Svetlana and Alex, Irina and Mikael’s counterparts, are waiting for us at the Volvo dealership in Yekaterinburg, capital city of the Urals, founded in 1723 by Tzar Peter the Great and named for his wife Catherine. Since I have to forego Yekaterinburg’s sights, her monuments and museums, beautiful churches, elegant estates, I’m glad I have these two for compensation. Svetlana is petite, pert, and white blonde. In her tight, flattering beige suit, she’s dressed more like a model than a sales clerk. Alex, an amiable schlumpf, does not match her for looks, but outshines her in his eagerness to practice English. The two are equals when it comes to physical contact though, enclosing us in embraces, smacking our cheeks with more kisses, holding each door open and then, with a hand on the small of our backs, escorting us into their facility as if we’re royalty. Considering what happened to Tsar Nicholas II and his family, the last royals to pass through this city, I’m not convinced this is a good thing. Regardless, the Romanov murders happened in 1918 and this is 2007, so surely enough time has passed that Russian antipathy toward non-proletariats has dissipated. Besides, wandering around yet another car repair shop, I feel anything but noble.
Alex is all about self-improvement, imparting over the course of another long day in a dealership his hopes for a future in upper management. Meanwhile, though, he’s happy to order chicken sandwiches for us for lunch, to find a mechanic to do some spot welding under Roxanne, and to introduce us to Vladimir, his colleague in the parts department, from whom we decide to buy a new jack.
We have an excellent jack with us. To be accurate, we have two. One is the usual sort, designed to lift a car up by pumping up and down on a lever. It’s heavy, though, robust enough to jack up a vehicle even weightier than Roxanne. The other isn’t an ordinary jack at all. It’s a balloon of heavy plastic, which Bernard ordered from Taiwan, which inflates with hot air from the exhaust pipe. The idea of it is that, if Roxanne were ever stuck in soft sand, where a normal jack would sink into the ground, the balloon would spread over the soft surface and not sink in at all. As it filled, Roxanne would rise, pressed upward by the inflating mattress underneath her. The idea did not come through in practice, as the one time we tried to inflate the gadget, Roxanne’s heft won out and the inflation device gave one last gasp when the balloon was barely half full.
Given the fragile state of Roxanne’s suspension, Bernard wants to cut weight wherever we can. Despite the failure of the Taiwanese balloon jack, Bernard loves the concept and won’t part with it. Anyway, though two jacks might be overkill, there’s no question that a folded piece of plastic weighs much less than a collection of steel parts. He’s decided to ditch the heavy jack in exchange for one of more modest size, scope, and weight.
Vladimir offers us several options, each smaller and lighter than the last. Bernard selects a medium jack, one which Alexander’s translation assures us will extend to a height appropriate for Bernard to ease himself under Roxanne whenever he needs to. We stow our new, bright red, bottle jack in the trunk. Who knows? Having five pounds less in weight could be all the difference between breaking down on the Trans-Siberian and making it to Paris. Bernard gives the super-jack to Alex who appears overjoyed to be the recipient of such a strong, well-made, useful American item. Neither of us thinks to ask whether he owns a car.
Next morning, ready to drive on to Perm, the true brutal heart of the gulag, I carry satchels and bags down from our room to stash in Roxanne. I’ve perused the map of Russia, and despite having covered nearly 1,400 miles, it looks like we’ve barely made any progress at all. Russia just goes on and on and on. It’s daunting and demoralizing. No matter how much effort we put into completing a day’s drive, one look at the map shows we’ve barely made a dent in the huge distance that must be crossed before we reach the border with Estonia. The weird Russian potholes aren’t helping. They’re unlike anything I’ve seen.
First off, like the country itself, they’re vast, though that’s not the worst thing about them. While other countries put effort into filling potholes, Russia makes them bigger. What surely starts as a modest, shapely pothole with slightly sloped edges is sculpted by a road crew into a shallow trench, sometimes several feet across and as much as five or six feet long, with sharp edges and vertical sides. They’re meant to be temporary, filled in and smoothed over when an asphalt truck arrives. The problem is, there are no asphalt trucks on the highway, at least not that have made themselves apparent to me. The potholes seem to have taken on their own separate existence, and the longer they’re left open, the wider they get. They appear out of nowhere and can churn sturdy tires into mincemeat or shatter leaf springs as if they were made of balsa wood rather than quarter-inch-thick steel. Drivers have been known to risk death by swerving into oncoming traffic rather than to take a Russian pothole head on.
For a while that morning, we drive through pleasant countryside. The smell of new-mown hay fills the car. Looking for tractors pulling hay rakes and balers like at home, instead I see people in the meadows raking hay by hand. The villages we pass are prosperous. I know this because there are solid brick houses, with pots of red geraniums inside lace-curtained windows. It’s a lovely day, sunny and cool. When I close my eyes I can sift out the sweet, vanilla scent of the purple lupine and Queen Anne’s lace blooming along the road.
Without warning, Roxanne lurches. My eyelids fly open just in time to notice the largest, sheerest pothole I’ve seen. The truck we would have hit if Bernard had tried to avoid the pothole thunders past. Roxanne gamely jolts through, up, and out the other side. No tires explode. Her gas tank doesn’t erupt. Sadly, like many a mature woman, her backside now is drooping worse than ever. Even the slightest divot in the road is enough for her rear to swing wildly up and down. Bernard tightens his grip on the steering wheel to manage the bucking bronco we’re now riding in. Tension simmers between us. We each mull over the possibilities and consequences of what may have broken.
Bernard appears to calm himself by planning how he’ll address what his experience tells him is likely to be wrong. I don’t want to believe that the shocks are gone again, but don’t know what else could be causing Roxanne to want to drag her behind on the pavement. My imagination gallops through the valley of infinite disasters with me in tow.
We arrive early at the first passage control, thankful it’s a parking lot with plenty of flat surfaces for jacking up a car. Out comes the cheerful, cherry-red, new jack from the trunk. Bernard sets it up in front of Roxanne’s right rear tire. He starts pumping. The jack’s handle is flimsy and immediately bends. Roxanne rises centimeter by centimeter. Bernard glances up at me. It’s hot in the parking lot and beads of sweat are already dripping down his cheeks and neck. Finally, the jack has reached full extension, and it becomes clear that, regardless of the blithe promises on the packaging, this jack does not have the reach it’s supposed to have. Our lovely, lightweight jack is stretched to capacity, yet it barely creates enough clearance for Bernard to slide under the chassis on his back. There’s no room for him to lift his arms when under there, let alone wield any tools.
I stand next to him. Though I look for all the world like a relaxed navigator guarding the tool bag as usual, I can feel my teeth grinding and inside my pockets my hands are balled into fists. I just know that whatever’s wrong won’t be simple to fix, not here in the middle of nowhere. That, plus the thought that the flimsy Russian jack might collapse, sending our overloaded car smashing onto Bernard’s head, is making me anxious. Not wanting to add my unconstructive agitation to Bernard’s cares, I keep my mouth shut and paste a grimace on it that I hope will fool people into thinking I’m smiling.
Bernard wriggles back out from under the car, sweat pouring from his face, his collar soaked, his shirt pitted by gravel. “Broke the shock absorber mount again,” he tells me. It’s the sixth time it’s happened. In a sense, I’m relieved that this will be just another routine repair. On the other hand, I can feel aggravation building, as the loss of the shock absorber yet again makes a long day even longer. Even more irritating, while other crews have managed to execute complicated repairs to their engines out of nothing, mending major breakages like blown head gaskets and bent tie rods, we have failed to secure a proper fix for something far more simple.
Bernard heaves a sigh of frustration. “We need to find a ramp or a pit. Something I can drive the car onto and get underneath to remove it.” We give the surrounding dirt lot a quick once-over. It’s a simple affair, just a large parking area where long-haul truck drivers can pull off for a rest or refreshment. There’s no fuel here, no service bay, no mechanic.
So we leave, hoping to find a place down the road where Bernard can work on the car. To our surprise, within ten kilometers we do indeed spy a ramp, just like the one we found in Khovd, Mongolia. This one’s at the back of what appears to be a deserted auto repair shop. All the windows in what used to be the shop are broken, lethal fragments jutting from the window frames, shards scattered on the ground. Trash wafts through weeds choking for sunlight among the pavement cracks. There are no crowds here. There’s no one here at all. By now we have so much experience with shock absorbers that we make quick work of removing this one. Then Bernard turns to me and says what I’ve been dreading to hear for the past two weeks: “I couldn’t see this back at the checkpoint, but here it’s obvious.”
“No, no, no,” I beg silently. “I don’t want to hear this.”
“I don’t think the leaf spring will hold up much longer.”
I can tell you now that a leaf spring is part of what keeps a car’s rear end from bouncing uncontrollably up and down and sideways. It keeps the car straight, and gives the passengers that comfy feeling that they and their vehicle are all going in the same direction. Back then I didn’t exactly know what would happen if the leaf spring gave up, but I’d faked knowing for so long that I couldn’t bring myself to ask for details. Ignorance had been bliss. Until now.
Inching the car down off the ramp, we bump over the lip of the deserted lot onto the highway. That’s all it takes. After 4,400 miles on washboards, through sand bogs, down outrageous inclines, over rocks and holes, after whatever the world’s roads could throw at us, the leaf spring gives out on a simple curb. There’s nothing dramatic about it. One second Roxanne handles normally, the next she acts like two halves crabbing down the highway, with her front and back ends wanting to go in separate directions.
Instead of heading down the road toward the day’s destination of Kazan, Bernard turns back toward the passage control. Gone is any pretense of things being OK. The gravity of our situation is painfully apparent. Despite his relentless optimism, the best he can muster now is, “I think we can make it back. Then we’ll see.”
Bernard has a bottomless well of positivity to draw from. He’s Mr. Can-Do. If he of all people is unsure about the future, where does that leave me? Absorbing the possibilities, my eyes expand like sponges while my lungs constrict to the size of a pea. Even though I have felt variations on a theme of pity and disdain for those who have quit or whose cars have broken beyond repair, I have also, secretly, longed to be one of them. Now I’m gasping and staring, realizing my wishful thinking may be about to come true. Except that with an early end a real possibility, I find that more than anything, I don’t want it. That what’s starting to matter more is to finish what I started.
Within the fifteen minutes it takes us to retrace those ten kilometers, while I simmer in my nauseating anxiety, Bernard formulates a plan. “Look over there,” he points toward the row of empty big rigs parked behind the Rally checkpoint. “Maybe one of them’s going our way. Go get us some ice cream.” Bernard’s in his element now. When calamity strikes, he gets stronger and more assured, and somehow he finds a little space for me in that, a little job that gives me a necessary place in the ultimate success of his plans. I love having a worthwhile task on which the success of the whole depends. Right now, the success of the whole depends upon ice cream. I’m delighted to be in charge of getting it.
I emerge from the sweltering, sour-smelling restaurant across from the passage control, lime green and cherry red Popsicles already starting to melt. Squinting in the sun’s glare, I see Bernard standing by a new-looking vehicle transport truck, one that typically has ten new cars strapped doubledecker fashion on its bed. Only this one is empty. A glimmer of hope appears amid my glowering thoughts. Waving me over, he points to the stocky blond driver in oddly short shorts, who’s standing proudly next to the truck cab. “Mikhail here is going to Moscow.”
“Moscow? Really?” I squeak, handing Bernard the cherry Popsicle so it drips all over his fingers rather than mine.
An hour later, our car is strapped securely on the transport frame and we are cozily ensconced with Mikhail, me on the passenger seat, Bernard hunched over on the sleeper bed behind us. Our outrageous good fortune continues as we discover that Mikhail runs a no-smoking vehicle. What looked to be a disaster has turned into a proper adventure. Never mind that the truck seat has no suspension and that my back is aching within an hour of our start. Who cares that Mikhail and I have exhausted our meager vocabulary in each other’s language after four minutes. We’re on our way to Moscow, and we don’t have to do the driving.
Several hours pass before we stop at a roadside stand for a Russian fast food lunch of shashlik: tiny hunks of lamb succulently barbecued on a small coal brazier, served on a heap of stewed onions and peppers. The juices drip down my chin and seep through the flimsy paper plate. It’s the best meal I’ve had in Russia since we entered Siberia seven days and 2,300 miles ago. Later that afternoon, Mikhail pulls over near a group of women squatting next to little baskets of berries. He buys us a sack of the jewellike strawberries picked in the nearby woods, waves off our attempts to repay him, and says with his limited English that the harvest won’t last much longer. They’re so rarely available he always stops for some. Back on the road, the three of us snack on berries, our fingertips staining red, and I toss our last pack of biscuits on top of the glove box to add to the feast.
Ten hours after leaving the passage control, Mikhail turns into a magnificent truck stop, complete with a new motel, a large self-service restaurant, and at least one hundred darkened trucks parked like tinned sardines in the lot behind the motel. Bernard and I stumble down from the cab, two rag dolls stupefied from the long, bouncing drive. Mikhail, who’s as sprightly now as he was when we started, and who does not seem to react to the chilly air despite his tiny shorts and skimpy T-shirt, leads us into the motel foyer, a stark, efficient affair from which room keys are dispensed but little else. He chats up the concierge, motioning at us with his head. It seems he tells the concierge we are honored travelers and must have their best room, because when she shoves a gray rate sheet across the desk and points, her finger reveals that ours is the highest priced accommodation they have.
Somewhat slumped with relief that we’re no longer in the truck, we signal that any old bed will do, as long as it’s not moving; that we really don’t need their most expensive suite. Mikhail stiffens and shakes his head. We offer to pay for his room, too, but he indicates that he will be sleeping in his truck, end of discussion. The set of his shoulders is indication enough that he will take offense if we don’t treat ourselves to the best the place can offer, so we stagger up two flights of stairs and down a long hallway lined with black and purple carpet. Our accommodation turns out to be the truck stop honeymoon suite, a room so large, with such voluminous blood red velvet brocade curtains, that we burst out laughing. Velvet paintings of Russian monuments adorn the walls, an onion dome here, a triumphal arch there. On the bed is a plush burgundy coverlet, which, when flung back, reveals a fleece tiger print quilt. Two table lamps complete the Victorian safari brothel effect, managing to cast a meager buttery glow through their dense maroon fringed lampshades, leaving much of the cavernous red room in darkness. No matter. This is better than we ever expected.
We break open a bottle of warm juice, toast our unexpected good fortune, and share a handful of smashed cookie crumbs. Then we pull back the tiger spread and collapse into bed. Tomorrow we’ll be in Moscow.