Sunbathing in Siberia (20 page)

Sometimes, when I didn't want to visit Nastya's parents or wash clothes in the bath, I was given a helping hand by one of our neighbours. Directly across from our apartment, on the eastern side of the building lives Benya, an old school friend of Nastya's. She lent us many things over the summer and let us use her washing machine from time to time. As a thank you for her help, we often invited her to our apartment for weekend drinks. For some reason we were never invited to her apartment. It was clear that Benya obsessed over her body and self-image, to the point of looking like Lolo Ferrari, but Nastya suspected she took less care of her apartment, which was rumoured to look like a cross between a Barbie house and an overflowing skip. Even so, with Benya's generosity we were able to get by quite easily until we could afford all the kitchen utensils and furniture we needed, and her constant pouting also provided us with hours of entertainment on weekends.

It was a tremendously hot summer, much worse than 2011. The temperature rose to 38 °C in June and lingered around that point until mid-August. If we had lived with Nastya's parents I would have walked around in what is known as a home-shirt. This is a very Russian thing; it's a standard length, thick, checkered shirt that is made of a cheap material so it's okay to get it dirty. It was so hot that I couldn't bother with my home-shirt at all; I didn't bother with any shirt for that matter. In the privacy of our own home Nastya and I walked around in our birthday suits. This was still too many clothes. Sat at the kitchen table, which fast became my favourite place to write, a pool of sweat would appear at my feet and fill my home shoes. This perspiration was constant, even if I didn't wear anything. To cool off we would both take cold showers every hour, without bothering to dry ourselves as we would be soaking again within five minutes anyway. Our balcony became our cooling-off place. After cold showers we would stand for a few minutes on the balcony with the blinds completely closed and the windows open all the way. The balcony windows are very tall and are of the sliding frame variety, fully open they let in a lovely cool breeze; at night-time, we occasionally put a mattress down on the balcony floor and slept there, even though we were eaten by mosquitoes.

Other than Benya, we didn't get to know our other neighbours very well. We did however get to learn a bit about our neighbour in the apartment above us. Almost every night he played loud trance music and had people over who would dance until 3 a.m. It was worst on weekends, there were more people and we would sometimes see them hanging out of the balcony window above us, smoking cigarettes and dribbling mucus. We determined that our music-loving neighbour was in his early twenties. Although we never knew his name, due to his late night partying he came to be known as ‘that bastard'. At around 3 to 4 a.m. his parties would end and it quietened down enough to get some decent sleep. This affected Nastya more than it did me, as I wasn't working and I've had insomnia since 2005. Also I grew up in Ely, where late-night parties on any night are the norm.

I know how important it is for a young man to look after and nurture his ‘man-image'; young men always do their utmost to dress well and must be seen to listen to the most popular tunes of the time, though everyone has their secret guilty pleasures. When I was sixteen and listening to the likes of the Manics and Joy Division, my guilty pleasure was
ABBA – The Movie
. So it came as no surprise to me when at 8:30 a.m. after the party hard-man had been asleep just a few hours, I would be woken by his alarm; in place of a normal ringing sound or the radio coming on, I was woken by Bucks Fizz ‘The Land of Make Believe' at full volume. It's amazing what guilty pop pleasures some people have, most but not all of which are entirely forgivable.

On days when Nastya was working, after I had cleaned the apartment I could either sit in the kitchen and write or lean out the balcony window and watch the world go by. I could have left the apartment if I'd wanted to, and I did want to, but I was still afraid. Not knowing the language crippled me. Plus I was intimidated by the streets and the people who walked along them. It wasn't like Paris where I could scrape by on the pigeon French I had been forced to learn in high school. In Russia I had no means of communication and the architecture, the pavements, even the birds of prey circling outside the balcony helped cement my view that I was in a hostile country. If I stepped out of the front door and locked it behind me, I couldn't guarantee my safe return.

Across from our building was a small scrap of grass, partly covered in litter and dog shit. Over the summer I watched as a babushka came out of her apartment, cleaned the area, dug the ground, fenced it off and planted a small herb garden. She came out every day in the early morning and late afternoon to water her plants. Her little garden was never vandalised, the young people seemed to have an ingrained sense of respect for the babushkas and the efforts they made. It wasn't just one little garden opposite us, everywhere in Krasnoyarsk I saw the elderly tidying the areas outside their dilapidated apartment buildings. They made a great effort and it made an astonishing difference to the suburban areas of the city. Whether in summer or winter, the most common sight in Krasnoyarsk is seeing the many babushkas walking around with food shopping. My mother-in-law is one of them. She may be in her sixties but the rule is that anyone with grandchildren, regardless of age, is a babushka. Though Nataliya Petrovna once broke her neck in a serious accident that almost killed her when she was younger, she still managed to accomplish everything she needed to and more. She looked after Semka during weekdays and some weekends, took him to school, took him to his karate class, took him shopping – there was nothing that was too much for her. During the summer months she always helps Boris plant the crops at the dacha and waters them every day. At the apartment she has to climb the four flights of concrete stairs many times a day. She shifts furniture, barrels of water, logs for the fire, anything. To look at the way she moves and the way she lives, she puts Nastya and me to shame. It may sound strange and probably a bit patronising for me to praise her this way, because she is after all only in her sixties, and this is still quite a young age, but there is a huge difference between pensioners in Siberia and pensioners in Britain. By retirement age a Siberian has not only lived through sixty winters, but sixty Siberian winters. The weather, the painful and life-threatening cold takes its toll on people's bodies, to the point that I would say a Siberian winter is worth two or three British winters. Compared with my grandparents in the UK, Nataliya Petrovna is a superwoman, though in Russia she is no different from the millions of other babushkas. When I see them doing their daily shopping, with hunched backs and short legs, they look like small armoured vehicles. There is no weight that is too much, no distance too far, and no weather system too harsh; babushkas are the backbone of Russia, and without them the country would come to a standstill.

Something else I noticed during the summer was the repair of the roads. In my poem
‘
There are no problems in Russia' I state that there are many roads with potholes that drivers need to swerve constantly in order to avoid. This is true but not all year round. The winter ice is often several inches if not several feet thick, and this ice lifts paving slabs, wreaking havoc with flat surfaces. In the summer of 2012, I witnessed a major effort to replace thousands of paving and kerb stones. A small army of construction workers laboured away all summer laying new paving and filling the potholes created by the winter ice. I was wrong to give the impression that the roads in Russia are broken and the problem ignored. Seeing the huge workforce made me realise what an unimaginably expensive affair it must be to keep the roads in constant good repair. Russia is big enough to swallow central Europe several times over, it's hard to conceive how many roads there are, the quantity of materials needed and the manpower required to keep it all working smoothly. Another line in my poem insinuates the militia is corrupt and only ever intervenes in crimes where it can squeeze a bribe out of someone. I have never seen this in real life. I have actually enjoyed a slice of cake and a cup of coffee in a café while sat at a table next to some militia on their lunch break. They did not ask to see my papers even though I was clearly speaking English. Similarly I have never been harassed or stopped in the street, though I stand out like an amateur among poets. Shamefully I have to admit that this poem is largely influenced by anti-Russian propaganda, and a few articles in newspapers, and as time passes a lot of my early beliefs and impressions have been altered by my own Siberian experiences.

Line of Sight

In the middle of July, on one of the hottest days, Nastya took me to a place called Orbit; this is a concrete platform near a branch of the Siberian Federal University, on the north west side of the riverbank. It's quite high above sea level and offers a view of riverside dachas below as well as the city centre to the east. It's a favourite place for lovers to go in summer because of its remoteness. There is also the best view of Krasnoyarsk Railway Bridge anywhere in the city; this bridge is famous for carrying part of the Trans-Siberian Railway across the Yenisei. It is one of the most romantic bridges in the world and I was glad to see it from such a great viewpoint. Near Orbit is a small suburban area named Akademgorodok, or the Academia City. It's not so much a city, more a little cul-de-sac where the students live in relatively smart looking apartments. A few hundred metres west of this is another suburban area with twenty or so buildings. These are some of the poorest looking apartments in the city and a stark contrast to the student buildings.

As we walked high above the Yenisei, we noticed a lot of construction sites and cranes on either side of the river. Many swanky-looking apartment buildings were going up fast. The whole riverbank area seemed to be going through an overdue period of reconstruction; some of the apartments looked so attractive they could have been built along the Thames. When it was time to leave, we walked inland and found ourselves at the eastern end of the street where the bus had dropped us off. We couldn't make out exactly where the bus stop was as the signposts were missing. There were one or two couples walking so Nastya asked them for directions. They shied away. This is normal in Russia where the Soviet years forced a culture of suspicion. No matter which part of the city we ask directions, people have always walked away from us, pretending they didn't hear or just brazenly ignoring us. This time it was obvious we weren't thieves, Soviet spies or KGB informers as Nastya said out loud ‘We are lost, please just point to the bus stop.' One of the couples gave in and told us where to stand. At the bus stop Nastya began to shout ‘Get your back to a tree, you could be shot.' I adjusted my position to not leave any part of my body visible to anyone in the apartment windows behind us. Nastya said that in poorer areas of Krasnoyarsk there are some people who live on dubious incomes. In these areas some people carry guns and will shoot at someone in their area simply for being stupid enough to leave themselves open. I put my back to a tree and waited for the bus.

As it was my fourth time in Siberia, and my spoken Russian was improving, I steadily felt less afraid walking around on my own. I started walking Nastya to the bus stop when she was leaving for her night shift at 7.30 p.m. and would then walk home alone. When she came to the end of a day shift, I would leave our apartment at 7.20 p.m. and walk to her office along populated main roads. This had begun as a very pleasant thing to do. However, with the possible-sniper experience of Akademgorodok, the pleasure of walking around on my own diminished somewhat; I began to walk faster and became very suspicious of people within a close proximity to me. This was of course totally irrational as nobody meant me any harm. When I walk anywhere I usually have a song on repeat in my head. I have songs for different occasions, and different memories. Up until that time the soundtrack accompaniment to my walk to Nastya's office had been Bowie's ‘Golden Years'; but this unfortunately changed to the main theme of John Carpenter's 1976 movie
Assault on Precinct 13
. As I walked down the street, I heard the initial ‘Rat-a-tat-a-tat. Rat-a-tat-a-tat' before ‘Du-du-du-du-dun'. I had visions of cars packed with badasses cruising past with semi-automatics complete with silencers. God forbid I walk past an ice cream van.

What is Good for a Welshman is Great for a Siberian

There's an old joke that goes something like this: An Englishman, a Frenchman and a Russian are admiring a painting of Adam and Eve. The Englishman says ‘Look at the paleness of Eve's skin, the rose-red of her cheeks; she must be English.' The Frenchman says ‘Look at the way they are looking deep into each other's eyes, they are full of romance, and must be French.' The Russian finally adds ‘They have no clothes and only an apple to eat, and they think it's paradise. They are Russian.' Ignoring the fact that this will be extremely offensive to many people, there is an element of truth in the way it stereotypes Russian people.

The Soviet government famously attempted to instil in its population a belief that Russia was some kind of utopia; but had a lot of trouble doing so while Stalin's government went round killing millions of people. Even so, there are inordinate numbers of Russian people I have met who believe that Russia is practically faultless. While initially I may have had some of my facts wrong as a result of Western anti-Russian propaganda, there are several factors of Russian life that are indisputably unfair and in some cases dangerous; for example: when the roads and pavements were repaired over the summer there were no barriers preventing people from hurting themselves. Twice I was nearly killed by walking into a reversing JCB or mini-crane. The kerbstones, which were dug up initially by heavy machinery, were left alongside the road jutting out in all directions. Cars had to be careful to avoid them and crossing the road meant stepping into the ditch where previous kerbing was, hopping through the myriad of rubble, climbing over the old kerbstones and then doing the same on the opposite side. For the elderly and disabled it was practically impossible in some places. When buildings and railings are removed, they are simply cut off with a grinder about 10 cm from the ground; this leaves metal poles sticking up everywhere. While one could argue it simply takes common sense to avoid these dangers it made me very grateful for the often all too easily criticised health and safety laws back in the UK. Besides building-related issues, food safety standards in Russia are clearly ignored. None of the eggs in our fridge were ever in date, and with the regular power outages it was hard to say just how many times everything in the freezer had defrosted and refrozen. Cheese in Russia is arguably the same stuff that bouncy balls are made from and most milk products are laced with palm oil.