Sunbathing in Siberia (21 page)

Although my life in Russia is generally a vast improvement on my life in the UK, I can't avoid the fact that I have been spoilt in some ways by Western standards and cultural differences. Before visiting Siberia, I had never had to show my passport to board a train, never had to fetch water from a well or grow my own food. I have never in my life had to rely on someone's ability to hunt for deer to avoid starvation, and I have never had to work any period in any job for free, even when the economy was at its worst. Life in the West isn't perfect; certainly there are faults in the capitalist system, and the current British government are doing their very best to make life harder for the working classes, but it's easier in many ways compared with life in the East.

As a Westerner, I am spoilt. I have come to expect everything to be available in the supermarket; I expect everything to be within date; for buildings and roads to be repaired in a timely fashion; and for hospitals to have the latest technologies and to have access to modern medicine instantly, thanks to the NHS. I would have said that I expect the public transport to be of a certain standard and to provide seating, but the fact is that the train service in Russia is a vast improvement on the service provided by Arriva Trains Wales. These standards that I am accustomed to as a Westerner have often amazed my Siberian family, and although Siberians have the luxury of dacha lifestyles and a wide-open country to explore, what is considered ‘good' by Western standards is ‘great' from the Siberian perspective. This newfound insight hasn't made the transition to Russian life any easier for me. There have been occasions in supermarkets when I just wanted to grab the owner by the scruff of the neck and shout ‘Why can't you provide stock that is in date!' Similarly, I have wanted to knock some sense into friends of mine in the UK who have spent time feeling sorry for themselves. There was once an occasion when a friend of mine was forced to cancel their satellite television subscription because of the recession. When this cancellation was then posted on Facebook, my friend received several messages of condolence and sympathy. Apparently, such a loss was considered really awful. To top it off this friend then went on to say how he was considering moving to Russia to escape the UK austerity measures. He wasn't joking. One of my worst memories is of Moscow, when I saw a 90-year-old homeless babushka next to a metro station begging for food. It's an image that will never leave me. Thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of babushkas suffered the awfulness of being forced to beg on the streets following the collapse of the USSR. I wanted to grab my Satellite-TV-less friend in the UK and implant my memory of the homeless babushka; but I couldn't. It's not for me to judge others' perception of value, although I sometimes find this hard.

As much as I hate to admit it, I too was once this ignorant, though I have only glimpsed a fraction of the suffering of those who have lived through Russia's several economic crashes. There are some who would look at me and say ‘He knows nothing of real hardship and his new-found insight and perception of value is contrived and middle-class.' And they might be right; I have not seen people living on $1 a day, or witnessed the slavery in Chinese factories; but I have seen enough to help me realise that I am a spoilt bastard and was lucky to be born in Wales. Saying this I don't want to appear to sympathise with British Conservative values. I do not subscribe to the notion that British people don't know how good they have it, and therefore can afford to lose most of their libraries, their affordable education system and large chunks of the NHS. These things have been hard earned and should be preserved at all costs. Just because life in Britain is for the most part far easier than life in Post-Soviet countries, it doesn't mean we shouldn't strive to improve it further. Seeing something as essential as the NHS being sold off bit-by-bit hurts even more, watching from a distance.

Siberian life has given me a more in-depth appreciation of certain British values and it pains me to see the welfare state under attack, and the poor being played off against each other. I didn't realise just how fundamentally essential the welfare state and the NHS were until I saw them being dismantled from afar. When the USSR collapsed, Nastya's parents had no option other than to work for free, however such conditions seemed inevitable when you consider that the entire Eastern Bloc was undergoing its biggest social, political and economic reform since the USSR began. Although the global economic crash of 2007 was a major setback for the British economy, the resulting crisis wasn't anywhere near as extreme as the Russian crisis less than twenty years earlier. Therefore, when I read about people being forced to work for free as part of the Workfare scheme it seemed to me completely obvious that such measures were unnecessary. Knowing this, when Nataliya Petrovna said that in her opinion ‘What was good for a Welshman was great for a Siberian' I had to really fight to hold my tongue.

The Uninvited

Rain in Siberia is a rare phenomenon but when it happens it's as dramatic as the winter weather. One afternoon when Nastya was home and we felt it was too hot to go out, we passed the time by hanging out of the balcony window, smoking cigarettes and drinking home-made lemonade. The sky darkened in the west, filling with oppressive clouds that stretched out for miles. When the rain began to fall it was a very welcome change to the atmosphere; the large store of water behind the hydroelectric station means that Krasnoyarsk can be very humid in the summer, making the air stuffy. We watched as people below us attempted to protect themselves, putting their shopping bags on their heads or using a t-shirt as a hat. When the first rumble of thunder shook the sky we pulled up some of the stools from the kitchen, resigning ourselves to spending the remainder of the day watching the weather.

The rain clouds enveloped all of the summer blue, stopping short of our apartment building. A series of lightning bolts struck one after the other above the apartment block across the way; not single bolts, but impressive lances of forked lightning, long and intimidating. I had only ever witnessed a similar display when I was living in Abertridwr in 2000, and it was considered so rare it made the headlines of all the newspapers the following day. The residents of the opposite block, who had been hiding from the sun, came out onto their balconies, and strained their necks to watch the lightning above them. It went on for hours, though it was such an exotic event for me that I didn't notice the day pass by.

Nastya, who enjoyed the display as much as I did, cautioned me to be ready to move back very quickly, and asked me to close the window up to the point where the sash nearly met the frame. She wanted to continue watching the storm through the glass. She was worried lightning would come into our apartment and cook us where we sat. Thinking she was bonkers I told her the satellite dishes, antennae and air conditioning systems on the roofs would likely connect to the forks of electricity way before lightning bolts reached down, bent horizontally and zapped us. I was wrong. In Russia there exists a phenomenon known as ball lightning. This is an unexplained electrical phenomenon that refers to white spheres that appear to float down from the sky. Unlike forked lightning these balls of electricity have the ability to move horizontally. They are usually associated with thunderstorms, but can last considerably longer than the split-second flash of a regular lightning bolt. It is said that these balls eventually explode like grenades and can be fatal if they connect to you or if you unlucky enough to be too close during the explosion. Although there are many theories concerning nature's electronic balls of death no one really knows for sure why they happen.

Nastya would often ring me from her night shift after she'd received a call from her mother at the dacha. As we lived so close to their apartment, I was often nominated to go there and give Baba Ira her heart pills so that Boris didn't have to drive back. I'd normally get a call by 10 p.m., not so late that I would be sleeping but late enough for me to see it would be totally unreasonable for anyone else to do it. Not that it was any great hardship walking for five minutes up the street. In the middle of summer the sun doesn't set until about midnight, sometimes later. The pink sky of dusk can still be seen on the horizon until it becomes the pink sky of dawn. Pitch blackness is rare and only occurs if there is cloud cover. When I entered the other apartment, searched out the pills that would normally be stored in an old biscuit tin in Nastya's old bedroom, and handed them over, I often wondered whether I should stick around. I felt sad for Ira's lonely existence. With hindsight I see that this was merely sentimentality on my behalf. Ira, like anyone, probably enjoyed having the apartment all to herself. She would play the radio, spend time in the kitchen and call her friends on the phone. There was no noise, no Semka running about, no bickering between Boris and Nataliya Petrovna over where he had placed his hunting bags, and no obstacles to negotiate while shuffling from room to room on her support stool. Although we couldn't communicate with each other very well, we always did our best to exchange kind words and always spoke in the most respectful tones. Baba Ira survived eighty-nine years in Siberia, eighty-nine winters, eighty-nine scorching summers; she lost her sons, her husband, and her father (who disappeared during Stalin's purges), but she still managed to get up every day. She dressed very well regardless of occasion and managed to keep regular hours of sleep and wakefulness, something that I have never been able to do; if I have more than one week without work I usually end up staying awake till 3 a.m. or worse. With little else to do, those regular visits to Ira gave me some sense of purpose and responsibility.

As Nastya was stuck in her office whole nights and I'd now spent three months without work, my sleeping pattern became erratic. I would stay up all night when I was alone, and sleep in the day with Nastya when she returned at 9 a.m. Those were strange nights. Usually after eating, washing, doing the dishes and sweeping the floor with the broomstick, I settled down at the kitchen table to write. I sat in the corner next to the radiator, as far from the fridge as possible, because if I sat close to the fridge I would be visible to the residents in the opposite block. We started leaving the blinds open when the balcony windows were open, because if the blinds were shut they would rattle in the wind and be loud enough to annoy our neighbours and alert the world that our apartment was wide open. Between midnight and sunrise I wrote by the light of my laptop, keeping the lamp off so as not to be seen. I became quite paranoid during those nights. I think this had a lot to do with total isolation, having only Nastya to speak to online, and the continuous explosions coming from the nearby electricity sub-station, which made me feel that I was alive in some Solzhenitsyn novel where the KGB bugged all the rooms and had fake neighbours positioned in the apartments with a view of ours. When I wanted to make tea, I would walk very slowly over to the counter even though it was only a few feet away, because the floor boards would creak when I stepped on them.

I didn't want to make a sound at night, and I didn't want to be seen either. Sat in the darkness I often had the feeling of being watched. I suspected other nocturnal people existed in the opposite building. Sometimes I could see a shadow moving on one of the balconies; sometimes a cigarette would be lit. I was always careful to light my cigarette with my hands covering the lighter, but it was no use, I could always be seen no matter how careful I was. When I saw someone stood in the darkness on their balcony, often staring, watching for any movement, I had the distinct impression that they were watching me; I could feel their eyes on me. Regardless of how careful I was, I couldn't blend into the darkness as well as my Siberian neighbours. They were experts. I might as well have turned on all the lights and worn sparkly clothes because I was about as good at discretion as a blazing bonfire. This ability to see without being seen is a skill I assume most people learned during the Soviet years. Everyone was naturally suspicious of everyone else; your neighbour could be an informer, or worse, your neighbour could be KGB. Why were you awake so late? Were you writing? What were you writing? I had seen for myself how people still shy away from each other in the street; that fear of saying the wrong thing or speaking to the wrong person still exists. It is safer not to speak, not to write, but if you do have to write, as I do, it's important to learn how to be a shadow. You never know who is watching.

There would sometimes be a ring at the door when I was home alone. When the bell rung, I froze; very few people answer the door to strangers, or even the militia, choosing instead to communicate through closed doors. With my limited Russian I couldn't even do that. Instead I turned off any music and pretended I wasn't there. I couldn't open the peep-hole at the centre of the door as it would have let light out and made it obvious I was there, plus the fact that our floor creaks like hell. If the bell rang before midnight it was sometimes Benya who had run out of sugar or coffee; though she normally phoned Nastya who would then call me from her office. Sometimes the bell rang in the early hours, while I was writing or sleeping. We had bought the apartment from a middle-aged single mum with a teenage son; logic dictated some of the daytime calls were possibly his friends or family members who didn't know they had moved. The night-time calls could not be explained. Despite our steel-plated front door, every time the bell rang it scared the hell out of me as I also knew that there are keys available on the black market that are specifically designed for opening Russian doors; they have several malleable segments at the tip and make armoured doors as useful as paper shutters. Though someone with such a key probably wouldn't have rung the bell if they'd wanted to get in. Those late night calls were likely caused by a drunken neighbour pressing the wrong button outside the door at the end of the corridor, but it was impossible to know at the time. The fact was we lived in a decrepit old building and had some very dubious looking neighbours; when I took the lift in the morning to get cigarettes, there were occasional pools of blood on the floor mixed with other human juices. Although I really loved our new apartment, and having time alone to write, those solitary nights were some of the most terrifying I've ever had.