I sit down on the metro and go round and round on the Koltsevaya line. It’s a godsend for the sleep-deprived, the best solution anyone’s come up with apart from the cinema, but going to the cinema costs more money. I have nowhere to go. Recently that’s been a leitmotif of mine: I-have-nowhere-to-go-I-have-nowhere… I see a young hippy get on further down the carriage, he flashes me the V; I do the same back and carry on trying to sleep. Next thing he’s standing in front of me. ‘I’ve just come from the tusovka on the Arbat,’ he says. ‘Are you kaif?’ I don’t answer. So it turns out there’s a tusovka on the Arbat. I thought the Arbat was all street vendors, artists and lunatics; a world of weirdness crammed into a few blocks, and far too many people. ‘Do you need vpiska?’ he asks. I’m about to start laughing again. ‘I’m vlom,’ I say bluntly. ‘Here, take this number. She’s completely nuts, but she lives by herself.’ I look up at him, surprised. I take my diary and a pen from the little pouch hanging around my neck. ‘Her name’s Ophelia. Well, I don’t know what her name is but she goes by Ophelia. If she answers, you might be in luck.’ I write down the number, give the pioneer a fenka and get off at the next stop to try my luck with the vpiska.

When the door opens, Ophelia makes quite the first impression: there’s a crazed look on her face, her hair is in complete disarray, and she’s got nothing on except for a big knitted shawl.

‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ she says, and her gentle tone puts me a little more at ease. ‘Come in.’

I go inside. It’s a small apartment with very eclectic décor. On the walls are Orthodox icons, masks of African deities, drawings of yin and yang and other esoteric symbols; various Buddhas smile from the shelves, peeking out between old books, lumps of quartz, magnets, candles and glasses of water.

Ophelia leads me straight to the bathroom.

‘You need to cleanse yourself,’ she says. ‘Your energies are all out of sync. Give me your clothes and I’ll throw them away. You have a wash and when you’re done, cover yourself in this.’ She hands me a bottle of apple vinegar.

I clumsily undress. I turn on the tap to fill the bath.

‘No no no!’ shouts Ophelia. ‘No stagnant water. Use the shower.’

‘Do you have soap?’ I ask faintly.

‘Forget soap. You need purity, not chemicals.’

I can’t see any towels. There don’t seem to be any other clothes either, but fortunately I turn out to be wrong on that front: Ophelia brings me a thick white linen robe, and I see that she too has swapped her shawl for a matching one.

I get out of the bath smelling intensely of vinegar.

‘You’re like a whole new person,’ she says. ‘Sit down and have some tea.’

I look doubtfully at the musty liquid in my cup. I take a tentative sip. It tastes of nothing, there’s not even any sugar in it, but at least it’s hot.

‘This is a special variety of tea that’s only drunk in the Vatican. Some friends of mine – very devout Christians – smuggle it into Russia. I hardly have any of it left,’ she explains, then her tone changes. ‘And you? Tell me about yourself, what sign are you? What’s your faith? Where are you from?’

I swallow.

‘I’m a Pisces,’ I say slowly. ‘I used to go to the Catholic church for a while…’

‘Pisces is a good sign, very mystical… But from now on you’ll only serve the Supreme Absolute.’

I don’t say anything, I’m literally lost for words. The phone rings, but she ignores it. I’ve noticed that she is very selective when it comes to answering the phone or the front door. When I called her from the metro station, she told me she hadn’t answered the phone in ten days. She only does so when the call is truly transcendental, apparently. I don’t know how she can tell that without answering. The doorbell rings for a long while; she carries on talking as if she can’t hear it.

‘Purity is the force that allows us to move beyond the impasse of this disorientated world. Birth and death don’t mean a thing to the soul, but they do to people whose souls are lethargic. That’s what you are, but you’ve come to the right place: God has put me in your path so that I can be your spiritual guide…

‘Then, can I stay here?’ I ask the all-important question.

‘Of course! Just as long as you follow my instructions to the letter, so that we can bring about universal harmony…’

Following the rules of the vpiska at Ophelia’s was no mean feat.

Each morning, when we woke up, we had to meditate, which basically involved sitting for a long time with our legs crossed and our eyes closed. ‘Imagine that you’re looking down on yourself from above,’ explained my spiritual guide. ‘First you see yourself sitting in the room, then you rise a little and you see the whole apartment, then you carry on rising and you see the whole building, then the neighbourhood, the city, until you get far enough away that you can see the whole Earth and the other planets of the solar system and beyond, if you can… Then you slowly descend back to Earth by the same route.’

After that, Ophelia would make breakfast. All we ever ate were oats boiled in water, seasoned with soy sauce and sprinkled with a few drops of vegetable oil. For every meal. Occasionally we would have baked apples for dessert. No salt, no sugar, no bread, and God forbid we eat meat, eggs, milk, butter, potatoes or jam. On special occasions you could swap the oats for rice or another grain. And the apples for pears. And, of course, there was the contraband pontifical tea.

After breakfast, we had half an hour’s rest. We would discuss ‘worldly’ matters, as she referred to them, and she would talk to me in Spanish, which she had studied at the Foreign Language Institute. ‘¿Me entiendes?’ she would ask. But I didn’t understand. ‘You must remember!’ she would say, getting annoyed. ‘Liberate your subconscious! Let the cosmic energy flow through your mind!’ I tried my hardest to let the energy flow, but I still couldn’t understand a word.

Later we would practice tai chi. I had to imitate her achingly slow movements ad infinitum. This was meant to bring me a profound inner peace, but in fact the sluggishness of the exercises and their pointlessness only irritated me to the point of desperation. My knees hurt from being bent for so long, and the music Ophelia put on in the background made me dizzy; she described it as a transcendental symphony, but to me it just sounded like someone flicking a spring over and over.

After this torture came the time for ‘self-realisation’. Ophelia was studying Sanskrit so she could translate some original Vedic manuscripts which she had in her possession. My job was to do the chores, since I didn’t feel ready for any more creative undertaking. She kept telling me that I was too closed off and I needed to escape the spiritual cage I had built for myself, but as the days went by I began to feel like it was Ophelia who was living in a prison of her own making.

In the afternoon we would eat more oats with soy sauce for lunch, rest for another half hour, and then she would give me lectures on mysticism, her theory of universal history, white and black magic, religions, energy, demons and parapsychology. She would bombard me with so much chaotic, contradictory information that I couldn’t decipher, process or retain a single thing.

In the evenings we would pray by candlelight. I had to learn various Orthodox psalms, which we would intone to a vague melody in order to ‘experience the awakening of a pure love of God.’ We also said the Lord’s Prayer and the Mahā-mantra.

Over the course of the day, we would drink vast quantities of water purified by moonlight, which Ophelia prepared by leaving it out in jars on the balcony each night. We also had to wash our hands periodically with apple vinegar to cleanse them of negative auras.

Before bed we would take turns playing discordant sounds on a wooden flute; these were intended to invoke the beings of light who would supposedly watch over us in our sleep. We slept on mats, totally naked and without any covers in order to preserve our purity – this was especially annoying because of the cold – and we always slept with our heads pointing west so we were less receptive to the satanic spirits that caused nightmares.

Around three weeks into her cloistered existence, three weeks in which she hadn’t seen a single person other than Ophelia, Alia was desperate to leave the apartment, even if it was just for a stroll around the block, to be around people again, to be outside, to breathe some fresh air.

‘The air outside is polluted,’ Ophelia told her matter-of-factly. ‘Anyway, we have visitors today.’

‘How do you know?’ Alia wanted to ask, but it wasn’t worth the trouble. She knew and that was that, though she hadn’t answered a single phone call in recent days, or opened the door to anybody, despite the phone ringing nonstop and the doorbell almost as often.

That morning, Ophelia had started to clean and tidy from first thing. She lit several incense sticks, sprinkled salt in all the corners, rearranged the furniture to help get the stagnant energies flowing and put on the cassette with the transcendental symphony and its flicked spring as soon as she got up.

The first guest arrived around midday, a woman dressed all in black, who said her name was Rusaline. She was from Peter, she introduced herself as a gypsy and a witch, and she brought several packets of oats with her. Then came two seers from Archangelsk, both dressed in traditional kosovorotka shirts and speaking in an archaic form of Russian. They gave Ophelia a new icon for her collection and a bag of apples. They were followed by an astrologist from Alma-Ata, who brought sesame seeds, dates and a small yellow pyramid which was possessed of a powerful energy. Then, arriving almost simultaneously, came various Hare Krishnas with shaved heads dressed in white and pink, an extrasensory old man, a group of devotees of Carlos Castaneda, a pair of yogis, and too many hippies to count, all from different parts of the country, all bearing gifts.

They prepared a vegetarian feast, which they laid out on the floor on top of a tablecloth, then they all sat around it and began to meditate. At first they did it with their eyes closed, each in their own world, then they stood up and formed into several rows and started dancing and chanting a mantra, repeating the same three or four words louder and louder. Some danced extravagantly, some just shuffled their feet on the spot, and others stuck their arms in the air and swayed from side to side. When they had finished, they sat back down around the tablecloth and began to eat.

Alia went along with it all just like everyone else, but she could feel an icy chill in her brain, a sure sign that her patience was reaching its limits. She had already decided that her time at Ophelia’s apartment wouldn’t extend beyond that day. She couldn’t stand it anymore.

She scrutinised each of the visitors very closely – there had to be someone who could get her out – and she landed on an intelligent-looking, bearded hippy. She sat down beside him and without beating around the bush, asked him outright if he had vpiska for her. The hippy smiled and nodded. He said that his name was Snus and he lived with his dog on Mir Prospekt. ‘Perfect!’ said Alia. She didn’t leave his side until they all started clearing up, at which point she took advantage of the general hubbub to escape, dragging Snus along with her. She was scared Ophelia might hypnotise her or something, and then she’d be trapped in that godforsaken apartment forever.

‘This is Dog,’ says Snus, introducing me to his companion, who appears to be named after the English word for his kind. ‘Dog, say hello.’

Dog growls and bares his teeth. He’s a Great Dane the size of an elephant, with sharp fangs.

‘He’s very gentle,’ says Snus. ‘He’s five years old and he’s a virgin.’

I smile, trying to look friendly. I sit down on the sofa and avoid making sudden movements. It’s not so easy to relax with that dog around. Snus brings me tea – black, with sugar – and tells me a bit about himself. He’s tried crossing the border twice, and both times he’s ended up in psychiatric hospital. In winter he likes to swim in holes in the ice. You have to fully immerse yourself in the water, he explains, head included, otherwise you get sick. He also tells me that he doesn’t believe in love between a man and a woman, but that he can’t live without sex. At this point, and without further ado, he starts kissing me passionately. What’s unusual in this case is that Dog does more or less the same thing. While one of them is licking the right side of my face, the other licks the left. I’m about to cry out in horror, but I summon all my inner strength and ask him delicately if he wouldn’t mind getting his dog off me.

‘Have you got something against dogs?’ Snus seems offended.

‘It’s not that…’

‘If you don’t like my dog, just tell me.’

‘Your dog seems lovely, but…’

‘Come here, Dog!’ Snus interrupts. He pulls away from me and hugs Dog with a wounded look. ‘Nobody understands us.’

I feel tired, very tired. I had wanted to sleep with Snus at first, it had been a lengthy period of abstinence, but now all I want to do is sleep.

‘Do you think we could maybe call it a night?’ I ask him, as sweetly as I can.

‘Fine!’

He gets up and walks off into the other room followed by Dog, turning the light off as he leaves. I curl up on the sofa and fall straight to sleep, but not for long. I’m woken in the night by his hands all over my body, his wet mouth. Half-asleep, half-awake, I have sex with Snus to the sound of his dog desperately scraping at the door of the adjoining room.

In the morning I have a headache. I look out the window at the rainy street. It’s autumn, the trees are bare, the world outside is gloomy and depressing. I go out to the balcony to taste the icy air and the sad scent of mist. My gaze falls on the clothesline hanging from the railings. I undo both ends with the vague idea of killing myself. Nothing has any meaning. I’m mortally tired of everything, of myself above all. But I can’t strangle myself in Snus’s house. I couldn’t do that to him. He doesn’t deserve it, and neither does his gentle dog.

I listen to Dog scratching at the door in the other room, and before his owner emerges, I leave the apartment, carrying the clothesline in my pocket.

I was filled with a sudden urge to see people, lots of people, to feel them close, pushing me, jostling past me; I wanted the illusion of closeness, belonging, being among, a final gesture to my desperate isolation, before I went through with the decision that had slowly taken shape in my mind.

I went to the Arbat, the perfect place to find an unceasing throng of people, a human hive. Arbat Street – it was a boulevard really, for pedestrians alone – had become one vast marketplace, with painters sitting on the curb in front of their easels and hawking their wares, poets standing under trees with their typewritten pamphlets hanging from the branches as they flogged their verse, artisans of all kinds displaying their crafts, theatre groups announcing their upcoming performances, and fortune tellers, dancers, acrobats, preachers and smugglers eking out a living among a whole host of picaresque characters drawn from the many subcultures popping up across the country – punks, metalheads, rockers, Hindus, social democrats, Jehovah’s Witnesses, hippies, anarchists, bards and plenty more – all mingling against a backdrop of private cafes and foreign correspondents, tourists and mere mortals.

I spent a long time trying to make my way from one end of the Arbat to the other, swallowed up by the mass of people, and in my head, that Okudzhava song: Oh Arbat, my Arbat, you are my native land / Nobody could ever reach your end… I wasn’t actually after anything in particular; I had no desire to interact with anyone other than indirectly, which is why I didn’t go to the tusovka.

Then I spotted a curious sign, which I had to reread several times before I understood it: Psychoanalyst. I offer advice for all life’s problems. I didn’t need any advice, my problems had no solution, which is why I decided to go and take a look at this psychoanalyst; I liked the idea of presenting him with an insoluble dilemma.

It was hard to work out exactly how old he was. He was short, with a big moustache, messy, greying hair, and big, dark, crafty eyes.

He was talking in hushed tones to a woman who looked back at him with limitless devotion. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but it was clear his words were making an impact. I waited patiently for him to finish, then went over and gave him a broad outline of my situation.

‘Wait there,’ he said, his tone polite, respectful. ‘I’ve been expecting you, may you be my little thread.’

He told me he needed to do a few more hours’ work, then he was all mine, so I sat down on the curb to watch him ‘work’. People came over to him and talked and talked, and he listened to them very patiently. Then his turn came to speak, and each time, without fail, their eyes would begin to shine with humility. They would pay him accordingly, firm in the conviction that from that exact moment their lives would take a new course. They were like innocent little lambs, so easy to manipulate. It seemed like a nice line of work, this ‘psychoanalyst’ thing.

The streetlights were just coming on when the psychoanalyst came and told me he was done.

‘Let’s get something to eat,’ he suggested. ‘I bet you haven’t eaten all day.’

He was right. Although by now I was so used to being hungry I no longer noticed it, I did start to feel very weak when it had been a long time since I’d last eaten. We went to a cafeteria on the Arbat and filled ourselves up; I treated myself to hotdogs and chocolate milk, all the while thinking maliciously of Ophelia and her vegetarianism.

‘I don’t have anywhere to go either,’ confessed the psychoanalyst. ‘I’m just an old sick clown. But don’t go, please, may you be my little thread,’ he said, repeating that mysterious catchphrase of his.

I wasn’t planning on going anywhere. I had nowhere to go. I told him not to worry.

‘I usually sleep at Kiyevsky station,’ he said. ‘We can head over there in a bit, before all the seats in the waiting room are taken.’

I wasn’t overjoyed at the thought. I suggested we go to the tusovka instead, to see if we could get vpiska somewhere. This old sick clown intrigued me; I was keen to talk to him before I carried out my sentence.

There were no familiar faces at the tusovka, but we met a hippy there trying to earn a bit of cash by chewing on Neva razor blades, a rouble a pop; he told us about an abandoned building on Kalinin Prospekt where we could spend the night. We went straight there.

My companion was limping heavily on his left leg. I thought he must have some kind of injury.

‘Don’t you know who limps on his left foot?’ he asked with a glint in his eye.

I laughed, realising he was talking about the Devil.

‘You’re not telling me Satan spends his nights sleeping in train stations?’ ‘Appearances can be deceiving.’

---

Anima Fatua is out soon with Amaurea Press. You can order a copy here.

Anna Lidia Vega Serova was born in the former USSR, to a Russian/Ukrainian mother and Cuban father, and settled definitively in Havana, Cuba, in 1989. Originally a visual artist, in 1997 she won the Premio David for her first short-story collection, Bad Painting. Many of her short stories have appeared in English, in publications such as American Chordata, Exchanges, Guernica, Two Lines, Words Without Borders and Your Impossible Voice. 

Robin Munby is a literary translator from Liverpool, based in Madrid. His translations from Spanish, Russian and Asturian have appeared in publications including Wasafiri, Poetry Ireland, World Poetry Review, The Glasgow Review of Books, World Literature Today and Circumference. His poem ‘Machado Version 5 [El hospicio]’ appeared in the Winter 2025 issue of Asypmptote. His translation of the poetry collection El llibru póstumu de Sherezade by Raquel F. Menéndez is forthcoming from Skein Press.