The kindness of strangers: we thought we’d been poisoned at Tolstoy’s house. Then a local explained what we had really drunk
In July 2019 I travelled to Russia with my sister and a friend. As three bookish girls, our highlight would be a pilgrimage to Yasnaya Polyana, Leo Tolstoy’s country house.
The trip was already punctuated with comical mistakes and miscommunications. We couldn’t speak Russian, and it was our first experience in a country where no locals come to your aid to translate.
The three-hour train trip from Moscow into the countryside where Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina and War and Peace was surprisingly luxurious, with slippers waiting on our seats and slices of lemon in our tea. That evening, after we checked our bank accounts, we realised we’d accidentally bought first-class fares for about A$300 each.
Although we arrived at Tula train station refreshed, it was a summer day, and by the time we arrived at the writer’s house, we were overheated and dehydrated. Our first stop was the little restaurant at the estate’s entrance, which served recipes written by Tolstoy’s wife, Sophia.
When bottled water arrived at the table we poured ourselves three tall glasses and took greedy chugs. Before anyone spoke a word, the expressions on our faces confirmed our experience was shared. It looked like normal water but our tastebuds told us otherwise. This substance belonged in a biohazard chamber, not our mouths.
We tried to communicate the problem to our waitress, pointing to the bottle so unlike anything we had tasted before. She tried her best to understand our miming and the broken Russian from our translation app. She eventually brought us another bottle. It tasted the same.
We were parched, but our trepidation was even greater than our thirst. Particularly because both my sister and our friend were law students and started drawing parallels to the classic legal case of the decomposing snail in ginger beer. Could something have died at the water source? It certainly tasted like it.
Then the food arrived. We thought we’d ordered a savoury pie and “Sophia’s traditional cake” for dessert. The pie was actually a cream cake and “Sophia’s traditional cake” a scone-like hunk of plain bread. Our dry mouths stole our appetites.
A family of international tourists waved us down from the other side of the restaurant. Like two groups of shipwreck survivors, they were also surrounded by undrinkable water and equally at a loss as to why.
We went back and forth across the restaurant until another diner spoke up. We turned to find a tall Russian woman with an elegant chignon and some grasp of English. She rose from her chair and addressed us like a kindly teacher, explaining we were drinking a specialty natural Russian mineral water from the springs of the Caucasus. It is known for its high sulphur, magnesium, sodium and potassium compounds. “Drink,” she instructed. “It is good for health.”
This didn’t make the water taste any better – but it assuaged our thirsty panic. Now we knew it was supposed to taste that way – that there was no mollusc at the bottom of the bottle. I am still grateful to that bilingual woman for teaching us the journey our mineral water had taken from the artesian aquifer depths. By saving us from dehydration, she’d also saved the day.
• The main photograph was changed on 9 January 2025 to more accurately reflect the subject. A previous photo featured Russian mystic Grigori Rasputin
