Waiting for Spring: 4) Kazan

Why? When? 

The relatively new 'Temple of all Regions' outside Kazan

A myth was formed around Kazan from the first time I heard the name. It was depicted to me as a hub of beautiful architecture, educated citizens and an interesting mix of 'Mongol' and Russian culture, where a mosque and a kremlin could peacefully exist together as the symbol of the city. It was promised to be the 'third capital' of Russia and the centre of one of the country's most important economic regions: Tatarstan. When inquiring about the city, I received no negative comments: an acquaintance who had grown up there told me that it was one of the most sophisticated parts of Russia; countless people from Krasnodar to Minsk told me that they dreamed of going there...

I planned to travel from Yekaterinburg to Moscow by train, and Kazan was the ideal resting point in between: I wouldn't have to spend a whole day travelling. Yet I hesitated to visit the city: too many positive comments made me feel intimidated. What if it wasn't actually that beautiful? What if I couldn't enjoy it because I was supposed to? What if it just didn't feel right for me?

To be quite honest, I was wary of Kazan for the same reasons I am sometimes wary of France. Everybody loves France. Everybody learns French.  Everybody speaks well of French cuisine. Everybody thinks their language is beautiful, everybody adores French philosophy and everybody seems to dream of romantic holidays glugging wine on the Seine. As a result, in my perception France immediately loses a certain quantity of beauty: it becomes a standard given beauty, rather than the unexpected, the new and the adventurous beauty I prefer. When I spend time in France, I actually quite like it, but when I think about France, I get a bizarre feeling of dread and ennui. I have always respected its citizens as I would any human being, I learned its language as enthusiastically as I could muster in my school days (even winning in a French language debating competition), listened to its music, travelled to the country... But something didn't quite click: It's a beautiful place, but it's not my beautiful place. It doesn't quite make me feel at ease. It doesn't thrill me or speak to me like other places can. This isn't a rational standpoint; it is more romantic and instinctive. My psychology rests more peacefully in other climes...

My instinct told me that the time wasn't right to visit Kazan. At first, I tried to go against this foreboding, irrational feeling: I made plans to get up early in the morning and buy the train ticket well in advance at the station, so that I would definitely leave that evening. Instead I slept sixteen hours and woke up nauseous and unsettled. The next day, instead of attempting to buy the train ticket again, I ended up going back to Magnitogorsk  -- for the second time – because my story of that place felt incomplete and still compelled me, whereas there was something premature and unpleasant about my plans for Kazan.

A digression on train stations

I should, at this point, make a little detour and explain why it is often very important to go to the train station in advance:  depending on circumstances, buying a ticket at a Russian station can take between ten minutes and an hour. If you stand in the queue for the ticket desk, you have to make sure that said queue won't just randomly stop working in a few minutes time. All the ticket desks have their schedule written on a sheet of paper stuck to the corner of the glass screen. A first time train traveller is unlikely to notice this schedule, but nonetheless you must always check it before you even start queuing, otherwise you might queue twenty minutes, with frustratingly slow crowds of people in front of you, and then finally, when it's your turn, realize that the desk is closing in thirty seconds ('Sorry, young man, this desk always closes at 20:36!'). The staff will refuse to serve you. The poor guys just want to go home.

If you do manage to get to a ticket desk that is open, your status as a foreigner can still create confusion as the ticket seller looks through your passport trying to find the details needed for the system. Moreover, if you are hesitant at speaking Russian and don't say your request immediately, the person behind you will probably just brush past and take your spot. Everybody hates a time waster. In the best case, a kind-faced, bemused stranger will look at you like an alien and exclaim: 'What are you so shy for?' ("Че стесняетесь?")

The alternative is, of course, the ticket machines. These, however, are very frustrating and may lead to finger bleeding and grievous bodily harm. They look like innocent little touch screens. You would expect to just lightly press the buttons with your soft, delicate fingers and then frolic off joyously clutching your choo-choo ticket. But no. This is Russia. The machines require you to suffer to earn your ticket. You're expected to press the buttons not with your fingers, but with your nails. And if you don't have any real nails to talk of, then tough, it's going to be a hard, painful procedure. I normally feel like crying half way through. There is something distinctly unpleasant about the sensation of repeatedly pressing my short, ineffective nails against the hard screen. The only thing that keeps me going is the unpredictability of the queues. The machines may inflict physical discomfort, but they are at least predictable, and normally always unoccupied. The queues, on the other hand, are like the great shifting sands of the Sahara: theirs changes in form and size are both majestic and unexpected, presumably corresponding with the patterns of the wind. 

Let us for a minute imagine a pretty standard ticket desk situation. Put your mind and soul into the body of the feeble ticket tourist, breathe deeply, activate your senses, feel your chi and give yourself up to the following scene: You walk through the security gate, pick up your heavy black rucksack from the scanner, turn your head in search of the needed desk and navigate your glance through crowds of standing people, kiosks selling magazines and children sitting on suitcases. Eventually, you spot a far off desk and take joy in the fact that there's only one kind-featured older figure getting served. You instinctively go to this queue, skipping in your luck. They'll be quicker than that other quite substantial line to your right, you think, and proceed to wait.

Nope.

That's a bad assumption.

Sorry, but you have been fooled.

The humble citizen’s procedure will inevitably take a total of fourteen minutes as they:

1) ask for a refund of an old ticket

2) inquire about luggage policies and whether they need to buy insurance 

3) wonder whether there is an adequate on-board buffet

4) ask for seats in carriage 4, away from the toilets, in the lower bunk, with bedding provided, for the train between Moscow and Irkutsk on the 14th April at 16.05pm, which, frustratingly, is about 4 months in advance, when you just need your ticket, here, now, for the next available train which is leaving at... well, pretty much immediately really.

Moreover, you may get to the end of the queue only to realize that you don't have enough cash at hand (prices on the internet sometimes don't correspond to prices at the station). You can't pay the ticket seller by card. The only place you can pay by card is at the ticket machine and you gave up on that deliberately, because your fingers were bleeding. Oh, and you thought maybe you could ask the ticket seller for advice. But that is also a dangerous game. Sometimes they are genuinely lovely and very helpful, giving you a long list of options. Sometimes they look so fed up with their job that your question about the best seat for your journey provokes a reaction as if you have just said the stupidest thing in the world. You have literally just asked them whether the moon is really that big, whether Yeltsin is still president and whether Petrozavodsk is the capital of Russia. Either that or you've spilt wine over their cream carpet, accidentally neutered their poodle and shat on their doorstep.

Occasionally there are queues of twenty or thirty people that move swiftly, with German-style efficiency. But these queues are like a mirage in the desert. They only ever seem to happen to the people in the queue beside you. Trust me, you will never actually be in one of these queues. They are merely created by ultra-nationalist terrorists to piss off foreigners. They are a huge conspiracy. Do not believe your eyes. They are deceiving you. Just bludgeon your fingers on the machines instead. Much more efficient. Oh, and you'll have cool 'war scars' to show the grandchildren.

....

Actually, maybe it's not that horrific. But still: be prepared.

Fifteen empty beds

 

Sludge

More sludge

I went to Kazan in the end. At my own pace, when I sensed that I had become comfortable with the situation, that it didn't matter whether I would like it or not, and when I felt that I was ready to make that step: leaving the Urals would be taking me towards Moscow and St. Petersburg and would tacitly confirm that my pre-Spring journey through Russia wasn't permanent: that I had to go back to Krasnodar at some point and that these adventures would have an end.

I arrived in Kazan to coincide with a sudden warm-up in the weather. While it was still in the minus teens and twenties in Yekaterinburg, here the snow was melting. The city was covered in a mess of dirty sludge and icicles were precariously falling from the roofs. The street surfaces were ugly and brown and given that the avenues and roads were quite wide, this browness stung the eye. The elegantly designed building facades looked pale under a permanently dull sky. It was obvious that the ill-intentioned weather had reached a peak in its conniving plans to spoil the city's beauty. 

To make things worse, I had given my friend S. back his supernaturally efficient snow boots and was now wearing a pair of old, shabby winter shoes with loose soles I had bought for a trip to the Alps when I was seventeen. They were not watertight enough for the piles of snow and the sludge splashes that passing cars inflicted. Precarious icicles if you walk too close to the buildings, flying sludge puddles if you walk too close to the road, and wet feet in any circumstance. It wasn't a particularly good start to my visit.

The cheapest hostel I could find was also not exactly the epitome of travelling spirit. A good hostel is a place where adventurous travellers slum it together: casting off the luxuries of the world to appreciate the small things in life, to teach each other about music and varying philosophies and their different countries of origin and destination. They are places where you can feel free to be yourself, because everyone gives off a quiet aura of acceptance: they allow the different to be different. Pressures evaporate and you feel at home in a foreign country. I appreciate that these kinds of untainted, idealistic hostels are pretty rare, but I hoped that I would at least meet one or two impassioned travellers over a cup of coffee and talk about what inspired us to come to the middle of Russia at the end of winter.... That, in the end, turned out to be the problem. No-one actually comes to the middle of Russia in the winter! At least not very many travellers. I think I saw one Uzbek family in the other room, but my 16-bed dorm was just that: a 16-bed dorm. Tumbleweed. I was the only guest.

I locked my possessions in my room and wondered what I should do. I decided I would immediately try to make friends in the city. I would test how charming and educated they could actually be. I didn't have the patience for finding someone on couchsurfing. I needed something more immediate. After all, I am not a visual person. The tactile and aural sides of my personality and memory are much more developed. Whereas a beautiful voice, the warmth of my bed or the strokes of a massage can lead me into a semi-orgasmic trance, I rarely get a huge wave of euphoria from seeing a beautiful building. There has to be a context behind the building to make me really appreciate its beauty: whether it be the harmonious voice of a good-hearted person explaining to me the characteristics of the beauty and why it is relevant to their life, or a musical soundtrack played on to the beauty, or a feeling of overwhelming, heightened romanticism caused by such temporary afflictions as literature or falling in love. I decided I needed to meet someone to show me the architecture, to draw emphasis on the little moments of genius in the city's structure and to draw my eyes away from the gaping sludge.

Luckily, being homosexual can prove a great advantage to travellers. Firstly, LGBT+ communities in countries with higher levels of oppression can be very welcoming of outsiders and form supportive communities to survive. Not always – you should always be very cautious – but often. Secondly, in the 'gay world' the use of smartphone apps for meeting people is much more widespread. Obviously, we all know of the infamous/useful/bug-ridden (delete as appropriate) app 'grindr', which literally tells you how far away the closest men with homosexual inclinations are. Whereas grindr has gained a reputation as being mainly for people looking for immediate sex (and other people use okcupid and all those lovey dovey sites), in Russia there is another app which is much more widespread and a lot less sex-driven. Its name is Hornet. It beats Grindr in several key ways:

1) It shows more than one picture of your future date/conversation partner/tennis buddy

2) It allows you to save favourites

3) It allows you to 'investigate' who is in a certain city by dropping a pin on the virtual map. Meaning if you get bored one evening, you can just spend hours travelling the world with that urging question in your mind of: 'What do the online gays in Tokio/Rio De Janeiro/ Istanbul/ Ulan Batоr look like?'

4) It allows you to easily scroll between users

5) In Russia nobody uses Grindr and most users of Hornet don't even know what it is

6) You may occasionally get sent a foreskin-frothy penis picture by an older gentleman, offering you to be his sex slave, but in general it has quite a lot of open-minded people who are just looking for conversation partners, friends or boyfriends. After all, in Russia there are very few open places for meeting partners for LGBT+ people. The internet is key.

Within an hour I had arranged to meet Gleb, a twenty-something year old guy from the suburbs, who was in a stable relationship and simply intrigued at the idea of meeting a foreigner. Oh, and hopefully at the idea of meeting me too. I try to sound interesting on the internet for things other than my foreigness, as being exotic is a pretty shallow trait. I normally don't write that I'm not from Russia until half way through the conversation as I don't want to make friends for being the novelty westener. I don't particularly identify with a western, Irish or British persona: I understand that my upbringing and education have had a huge effect on me, placing me in a certain mentality and scale of cultural and psychological values that I will probably never transcend, but I try to base my development in life on broader, more general human values. I don't want to be a nationality. I don't want to be a country. I don't want to be an accent. I want to be a good, intelligent, valued person. I have a strong dislike for 'patriotism' across the world. It seems stupid to love your state. 

I prefer a more pragmatic approach to any government. Never get complacent as love for your country can easily turn into a superiority complex: thinking that you are better than other 'races' or nations or blindly praising the state. It's important to love who you are (and that often involves learning to love, or at least accept, your roots and the place you were born), but it is also important to love the world as a whole. But that's another topic and I won't digress. You, on the other hand, can feel free to go ahead and write a dissertation on whether you agree with Samuel Johnson's statement that 'patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel'. Come on. You know you want to. I accept applications via pigeon mail or carried on the backs of butterflies.

Black to Gleb, whose name rhymes with 'Khleb' (bread).

'What's your name?' I asked when we met.

'...' he replied, mumbling a name that I thought sounded beautiful, but somehow also managed to instantaneously forget, 'but everyone calls me Gleb.'

I later asked him why he went by a different name. He told me he just preferred his new name. It was more him. I told him, flippantly, when we were already on good terms, that his name rhymed with the word for 'bread'. 'Yep', he agreed proudly with a wide smile, 'it does'.  He loved his new name. I hated it. Gleb, Gleb, Gleb, Gleb, Gleb, Gleb, I repeated to myself on the way home, Gleb, Gleb, Gleb, Gleb, Gleb, Gleb, Gleb, Gleb, Gleb, Gleb, Gleb, Gleb, Gleb. Sounds like a frog quickly spouting foam. I didn't tell him I didn't like his name. I think he sensed it, but didn't care. He was calm within himself. He had a happy, kind, very relaxed aura. I could understand why he said 'many people don't like to talk to me': his calmness could perhaps be interpreted as a little bit smug by those with lower self-esteem, and he asked very deep, personal questions even though he barely knew me, which to some may seem intrusive. I, on the other hand, loved it. I appreciated the fact that through this means our conversation was able to transcend the everyday small talk and niceties that can numb the mind and dull the wit. We immediately reached a deeper level of communication, even if it did sometimes scrape the skin and roughen the bone to think of answers to difficult questions. To a certain extent, it reminded me of myself. I always like to ask people strange questions. Mostly I simply ask what comes into my mind. I think it's the best way to get to know someone on an honest level. Sometimes I feel an urge to ask people about their relationships with their parents or family or partners; or about what kind of beliefs or assumptions make up the philosophy that keeps them alive rather than jumping of a bridge; or sometimes I ask whether they like the colour of the grass or whether they wear odd socks or whether Shirley Bassey has had an effect on their perception of the world. This approach can make you great friends very quickly. It can also make people think you're a data-mining psychopath. You win some, you lose some.

I must mention that I met Gleb beside a dragon. I thought I really ought to find out why there was a dragon standing outside the metro station, but I decided it was best not to. That way I could call him Fred the friendly dragon and wonder about his function for the rest of my visit. Sometimes seeking answers and playing with hypotheses is more fun than the answer itself. Fred was the first thing whose beauty I appreciated in the city.

Gleb was effective in adding some context to the place, in lifting my mood and in letting me appreciate that I was in a beautiful environment, although he kept repeating 'why have you decided to travel Russia in Winter?' and telling me that I really ought to come back in Summer. 'Definitely no earlier than May! Even April could be risky.. The snow can be very persistent..'

At this point, my eyes probably glazed over and I probably went into one of my phases where I start being mildly poetic. I explained to Gleb that it didn't matter that it was winter. I needed wide open spaces. I needed trains travelling over huge expanses. I needed fir tries zooming past my eyes. I needed inspiration for poetry and life and little doses of madness and creativity along my path. I needed huge adventures and little pleasures. I needed the beauty of being alone in places I didn't know. I needed the security of little anonymous cafes where you can warm your hands with a mug of tea and imagine that you must seem mysterious with your little notebook, your biro and your continuous smile at the wonders of the morning. I needed freedom, or the illusion of it. I needed to meet boys and feed my heart on the hope that I would fall in love with one of them. I needed to finally grasp Russia within my hands and feel that it was whole and pulsating and vibrant and H.U.G.E., and not just one part of one small region, where I had lived for four months. I needed a psychological escape. I needed to move from place to place, to spend time alone, to figure out which elements in my mind were external and which were my own. I needed Kazan in the winter with the sludge and the non-waterproof boots and the cars honking outside McDonalds in the rush-hour gloom. I needed these things to feel alive.

I love stability and warmth and relationships of lasting, tested value. But I am also changeable and impatient. I need adventure to feel I am making something meaningful from life. I need the ability to fly last minute to Siberia or Arkhangelsk. I need this wildness. I can't live without higher emotions, more colourful colours, deeper impressions, feelings that pass the skin, glances which actually penetrate and touches which actually burn. I need insulation from the numbness of a day which is the same as that which has passed and that which is coming. I can handle -- and even love -- stability for periods of several months. I love cats, I love books, I love sitting cross-legged on floors learning languages, I love vibrantly dancing to motown in my teenage bedroom at 4 am and I love warm, homely snuggles with my pillow factory -- but I can only go through these stable stages in my life if I can dream of the rawness of travelling, knowing that it's not just a dream, but a reality that will come to life in a matter of a few small months, or a few days of patience, or a few hours. When I arrived back to Krasnodar after Christmas, I couldn't see an opportunity to leave for another few months. I saw ice falling from the trees. I saw people shouting at each other and the elements, and I felt mundanity suffocating me, not allowing for change. That's why I decided to fly thousands of miles away at the last minute. That's why I decided to travel Russia in the middle of the Winter, hoping for a quick spring. That's why I didn't have a clue where I was going or what I was doing, but still loved it.

I couldn't put this to Gleb in so many words, but I think he understood it and accepted it. His question of 'why in Winter?' was probably more related to his love for Kazan, rather than anything else. 'You should come back in summer, the city is ten, twenty times prettier...'

He was proud that I found things beautiful.

During our walk we talked about his relationship. He loved his boyfriend. In fact, even though he was currently unemployed, he told me that he could only ever meet in the evenings. They were reserved exclusively for his boyfriend, who he described as intelligent ('much more intelligent than me'), ambitious and educated. He said that he didn't want to hold him back, that he would always give him freedom to leave and move to another city or country and to make progress in work or education. He also said that one day he hoped he would have a wife and biological children. His boyfriend, on the other hand, dreamed of sharing his life's path with him for the long run.

'Why?' I asked. 'Couldn't you avoid getting a wife and build the same sort of relationship with him? Then at least you would be creating a family with someone you loved, and the family would be based on love?'

'I can love a woman.'

I realised I had made an assumption about his sexuality and romantic interests. I asked whether he experienced significant physical attraction to a woman.

The answer was somewhere along the lines of 'not really'. I was sceptical about his plans, but he began to speak about the importance of finding a person, not a gender. He said that even though he is attracted to males, it doesn't mean that there won't be a female that he would fall in love with. He didn't have to be a sexuality, he could just love, and he was adamant that one day he could love a woman.

I could have made more assumptions. I could have assumed that he was gay and didn't believe that his goals of a long-term relationship and a family were viable in Russia, therefore he was imagining love for a woman. But I decided that these were assumptions and they didn't have much value anyway: I was sure he had been told the same thing many times and he still held to his dream. It might work out. It might not work out. He might change beyond recognition in the future, he might stay the same. The boyfriend might leave, they might celebrate their 40^th wedding anniversary sipping lime sodas in Barbados. But he was calm, and I was calm. We could accept each other as we were. I couldn't help but believe him. The topic passed.

Somewhere on the path to the phone shop, where I bought myself a new charger with the words 'give me the cheapest thing you've got for this kind of hole' (pointing to the charger socket. I didn't know what to call it...), we touched on the topic of open relationships. His talk about the importance of giving his partner freedom had made me want to test the boundaries of this openness. He was quite against the idea of sex or romance with more than one partner.

Partly to play devil's advocate and partly to defend the relationships of many healthy couples I know, I took up the opposite argument. I maintained that humans have various needs for love: romantic desire, sexual desire, and the desire for stability, warmth and partnership. It's very hard to satisfy these three needs at once, or for the whole period of your relationship. You might be romantically in love with someone and sexually attracted to them, but they can't give you the feeling of partnership and a shared path through life that you would have with your wife of twenty years. Or you may not be sexually attracted to your partner anymore and therefore want occasional sex with someone else, despite being quite glad to buy groceries and pick wallpaper with your spouse and share the same bed. Or maybe it's feasible to love different people at once in different ways. Arguably, this lack of understanding of different types of love is why so many people have affairs. It doesn't make them monsters to want to satisfy their needs with more than one person. In terms of cheating, it's terrible to lie to your partner, as relationships work best when based on pure, open communication, where partners don't have to fear hurting each other with the truth. In that sense, it is a grave sin to 'cheat' on your partner, but if both parties consent to having an open relationship, that is a completely different matter.

'Of course,' I continued passionately against his slightly bemused glance, 'living in a society where strict monogamy is the norm, these people get branded as 'whores' or 'cheats' or 'people who just don't love their partner enough' or 'people who can't handle compromise'. But why does it have to be this way? Why can't people overcome jealousy (it's a bit of a pointless emotion anyway) and let their partner be free? Why must everyone follow the same pattern for relationships? Often: a brief period of romantic love and sex, followed by long periods of sexless romantic partnership and strict monogamy, maybe with the occasional romantic or sexy interval whilst on holidays. Aren't we all different? Don't we not all have our own path? Where is the moral abyss in having relationships that differ from the norm? Both parties are consenting, both parties are making decisions together and both parties are striving to accept each other as they are: as human beings with certain biological, emotional and intellectual needs.'

Okay. I'm sure I've just misquoted myself. I'm not that articulate. But you get the jist. I was rabidly rambling arguments and hoping he would understand.

He told me that he could sort of understand what I was talking about, but that it's important to make sure that your partner just doesn't love you enough.

I could have continued. But he was so calm. We walked on and the winter wind blew our thoughts in different directions.

We parted and agreed to meet again soon.

 

THE ETHEREAL TEA

 

Ranuel walking through the snow

Our next meeting was no less remarkable: it was a scene of dutiless relaxation, comfort in armchairs, and calmness in the endlessness of an afternoon.

Gleb invited me and a friend of his, Ranuel, to a cafe for tea. I immediately took a liking to the boy. He was a kind, dark-haired Tatar with delicate features, high cheek bones and remarkable slightly cornered, chestnut eyes. His walk was wonderfully endearing: his head was permanently tilted downwards to snuggle into his coat for warmth, his shoulders were gently arched, and his boots made little crunching sounds with his movements. As the conversation carried back and forth from me to Gleb, he would occasionally swing round swiftly (without moving his head) like a slightly robotic penguin. It was snowing again, and we walked to the cafe without haste. The weather had reluctantly relinquished its conspiracy to ruin the city's visual magnificence. It was growing beautiful again.

The cafe was probably designed for richer clients: the staff were dressed up neatly in suits and bow-ties and greeted us with unusually effort-filled politeness. There was a grand piano and exotic birds in a cage to our right; the toilets had ornamental furnishings and illusions of gold, and the cups and plates were delicately patterned with strings of blue and shining, quality white. Nonetheless, we were prepared to sacrifice some student kopecks for a warm afternoon inside and a feeling of endlessness. We sat in a corner. Opposite me was a whole wall of glass, meaning that when I looked towards Gleb and Ranuel, I saw not only their faces, but also the scene of snow behind them. In turn, behind my back there was a television screen, broadcasting the Winter Olympics on mute, meaning that that when they looked at my face, they saw not only me, but also elegant patterns of figure skaters or the buoyant jumps of international skiers. We need never fear a lull in conversation. Any periods of silence were easy, unpressured, natural.  Our speech was slow, but precise. Our words and breath were light, untroubled, instantaneous..Whole pots of various teas seemed to just appear unnoticed, cakes formed magically on the table. I was so uninvolved in the physical side of things, that I could only concentrate on a small collection of thoughts and visions: my sheer happiness at being in the company of likeminded people in the middle of the adventure in the middle of the Russia in the middle of the winter that I had dreamt of for so many years of learning verbs and studying culture in my bedroom; the little flirtatious half-timid, half-knowing smiles Ranuel offered up to me; the bemused, but welcoming glance of Gleb; and the dynamics of passing snow-burdened silhouettes through the glass. 

Gleb told me that my gestures and form of speech were somewhat similar to that of a Russian director, Renata Litvinova, and Ranuel enthusiastically agreed. I had never watched any of her films, but I was overwhelmed by the compliment. I had seen a short extract of her in an interview for a programme called 'Shkola Zloslovija' ('School of Scandal') and been entranced. She was elegant, soft-mannered, a little bit wisely, but welcomingly distant and lost in thought at all time. Perpetually beautiful. Ethereal.

They might has well have called me Jesus.

Renata Litvinova looking mysterious in a music video for  a Zemfira song. She is rumoured to have a relationship with the singer, who is the short-haired, tellingly singing girl in black. Click on this picture and open the video clip..

 

Ranuel smiled directly at me, mischievously, and told me I was cute. A pretty childish word 'cute', but it fulfilled its function: my stomach grew wheezy-pleasant with a feeling of thirteen year old bliss.

A few hours passed, but I still didn't know how to spell or even fully comprehend his name (which he had repeated a few times alongside his surname) as I had never heard it before. He wrote it down from me in my notebook in tall, cursive letters. Underneath, I immediately wrote, in my comparatively brutal script, the word 'Skovznjak' or 'draught'. Earlier I had mistaken his surname for this word describing a flowing gasp of unpleasant wind. Something which Russians instinctively fear as the bringer of illness and death, permanently rushing to close windows, even when it gets to ridiculous levels of stuffiness. A quirky surname, I thought, for a quirky boy. Alas. No. I just misheard.

At the risk of sounding a hopeless poet, I must admit that for an afternoon, I was in love with those boys. One was shy yet sly, the other bemused and kind. They formed the whole world. The centre of beauty, the centre of calmness, a foundation for a belief in the romantic side of life.

Eventually the afternoon passed. Darkness fell unnoticed and we left.

We walked Gleb to his bus stop. The boys rushed ahead of me, sliding down the ice to move faster and add some fun to a winter evening. I walked on behind them, stumbling slightly, as if I was their older grandmother, who admired their youth and mobility, but was scared of breaking that old hip again.

We said goodbye to Gleb, and Ranuel walked me most of the way home up to the pyramid building. (Yes, after the fall of the Soviet Union someone thought it was a good idea to build a massive, tacky pyramid. Kazan clearly needed some Egyptian flare.)

What an attractive, genuine Egyptian pyramid! How on earth did it get to the middle of Russia?

On the way he told me that I was the first foreigner I had ever met, that he was glad to have come across me so unexpectedly and that he hoped I could come back in the summer. We exchanged vkontakte details (Russian's leading social media website, where, conveniently, you can listen to any music or watch any Russian-dubbed videos for free. Trust the good old Russkies to not care about copyright and therefore give endless joy to the teenagers of Eurasia.) I knew it would be several months before we saw each other, and that we would probably barely write in the meantime, but it didn't matter. I was happy that I had appreciated the beauty of the afternoon, and that was all that mattered.

 

The Rest

I have a few other memories of what happened before I left Kazan. I remember that Gleb and I walked around the city once more on my last day, on a fruitless search for an internet cafe, which had existed online, but not in reality. I got wet again.

 I also spent an evening with a man who ate a lot of dumplings and debated heavy metal with a historian. Moreover, I remember that the police interrogated me for a few minutes in a metro station because they were checking 'non-Russian individuals' (Проверка нерусских лиц i.e. using the word that means 'ethnically Russian', rather than 'Russian citizen'. Quite shocking given that city is a mix of both Russians and Tatars.) But these memories don't seem as imbued with meaning.  They are subsidiary tales.

In retrospect, I don't ruminate on these events, but attach significance to my wanderings instead. On the eve of my departure a thick mist fell over the city. During this trip to Kazan I was never going to be graced with bright sunlight and green fields, but I was given the present of a beautiful shroud of mystery circulating around every building and every passer-by. There is nothing more wonderful than stumbling across an elegant streetlamp, hidden by the mist, and behind it the rising glory of a modern mosque.

 Ночь, улица, фонарь, мечеть...

 

I think I liked Kazan more than France in the end.