Clockwork Russia
The only time I’d get into bad arguments with Vitaly was on the railway crossing next to his dacha.
I could bear his stubbornness, alcoholism, hooliganism and excessive use of drugs, but crossing a railway line in your car blindly just by telling the time from your watch – that’s too much for me.
“Don’t whine, I know the timetable in this place,” he would say. In his little Oka, the Soviet version of the unbeatable Fiat Panda, I felt as if we were driving in our coffin. At any given moment a Moscow-bound train could kill both of us, but Vitaly somehow managed to avoid this by checking the timetable with his cheap Chinese wristwatch.
He’s a weird fellow anyhow. His friends moved him out of town after he once again shot the windows out of his little apartment on Kutuzovsky.
By day, Vitaly heads a small but tough PR agency. By night, Vitaly is high on Moscow’s nightlife. He’s a tall, blond and handsome young man who, despite using all drugs available on the market and drinking more than a gang of sailors put together, still looks in great shape. He bursts with energy, sleeps three hours a day and is the type of person who manages to get married and divorced again over the course of a weekend.
At his old dacha, however, he cools his energy down by repairing the roof, floor and walls and building a banya. Like most Russian men, by dint of DNA, he’s able to build the house of his dreams with his bare hands.
“Most importantly, I can do whatever I want here,” Vitaly explains. He runs around naked in the fields and just last week brought an old motorcycle back to life. Using mobile Internet, he somehow still manages to run the PR firm.
It’s bizarre, but in a country where nothing really works, trains actually run on time. Not only do they depart on the very second they’re scheduled to, but they arrive with the same punctuality. Like a perfect clockwork in a ruined house.
When I once stopped in an idyllic little village not far from Murmansk, I asked the driver of the train how long we’d stay. “Ninety seconds,” he said. “You’ve got 85 left.”
The view was amazing: further down the road were a couple of little wooden barracks, and I think I even saw a herd of moose running by.
“Can’t we stay a bit longer?” I asked.
“Are you mad?’ he shouted at me. “Can you imagine what happens when we run late?”
I never could. In the most of the western world, trains run hours late (in Italy, for example, I once managed to get on a train that was delayed 37 hours). It’s acceptable to say you’re late on a meeting “due to public transport”.
But when you board a train in Murmansk, your friends in Moscow know exactly when to pick you up – even though its two days later.
So now, whenever Vitaly and I cross a railway line, I close my eyes for a second and think of the 1.2 million employees of Russian Railways. Vitaly, Moscow and in fact this whole country depends on them.
Illustration by Evgeni Vasiliev
