Sunbathing in Siberia, page 22
According to Russian superstitions if you clean your house within three days of a guest leaving they will have a bad journey home, or they will die, or devils will come, big Russian-speaking devils that want to force-feed you kittens. I didn’t want this to happen but it was difficult after my dad had left to leave the kitchen the way it was. The floor hadn’t been cleaned in a month, and as the sofa bed was a sofa once again, we found dust-bunnies so big there was a danger of them turning into dust-bears or tigers. I had to clean, just a little bit. Three days after my dad had left, we Skyped each other. He had panicked in Yemelyanovo Airport just as I had thought. He had even asked people what was going on only to be looked upon as a crazy person. Nobody understood him and he couldn’t understand anybody else. When they started boarding the plane, he showed his plane ticket to an airport assistant who waved him towards the plane. He had worried about following the 7 ft giant man, as it seemed he wasn’t leaving the departure lounge café. Only at the very last call did the fella board the plane. They did leave nearly an hour late and got to Moscow at the time I had seen on the flight radar. His connecting flight had left Moscow on time. It had failed to show up on radar until 10.50 a.m. because it had to be covered in de-icer. Boarding of the plane had finished on time at 10 a.m. sharp. When he was stood in the X-ray machine with his belt and shoes off they had announced the final call. When he was cleared to enter the departure lounge, he’d had to run to his gate and made it with only a few seconds to spare. As he sat down on the plane, he had worried about his luggage. Had they had time to transfer the bags? When he arrived in Heathrow he found his answer. His luggage had extended its holiday. While talking to my dad I didn’t tell him that I had cleaned the kitchen a bit after he left. He’s not the superstitious type, but I felt a bit guilty. Perhaps my clearing of dust-bunnies had caused some kind of demonic force to hold on to my dad’s suitcase for amusement.
Apocalypse Day came and went without even a hint of the four horsemen. Boris stayed in the mountains, Nataliya Petrovna went about her business and nobody in Russia was hurt. There were no riots, no panic, no fireballs from the sky, and no bullets being fired in the street. The day before the apocalypse was due; I had been summoned to an immigration office to the east of the city near the biggest war memorial. I had to go and collect the new visa that would allow me to leave the country in future. This time there were no would-be-assassins, just a large room with no furniture, and a security guard sat on a windowsill. My visa had already been prepared. The three-month private visa I had entered on was stamped to make it useless, and I was handed a small green booklet with my picture on each page. It looked like an old World War II identity card. I wasn’t even charged anything. We left the office and found that the bus we had taken to get there had finished its route in that part of the city, turned around and would be taking us back home. To avoid being asked to give up our seats by babushkas we sat at the back where they never go. The windows of the bus were covered with tiny crystals of ice, so that when car headlights shone through it gave the impression that we were inside a giant Christmas bauble. Sat there, watching the city go by through frosted glass I felt a strange sensation. For days leading up to that moment I had been trying to figure out what I was feeling. I thought it might have been fear. Fear of the cold, or fear of not seeing my family in Wales again for an awfully long time. But I was too relaxed – so it couldn’t have been fear. Sat on the back of the bus it felt like I had bunked off school. It was early afternoon and I wasn’t normally in the east of the city at that time of day. It reminded me of the time I was in junior school in Ely, and had been picked by a television company to be involved in a few hours’ filming for a documentary. I was nine or ten years old. The camera crew took three others and me to Cardiff market, where they wanted us to walk around with clipboards and look like we were carrying out some kind of junior survey. That was the first time I had seen Cardiff Market. It had felt like an adventure, seeing the market salespeople calling out prices of strawberries and people bartering. I had felt wonderfully free, being away from school and having a taste of adult life. Sat in the giant bauble with my passport and visa in my pocket and Nastya by my side, watching the rays of crystalline light swirl around, I had the sensation that even though I had reached my destination, even though I now had one place to be and would likely be there for years to come, I was at the beginning of my adventure.
EPILOGUE – ONE YEAR IN SIBERIA & COUNTING
Aeroflot Flight SU1483N. December 25th 2013. Krasnoyarsk – Moscow
Nastya and I both felt excited to leave. Though we had met in Paris, and flown to Moscow together a few times, we had never actually enjoyed a holiday or trip of any kind together as a couple. Thanks to a friend of mine, we had been bumped up to comfort class on Aeroflot’s new Boeing 777. Reclining in seats we would never normally be able to afford I looked down on the clouds stretching out into the sunrise. Barely a month had passed since I had celebrated my first full year in Siberia. To mark the occasion I had arranged a small party in a café that doubled as a gig venue and nightclub. I had recently become an English teacher/cultural advisor and so one of my colleagues and several of my students joined us. Without any decent command of the Russian language, it became obvious that teaching would be the only option available to me. It’s the perfect job really, as it gives me access to many different people, all of whom are eager to tell their story. It also provides a great deal of insight into the differences that have long existed between the British and Russian ways of life. For instance, while discussing music with one female student in her late thirties, we started on cultural shifts that had happened since the sixties. I talked about all of the music I had grown up with and the famous clash between the mods and the rockers. When I asked her if they had ever experienced any similar kind of musical rivalry in Russia she replied ‘No, we had communism.’
Though I couldn’t wait to travel, in the back of my mind I had been slightly concerned about flying again. My previous flight had been with my dad over a year earlier, and I distinctly remember a minute where the plane had started falling from the sky after take-off. As was the case a year earlier, the pros outweighed the cons, so I took my fear and placed it beneath my nervous excitement. Something I had become really good at. The days of being too afraid to step out of the apartment or walk down the street alone are long gone too, although I have done away with the soundtrack in my mind so I can listen for people walking too close to me. Regardless of such new vigilance, I still managed to get side blinded by a pack of wild dogs on my way to class in early December. I had been in the middle of the city, in broad daylight at 3 p.m., when a small dog started barking in front of me. As he was only the size of my shoe I thought nothing of it and continued along my way. I failed to notice the two much larger dogs under a fur tree to my right who decided I had walked into their territory. The largest locked its jaws over my right arm. I shook it off and ran. Fortunately, it didn’t cause me any harm though my brand new winter coat needed some stitching.
Other than a pack of large furry beasts trying to eat me, as years go it’s been mostly pleasant. The summer, though chilly, was full of boat trips up the Yenisei River and festivals on the islands in the city centre, and I even managed to lose my rugby match virginity. Who’d have thought that after thirty years in Wales I would see my first live rugby match in Siberia? While I sat watching players tackle each other, I felt a pang of regret over having never experienced such a thing before, though I was too caught up in the moment for my negative feelings to last. I have little time for regrets these days. I spent most of my twenties looking back at things I didn’t do or hadn’t done yet. It has taken me so long to realise that I am alive, now, and I can only use the time I have once. I’m not sure when or why this realisation occurred, but it did, and I am now unmistakably different. A year has changed me much. When I’m not working, I attend Russian and German classes. Nastya has queried my decision to learn German several times saying ‘It’s pointless to learn a language you have no plan to use’; each time I explain how I had wanted to learn languages when I was twenty. I bought phrase books and did nothing with them, because everything I did then was half-hearted. I don’t have time for half-hearted attempts anymore. Either I make a decision to do something or I forget about it. I’m not sure whether this is something to do with living in Siberia or whether it comes with age.
Russian Railways Train 258. December 26th 2013. Moscow – St Petersburg
After only one day in Moscow, we were on our way to another city. It had been a hectic first day of travelling. Dropping our luggage off at Masha’s, we made a quick visit to Gorky Park before ending up at a café with Evgeny Nikitin. Almost three years had passed since we had last seen each other; before Nastya and I were even married. We had little time. After waking up at no-o’clock in the morning in Krasnoyarsk, flying to Moscow and spending the day on our feet, our eyes were red and conversational skills a little weak. Nikitin and I chatted as if we had seen each other just the day before. The evening vanished and before I knew it we were shaking hands and saying farewell again.
Nastya woke me up the next morning to tell me we couldn’t stay another night in Moscow. Masha had relatives coming over; and Olga, Masha’s sister who also lived in Moscow, and who had promised Nastya and I that we would be able to stay the night at hers, had withdrawn her offer; the hostels were expensive at short notice, and so there had been nothing for it but to continue on our journey. I barely had time to shower before throwing on my rucksack and heading for the train station. It hadn’t changed much, though the ticket office was even harder to find this time as half the station was sectioned off due to some repair work. The place was teaming with thieves just as it had been in 2011. As we were travelling by day and the journey was only ten hours’ long, we decided to buy cheap regular seats. This was a mistake. A few hours in and our backs were aching like hell. Not only that but there was a young guy with mad, staring eyes moving round the wagon asking people for their phones, claiming he was too poor to afford one of his own. Later however he seemed to be talking quietly on his own mobile while hunched down in his seat. In the beginning, Nastya and I were worried about going for a cigarette in the section where two wagons join. If we left our luggage Mr Crazy Eyes would likely go through it. As we squirmed in our seats, Nastya overheard the man sitting behind us chatting to someone on his phone. He was militia. We left our luggage and smoked. The day went on like this with nothing to do but sit for a while then go for a cigarette.
Besides the pack of wild dogs in Krasnoyarsk and the guy on the train, I couldn’t say that I had encountered any other real dangers throughout my first full year in Russia. However, I can’t say the year wasn’t without obstacles. For a start, there were and are still major cultural and personal differences between Nastya and I – I would be lying if I said we hadn’t fought it out a few times, shouted at each other or cursed under our breath. During the beginning of 2013 we did it rather a lot. It took a good six months to get used to each other’s habits. I am and have always been obsessively tidy. Nastya is the exact opposite. When we get up for work in the morning Nastya likes to carpet the floor in clothes before redecorating the kitchen with breadcrumbs. I’ve had to learn to let things go a lot. When I first moved to Abertridwr at the age of sixteen, although I loved being with my girlfriend and her family, the disorganisation of their house annoyed me. But it was home, and by being homely it was occasionally untidy. It’s much the same now. If our apartment looked less messy, I’d probably be equally annoyed because I also hate clinical environments. I’ve come to live with the fact that homes and places that are lived in, look lived in. It’s not mess, it’s life. Besides domestic stuff, we have occasionally pissed each other off with other things. For example, Nastya is forever going on about supernatural stuff. She even asked me whether I thought my new coat had attracted the wild dogs to me, because my new coat is purple, and purple attracts evils; though I think the real reason she asked may have more to do with the fact that I didn’t buy the blue coat she wanted me to. If something bad happens, Nastya usually blames it on some far-fetched superstitious blah, which causes me to switch my ears off. Then she becomes angry with me for having not listened to a word. In this way, I’m a lot like my dad; I require proof of everything; closing myself off from mysticism and other difficult to explain phenomena. Saying that, in recent years I have experienced a strange sense of synchronicity that I can’t explain.
After I met Nastya, whenever I checked my clock, the time was always 14:14, or 12:12, or something similar. I showed my dad back in 2010 – my dad who doesn’t believe in anything other than that worms eat you when you die; and then it began happening to him. I took it as a sign that I was in the right place at the right time. It may sound weird but if you checked your watch at random times and it was always some freakish kind of time palindrome you would start to believe in the unusual, wouldn’t you? I know that people who have experienced this kind of thing before have been criticised for maybe checking their watch at the exact same time every day, subconsciously. That may have been the case with me. I don’t know. What I do know is that I can’t explain everything. Just a few years ago, while I was in Cardiff and too lazy or stuck in my ways to even visit friends on the other side of the city, if you had told me I would be living in the centre of Siberia now I probably would have laughed. Still, when Nastya tells me that a distant relative has become pregnant only because some other distant relative has recently died, or that an apocalypse is due because a bird flew into our balcony window, I still tend to zone out.
Tallink Silja. Baltic Princess. December 30th 2013. Turku – Stockholm
Three days in the city of St Petersburg proved more than enough for both of us. By day it seemed that the whole city had been built for cultural tourism. There are more museums than I can count. But by night it was as if the whole city turned into a party. It did not sleep, and neither did we. Even while I was bunkered down in a hostel, I could feel the vibration continue until dawn. When our bus arrived we couldn’t wait to leave. Modern St Petersburg requires a lot of energy and we were decidedly past it.
The bus drove all night, through the Russian border and into Helsinki. When we arrived at the main bus terminal at 10 a.m. Nastya spotted an Indian restaurant, made a beeline for it and banged on the door. We could see a woman vacuuming through the window. She alerted a man who then came to the entrance. It was obvious that we had come from Russia and that we were very hungry. Thirty minutes later he opened up early especially for us. Although we had averaged about one café an hour in St Petersburg, that first taste of curry was magic. When the sun set on Helsinki we were off once more, west into Turku, which is where we caught the ferry to Sweden. Sitting up at night, looking at Finnish houses dotted along the coast, I found myself thinking of Baba Ira. She had died on a Tuesday.
Before Ira passed, she would often be found sitting on the floor of her bedroom for no reason. She didn’t know why or how she got there and occasionally couldn’t remember who anyone was either. I was called over a few times to help lift her back into bed. After that came a short spell in hospital, which only seemed to make her worse. She gave up on food and soon after gave up her will to speak. She died peacefully in her sleep, in the comfort of her own bed, a few days after being released. She was ninety. Two days later, we buried her in a cemetery on the other side of the city, in the same plot as her husband. At her funeral Ira was laid in clothes she had pre-chosen for the occasion long ago, while I sat with many other members of the family and friends as a priest gave a eulogy and burned incense. We were given candles and stood with them in our hands until they burned to nothing. Wax dripped over our fingers, which burned momentarily, though it reminded us that we were still alive and well. At the cemetery Ira’s open coffin was placed on a small wooden platform so that everyone could say their last goodbyes. Nastya and I were encouraged to touch her hand. This took the sense of death and sorrow out of the occasion. It was like shaking someone’s hand in farewell. Once her coffin had been laid in the ground, and we had each thrown a handful of dry soil on top, we looked on as the young men who had only dug the hole a few hours earlier, filled it in again. We couldn’t leave until it was finished, tidied up, and a cross placed on top. Since then we have feasted three times: once on the afternoon of her funeral, the second five days after, and the third and final exactly forty days after her death. As opposed to the tearful wakes I have known in the UK, The Three Feasts of Ira weren’t all doom and gloom. We shared memories and toasted her long life. Nastya and I spent a few hours looking through Ira’s old photo albums and listening to her cousins tell stories of Ira’s youth. Apparently she had been quite adventurous. She would invite people to dinner, only to announce she would be leaving that very evening for some distant part of the world. She loved to be spontaneous and buy plane tickets on a whim. Even though she was married, she sometimes travelled alone. She wanted to see the world and the expectations of women of her time wouldn’t stand in her way. When she was alive, the only Ira I knew was the shadow of a woman who crouched over a stool and ate soup twice a day. Since her death I have learned so much more. If anything I regret not learning more about Ira’s life from Ira herself, who would have been only too happy to share her memories with me. Inspired by Ira, Nastya and I have found a new sense of urgency. Two weeks after the final remembrance, Nastya bought us plane tickets to Moscow, train tickets to St Petersburg, and ferry tickets to Sweden. Though we never had any reason to travel to Sweden in particular, we couldn’t think of one reason not to. Our decision had less to do with the destination than it had to do with rediscovering the feeling that we were making the most of our time.
