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Extract 4 - Olga, Sasha and Bim

Olga preparing a feast

Any other administrator of a respectable hotel would have had me out on the street at the double. And with extra good reason, since a block booking by a Turkish consortium had accounted for every single room.

But Olga was not just any other administrator. Olga, I was rapidly to learn, was special. Within a remarkably short time I was partially sanitised under the shower, fed, and tucked up in her own bed, while Olga moved out to a shake-down in a spare corner. When she came off duty the next morning, she took me home with her like a stray puppy.

Olga was blonde, plump, motherly and forty-five-ish. She lived near the hotel, in a flat in the magnificently named Street of the Soviet Frontier Guards, with her husband Sasha and teenage children Maxim and Katya. And, of course, Bim.

Bim was the family mutt, a dwarf something-or-other with bat ears, bulging eyes and chronic incontinence. On our first meeting he chewed my hand furiously while peeing on the floor in ecstasy. Such contradiction between opposing ends of his person was quite normal. He soon left me and attacked my baggage, allowing me to tiptoe away round the puddles - and gasp at the view from the kitchen window.

Winter was finally losing its grip on Ashkhabad. Whereas a fortnight ago the air had been damp and bleary, today it sparkled. Olga's second-floor flat was at the south-western tip of the city, close to the mountains. From her balcony there was a stupendous view out and up to their silver ridges, soaring literally and metaphorically far above the grime and litter where human insects crawled below.

Sasha, the catfish - and Bim

For a long time I stood transfixed. Only exhaustion tore me away, to collapse on to Olga's sofa in blissful immobility.

Life chez Olga was mostly carried out in the kitchen. Olga believed that everyone should eat as if about to set out across the Kara Kum by camel. After some weeks of travelling constantly and eating intermittently, I was strongly inclined to agree. The greatest luxury was access to kettle, teapot, and endless supplies of black tea. And when I discovered that I could buy tinned, condensed milk in the little market on the corner of the street, I was in heaven. The label read, "suitable for infants, convalescents or tourists". I wasn't sure what category I came under. But from then on, the incomparable Olga kept a tin constantly in her fridge. "Gill... chai?" became as constant a theme in the house as "Bim... nelzya! Stop it!"

...On my second morning Sasha came into the flat like a whirlwind, bearing a flush of triumph and a catfish two-thirds of his own considerable length.

"Only a small one," he said deprecatingly. "Until a few years ago we used to get them this big..." He held a hand level with the top of his head. And he was not the sort of man given to fisherman's tales.

The fish, still alive and writhing feebly, was put in a bath full of water. It stayed there for twenty-four hours, mournfully flapping its great gills, while Bim stood against the tub on his hind legs and dribbled over it, and Olga fretted that she couldn't have a bath. When I came home the next day it was gone, and the freezer was full. Olga produced deep-fried fish goujons for supper. They were delicious; but I could only think of the great sad, whiskery creature, captive for twenty-four hours while awaiting its inevitable end.

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