Travel Reference
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slapped him hard across the face. He just sniggered and spat into his smoking ash-
tray.
Eventually, I weeded out some interesting information.
It turned out that Alexsei was the retired chief of police for the Zvyozdni district.
He was able to confirm that seven prisoners had escaped and that three of them
were brothers. But they posed no threat to us - they had all been shot dead in the
forest earlier in the day.
We also gleaned that he and his wife had three sons. One of them had recently
died fighting in Chechnya; the other two were unemployed and still living in
Zvyozdni.
At some point the term
bomzsh
came up in conversation. It was the Russian
equivalent of 'bum' or 'tramp'. I had heard it before but was still unsure of its
meaning. Alexsei was eloquent in his definition. '
Bomzsh
! Well, basically, that is
you without bicycles!' he said, sniggering. Even his wife giggled at that.
Later, when a blind-drunk man fell through the doorway, we had the pleasure of
meeting the eldest son. Fuck was the only word I could make out as he delivered
an epic tirade aimed at his father. Alexsei argued back in a similar fashion until
the wife, to whom we were not introduced by name, stomped over to her son and
struck him deftly on the skull with a clenched fist. 'Idiot! Fool,' she screamed.
The festivities dragged on until 4 a.m. I went to bed feeling as if our healthy
cycling routine had been badly broken. The vodka over dinner had felt like little
glasses of bad health. It seemed ludicrous that we had opted for such hospitality
when there was perfectly nice forest stretching thousands of kilometres in all dir-
ections from the village.
In the morning I headed into the vegetable garden behind the apartment block
to repair my torn bike seat. Next-door the charcoal remains of a garage were still
smouldering. Apparently, it had burnt down the day before our arrival.
For hours I sat prodding at the torn mesh with needle and thread. Meanwhile,
Chris and Alexsei went about fixing my punctured tubes. Each attempt was shortly
followed by a loud hissing sound as another patch broke free.
Alexsei's wife, looking even more wrinkled without make-up, lay on a deck
chair next to the carrot patch, taking deep drags of a cigarette and exhaling heavily.
Her plan to go berry-picking for the day disintegrated when her son arrived with a
two-litre soft drink bottle of
samagonka
.
With each successive repair failure our hopes of getting back on the road also
disintegrated. By 4.30 p.m. I was reaching the point of intolerance. By 5 p.m. I was
