On The Couch. Fleur Britten
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Ollie a pair of brown leather, open-toed sandals of dubious sexuality, and me some pink towelling slippers. Hit by the smell of a second-hand bookshop, we looked up from our feet. Bearing down on us was an object lesson in cold Soviet life: peeling ochre wallpaper covered with old theatre posters, dusty cabinets and shelves piled with books, old photos and dead flowers. We were in a 1950s time warp.
‘Wowwww,’ Ollie and I emitted in unison.
‘Well,’ explained Olga, without uttering the vowel. ‘It was my grandparents’ place. My mother was born here, my parents used to live here—it hasn’t really changed since then.’ Her eyes darted around. An only child, she now lived alone. I wondered, was couchsurfing supposed to bring the company she craved?
It was hard to ignore the blood-boiling heat.
‘Russia has a centralised heating system,’ Olga said, fidgeting with her hands like they didn’t belong to her. ‘The heating is turned on at the same time every year by the government. Residents have no control. If we go on holiday for two weeks, it is still on.’
Her windows were wide open.
‘What about the environment?’ I spluttered.
‘Mother Russia doesn’t worry about natural resources,’ she said, her eyes scouring the floor.
I’d read that Russia had the world’s largest natural gas reserves and second-largest coal reserves, and was the world’s third-largest energy consumer. I opened my mouth, then let it go—best not to insult the host country.
A sinewy silence slipped out. My arms were crossed and clinging on to each other tight, while Ollie was pretend-laughing at thin air. Olga was biting her cheeks tensely. Frozen in this psychological drama, we were all hyperaware of ourselves. I, for one, couldn’t quite get those bossy Muscovites’ constitutions that I’d read in London out of my head. What would real couchsurfers be doing now, I wondered?
‘Shall we make our beds?’ I offered helpfully. Knowing where I’d be sleeping would be one comfort. Olga directed us straight ahead with an outstretched arm: ‘I have bedding if you need.’ Ollie and I entered the living room (though any evidence of life here had long since departed) and Olga discreetly left us to it. Yet we continued to behave as if she were still in the room; no conspiratorial whispering—we were still being ‘good’.
There, in the darkest corner of a long, low-lit room (most bulbs had blown) was my couch—an actual couch. Apparently from the 1980s (though it looked 1970s—maybe that was the Russian delay), it was a coffin-sized rectangle of foam upholstered in a brown and beige, zigzag-patterned, coach-seat fabric. Ollie said he’d prefer the retro, canvas camp bed, which didn’t look comfortable but, he insisted gallantly, its wonky elevation would be good for his leg. The fact that Ollie and I would be sharing a room—a first in our long history—was vaguely unsettling, but it was the least of our new experiences. What was more overwhelming was suddenly finding myself in the slipstream of someone else’s life. I was wearing Olga’s slippers, breathing her air and shadowing her life. It all felt extraordinarily random.
We regrouped with Olga in the hallway, and handed over our gift. In response to our invitation, she’d politely suggested a book of our choice, and we’d picked a photographic compilation, London Through a Lens. She unwrapped it, peered at it, flicked through it, but it was impossible to decipher her half-nod, halfsmile and restless hands. Maybe we’d embarrassed her.
‘Would you like a drink?’ Olga offered.
We repaired to her modest kitchen, which looked unchanged since the 1950s—rose-print kitchen units, an electric oven and a quaint, rounded, ceramic sink—and sat at a humble breakfast table.
‘I’d love a drink of water,’ I supplicated.
‘Oh. That could be a bit difficult.’ She looked mildly ashamed. ‘You can’t drink the tap water here.’
She poured the tepid remains of water from the kettle into a teacup for me. Ollie and I were starving.
‘Do you do much cooking?’ Ollie asked.
‘I don’t cook for couchsurfers,’ she said with surprising frankness. ‘I just cook for myself. It’s not so tasty; it’s very basic things. But you can help yourself.’
She opened a monastic-looking fridge to reveal eggs, bread and cheese. A sticker on the door read WHERE ON EARTH IS PERTH?
‘From a couchsurfer,’ she said.
Now that our first living-and-breathing couchsurfer was firmly in our clutches, we cross-examined her with our entry-level questions. Forget Putin and polonium—what we really wanted to know was: how was it with other couchsurfers? Was it strange the first time she hosted?
‘It was something unusual,’ she said, smiling quietly, ‘so I didn’t know what to do.’
That was at least reassuring. Telling us how she’d hosted a male English teacher for six days, I wondered how this shy sparrow had coped, and then I thought, maybe it was our gaucheness polluting the atmosphere. I was looking forward to when this all felt more normal.
‘Did you ever give any bad references?’ I asked, trying to feel for the edges of this experiment.
‘Most people don’t leave negative references unless it’s really bad,’ Olga replied. ‘I had a couple of fairly bad guests, though they never broke or stole anything. ‘I did hear that one host found their guest shooting up.’
Olga’s ‘worst ever guest’ treated her like his servant, asking her for tea, coffee, to buy his train ticket, ‘Can I have my breakfast now?’
‘He asked for many, many things like this, and he didn’t bring anything,’ she said, softly indignant.
Our problem was the opposite: British reserve and a keen concern for etiquette. Perhaps ten weeks of couchsurfing would knock it out of us. Still, at least first-time guests were still grateful. There was obviously some delicate balance to strike, somewhere in between excessive courtesy and taking liberties.
As for sexual harassment, she’d received messages, from mostly Turkish and northern African men, saying, ‘You look nice—let’s be friends.’ Impossible, given that Olga’s profile picture was of foliage. I’d noticed girls who seemed naked in their profiles, I said.
‘Yes, probably,’ she laughed timidly. ‘And they never look as good as their picture.’
The 1950s standard wasn’t so welcome in the bathroom: there was no lock (the door didn’t even shut), the single-ply toilet paper was the colour of Jiffy bag stuffing, and above the sink was an old-fashioned shaving brush, some wooden combs and antique mildew.
Back in the kitchen, the wine came out. ‘It’s only cheap and sweet,’ Olga apologised, adding, ‘It’s how I like it. Would you like some?’
‘Oh—only if you’re having some.’
‘No, no, please have if you like.’ She poured from an open bottle labelled ‘La Jeunesse’. Nibbling on past-it black and white grapes, Ollie and I smiled away our hunger. There was a couchsurfing house party that night, Olga said, the leaving party of an Irish couchsurfer called Donna. Result. We’d just inherited her social life—it felt liberating to have to go with it.
En route to the party, Olga pointed out one of the Kremlin’s potent red stars atop its spiky towers. A volt of joy fizzed through my body: we had a house party, a hand-holder and a local guide through Europe’s largest city. We passed a street kiosk and refuelled on public-transport-grade potato-filled pirojki pies, too flabby and tepid to be savoured.
Inside another anonymous Soviet apartment block, past a fourfoot—high mound of coats, twenty-five-odd twenty-somethings were mingling amongst the scatter cushions and up-lighters. The first four guests we encountered had been made redundant. ‘Actually, it freed me,’ said a Russian in a blazer. ‘There’s no point for career