PASCHA: No. Why would I want to do something that’s totally predictable? I’ll leave that to you British. So, anyway, what do you want to see? Red Square?
KARL: Yeah, you can show me that if you like. Errmm, I mean, whatever you think is worth seeing here.
PASCHA: Nothing.
KARL: Right, well, that isn’t very . . .
PASCHA: Red Square is a place of execution. The ground is saturated with blood. We would be walking waist deep in blood.
KARL: Do you do this as a living, this tour guide thing?
PASCHA: Occasionally. It’s not really my main service product, but, yes, I do these things. The more I do it, the less I like it.
I never understand why people stay in a job they really hate. Yes, we all have to make money to pay the bills, but if you hate your job so much you’ve got to get out.
The worst thing would be to have a job that you can’t leave. I’ve always thought that with doctors and surgeons. If they left and became interior designers or butchers I’d imagine they’d feel guilty. It would be like Superman knocking it all on the head to become a financial adviser.
I’m always surprised when they ask if a doctor is on board a flight. There they are trying to have a holiday from their stressful job and now ’cos someone in seat 47b is choking on their bag of free nuts, they have a call of duty. The closest I’ve come to having to do a job I really didn’t like but couldn’t leave was having to do jury duty. There is no getting out of it. Having to sit there for weeks in court judging a stranger. I felt like Simon Cowell. The most annoying thing was that you’re not allowed to eat or drink when doing jury duty. I don’t know why as I watch Midsomer Murders while eating a Twix and having a brew, and it doesn’t affect me working out who did the murder. If anything, eating helps you to think. Kojak solved plenty murders while sucking a lollipop.
I offered Pascha some of my Revels as a way of bonding, but he wasn’t interested. So I tried to be friendly by showing interest in his car.
PASCHA: It’s the worst car I ever bought, and it’s British. I never thought a car could be that bad.
KARL: But you’ve got to look after cars. You can’t expect it to just run and run. You’ve got to service it if the brakes have gone. You’ve got to get the brakes fixed.
PASCHA: How many times do you think I’ve had the brakes fixed this year?! You want to guess?
KARL: You say fixed. Do you mean replaced?
PASCHA: Replaced the whole system. I would take to a qualified Land-Rover dealer and say, fix it, I don’t want to think about it, four times!
KARL: Four? But maybe it’s just a bad garage then.
PASCHA: Uh, how many garages do you think I went to?
KARL: (pause) Four?
PASCHA: What do you think I was doing this morning?
KARL: Fixing your car?
PASCHA: Attempting to.
KARL: Well, get rid of it. If I’m annoyed about something I get rid of it.
PASCHA: That’s what I’m trying to do!
KARL: Are you fed up at the moment?
PASCHA: Yes, I am. With car, with job and, frankly, with you British.
KARL: What? Me? I haven’t done anything.
PASCHA: No. You’re not my usual type of client. Before you I had a British couple come to my cottage to do horse riding. They signed up for two days. I told them it is important to inform me once they left Moscow, but they won’t do that, because the Brits, um, you have the mentality of slave owners. You expect people to wait on you.
KARL: What do you mean? We don’t have slaves. Where did you get that from?
PASCHA: You speak a different language. By now I would have called another driver. I don’t understand you.
I think I moaned less when I was with Pascha. His pessimistic approach made me more optimistic. This hasn’t happened much to me before. Suzanne very rarely moans, and I wonder if it’s ’cos I do it all for her, as Pascha was doing for me. If someone is happy I tend to look at the negative. There’s no fun in moaning if it isn’t getting the opposite reaction. The longer he was with me, the more he moaned. If Pascha was a dog I’d have had him put down.
Other than his tuts and huffs we drove in complete silence until the police pulled us over. Pascha spoke to them in Russian and then we drove away again.
PASCHA: The fine for this is 300 roubles.
KARL: What, for having a dirty car?
PASCHA: But they can’t be filmed while fining us, so no fine.
KARL: But they would normally?
PASCHA: They would. They would if they had nothing better to do. Three hundred roubles. About ten dollars.
KARL: But, still, it’s only a dirty car. What about the brakes then? You told us the brakes were dodgy. What would they do if they knew about that?
PASCHA: Ah, technically nothing, because Russia is more concerned about appearance. It’s consistent with the general Russian pattern – form and appearance. If you have errors, factual errors, in your document they will not be noticed. If you cross something out and correct it yourself, it will be noticed and you will be required to fill out the entire thing again.
KARL: Yeah, we had that at the airport, with all the equipment. We had to write it out, someone made a mistake, and we had to do it all again.
PASCHA: Now this is the kind of discussion I do welcome, because it has to do with the essence of the country.
I got out of the car while I was on his good side. The director took me to an old-looking place that I thought was going to be for food. I entered the main room where old dark wooden furniture soaked up any light. Me mam bought some old antique furniture like this once, but me dad found it depressing so he stripped it and painted it in white gloss. Me mam went mad. He did that sort of thing a lot. He washed an old ornament with a Brillo pad ’cos he thought it was dusty, and all the paint came off, so he tried painting it himself. It ended up looking like a garden gnome. There’s a song by Daniel Merriweather with lyrics that go ‘took something perfect and painted it red’ – I’m sure Daniel must have met me dad.
Men sat around talking, some naked, some with very little on apart from a towel and a white bell-shaped hat. I sat down on one of the hot leather high-backed chairs. Not the sort of chair to sit on naked ’cos it sticks to your skin. It took me back to when my dad had a Ford Cortina with a dark PVC interior, seats that on sunny days could heat up to temperatures close to that of molten lava. People always talk about the hot summer of 1976 when it was so hot you could fry eggs on your car bonnet. Well, in my dad’s Ford Cortina we could have slowcooked a leg of lamb. Baby seats were not needed back then ’cos the hot plastic kept young kids stuck to their seat. Everyone had car seat covers in the late ’70s, not for comfort but