But on my right there was an empty lane, separated off by a solid line. For some reason the cars with the flashing lights didn’t enter it, although you’d have thought they had no reason to feel shy. During the half-hour that I spent in a slow-crawling queue, two buses and a couple of cars with black-tinted windows and no number plates drove along the dedicated lane. In one of the cars—a hulking great Lexus SUV—the window on the driver’s side was lowered. The driver was a swarthy young man with a mobile phone in his hand. He was hardly even looking at the road. People like him used to be called “individuals of Caucasian nationality” in the police bulletins, but recently they’d started using the more politically correct expression “natives of the Northern Caucasus region,” which in the popular daily vernacular had rapidly been reduced simply to “natives.”

It would have been okay if buses and taxis had been driving along the dedicated lane in an unbroken stream, the way they do everywhere else in the world! Then it wouldn’t have been so offensive. It would have been clear that I was paying with my time for the comfort of riding in a car, while people using public transport were granted the right to ride past the traffic jams.

Only there weren’t any buses to be seen. But even so, apart from a few especially self-confident “natives,” the drivers didn’t venture into the special lane.

I lit a cigarette. Then I crushed the cigarette into the ashtray and started turning to the right. They weren’t exactly delighted to let me through, but they did it calmly—the jam had given drivers a sense of unity but had not yet driven them berserk. Once I was through the four lines of cars that were driving in three lanes, I turned grimly out onto the dedicated lane and put my foot down.