doing some job. He sleeps in tyre workshops, and if he can’t find a place to stay, he spends the whole night walking to avoid dying of cold or freezing his legs off.
‘At night I stop waving at the cars’, he says, ‘because I know they won’t stop.’
‘What if there were a blizzard?’ I ask.
‘I’d run into the taiga.’
‘It’s impossible to keep walking in the forest. And last night it was minus thirty-four degrees.’
‘I’d manage somehow’, he says without conviction.
He wouldn’t manage. For two days, since parting with his brother, he hasn’t eaten and he hasn’t slept, because he was walking through an extremely deserted area.
‘Who gives you lifts?’ I ask.
‘Simple people. From villages or collective farms. Ordinary Russian cars and lorries. And they take me from one village to the next. Short stretches.’
‘And your father won’t turn you away?’
‘No. He’s expecting us. We called. He’s got a cottage, a job in the forest and a wife but no children. I’ll get a driving licence and transport wood’, says Igor and falls asleep.
Finally I reached Skorovodino, where I was turning north towards Tynda, and he had to keep going east. I stopped the car in the sun and let the boy sleep in the warm for another hour. In his sleep he finally withdrew his hands from his pockets. They were large, red and chapped. He hadn’t any gloves.
MONDAY, 18 FEBRUARY 2008
A hotel in Shimanovsk.
I left Tynda at 11 a.m. and drove until midnight. I’ve done 553 kilometres, at an average speed of 42.5 kmph. I’m dying of exhaustion, because today there wasn’t a centimetre of tarmac on the road, and I drove at least half the way without brakes – the pedal has sunk into the floor. I’m going crazy – tomorrow I’ll have to look for another workshop.
I set off late today, because this morning I came back from my beloved Evenks in the taiga. They gave me provisions for the journey – two enormous pieces of roasted reindeer loin. It’s delicious, like tender beef. I’ve become terribly carnivorous thanks to the week I spent with them. In their village it’s easier to get meat than bread.
The car spent nine days in a parking lot in Tynda. The minimum thermometer shows that at night it was 42.5 degrees below zero. The battery was in the caretaker’s hut, but even so the Lazhik refuses to start. I warm the sump with a petrol burner. I can hear the oil boiling inside, then I see flames bursting out from under the bonnet. The engine and all the insides are hellishly covered in oil, so naturally they’ve caught fire. I grab the extinguisher, but not a drop comes out of it. It’s frozen! I use a spade to toss snow inside and put out the fire. If I’ve burned through the electrical wires I’ll have to hitchhike. With my heart in my mouth I turn the key. It starts.Yet another lesson learned – as well as the battery, put the extinguisher in a warm place overnight too.
From Tynda I take a shortcut, not by road, but along an ice crossing. That’s what they call roads that run along frozen rivers in winter. I drive south down the river Tynda for about fifteen kilometres. In the city the transport services have marked out two traffic lanes with poles and put up signs setting a speed limit of 30 kmph and a vehicle weight limit of twenty-five tons.
My hotel in Shimanovsk is a horrible shack with two dorms run by Chinamen, where foreigners – with the exception of the Chinese – pay double. The bog’s outside, and it’s thirty below, so at night I pee into an empty Cola bottle. The hotel is located in one quarter of a small building. Another quarter houses a pharmacy, and in the third and fourth there’s a small hospital. Above my sack of a bed there’s a sign saying: ‘In our hotel it is forbidden to throw ash into the flowers, open the windows, lie on the bedspreads, be in possession of explosive materials, use electrical stoves or drink spirits.’
LYUBOV
Lyubov Vladimirovna Chegrina from the village of Ilinka is terribly fat. She’s fifty-seven, but she looks twenty years older. I only drive her ten kilometres to Nekrasovka, but her smell lingers in the car
for another two days.
Lyuba is going to town to fetch her twenty-one-year-old daughter Olya. Several times a week the girl goes to church by herself, to pray and get something to eat.
‘And I come to fetch her, because sometimes she feels ill and she could have a fall’, says Olya’s mother. ‘She walks very badly and can’t do anything with her left hand. A car hit her when she was nine. They operated on her head, but since then she hasn’t grown. And she stopped developing, though she can read. And she can sign her name. She’s due to have another operation to get her left side moving.’
‘I can see you’ve had a little bit to drink, Lyuba’, I say in surprise, as it’s only 10 AM.
‘I just had a tiny drop with my husband today, for Defender of the Fatherland Day.’
‘That was yesterday.’
‘We didn’t have any money yesterday, but today we managed to borrow fifty roubles (£1) to have a drink instead of for yesterday’s holiday. My pension’s due soon so I’ll pay it back. I get group two disability, 4500 roubles (£90), just like my Olya. I’ve lost my health, because I worked in disinfection at a poultry plant. I used to bathe the birds in delousing fluid.’
‘Isn’t your daughter bothered by her parents drinking?’ I ask.
‘No, because she lives at her gran’s.We’ve got bad neighbours at our place. They’re noisy. At night there’s music, screaming, and she very often has dreadful headaches. She and her older brother Andrei live at their gran’s. One time the boy had a drink of beer outside the shop, and the janitor there attacked him, kicked him lying down, so badly my son went to hospital for an operation. They removed bone from his brain, so now he’s got a hole in his head as big as a hand. They said they can put in a plate, but we’d have to pay thousands. He’s terribly disabled, all the more since this year he lost three fingers to frostbite. That’s why he can’t work. He has no pension because he only ever worked on the black market.’
‘What does he live off?’
‘He collects bottles and helps clean at the grocery kiosk’, says Lyuba. ‘And his granny has her pension. But now her back’s going.’
‘And is everything all right inside your son’s head?’
‘Yes. But he puts away a lot of drink. More than us. We only have a little drop.’
‘So are you happy, Lyuba?’
‘When the sun’s shining, my husband chops some wood, it’s warm and the holiday’s a success, I’m very happy. The holiday we moved from yesterday to today.’
TUESDAY, 19 FEBRUARY 2008
Blagoveshchensk.
Today I’ve come 276 kilometres from Shimanovsk in five hours. Average speed 55 kmph. I only set off at 3 p.m. because the brakes went and I frittered away the whole morning at repair shops.
First at a former state garage. The workers keep arriving until eleven o’clock, including my mechanic. He starts with a beer, then unscrews the broken brake-fluid tube. He often uses his teeth, because he only has one finger on his right hand.
The head of the repair shop, a tipsy, unshaven fellow of Caucasian appearance, in cowboy boots with spurs, a Puma track suit and a leather waistcoat with a fur collar, looks at the tube in disgust, blows his nose onto the floor, crushes the snot with his heel and says they don’t have that kind. They’ll have to choose one from another car.
They’ve found one. It’s half a metre too long, but they make it into a coil, like for distilling hooch, and then it fits.
They’re all very nice, they’ve generously dropped their other work and spent two hours battling with my brakes. All for 600 roubles (£12), but a dozen kilometres out of town the car chokes and stops. I’m towed back to Shimanovsk by a dirty beer truck, on which the driver has written with his finger ‘Better a belly from beer than a hunchback from work’.
Now I’ve ended up at a small private workshop in an old barn, run by Sasha Kropov, grandson of a Polish partisan who was sent to Siberia after the Second World War. Sasha’s granddad was called Kropowski, but to make life easier he Russified his surname. The lad discovers that the air filter is blocked. Of course they hadn’t changed it during the overhaul done in Irkutsk. Sasha doesn’t have the right filter, so he cuts a big hole in the existing one. It’s like carving a hole in a consumptive’s chest to make it easier for him to breathe.Yet another Russian improvisation, but the Lazhik goes like a rocket.
PARCEL
In Khabarovsk, before the final stage of my journey, I send home a parcel full of personal items so I won’t have to pay for excess luggage on the plane.
Beautifully wrapped, I take it to the post office, but the clerk tells me to open it, because it’s too heavy (it can’t weigh more than seventeen kilos), and in any case she has to check what’s inside it.
This makes me feel very annoyed, so the scene gets longer and longer, as does the queue of people behind me. My posture alone is unbearable, because I have to bend double to talk to the clerk through a tiny window at waist height. Occasionally, to give my spine a rest, I kneel down, and then I have the window at face height.
Furiously I rip the cardboard box open and hand over the contents one item at a time so the clerk can weigh each thing separately. One by one the woman takes my shirts, sweaters, gloves, billycan, battery charger, cedar cones, large and small towels, and flip-flops, and puts each of them on the scales. I write down the weight to three decimal points on the parcel registration record, and give each item a separate value.
Then it’s the turn of my ski boots and skates, stuffed into which the clerk discovers some dirty pants, socks and long johns. The people in the queue are craning their necks in curiosity, and the unpleasant smell of the men’s locker room pervades the post office. I’m screaming at the woman like a lunatic as she mercilessly pulls them all out with her bare hands, shakes them to make sure they’re not tangled together, and disgustedly places each item on the scales. Then she pushes the pile of dirty clothes back through the tiny window, permits me to start packing again and consults a huge book the size of a tombstone.
‘It is not allowed to send used clothing to Poland’, she drawls sadistically.
‘It’s personal clothing, not used!’ I try to defend myself.
The security guard comes running, and what must be the entire post-office staff. Together with the crowd of people waiting in the queue behind me, they hold a referendum on who is right.
I’m the winner. And then disaster strikes. The monster in the little window weighs the entire parcel. Her weight doesn’t match the total of the individual items as listed on the registration record, so the whole operation has to start from the beginning again. Some of the clerks actually sympathize with me, but they haven’t the faintest idea why I’m screaming – I’m red in the face, sweating, confused and humiliated. The other people in the queue are also complaining about tiresome bureaucracy, but they endure it all meekly.
Finally the monster cuts a piece of cloth from a roll, deftly sews it up on a sewing machine and packs my parcel into it. She fixes several dozen wax seals to the stitches.
The parcel registration record covers thirteen pages. I must calculate the value of each item so that the total sum does not exceed 100 dollars, otherwise the costs will be six times higher and the sending procedure three times as complicated.
The cost of sending a seventeen-kilo parcel worth 2000 roubles (£40) was 1941 roubles and 70 kopecks (£38.83). It took me two hours and forty minutes.
MONDAY, 25 FEBRUARY 2008
Vladivostok. Room 1144 on the eleventh floor of the Hotel Vladivostok.
At 7 p.m. I’m at the end of Scott Peninsula. It’s the bit of the Eurasian continent that extends furthest into the sea. I drive past a lighthouse and out onto the frozen edge of the Pacific Ocean. I’m at the end of my journey.
I drove the last 424 kilometres from Lesozavodzka in 7 hours and 45 minutes. Average speed for the day 54.7 kmph.
The odometer reads 42,926, so since leaving Moscow I have come 12,968 kilometres at an average speed of 43.8 kmph.
It took me fifty-five days, during which I spent 296 hours at the wheel, which equals twenty-five twelve-hour driving days. In this time I used 2119 litres of mainly 92-octane petrol at a cost of 42,380 roubles (£848), got four flat tyres and had to have the car fixed eleven times at various repair shops, which cost me a total of 27,000 roubles (£540). As a result the final cost of the car rose to 228,000 roubles (£4560). My Lazhik packed up for the last time in Ussuriysk, 100 kilometres before the end of the journey. At the end of our friendly acquaintance the carburettor got clogged.
SASHA
She travels with me from Artyom to the border of Vladivostok, where there’s a statue of a Soviet sailor by the road.
‘Because I work there’, says the girl. And seeing the dumb look on my face she adds: ‘Sexual services. I’d be glad to do it with you too, but only when we get there, because this patch belongs to a different lot. I’m not allowed to do it here. How much? Depends what – 400 roubles (£8) for a blow job, 600 for straight sex, and 700 for the whole lot, but for you it’ll be cheaper because of the lift. I’ve got condoms.’
‘No thanks.’
‘So where are you from? Moscow? All that time on the road and you haven’t had the urge?’
‘Well . . . I have, but . . . Call me Jacek. Have you ever been in love?’
‘Once’, replies Sasha. ‘Two years ago, but I ran away from him because he started taking an awful lot of stuff. Marijuana grows like grass round here, and they import heroin for 1500 roubles a gram (£30) all the way from Dagestan.’
Sasha is a pretty twenty-two-year-old. She finished seventh class and a cookery course. She lives with her parents and grandparents. She’s been going out on the road for a year and a half now, three times a week. She earns four or five thousand roubles a day (£80 – 100), as much as her mother gets in a month working in a shop. For each working day she gives the local gangsters 300 roubles.
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