He had the face of a pugilist: ears flattened and ragged, his nose asymmetric and lumpy. Rolls of fat separated his head from his equally sized neck. His head was a grizzled mix of black and silver stubble, his pitted chin the same. You could picture him moonlighting as security at a seedy lap dancing bar, his moniker ‘Dimitri, The Enforcer.’ He had the look of a man you would not want to cross. He grunted at the ice-queen behind the counter, picked up our paper work then, without the slightest acknowledgement of us, set off at speed through the throng of travellers. Grabbing our bags, we followed in hot pursuit, our eyes fixed on the bobbing head bowling through the crowds. It was peak holiday season and the airport was heaving with travellers from all points of the globe. Ducking and weaving our way past the throng, we arrived at the carpark, puffing and hot. Our driver casually popped the boot on a collection of car parts that had once called itself a taxi and we hefted our bags in hurriedly. The taxi was moving before we had closed our doors. ‘So, Moscow?’ Pete grinned excitedly, squeezing my hand. The taxi fishtailed out of the carpark, a cloud of black smoke in our wake, heading towards the freeway—or so I thought. With a series of overpasses in our sights, our driver suddenly wrenched the steering wheel to the left and headed towards open countryside. My partner’s smile slipped a little as he looked around. I was not convinced. Dimitri put his foot down. The Russian countryside was flying past us, the needle waving around 120km. My stomach dropped. ‘They all drive like this,’ Pete remarked quietly, but with his eyes fixed firmly on the road ahead. Dimitri drove with cavalier abandon, careering wildly around ancient Ladas, buses, trucks and motorbikes, passing them on both the inside and outside lanes. Horns blasted. Clenched fists waved. Meanwhile in the back seat, lockjaw had set in. We had entangled ourselves in the nonfunctioning seatbelts in the faint hope that they might provide some modicum of safety. It was optimistic, at best. But now our driver was hungry. Like his silverback relatives, he shared a love of peanuts,
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ripping the bags open with his teeth, pouring them into his meaty paws and tossing the nuts down his throat with a grunt. Next came packets of seeds. These he gnawed on, then spat out the window, the odd one being blown into the back, onto his luckless passengers. Brushing the soggy husks off ourselves was impossible; we needed to hang on with both hands to stop ourselves being hurled around like two dice in a shaker. After about twenty minutes of rally driving on rural and semi-industrial roads, we miraculously re-joined the freeway. I loosened my claw-like grip on the door handle, shaking my hands briefly to encourage the blood flow back into them. ‘Phew!’ I whispered. But the rural roads were just the warm-up laps. Dimitri’s phone rang. He wrestled with his pocket, extracting an ancient Nokia and started a loud, angry conversation with the caller. When the phone started to play up, he took it in a hairy grip and bashed it repeatedly against the steering wheel; the speedometer was now registering 150km. Unsatisfied, he put his knees to the steering wheel and foraged around in the centre console, extracting a second, equally ancient phone. He then proceeded to switch the sim card from one phone to the other. We were no longer capable of speech. The drive from the airport into the capital of the world’s largest country passes through villages, small towns and then alongside massive Soviet housing blocks, adorned with statues of Lenin and the proletariat. Eventually it turns to run alongside the River Moskva, and it is here you first glimpse the grandeur of old Moscow: the university, churches, gothic bridges, Gorky Park and the towering red walls of the Kremlin with the domes of St Basil’s and Red Square beyond. Well, that’s what the guidebook I read on the plane said anyway. I was too busy texting my family goodbye. Never have I been so happy as to strike peak-hour traffic on the freeway. The forty-five minute trip from the airport felt like a lifetime but, somehow, with hearts pounding, our muscles locked rigid, we screeched to a halt outside our hotel. Dimitri waved a hairy paw in the direction of the meter, his expression inscrutable, and returned his attention to his phone. We didn’t tip.
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23/05/2017 3:11 pm