On The Couch. Fleur Britten

metro system;

       The railway station;

       A Russki hair salon (I had amused myself with a Moscow makeover, hairspray finish and everything).

      Not exactly Top Ten. Couchsurfing, with all its social and organisational demands, was eating into our tourists’ needs, but then,we’d seen a very different kind of tourism—intimate tourism.

      But we were just getting to know our host and our little party was over: we had to leave Olga’s at 7am the next day to meet Max, our second Moscow host (‘Please arrive at 8am—I have a very hard day.’). Couchsurfing Rule Numero Uno: guests defer to hosts. Olga assured us she’d get up early to say goodbye. She really was the sweetest thing, I said to myself, mentally composing my very first positive reference.

      14TH OCTOBER

      ‘When you come out of the metro, you’ll see a supermarket, then we are house 36.’ A riddle wrapped in a Soviet apartment block.

      Metro—check. Supermarket—check. Time check: 8.10—a little late. But house 36? House even? Encircled by row upon row of dirty white, high-rise blocks, we were stumped. We sent out a Mayday to Max, but by 8.50 (a lot late), there was still no word. We called him (wasn’t that the sound of a man freshly woken?), and received our instructions for the final stage.

      The smell came first—the fetid smell of fermenting men. At the foot of the twenty-storey Block 36, four red-faced, leering drunks swayed in the wind; a fifth was retching over clutched knees. We picked our way past the broken bottles, suspect puddles and a dark-skinned, obese woman slumped in the janitor’s cabin, and into a lift. One hour late, we got our hands on the prize.

      Max, rangy in jeans and a Cambodia T-shirt and with the flat, fringed haircut of a young geography teacher going on fifty, bounced out to greet us with a laughing, long-armed hug. Sleep creases marked his smooth Pinocchio cheekbones. ‘Lock the door behind you!’ he said merrily, as we followed him through two solid steel doors and straight into a glittering coral-pink hall resembling a camp Santa’s grotto. We were equipped with slippers (leather for the boys, flowery pink towelling for the girls), and led off the hall into a small room containing a brown velour ‘super deluxe’ sofa.

      ‘Yesterday,’ clucked Max in a singsong voice, ‘ve vent to ze couchsurfing film night, on ze Irish independence!’

      ‘Oh yes?’

      ‘Ve vatched ze Bloody Sunday, khuh khuh!’

      We courtiously laughed back, and Max took to his computer. I slumped dysfunctionally on my new bed; I’d had on average four hours’ sleep a night at Olga’s.

      ‘Zere’s anozzer couchsurfer vere you sleep. Yvonne from London!’

      I was confused, but too strung-out to pursue. Max fiddled with his computer, putting disks in, taking disks out, taking work calls (aged thirty-five, he worked in logistics, he told us), then, with a grin the size of his face, he presented us with a commemorative Moscow photo disk.

      ‘So, Max, have your other couchsurfers struggled to find your place?’ I bleated. ‘All the blocks look the same!’

      ‘Khuh khuh! Ve khave a film zat is set around New Year’s Ev, ze main kholiday in Russia. So, it’s usual to go to ze banya to clean your body and mind at zis time. When you go to ze banya, you take wodka. So, in zis film, four men khad drunk so much…’

      To shear back a long and tangled shaggy-dog story, Max was recounting a much-loved Russian film by the director Eldar Ryazanov, which was shown on Russian TV every New Year.

      ‘It’s called The Joke of Your Life,’ he explained.

      The plot followed a drunk Muscovite who mistook a Soviet apartment in St Petersburg for his own, as the addresses coincided, the appearances coincided, the interiors coincided; even the key worked.

      ‘It’s based on Soviet style of life,’ explained Max. ‘For foreign person, it’s difficult to understand.’

      We understood.

      Yvonne, a wan, thin girl with straggly, long hair, emerged from the kitchen. So that’s where we’d be sleeping; I hadn’t done that since drunken student days.

      Max hooted, ‘Breakfast Included!’

      The opposite of Olga, extroverted, jokey and unselfconscious, he made me feel instantly cosy. In the kitchen, against a pumpkin-coloured backdrop, rested a pumpkin-coloured sofa bed. Claustrophobically small, it was in fact rather like being inside an actual pumpkin. What space remained was serried with panpipes, fridge magnets and ethnic masks—Max’s apartment was a shrine to travel. If travel was Max’s religion, couchsurfers were its disciples—for Russians, visas were difficult to obtain, Max told us, and air travel was expensive: in times of need, couchsurfers brought the world to him.

      ’s phone rang again, so we acquainted ourselves with our compatriot. Couchsurfing was an obvious starting point (and current obsession).

      ‘It would be quite lonely without couchsurfin’,’ Yvonne explained in her London accent. ‘I’m twenny-one, I’ve got £1,000 to travel indefinitely. I’m going to Mongolia, China, India, Tibet, Nepal, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam…I can teach but I’d rarver not.’

      Yvonne’s conversational coffers seemed infinite—and so she went on. She’d been staying at Max’s for a week, but she’d evidently earned her moral right because she’d hosted a lot in London. She recounted how two guests had paid for her National Express ticket so she could show them Stonehenge, and how one girl had asked for the vacuum cleaner (‘My house isn’t completely spotless, right’) and left after an hour.

      Max returned and busied himself with breakfast: tea in glasses and a large bowl of chocolates and wafers.

      ‘Zere’s not so much sugar so I khave some khow-do-you-say…blackberry.’

      I gamely put some jam in my tea and took a chocolate for breakfast, but the wrapper wouldn’t budge so I aborted. Max spooned soupy chocolate spread straight from a bowl into his mouth. I went to refill the kettle from the tap, but Max leapt up, saying ‘No, no!’ and ladled a cup of water from a large pan. The point of couchsurfing was being played out—we were experiencing a new ‘normality’. A random bloke sloped in, helped himself to tea, offered legal-minimum pleasantries, and sloped out.

      ‘Khe’s out-of-verk computer programme,’ explained Max. ‘Khe’s my permanent couchsurfer. Khuh khuh.’

      ’s was evidently a hospitality that didn’t say no.

      With a stomach-turning collection of corpse-long and broken fingernails, Yvonne clawed a number into her mobile.

      ‘So can I crash your language class today?’ she drawled into the mouthpiece. ‘Cuz you said the ovva day I could sit in on your Russian class?’ Yvonne was looking for a pen.

      ‘Ruchka!’ enthused Max. ‘Tsat’s ‘pen’ in Russian. ‘Arm’ in Russian is ruka, so pen is little arm!’

      Yvonne scratched down the new word in her exercise book. It seemed they had a good tutor-student relationship going on.

      Max had to drive out of Moscow, so we gathered ourselves to leave with him; there were no spare keys and we’d have to stay out all day.

      ‘Zere’s a couchsurfing party tonight. Someone is presentation khis trip to China.’

      He furnished us with the address, and the three Londoners disentangled themselves from this force of positive energy and returned to the real world.

      Passing thunder-faced, potato-bodied babushkas selling kittens in cardboard boxes, we advanced in the drizzle to Red Square. In my sleep-deficient state, Yvonne’s motormouth was bringing out my misanthropy. Gone was my rictus smile—compulsory companionship had gone unquestioned when there was a motive but now I dropped