Trust Me, I’m Lying
‘She looked offended, as if I had just offered her sex.’
Back in 2018, Angelina and I were coming back from an event when she discovered her phone was gone.
“Let’s go back and look for it,” I suggested—a futile attempt in a big city like Moscow, but worth a try. We walked all the way back to the event venue through the snow-covered streets of Kitay-Gorod, but, of course, we didn’t find anything.
“C’est la vie,” I said to Angelina afterwards, taking a bite of shawarma.
“Fuck fuck fuck!” she replied, holding her head in her hands.
The next morning, I woke up to a call. The time on my phone said 6:54 AM.
“Hello?” I said, my eyes still shut, my mind caught somewhere in a space between sleep and awakening.
“I have your phone,” the male voice on the other end said blankly.
I prepared myself for ransom demands. Now alert, I felt like in a Liam Neeson movie.
Where’s my daughter? Who are you?
“What do you want?” I said.
“I want to return the phone to you,” said the voice, as if this was evident from the beginning. “But first, I need to verify that you’re the real owner.”
Looking back, I realize how ridiculously naive I was. When a stranger calls you and demands anything, the only right response is to hang up. But at that moment, my trust in humanity went through the roof. I put my hand on the receiver and said to Angelina, who was in bed next to me, “What a wonderful man. He found your phone and wants to return it to you!”
Angelina’s eyes lit up.
“Just tell me your code to unlock the phone, and if it’s all good, I’ll send it back to you for 1,000 roubles,” [roughly 10 GBP or $12 in real money], the voice continued.
“1-3-5-7-9,” Angelina whispered, biting her fingernails in anticipation and excitement. She was just as dumb as I was.
I repeated the code to the voice.
After a short pause, the guy said, “It works. Thanks!”
Then he hung up.
“Wow,” I said to the ceiling. “And here I was, thinking Russians are nasty. But this is really something. Maybe the times are changing. Maybe people are not as bad as I thought. Maybe…”
I was interrupted by Angelina’s iPad making a chiming sound. The notification on the screen said: Your iPhone was successfully disconnected from iCloud and Find My iPhone.
Angelina and I exchanged worried glances. The email mentioned a location—Novosibirsk, roughly 2,000 miles away from Moscow.
I called the man back, but the line was disconnected.
I like to think I used to be someone who believed the best in people and that growing up in Russia changed that, making me wary of people’s intentions. The truth is probably that I’ve never trusted people in the first place. It’s just not in my Russian nature.
Sure, being afraid of people on the streets is an overreaction, but when you’ve been stopped by bald men in Adidas with a knife put to your stomach, demanding you give all your cash or else, you learn to avoid dodgy alleyways coming home from a theatre.
When I first came to London, I would see women walking the poorly lit streets north of 11 p.m. alone, all dressed up after what looked like a big night out.
You really have balls, I remember thinking. Even though you don’t.
An upstairs neighbour I once had in Georgia (the post-Soviet country, not the “Peach State”, my dear Americans) before I moved to London– a Russian-Asian man, a little older than me – once had his phone stolen on the streets of London’s Soho.
When he chased after the thief, he inadvertently broke the criminal’s left rib. (He’s trained in martial arts.) Then my would-be neighbour spent three months in jail for assault.
He left the UK for Georgia shortly after being released.
During our first meeting, after three bottles of beer, he complained to me, “What a stupid system. I protect myself and they put me in jail!”
This seemed like a reasonable argument at the time but weeks later, when we settled in our new Georgian apartment, I’d wake up to the sounds of him shooting pigeons who shat on his balcony – with a gun. Every. Fucking. Morning. Which made me wonder whether the system wasn’t as stupid as it seemed.
Phone theft is a serious problem in London — I see it in the news all the time, those black-clothed riders on their speedy electric bikes jumping from curb to curb, snatching phones from ignorant bypassers — and it’s part of the local folklore. Things like that are Big City Problems, they happen everywhere. Still, to me, London is the sаfest place I’ve lived. And after five years, I’ve lived in the shadiest neighbourhoods imaginable. Unlike in America, London kids don’t carry rifles, and unlike in Russia, I wasn’t mugged – not once.
“Oh you just wait,” my friends in London say to me, as if they want me to get robbed.
So whenever I am in central parts, I try to keep the phone inside my jeans pocket.
Just in case.
A friend of mine says that on a scale of zero to ten of trustworthiness, she sees people as plus eight unless they give her serious reasons to believe otherwise. A good way to look at life, but not practical, in my opinion.
“Sorry, can I ask you a question?” says a person on the street holding a banner donating to some serious cause, and I look down and mumble, “No, I am busy.”
“Of fuck you!” usually follows, as I walk away, muttering, There you go, exactly what I am talking about.
A tourist approaches. “Excuse me, how do I get to Buckingham Palace?” and I eye them with scorn and ask, “Why?”
“Uh, just wanted to visit the famous tourist spot?”
“Well, keep walking!”
Alright, maybe I am exaggerating a little but the older I get, the more I see everyone as a minus five: people I don’t know need to gain my respect with good deeds if they want to scale up the ladder of trust.
I never show this—I try to be polite—but the lack of trust is always there, creeping into the back of my mind whenever a person asks me for directions on the street.
I can’t help but think, What if he’s a rapist?
The hardest bit is when a homeless person asks you for money. It’s one thing to hand cash to a street musician playing the accordion. That’s work. But I belong to the closed society that believes giving money to the homeless simply because they ask for it incentivises homelessness—that is, the more money you give, the more they’ll see it’s working, and will keep begging for more—and that it’s all a big scam, controlled by the Albanian mafia who hire people to dress up as homeless and pay them pennies on the dollar.
That might not be the case in every situation, but it’s probably true most of the time. Or so my mother told me when I was little.
The last time I tried to help a homeless person, outside my local Tesco, I thought I was doing the right thing when I said, “You know what? I am not giving you money because who knows what you’ll buy. But I’ll get you food instead. Deal?”
The woman sitting in front of the store looked offended, as if I had just offered her sex.
Minutes later, I came out with a packet of crisps, a BLT sandwich, and a bottle of water, all of which I spent roughly $10 on. “Here,” I said, feeling as generous as Bill Gates. “Enjoy!”
The woman took the food from me with two fingers, sniffed it, looked at the packet of crisps with disgust, and then said, “I hate salt and vinegar. And I don’t eat meat!”
“Well, I am sorry they didn’t have vegan options!” I replied and walked away.
“Go fuck yourself you little twat!” I heard from behind.
Beggars, I learned, can be choosers.
Why do people lie? Out of fear, out of jealousy, out of a general feeling that the system is crooked and the only way to get ahead is by putting someone else down. Say the word “businessman” to a Russian over forty, and immediately, the image of a crook pops up. They aren’t to blame—most people who got rich in Russia in the 1980s-1990s were crooks, though it’s hard to follow the law when none exists.
I lie, and I lie often—practically every day. In my family, I have somewhat of a reputation for making things up on the spot. Every time I tell a story, my sister or my mother goes, “No, it wasn’t like that at all!” The time was 10 PM, not early morning, and the blanket was black, not orange.
Whenever we go out with friends and I tell a story, Masha usually plays along but afterwards, at home, she says, “Well, you’ve told that story completely wrong, of course. It was winter, not summer!”
In my defence, my lies are all in the little things, the details, which I embellish solely for the purpose of storytelling. It’s compulsive, I really can’t help myself, and I was never interested in facts anyway. Who cares if the person was a middle-aged man and not a teenage girl if the story is about how they screamed profanities on the double-decker bus and the driver had to stop the ride and ask them to get out? The truth, to me, is more important than fact and the truth is always subjective, contextual, emotional.
As Lara Pawson wrote, “Today I don't even believe that objectivity is a useful goal. It's false and it's a lie and it doesn't help people to mentally engage in events taking place around the world.”
Annie Dillard reportedly said, “You can invent the unimportant details, at the edges. It’s the important details that you must get right.”
That’s why the word creative exists in the term Creative Non-Fiction – and may I notice, it also goes first!
Living in Georgia, I took a taxi roughly three to four times a day. Not because I was a spoiled brat but because it was the most convenient form of transportation, and you could get to any part of the city for about $1 a ride. Georgian taxi drivers are extremely talkative, and every ride—especially after the war with Ukraine—started off with, “So, where are you from?”
After about a week, I got sick of saying the same thing over and again, so I came up with stories to entertain the driver but, most importantly, myself.
“Barcelona,” I’d say. “My father is from Spain and my mother is Ukrainian. I’ve lived between two countries most of my life and speak five languages. I am currently in Georgia to visit my Georgian grandfather on my cousin’s side. You could say we’re somewhat of an international family…”
“Siberia,” I’d reply with fake shyness. “My father was killed in a coal mine accident and my mother is a well-known prostitute in my birth city of Tumen. I don’t see her very often. I make ends meet by translating Russian poetry into Arabic. It’s my first time abroad.”
Occasionally, I’d venture too far. “I don’t know,” I’d say with a theatrical sigh. “Nobody knows where I was born, and all I know about my father is that he’s a ship captain, so my mother might have given birth in international waters in the Atlantic during an especially hard storm. She died giving birth to me, obviously. You could say I am a true citizen of the Earth and the Child of the Ocean!”
“Oh wow,” the driver would reply, eyeing me through the rearview mirror with a curiosity reserved for celebrities or street psychos. “What a story. I myself am a businessman. This,” he’d gesture to the steering wheel of his beat-up Toyota Prius, “is just temporary while I launch my Bitcoin company.”
I’d nod politely and repay him – it was almost always a man – with the same fake astonishment as he did for me.
“Wow. Good luck with that,” I’d say and pat the seat in front of me in brotherly solidarity.
Tit for tat, lie for lie. And both are happy and entertained. No harm done.
The harm in lying is, obviously, when you deceive people on purpose to gain something. Which is something I never do. Not because I am some saint—I wish!—but because I am not that smart.
Coming up with elaborate schemes always seemed like too much work, you have to think about all the potentialities and possibilities and make maps with red strings on corkboards, like they show in detective TV shows, and then, if people find out you’ve lied, you’re done. Over. Finished. You’d have to move away, come up with a new name, get plastic surgery, and make new friends, all of which seems like work you won’t get paid for.
I had a friend—let’s call him G—who stole tens of thousands of dollars from me. We were good buddies during my seven months of college, and he was helping me make some transfers to buy crypto back in 2017 when the whole Bitcoin craze was going around. We made a few transfers, and all was good, but after yet another big transfer of other people’s money, he simply disappeared. He wouldn’t return my calls or texts, and the money never showed. I imagine how he justified it to himself: “Serge will make more money, and I need this money now.” Or he simply spent a few dollars on gas and cigarettes and decided, “Why not spend the rest? It was so easy!” It’s astonishing how we can justify even the most immoral acts and come out as good people for our own psyches.
It’s cheaper – not to say more effective – to just be honest. Except, of course, when applying for a job or raising money from investors.
A close family friend once joked, “You know why VCs never understand anything in business? Because their job is being lied to.” The same, I imagine, goes for recruiters. They must be sick of hearing stories from cancer-curing-Africa-volunteering millennials with five Master’s degrees and reference letters from Elon Musks of the world, so if you try to be honest – as in, “Yo, I am just looking for a job, my experience talks for itself, I know I can do this,” – you’re simply not good enough.
Nobody is. This, I imagine, is why nobody gets hired.
When you’re tricked, played, lied to, it’s easy to feel angry and want to avenge them somehow—but in my mind, I always felt that if you did that, it was like the person who tricked you won twice. Best to vent, feel sad, and then let go. Move on. Ultimately, if you trust someone, it’s always a risk – and a big part of it is on you.
When Angelina’s phone was stolen, we went to the store and got her a new one. I didn’t have money back then – much like now – so we bought it on a credit card which I got to cover the first credit card.
As for my friend G, the last thing I messaged him was, “Well, now I know how much our friendship cost.” Looking back, I am glad that friendship ended early on because the guy was sort of an asshole.
Still – how do you know he / she won’t have an affair? How do you trust people with money? What do you do when you need to take a serious risk?
The best way, I’ve found, is to treat risky decisions as a story waiting to happen or be told.
You’ll either get what you want – good for you! – or you’ll get to tell a fun anecdote to your friends over a bottle of wine.
My favourite stories are all about major fuckups by the most ordinary people. Such stories bring us together, they create a world where you get to relax knowing that you’re just as fucked as everyone else. Even if some people are better at hiding it.
Think about it. If everything in my life went according to plan you wouldn’t be reading this essay right now. That alone must be worth a few lies here and there.
Which I tell solely for dramatic purposes, obviously.
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