Sunbathing in Siberia (13 page)

At the generator, to get the water out I had to place my plastic containers beneath a makeshift hose, and then plug the generator into an outside electric socket built into a concrete wall. It always began by making a horrible whirring sound, before water came gushing out. This water is free and anyone can have as much as they can carry. In some districts, where there is no fresh water generator, they have old-fashioned hand pumps that are plumbed into natural sources of water underground. These are not as common and much less convenient as not only do you have to physically exert yourself to get the water out, but the water can run dry in summer. Our generator also stopped sometimes. It's not that it broke, it was simply that there was no fresh water available. This kind of thing had happened a few times at the apartment; the water would be switched off without reason or warning. This could be very annoying if you were in the shower, covered in bubbles. It was even more annoying if you were in the middle of the shower and only the cold or hot water was switched off, leaving you burnt or frozen on the spot. Sometimes this lack of water at the apartment could last for several days. I am not sure why it happened and nobody else seemed to know either. I put it down to a need for regular maintenance as the result of pipes bursting in winter, or pipes being laid without much thought as they were throughout the dacha territories.

There are two ways of washing at the dacha. Russians are very fond of sitting in a sauna or
banya
. Although Dima has one built apart from his dacha, during the summer of 2011 I was too afraid to use it. In Boris's dacha there is an indoor washing area that can also be used as a sauna. It never is though as Nataliya Petrovna is worried the constant steam will warp the wood or make it soft. Instead, to get clean, Boris set up some steel poles in the garden with a shower curtain wrapped round them. This is where I washed. I would take two buckets of cold water and pour them over me, one pre-soap, one to rinse; because it was so hot, there was no need to heat any water. This method has a real lack of privacy to it. Although it was strange at first, I eventually got used to seeing more of people's flesh than I normally would; either someone is walking semi-naked from the banya to the dacha, or Boris is digging in a small pair of shorts, or Nastya and Marina are sunbathing in the garden with nearly everything on show. I was at first very self-conscious of my body, because it is pale and I have psoriasis, but it was too hot to really care too much about this, and I really needed to heal my skin.

When going to sleep in the dacha there was a similar lack of privacy that I had to get accustomed to. Nastya and I slept in a double bed, behind the stove in the original section of the dacha; and because the stove and chimney don't make a complete wall, a curtain was strung up as a divider. At night I could not only hear the grunts and snoring of Boris, whose favourite bed was the single one on the other side of the curtain, but I suspected that he could hear Nastya and I if we had some boinka-boinka. I was a little weirded-out by this, but Boris either politely ignored it, or was too fast asleep to notice. At the dacha during the night, it's possible to hear what people would normally get up to behind closed doors, but it's okay; like anywhere people engage in natural things, they have their bodies on show when it's sunny, and occasionally have sex at night. This isn't to say that people regularly take their kit off in front of everyone and get busy on the lawn. On the contrary, Nastya's parents seemed quite prudish. If they did the boinka-boinka, we never heard them, and Nastya was always worried about them hearing us.

The most popular food in Russia throughout summer is
shashliks
, otherwise known as shish kebab. Russians love
shashliks
and spend a lot of time preparing them. The meat is usually marinated overnight in vinegar, or wine, with a range of herbs and spices, before being arranged on skewers. These are roasted on a trough or barbeque and are the highlight of Russian dacha time. To cook them, we had to first let Semka build the fire. He insisted on bringing the wood and making the fire himself. He would have cooked the
shashliks
too if it weren't for the fact the barbeque trough was taller than he was.

Across from Boris's dacha is another belonging to Dima and Marina and next to this is Marina's flower patch: a small circle of flora and fauna with sunflowers at the centre. The sunflowers aren't merely for show. Every member of my Siberian family loves nothing more than to sit for hours eating sunflower seeds. After putting whole shells in their mouths, they have the ability to crunch out the seed, swallow it, and then spit out the bits of shell into a cup. No matter how many times I tried, I couldn't master this without eating the shells.

A small veranda at the front of Dima's dacha acted as the usual meeting place for everyone during summer. We often ate
shashliks
there. This was a pain at times, because both Nastya and her mother didn't really see eye-to-eye with Marina, and Marina didn't much like them either. But the trough for cooking
shashliks
had been permanently located at the front of Dima's dacha, so if we wanted to cook, we had no other choice but to go there. Though everyone tried to get along for the sake of Dima, who is a very calm and sober fellow, there were occasional heated exchanges between Nastya and Marina. These were normally preceded by two things. Either Marina had had a drop too much, which she was fond of doing at the weekend, or we had overstayed our welcome on their veranda. The smallest thing could lead to the most ferocious verbal battle, so I began spending less time at Dima's just to keep the peace.

At the end of July, Boris celebrated his sixty-third birthday. Although he doesn't drink or smoke, he didn't hold back from enjoying himself, albeit with fruit juices instead of alcohol. Besides the immediate family, Boris had invited a few guests – all regular folk except for one, a mathematician who had the same face and voice as Leonard Nimoy from the original
Star Trek
series. Although I wasn't able to communicate much with him, I spent a little too much time looking at his face, because it's not often you find yourself in the middle of Siberia drinking vodka with Spock.

Marina who had brought five bottles of Cognac, and who normally wouldn't attempt to speak English, plucked up the courage to say ‘Michael, Cognac?' to which I would reply in my very awkward and basic Russian, ‘Da' (yes). This led to my drinking at least one whole bottle of Cognac, and was likely the cause of my throwing up at 4 a.m. Nataliya Petrovna was a little disappointed by this as earlier in the evening she had said ‘We have had English here before. They were sick.'

A Brit in Eastern Siberia is a bit of a novelty, though not completely unheard of thanks to the tourists who take the Trans-Siberian throughout the year, but a Welshman is considered stranger company than someone from outer space. Nastya had to constantly explain to our guests that Wales is the little country that England is stuck to. Everyone was curious to learn how Nastya and I were planning to make a future for ourselves and when we would settle. Boris's guests somehow had the impression that everyone in the UK knows each other well because it is such a small place compared with the vastness of Russia. When Nastya's attention was diverted our guests still spoke to me, and I was lucky if I could understand just one per cent of the conversation. However there were a few words I did recognise, as they were spoken in English. Thankfully, due to a popular joke on television which pokes fun at professional Russian to English translators, a few Siberians are able to say Anthony Hopkins, Chicken McNuggets, Windows XP, together because (as a stock phrase), Britney Spears and Status Quo. Everyone was pleasantly surprised to learn Anthony Hopkins is in fact a Welshman, but slightly disappointed to learn that I didn't know him personally.

Like most events in Siberia that involve copious amounts of alcohol, the evening eventually descended into the inevitable wailings of karaoke. Unfortunately, the art of singing badly into a microphone is very popular all over Russia and there are a huge number of popular Russian tunes, none of which I knew how to sing. Fortunately for me there are a few old bands from the West that are still massive in Russia. After several Cognacs, I found myself singing Status Quo's ‘In The Army Now' as a duet with Dima, followed by a double bill of Boney M – ‘Rasputin' and ‘Daddy Cool'. All bands and singers who have ever acknowledged Russia in a song have become favourites in Russia. This is also true for actors, such as Jude Law who played Vasily Zaytsev in
Enemy at the Gates
(2001), and Scarlett Johansson who played Natasha Romanoff in
Iron Man 2
. One of my first memories of Moscow is Jude Law's face printed on the giant advertisements for vodka hanging in Sheremetyevo Airport. Scarlett Johansson can often be seen on billboards advertising Russian saunas, though I'm not clear if these are authorised advertisements or not. When I first visited Russia in the spring, I vividly remember arriving in Krasnoyarsk on the Trans-Siberian. Through one of the windows, I saw a dacha where the roof had been made from a large recycled billboard and on this billboard was a huge cameo of Scarlett Johansson, partially covered in snow.

Just as I was falling asleep to the image of a snow-covered Scarlett Johansson, the pilot announced our descent. I'm not sure why, but every time I fly I always take a seat above the left wing of the plane. I think it has something to do with
The Twilight Zone
, which had a huge effect on me as a boy, and gave me nightmares for years after. If there is ever a gremlin on a wing, I need to be able to see it. Fortunately there were no gremlins and the flight was peaceful. When it came to landing, however, things changed rapidly. There was a very high wind and heavy snow fall. We glided over the city, over the forest and over the airport perimeter fence. Wheels were about to touch the ground. At the crucial moment a huge gust of wind took us off course, the plane lost balance, tipped to the left, and the left wing came horribly close to the tarmac. I thought we were fucked. Totally and utterly fucked. Thankfully Russian pilots are used to this kind of thing. After all, they take off and land in the world's worst flying conditions every day. At the point we were about to become pancakes, the engines roared and we flew high and left. The pilot then said something over the tannoy in Russian that I think was ‘Hold onto your balls I'm going to try again'. The second time we came in fast and straight, and the pilot made use of the entire length of the runway. Russians have a tradition of clapping when a plane lands, and until that moment I had never understood it. When everyone erupted into applause I couldn't help but join in. It was the first time I had ever participated in ‘the clapping' and the first time I had almost become a pancake.

PART III

Aeroflot Flight SU241. January 16
th
2011.
Moscow – London

Following an all too brief first Christmas holiday in Krasnoyarsk, Nastya had flown to Moscow with me again in the early hours of the morning. We got to Yemelyanovo airport in good time and the subsequent flight to Moscow was uneventful. In Sheremetyevo airport, Nastya was as tearful as ever and wouldn't let me go even as I entered the booth where I had to surrender my immigration card. People are supposed to enter this booth alone to hand over their passport and papers, and the customs official usually holds up your passport against the glass in his little hut and compares your picture with your face, even though you're leaving the country. I guess this is to make sure nobody is leaving Russia pretending to be you. This time the customs man just smiled and looked away as Nastya and I kissed over and over again. When she finally let go of me the man scanned my passport, took the immigration card away and let me into the waiting room for international transfers.

Looking down over Moscow, sweltering in my snow boots and a large black hunting jacket, I couldn't help feeling I was a little overdressed for London. One of the immigration officials in Moscow had laughed after Nastya had left. He looked at me, then my passport, then back at me, and said ‘You cold yes?' before laughing to himself. It seemed I was overdressed even by Moscow standards; God only knew what I would look like touching down in Heathrow. With yet another four hours to wait until I got there, I relaxed in my chair as much as I could with too many clothes on and thought of my Siberian winter adventure; happy that we finally had a plan, and confident I would take care of my end of things.

Winter in Russia

Nastya had picked me up from the airport in a taxi upon arrival from the UK in December; Boris was already on a hunting trip and Dima was having his well-earned Sunday lie-in. The drive from Yemelyanovo airport to Krasnoyarsk was bleak. The sky was dark grey and heavy with snow. There were huge banks of the white stuff either side of the motorway and the only parts of the road visible were track lines where previous cars had been. Still, it was busy. Our taxi driver weaved through the traffic at a hair-raising speed, completely ignoring the treacherous weather conditions. It was a sharp contrast to what I had experienced in the UK where the slightest sign of snow meant traffic crawling along at a snail's pace, and all the airports and trains coming to a halt. I was a bit frightened and made sure to fasten my seatbelt.

Russian roads can be a bit crazy. They drive on the right and are supposed to overtake on the left. What actually happens is they drive on anything that is flat, and overtake on anything including the hard shoulder; this creates semi-organised chaos. While driving at the speed of sound, our taxi very nearly got boxed in a few times by people also driving at the speed of sound. Fortunately, our taxi was a very shiny and expensive-looking Mercedes, and the driver was obviously aware of his capabilities. At the point I was sure we would be squished he put his foot down and increased acceleration to the speed of light. We flew down the motorway, and all the while trance tunes were playing on the radio with the driver bobbing his head to the beat while smoking a cigarette. He was quite a cool guy.