Alexei the mad shoveler

Lena is a twenty-seven year old young and beautiful Russian woman. She speaks German as well as Spanish and English. As an architect and civil engineer, she has already traveled a lot around the world. Her father is a friend of the monastery and Lena has already lived here for a few weeks. Mother Superior has asked her to accompany us on today’s excursion and translate for us. “I really enjoy doing this,” said Lena, who took a day off work to do it.

“Are you ready?” asks Lena as she picks us up. “Sure,” we reply and accompany her to the building where the matron lives. A chauffeur arrives in a Lada. We say goodbye to the Mother Superior who, despite our objections, puts some money in Lena’s pocket for the trip and our well-being. Then we’re off. As soon as we pass the monastery gate, the driver Alexei presses the accelerator and lets the wheels spin. At first I think it was a mistake, but the rest of the journey proves us wrong. We shoot through Samara’s rush-hour traffic in a mad rush. Our first stop is a viewing platform high above the Volga. “We’re lucky today because of the bad weather. When the sun shines, everything here is full of people,” explains Lena. Then we continue past ugly residential castles that look as if they will collapse at any moment. Compared to the beautiful center of Samara, it looks shockingly bleak here. “How old are the houses here?” I want to know. “About 20 to 30 years,” answers the architect. “What? They look much older. Why aren’t they being renovated?” “No idea. They probably belong to business people. They don’t see any profit in renovating them. The houses are often in a terribly poor state of repair and were built by unqualified workers. Nobody really cared about quality during the socialist era. Sometimes the foundations were skimped on or not properly calculated for cost reasons. As a result, the houses on the banks of the Volga started to crack. Some could never be occupied for safety reasons and fell into disrepair. No one is responsible. After the communist era, many of the apartments were privatized for little money. This meant that the residents could buy them for a few thousand roubles. But the company that manages the houses doesn’t care? As I said, too little profit.” “Yes, that’s one of the disadvantages of capitalism,” I reply in amazement. “So the city is heading for disaster?” “Yes, at some point the houses will no longer be habitable. Pipes and gas pipes are already bursting everywhere, lifts are broken or the roofs are simply leaking. In fact, nobody knows how to deal with this upcoming problem,” replies Lena.

Our driver continues to race through the traffic madness. He overtakes on the left, then on the right again, brakes abruptly, accelerates and sometimes speeds over the pothole strip at 100 km/h. In Samara you might think that there is not a single meter of unpatched road. Dust swirls around, the kerbs collapse. All in all, a very, very sad sight. Maybe it just seems so dilapidated to me because I’ve just come from a clean, licked Germany. One of the richest countries in the world, where many people complain that milk prices are rising, taxes are too high or smoking bans are being introduced in pubs. The problems here are definitely different.

Alexei has reached the main road in the direction of Moscow. A road sign shows 1006 kilometers to the richest city in the world. We were told that 80 percent of Russia’s entire capital is hoarded in the city. The way things look outside Moscow, you can imagine that this statement is true.

The speedometer needle reaches the dizzying figure of 135 km/h. We fly over the deep cracks, holes and fissures in the old, battered bitumen. Our loader shoots towards a gap that has just opened up between two trucks driving side by side. When our heap of metal on wheels actually squeezes through the gap, I almost kick through the floor panel in sheer terror. “Alexei probably thinks he’s a racing driver?” I ask Lena. It translates. He smiles and seems to feel motivated by my statement. They say a cyclist lives dangerously, but being a passenger of a madman is no less dangerous.

After 130 kilometers we find ourselves in the Kamennaya Chasha National Park, which Mother Superior recommended to us. The asphalt suddenly stops and we bump along a dirt track for another 15 minutes through a beautiful, densely wooded hilly landscape. We stop at a wooden hut, the outhouse for pilgrims. “Here it is,” says Alexei. Broken bottles, garbage and fire pits show us that people like to party here. A narrow, slippery path leads us to the holy chapel of St. Nikolay. As soon as we enter the forest, millions of mosquitoes pounce on us. So there they are, the terrible bloodsuckers we were warned about years ago. “The swarms of mosquitoes should actually be in Siberia,” I joke somewhat meekly. Lena answers with a slightly pained smile. She swirls her bag wildly around her body to keep the voracious beasts at bay. She is wearing a skirt and nylon stockings, so she is hopelessly at the mercy of the mosquitoes. We reach the highlight of the trip, the holy spring of St. Nikolay. “It’s traditional for pilgrims to take a shower under the holy water here. Would you like one too?” asks Lena kindly. “No, thank you,” we also kindly decline. Just the thought of offering the swarms of mosquitoes another centimeter of skin makes Tanja’s and my hair stand on end. Alexei, on the other hand, is a particularly hard-boiled pilgrim. He places two buckets under the rivulet until they are full, goes into the corrugated iron changing room and pours the holy water over his body. “Why is the water here sacred?” I ask. Lena shrugs her shoulders and asks Alexei. “I don’t know. A miracle probably happened here. Or someone had a special encounter here,” he replies, shrugging his shoulders. When we leave the pious place, Lena’s legs are literally stung with blood. The poor girl sits scratching her head in the car as Alexei resumes his kamikaze drive and plunges into the traffic with glee.

Is our friend Michael an angel?

We reach the Iverskiy monastery safely in the late afternoon in torrential rain. I lie down in bed, exhausted, to get some rest. Then comes Michael. He prepared bliny (pancakes) for us today and invited us to his studio apartment. Michael’s apartment is in one of the run-down blocks of flats. “I hope the elevator doesn’t stop,” I joke as we stumble up to the fourth floor. “Not really. It only happened once on New Year’s Eve when a friend came to visit me. Thank God it was before 6 p.m. and so he was able to be released from the emergency service,” he laughs, which also makes us laugh heartily. Michael opens the door to his apartment and we are surprised at how clean it is. We immediately feel at home with our friend. “Let’s eat,” he suggests after a while of talking. His girlfriend Katjana, Tanja and I sit down at the small kitchen table. Michael places three cans of beer and a large plate of blinis on the table. They are pancakes filled with delicious salmon. “Man, you can cook really well,” Tanja and I praise him enthusiastically. “Blinys are my specialty. It’s not difficult to prepare,” he says modestly. We experience a cheerful evening and are glad to have met him. Michael is a photographer and happened to be at the monastery when we arrived last November to take some photos for his friend the church carver. He was the only one who spoke English at that time and helped us a lot to make communication between the nuns and us possible. Once again, we have met a person who seems like an angel to us. As soon as we need him, he is there to help us organize a phone card for our cell phone, the trip from the airport to the monastery, the purchase of special batteries, etc. etc. Without a doubt, our stay here in Samara would be much more difficult without him and many things would not be possible. Maybe he really is an angel. At the very least a fantastic, helpful, friendly and always good-humored person.

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