Moscow – Yekaterinburg, 22nd September

I’m now on the train to Yekaterinburg. I spent last night drinking and smoking with three young Russians who are sharing my cabin – Serge, Ira and Olia. Smoking in the cabin is not allowed so we kept the door firmly locked and created a kind of hot box in the little space. It was a crazy night. Serge insisted on doing a striptease about halfway through the evening and at about 10.30 him and I went on a mad quest to find more beer (‘peevah’) though we were pretty bloody drunk by then and hardly needed more. We tried at all the steward’s cabins on the entire train before we found a dining car which presented a bizarre spectacle: it was filled with other mad, fat, tall drunk Russians. One man was half naked and dancing with a tall beautiful woman with rotten teeth. There was no music.
Ira and Olia are travelling together and both girls live In ‘Moskva’, they are aged about 26 and 22 respectively. Serge is my age and is married and from Yekaterinburg. He has been to the capital on a business trip. He’s an amusing guy, tall and lanky with a perpetually surprised expression, in fact, he would make an ideal funny guy in a comedy duo. I like him a lot. He’s a salesman and he lifted up the bottom bunk to show me his wares. Inside an enormous check plastic hold-all were hundreds, maybe thousands of pairs of glasses. I’ve honestly never seen so many glasses in one place, not even at an optician. There was something hilarious about the sight and I resisted laughing.
Serge immediately wanted to chat with me and learn some English so we embarked on a convoluted, sketch-aided conversation similar to the one I’d had with Dina. The girls seemed a little stand-offish when they first entered the cabin. Maybe it was the fact they were sharing with two guys or because I was a foreigner but soon enough they warmed up and the four of us got along great.
Both the girls are very pretty. Ira is olive-skinned and good looking in a classical way - she could be Mediterranean, while Olia is very petite and blond haired. She’s training to be a PE teacher and she spoke a little English which really helped our conversation along. She’s a tough chick despite her size while Ira seems a softer person.
During the night we played many drinking games and at one point I found myself linking arms with Olia, drinking from our beer bottles which we still held and kissing before we swallowed the beer. Whether it was an actual drinking game or just something she invented I don’t know, but it was nice either way. Serge has been ‘going for’ Ira all night but she has a boyfriend in Moscow (plus the fact he’s married anyway!) and she tactfully avoided his drunken advances. Since the beer-kiss, Serge has been hinting very obviously that Olia and I should get together – even without speaking Russian I can understand exactly what he means. The three of them have been questioning me closely about my love-life, why I don’t have a girlfriend in England, why I don’t have a girlfriend in Russia.
Serge was convinced that Olia and I would get together and he took me off to smoke a cigarette by the toilet and attempted to outline a plan designed to get me into her bed! It was a touching gesture if slightly embarrassing and I listened politely. He kept asking me if had a ‘preservatif’ and grinning manically, smoke pouring from his nostrils. I went to clean my teeth and when I got back to the cabin found that Serge had taken my bed up top leaving the bottom bunk – conveniently opposite Olia – free for me. I had immediate stage fright aware that all three of them might be waiting to see what I would do. At the same time I couldn’t be sure if the whole thing was just in Serge’s drunken mind and now transmitted to my own beer-fuzzy brain.
I fumbled around for a bit, smiled at Olia who was still sleepily awake and then turned off the light and got into bed (very comfortable compared to the Brussels-Moscow train). The ludicrousness of trying to do anything ‘romantic’ let alone have sex in a train compartment with two other people nearby suddenly hit me then. However, I was still not prepared to give up hope completely. I listened to my MP3 player for a while to buy time as I frantically racked my brains. After about four or five tracks I finally summoned the courage, sat up, plucked the headphones from my ears and reached over to give Olia a prod on the shoulder in the darkness. A half-conscious grunt decided it for me and so I settled back down in bed safe in the knowledge that I had tried my best to rouse the young Russian maiden.
The next day, when it was of course far too late, I did my usual thing with girls of mounting a full-frontal attack on a retreating army. I popped in my contact lenses, turned on the charm and granted Olia as many little favours as I could muster. I let her use my MP3 player and listen to recordings of my own songs that I’d brought along with me. She was so impressed she recorded them onto her phone via the earphones but it was all to no avail. We were no longer drunk, in a few hours we would be arriving in Yekaterinburg and our brief friendship would sadly be over.
By the end of the journey I felt very close to these guys – we’d shared a great night of revelry together and when it was over I was sad. Some time before we arrived in Yekaterinburg the girls did as Dina had done and suddenly transformed themselves from homely girls-next-door to glamour models. I didn’t like it but I guess it’s the Russian way. We all parted at the train station. Olia and Ira with a group of friends who me them at the station, Serge with his impossible bag of spectacles was met by his wife and I wandered off in search of a hotel for the night.