Sunbathing in Siberia (26 page)

In our apartment, the only way one can wake up fully and escape the oppressive heat of the apartment is by going outside. However, this isn't simply a case of popping your shoes on. To go anywhere in Krasnoyarsk in winter you have to prepare as if you were going on some major arctic expedition. You must ensure you have several layers on your legs, two pairs of thermal trousers, thermals on the upper body, a jumper, your coat, gloves, a scarf, and you must never ever forget your shapka. With all these clothes on, you sweat horrendously before you even step out the door. This makes the Russian tradition of sitting for a few moments of silence before you take a long trip even more tedious.

Rambo

Stepping through the large door to exit our apartment building is also a bit of an experience in sub-zero temperatures. Firstly the door is iced over, on the inside. Blades of ice run right across giving the impression that Jack Frost or some huge snow beast got its hands caught as the door was closing. It regularly sticks the door to the frame but in winter, after pressing the button to release the magnetic lock I would have to throw myself against it shoulder first. Once the door is open we then move outside onto the small porch with four steps that lead down to ground level. Because the snow is relentless the steps have a kind of outdoor heating system of their own to keep them from turning into a slide. A generator sits below the building that forces steam out of a pipe underneath the steps and out through the gaps in between them. This steam is quite harmless by the time it rises above the steps, but it builds up around the outside of the doorway, so that when we open the main door, all the steam rushes in. There is so much of it that for the first few minutes you can't see, and it's all the worse if you have sunglasses on to protect you from snow glare.

When the steam clears, the initial view outside is snow – in the sky, on the ground and on the rooftops of every building. Every morning in Krasnoyarsk, a team of municipal workers have to go out to clear snow from paths and stairwells. As we are in the suburbs our building isn't serviced in this way therefore the path is only made visible by people's feet. Hence our entrance path is barely visible in winter. There are several dangers when stepping out of our building. First, you have to make sure there isn't ice where you want to walk. Most Siberians make a mental note of the path and plan their movements ten steps ahead. The ice is usually more reflective and is easy to avoid. Secondly, when you leave any building you must look up to check if there are any icicles. These can be anything from a few inches to several feet in length. They can kill and so you must always be aware of them. During the middle of the day when the sun is up they can become weak and occasionally fall. On days when Nastya was working and my dad and I were sat in the kitchen, we would sometimes be distracted by what sounded like gun fire. We discovered that it was caused by icicles falling from the guttering onto the steel windowsills. The icicles are not a permanent danger, they occur at the beginning of winter, because the temperature increases enough to melt snow, but in the middle of winter, once they have fallen under their own weight, they are no longer anything to worry about. After that it doesn't warm up enough for snow to melt, and icicles are not seen again until the warmer weather comes in April. The third danger is that you have to watch out for the hounds of Siberia. These beasts are ordinary dogs; however, with their wild fur coats and wolf-like eyes they often give the impression of being some weird hybrid beast. They come in various colours and sizes but what they all have in common are sharp claws and long teeth. They can work in packs but some stand alone. For the most part they are friendly, but if you have recently eaten meat and still have the smell of it on your hands they can turn on you. When they growl and hiss they can be very intimidating. We have one at the bottom of the footwell of our building. He is half the size of me but with his large brown coat looks more like a bear. Over the course of the month my dad was in Siberia I made a point of making friends with this hound. Dog, as I had so affectionately named him would not only come to me when I called, but would follow me to the local shop and then wait to walk me home again. The fourth and final hazard to look out for, as you step out into Siberia, are the people. For the most part Siberians are harmless and lovely but there are some bad eggs wherever you go. There have been a few drunk people who congregate outside our building, just standing there with a bottle of something. I've never had any problem from them but you never know. There can be as many as five drunks just hanging round the main entrance. Sometimes they come in, maybe to get a few minutes' warmth. It's possible that they live in the building, like us. Still, I never speak English around them and I made sure my dad was aware that he should do the same. There are times in Siberia when native English speakers should keep their mouths shut. There are times when native Russians should keep silent too. While walking down the street during my first couple of visits Nastya sometimes told me to be quiet. She did the same with my dad only he didn't take it as well as me. He demanded an immediate explanation and I had to be the one to tell him to ‘Shut the fuck up'.

Nastya, being a home-grown Siberian, has a heightened sense of danger. She can sense when someone is lying, when someone has bad intentions and when someone nearby has possible ill will towards foreigners. She is right on most occasions. To us Brits it can occasionally seem excessive, but such hyper-awareness isn't always a bad thing. In Siberia, in summer but more so in winter, you learn to keep your eyes and ears open at all times. If you are on the street you have to learn to be prepared for danger but without showing it; and though you train your eyes and ears to be on full alert you must also let your primary senses subside, and let your intuition or second sense come to the front of your mind. Russia is a mystical place, and the people believe in all kinds of mysterious crap. The only part of this that is real for me is learning to live by my gut feeling. It now serves me more than my eyes and ears. Sometimes, for apparently no reason, the hairs on my arms rise. They spike up like some kind of human radar system. And I listen to the feeling, that isn't in my mind, but in the whole of me. It's like learning to walk all over again, only the dangers aren't things you see or hear, smell or taste. They are in the shadows, or they are the shadows themselves. This is something I tried desperately to get my dad to understand, but being an old and rather stubborn know-it-all, he wasn't having any of it.

Before bringing my dad to Russia, one of my concerns was how he would mix in, and whether he would be able to obey the certain unwritten rules we have that keep us safe. Back in Wales, my dad likes to convey a hard-man image. He keeps his head shaved (though I think this is perhaps to mask the bald patch on top of his head that happened in his early twenties); he grunts a lot and speaks very loudly. Also, because he's been a builder for at least thirty years, he's pretty well-built for a British person. Back when he was twenty, he studied several martial arts, ran a few marathons, and lifted weights. By UK standards I suppose he is a bit of a hard-man. Compared with the standard of Russian men, however, my dad is as hard as a sack of mouldy old potatoes. During his month in Siberia, when he stood alongside Russian men, he did indeed look a lot like a sack of potatoes with a Mr Potato Head face on top. Not that my dad is terribly unfit now, compared to who he was in his twenties, but you have to remember that Russians usually take excellent care of their bodies, and the harder living conditions and dacha lifestyle make them very tough people. Not only are the regular, law-abiding citizens built like Dolph Lundgren, but there are also a number of law-flouting citizens: drunks, thieves, mafia, and mafia subordinates. I suppose Krasnoyarsk, like everywhere in Russia and the rest of the world, has its own mafia. While walking with my dad, we often passed a number of cars without number plates. Whereas in the UK, these would be instantly spotted and stopped by police, in Russia the police seem to ignore them. Although I couldn't say for sure if those cars and the people in them were part of any organised gangs, owing to the fact their vehicles were in open violation of the law I thought it best never to look at the people inside or around them, and instructed my dad to do the same.

There is a rather shady nightclub near our apartment. By day it looks like a regular café, although, unlike most other cafés and clubs this building stands detached from everything else on the corner of a main road. I have never been inside but have heard horrendous stories about this place. According to Nastya, there are regular fights there in the evening and unassuming people who have visited the club have either been stabbed or seriously wounded. It has all the characteristics of a nightspot that should be shut down, and yet it isn't. Though it sounds a lot like a few establishments in the UK, I can't think of one nightclub in Britain that I would be afraid to walk past during the day. Knowing all this, you can imagine my alarm when my dad told me one evening that the local hard men ‘don't seem to like it when you stare back at them.' I casually explained to him in the best way I could that, even though in his mind he is a hard-man, he'd get no extra points for getting himself killed. The British embassy is closer to Cardiff than Krasnoyarsk, and if he was hurt, it's likely nobody around would help. There is no shame in looking away when a Siberian hard-man stares you out. It's not cowardice, simply self-preservation. My dad listened to me and mumbled something that sounded like agreement but I knew deep down he would still stare at local hard-men. I only hoped that he didn't annoy the wrong person before he was due to leave. Had my dad stared at the wrong person, there was no knowing what could have happened.

North Korea Invades

Within a few days of arriving back in Krasnoyarsk I received a letter in the post from Siberian immigration. I had been granted temporary residency for three years. The type of residency I was given meant I could only live in Krasnoyarsk unless I could prove a means of sustaining myself elsewhere. All I had left to do was get my new certificate of no criminal record – which had recently been granted to me by Cardiff Police Station – translated and notarised, together with its Apostille, and get a new ‘I don't have Aids' certificate. This meant I had to go back to that clinic again, and be crammed into a room full of scary-looking people. Getting the translation was a piece of cake; an office in the city centre took care of it overnight. Obtaining a new HIV certificate was going to be the headache it had been in summer. Early one morning Nastya and I went to the clinic to register, as we had done a few months earlier. Because we got there at about 11 a.m. and the taking of blood happened at 4 p.m. sharp, we decided to hang around the centre that day. It was -28 ˚C. We ate a lukewarm potato pie and then washed it down with piss-poor tea in every café we could afford to enter.

At 4 p.m., frozen, we went back to the clinic. On this occasion there was a battalion of men in matching camouflage clothes, the kind Boris wears. These men were short but extremely well built. They didn't speak in any language I recognised. It turned out they were all from North Korea. Even though my name was above theirs on the list, they were processed first as one large group. It seemed no one wanted to argue with them. The following day we went back for my results and certificate and, because we had left my dad alone in our apartment for ages the day before, we thought it best to take him with us. At the very least he would get some fresh air. He needed stamps for his postcards and wanted to visit a post office anyway. We left late. After visiting the post office, getting no less than four stamps for each postcard, licking them as fast as we could, sticking them on and throwing them in the first postbox we found, we arrived at the HIV clinic.

Nastya had worked a nightshift and rushed to the clinic in the morning to put my name down first. Because of this we didn't have to wait long. When my name was called, Nastya and I squeezed ourselves through the would-be-assassins, past the guard and into the certificate office. My dad would have to stay and wait for us. As I left that room I looked back at him and hoped he kept his hard-man stare to himself. Once we had the certificate and I had been given a lecture I didn't understand but can only assume was about how important it is still to use condoms and be a good boy, we grabbed my dad, bought some cakes at my favourite patisserie near the Krasnoyarsk Hotel on Central Square then caught a bus home. All we needed now was an appointment at the immigration office.

Hypothermia

Unlike the previous winter, this year's cold was earlier and slightly more extreme. Within two weeks of our arrival it had quietly gone from -5 ˚C to -25 ˚C, with occasional days of -31 ˚C. There was no room for error when we went out. With all my attention focused on making sure my dad was covered up properly, I made the schoolboy error of neglecting myself on more than one occasion. Three times during the month I left the apartment without my shapka. Although this was easily fixed, as soon as I stepped outside I was instantly reminded that my head was uncovered, and even if I didn't go back for my shapka, my jacket has a hood that would have been more than adequate for a few hours. One day however, while we were planning a trip to the local outdoor market, just five minutes from our apartment, I had neglected to put sufficient cover on my legs. I wore one pair of thermals and one pair of thick trousers. I had also failed to notice that I had a crack in the rubber of my snowboots. Needless to say I got ill. We got to the market without incident and spent a good thirty minutes looking round. Nastya and my dad were talking about taking a ten-minute walk up the road to buy some of the same tea towels we had at home (for some reason my dad took a fancy to Siberian tea towels). During this time, it seemed that I had become increasingly irritable and nauseous. I told them both that I felt a bit cold and that my toes were cold, but they didn't realise just how freezing I was. After five more minutes at the market I felt something strange at the core of me. It felt like I had begun to disintegrate from the inside out. I mentioned this to Nastya, who, after telling me how stupid I was decided on a course of action. We would go to see Boris, as he would know better than anyone how to make me feel better and would also be able to lend me some snowboots without holes in. When we got to Nastya's parents' apartment, I had to take off my shoes and socks and sit with my feet in a bowl of water. The temperature of this water was then increased gradually. My legs were extremely cold. It took nearly an hour for the warmth to creep up into my body. While sat in this funny position, I was also made to drink hot water. Lots of hot water, and made to eat hot fish pie. As it turned out, it wasn't such a bad experience. The fish pie was excellent and being pampered was something I could get used to. When we left Boris to go home again, with me wearing a pair of Boris's old boots, I made a promise to myself never to be so stupid again. I had worn several layers, but had made the mistake of underestimating the cold and not speaking out soon enough when I knew something was wrong.