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Home From Home

by RACHEL SYKES

There is a small tavern in the city of Veliky Novgorod known as “Sinbad’s Cave.” The sign above the front door swings low from two brass hooks, spelling its name in faded, gold Cyrillic. Its doorway opens onto a pitch-black staircase, warm with the smell of cucumbers and damp - inside the walls are crowded with fishing nets, plastic crabs, murky portholes and an orange tree. Although the walls are unmistakably cave-like and drip in the manner of their namesake, they are made only of the dankest plastic.

Sinbad’s is neither a cave, nor even partially underground. It sells discount perogis and high percentage beer by ambiantly manufactured cave-light. Locally, it’s infamous for providing its clientele with lighting so low that you can’t tell the colour or form of the bar food. As a drinking experience, this means that it probably rates lower than consuming a can of gin and tonic in a snow drift. But for seven months, Sinbad’s was the high point of many of my days. From work, it was a last point of contact before I picked up a kilo of dates from the elderly woman on the corner of Main Street and returned to my tiny bed, two streets further, to listen to my host brother sing “Material Girl” through the walls.

Seven years after the fact, I get told off for talking about Russia. This must be to do with what I returned as. A mass of hair grown to two feet in length, wooden beads around my wrist and neck, a Discman full of ripped CDs of Russian ska, I had Novgorod written across my body and was not afraid to force it into the eye line of others. In the months after I left, all my thoughts turned towards it, my entire body feeling like its reboot might need several years to take hold. For my even more luckless friends, it was the break-up I never got over. I would lie on student futons and talk obliquely about my “soul” and the “Russian winter” spent in Sinbad’s Cave, until the memories of this place, which I had seized in a moment but crafted only in retrospect, were formed out of the desire to make myself an other.

I remained in daily contact with a friend I had met there. It became strange how, more often than not, we did not recall the excitement of our time together. We didn’t mention the adventures around a city where everyone noted our privilege, the drug dealers who wanted to date us, the strange trips to the middle of Russian nowhere. It was the mundanity that we wanted back. The elaborate and immensely boring routine which we had carved for ourselves in what had seemed like a parody of the western world. This, to us, was what became remarkable.

My friend was a seventeen year-old Australian girl, shipped with me to Novgorod by a ramshackle teaching organisation and instructed to teach the English we quite obviously misunderstood. We met on our first day as teachers and fell quickly into friendship, the two of us very much in love with our dissimilarities. As teenagers, we were still shaping ourselves out of the shadows of others. We loved each other, for the cold winter in which we both turned eighteen, because being so very different made us ambitious for ourselves. We were friends because we were obsessed with our hormones.

“It’s spring,” she would say, scanning the men as we crossed the melting snow towards Sinbad’s. “All the animals are mating.”

I looked at her and would often nod very sagely, pretending to be neither British nor sexually awkward. I wasn’t quite sure that what she was saying applied to me, but I did know that I wanted her to think it did.

The city wall in Veliky Novgorod

So for seven months we sat together in Sinbad’s, or in a better lit café called only “GRILL” that sold chicken covered in cat hair. On bad days, we ate the chicken. But on good days, we drank vodka with a glass of peach juice, listing one hundred Australian terms for vomit and conjugating Russian on the side. On one of these good days, whilst constructing a manifesto on oral sex, my friend began a list of what she was seeking in The One. Bullet by bullet, we wrote each point painstakingly in English then translated into Russian, in the back of my teaching book, a bright notepad whose cover dramatically recreated the bedtime routine of a family of Russian mice.

“A former drug addict,” she said with the pen poised at her mouth. “That’s obvious. Also, a drug dealer swagger, a B.O. problem, and a disgusting amount of back hair. And I mean, disgusting.”

The only thing I knew with that degree of certainty was that I wanted to go at least twenty-four hours without falling over on the ice. As it was, I couldn’t imagine myself an ideal. I could barely conceive of anything to settle for.

As a reality that I was more comfortable with, we described our friends at home in exquisite detail. Eventually, there were no parts of our lives that the other did not understand. We could give a full description of every best friend we’d claimed since kindergarten, every boy we’d brushed the hand of, every pop song that made us feel mind-numbingly understood, as only good pop songs could do. We might never have left home; we made sure every part of it followed us to that cat-lined café.

Slowly, together, we wrote intricate profiles of our fellow teaching assistants. Pages and pages in length, it seemed as though missing any detail of their fledgling personalities would mean that their memory escaped us forever. We denied them the privilege in which we luxuriated, defining their personalities with damning solidity. Tearing off every sticker from every bottle of beer we drank, making blood brother promises to spend our lives meeting in countries halfway between our antipodean homes until the ultimate goal might be achieved: a tour of the Eastern bloc in our twilight years.

There was no doubt that this was the point to which our future would always return. And we had to remember every part of it for when we eventually came back, together, fifty years in the future.

Church of the Saviour on Blood, St. Petersburg

One of our Russian friends, Yulia, wanted to follow us back home. Yulia was infamous amongst our friends for her love of aerobics. Her infamy spread for one simple reason; when she introduced herself to strangers she began by saying: “I love to shape my body.” Repeated explanations of her body’s morphic qualities meant that we referred to her only as “Shaping” for six months. She claimed not to care. When we suggested she should visit us in either Anglo pole of the world, she would respond with a sigh: “Quite frankly, girls, this is the only reason I am being friends with you.”

Shaping had a game she liked to play. In the middle of crowded bars, she would tear us each a square of her plain white notepad and distribute pieces between us. “Close your eyes,” she would say, “close them tightly.” Then, placing a pen in our hands, she would ask us to draw a room with no windows or doors, the colour of a brilliant white. “This,” she would whisper in our ears, “this is what heaven will be like.”

As a party trick, it wasn’t a lot of fun. But if we didn’t play along, she would go off to her shaping class in a puff of anger, upsetting chairs and beer cans as she left. The game would last for about fifteen minutes and by the time we surfaced out of our trance, all we could see were white lights and phobias of death. Shaping told us that the aim was to find the most important thing in our lives, to focus our energies on what we cared for the most. She claimed her white room had to be some form of gymnasium.

In the back of one of our notebooks, my Australian friend wrote to me: “Here’s to a lifetime of meeting half-way between us, until the time we enter a white room with no windows and no doors.”

Months after we left Russia for the final time, we struggled to see ourselves in our notebooks. By the end of our short time there, I had fallen in and out of love enough times to feel, firstly, less British, and secondly, changed in a deeply fundamental but ultimately inexplicable sense that no-one at home would ever be able to understand. Outwardly I might look the same: same skirts, same woolly hats, same discount t-shirts with “MAKE TEA. NOT WAR” written across them in inoffensive pastels. But still, my world had expanded, unfathomably. If I was sure of anything, I was 99% sure of this.

The full terror of that remaining 1% was enough to ensure that my friend and I wrote to each other every day. Back in Australia, she felt like she was waking up from a seven-month hangover. I had half-heartedly started at university. Bulbous packages, some actually shaped like kangaroos, turned up at my halls of residence, spilling coasters of every Australian city over my textbooks. I sent back ill-formed letters, attempting to delicately balance first-year philosophy with explicit sexual content. I interpreted, revisited, cut and paste sacred parts of my diaries and scrap books, adding photos, CDs, and, unbeatably, excerpts from the five tapes of the dictaphone I had religiously carried. I had recorded impulsively and without discrimination, leaving me with tape upon tape of appalling in-jokes, accordion music, and depressing speeches from our superiors, whose job of teaching English expanded far beyond our seven month holiday in Veliky Novgorod.

In October, the month I started university, I got an email with the following writ large in the subject box. “ELENA SERGEIVNA,” it read, “IS NOT HAVING AN ASSISTANT THIS YEAR.”

St. Sofia's cathedral, Novgorod

Starting universities on opposite ends of the planet, we were running at everyday life with all the gravitas of an astronaut returning from space. About my year abroad I was casual and always cool in conversation. We had lived through a Russian winter, I would say, what can the north of England do to me? I was in danger of becoming one of the people that university guides warn you about. Empty bottles of vodka lined my tiny room, Soviet matchbooks lit the cigarettes of strangers, and a miniature accordion sat on my kitchen table. Sometimes, as if struggling for affectation, I still carried the Dictaphone.

In October, two months out of our English teacher guise, my friend told me that our role as teaching assistant no longer existed.

Elena Sergeivna was an English teacher who had married young to a man in the Russian militia. She taught the humanities pathway in our school in Novgorod, where the high achievers of the top year, we were told, would develop a fine grasp of English in order to become an economist in either New York, or Leicester.

“We expected poets,” we complained, “We get economists.”

As Elena Sergeivna repeatedly told us, teachers in Russia earnt as much as doctors. But doctors earned the least in the country. The teachers who did the most work still needed second jobs and would frequently ask us if we knew of anyone who needed a cleaner. Elena had finally decided to get pregnant. Now in her early thirties she would loop the following phrase: “I am only here until pregnancy.” We mourned the fact that a woman both so young and so unmotherly could soon be with child. She had assumed that two fully grown women would not need looking after; we, in turn, gave her no pity.

After we left Novgorod, we never heard from Elena again. But three months later, word somehow reached Australia that our former jobs had been done away with.

“We’re obviously not good enough,” my friend suggested, before rattling off an anecdote about the time we ate two litres of soup, ordered in a Chinese restaurant because we knew neither the relevant Chinese, nor the relevant Russian.

In England, I continued to tease and provoke relationships with my ex-teachers in ways that extended their every relevance to my world. I made sure if I had to leave Russia that most of the Russia I knew would come with me. It was inconceivable that I could be anything but the weirdest personality that my closest Australian friend had helped to cultivate through seven months in Sinbad’s Cave.

When I went on dates, I would say I was passionate about dried fruit and pickled cabbage. “As long as the dried fruit has been stored in two metres of snow,” I would add glibly. “I like ska-punk. And I like to pluck my eyebrows.”

I was nineteen years old. And Elena Sergeivna never had an assistant again.

Rachel Sykes is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Nottingham. This is her first appearance in these pages. She tumbls here.

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