very lost in translation

Turning to the right, and then left, for almost two hours in my “Queen’s bed” as my hostess called it, I decided this night would be hopelessly sleepless. This is despite that I need some good-quality nap following two nights in the upper bunk bed on the train from Koln to Moscow and a long day battling with the rip-every-single-outsider-off culture in the centre of the Russian capital.

In this housing estate on Fadeeva Street, outside of the tourist zone, which got peculiarly quiet on a Saturday evening, I couldn’t feel less like a tourist. More like a neglected guest deserted by her hostess in a run-down second-floor flat. There aren’t even noises of children around on the estate. And the only person I know in this city, Ruda my hostess, had fled and left me for the night.

She was the landlady of this three-bedroom flat where I was staying. “Dorothy’s Bed & Breakfast”, her business is called, which I spotted online after two hours’ of searching for a room of reasonable price in Moscow. Anything above B&Bs would be three-to-five-star hotels that I would have hated to pay for. Anything below B&Bs would be youth hostels which wouldn’t be suitable for me this time as I’m carrying two items of luggage - a large rucksack with presents for my Chinese friends’ families in China, and my own bag filled with recording equipments and notebooks. I needed to have my own room. “Dorothy’s Bed & Breakfast” costs £67per night, which isn’t cheap but is the only good “mid-to-lower-range” option available. Besides, the ad said the location is central. So I went for it.

Moscow has always welcomed me with surprises (and I don’t mean a “cultural shock”). Not a first-timer to this city, I honestly thought I’d prepared myself for the spontaneously chaotic fun in the see-how-lucky-you-are “tourist-infested” central Moscow. I was proved naïve when ruthlessly asked for two hundred euros for a three-mile taxi ride. (I would walk if I weren’t restricted by my heavy rucksack.) And this wasn’t because I don’t speak the lingo – I had my cabin-mate Nastya (who travelled with me from Koln to Moscow) kindly speaking to the taxi driver on my behalf.

Not able to afford the taxi, I asked Nastya to point me to the nearest underground station to the B&B where I should get off at. It is Mayaskovskaya, she said, ‘You will need to get a cab from there to the B&B, but it will be for a short distance.’ She then patiently taking me inside to the ticket office of the maze-like station and seeing me off.

Nastya is a student from Ulan Ude, capital of the Republic of Buryat in Siberia. Had it not been for the grant that she’d won for herself, she wouldn’t be able to pay for her education in a wildly expensive Moscow university. ‘My tuition fees would have cost me around 3,000 euros a term. I’m only paying 30 euros a month due to the grant which also covers my accommodation in Moscow,’ said Nastya.

Working part-time during her university years, Nastya managed to save some money and paid for her precious one-week holiday in Holland - and that was how we met on the train from Koln. She’s now back to Moscow to complete her final year at the university.

As I finally got on the tube, I repeated “Mayaskovskaya” in my head and waited for the right name of the station in the announcement at each stop – but all the names sounded the same! I looked around for some hint of help, but was only confronted with the distressed faces not unlike in London tubes.

OK, enough is enough. Let’s just get off in one of the “kayas”.

I was sweating like hell, practically sliding and pulling my rucksack on the floor as it seemed to get heavier and heavier. Out of the tube station, now I searched for a humane-looking taxi. The first one in front of me said that he has never heard of Fadeeva Street. Then a strong wind blew away my piece of paper with the address of “Dorothy’s B&B” on it!

‘Help!’ I screamed. The taxi driver was kind enough to grab it back for me before it got blown away to the main road. Phew!

Here came another taxi driver. He said he knows Fadeeva Street! ‘1,000R (£20),’ he demanded heartlessly. Knowing I wouldn’t get away with much less, I played innocence and put on a girly voice. ‘800R, please!’ He shook his head and accepted no bargain. Damn, I cursed Russia in Mandarin Chinese, and jumped in the cab.

When he dropped me at the top of a housing estate after two to three miles, I thought he was cutting short the trip on me. ‘This B&B, please!’ I pointed again to the address in my hand. I was expecting a sign outside on one of the main roads. ‘This is your B&B,’ he said, waving towards a block of flats across the road that look more deserted than some of the poorest council estates in Isle of Dogs.

With the bag on one hand, I dragged my rucksack to the front door of the flat and looked for number 114. There was no sign of a B&B. Nothing indicates that it‘s a business…Not even a piece of note from the landlord saying “We’ll be back in ten minutes”.

I pressed the bell on the metal door. Once. Twice. No answer. I pressed it again. Still no answer. Someone came out of the flat. I went in as he let go of the door. It was a dark hallway. There were electric wires all over the floor and it was a tough job to get my luggage through the mess. The mailbox was rusted and half open. This must be a mistake, I thought. There’s no Dorothy here.

But I didn’t want to just leave without finding out first. I’d already paid for the room. I climbed the stairs with my rucksack, to the second floor. It is number 114. I rang the bell once. Again. Three times. No answer. I waited for ten minutes. I rang the bell again, hard. Still, no answer.

I went back downstairs, thinking I might have to give up. I felt more than demoralised, wondering if this is what I‘ve come to after two days’ journey across Europe. I put down my luggage, took out a Parliament cigarette that Nastya had given me and tried to calm myself down.

I tried to think rationally. This must be an internet scam – one of all scams that originated from the kingdom of scams! From the Russian-bride scams online that have cheated cash out of many desperate, sad single older men, to the usual scams that are designed for naïve and nosy tourists on the street…You’ll be conned into losing your money if you are so kind as to return some rich Russian guy’s wallet to him. You’ll be foolish to believe anyone who comes over to join you for a coffee and tells you that they’ve fallen in love with you. A scam always looks more complex than a straightforward rip-off – there’s always a hook. Haven’t I heard that this is a city of scams and some of them are run by huge criminal networks? Why would I be surprised that this is happening to me now? And this innocent little down-market B&B has already charged my card online, emailed me a receipt, promising a non-existent room in a non-existent Dorothy’s B&B! This is got to be what happened. There was no way to prevent it from happening – how could I have distinguished this particular ad from the others? I felt outraged. How could they be allowed to get away with this? They must be still advertising online. Something will have to be done about it! I started to take pictures of the flat from downstairs – these will be my evidence to prove that I’ve been here. I’ll expose the bastards!

Out of anger, I rang the bell continuously from the front door. I kicked the door and screamed. As I would say in London: Why does pigeon shit always fall on me?!

A little blonde girl came out. She looked at me curiously as if I were the first violent foreigner she’s ever met. I felt I had to explain to her why I lost my temper. ‘I’m looking for a Dorothy’s Bed & Breakfast. It’s not here!’

‘Yes, here!’ she pointed to the second-floor flat, number 114.

‘You mean Dorothy?’ I couldn’t believe it.

‘Yes, here,’ she pointed upstairs again, smiling, and walked away.

I rushed upstairs, pulling my luggage with the last breath! As I made it to the second floor, a woman opened the door before I rang the bell. She seemed to be expecting me, waving to me and greeting me in Russian.

‘Dorothy?’ I wanted to be sure.

‘Da, da, Dorothy,’ she smiled warmly, pushing up her glasses. She has short, grey hair and looks in her late sixties or early seventies.

“Me, Ruda,” she introduced herself.

What can I say, Ruda? I’m only too happy to meet you!

Ruda showed me into my room – it has a double bed and a sofa, although I’d booked a single room. How generous of you, Ruda! The best thing is its large windows. I felt relieved to be able to rest my luggage in the room. Ruda carried on showing me the place - two other bedrooms, a clean bathroom and kitchen. Looked like I am the only guest here.

Ruda wouldn’t stop talking, even though we couldn’t understand each other – she speaks no English and of course I speak no Russian. “Kitay i Angliski,” I kept explaining. Our words run parallel – she said what she wanted to say and I did the same. There was no possibility of a dialogue. She looked so eager when she was having a monologue at me that I didn‘t want to discourage her. I simply smiled at her.

When she wasn’t talking at me, she was talking to herself. I could hear her mumbling away in Russian in the kitchen when I was in the shower. It sounded as if she feels more occupied when she speaks.

Half an hour later, Ruda called me from the kitchen. She showed me the lunch she had prepared for me: two wheat sticks, a plate of cornflakes without milk, a glass of pure chocolate, and a cup of hot black tea. But she wasn’t supposed to make me lunch – the internet ad said only breakfasts.

“It’s very kind of you!” I gave her the thumb up thankfully as I chew the wheat stick. She looked pleased. I took out the Belarusian chicken and gherkin left over from the trip, and left it on the table. I made a gesture for her to have some, too.

Ruda sat with me as I ate. She continued talking to me in Russian. I carried on listening thankfully and saying “ya ne ponimayo!” from time to time. It didn’t seem to matter to her that I didn’t understand her.

‘Why do you call this place “Dorothy’s”?’ She probably got the gist of my question, and answered: ‘Dorothy, American!’ I guessed she meant that Dorothy sounds more attractive to US tourists.

After a while of gesturing and guessing, it felt as though we were having a conversation. She giggled when I shrugged my shoulders to indicate my ignorance of the language. And then she asked me my name. She got excited at hearing the sound of a Chinese name. We laughed – at this one of the few full pieces of information that we were able to share!

The next morning I got up feeling starved. I found no breakfast in the kitchen. Where is Ruda? Alright, let’s not worry about breakfast. After all, she had given me a free lunch yesterday. I opened the fridge to look for my leftover chicken and gherkin. But the bowl’s empty – to my surprise, only chicken bones were inside! How bizarre! As I knew, I was the only guest here. Could Ruda have eaten all my food without telling me? And why did she leave the bones in here? Is this meant to be a joke?

As I was getting ready to leave the flat and forget about this unusual incident, Ruda came back. Using body language of shivering and tittering her teeth, she asked me if I’m cold and if I have brought enough clothes with me for the weather. She looked genuinely concerned. It has got considerably cooler in the past few days - now 16C out there. I’ve arrived at the tail end of summer.

‘Don’t worry, Ruda, I’m fine,’ I said to her. She looked at me endearingly, feeling the material of my jacket and checking if I was wearing the right clothes. How could I even think of ill intentions from her? Maybe she was just forgetful and left the chicken bones in the fridge after enjoying my Belarusian chicken…Anyway, forget about it!

I took a long walk to the Red Square outside the Kremlin’s north-eastern wall. The late summer breeze gave it a different feel of gentle bleakness. At one time, this was a market square next to the commercial area of Kitay Gorod (China Town). Looking to the south of the square I saw the familiar, the most “Russian” object in Moscow – St Basil’s Cathedral, built between 1555-1561 to celebrate Ivan the Terrible’s conquest of Kazan, now the capital city of the Republic of Tatarstan in central European Russia.

When I came back to the flat in the early evening, Ruda had kindly put a second new towel on my bed. She came out of the kitchen immediately as she heard me opening the front door. She greeted me and asked if I wanted a cup of tea. She has a warm smile of a grandmother. I wondered if she has grandchildren…

She giggled when she saw me walking around the flat in my pajama. She looked at me caringly, asking me questions in Russian. Then she came over and gave me an unexpected big hug. I hugged her back. We laughed, without any language.

Then Ruda tried to tell me something – she was pointing at herself and then at the door.

‘You’re going out?’ I asked.

‘Da, da,’ she nodded.

I asked her what time she’s going. She wrote “10:30” on a piece of paper. Then she pointed at the door again, making a gesture of turning the key three times. I gathered that she was asking me to lock the door behind her when she’s gone.

‘Sure! OK!’ I had my thumb up to reassure her.

Confusingly, at 8pm, Ruda opened the lockless door to my room. I had been reading Moscow Times in bed and fallen asleep. She stood by my bedside for god knows how long and spoke streams of Russian to me, shaking me a few times to try to wake me up. An odd thing for a landlady to do, I thought.

But do as told by the Romans when in Rome. So I got up. She took my hand and led me to the front door. She pointed at it again. I remembered now: Lock the front door behind her!

I did as told. But it all seemed quite out of the ordinary. Ruda looked unusually smartly-dressed tonight. I had no idea where she’s gone to, or when she will return. Why did she tell me she was going at 10:30 if she left at 8pm? She had indicated to me she lives in the next room to mine. But why does it look all empty inside, with no bedding or belongings, and the door’s always wide open?

As it got to midnight and Ruda still hasn’t returned, I started to ask myself questions. Where could she go at this time of night? Is she visiting family at another part of town? But why didn’t she try to tell me that she isn’t coming back?

All evening, I felt strangely apprehensive and restless. Our inability to communicate has created a mystery. I feel left in the dark. Are things unexplained because of our language barrier? Or is our language barrier making it possible not to explain things? Who is she? And what is she doing? Is she really what she said she is? Is this place owned by her? Or could this be something sinister? What if she actually does speak English but pretends that she doesn’t? What if she isn’t the landlady but is acting on someone’s behalf? Could she be the front face of a dodgy business in an area not far from the mafia-active part of the city? Should I be naïve again and assume the good nature of people? Or should I run now?

I let my imagination go wild into the night. I let anxiety take over. At this point, 3am precisely, it hasn’t been proved yet that I am madly paranoid. Ruda hasn’t returned, and she hasn’t answered my calls on her mobile phone – in fact, it wasn’t her voice at all on the answering machine. It was a Russian man.

Acting on my instinct, I moved the sofa against the door, so that no one could come in without me knowing. The last thing I wanted was surprise of an unsually hospitable woman turning into a cold-blooded murderer.

My possible paranoid aside, there is real evidence of this city’s increasing level of violence – and violence of a specific kind. Nastya had kindly warned me about xenophobia, racial violence and my personal safety in Moscow. She warned me to be on alert here. ‘You can never be too careful in Moscow,’ she said, ‘Racist attacks against Asian and African people have become very common. There have also been increasing numbers of murders. Any foreign-looking person would be a potential target.’

It was not until I read the news in the Moscow Times the day before that I understood the extent of this threat of violence and how realistic Nastya had been in her warning to me. The headline read “Racist crimes numbers explode”, and it said:

‘The numbers of hate crimes committed in Moscow has exploded this year, rising sixfold compared to the same period last year…The authorities registered 73 hate crimes in Moscow in the first six months of this year. The Moscow branch of the Investigative Committee announced Friday that it had opened two criminal cases involving hate crimes, one of which involves twelve racially motivated murders.’

It’s common knowledge that skinheads in Russia have raved the cities for years with its attacks and murders of Asian and African people. More recently, as oil prices fall in the midst of the global economic downturn, Russia’s industrial companies are cutting jobs and trimming down workforce. In Moscow, the number of the unemployed has reached 21,000. This climate of economic crisis has given the far right and their representatives a platform to develop, and its activities of violence has escalated to an unprecedented level.

Refreshing Nastya’s words in my mind, I began to feel angry with myself. Why am I here? Alone, in this hostile country where I couldn’t understand even the basics of the language? What is the point of being here? What am I trying to get here? Is Ruda deluding me, or am I deluding myself?

The stay in Moscow is in fact a brief intro to my journey on the world’s longest rail, through Siberia into East Asia. Each time, I’d anticipated it to be a not-so-easy intro. The last time here in Moscow, I was stopped and searched by police in bright daylight, twice. (It’s not as if I look anywhere near a drug addict.) You’ll know what a big deal that could be if it happens to you. To be talked to and treated like a suspect on the street is upsetting. To be picked out by the police because you look a certain way (i.e., “Chinese”/East Asian) is utterly humiliating.

Two Russian students explained to me: ‘It was because there are over a million illegal Chinese migrants here and Russia doesn’t like them.’ ‘They crossed border and work here for years without papers.’ Therefore anyone who looks Chinese may be an easy target.

It’s time like this – fear of being targeted – that makes me wonder why I set out this trip. I would think hard about my motivations and reflect on the past rail trips I’ve taken. I’d ask myself questions that I’ve asked loads of times before. What is this for, and, is it worth the while?

The fact is that it takes time and patience to organise the entire trip – I’ve always needed a month to be able to get all the train tickets and accommodation booked as well as applying for visas. As the trains are run by different companies, you need to book tickets for each section (such as, Moscow-Ulaanbaatar, Ulaanbaatar-Beijing, Beijing-Ulaanbaatar) and ensure that you connect up the train times precisely so that you will get to your destination within your schedule. As not all the trains run daily, missing one section of the train will mean changing your whole travelling timetable.

Apart from this, you need to have the train tickets and accommodation booked up before you apply for visas because they are required. Visa application is itself a huge pain – queuing at the Russian and Chinese Consulates, for instance, is not something you’d do for a laugh. The last time I visited the Russian Consulate, I spent the whole day queuing. But the Stress Award should ultimately go to the Chinese Embassy. The last time I visited them for my visa application, I was told to return with a new application form simply because I had put “Taiwanese” instead of “Chinese” under the “previous nationality” question. To put it mildly, the staff at the visa section are a show window of what public service staff are like in China. It would be your first lesson about China. They are a very emotional bunch and if you get on the wrong side of them, you won’t be getting into the country. Allow yourself lots of time for this process, because you never know what to expect.

Given that the organising itself is a major task even before you set out the journey, let alone the fact that rail travel is my only means of visiting families, I know that, once I set out, there’s no turning back half way. I must complete the journey.

After leaving London, my starting point, I had travelled with the train moving backwards in the first half day of this journey - on Eurostar from London to Brussels and then on Thalys, the high-speed European rail from Brussels to Koln - as if I was being pushed away from Western Europe. In that half day, I’d learnt to behave like the leading protagonist in Taiwan’s Second New Wave filmmaker Tsai Ming Liang’s ‘What Time is it’, waiting endlessly at empty platforms, pretending to have a big purpose to travel. In the reserved and uninspiring Koln, I spent three hours from 8pm on its chilling and lonely platform, waiting for a train to take me to Moscow.

When I finally got on that train, I couldn’t get to sleep, probably because I hadn’t eaten all day. But the good thing was, from Koln to Moscow, I was finally sitting facing forward. It was as if the journey had really begun from then.

In the daytime, when I’d folded up my upper bunk bed, I’d sit and chat all morning with the first human being I’ve had a chance to communicate with on this journey - my pleasant cabin-mate Nastya, a student of Spanish in her mid twenties. We were sharing this two-square-meter cabin space for two days.

I’d had six cups of coffee that morning, bought from our conductor at the top of our carriage. We sat through changeless landscape of plains through the countryside of Poland.

‘I’ve gone pass your hometown many times on the train,’ I said to Nastya, hoping that she will talk about Ulan Ude.

‘Yes…Nice place. But many young people want to leave Ulan Ude and come to Moscow. There are few opportunities back home. If you want to do something with your life, you must leave.’

Nastya has travelled on the rail to and from home and she knows all about the life and trade along the rail. ‘My boyfriend’s mother runs a fur coat shop in Moscow. She buys fur coats from Mongolian traders who always bring the coats from Mongolia on the train and sell them in Moscow.’

But I could see that Nastya’s interest lies more in the subject of her studies – Spain and Western Europe generally. She talked little about home in Ulan Ude. I guess that is more about her past rather than her future.

In the afternoon, Nastya started to prepare me for Moscow. Although I’ve visited it many times before, the city was new to me each time. She tried to familiarise me with the basic Russian phrases.

‘Kak ya mogu popast hotel..?’ (Can I go to the hotel?) She asked me to repeat after her. And, ‘Skol’ko stoit?’ (How much?) It isn’t easy to simply memorise phrases without systematically learning the language. I knew I wouldn’t go very far. But this is how most Westerners learn to speak Chinese. It’s like polishing the window but never pushing it open.

As hours passed and I knew Russia was just another day away, I began to feel both excited and a little anxious.

As I dozed off a few hours before the train crossed the border from Poland to Belarus, I had a dream... I was carrying six bottles of red wine as instructed by a Chinese friend. He hasn‘t been back home for seven years and he really wanted these presents transported, by me, the border-crossing donkey, all the way on the train to his family in China. “Do you have anything to declare?” asked a Belorussian border immigration officer in smart, light green uniform. He looked suspiciously at my well-over-weight rucksack. “Wo ting bu dong!” in a panic I replied in Chinese – to speak in a language that the receiving person wouldn’t understand is not something I’d do in real life. The officer didn’t understand me, of course, and was going to search me.

I wouldn’t need a therapist to help me interpret my dream. It clearly had something to do with my experience of being circled by a group of border officers – also in light green uniform – when the train was at the Poland-Belarus border the last time I went home by rail…I was alone smoking at the corridor and the officers were trying to intimidate me with their number, for no reason at all (Yes, I had a proper passport then).

The dream probably also reveals a deep anxiety of having my weakness uncovered. The anxiety of not being strong enough to cope with challenges in life (as well as on this particular journey). The anxiety of not being the master of my own destiny…

The train reached Minsk in Belarus at 6pm. Between 8-9pm, we waited for the European wheels to be changed into the wider Russian ones. Three or four babushkas with scarves wrapped around their hair hurried up to the train from outside to try to sell their mineral water, fresh large gherkins, loafs of fresh Russian black bread, cooked oily chicken and herbed potatoes. ‘Five dollars,’ one of them asked. I was one of the few interested passengers. Once you show your interest, they would take out all their food from their filled-up handbags. The chicken were just cooked, looking steamy and delicious. I hadn’t had proper cooked food for two days. I bought two fat and tasty chicken legs, some gherkins and a loaf of black bread for dinner.

Over my Belorussian meal, I chatted with Nastya about her future plans.
‘I will graduate from the university in a year’s time. But I don’t want to return to Ulan Ude. Jobs are rare there. I want to stay and try to get a job in Moscow,’ she said.

‘How easy is it for a graduate to find work in Moscow?’ I asked.

‘For the students from Moscow itself, it’s not that bad. But for us from outside of the city, it can be quite tough. There is this population registration system here, initiated in recent years to control the country-to-town migration in Russia. This means that graduates from outside of Moscow who wish to work in the capital must apply for registration to be able to work in Moscow. It’s quite unfair…Those who haven’t registered become the ‘ghost’ working population in the city…Their number has increased.’

I told her that there is the same system in China, called the hukou system, that serves the same purpose of internal migration controls.

Nastya was reading the Russian version of ‘How to Stop Smoking’ in her lower bunk bed when I woke up the next morning. Yet she continued to pop down to the corridor for a quick fag. ‘If you meet my boyfriend at the Belaruskaya station when we arrive in Moscow, please don’t tell him I’m smoking!’

As the train was approaching Moscow at midday, Nastya murmured dispiritedly: ‘Looks like there will be no sunshine…’ This was the end of her journey, when mine was only starting.

I wondered if she has settled well back into the uni?

Now lying in bed in the Fadeeva Street flat in Moscow, after going over the past few days in my exhausted head, I finally drifted to sleep. The room was by now filled with smell of my chain smoking.

Then – I had no idea how much later – I heard the turning of the door handle. It was my door. It woke me up. I came to the consciousness that someone was trying to open the door to my room!

The door wouldn’t open, of course, because the sofa was firmly put against it. I couldn’t believe this was happening. Someone was really trying to open my door as I had feared! I held my breath, not daring to move, and waited to see what happened next. The handle was turned again - second attempt! My heart was beating so fast that I could almost hear it. As the attempt failed again, the person let out a grunting noise. It was a woman and sounded just like Ruda.

She’s back? So why didn’t she call out my name and just speak to me? What was she intending to do trying to open my door in the early hours of the morning – I looked up at the clock on the wall and saw that it was 4:30am.

I pretended to be asleep. As I couldn’t understand her the motivation of her intrusion, it’s better not to have to deal with it. Now it sounded like she was carrying and moving things around in the flat, making a lot of noise. A lot of zipping and unzipping of bags. Then I heard Ruda speaking to herself again, sounding upset and annoyed, and left.

I lied there, confused. What should I do now? My landlady’s gone, in such an incomprehensible manner! It felt like a crass Russian TV mystery had just been imposed upon me, forcing me to take part.

Then I recalled those moments of doubt and confusion similar to this on many occasions during my years in England…moments when I felt as alone and out of control in the events that were thrown at me…moments when I was caught up in the mental games of exclusion where I did not want to take part… and moments when I felt suffocated by the endless anticipation of hostility. Those were the moments when I had to fight isolation on my own.

This is sadly why this witless episode in an empty flat of a run-down estate of Moscow did not feel accidental to me, however insignificant it might seem. I was travelling to visit home – a place that is no longer a home in the real sense of the word. But where is my “home”? I drifted to sleep again in the haunting thoughts of my mother’s casually-asked question – ‘Do you really want to grow old and die in England…?’

A while later, I heard the front door of the flat opened again. This time, the loud noise of key turning had fully awoken me. Is Ruda back? I tensed up and listened. I looked up the clock: it was 6am. It was a man’s voice. I pulled up the duvet slowly and covered my face under it. Then I heard the man followed by two other people through the hallway and to the bedrooms, in confident steps. The two people were speaking in Spanish to each other. There was a lot of discussion between the three of them in English, in strong non-native accent. They seemed to be talking about the property, but were not loud enough for me to understand everything. They did not seem aware of my existence. They were speaking in normal volume. Who are these people? Are they Ruda’s friends as they have the key?

‘Bueno, Niki, bueno,’ one of the Spanish men said to the man who had the key. Niki must be a Russian name. Who is he?

By this time I was drained out by the anxiety of the whole night and morning. I was too exhausted to speculate. I drifted to sleep again.

The next time I had someone trying to open my door was 10:30am. And then there was an anxious, repeated knock. Bang, bang, bang, it went again and again. It was like saying ‘Open up, or else!’ The motion intimidated me, and I decided not to answer it. I heard a woman’s voice, speaking to herself, sounded frustrated - it must be Ruda. What does she want? Shall I get up to talk to her now? I slowly got myself out of bed. But she didn’t wait. She left the flat again.

I saw that there was no breakfast for me today in the kitchen. No wheat sticks. Not even cornflakes in a plate. A glass of chocolate is thrown in the sink. Maybe Ruda was really crossed with me for shutting the door with the sofa and not answering her? Was I meant to leave the door open for her to come in as she pleased? What on earth did she want from me?

Despite a difficult evening and deep bags under my eyes, I decided to temporarily forget about it and make good use of the daytime. I wanted to see a bit of the city. I decided to pop down to Malaya Nikitskaya to visit the Gorky Museum – yes, ‘Gorky’, meaning “bitter”, exactly how I was feeling now, was the pen name of writer Aleksey Maksimovich Peshkov best known as Maxim Gorky. He was a writer of the “bitter truth” of Russia’s society and a founder of socialist realism as a literary tradition. Gorky was at the same time an admirably persistent traveler who took a five-year trip across Russia.

My reason for visiting the museum, however, wasn’t only to admire Gorky’s collection of work there, but also to see the museum building itself, recognised as the Art Nouveau hot spot in Moscow, designed by the king of Moscow Art Nouveau, Fyodor Schechtel (1859-1926). The elaborate asymmetry and organic image of the construction are extremely pleasing to the eyes – and you need not be trained in architecture.

When you enter the Museum, you can see an exaggeratingly enlarged marble staircase that looks as if it’s in the process of melting. You’ll see the huge stained-glass windows and the wood paneling decorated with roses. The funny thing is that Gorky himself would have hated all this elaborateness.

Tourists tend to associate Moscow with the grandeur of Soviet-period architecture. But a little exploring will bring you surprises – such as the plenty of fun traces of the Art Nouveau tucked away in the backstreets or behind buildings. It does not take much to find them, often in some of the quieter corners in the city. Art Nouveau is known for its small details, such as the changeable, expressional human faces, flowers, vines and curves… They can be observed throughout the area between Kremlin and the Garden Ring, a circular avenue around the centre of the city, that derives its name from the fact that landowners here in Tsarist times were obligated to maintain gardens to make the road attractive.

Arbat, Spiridonovka, Ostozhenka and Myasnitskaya are all among the key streets to see these Art Nouveau features. I re-visited Arbat Street, and this time, I noted things that I didn’t see before, such as the architecture of No. 2, the Prague Restaurant, that stood out among the numerous dining places of all cuisines on this street for its appealing Art Nouveau design. It was opened in the 1870s and known as one of the city’s best restaurants. Here in 1901, the playwright and short story writer Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) celebrated the first performance of his play The Three Sisters, which was about the degradation of Russia’s privileged class and their place in a new, modern time.

To further boost my tourist morale, I walked around looking for a Chinese café to have my first meal in Moscow. (Why Chinese? Well, because I’ve had a great deal of experience of the Russian cuisine and knew that it wouldn’t serve the cheering-up effect as the first meal!) I spotted one with red lanterns, so I walked in. It was a café with Russianised Chinese-Japanese themes: Childlike Chinese calligraphy and sushi-displaying Japanese bar counter. A grumpy-looking Russian waitress came over after five minutes and handed me a menu filled with mis-spelt words. No, I don’t want any “biff”, thank you. And god, I wish they could turn off that Disney cartoon on the TV hung high up on the café wall. I picked one of the cheapest thing on the menu – chicken and cashew nuts that cost 200R (£4.69). Only that the chicken turned out as hard as the cashews. That wasn’t the worst. I had to sit through the meal with all the locals dining around me with no facial expressions at all.

When I returned to the flat in late afternoon, I’d prepared myself to talk to Ruda. I’d decided not to let the mystery of her occupy my thoughts and spoil my time here. I wanted to clear the air and understand everything. There may be a simple answer to all that happened last night.

As I walked in, a man and a woman were mopping the floor. I was pleased to see that they look south-east Asian. (Believe me, it’s reassuring to be able to feel some ethnic affinity to someone when in Russia!) The woman told me they are from the Philippines and they are the cleaners employed by the people in charge of this flat. “You mean Ruda,” I said.

‘Who?’ she didn’t know who I was talking about.

‘Ruda, our landlady.’

‘Landlady? We don’t have a landlady,’ she said, looking more confused than me.

‘Well, I have a landlady. Her name is Ruda and she’s in charge of this place,’ I explained.

‘No, no! There’s no landlady here. It’s a Russian man in charge of this place. He doesn’t come here often though.’

‘Who’s Ruda then? This is the Dorothy’s B&B, right?’ I became more confused than ever.

‘Yes, Dorothy is just a name for the business. This is a self-catering place, actually. There are only guests here. No landlady.’

‘But…but an older Russian woman, called Ruda, let me in and gave me the key. She advertised her business as a B&B, not self-catering. She made me food on the first day and gave me clean towels. She must be the landlady, no?’

‘No! No! No landlady!’ she reaffirmed. But two seconds later, she remembered something, pointing to Ruda’s room: ‘Ah! Are you talking about the Russian woman living in that room?’ I nodded, waiting for her to explain it all to me.

‘That woman was a tenant here, until last night,’ she said, ‘She lived here for about a year…She paid rent to our boss.’

‘So…Ruda is a tenant?’ I couldn’t quite believe it. ‘She was acting like a landlady though…And what did you mean she was here till last night?’

‘Well, she has moved to live with her son and grandson. She told me she was leaving…She‘s really nice, always talking.’

I was more than surprised but amused and relieved to hear the real story. ‘So she’s not coming back?’

‘No. She has found the rent too high. More importantly, she’d prefer to live with her family. She was quite lonely here,’ the Filipino woman said, mopping the floor again. ‘She made you food because she likes to talk to people. Now you have to make your own breakfast!’

Now the mystery was half resolved. But I still puzzled about some of her behaviour. ‘Do you have any idea why Ruda tried to open my door twice in the middle of the night?’ I asked.

‘Did she?’ the woman was surprised.

‘Yes, definitely. Look at my eyes – I didn’t sleep well last night.’

‘Maybe…maybe she wanted to say good-bye to you?’ she came up with a sympathetic answer. ‘Maybe she didn’t want to leave without you knowing that she won’t be back?’

Well, that made some sense, I guess, although she was very insistent on saying farewell if she had to try to force open my door twice. But this was all the explanation I could get.

Anyhow, I was feeling much more relaxed after talking to the Filipino woman. I made some coffee and started chatting with the couple.

‘Me and my wife have been working for over a year in Moscow, for Nikita and Vincent, managers of this B&B,’ the man said.

‘Nikita?’ I asked, remembering the man who came into the flat early in the morning. ‘Is he also called Niki?’

‘Yes, yes! People call him Niki, too. Nikita and Vincent run this and three other B&Bs in town.’ So I guessed he was showing rooms to the Spanish guests early this morning? It’s all making sense now.

‘But they’re just managers. The real owner is a Swedish woman…’ he told.

Whoever’s running the business, it hasn’t lived up to its online advertising: Where’s my breakfast?! I’d paid nearly as much as for a room in a London B&B.

But I learnt from the couple that high-price housing, whether temporary or permanent, seems to be the norm. The cleaners, for example, are having to afford housing and living costs as high as that in London while their wages are lower than average here. ‘We’re earning 160R a day (£3.75). We don’t compare ourselves with the locals – that’s not possible. The average wage levels for Filipino cleaners in Moscow are 120-200R (£2.81 - £4.69) per day,’ the man said, ‘But you know, the lower-end rent in Moscow is $1,200 per month (£697) on average!’

I was stunned. A room in East Ham would be cheaper to rent.
He continued: ‘The rich are stirring up housing prices, and it’s becoming extremely expensive to live in Moscow, for us as well as for the Russians. We Filipinos have to live together in crammed and poorly-facilitated housing so we could just afford it.’

‘Food prices have also gone up when food quality remains poor. Life’s getting tougher and tougher. People’s wages remain the same – Now 1,000-1,500 euros per month which is the average national income. We Filipinos are earning even far, far less than that.’

The rise of the housing costs is one of the major concerns on everyone’s lips. In the English-language newspapers in Moscow, housing is one of the top issues. Even for the Western elite, the rise of housing costs has been faster than they predicted. One reported: ‘In the first half of 2008, the going price for a luxury apartment in Moscow reached one million roubles (£23,569) a month to rent…’

The Filipino couple told me that they will continue to work in Moscow and plan to return home in two to three years’ time. ‘Every one of us plans to go back home after a few years of earning here. It’s not a place you can think of settling.’

The next day seemed a sunny, new start for me. , I went to enjoy sunshine in a park opposite the Gorky Museum. A few young people were sitting around on the lawn. I sat reading on a bench by the fountain. An Asian-looking man walked pass and spoke to me in a language that I didn’t understand. I shook my head.

This man introduced himself as Saha, from Almaty, the largest city of Kazakhstan. I was really pleased to have someone to talk to.

‘I’ve been to Almaty,’ I told him. It was a two-night bus ride to reach Almaty, I said. After a drink with our Uyghur friends in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (known as the East Turkistan) in northwest China, they saw us onto our first bus, bumping across the western end of Xinjiang into the early hours of the morning. It was the first time I’d ever been on a bus with an upper bunk bed! I watched the sun rise and alpine forests of Yili from my window…When we reached the border town Khorgos, we were held up at the Chinese customs for two hours, and I remember being asked loads of questions about why I was there and what I was doing. Eventually, we got on the second bus heading towards Kazakhstan. I watched the beautiful lakes and the southern part of the Altai mountains all along the way…to Almaty.

‘You like Almaty?’ Saha asked.

‘Yes, very much…It was a very relaxing place to be…and a good change from China from where we just left. I like it there, definitely, except the food - In Almaty, it was easier to find Russian food than Kazak food,’ I said jokingly.

Saha would agree if he had understood me. Almaty looks primarily a Russian city, for good and bad. But the visual appearance does reflect the Kazak-Russian relation which has always been a colonial one, traced back to hundreds of years ago. Kazakhstan suffered the impact of Russia’s wars where a million of Kazak people died in the famine in the early 1920s and then Stalinist policies of collectivization in the early 1930s that led to famine again and mass emigration of Kazak people. When Kazakhstan was made a Soviet Socialist Republic of the USSR in 1936, the “liberation” was soon followed by Stalin’s creation of prison camps in Kazakhstan that made the country the southern part of his Gulag where many Kazakhs, Jews and people from other ethnic minority groups had perished.

Under Stalin, Kazakhstan was no more than an outlying province with natural resources – oil, gas, what have you - to exploit and expropriate for the use of the industrial centre of the Soviet Union. It was also a convenient playground for Russia’s nuclear experiment. During 1949-1989, Soviet Union tested 470 nuclear bombs in Semipalatinsk Test Site, the centre of which is Kurchatov, a town in East Kazakhstan named after the Soviet nuclear physicist Igor Kurchatov. But in Kazakhstan, it was nicknamed “Konechnaya”, meaning “the end”, the destruction.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan declared independence in December 1991. The economic disparity between the centre of the margin of the Soviet empire – indeed the legacy of this empire - meant that Kazakh people have continued to migrate to Russian towns and cities for work, making them one of the largest migrant workforce in post-Soviet Russia. Despite being a member of the CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) set up in 1991 to signal the formal dissolution of the USSR and to re-consolidate Russia’s sphere of influence, citizens of Kazakhstan have been subjected to racism and harsh treatment in Russia.

‘I…work…Moscow…three years,’ Saha said. He’s been working in Moscow for three years. He speaks fluent Russian but, naturally, no English. I realised we will have a tough job communicating with each other.

He sat himself down on the bench, and started asking me questions. I understood that my Asian face was the reason for his affinity to me. To make it easier, I took out a pen and my notepad, for him to write things down if he can’t speak whatever he wanted to say in English. He wrote down his age – 23. A young Kazakh man in Moscow. I wonder what he does for a living.

It is a difficult concept to put down as a simple question when someone doesn’t know the basics of a language.

‘What do you do?’ No, he didn’t understand.

‘What job?’ I tried again.

‘Job?’ he wasn’t sure. Two seconds later, he shouted: ‘Ah, yes! yes! job! I know, job!’

‘So, what is your job?’ I repeated.

He answered in Russian. I shook my head.

‘I…’ he paused, thinking hard, frowning, with his thin dark eyes squeezed in a line. Then he stood up and started to wave his arms around, shaking his thick black hair, and humming a tune in Russian.

‘You mean…you are a singer?’ I tried, mimicking the movement of holding a microphone in my hand and singing.

‘No! No!’ he frowned again.

Saha was patient, despite that this was turning into a charade. He stood up again, walked to and fro, and then shook his bottoms around.

‘Ah! You are a model?’ I almost screamed. ‘Or, a dancer?’

‘Yes! Yes! Dancer! I, dancer!’ he was over the moon that I finally got the answer to my question.

‘Wow! That’s amazing…’ I said, ‘Where do you work?’

Saha couldn’t explain this with words. He took over my notepad, thinking hard again, and made a drawing that looked like a fish.

‘Yes?’ I puzzled.

Then he continued with the drawing, putting a door on this fish. ‘A fish house?’ I tried.

He shook his head.

‘A fish…club?’

‘Yes! Yes! Fish club! Fish club!’ he said.

‘So your workplace is called Fish Club in Russian?’

‘Yes! Yes!’

I looked at him up and down secretively. He does look quite like a dancer. Broad shoulders. Good figure. I can imagine him dancing on stage and being a performer. I wonder what sort of dancing it is?

Saha suggested we go to Arbat Street for a cup of coffee. He led me through many alleyways, onto the main road. He knew the city so well. He pointed out all the clubs that he goes to along the way, and asked me to take pictures of him in front of them. He enjoyed looking at his digital pictures in my camera.

In this half an hour’s walk to Arbat Street, we kept bumping into his friends from Kazakhstan, saying hello and chatting – it looked like he has a wide social circle in town. I was keen to ask him how he feels about living in Moscow, but frustratingly our only tool of communication is a pen and a notepad and we relied on drawing to get most our ideas across to each other and the concept of “how he feels” is too complex to draw.

When we finally sat down in a café on Arbat Street, the waitress watched in amazement as we drew and passed pieces of paper backwards and forwards to each other. It must have looked like an Asian comedy!

But who cares! It was a sunny day out there, and the Arbat street was filled with artists working on their canvasses and musicians performing for a reward of few coins in their hats. Some men were selling icon paintings, others touting their amber and precious stones.

It was hard to think of this street as the same street that was almost completely burned down over two hundred years ago during Napoleon's occupation of Moscow. The image and reputation for being the centre of the past bourgeois Moscow wasn’t burnt down, although the street was largely rebuilt, of course, and developed over the years into a centre of the city’s bohemian cultures. Today, the Arbat street has been livened up as the gathering point for street artists, poor buskers and migrant sellers. It is where Saha sometimes meets his Kazak friends.

We carried on chatting on paper. ‘How many Kazak people are living in Moscow?’ I asked Saha, drawing a few persons and pointed at him. He understood.

‘Many, many. I know…thousands, maybe,’ he said. ‘Russians…Not like us.’ He meant to say that the Russians discriminate against the Kazak migrants.

Then he drew a man with a knife and lots of blood on his neck. ‘Kill… They kill many.’ I immediately understood that he was referring to the murders of migrants in Moscow.

The rise of racist attacks and murders in the midst of the economic slump has driven many migrants back home, to Central Asia where most of them have come from. It’s estimated that around a quarter of the two million migrant workers in Moscow have left. I asked Saha if he considers returning to Almaty.

‘No. My salary…very good,’ he said, ‘I…make…1,500R (£35.17) per hour.’ Earning this much is exceptional for a migrant in Moscow, if not unbelievable. And I guess that for him, a dancing job in a night club would be one of the safest jobs here – at least he wouldn’t be seen as taking jobs from the locals?

‘No go out…night,’ Saha warned me about safety, in the same way as Nastya. He meant don’t go out at night. I wondered how fearful he felt every night to return home after his work at the club. I’d imagine that would be one of the worst times to be out on the street in Moscow!

Saha and I sat and drew for an hour or two. Another cup of coffee. When he needed to mediate his speech with drawing and thinking of how to draw, his eyes brims hesitation. These moments of pause for thought seemed to say a lot more than words. Somehow, despite his active work-related social life and a high-earning job as a dancer in the middle of a busy city, this streetwise young migrant looked so alone.

‘You miss your family in Kazakhstan?’ I asked. He understood “family” and “Kazakhstan”.

He nodded, putting his finger on his lips. ‘And you?’

Through the drawing, he told me that he was feeling very tired and sleepy because he had worked from 7pm to 6am this morning. He pointed at his eyes, indicating that the lack of sleep is the trait of the trade.

I couldn’t stop wondering what the dancing job really involves? He didn’t understand my question fully, but said: ‘You…come to Fish Club. See.’