Sunbathing in Siberia (10 page)

From the plane it didn't look anywhere near as menacing as it had up close. It was impossible to see Lenin, and the big grey buildings looked a lot like one of the residential buildings. If anything, with the great body of water behind it, it was a much better experience to see it from the sky.

PART II

Aeroflot Flight SU778. August 17
th
2011.
Krasnoyarsk – Moscow

Arriving back in Krasnoyarsk had felt different from the first time, in that it felt like I was returning home. Although the three months I had spent in the UK were busy, I had felt very claustrophobic, which I think had more to do with staying with my parents than anything else. It's not that I felt I had become Siberian or that my life in the UK was awful, but home was wherever my wife was.

Another reason it felt different is because it was summer, and it was this summer that I learned about the Siberia I had never known or heard of back in the UK. In summer most of southern Siberia is exceptionally hot, and the temperature in places can reach the high thirties. Those first few days in the apartment I had to learn how to cope with extreme heat. In place of the shirt, jumper, trousers and thick socks I had worn in the early spring, I now had to wear shorts, t-shirts and flip-flops. I hadn't worn shorts since the 1990s, so we had to go to the centre to get me some from one of the Chinese markets. Once I had my shorts and flip-flops I was able to enjoy myself, although I was self-conscious with my skin so pale that I reflected as much sunlight as the moon.

Whereas Krasnoyarsk used to be known as a strategic military city, which was closed to Westerners, it is now known as the Russian City of Fountains. This is due to the work of the previous mayor Pyotr Pimashkov, who restored all of the Soviet fountains after they fell into disrepair and threw in some new ones for good measure. It's impossible to walk or take a bus ride without passing at least one. Although people are not technically allowed to splash around in them, everyone seemed to be at it, so we did it too. It was so hot we spent whole days in the city centre walking from fountain to fountain, getting soaked to the skin and eating ice creams. When militia passed in their cars, Nastya cautioned me to stop jumping so hard in the fountains as they might pull over and have a word with me, but they never did. As long as you don't make a public nuisance of yourself, they leave you alone. My whole first week back in Krasnoyarsk was spent this way. It was bliss. I would even dare to call it paradise if it wasn't for the mosquitoes. Unfortunately, these little blood thirsty bastards stage an annual invasion of Russia every June and bugger off again in October. Night-time was the worst. It was so hot that we couldn't leave the window closed, but when it was open, hundreds of mozzies would stream in. We compromised by leaving the window open just a fraction and invested a hundred roubles in one of those plugin anti-mosquito devices that fills the air with scenty stuff and makes mosquitoes breakdance. However, the sound of mosquitoes buzzing away as the madness took them was just as annoying, and when I woke in the morning I had to shake their little corpses off the bed cover and out of my hair.

Ira

Nataliya Petrovna's mother was back from the hospital and living in the small back room next to Nastya's. Because of the language barrier, I never engaged in conversation with her, and neither did Nastya. Opportunities didn't present themselves as she spent most days in her room listening to the radio. Nastya's parents had gone to live at the dacha, though one of them would come back every day to give Ira her pills. Ira had a dodgy heart and needed looking after, having aged rapidly since a bad fall ten years earlier. Before this she had apparently been quite spritely. Nastya told me that after Ira's accident all those years ago, anyone who would lend a hand had to spend many hours a day coaxing Ira back onto her feet. She hadn't quite given up the will to live but had given up the will to walk. Thankfully everyone's efforts were successful.

In the middle of the afternoon Ira would make her daily trip to the balcony, to sit and watch the world go by. To get there, to get anywhere, Ira, hunched and frail, would lean on a small wooden stool and inch it forward. Every journey she made was equivalent to a long mountain trek for someone in the prime of their life. The sound of that stool scraping across the floor haunted me, especially at night. Ira – silent and solitary – was a kind of ghost. She existed and yet she wasn't present in our lives. When she was younger, she had been a highly celebrated Soviet scientist and engineer. Having studied at the Yekaterinburg polytechnic at PhD level, she went on to become a leading specialist in platinum and other rich metals. However, she never managed to finish her PhD as her tutor passed away, and there was nobody to replace him at the time. Ira went on to marry Pyotr Karbovski, and had three children, two of whom are now dead. When her husband passed away, it was felt that the best place for her was with her one surviving daughter.

Regardless of Ira's failing health, she still managed to maintain a normal dignified appearance. Before I woke in the morning, she would already be dressed in a long flowing gown and wore a red beret to mask her thinning hair. She made regular trips to the bathroom, sat on her stool and washed as best she could. She even cooked all her own meals and did the washing up if we left any dirty dishes by the sink. I was impressed by her stamina and will to continue living as normal a life as possible but sad that she spent so much time alone. To remedy the loneliness of senior citizens, Russian social services provide retired soviet comrades with state of the art mobile phones. Ira had one; I heard her talking on it quite often, though I don't think she knew what any of the other applications were for.

With my brother-in-law Dima and his wife, Marina, working every day, their son Semka would normally spend his weekday evenings with his grandparents. Although they were hardly at the apartment in summer, when they were, Semka would pretend to be afraid of Ira, and nicknamed her Baba Yaga. In Russia Baba Yaga is a fairy-tale witch that chases people around in her dacha, which has a pair of legs of its own. Ira, who we would normally refer to as Baba Ira, as Baba is short for grandmother in Russian, was called Baba Yaga so many times by Semka that I made the mistake of referring to her by that name also. Thankfully Nastya always managed to put her hand over my mouth at the right moment when her mother was around, as she would have been upset by it.

Superstitions

Some people believe in the strangest things. My mother believes her grandmother, my great Nana-Collie was a witch who could make people fall in love with others, or make people ill, by planting certain roots in the back garden with a bit of that person's hair. My mother still practises some of this stuff and reads tarot cards for my sisters and me once a year. Though I don't quite share my mother's views, I can forgive her mystic beliefs as they are, for the most part, quite unobtrusive. The same can't be said for Russian superstitions. For although they are charming in their own way, I have occasionally been really annoyed by either being told not to walk around something, or to say hello a hundred times in the street. It isn't simply a case of not walking under ladders or stepping on the cracks. Russian superstitions are extremely common and practised by almost every Siberian I know; if they are not carefully observed at all times it's possible to cause a great deal of offence. During my earlier visit I had witnessed occasional references to certain mystical beliefs, but it wasn't until summer that I fully understood the extent of them.

Nataliya Petrovna, who occasionally suffers from high blood pressure, would sometimes use very archaic methods to get this pressure down to an acceptable level. While we watched TV, she would sit with a jar of leeches bought earlier in the day, and attach two behind each ear. They were horrible to look at, and even worse when they were all fat with blood. They wriggled and writhed like the eels that were put into Commander Chekov's ear in the
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
. When she had the leeches on the ear, I felt compelled to watch them grow bigger. With each passing minute they evolved from slithers into full grown monsters. It was during one of these evenings that Nataliya Petrovna, complete with ‘eels' behind the ear, sat down with Nastya and me to discuss superstitions.

Before leaving for a long journey, travellers, and all those saying goodbye are supposed to sit for a moment in silence before the travellers depart. This allows time to sit and think of anything you may have forgotten but it's also supposed to bring you some luck. When I left Siberia at the end of spring, we had to begin our travels at 5.30 a.m. I hadn't slept and therefore was a bit irksome. I had taken the time to pack the night before and so after a shower and a cuppa I was ready on time. I have always made a point of being exactly on time in everything that I do. Nastya it seems is the exact opposite. She woke up late, insisted on breakfast, and took half an hour in the shower. Boris, whose job it was to take us to the airport, woke up even later. When I was really quite pissed off, and full of anxiety over the possibility of missing the flight, Nataliya Petrovna
insisted
on us sitting for a few minutes in silence. While this apparently brought a sense of calm to everyone else, it made me want to scream. But this is another major cultural difference. In Siberia, there is an attitude of ‘We'll get there when we get there'. Nastya for example is always late for work. And if Boris says he'll take you somewhere at say 4:30 p.m., you always know you have time to see a movie before he is actually ready three hours later. It's not just my Siberian family. Nearly every Siberian I know is relaxed when it comes to schedules. I don't know whether it's a British thing, or a Welsh thing, or whether it's just me but I've worn the same watch on my wrist for twenty years as a means to be punctual and not upset people. It's hard for me to understand why other people don't do the same.

There are many more Siberian superstitions. Apparently it is forbidden to demonstrate something bad that happened to you or someone else in the past using your own or someone else's body. For instance, if you're talking about a broken arm you had as a kid or a time when you saw someone with a broken arm, you couldn't point towards your own arm and say ‘it was like this', because, according to Siberian superstition, your own arm would soon become broken. If you do point to yourself without thinking while in the midst of conversation you then have to ‘grab' the bad energy you just put into yourself and throw it into the air, then blow on your hands to clean them also. This one has brought me no end of irritation. When talking to Nastya, I often use hand gestures to emphasise certain words or point to a limb of mine when talking about previous accidents of others. No sooner have I pointed to the limb, I am always stopped mid-sentence and brushed down. Even if we are in the middle of the street Nastya will do this unashamedly, which was a little bit embarrassing for me at first but I got used to it after the hundredth time.

Returning home for forgotten things is especially bad. It rouses all kinds of demons and Slavic monsters from wherever they live. If you have forgotten something it's considered wise to leave it behind, but if you absolutely have to go back and get it you should look in the mirror with your tongue hanging out before leaving again. There were times when I left my gloves at home by mistake in the spring, which left me no choice but to go back for them. When I did, Nastya pleaded with me to poke my tongue out in front of the mirror and wiggle it about for a second. This was horrendously funny to me, but to Nastya it was a very serious issue. I couldn't help laughing, and when faced with Nastya's scornful expression it just made it all the funnier.

If a bird lands outside your window you have to tap the glass to get it to bugger off. Although if a bird accidentally flies into the glass or taps on it, beware, because this will rouse the Slavic bird monsters. If a bird flies through an open window and spends some time inside, this is considered the worst of all. This means someone in your family will die soon or accidentally be squashed by evils. This one was already familiar to me as my mother used to say ‘If you see a white owl on the windowsill you will die'. As a young boy, I took this quite seriously and as a test I spent a number of hours at the window to see if I could spot one. I never did though. There aren't many white owls in Cardiff apparently.

People walking down the street together must never walk on opposite sides of any given obstacle; they must choose one side or the other, even if they end up walking in single file. Again, while walking with Nastya, she often pulled me around bollards or other people as a means to keep us together. Observing this ritual makes it almost impossible to get somewhere in a hurry. If we did end up walking around something separately, she insisted on us saying ‘Hello' to each other. We're supposed to say it a hundred times, but I tend to stop after two.

Birthday parties must never be celebrated before the actual date. If you wish someone a happy birthday before the day, they might suffer some sort of bad luck or devils will come. Talking about future success, whistling in the apartment, putting an empty bottle back on the table, shaking hands across the threshold of a doorway, and not draining your glass before you put it down, all bring bad luck or raise devils. I'm sorry to say that I have been guilty of all of these at some point or another and with so many superstition rules broken it is likely that I've raised enough devils to cause quite a commotion. So if I have inadvertently instigated some sort of future apocalypse, I apologise. The only Siberian rule that I do observe and quite agree with is that if you have alcohol, it must be drunk until it's gone.