Russia offers plenty of sights
ROSTOV-ON-DON, Russia — As strangers who could not converse except sporadically through his fickle cellphone interpreter, we set out together around 4:30 a.m., into the unknown where I knew neither the language nor a soul. He would drive his car service the 295 miles from Rostov-on-Don to Volgograd, and I would ride up front with him, all unexpected at this World Cup of vast distances. Already we had spent two hours hunting a working ATM with my debit card that turned out to be on a security hold, and we had communicated by calling repeatedly a Kazakhstan-born, Germany-based, multilingual man he knew. That man had gone to sleep as had most humans. The sky had lightened already.
“Sleep!” he advised me in English, but I had lived an American childhood that supplied me an American-conditioned brain, an organ that spends inordinate time in blinding dread of horrible possibilities that seldom happen. I coursed through all the imaginable catastrophes including, of course, kidnapping. I thought of those overworked cabdrivers from my Abu Dhabi days, when sometimes a light would change and the car wouldn’t budge and the driver would be dozing. Then I remembered my mantra, which is that one of the secrets to life is letting concrete rationale stampede fleeting emotion.
His GPS on his phone, mounted on his dashboard, indicated 5 hours 23 minutes to go.
He conveyed he would need coffee and a smoke, which I endorsed.
Off we went.
Here’s another one of those World Cups, as with Brazil or the United States, with distances that seem three-quarters of the way to eternity. Here’s the world’s largest country by far, almost double the size of runner-up Canada, with trains both pleasant and plodding and flights somewhat fewer than abundant. Sometimes it’s can’t-get-there-from-here-intime, but sometimes it’s the middle of the night and there’s a kickoff 17 hours and 295 miles away, which the trains need 12 hours to cover, so I mentioned “Volgograd” to the driver, and he proved eager for the fare, which, while not all that much higher than a train, seemed lower than it should be, a hint of a hard economy.
Of the 11 Russian World Cup cities and the 55 distances among them, just seven routes come in at fewer than 400 road miles. Eight yawn with more than 1,000 air miles, even if the longest air distance - 1,546 - doesn’t even approach that between the two American coasts that will brim with World Cup fans in 2026. Russia is using only a huge chunk of its vast, vast land, with no matches in Siberia or out beyond in Vladivostok near Alaska. Russia, as with the United States, lacks the futuristic infrastructure found in much of Europe and Asia, yet the two-lane highway to Volgograd is swell.
Murad and I had shaken hands, ex- changed names. I can’t speak Russian except for one word, and he can’t speak English except for about 25. I wished I could listen and learn from him. I might have asked him about life for Muslims in Russia. Maybe he, in his mid-to-late 30s or so, could have asked me about a topic that seems to fascinate many Russians, especially young adults: New York. (“City of dreams,” a 21-year-old Siberian man said wistfully along the promenade in Sochi.)
We stopped for gasoline, for coffee, for him to smoke, for him to stretch, for him to smoke. He showed a photo of his beautiful 4-year-old son and said in English, “crazy,” which I took to mean “rambunctious.” He suddenly announced at one point, “Fifty-fifty,” meaning he had completed half the drive. Somewhere along the way, I began to marvel at the countryside, mostly flat but slightly rolling, with some awesome, sprawling vistas. It made me think of maybe Iowa or eastern Nebraska. I looked at farmers tending to animals in fields and wondered how those lives must go.
We stopped in a gumdrop of a town beside the highway, and I walked through a room drastically foreign to my experience, and I got that exhilaration of being somewhere I never figured to be: in a restaurant full of rural Russians conversing quietly at tables in the morning hours while not noticing me, unless you count the young woman in ripped jeans who joined me briefly at the large bathroom mirror. I thought that of all the times I thought about Russia, I seldom thought about any highway through the countryside. I thought about how rest stops all over the world have begun to look ever more homogeneous.
I kept glancing over at Murad, and I began to notice that his eyes never seemed even to narrow. The lids never seemed to weigh down upon the rest in a way that might make you shout out to reawaken him. He resonated a comprehensive sturdiness that began to induce me to sleep at pleasurable durations such as 30 minutes, even 45.
A country so vast has, of course, regions so varied. In Volgograd along the Volga River, there’s a stunning war memorial and a two-week hassle every June with seemingly trillions of bugs, so the rental-apartment owner supplied a little bottle with a potion that, when applied to a face, works but also turns a face into a mild form of concrete. Way up in the midnight-daylight latitudes, St. Petersburg has untold elegance, becoming canals and one of the world’s grandest boulevards, the stunning Nevsky Prospekt. Way, way over two time zones east of Moscow in big yet hushed Ekaterinburg, there’s the shiny Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center downtown, with its Cafe 1991 with outstanding hummus and borscht and a museum guest book on which somebody scribbled, “Vamos Uruguay” and a video you watch in the museum while sitting on a bus (because Yeltsin used to ride buses with the citizens), with edifying facts such as that Mr. Yeltsin got expelled from school in seventh grade for justly declaring a teacher unfit because she had used students to do her housework. All along, the long trail can be halting for the monolingual; only the young Russian adults tend to speak the language (English) that has swept the world to a lazying degree, and they’re keen to practice, curious about the rest of the planet.
Yet in English, sometime after 10 a.m., with the Russian sun burning and screaming through the passenger window, Murad announced, “We won.” To an ear poor at accents, it didn’t come across. “We won,” he repeated, until he finally said, “Victory!”